(upbeat music) >> Hi, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. As part of International Women's Day, we're featuring some of the leading women in business technology from developer to all types of titles and to the executive level. And one topic that's really important is called Getting a Seat at the Table, board makeup, having representation at corporate boards, private and public companies. It's been a big push. And former technology operating executive and corporate board member, she's a board machine Sue Barsamian, formerly with HPE, Hewlett Packard. Sue, great to see you. CUBE alumni, distinguished CUBE alumni. Thank you for coming on. >> Yes, I'm very proud of my CUBE alumni title. >> I'm sure it opens a lot of doors for you. (Sue laughing) We're psyched to have you on. This is a really important topic, and I want to get into the whole, as women advance up, and they're sitting on the boards, they can implement policy and there's governance. Obviously public companies have very strict oversight, and not strict, but like formal. Private boards have to operate, be nimble. They don't have to share all their results. But still, boards play an important role in the success of scaled up companies. So super important, that representation there is key. >> Yes. >> I want to get into that, but first, before we get started, how did you get into tech? How did it all start for you? >> Yeah, long time ago, I was an electrical engineering major. Came out in 1981 when, you know, opportunities for engineering, if you were kind, I went to Kansas State as an undergrad, and basically in those days you went to Texas and did semiconductors. You went to Atlanta and did communication satellites. You went to Boston or you went to Silicon Valley. And for me, that wasn't too hard a choice. I ended up going west and really, I guess what, embarked on a 40 year career in Silicon Valley and absolutely loved it. Largely software, but some time on the hardware side. Started out in networking, but largely software. And then, you know, four years ago transitioned to my next chapter, which is the corporate board director. And again, focused on technology software and cybersecurity boards. >> For the folks watching, we'll cut through another segment we can probably do about your operating career, but you rose through the ranks and became a senior operating executive at the biggest companies in the world. Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and others. Very great career, okay. And so now you're kind of like, put that on pause, and you're moving on to the next chapter, which is being a board director. What inspired you to be a board director for multiple public companies and multiple private companies? Well, how many companies are you on? But what's the inspiration? What's the inspiration? First tell me how many board ships you're on, board seats you're on, and then what inspired you to become a board director? >> Yeah, so I'm on three public, and you are limited in terms of the number of publics that you can do to four. So I'm on three public, and I'm on four private from a tech perspective. And those range from, you know, a $4 billion in revenue public company down to a 35 person private company. So I've got the whole range. >> So you're like freelancing, I mean, what is it like? It's a full-time job, obviously. It's a lot of work involved. >> Yeah, yeah, it's. >> John: Why are you doing it? >> Well, you know, so I retired from being an operating executive after 37 years. And, but I loved, I mean, it's tough, right? It's tough these days, particularly with all the pressures out there in the market, not to mention the pandemic, et cetera. But I loved it. I loved working. I loved having a career, and I was ready to back off on, I would say the stresses of quarterly results and the stresses of international travel. You have so much of it. But I wasn't ready to back off from being involved and engaged and continuing to learn new things. I think this is why you come to tech, and for me, why I went to the valley to begin with was really that energy and that excitement, and it's like it's constantly reinventing itself. And I felt like that wasn't over for me. And I thought because I hadn't done boards before I retired from operating roles, I thought, you know, that would fill the bill. And it's honestly, it has exceeded expectations. >> In a good way. You feel good about where you're at and. >> Yeah. >> What you went in, what was the expectation going in and what surprised you? And were there people along the way that kind of gave you some pointers or don't do this, stay away from this. Take us through your experiences. >> Yeah, honestly, there is an amazing network of technology board directors, you know, in the US and specifically in the Valley. And we are all incredibly supportive. We have groups where we get together as board directors, and we talk about topics, and we share best practices and stories, and so I underestimated that, right? I thought I was going to, I thought I was going to enter this chapter where I would be largely giving back after 37 years. You've learned a little bit, right? What I underestimated was just the power of continuing to learn and being surrounded by so many amazing people. When, you know, when you do, you know, multiple boards, your learnings are just multiplied, right? Because you see not just one model, but you see many models. You see not just one problem, but many problems. Not just one opportunity, but many opportunities. And I underestimated how great that would be for me from a learning perspective and then your ability to share from one board to the other board because all of my boards are companies who are also quite close to each other, the executives collaborate. So that has turned out to be really exciting for me. >> So you had the stressful job. You rose to the top of the ranks, quarterly shot clock earnings, and it's hard charging. It's like, it's like, you know, being an athlete, as we say tech athlete. You're a tech athlete. Now you're taking that to the next level, which is now you're juggling multiple operational kind of things, but not with super pressure. But there's still a lot of responsibility. I know there's one board, you got compensation committee, I mean there's work involved. It's not like you're clipping coupons and having pizza. >> Yeah, no, it's real work. Believe me, it's real work. But I don't know how long it took me to not, to stop waking up and looking at my phone and thinking somebody was going to be dropping their forecast, right? Just that pressure of the number, and as a board member, obviously you are there to support and help guide the company and you feel, you know, you feel the pressure and the responsibility of what that role entails, but it's not the same as the frontline pressure every quarter. It's different. And so I did the first type. I loved it, you know. I'm loving this second type. >> You know, the retirement, it's always a cliche these days, but it's not really like what people think it is. It's not like getting a boat, going fishing or whatever. It's doing whatever you want to do, that's what retirement is. And you've chose to stay active. Your brain's being tested, and you're working it, having fun without all the stress. But it's enough, it's like going the gym. You're not hardcore workout, but you're working out with the brain. >> Yeah, no, for sure. It's just a different, it's just a different model. But the, you know, the level of conversations, the level of decisions, all of that is quite high. Which again, I like, yeah. >> Again, you really can't talk about some of the fun questions I want to ask, like what's the valuations like? How's the market, your headwinds? Is there tailwinds? >> Yes, yes, yes. It's an amazing, it's an amazing market right now with, as you know, counter indicators everywhere, right? Something's up, something's down, you know. Consumer spending's up, therefore interest rates go up and, you know, employment's down. And so or unemployment's down. And so it's hard. Actually, I really empathize with, you know, the, and have a great deal of respect for the CEOs and leadership teams of my board companies because, you know, I kind of retired from operating role, and then everybody else had to deal with running a company during a pandemic and then running a company through the great resignation, and then running a company through a downturn. You know, those are all tough things, and I have a ton of respect for any operating executive who's navigating through this and leading a company right now. >> I'd love to get your take on the board conversations at the end if we have more time, what the mood is, but I want to ask you about one more thing real quick before we go to the next topic is you're a retired operating executive. You have multiple boards, so you've got your hands full. I noticed there's a lot of amazing leaders, other female tech athletes joining boards, but they also have full-time jobs. >> Yeah. >> And so what's your advice? Cause I know there's a lot of networking, a lot of sharing going on. There's kind of a balance between how much you can contribute on the board versus doing the day job, but there's a real need for more women on boards, so yet there's a lot going on boards. What's the current state of the union if you will, state of the market relative to people in their careers and the stresses? >> Yeah. >> Cause you left one and jumped in all in there. >> Yeah. >> Some can't do that. They can't be on five boards, but they're on a few. What's the? >> Well, and you know, and if you're an operating executive, you wouldn't be on five boards, right? You would be on one or two. And so I spend a lot of time now bringing along the next wave of women and helping them both in their career but also to get a seat at the table on a board. And I'm very vocal about telling people not to do it the way I do it. There's no reason for it to be sequential. You can, you know, I thought I was so busy and was traveling all the time, and yes, all of that was true, but, and maybe I should say, you know, you can still fit in a board. And so, and what I see now is that your learnings are so exponential with outside perspective that I believe I would've been an even better operating executive had I done it earlier. I know I would've been an even better operating executive had I done it earlier. And so my advice is don't do it the way I did it. You know, it's worked out fine for me, but hindsight's 2020, I would. >> If you can go back and do a mulligan or a redo, what would you do? >> Yeah, I would get on a board earlier, full stop, yeah. >> Board, singular, plural? >> Well, I really, I don't think as an operating executive you can do, you could do one, maybe two. I wouldn't go beyond that, and I think that's fine. >> Yeah, totally makes sense. Okay, I got to ask you about your career. I know technical, you came in at that time in the market, I remember when I broke into the business, very male dominated, and then now it's much better. When you went through the ranks as a technical person, I know you had some blockers and definitely some, probably some people like, well, you know. We've seen that. How did you handle that? What were some of the key pivot points in your journey? And we've had a lot of women tell their stories here on theCUBE, candidly, like, hey, I was going to tell that professor, I'm going to sit in the front row. I'm going to, I'm getting two degrees, you know, robotics and aerospace. So, but they were challenged, even with the aspiration to do tech. I'm not saying that was something that you had, but like have you had experience like that, that you overcome? What were those key points and how did you handle them and how does that help people today? >> Yeah, you know, I have to say, you know, and not discounting that obviously this has been a journey for women, and there are a lot of things to overcome both in the workforce and also just balancing life honestly. And they're all real. There's also a story of incredible support, and you know, I'm the type of person where if somebody blocked me or didn't like me, I tended to just, you know, think it was me and like work harder and get around them, and I'm sure that some of that was potentially gender related. I didn't interpret it that way at the time. And I was lucky to have amazing mentors, many, many, many of whom were men, you know, because they were in the positions of power, and they made a huge difference on my career, huge. And I also had amazing female mentors, Meg Whitman, Ann Livermore at HPE, who you know well. So I had both, but you know, when I look back on the people who made a difference, there are as many men on the list as there are women. >> Yeah, and that's a learning there. Create those coalitions, not just one or the other. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. >> Well, I got to ask you about the, well, you brought up the pandemic. This has come up on some interviews this year, a little bit last year on the International Women's Day, but this year it's resonating, and I would never ask in an interview. I saw an interview once where a host asked a woman, how do you balance it all? And I was just like, no one asked men that. And so it's like, but with remote work, it's come up now the word empathy around people knowing each other's personal situation. In other words, when remote work happened, everybody went home. So we all got a glimpse of the backdrop. You got, you can see what their personal life was on Facebook. We were just commenting before we came on camera about that. So remote work really kind of opened up this personal side of everybody, men and women. >> Yeah. >> So I think this brings this new empathy kind of vibe or authentic self people call it. Is remote work an opportunity or a threat for advancement of women in tech? >> It's a much debated topic. I look at it as an opportunity for many of the reasons that you just said. First of all, let me say that when I was an operating executive and would try to create an environment on my team that was family supportive, I would do that equally for young or, you know, early to mid-career women as I did for early to mid-career men. And the reason is I needed those men, you know, chances are they had a working spouse at home, right? I needed them to be able to share the load. It's just as important to the women that companies give, you know, the partner, male or female, the partner support and the ability to share the love, right? So to me it's not just a woman thing. It's women and men, and I always tried to create the environment where it was okay to go to your soccer game. I knew you would be online later in the evening when the kids were in bed, and that was fine. And I think the pandemic has democratized that and made that, you know, made that kind of an everyday occurrence. >> Yeah the baby walks in. They're in the zoom call. The dog comes in. The leaf blower going on the outside the window. I've seen it all on theCUBE. >> Yeah, and people don't try to pretend anymore that like, you know, the house is clean, the dog's behaved, you know, I mean it's just, it's just real, and it's authentic, and I think that's healthy. >> Yeah. >> I do, you know, I also love, I also love the office, and you know, I've got a 31 year old and a soon to be 27 year old daughter, two daughters. And you know, they love going into the office, and I think about when I was their age, how just charged up I would get from being in the office. I also see how great it is for them to have a couple of days a week at home because you can get a few things done in between Zoom calls that you don't have to end up piling onto the weekend, and, you know, so I think it's a really healthy, I think it's a really healthy mix now. Most tech companies are not mandating five days in. Most tech companies are at two to three days in. I think that's a, I think that's a really good combination. >> It's interesting how people are changing their culture to get together more as groups and even events. I mean, while I got you, I might as well ask you, what's the board conversations around, you know, the old conferences? You know, before the pandemic, every company had like a user conference. Right, now it's like, well, do we really need to have that? Maybe we do smaller, and we do digital. Have you seen how companies are handling the in-person? Because there's where the relationships are really formed face-to-face, but not everyone's going to be going. But now certain it's clearly back to face-to-face. We're seeing that with theCUBE as you know. >> Yeah, yeah. >> But the numbers aren't coming back, and the numbers aren't that high, but the stakeholders. >> Yeah. >> And the numbers are actually higher if you count digital. >> Yeah, absolutely. But you know, also on digital there's fatigue from 100% digital, right? It's a hybrid. People don't want to be 100% digital anymore, but they also don't want to go back to the days when everybody got on a plane for every meeting, every call, every sales call. You know, I'm seeing a mix on user conferences. I would say two-thirds of my companies are back, but not at the expense level that they were on user conferences. We spend a lot of time getting updates on, cause nobody has put, interestingly enough, nobody has put T&E, travel and expense back to pre-pandemic levels. Nobody, so everybody's pulled back on number of trips. You know, marketing events are being very scrutinized, but I think very effective. We're doing a lot of, and, you know, these were part of the old model as well, like some things, some things just recycle, but you know, there's a lot of CIO and customer round tables in regional cities. You know, those are quite effective right now because people want some face-to-face, but they don't necessarily want to get on a plane and go to Las Vegas in order to do it. I mean, some of them are, you know, there are a lot of things back in Las Vegas. >> And think about the meetings that when you were an operating executive. You got to go to the sales kickoff, you got to go to this, go to that. There were mandatory face-to-faces that you had to go to, but there was a lot of travel that you probably could have done on Zoom. >> Oh, a lot, I mean. >> And then the productivity to the family impact too. Again, think about again, we're talking about the family and people's personal lives, right? So, you know, got to meet a customer. All right. Salesperson wants you to get in front of a customer, got to fly to New York, take a red eye, come on back. Like, I mean, that's gone. >> Yeah, and oh, by the way, the customer doesn't necessarily want to be in the office that day, so, you know, they may or may not be happy about that. So again, it's and not or, right? It's a mix. And I think it's great to see people back to some face-to-face. It's great to see marketing and events back to some face-to-face. It's also great to see that it hasn't gone back to the level it was. I think that's a really healthy dynamic. >> Well, I'll tell you that from our experience while we're on the topic, we'll move back to the International Women's Day is that the productivity of digital, this program we're doing is going to be streamed. We couldn't do this face-to-face because we had to have everyone fly to an event. We're going to do hundreds of stories that we couldn't have done. We're doing it remote. Because it's better to get the content than not have it. I mean it's offline, so, but it's not about getting people to the event and watch the screen for seven hours. It's pick your interview, and then engage. >> Yeah. >> So it's self-service. So we're seeing a lot, the new user experience kind of direct to consumer, and so I think there will be an, I think there's going to be a digital first class citizen with events, so that that matches up with the kind of experience, but the offline version. Face-to-face optimized for relationships, and that's where the recruiting gets done. That's where, you know, people can build these relationships with each other. >> Yeah, and it can be asynchronous. I think that's a real value proposition. It's a great point. >> Okay, I want to get, I want to get into the technology side of the education and re-skilling and those things. I remember in the 80s, computer science was software engineering. You learned like nine languages. You took some double E courses, one or two, and all the other kind of gut classes in school. Engineering, you had the four class disciplines and some offshoots of specialization. Now it's incredible the diversity of tracks in all engineering programs and computer science and outside of those departments. >> Yeah. >> Can you speak to the importance of STEM and the diversity in the technology industry and how this brings opportunity to lower the bar to get in and how people can stay in and grow and keep leveling up? >> Yeah, well look, we're constantly working on how to, how to help the incoming funnel. But then, you know, at a university level, I'm on the foundation board of Kansas State where I got my engineering degree. I was also Chairman of the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering, which was all about diversity in STEM and how do you keep that pipeline going because honestly the US needs more tech resources than we have. And if you don't tap into the diversity of our entire workforce, we won't be able to fill that need. And so we focused a lot on both the funnel, right, that starts at the middle school level, particularly for girls, getting them in, you know, the situation of hands-on comfort level with coding, with robot building, you know, whatever gives them that confidence. And then keeping that going all the way into, you know, university program, and making sure that they don't attrit out, right? And so there's a number of initiatives, whether it's mentoring and support groups and financial aid to make sure that underrepresented minorities, women and other minorities, you know, get through the funnel and stay, you know, stay in. >> Got it. Now let me ask you, you said, I have two daughters. You have a family of girls too. Is there a vibe difference between the new generation and what's the trends that you're seeing in this next early wave? I mean, not maybe, I don't know how this is in middle school, but like as people start getting into their adult lives, college and beyond what's the current point of view, posture, makeup of the talent coming in? >> Yeah, yeah. >> Certain orientations, do you see any patterns? What's your observation? >> Yeah, it's interesting. So if I look at electrical engineering, my major, it's, and if I look at Kansas State, which spends a lot of time on this, and I think does a great job, but the diversity of that as a major has not changed dramatically since I was there in the early 80s. Where it has changed very significantly is computer science. There are many, many university and college programs around the country where, you know, it's 50/50 in computer science from a gender mix perspective, which is huge progress. Huge progress. And so, and to me that's, you know, I think CS is a fantastic degree for tech, regardless of what function you actually end up doing in these companies. I mean, I was an electrical engineer. I never did core electrical engineering work. I went right into sales and marketing and general management roles. So I think, I think a bunch of, you know, diverse CS graduates is a really, really good sign. And you know, we need to continue to push on that, but progress has been made. I think the, you know, it kind of goes back to the thing we were just talking about, which is the attrition of those, let's just talk about women, right? The attrition of those women once they got past early career and into mid-career then was a concern, right? And that goes back to, you know, just the inability to, you know, get it all done. And that I am hopeful is going to be better served now. >> Well, Sue, it's great to have you on. I know you're super busy. I appreciate you taking the time and contributing to our program on corporate board membership and some of your story and observations and opinions and analysis. Always great to have you and call you a contributor for theCUBE. You can jump on on one more board, be one of our board contributors for our analysts. (Sue laughing) >> I'm at capacity. (both laughing) >> Final, final word. What's the big seat at the table issue that's going well and areas that need to be improved? >> So I'll speak for my boards because they have made great progress in efficiency. You know, obviously with interest rates going up and the mix between growth and profitability changing in terms of what investors are looking for. Many, many companies have had to do a hard pivot from grow at all costs to healthy balance of growth and profit. And I'm very pleased with how my companies have made that pivot. And I think that is going to make much better companies as a result. I think diversity is something that has not been solved at the corporate level, and we need to keep working it. >> Awesome. Thank you for coming on theCUBE. CUBE alumni now contributor, on multiple boards, full-time job. Love the new challenge and chapter you're on, Sue. We'll be following, and we'll check in for more updates. And thank you for being a contributor on this program this year and this episode. We're going to be doing more of these quarterly, so we're going to move beyond once a year. >> That's great. (cross talking) It's always good to see you, John. >> Thank you. >> Thanks very much. >> Okay. >> Sue: Talk to you later. >> This is theCUBE coverage of IWD, International Women's Day 2023. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> While never really meant to be a consumer tech event, the rapid ascendancy of smartphones sucked much of the air out of Mobile World Congress over the years, now MWC. And while the device manufacturers continue to have a major presence at the show, the maturity of intelligent devices, longer life cycles, and the disaggregation of the network stack, have put enterprise technologies front and center in the telco business. Semiconductor manufacturers, network equipment players, infrastructure companies, cloud vendors, software providers, and a spate of startups are eyeing the trillion dollar plus communications industry as one of the next big things to watch this decade. Hello, and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights, powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we bring you part two of our ongoing coverage of MWC '23, with some new data on enterprise players specifically in large telco environments, a brief glimpse at some of the pre-announcement news and corresponding themes ahead of MWC, and some of the key announcement areas we'll be watching at the show on theCUBE. Now, last week we shared some ETR data that showed how traditional enterprise tech players were performing, specifically within the telecoms vertical. Here's a new look at that data from ETR, which isolates the same companies, but cuts the data for what ETR calls large telco. The N in this cut is 196, down from 288 last week when we included all company sizes in the dataset. Now remember the two dimensions here, on the y-axis is net score, or spending momentum, and on the x-axis is pervasiveness in the data set. The table insert in the upper left informs how the dots and companies are plotted, and that red dotted line, the horizontal line at 40%, that indicates a highly elevated net score. Now while the data are not dramatically different in terms of relative positioning, there are a couple of changes at the margin. So just going down the list and focusing on net score. Azure is comparable, but slightly lower in this sector in the large telco than it was overall. Google Cloud comes in at number two, and basically swapped places with AWS, which drops slightly in the large telco relative to overall telco. Snowflake is also slightly down by one percentage point, but maintains its position. Remember Snowflake, overall, its net score is much, much higher when measuring across all verticals. Snowflake comes down in telco, and relative to overall, a little bit down in large telco, but it's making some moves to attack this market that we'll talk about in a moment. Next are Red Hat OpenStack and Databricks. About the same in large tech telco as they were an overall telco. Then there's Dell next that has a big presence at MWC and is getting serious about driving 16G adoption, and new servers, and edge servers, and other partnerships. Cisco and Red Hat OpenShift basically swapped spots when moving from all telco to large telco, as Cisco drops and Red Hat bumps up a bit. And VMware dropped about four percentage points in large telco. Accenture moved up dramatically, about nine percentage points in big telco, large telco relative to all telco. HPE dropped a couple of percentage points. Oracle stayed about the same. And IBM surprisingly dropped by about five points. So look, I understand not a ton of change in terms of spending momentum in the large sector versus telco overall, but some deltas. The bottom line for enterprise players is one, they're just getting started in this new disruption journey that they're on as the stack disaggregates. Two, all these players have experience in delivering horizontal solutions, but now working with partners and identifying big problems to be solved, and three, many of these companies are generally not the fastest moving firms relative to smaller disruptive disruptors. Now, cloud has been an exception in fairness. But the good news for the legacy infrastructure and IT companies is that the telco transformation and the 5G buildout is going to take years. So it's moving at a pace that is very favorable to many of these companies. Okay, so looking at just some of the pre-announcement highlights that have hit the wire this week, I want to give you a glimpse of the diversity of innovation that is occurring in the telecommunication space. You got semiconductor manufacturers, device makers, network equipment players, carriers, cloud vendors, enterprise tech companies, software companies, startups. Now we've included, you'll see in this list, we've included OpeRAN, that logo, because there's so much buzz around the topic and we're going to come back to that. But suffice it to say, there's no way we can cover all the announcements from the 2000 plus exhibitors at the show. So we're going to cherry pick here and make a few call outs. Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced an acquisition of an Italian private cellular network company called AthoNet. Zeus Kerravala wrote about it on SiliconANGLE if you want more details. Now interestingly, HPE has a partnership with Solana, which also does private 5G. But according to Zeus, Solona is more of an out-of-the-box solution, whereas AthoNet is designed for the core and requires more integration. And as you'll see in a moment, there's going to be a lot of talk at the show about private network. There's going to be a lot of news there from other competitors, and we're going to be watching that closely. And while many are concerned about the P5G, private 5G, encroaching on wifi, Kerravala doesn't see it that way. Rather, he feels that these private networks are really designed for more industrial, and you know mission critical environments, like factories, and warehouses that are run by robots, et cetera. 'Cause these can justify the increased expense of private networks. Whereas wifi remains a very low cost and flexible option for, you know, whatever offices and homes. Now, over to Dell. Dell announced its intent to go hard after opening up the telco network with the announcement that in the second half of this year it's going to begin shipping its infrastructure blocks for Red Hat. Remember it's like kind of the converged infrastructure for telco with a more open ecosystem and sort of more flexible, you know, more mature engineered system. Dell has also announced a range of PowerEdge servers for a variety of use cases. A big wide line bringing forth its 16G portfolio and aiming squarely at the telco space. Dell also announced, here we go, a private wireless offering with airspan, and Expedo, and a solution with AthoNet, the company HPE announced it was purchasing. So I guess Dell and HPE are now partnering up in the private wireless space, and yes, hell is freezing over folks. We'll see where that relationship goes in the mid- to long-term. Dell also announced new lab and certification capabilities, which we said last week was going to be critical for the further adoption of open ecosystem technology. So props to Dell for, you know, putting real emphasis and investment in that. AWS also made a number of announcements in this space including private wireless solutions and associated managed services. AWS named Deutsche Telekom, Orange, T-Mobile, Telefonica, and some others as partners. And AWS announced the stepped up partnership, specifically with T-Mobile, to bring AWS services to T-Mobile's network portfolio. Snowflake, back to Snowflake, announced its telecom data cloud. Remember we showed the data earlier, it's Snowflake not as strong in the telco sector, but they're continuing to move toward this go-to market alignment within key industries, realigning their go-to market by vertical. It also announced that AT&T, and a number of other partners, are collaborating to break down data silos specifically in telco. Look, essentially, this is Snowflake taking its core value prop to the telco vertical and forming key partnerships that resonate in the space. So think simplification, breaking down silos, data sharing, eventually data monetization. Samsung previewed its future capability to allow smartphones to access satellite services, something Apple has previously done. AMD, Intel, Marvell, Qualcomm, are all in the act, all the semiconductor players. Qualcomm for example, announced along with Telefonica, and Erickson, a 5G millimeter network that will be showcased in Spain at the event this coming week using Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset platform, based on none other than Arm technology. Of course, Arm we said is going to dominate the edge, and is is clearly doing so. It's got the volume advantage over, you know, traditional Intel, you know, X86 architectures. And it's no surprise that Microsoft is touting its open AI relationship. You're going to hear a lot of AI talk at this conference as is AI is now, you know, is the now topic. All right, we could go on and on and on. There's just so much going on at Mobile World Congress or MWC, that we just wanted to give you a glimpse of some of the highlights that we've been watching. Which brings us to the key topics and issues that we'll be exploring at MWC next week. We touched on some of this last week. A big topic of conversation will of course be, you know, 5G. Is it ever going to become real? Is it, is anybody ever going to make money at 5G? There's so much excitement around and anticipation around 5G. It has not lived up to the hype, but that's because the rollout, as we've previous reported, is going to take years. And part of that rollout is going to rely on the disaggregation of the hardened telco stack, as we reported last week and in previous Breaking Analysis episodes. OpenRAN is a big component of that evolution. You know, as our RAN intelligent controllers, RICs, which essentially the brain of OpenRAN, if you will. Now as we build out 5G networks at massive scale and accommodate unprecedented volumes of data and apply compute-hungry AI to all this data, the issue of energy efficiency is going to be front and center. It has to be. Not only is it a, you know, hot political issue, the reality is that improving power efficiency is compulsory or the whole vision of telco's future is going to come crashing down. So chip manufacturers, equipment makers, cloud providers, everybody is going to be doubling down and clicking on this topic. Let's talk about AI. AI as we said, it is the hot topic right now, but it is happening not only in consumer, with things like ChatGPT. And think about the theme of this Breaking Analysis in the enterprise, AI in the enterprise cannot be ChatGPT. It cannot be error prone the way ChatGPT is. It has to be clean, reliable, governed, accurate. It's got to be ethical. It's got to be trusted. Okay, we're going to have Zeus Kerravala on the show next week and definitely want to get his take on private networks and how they're going to impact wifi. You know, will private networks cannibalize wifi? If not, why not? He wrote about this again on SiliconANGLE if you want more details, and we're going to unpack that on theCUBE this week. And finally, as always we'll be following the data flows to understand where and how telcos, cloud players, startups, software companies, disruptors, legacy companies, end customers, how are they going to make money from new data opportunities? 'Cause we often say in theCUBE, don't ever bet against data. All right, that's a wrap for today. Remember theCUBE is going to be on location at MWC 2023 next week. We got a great set. We're in the walkway in between halls four and five, right in Congress Square, stand CS-60. Look for us, we got a full schedule. If you got a great story or you have news, stop by. We're going to try to get you on the program. I'll be there with Lisa Martin, co-hosting, David Nicholson as well, and the entire CUBE crew, so don't forget to come by and see us. I want to thank Alex Myerson, who's on production and manages the podcast, and Ken Schiffman, as well, in our Boston studio. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight help get the word out on social media and in our newsletters. And Rob Hof is our editor-in-chief over at SiliconANGLE.com. He does some great editing. Thank you. All right, remember all these episodes they are available as podcasts wherever you listen. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis podcasts. I publish each week on Wikibon.com and SiliconANGLE.com. All the video content is available on demand at theCUBE.net, or you can email me directly if you want to get in touch David.Vellante@SiliconANGLE.com or DM me @DVellante, or comment on our LinkedIn posts. And please do check out ETR.ai for the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next week at Mobile World Congress '23, MWC '23, or next time on Breaking Analysis. (bright music)

>> From the Cube Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from The Cube and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> The world's leading telcos are trying to shed the stigma of being monopolies lacking innovation. Telcos have been great at operational efficiency and connectivity and living off of transmission, and the costs and expenses or revenue associated with that transmission. But in a world beyond telephone poles and basic wireless and mobile services, how will telcos modernize and become more agile and monetize new opportunities brought about by 5G and private wireless and a spate of new innovations and infrastructure, cloud data and apps? Hello, and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis and ahead of Mobile World Congress or now, MWC23, we explore the evolution of the telco business and how the industry is in many ways, mimicking transformations that took place decades ago in enterprise IT. We'll model some of the traditional enterprise vendors using ETR data and investigate how they're faring in the telecommunications sector, and we'll pose some of the key issues facing the industry this decade. First, let's take a look at what the GSMA has in store for MWC23. GSMA is the host of what used to be called Mobile World Congress. They've set the theme for this year's event as "Velocity" and they've rebranded MWC to reflect the fact that mobile technology is only one part of the story. MWC has become one of the world's premier events highlighting innovations not only in Telco, mobile and 5G, but the collision between cloud, infrastructure, apps, private networks, smart industries, machine intelligence, and AI, and more. MWC comprises an enormous ecosystem of service providers, technology companies, and firms from virtually every industry including sports and entertainment. And as well, GSMA, along with its venue partner at the Fira Barcelona, have placed a major emphasis on sustainability and public and private partnerships. Virtually every industry will be represented at the event because every industry is impacted by the trends and opportunities in this space. GSMA has said it expects 80,000 attendees at MWC this year, not quite back to 2019 levels, but trending in that direction. Of course, attendance from Chinese participants has historically been very high at the show, and obviously the continued travel issues from that region are affecting the overall attendance, but still very strong. And despite these concerns, Huawei, the giant Chinese technology company. has the largest physical presence of any exhibitor at the show. And finally, GSMA estimates that more than $300 million in economic benefit will result from the event which takes place at the end of February and early March. And The Cube will be back at MWC this year with a major presence thanks to our anchor sponsor, Dell Technologies and other supporters of our content program, including Enterprise Web, ArcaOS, VMware, Snowflake, Cisco, AWS, and others. And one of the areas we're interested in exploring is the evolution of the telco stack. It's a topic that's often talked about and one that we've observed taking place in the 1990s when the vertically integrated IBM mainframe monopoly gave way to a disintegrated and horizontal industry structure. And in many ways, the same thing is happening today in telecommunications, which is shown on the left-hand side of this diagram. Historically, telcos have relied on a hardened, integrated, and incredibly reliable, and secure set of hardware and software services that have been fully vetted and tested, and certified, and relied upon for decades. And at the top of that stack on the left are the crown jewels of the telco stack, the operational support systems and the business support systems. For the OSS, we're talking about things like network management, network operations, service delivery, quality of service, fulfillment assurance, and things like that. For the BSS systems, these refer to customer-facing elements of the stack, like revenue, order management, what products they sell, billing, and customer service. And what we're seeing is telcos have been really good at operational efficiency and making money off of transport and connectivity, but they've lacked the innovation in services and applications. They own the pipes and that works well, but others, be the over-the-top content companies, or private network providers and increasingly, cloud providers have been able to bypass the telcos, reach around them, if you will, and drive innovation. And so, the right-most diagram speaks to the need to disaggregate pieces of the stack. And while the similarities to the 1990s in enterprise IT are greater than the differences, there are things that are different. For example, the granularity of hardware infrastructure will not likely be as high where competition occurred back in the 90s at every layer of the value chain with very little infrastructure integration. That of course changed in the 2010s with converged infrastructure and hyper-converged and also software defined. So, that's one difference. And the advent of cloud, containers, microservices, and AI, none of that was really a major factor in the disintegration of legacy IT. And that probably means that disruptors can move even faster than did the likes of Intel and Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco, and the Seagates of the 1990s. As well, while many of the products and services will come from traditional enterprise IT names like Dell, HPE, Cisco, Red Hat, VMware, AWS, Microsoft, Google, et cetera, many of the names are going to be different and come from traditional network equipment providers. These are names like Ericsson and Huawei, and Nokia, and other names, like Wind River, and Rakuten, and Dish Networks. And there are enormous opportunities in data to help telecom companies and their competitors go beyond telemetry data into more advanced analytics and data monetization. There's also going to be an entirely new set of apps based on the workloads and use cases ranging from hospitals, sports arenas, race tracks, shipping ports, you name it. Virtually every vertical will participate in this transformation as the industry evolves its focus toward innovation, agility, and open ecosystems. Now remember, this is not a binary state. There are going to be greenfield companies disrupting the apple cart, but the incumbent telcos are going to have to continue to ensure newer systems work with their legacy infrastructure, in their OSS and BSS existing systems. And as we know, this is not going to be an overnight task. Integration is a difficult thing, transformations, migrations. So that's what makes this all so interesting because others can come in with Greenfield and potentially disrupt. There'll be interesting partnerships and ecosystems will form and coalitions will also form. Now, we mentioned that several traditional enterprise companies are or will be playing in this space. Now, ETR doesn't have a ton of data on specific telecom equipment and software providers, but it does have some interesting data that we cut for this breaking analysis. What we're showing here in this graphic is some of the names that we've followed over the years and how they're faring. Specifically, we did the cut within the telco sector. So the Y-axis here shows net score or spending velocity. And the horizontal axis, that shows the presence or pervasiveness in the data set. And that table insert in the upper left, that informs as to how the dots are plotted. You know, the two columns there, net score and the ends. And that red-dotted line, that horizontal line at 40%, that is an indicator of a highly elevated level. Anything above that, we consider quite outstanding. And what we'll do now is we'll comment on some of the cohorts and share with you how they're doing in telecommunications, and that sector, that vertical relative to their position overall in the data set. Let's start with the public cloud players. They're prominent in every industry. Telcos, telecommunications is no exception and it's quite an interesting cohort here. On the one hand, they can help telecommunication firms modernize and become more agile by eliminating the heavy lifting and you know, all the cloud, you know, value prop, data center costs, and the cloud benefits. At the same time, public cloud players are bringing their services to the edge, building out their own global networks and are a disruptive force to traditional telcos. All right, let's talk about Azure first. Their net score is basically identical to telco relative to its overall average. AWS's net score is higher in telco by just a few percentage points. Google Cloud platform is eight percentage points higher in telco with a 53% net score. So all three hyperscalers have an equal or stronger presence in telco than their average overall. Okay, let's look at the traditional enterprise hardware and software infrastructure cohort. Dell, Cisco, HPE, Red Hat, VMware, and Oracle. We've highlighted in this chart just as sort of indicators or proxies. Dell's net score's 10 percentage points higher in telco than its overall average. Interesting. Cisco's is a bit higher. HPE's is actually lower by about nine percentage points in the ETR survey, and VMware's is lower by about four percentage points. Now, Red Hat is really interesting. OpenStack, as we've previously reported is popular with telcos who want to build out their own private cloud. And the data shows that Red Hat OpenStack's net score is 15 percentage points higher in the telco sector than its overall average. OpenShift, on the other hand, has a net score that's four percentage points lower in telco than its overall average. So this to us talks to the pace of adoption of microservices and containers. You know, it's going to happen, but it's going to happen more slowly. Finally, Oracle's spending momentum is somewhat lower in the sector than its average, despite the firm having a decent telco business. IBM and Accenture, heavy services companies are both lower in this sector than their average. And real quickly, snowflake's net score is much lower by about 12 percentage points relative to its very high average net score of 62%. But we look for them to be a player in this space as telcos need to modernize their analytics stack and share data in a governed manner. Databricks' net score is also much lower than its average by about 13 points. And same, I would expect them to be a player as open architectures and cloud gains steam in telco. All right, let's close out now on what we're going to be talking about at MWC23 and some of the key issues that we'll be unpacking. We've talked about stack disaggregation in this breaking analysis, but the key here will be the pace at which it will reach the operational efficiency and reliability of closed stacks. Telcos, you know, in a large part, they're engineering heavy firms and much of their work takes place, kind of in the basement, in the dark. It's not really a big public hype machine, and they tend to move slowly and cautiously. While they understand the importance of agility, they're going to be careful because, you know, it's in their DNA. And so at the same time, if they don't move fast enough, they're going to get hurt and disrupted by competitors. So that's going to be a topic of conversation, and we'll be looking for proof points. And the other comment I'll make is around integration. Telcos because of their conservatism will benefit from better testing and those firms that can innovate on the testing front and have labs and certifications and innovate at that level, with an ecosystem are going to be in a better position. Because open sometimes means wild west. So the more players like Dell, HPE, Cisco, Red Hat, et cetera, that do that and align with their ecosystems and provide those resources, the faster adoption is going to go. So we'll be looking for, you know, who's actually doing that, Open RAN or Radio Access Networks. That fits in this discussion because O-RAN is an emerging network architecture. It essentially enables the use of open technologies from an ecosystem and over time, look at O-RAN is going to be open, but the questions, you know, a lot of questions remain as to when it will be able to deliver the operational efficiency of traditional RAN. Got some interesting dynamics going on. Rakuten is a company that's working hard on this problem, really focusing on operational efficiency. Then you got Dish Networks. They're also embracing O-RAN. They're coming at it more from service innovation. So that's something that we'll be monitoring and unpacking. We're going to look at cloud as a disruptor. On the one hand, cloud can help drive agility, as we said earlier and optionality, and innovation for incumbent telcos. But the flip side is going to also do the same for startups trying to disrupt and cloud attracts startups. While some of the telcos are actually embracing the cloud, many are being cautious. So that's going to be an interesting topic of discussion. And there's private wireless networks and 5G, and hyperlocal private networks, they're being deployed, you know, at the edge. This idea of open edge is also a really hot topic and this trend is going to accelerate. You know, the importance here is that the use cases are going to be widely varied. The needs of a hospital are going to be different than those of a sports venue are different from a remote drilling location, and energy or a concert venue. Things like real-time AI inference and data flows are going to bring new services and monetization opportunities. And many firms are going to be bypassing traditional telecommunications networks to build these out. Satellites as well, we're going to see, you know, in this decade, you're going to have, you're going to look down at Google Earth and you're going to see real-time. You know, today you see snapshots and so, lots of innovations going in that space. So how is this going to disrupt industries and traditional industry structures? Now, as always, we'll be looking at data angles, right? 'Cause it's in The Cube's DNA to follow the data and what opportunities and risks data brings. The Cube is going to be on location at MWC23 at the end of the month. We got a great set. We're in the walkway between halls four and five, right in Congress Square, it's booths CS60. So we'll have a full, they're called Stan CS60. We have a full schedule. I'm going to be there with Lisa Martin, Dave Nicholson and the entire Cube crew, so don't forget to stop by. All right, that's a wrap. I want to thank Alex Myerson, who's on production and manages the podcast, Ken Schiffman as well. Kristin Martin and Cheryl Knight help get the word out on social media and in our newsletters. And Rob Hof is our editor-in-chief over at Silicon Angle, does some great stuff for us. Thank you all. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts. Wherever you listen, just search "Breaking Analysis" podcasts I publish each week on wikibon.com and silicon angle.com. And all the video content is available on demand at thecube.net. You can email me directly at david.vellante@silicon angle.com. You can DM me at dvellante or comment on my LinkedIn post. Please do check out etr.ai for the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for The Cube Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching and we'll see you at Mobile World Congress, and/or at next time on "Breaking Analysis." (bright music) (bright music fades)

>> Welcome back to SuperCloud2. This is Dave Vellante, and we're here with Jack Greenfield. He's the Vice President of Enterprise Architecture and the Chief Architect for the global technology platform at Walmart. Jack, I want to thank you for coming on the program. Really appreciate your time. >> Glad to be here, Dave. Thanks for inviting me and appreciate the opportunity to chat with you. >> Yeah, it's our pleasure. Now we call what you've built a SuperCloud. That's our term, not yours, but how would you describe the Walmart Cloud Native Platform? >> So WCNP, as the acronym goes, is essentially an implementation of Kubernetes for the Walmart ecosystem. And what that means is that we've taken Kubernetes off the shelf as open source, and we have integrated it with a number of foundational services that provide other aspects of our computational environment. So Kubernetes off the shelf doesn't do everything. It does a lot. In particular the orchestration of containers, but it delegates through API a lot of key functions. So for example, secret management, traffic management, there's a need for telemetry and observability at a scale beyond what you get from raw Kubernetes. That is to say, harvesting the metrics that are coming out of Kubernetes and processing them, storing them in time series databases, dashboarding them, and so on. There's also an angle to Kubernetes that gets a lot of attention in the daily DevOps routine, that's not really part of the open source deliverable itself, and that is the DevOps sort of CICD pipeline-oriented lifecycle. And that is something else that we've added and integrated nicely. And then one more piece of this picture is that within a Kubernetes cluster, there's a function that is critical to allowing services to discover each other and integrate with each other securely and with proper configuration provided by the concept of a service mesh. So Istio, Linkerd, these are examples of service mesh technologies. And we have gone ahead and integrated actually those two. There's more than those two, but we've integrated those two with Kubernetes. So the net effect is that when a developer within Walmart is going to build an application, they don't have to think about all those other capabilities where they come from or how they're provided. Those are already present, and the way the CICD pipelines are set up, it's already sort of in the picture, and there are configuration points that they can take advantage of in the primary YAML and a couple of other pieces of config that we supply where they can tune it. But at the end of the day, it offloads an awful lot of work for them, having to stand up and operate those services, fail them over properly, and make them robust. All of that's provided for. >> Yeah, you know, developers often complain they spend too much time wrangling and doing things that aren't productive. So I wonder if you could talk about the high level business goals of the initiative in terms of the hardcore benefits. Was the real impetus to tap into best of breed cloud services? Were you trying to cut costs? Maybe gain negotiating leverage with the cloud guys? Resiliency, you know, I know was a major theme. Maybe you could give us a sense of kind of the anatomy of the decision making process that went in. >> Sure, and in the course of answering your question, I think I'm going to introduce the concept of our triplet architecture which we haven't yet touched on in the interview here. First off, just to sort of wrap up the motivation for WCNP itself which is kind of orthogonal to the triplet architecture. It can exist with or without it. Currently does exist with it, which is key, and I'll get to that in a moment. The key drivers, business drivers for WCNP were developer productivity by offloading the kinds of concerns that we've just discussed. Number two, improving resiliency, that is to say reducing opportunity for human error. One of the challenges you tend to run into in a large enterprise is what we call snowflakes, lots of gratuitously different workloads, projects, configurations to the extent that by developing and using WCNP and continuing to evolve it as we have, we end up with cookie cutter like consistency across our workloads which is super valuable when it comes to building tools or building services to automate operations that would otherwise be manual. When everything is pretty much done the same way, that becomes much simpler. Another key motivation for WCNP was the ability to abstract from the underlying cloud provider. And this is going to lead to a discussion of our triplet architecture. At the end of the day, when one works directly with an underlying cloud provider, one ends up taking a lot of dependencies on that particular cloud provider. Those dependencies can be valuable. For example, there are best of breed services like say Cloud Spanner offered by Google or say Cosmos DB offered by Microsoft that one wants to use and one is willing to take the dependency on the cloud provider to get that functionality because it's unique and valuable. On the other hand, one doesn't want to take dependencies on a cloud provider that don't add a lot of value. And with Kubernetes, we have the opportunity, and this is a large part of how Kubernetes was designed and why it is the way it is, we have the opportunity to sort of abstract from the underlying cloud provider for stateless workloads on compute. And so what this lets us do is build container-based applications that can run without change on different cloud provider infrastructure. So the same applications can run on WCNP over Azure, WCNP over GCP, or WCNP over the Walmart private cloud. And we have a private cloud. Our private cloud is OpenStack based and it gives us some significant cost advantages as well as control advantages. So to your point, in terms of business motivation, there's a key cost driver here, which is that we can use our own private cloud when it's advantageous and then use the public cloud provider capabilities when we need to. A key place with this comes into play is with elasticity. So while the private cloud is much more cost effective for us to run and use, it isn't as elastic as what the cloud providers offer, right? We don't have essentially unlimited scale. We have large scale, but the public cloud providers are elastic in the extreme which is a very powerful capability. So what we're able to do is burst, and we use this term bursting workloads into the public cloud from the private cloud to take advantage of the elasticity they offer and then fall back into the private cloud when the traffic load diminishes to the point where we don't need that elastic capability, elastic capacity at low cost. And this is a very important paradigm that I think is going to be very commonplace ultimately as the industry evolves. Private cloud is easier to operate and less expensive, and yet the public cloud provider capabilities are difficult to match. >> And the triplet, the tri is your on-prem private cloud and the two public clouds that you mentioned, is that right? >> That is correct. And we actually have an architecture in which we operate all three of those cloud platforms in close proximity with one another in three different major regions in the US. So we have east, west, and central. And in each of those regions, we have all three cloud providers. And the way it's configured, those data centers are within 10 milliseconds of each other, meaning that it's of negligible cost to interact between them. And this allows us to be fairly agnostic to where a particular workload is running. >> Does a human make that decision, Jack or is there some intelligence in the system that determines that? >> That's a really great question, Dave. And it's a great question because we're at the cusp of that transition. So currently humans make that decision. Humans choose to deploy workloads into a particular region and a particular provider within that region. That said, we're actively developing patterns and practices that will allow us to automate the placement of the workloads for a variety of criteria. For example, if in a particular region, a particular provider is heavily overloaded and is unable to provide the level of service that's expected through our SLAs, we could choose to fail workloads over from that cloud provider to a different one within the same region. But that's manual today. We do that, but people do it. Okay, we'd like to get to where that happens automatically. In the same way, we'd like to be able to automate the failovers, both for high availability and sort of the heavier disaster recovery model between, within a region between providers and even within a provider between the availability zones that are there, but also between regions for the sort of heavier disaster recovery or maintenance driven realignment of workload placement. Today, that's all manual. So we have people moving workloads from region A to region B or data center A to data center B. It's clean because of the abstraction. The workloads don't have to know or care, but there are latency considerations that come into play, and the humans have to be cognizant of those. And automating that can help ensure that we get the best performance and the best reliability. >> But you're developing the dataset to actually, I would imagine, be able to make those decisions in an automated fashion over time anyway. Is that a fair assumption? >> It is, and that's what we're actively developing right now. So if you were to look at us today, we have these nice abstractions and APIs in place, but people run that machine, if you will, moving toward a world where that machine is fully automated. >> What exactly are you abstracting? Is it sort of the deployment model or, you know, are you able to abstract, I'm just making this up like Azure functions and GCP functions so that you can sort of run them, you know, with a consistent experience. What exactly are you abstracting and how difficult was it to achieve that objective technically? >> that's a good question. What we're abstracting is the Kubernetes node construct. That is to say a cluster of Kubernetes nodes which are typically VMs, although they can run bare metal in certain contexts, is something that typically to stand up requires knowledge of the underlying cloud provider. So for example, with GCP, you would use GKE to set up a Kubernetes cluster, and in Azure, you'd use AKS. We are actually abstracting that aspect of things so that the developers standing up applications don't have to know what the underlying cluster management provider is. They don't have to know if it's GCP, AKS or our own Walmart private cloud. Now, in terms of functions like Azure functions that you've mentioned there, we haven't done that yet. That's another piece that we have sort of on our radar screen that, we'd like to get to is serverless approach, and the Knative work from Google and the Azure functions, those are things that we see good opportunity to use for a whole variety of use cases. But right now we're not doing much with that. We're strictly container based right now, and we do have some VMs that are running in sort of more of a traditional model. So our stateful workloads are primarily VM based, but for serverless, that's an opportunity for us to take some of these stateless workloads and turn them into cloud functions. >> Well, and that's another cost lever that you can pull down the road that's going to drop right to the bottom line. Do you see a day or maybe you're doing it today, but I'd be surprised, but where you build applications that actually span multiple clouds or is there, in your view, always going to be a direct one-to-one mapping between where an application runs and the specific cloud platform? >> That's a really great question. Well, yes and no. So today, application development teams choose a cloud provider to deploy to and a location to deploy to, and they have to get involved in moving an application like we talked about today. That said, the bursting capability that I mentioned previously is something that is a step in the direction of automatic migration. That is to say we're migrating workload to different locations automatically. Currently, the prototypes we've been developing and that we think are going to eventually make their way into production are leveraging Istio to assess the load incoming on a particular cluster and start shedding that load into a different location. Right now, the configuration of that is still manual, but there's another opportunity for automation there. And I think a key piece of this is that down the road, well, that's a, sort of a small step in the direction of an application being multi provider. We expect to see really an abstraction of the fact that there is a triplet even. So the workloads are moving around according to whatever the control plane decides is necessary based on a whole variety of inputs. And at that point, you will have true multi-cloud applications, applications that are distributed across the different providers and in a way that application developers don't have to think about. >> So Walmart's been a leader, Jack, in using data for competitive advantages for decades. It's kind of been a poster child for that. You've got a mountain of IP in the form of data, tools, applications best practices that until the cloud came out was all On Prem. But I'm really interested in this idea of building a Walmart ecosystem, which obviously you have. Do you see a day or maybe you're even doing it today where you take what we call the Walmart SuperCloud, WCNP in your words, and point or turn that toward an external world or your ecosystem, you know, supporting those partners or customers that could drive new revenue streams, you know directly from the platform? >> Great questions, Dave. So there's really two things to say here. The first is that with respect to data, our data workloads are primarily VM basis. I've mentioned before some VMware, some straight open stack. But the key here is that WCNP and Kubernetes are very powerful for stateless workloads, but for stateful workloads tend to be still climbing a bit of a growth curve in the industry. So our data workloads are not primarily based on WCNP. They're VM based. Now that said, there is opportunity to make some progress there, and we are looking at ways to move things into containers that are currently running in VMs which are stateful. The other question you asked is related to how we expose data to third parties and also functionality. Right now we do have in-house, for our own use, a very robust data architecture, and we have followed the sort of domain-oriented data architecture guidance from Martin Fowler. And we have data lakes in which we collect data from all the transactional systems and which we can then use and do use to build models which are then used in our applications. But right now we're not exposing the data directly to customers as a product. That's an interesting direction that's been talked about and may happen at some point, but right now that's internal. What we are exposing to customers is applications. So we're offering our global integrated fulfillment capabilities, our order picking and curbside pickup capabilities, and our cloud powered checkout capabilities to third parties. And this means we're standing up our own internal applications as externally facing SaaS applications which can serve our partners' customers. >> Yeah, of course, Martin Fowler really first introduced to the world Zhamak Dehghani's data mesh concept and this whole idea of data products and domain oriented thinking. Zhamak Dehghani, by the way, is a speaker at our event as well. Last question I had is edge, and how you think about the edge? You know, the stores are an edge. Are you putting resources there that sort of mirror this this triplet model? Or is it better to consolidate things in the cloud? I know there are trade-offs in terms of latency. How are you thinking about that? >> All really good questions. It's a challenging area as you can imagine because edges are subject to disconnection, right? Or reduced connection. So we do place the same architecture at the edge. So WCNP runs at the edge, and an application that's designed to run at WCNP can run at the edge. That said, there are a number of very specific considerations that come up when running at the edge, such as the possibility of disconnection or degraded connectivity. And so one of the challenges we have faced and have grappled with and done a good job of I think is dealing with the fact that applications go offline and come back online and have to reconnect and resynchronize, the sort of online offline capability is something that can be quite challenging. And we have a couple of application architectures that sort of form the two core sets of patterns that we use. One is an offline/online synchronization architecture where we discover that we've come back online, and we understand the differences between the online dataset and the offline dataset and how they have to be reconciled. The other is a message-based architecture. And here in our health and wellness domain, we've developed applications that are queue based. So they're essentially business processes that consist of multiple steps where each step has its own queue. And what that allows us to do is devote whatever bandwidth we do have to those pieces of the process that are most latency sensitive and allow the queue lengths to increase in parts of the process that are not latency sensitive, knowing that they will eventually catch up when the bandwidth is restored. And to put that in a little bit of context, we have fiber lengths to all of our locations, and we have I'll just use a round number, 10-ish thousand locations. It's larger than that, but that's the ballpark, and we have fiber to all of them, but when the fiber is disconnected, When the disconnection happens, we're able to fall back to 5G and to Starlink. Starlink is preferred. It's a higher bandwidth. 5G if that fails. But in each of those cases, the bandwidth drops significantly. And so the applications have to be intelligent about throttling back the traffic that isn't essential, so that it can push the essential traffic in those lower bandwidth scenarios. >> So much technology to support this amazing business which started in the early 1960s. Jack, unfortunately, we're out of time. I would love to have you back or some members of your team and drill into how you're using open source, but really thank you so much for explaining the approach that you've taken and participating in SuperCloud2. >> You're very welcome, Dave, and we're happy to come back and talk about other aspects of what we do. For example, we could talk more about the data lakes and the data mesh that we have in place. We could talk more about the directions we might go with serverless. So please look us up again. Happy to chat. >> I'm going to take you up on that, Jack. All right. This is Dave Vellante for John Furrier and the Cube community. Keep it right there for more action from SuperCloud2. (upbeat music)

>> Now we're recording. >> All right. >> Appreciate that, Hannah. >> Yeah, so I mean, I think in general we continue to do very, very well as a company. I think like everybody, there's economic headwinds today that are unavoidable, but I think we have a couple things going for us. One, we're in the cyberspace, which I think is, for the most part, recession proof as an industry. I think the impact of a recession will impact some vendors and some categories, but in general, I think the industry is pretty resilient. It's like the power industry, no? Recession or not, you still need electricity to your house. Cybersecurity is almost becoming a utility like that as far as the needs of companies go. I think for us, we also have the ability to do the security, the security operations, for a lot of companies, and if you look at the value proposition, the ROI for the cost of less than one to maybe two or three, depending on how big you are as a customer, what you'd have to pay for half to three security operations people, we can give you a full security operations. And so the ROI is is almost kind of brain dead simple, and so that keeps us going pretty well. And I think the other areas, we remove all that complexity for people. So in a world where you got other problems to worry about, handling all the security complexity is something that adds to that ROI. So for us, I think what we're seeing is mostly is some of the larger deals are taking a little bit longer than they have, some of the large enterprise deals, 'cause I think they are being a little more cautious about how they spend it, but in general, business is still kind of cranking along. >> Anything you can share with me that you guys have talked about publicly in terms of any metrics, or what can you tell me other than cranking? >> Yeah, I mean, I would just say we're still very, very high growth, so I think our financial profile would kind of still put us clearly in the cyber unicorn position, but I think other than that, we don't really share business metrics as a private- >> Okay, so how about headcount? >> Still growing. So we're not growing as fast as we've been growing, but I don't think we were anyway. I think we kind of, we're getting to the point of critical mass. We'll start to grow in a more kind of normal course and speed. I don't think we overhired like a lot of companies did in the past, even though we added, almost doubled the size of the company in the last 18 months. So we're still hiring, but very kind of targeted to certain roles going forward 'cause I do think we're kind of at critical mass in some of the other functions. >> You disclose headcount or no? >> We do not. >> You don't, okay. And never have? >> Not that I'm aware of, no. >> Okay, on the macro, I don't know if security's recession proof, but it's less susceptible, let's say. I've had Nikesh Arora on recently, we're at Palo Alto's Ignite, and he was saying, "Look," it's just like you were saying, "Larger deal's a little harder." A lot of times customers, he was saying customers are breaking larger deals into smaller deals, more POCs, more approvals, more people to get through the approval, not whole, blah, blah, blah. Now they're a different animal, I understand, but are you seeing similar trends, and how are you dealing with that? >> Yeah, I think the exact same trends, and I think it's just in a world where spending a dollar matters, I think a lot more oversight comes into play, a lot more reviewers, and can you shave it down here? Can you reduce the scope of the project to save money there? And I think it just caused a lot of those things. I think, in the large enterprise, I think most of those deals for companies like us and Palo and CrowdStrike and kind of the upper tier companies, they'll still go through. I think they'll just going to take a lot longer, and, yeah, maybe they're 80% of what they would've been otherwise, but there's still a lot of business to be had out there. >> So how are you dealing with that? I mean, you're talking about you double the size of the company. Is it kind of more focused on go-to-market, more sort of, maybe not overlay, but sort of SE types that are going to be doing more handholding. How have you dealt with that? Or have you just sort of said, "Hey, it is what it is, and we're not going to, we're not going to tactically respond to. We got long-term direction"? >> Yeah, I think it's more the latter. I think for us, it's we've gone through all these things before. It just takes longer now. So a lot of the steps we're taking are the same steps. We're still involved in a lot of POCs, we're involved in a lot of demos, and I don't think that changed. It's just the time between your POC and when someone sends you the PO, there's five more people now got to review things and go through a budget committee and all sorts of stuff like that. I think where we're probably focused more now is adding more and more capabilities just so we continue to be on the front foot of innovation and being relevant to the market, and trying to create more differentiators for us and the competitors. That's something that's just built into our culture, and we don't want to slow that down. And so even though the business is still doing extremely, extremely well, we want to keep investing in kind of technology. >> So the deal size, is it fair to say the initial deal size for new accounts, while it may be smaller, you're adding more capabilities, and so over time, your average contract values will go up? Are you seeing that trend? Or am I- >> Well, I would say I don't even necessarily see our average deal size has gotten smaller. I think in total, it's probably gotten a little bigger. I think what happens is when something like this happens, the old cream rises to the top thing, I think, comes into play, and you'll see some organizations instead of doing a deal with three or four vendors, they may want to pick one or two and really kind of put a lot of energy behind that. For them, they're maybe spending a little less money, but for those vendors who are amongst those getting chosen, I think they're doing pretty good. So our average deal size is pretty stable. For us, it's just a temporal thing. It's just the larger deals take a little bit longer. I don't think we're seeing much of a deal velocity difference in our mid-market commercial spaces, but in the large enterprise it's a little bit slower. But for us, we have ambitious plans in our strategy or on how we want to execute and what we want to build, and so I think we want to just continue to make sure we go down that path technically. >> So I have some questions on sort of the target markets and the cohorts you're going after, and I have some product questions. I know we're somewhat limited on time, but the historical focus has been on SMB, and I know you guys have gone in into enterprise. I'm curious as to how that's going. Any guidance you can give me on mix? Or when I talk to the big guys, right, you know who they are, the big managed service providers, MSSPs, and they're like, "Poo poo on Arctic Wolf," like, "Oh, they're (groans)." I said, "Yeah, that's what they used to say about the PC. It's just a toy. Or Microsoft SQL Server." But so I kind of love that narrative for you guys, but I'm curious from your words as to, what is that enterprise? How's the historical business doing, and how's the entrance into the enterprise going? What kind of hurdles are you having, blockers are you having to remove? Any color you can give me there would be super helpful. >> Yeah, so I think our commercial S&B business continues to do really good. Our mid-market is a very strong market for us. And I think while a lot of companies like to focus purely on large enterprise, there's a lot more mid-market companies, and a much larger piece of the IT puzzle collectively is in mid-market than it is large enterprise. That being said, we started to get pulled into the large enterprise not because we're a toy but because we're quite a comprehensive service. And so I think what we're trying to do from a roadmap perspective is catch up with some of the kind of capabilities that a large enterprise would want from us that a potential mid-market customer wouldn't. In some case, it's not doing more. It's just doing it different. Like, so we have a very kind of hands-on engagement with some of our smaller customers, something we call our concierge. Some of the large enterprises want more of a hybrid where they do some stuff and you do some stuff. And so kind of building that capability into the platform is something that's really important for us. Just how we engage with them as far as giving 'em access to their data, the certain APIs they want, things of that nature, what we're building out for large enterprise, but the demand by large enterprise on our business is enormous. And so it's really just us kind of catching up with some of the kind of the features that they want that we lack today, but many of 'em are still signing up with us, obviously, and in lieu of that, knowing that it's coming soon. And so I think if you look at the growth of our large enterprise, it's one of our fastest growing segments, and I think it shows anything but we're a toy. I would be shocked, frankly, if there's an MSSP, and, of course, we don't see ourself as an MSSP, but I'd be shocked if any of them operate a platform at the scale that ours operates. >> Okay, so wow. A lot I want to unpack there. So just to follow up on that last question, you don't see yourself as an MSSP because why, you see yourselves as a technology platform? >> Yes, I mean, the vast, vast, vast majority of what we deliver is our own technology. So we integrate with third-party solutions mostly to bring in that telemetry. So we've built our own platform from the ground up. We have our own threat intelligence, our own detection logic. We do have our own agents and network sensors. MSSP is typically cobbling together other tools, third party off-the-shelf tools to run their SOC. Ours is all homegrown technology. So I have a whole group called Arctic Wolf Labs, is building, just cranking out ML-based detections, building out infrastructure to take feeds in from a variety of different sources. We have a full integration kind of effort where we integrate into other third parties. So when we go into a customer, we can leverage whatever they have, but at the same time, we produce some tech that if they're lacking in a certain area, we can provide that tech, particularly around things like endpoint agents and network sensors and the like. >> What about like identity, doing your own identity? >> So we don't do our own identity, but we take feeds in from things like Okta and Active Directory and the like, and we have detection logic built on top of that. So part of our value add is we were XDR before XDR was the cool thing to talk about, meaning we can look across multiple attack surfaces and come to a security conclusion where most EDR vendors started with looking just at the endpoint, right? And then they called themselves XDR because now they took in a network feed, but they still looked at it as a separate network detection. We actually look at the things across multiple attack surfaces and stitch 'em together to look at that from a security perspective. In some cases we have automatic detections that will fire. In other cases, we can surface some to a security professional who can go start pulling on that thread. >> So you don't need to purchase CrowdStrike software and integrate it. You have your own equivalent essentially. >> Well, we'll take a feed from the CrowdStrike endpoint into our platform. We don't have to rely on their detections and their alerts, and things of that nature. Now obviously anything they discover we pull in as well, it's just additional context, but we have all our own tech behind it. So we operate kind of at an MSSP scale. We have a similar value proposition in the sense that we'll use whatever the customer has, but once that data kind of comes into our pipeline, it's all our own homegrown tech from there. >> But I mean, what I like about the MSSP piece of your business is it's very high touch. It's very intimate. What I like about what you're saying is that it's software-like economics, so software, software-like part of it. >> That's what makes us the unicorn, right? Is we do have, our concierges is very hands-on. We continue to drive automation that makes our concierge security professionals more efficient, but we always want that customer to have that concierge person as, is almost an extension to their security team, or in some cases, for companies that don't even have a security team, as their security team. As we go down the path, as I mentioned, one of the things we want to be able to do is start to have a more flexible model where we can have that high touch if you want it. We can have the high touch on certain occasions, and you can do stuff. We can have low touch, like we can span the spectrum, but we never want to lose our kind of unique value proposition around the concierge, but we also want to make sure that we're providing an interface that any customer would want to use. >> So given that sort of software-like economics, I mean, services companies need this too, but especially in software, things like net revenue retention and churn are super important. How are those metrics looking? What can you share with me there? >> Yeah, I mean, again, we don't share those metrics publicly, but all's I can continue to repeat is, if you looked at all of our financial metrics, I think you would clearly put us in the unicorn category. I think very few companies are going to have the level of growth that we have on the amount of ARR that we have with the net revenue retention and the churn and upsell. All those aspects continue to be very, very strong for us. >> I want to go back to the sort of enterprise conversation. So large enterprises would engage with you as a complement to their existing SOC, correct? Is that a fair statement or not necessarily? >> It's in some cases. In some cases, they're looking to not have a SOC. So we run into a lot of cases where they want to replace their SIEM, and they want a solution like Arctic Wolf to do that. And so there's a poll, I can't remember, I think it was Forrester, IDC, one of them did it a couple years ago, and they found out that 70% of large enterprises do not want to build the SOC, and it's not 'cause they don't need one, it's 'cause they can't afford it, they can't staff it, they don't have the expertise. And you think about if you're a tech company or a bank, or something like that, of course you can do it, but if you're an international plumbing distributor, you're not going to (chuckles), someone's not going to graduate from Stanford with a cybersecurity degree and go, "Cool, I want to go work for a plumbing distributor in their SOC," right? So they're going to have trouble kind of bringing in the right talent, and as a result, it's difficult to go make a multimillion-dollar investment into a SOC if you're not going to get the quality people to operate it, so they turn to companies like us. >> Got it, so, okay, so you're talking earlier about capabilities that large enterprises require that there might be some gaps, you might lack some features. A couple questions there. One is, when you do some of those, I inferred some of that is integrations. Are those integrations sort of one-off snowflakes or are you finding that you're able to scale those across the large enterprises? That's my first question. >> Yeah, so most of the integrations are pretty straightforward. I think where we run into things that are kind of enterprise-centric, they definitely want open APIs, they want access to our platform, which we don't do today, which we are going to be doing, but we don't do that yet today. They want to do more of a SIEM replacement. So we're really kind of what we call an open XDR platform, so there's things that we would need to build to kind of do raw log ingestion. I mean, we do this today. We have raw log ingestion, we have log storage, we have log searching, but there's like some of the compliance scenarios that they need out of their SIEM. We don't do those today. And so that's kind of holding them back from getting off their SIEM and going fully onto a solution like ours. Then the other one is kind of the level of customization, so the ability to create a whole bunch of custom rules, and that ties back to, "I want to get off my SIEM. I've built all these custom rules in my SIEM, and it's great that you guys do all this automatic AI stuff in the background, but I need these very specific things to be executed on." And so trying to build an interface for them to be able to do that and then also simulate it, again, because, no matter how big they are running their SIEM and their SOC... Like, we talked to one of the largest financial institutions in the world. As far as we were told, they have the largest individual company SOC in the world, and we operate almost 15 times their size. So we always have to be careful because this is a cloud-based native platform, but someone creates some rule that then just craters the performance of the whole platform, so we have to build kind of those guardrails around it. So those are the things primarily that the large enterprises are asking for. Most of those issues are not holding them back from coming. They want to know they're coming, and we're working on all of those. >> Cool, and see, just aside, I was talking to CISO the other day, said, "If it weren't for my compliance and audit group, I would chuck my SIEM." I mean, everybody wants to get rid of their SIEM. >> I've never met anyone who likes their SIEM. >> Do you feel like you've achieved product market fit in the larger enterprise or is that still something that you're sorting out? >> So I think we know, like, we're on a path to do that. We're on a provable path to do that, so I don't think there's any surprises left. I think everything that we know we need to do for that is someone's writing code for it today. It's just a matter of getting it through the system and getting into production. So I feel pretty good about it. I think that's why we are seeing such a high growth rate in our large enterprise business, 'cause we share that feedback with some of those key customers. We have a Customer Advisory Board that we share a lot of this information with. So yeah, I mean, I feel pretty good about what we need to do. We're certainly operate at large enterprise scales, so taking in the amount of the volume of data they're going to have and the types of integrations they need. We're comfortable with that. It's just more or less the interfaces that a large enterprise would want that some of the smaller companies don't ask for. >> Do you have enough tenure in the market to get a sense as to stickiness or even indicators that will lead toward retention? Have you been at it long enough in the enterprise or you still, again, figuring that out? >> Yeah, no, I think we've been at it long enough, and our retention rates are extremely high. If anything, kind of our net retention rates, well over 100% 'cause we have opportunities to upsell into new modules and expanding the coverage of what they have today. I think the areas that if you cornered enterprise that use us and things they would complain about are things I just told you about, right? There's still some things I want to do in my Splunk, and I need an API to pull my data out and put it in my Splunk and stuff like that, and those are the things we want to enable. >> Yeah, so I can't wait till you guys go public because you got Snowflake up here, and you got Veritas down here, and I'm very curious as to where you guys go. When's the IPO? You want to tell me that? (chuckling) >> Unfortunately, it's not up to us right now. You got to get the markets- >> Yeah, I hear you. Right, if the market were better. Well, if the market were better, you think you'd be out? >> Yeah, I mean, we'd certainly be a viable candidate to go. >> Yeah, there you go. I have a question for you because I don't have a SOC. I run a small business with my co-CEO. We're like 30, 40 people W-2s, we got another 50 or so contractors, and I'm always like have one eye, sleep with one eye open 'cause of security. What is your ideal SMB customer? Think S. >> Yeah. >> Would I fit? >> Yeah, I mean you're you're right in the sweet spot. I think where the company started and where we still have a lot of value proposition, which is companies like, like you said it, you sleep with one eye open, but you don't have necessarily the technical acumen to be able to do that security for yourself, and that's where we fit in. We bring kind of this whole security, we call it Security Operations Cloud, to bear, and we have some of the best professionals in the world who can basically be your SOC for less than it would cost you to hire somebody right out of college to do IT stuff. And so the value proposition's there. You're going to get the best of the best, providing you a kind of a security service that you couldn't possibly build on your own, and that way you can go to bed at night and close both eyes. >> So (chuckling) I'm sure something else would keep me up. But so in thinking about that, our Amazon bill keeps growing and growing and growing. What would it, and I presume I can engage with you on a monthly basis, right? As a consumption model, or how's the pricing work? >> Yeah, so there's two models that we have. So typically the kind of the monthly billing type of models would be through one of our MSP partners, where they have monthly billing capabilities. Usually direct with us is more of a longer term deal, could be one, two, or three, or it's up to the customer. And so we have both of those engagement models. Were doing more and more and more through MSPs today because of that model you just described, and they do kind of target the very S in the SMB as well. >> I mean, rough numbers, even ranges. If I wanted to go with the MSP monthly, I mean, what would a small company like mine be looking at a month? >> Honestly, I do not even know the answer to that. >> We're not talking hundreds of thousands of dollars a month? >> No. God, no. God, no. No, no, no. >> I mean, order of magnitude, we're talking thousands, tens of thousands? >> Thousands, on a monthly basis. Yeah. >> Yeah, yeah. Thousands per month. So if I were to budget between 20 and $50,000 a year, I'm definitely within the envelope. Is that fair? I mean, I'm giving a wide range >> That's fair. just to try to make- >> No, that's fair. >> And if I wanted to go direct with you, I would be signing up for a longer term agreement, correct, like I do with Salesforce? >> Yeah, yeah, a year. A year would, I think, be the minimum for that, and, yeah, I think the budget you set aside is kind of right in the sweet spot there. >> Yeah, I'm interested, I'm going to... Have a sales guy call me (chuckles) somehow. >> All right, will do. >> No, I'm serious. I want to start >> I will. >> investigating these things because we sell to very large organizations. I mean, name a tech company. That's our client base, except for Arctic Wolf. We should talk about that. And increasingly they're paranoid about data protection agreements, how you're protecting your data, our data. We write a lot of software and deliver it as part of our services, so it's something that's increasingly important. It's certainly a board level discussion and beyond, and most large organizations and small companies oftentimes don't think about it or try not to. They just put their head in the sand and, "We don't want to be doing that," so. >> Yeah, I will definitely have someone get in touch with you. >> Cool. Let's see. Anything else you can tell me on the product side? Are there things that you're doing that we talked about, the gaps at the high end that you're, some of the features that you're building in, which was super helpful. Anything in the SMB space that you want to share? >> Yeah, I think the biggest thing that we're doing technically now is really trying to drive more and more automation and efficiency through our operations, and that comes through really kind of a generous use of AI. So building models around more efficient detections based upon signal, but also automating the actions of our operators so we can start to learn through the interface. When they do A and B, they always do C. Well, let's just do C for them, stuff like that. Then also building more automation as far as the response back to third-party solutions as well so we can remediate more directly on third-party products without having to get into the consoles or having our customers do it. So that's really just trying to drive efficiency in the system, and that helps provide better security outcomes but also has a big impact on our margins as well. >> I know you got to go, but I want to show you something real quick. I have data. I do a weekly program called "Breaking Analysis," and I have a partner called ETR, Enterprise Technology Research, and they have a platform. I don't know if you can see this. They have a survey platform, and each quarter, they do a survey of about 1,500 IT decision makers. They also have a survey on, they call ETS, Emerging Technology Survey. So it's private companies. And I don't want to go into it too much, but this is a sentiment graph. This is net sentiment. >> Just so you know, all I see is a white- >> Yeah, just a white bar. >> Oh, that's weird. Oh, whiteboard. Oh, here we go. How about that? >> There you go. >> Yeah, so this is a sentiment graph. So this is net sentiment and this is mindshare. And if I go to Arctic Wolf... So it's typical security, right? The 8,000 companies. And when I go here, what impresses me about this is you got a decent mindshare, that's this axis, but you've also got an N in the survey. It's about 1,500 in the survey, It's 479 Arctic Wolf customers responded to this. 57% don't know you. Oh, sorry, they're aware of you, but no plan to evaluate; 19% plan to evaluate, 7% are evaluating; 11%, no plan to utilize even though they've evaluated you; and 1% say they've evaluated you and plan to utilize. It's a small percentage, but actually it's not bad in the random sample of the world about that. And so obviously you want to get that number up, but this is a really impressive position right here that I wanted to just share with you. I do a lot of analysis weekly, and this is a really, it's completely independent survey, and you're sort of separating from the pack, as you can see. So kind of- >> Well, it's good to see that. And I think that just is a further indicator of what I was telling you. We continue to have a strong financial performance. >> Yeah, in a good market. Okay, well, thanks you guys. And hey, if I can get this recording, Hannah, I may even figure out how to write it up. (chuckles) That would be super helpful. >> Yes. We'll get that up. >> And David or Hannah, if you can send me David's contact info so I can get a salesperson in touch with him. (Hannah chuckling) >> Yeah, great. >> Yeah, we'll work on that as well. Thanks so much for both your time. >> Thanks a lot. It was great talking with you. >> Thanks, you guys. Great to meet you. >> Thank you. >> Bye. >> Bye.

(light music) >> Hi everybody. Welcome to this Cube Conversation. I'm really pleased to announce a collaboration with Rob Strechay. He's a guest cube analyst, and we'll be working together to extract the signal from the noise. Rob is a long-time product pro, working at a number of firms including AWS, HP, HPE, NetApp, Snowplow. I did a stint as an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. Rob, good to see you. Thanks for coming into our Marlboro Studios. >> Well, thank you for having me. It's always great to be here. >> I'm really excited about working with you. We've known each other for a long time. You've been in the Cube a bunch. You know, you're in between gigs, and I think we can have a lot of fun together. Covering events, covering trends. So. let's get into it. What's happening out there? We're sort of exited the isolation economy. Things were booming. Now, everybody's tapping the brakes. From your standpoint, what are you seeing out there? >> Yeah. I'm seeing that people are really looking how to get more out of their data. How they're bringing things together, how they're looking at the costs of Cloud, and understanding how are they building out their SaaS applications. And understanding that when they go in and actually start to use Cloud, it's not only just using the base services anymore. They're looking at, how do I use these platforms as a service? Some are easier than others, and they're trying to understand, how do I get more value out of that relationship with the Cloud? They're also consolidating the number of Clouds that they have, I would say to try to better optimize their spend, and getting better pricing for that matter. >> Are you seeing people unhook Clouds, or just reduce maybe certain Cloud activities and going maybe instead of 60/40 going 90/10? >> Correct. It's more like the 90/10 type of rule where they're starting to say, Hey I'm not going to get rid of Azure or AWS or Google. I'm going to move a portion of this over that I was using on this one service. Maybe I got a great two-year contract to start with on this platform as a service or a database as a service. I'm going to unhook from that and maybe go with an independent. Maybe with something like a Snowflake or a Databricks on top of another Cloud, so that I can consolidate down. But it also gives them more flexibility as well. >> In our last breaking analysis, Rob, we identified six factors that were reducing Cloud consumption. There were factors and customer tactics. And I want to get your take on this. So, some of the factors really, you got fewer mortgage originations. FinTech, obviously big Cloud user. Crypto, not as much activity there. Lower ad spending means less Cloud. And then one of 'em, which you kind of disagreed with was less, less analytics, you know, fewer... Less frequency of calculations. I'll come back to that. But then optimizing compute using Graviton or AMD instances moving to cheaper storage tiers. That of course makes sense. And then optimize pricing plans. Maybe going from On Demand, you know, to, you know, instead of pay by the drink, buy in volume. Okay. So, first of all, do those make sense to you with the exception? We'll come back and talk about the analytics piece. Is that what you're seeing from customers? >> Yeah, I think so. I think that was pretty much dead on with what I'm seeing from customers and the ones that I go out and talk to. A lot of times they're trying to really monetize their, you know, understand how their business utilizes these Clouds. And, where their spend is going in those Clouds. Can they use, you know, lower tiers of storage? Do they really need the best processors? Do they need to be using Intel or can they get away with AMD or Graviton 2 or 3? Or do they need to move in? And, I think when you look at all of these Clouds, they always have pricing curves that are arcs from the newest to the oldest stuff. And you can play games with that. And understanding how you can actually lower your costs by looking at maybe some of the older generation. Maybe your application was written 10 years ago. You don't necessarily have to be on the best, newest processor for that application per se. >> So last, I want to come back to this whole analytics piece. Last June, I think it was June, Dev Ittycheria, who's the-- I call him Dev. Spelled Dev, pronounced Dave. (chuckles softly) Same pronunciation, different spelling. Dev Ittycheria, CEO of Mongo, on the earnings call. He was getting, you know, hit. Things were starting to get a little less visible in terms of, you know, the outlook. And people were pushing him like... Because you're in the Cloud, is it easier to dial down? And he said, because we're the document database, we support transaction applications. We're less discretionary than say, analytics. Well on the Snowflake earnings call, that same month or the month after, they were all over Slootman and Scarpelli. Oh, the Mongo CEO said that they're less discretionary than analytics. And Snowflake was an interesting comment. They basically said, look, we're the Cloud. You can dial it up, you can dial it down, but the area under the curve over a period of time is going to be the same, because they get their customers to commit. What do you say? You disagreed with the notion that people are running their calculations less frequently. Is that because they're trying to do a better job of targeting customers in near real time? What are you seeing out there? >> Yeah, I think they're moving away from using people and more expensive marketing. Or, they're trying to figure out what's my Google ad spend, what's my Meta ad spend? And what they're trying to do is optimize that spend. So, what is the return on advertising, or the ROAS as they would say. And what they're looking to do is understand, okay, I have to collect these analytics that better understand where are these people coming from? How do they get to my site, to my store, to my whatever? And when they're using it, how do they they better move through that? What you're also seeing is that analytics is not only just for kind of the retail or financial services or things like that, but then they're also, you know, using that to make offers in those categories. When you move back to more, you know, take other companies that are building products and SaaS delivered products. They may actually go and use this analytics for making the product better. And one of the big reasons for that is maybe they're dialing back how many product managers they have. And they're looking to be more data driven about how they actually go and build the product out or enhance the product. So maybe they're, you know, an online video service and they want to understand why people are either using or not using the whiteboard inside the product. And they're collecting a lot of that product analytics in a big way so that they can go through that. And they're doing it in a constant manner. This first party type tracking within applications is growing rapidly by customers. >> So, let's talk about who wins in that. So, obviously the Cloud guys, AWS, Google and Azure. I want to come back and unpack that a little bit. Databricks and Snowflake, we reported on our last breaking analysis, it kind of on a collision course. You know, a couple years ago we were thinking, okay, AWS, Snowflake and Databricks, like perfect sandwich. And then of course they started to become more competitive. My sense is they still, you know, compliment each other in the field, right? But, you know, publicly, they've got bigger aspirations, they get big TAMs that they're going after. But it's interesting, the data shows that-- So, Snowflake was off the charts in terms of spending momentum and our EPR surveys. Our partner down in New York, they kind of came into line. They're both growing in terms of market presence. Databricks couldn't get to IPO. So, we don't have as much, you know, visibility on their financials. You know, Snowflake obviously highly transparent cause they're a public company. And then you got AWS, Google and Azure. And it seems like AWS appears to be more partner friendly. Microsoft, you know, depends on what market you're in. And Google wants to sell BigQuery. >> Yeah. >> So, what are you seeing in the public Cloud from a data platform perspective? >> Yeah. I think that was pretty astute in what you were talking about there, because I think of the three, Google is definitely I think a little bit behind in how they go to market with their partners. Azure's done a fantastic job of partnering with these companies to understand and even though they may have Synapse as their go-to and where they want people to go to do AI and ML. What they're looking at is, Hey, we're going to also be friendly with Snowflake. We're also going to be friendly with a Databricks. And I think that, Amazon has always been there because that's where the market has been for these developers. So, many, like Databricks' and the Snowflake's have gone there first because, you know, Databricks' case, they built out on top of S3 first. And going and using somebody's object layer other than AWS, was not as simple as you would think it would be. Moving between those. >> So, one of the financial meetups I said meetup, but the... It was either the CEO or the CFO. It was either Slootman or Scarpelli talking at, I don't know, Merrill Lynch or one of the other financial conferences said, I think it was probably their Q3 call. Snowflake said 80% of our business goes through Amazon. And he said to this audience, the next day we got a call from Microsoft. Hey, we got to do more. And, we know just from reading the financial statements that Snowflake is getting concessions from Amazon, they're buying in volume, they're renegotiating their contracts. Amazon gets it. You know, lower the price, people buy more. Long term, we're all going to make more money. Microsoft obviously wants to get into that game with Snowflake. They understand the momentum. They said Google, not so much. And I've had customers tell me that they wanted to use Google's AI with Snowflake, but they can't, they got to go to to BigQuery. So, honestly, I haven't like vetted that so. But, I think it's true. But nonetheless, it seems like Google's a little less friendly with the data platform providers. What do you think? >> Yeah, I would say so. I think this is a place that Google looks and wants to own. Is that now, are they doing the right things long term? I mean again, you know, you look at Google Analytics being you know, basically outlawed in five countries in the EU because of GDPR concerns, and compliance and governance of data. And I think people are looking at Google and BigQuery in general and saying, is it the best place for me to go? Is it going to be in the right places where I need it? Still, it's still one of the largest used databases out there just because it underpins a number of the Google services. So you almost get, like you were saying, forced into BigQuery sometimes, if you want to use the tech on top. >> You do strategy. >> Yeah. >> Right? You do strategy, you do messaging. Is it the right call by Google? I mean, it's not a-- I criticize Google sometimes. But, I'm not sure it's the wrong call to say, Hey, this is our ace in the hole. >> Yeah. >> We got to get people into BigQuery. Cause, first of all, BigQuery is a solid product. I mean it's Cloud native and it's, you know, by all, it gets high marks. So, why give the competition an advantage? Let's try to force people essentially into what is we think a great product and it is a great product. The flip side of that is, they're giving up some potential partner TAM and not treating the ecosystem as well as one of their major competitors. What do you do if you're in that position? >> Yeah, I think that that's a fantastic question. And the question I pose back to the companies I've worked with and worked for is, are you really looking to have vendor lock-in as your key differentiator to your service? And I think when you start to look at these companies that are moving away from BigQuery, moving to even, Databricks on top of GCS in Google, they're looking to say, okay, I can go there if I have to evacuate from GCP and go to another Cloud, I can stay on Databricks as a platform, for instance. So I think it's, people are looking at what platform as a service, database as a service they go and use. Because from a strategic perspective, they don't want that vendor locking. >> That's where Supercloud becomes interesting, right? Because, if I can run on Snowflake or Databricks, you know, across Clouds. Even Oracle, you know, they're getting into business with Microsoft. Let's talk about some of the Cloud players. So, the big three have reported. >> Right. >> We saw AWSs Cloud growth decelerated down to 20%, which is I think the lowest growth rate since they started to disclose public numbers. And they said they exited, sorry, they said January they grew at 15%. >> Yeah. >> Year on year. Now, they had some pretty tough compares. But nonetheless, 15%, wow. Azure, kind of mid thirties, and then Google, we had kind of low thirties. But, well behind in terms of size. And Google's losing probably almost $3 billion annually. But, that's not necessarily a bad thing by advocating and investing. What's happening with the Cloud? Is AWS just running into the law, large numbers? Do you think we can actually see a re-acceleration like we have in the past with AWS Cloud? Azure, we predicted is going to be 75% of AWS IAS revenues. You know, we try to estimate IAS. >> Yeah. >> Even though they don't share that with us. That's a huge milestone. You'd think-- There's some people who have, I think, Bob Evans predicted a while ago that Microsoft would surpass AWS in terms of size. You know, what do you think? >> Yeah, I think that Azure's going to keep to-- Keep growing at a pretty good clip. I think that for Azure, they still have really great account control, even though people like to hate Microsoft. The Microsoft sellers that are out there making those companies successful day after day have really done a good job of being in those accounts and helping people. I was recently over in the UK. And the UK market between AWS and Azure is pretty amazing, how much Azure there is. And it's growing within Europe in general. In the states, it's, you know, I think it's growing well. I think it's still growing, probably not as fast as it is outside the U.S. But, you go down to someplace like Australia, it's also Azure. You hear about Azure all the time. >> Why? Is that just because of the Microsoft's software state? It's just so convenient. >> I think it has to do with, you know, and you can go with the reasoning they don't break out, you know, Office 365 and all of that out of their numbers is because they have-- They're in all of these accounts because the office suite is so pervasive in there. So, they always have reasons to go back in and, oh by the way, you're on these old SQL licenses. Let us move you up here and we'll be able to-- We'll support you on the old version, you know, with security and all of these things. And be able to move you forward. So, they have a lot of, I guess you could say, levers to stay in those accounts and be interesting. At least as part of the Cloud estate. I think Amazon, you know, is hitting, you know, the large number. Laws of large numbers. But I think that they're also going through, and I think this was seen in the layoffs that they were making, that they're looking to understand and have profitability in more of those services that they have. You know, over 350 odd services that they have. And you know, as somebody who went there and helped to start yet a new one, while I was there. And finally, it went to beta back in September, you start to look at the fact that, that number of services, people, their own sellers don't even know all of their services. It's impossible to comprehend and sell that many things. So, I think what they're going through is really looking to rationalize a lot of what they're doing from a services perspective going forward. They're looking to focus on more profitable services and bringing those in. Because right now it's built like a layer cake where you have, you know, S3 EBS and EC2 on the bottom of the layer cake. And then maybe you have, you're using IAM, the authorization and authentication in there and you have all these different services. And then they call it EMR on top. And so, EMR has to pay for that entire layer cake just to go and compete against somebody like Mongo or something like that. So, you start to unwind the costs of that. Whereas Azure, went and they build basically ground up services for the most part. And Google kind of falls somewhere in between in how they build their-- They're a sort of layer cake type effect, but not as many layers I guess you could say. >> I feel like, you know, Amazon's trying to be a platform for the ecosystem. Yes, they have their own products and they're going to sell. And that's going to drive their profitability cause they don't have to split the pie. But, they're taking a piece of-- They're spinning the meter, as Ziyas Caravalo likes to say on every time Snowflake or Databricks or Mongo or Atlas is, you know, running on their system. They take a piece of the action. Now, Microsoft does that as well. But, you look at Microsoft and security, head-to-head competitors, for example, with a CrowdStrike or an Okta in identity. Whereas, it seems like at least for now, AWS is a more friendly place for the ecosystem. At the same time, you do a lot of business in Microsoft. >> Yeah. And I think that a lot of companies have always feared that Amazon would just throw, you know, bodies at it. And I think that people have come to the realization that a two pizza team, as Amazon would call it, is eight people. I think that's, you know, two slices per person. I'm a little bit fat, so I don't know if that's enough. But, you start to look at it and go, okay, if they're going to start out with eight engineers, if I'm a startup and they're part of my ecosystem, do I really fear them or should I really embrace them and try to partner closer with them? And I think the smart people and the smart companies are partnering with them because they're realizing, Amazon, unless they can see it to, you know, a hundred million, $500 million market, they're not going to throw eight to 16 people at a problem. I think when, you know, you could say, you could look at the elastic with OpenSearch and what they did there. And the licensing terms and the battle they went through. But they knew that Elastic had a huge market. Also, you had a number of ecosystem companies building on top of now OpenSearch, that are now domain on top of Amazon as well. So, I think Amazon's being pretty strategic in how they're doing it. I think some of the-- It'll be interesting. I think this year is a payout year for the cuts that they're making to some of the services internally to kind of, you know, how do we take the fat off some of those services that-- You know, you look at Alexa. I don't know how much revenue Alexa really generates for them. But it's a means to an end for a number of different other services and partners. >> What do you make of this ChatGPT? I mean, Microsoft obviously is playing that card. You want to, you want ChatGPT in the Cloud, come to Azure. Seems like AWS has to respond. And we know Google is, you know, sharpening its knives to come up with its response. >> Yeah, I mean Google just went and talked about Bard for the first time this week and they're in private preview or I guess they call it beta, but. Right at the moment to select, select AI users, which I have no idea what that means. But that's a very interesting way that they're marketing it out there. But, I think that Amazon will have to respond. I think they'll be more measured than say, what Google's doing with Bard and just throwing it out there to, hey, we're going into beta now. I think they'll look at it and see where do we go and how do we actually integrate this in? Because they do have a lot of components of AI and ML underneath the hood that other services use. And I think that, you know, they've learned from that. And I think that they've already done a good job. Especially for media and entertainment when you start to look at some of the ways that they use it for helping do graphics and helping to do drones. I think part of their buy of iRobot was the fact that iRobot was a big user of RoboMaker, which is using different models to train those robots to go around objects and things like that, so. >> Quick touch on Kubernetes, the whole DevOps World we just covered. The Cloud Native Foundation Security, CNCF. The security conference up in Seattle last week. First time they spun that out kind of like reinforced, you know, AWS spins out, reinforced from reinvent. Amsterdam's coming up soon, the CubeCon. What should we expect? What's hot in Cubeland? >> Yeah, I think, you know, Kubes, you're going to be looking at how OpenShift keeps growing and I think to that respect you get to see the momentum with people like Red Hat. You see others coming up and realizing how OpenShift has gone to market as being, like you were saying, partnering with those Clouds and really making it simple. I think the simplicity and the manageability of Kubernetes is going to be at the forefront. I think a lot of the investment is still going into, how do I bring observability and DevOps and AIOps and MLOps all together. And I think that's going to be a big place where people are going to be looking to see what comes out of CubeCon in Amsterdam. I think it's that manageability ease of use. >> Well Rob, I look forward to working with you on behalf of the whole Cube team. We're going to do more of these and go out to some shows extract the signal from the noise. Really appreciate you coming into our studio. >> Well, thank you for having me on. Really appreciate it. >> You're really welcome. All right, keep it right there, or thanks for watching. This is Dave Vellante for the Cube. And we'll see you next time. (light music)

>> Welcome back to SuperCloud2. This is Dave Vellante, and we're here with Jack Greenfield. He's the Vice President of Enterprise Architecture and the Chief Architect for the global technology platform at Walmart. Jack, I want to thank you for coming on the program. Really appreciate your time. >> Glad to be here, Dave. Thanks for inviting me and appreciate the opportunity to chat with you. >> Yeah, it's our pleasure. Now we call what you've built a SuperCloud. That's our term, not yours, but how would you describe the Walmart Cloud Native Platform? >> So WCNP, as the acronym goes, is essentially an implementation of Kubernetes for the Walmart ecosystem. And what that means is that we've taken Kubernetes off the shelf as open source, and we have integrated it with a number of foundational services that provide other aspects of our computational environment. So Kubernetes off the shelf doesn't do everything. It does a lot. In particular the orchestration of containers, but it delegates through API a lot of key functions. So for example, secret management, traffic management, there's a need for telemetry and observability at a scale beyond what you get from raw Kubernetes. That is to say, harvesting the metrics that are coming out of Kubernetes and processing them, storing them in time series databases, dashboarding them, and so on. There's also an angle to Kubernetes that gets a lot of attention in the daily DevOps routine, that's not really part of the open source deliverable itself, and that is the DevOps sort of CICD pipeline-oriented lifecycle. And that is something else that we've added and integrated nicely. And then one more piece of this picture is that within a Kubernetes cluster, there's a function that is critical to allowing services to discover each other and integrate with each other securely and with proper configuration provided by the concept of a service mesh. So Istio, Linkerd, these are examples of service mesh technologies. And we have gone ahead and integrated actually those two. There's more than those two, but we've integrated those two with Kubernetes. So the net effect is that when a developer within Walmart is going to build an application, they don't have to think about all those other capabilities where they come from or how they're provided. Those are already present, and the way the CICD pipelines are set up, it's already sort of in the picture, and there are configuration points that they can take advantage of in the primary YAML and a couple of other pieces of config that we supply where they can tune it. But at the end of the day, it offloads an awful lot of work for them, having to stand up and operate those services, fail them over properly, and make them robust. All of that's provided for. >> Yeah, you know, developers often complain they spend too much time wrangling and doing things that aren't productive. So I wonder if you could talk about the high level business goals of the initiative in terms of the hardcore benefits. Was the real impetus to tap into best of breed cloud services? Were you trying to cut costs? Maybe gain negotiating leverage with the cloud guys? Resiliency, you know, I know was a major theme. Maybe you could give us a sense of kind of the anatomy of the decision making process that went in. >> Sure, and in the course of answering your question, I think I'm going to introduce the concept of our triplet architecture which we haven't yet touched on in the interview here. First off, just to sort of wrap up the motivation for WCNP itself which is kind of orthogonal to the triplet architecture. It can exist with or without it. Currently does exist with it, which is key, and I'll get to that in a moment. The key drivers, business drivers for WCNP were developer productivity by offloading the kinds of concerns that we've just discussed. Number two, improving resiliency, that is to say reducing opportunity for human error. One of the challenges you tend to run into in a large enterprise is what we call snowflakes, lots of gratuitously different workloads, projects, configurations to the extent that by developing and using WCNP and continuing to evolve it as we have, we end up with cookie cutter like consistency across our workloads which is super valuable when it comes to building tools or building services to automate operations that would otherwise be manual. When everything is pretty much done the same way, that becomes much simpler. Another key motivation for WCNP was the ability to abstract from the underlying cloud provider. And this is going to lead to a discussion of our triplet architecture. At the end of the day, when one works directly with an underlying cloud provider, one ends up taking a lot of dependencies on that particular cloud provider. Those dependencies can be valuable. For example, there are best of breed services like say Cloud Spanner offered by Google or say Cosmos DB offered by Microsoft that one wants to use and one is willing to take the dependency on the cloud provider to get that functionality because it's unique and valuable. On the other hand, one doesn't want to take dependencies on a cloud provider that don't add a lot of value. And with Kubernetes, we have the opportunity, and this is a large part of how Kubernetes was designed and why it is the way it is, we have the opportunity to sort of abstract from the underlying cloud provider for stateless workloads on compute. And so what this lets us do is build container-based applications that can run without change on different cloud provider infrastructure. So the same applications can run on WCNP over Azure, WCNP over GCP, or WCNP over the Walmart private cloud. And we have a private cloud. Our private cloud is OpenStack based and it gives us some significant cost advantages as well as control advantages. So to your point, in terms of business motivation, there's a key cost driver here, which is that we can use our own private cloud when it's advantageous and then use the public cloud provider capabilities when we need to. A key place with this comes into play is with elasticity. So while the private cloud is much more cost effective for us to run and use, it isn't as elastic as what the cloud providers offer, right? We don't have essentially unlimited scale. We have large scale, but the public cloud providers are elastic in the extreme which is a very powerful capability. So what we're able to do is burst, and we use this term bursting workloads into the public cloud from the private cloud to take advantage of the elasticity they offer and then fall back into the private cloud when the traffic load diminishes to the point where we don't need that elastic capability, elastic capacity at low cost. And this is a very important paradigm that I think is going to be very commonplace ultimately as the industry evolves. Private cloud is easier to operate and less expensive, and yet the public cloud provider capabilities are difficult to match. >> And the triplet, the tri is your on-prem private cloud and the two public clouds that you mentioned, is that right? >> That is correct. And we actually have an architecture in which we operate all three of those cloud platforms in close proximity with one another in three different major regions in the US. So we have east, west, and central. And in each of those regions, we have all three cloud providers. And the way it's configured, those data centers are within 10 milliseconds of each other, meaning that it's of negligible cost to interact between them. And this allows us to be fairly agnostic to where a particular workload is running. >> Does a human make that decision, Jack or is there some intelligence in the system that determines that? >> That's a really great question, Dave. And it's a great question because we're at the cusp of that transition. So currently humans make that decision. Humans choose to deploy workloads into a particular region and a particular provider within that region. That said, we're actively developing patterns and practices that will allow us to automate the placement of the workloads for a variety of criteria. For example, if in a particular region, a particular provider is heavily overloaded and is unable to provide the level of service that's expected through our SLAs, we could choose to fail workloads over from that cloud provider to a different one within the same region. But that's manual today. We do that, but people do it. Okay, we'd like to get to where that happens automatically. In the same way, we'd like to be able to automate the failovers, both for high availability and sort of the heavier disaster recovery model between, within a region between providers and even within a provider between the availability zones that are there, but also between regions for the sort of heavier disaster recovery or maintenance driven realignment of workload placement. Today, that's all manual. So we have people moving workloads from region A to region B or data center A to data center B. It's clean because of the abstraction. The workloads don't have to know or care, but there are latency considerations that come into play, and the humans have to be cognizant of those. And automating that can help ensure that we get the best performance and the best reliability. >> But you're developing the dataset to actually, I would imagine, be able to make those decisions in an automated fashion over time anyway. Is that a fair assumption? >> It is, and that's what we're actively developing right now. So if you were to look at us today, we have these nice abstractions and APIs in place, but people run that machine, if you will, moving toward a world where that machine is fully automated. >> What exactly are you abstracting? Is it sort of the deployment model or, you know, are you able to abstract, I'm just making this up like Azure functions and GCP functions so that you can sort of run them, you know, with a consistent experience. What exactly are you abstracting and how difficult was it to achieve that objective technically? >> that's a good question. What we're abstracting is the Kubernetes node construct. That is to say a cluster of Kubernetes nodes which are typically VMs, although they can run bare metal in certain contexts, is something that typically to stand up requires knowledge of the underlying cloud provider. So for example, with GCP, you would use GKE to set up a Kubernetes cluster, and in Azure, you'd use AKS. We are actually abstracting that aspect of things so that the developers standing up applications don't have to know what the underlying cluster management provider is. They don't have to know if it's GCP, AKS or our own Walmart private cloud. Now, in terms of functions like Azure functions that you've mentioned there, we haven't done that yet. That's another piece that we have sort of on our radar screen that, we'd like to get to is serverless approach, and the Knative work from Google and the Azure functions, those are things that we see good opportunity to use for a whole variety of use cases. But right now we're not doing much with that. We're strictly container based right now, and we do have some VMs that are running in sort of more of a traditional model. So our stateful workloads are primarily VM based, but for serverless, that's an opportunity for us to take some of these stateless workloads and turn them into cloud functions. >> Well, and that's another cost lever that you can pull down the road that's going to drop right to the bottom line. Do you see a day or maybe you're doing it today, but I'd be surprised, but where you build applications that actually span multiple clouds or is there, in your view, always going to be a direct one-to-one mapping between where an application runs and the specific cloud platform? >> That's a really great question. Well, yes and no. So today, application development teams choose a cloud provider to deploy to and a location to deploy to, and they have to get involved in moving an application like we talked about today. That said, the bursting capability that I mentioned previously is something that is a step in the direction of automatic migration. That is to say we're migrating workload to different locations automatically. Currently, the prototypes we've been developing and that we think are going to eventually make their way into production are leveraging Istio to assess the load incoming on a particular cluster and start shedding that load into a different location. Right now, the configuration of that is still manual, but there's another opportunity for automation there. And I think a key piece of this is that down the road, well, that's a, sort of a small step in the direction of an application being multi provider. We expect to see really an abstraction of the fact that there is a triplet even. So the workloads are moving around according to whatever the control plane decides is necessary based on a whole variety of inputs. And at that point, you will have true multi-cloud applications, applications that are distributed across the different providers and in a way that application developers don't have to think about. >> So Walmart's been a leader, Jack, in using data for competitive advantages for decades. It's kind of been a poster child for that. You've got a mountain of IP in the form of data, tools, applications best practices that until the cloud came out was all On Prem. But I'm really interested in this idea of building a Walmart ecosystem, which obviously you have. Do you see a day or maybe you're even doing it today where you take what we call the Walmart SuperCloud, WCNP in your words, and point or turn that toward an external world or your ecosystem, you know, supporting those partners or customers that could drive new revenue streams, you know directly from the platform? >> Great question, Steve. So there's really two things to say here. The first is that with respect to data, our data workloads are primarily VM basis. I've mentioned before some VMware, some straight open stack. But the key here is that WCNP and Kubernetes are very powerful for stateless workloads, but for stateful workloads tend to be still climbing a bit of a growth curve in the industry. So our data workloads are not primarily based on WCNP. They're VM based. Now that said, there is opportunity to make some progress there, and we are looking at ways to move things into containers that are currently running in VMs which are stateful. The other question you asked is related to how we expose data to third parties and also functionality. Right now we do have in-house, for our own use, a very robust data architecture, and we have followed the sort of domain-oriented data architecture guidance from Martin Fowler. And we have data lakes in which we collect data from all the transactional systems and which we can then use and do use to build models which are then used in our applications. But right now we're not exposing the data directly to customers as a product. That's an interesting direction that's been talked about and may happen at some point, but right now that's internal. What we are exposing to customers is applications. So we're offering our global integrated fulfillment capabilities, our order picking and curbside pickup capabilities, and our cloud powered checkout capabilities to third parties. And this means we're standing up our own internal applications as externally facing SaaS applications which can serve our partners' customers. >> Yeah, of course, Martin Fowler really first introduced to the world Zhamak Dehghani's data mesh concept and this whole idea of data products and domain oriented thinking. Zhamak Dehghani, by the way, is a speaker at our event as well. Last question I had is edge, and how you think about the edge? You know, the stores are an edge. Are you putting resources there that sort of mirror this this triplet model? Or is it better to consolidate things in the cloud? I know there are trade-offs in terms of latency. How are you thinking about that? >> All really good questions. It's a challenging area as you can imagine because edges are subject to disconnection, right? Or reduced connection. So we do place the same architecture at the edge. So WCNP runs at the edge, and an application that's designed to run at WCNP can run at the edge. That said, there are a number of very specific considerations that come up when running at the edge, such as the possibility of disconnection or degraded connectivity. And so one of the challenges we have faced and have grappled with and done a good job of I think is dealing with the fact that applications go offline and come back online and have to reconnect and resynchronize, the sort of online offline capability is something that can be quite challenging. And we have a couple of application architectures that sort of form the two core sets of patterns that we use. One is an offline/online synchronization architecture where we discover that we've come back online, and we understand the differences between the online dataset and the offline dataset and how they have to be reconciled. The other is a message-based architecture. And here in our health and wellness domain, we've developed applications that are queue based. So they're essentially business processes that consist of multiple steps where each step has its own queue. And what that allows us to do is devote whatever bandwidth we do have to those pieces of the process that are most latency sensitive and allow the queue lengths to increase in parts of the process that are not latency sensitive, knowing that they will eventually catch up when the bandwidth is restored. And to put that in a little bit of context, we have fiber lengths to all of our locations, and we have I'll just use a round number, 10-ish thousand locations. It's larger than that, but that's the ballpark, and we have fiber to all of them, but when the fiber is disconnected, and it does get disconnected on a regular basis. In fact, I forget the exact number, but some several dozen locations get disconnected daily just by virtue of the fact that there's construction going on and things are happening in the real world. When the disconnection happens, we're able to fall back to 5G and to Starlink. Starlink is preferred. It's a higher bandwidth. 5G if that fails. But in each of those cases, the bandwidth drops significantly. And so the applications have to be intelligent about throttling back the traffic that isn't essential, so that it can push the essential traffic in those lower bandwidth scenarios. >> So much technology to support this amazing business which started in the early 1960s. Jack, unfortunately, we're out of time. I would love to have you back or some members of your team and drill into how you're using open source, but really thank you so much for explaining the approach that you've taken and participating in SuperCloud2. >> You're very welcome, Dave, and we're happy to come back and talk about other aspects of what we do. For example, we could talk more about the data lakes and the data mesh that we have in place. We could talk more about the directions we might go with serverless. So please look us up again. Happy to chat. >> I'm going to take you up on that, Jack. All right. This is Dave Vellante for John Furrier and the Cube community. Keep it right there for more action from SuperCloud2. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: TheCUBE presents Ignite22, brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. >> Hey, welcome back to Vegas. Great to have you. We're pleased that you're watching theCUBE. Lisa Martin and Dave Vellante. Day two of theCUBE's coverage of Palo Alto Ignite22 from the MGM Grand. Dave, we're going to be talking about data. >> You know I love data. >> I do know you love data. >> Survey data- >> There is a great new survey that Palo Alto Networks just published yesterday, "What's next in cyber?" We're going to be digging through it with their CMO. Who better to talk about data with than a CMO that has a PhD in machine learning? We're very pleased to welcome to the program, Zeynep Ozdemir, CMO of Palo Alto Networks. Great to have you. Thank you for joining us. >> It's a pleasure to be here. >> First, I got to ask you about your PhD. Your background as a CMO is so interesting and unique. Give me a little bit of a history on that. >> Oh, absolutely, yes. Yes, I admit that I'm a little bit of an untraditional marketing leader. I spent probably the first half of my career as a software engineer and a research scientist in the area of machine learning and speech signal processing, which is very uncommon, I admit that. Honestly, it has actually helped me immensely in my current role. I mean, you know, you've spoken to Lee Klarich, I think a little while ago. We have a very tight and close partnership with product and engineering teams at Palo Alto Networks. And, you know, cybersecurity is a very complex topic. And we're at a critical juncture right now where all of these new technologies, AI, machine learning, cloud computing, are going to really transform the industry. And I think that I'm very lucky, as somebody who's very technically competent in all of those areas, to partner with the best people and the leading company right now. So, I'm very happy that my technical background is actually helping in this journey. >> Dave: Oh, wait, aren't you like a molecular biologist, or something? >> A reformed molecular...yes. >> Yes. >> Okay. Whoa, okay. (group laughs) >> But >> Math guy over here. >> Yeah. You guys just, the story that I tease is... the amount of data in there is unbelievable. This has just started in August, so a few months ago. >> Zeynep: Yeah. >> Fresh data. You surveyed 1300 CXOs globally. >> Zeynep: That's right. >> Across industries and organizations are saying, you know, hybrid work and remote work became status quo like that. >> Yes. >> Couple years ago everyone shifted to multicloud and of course the cyber criminals are sophisticated, and they're motivated, and they're well funded. >> Zeynep: That's right. >> What are some of the things that you think that the survey really demonstrated that validate the direction that Palo Alto Networks is going in? >> That's right. That's right. So we do these surveys because first and foremost, we have to make sure we're aligned with our customers in terms of our product strategy and the direction. And we have to confirm and validate our very strong opinions about the future of the cybersecurity industry. So, but this time when we did this survey, we just saw some great insights, and we decided we want to share it with the broader industry because we obviously want to drive thought leadership and make sure everybody is in the same level field. Some interesting and significant results with this one. So, as you said, this was 1300 C level cybersecurity decision makers and executives across the world. So we had participants from Europe, from Japan, from Asia Pacific, Latin America, in addition to North America. So one of the most significant stats or data points that we've seen was the fact that out of everybody interviewed, 96% of participants had experienced one or more cybersecurity breaches in the past 12 months. That was more than what we expected, to be honest with you. And then 57% of them actually experienced three or more. So those stats are really worth sharing in terms of where the state of cybersecurity is. What also was personally interesting to me was 33% of them actually experienced an operational disruption as a result of a breach, which is a big number. It's one third of participants. So all of these were very interesting. We asked them more detailed questions around you know, how many...like obviously all of them are trying to respond to this situation. They're trying different technologies, different tools and it seems like they're in a point where they're almost have too many tools and technologies because, you know, when you have too many tools and technologies, there's the operational overhead of integrating them. It creates blind spots between them because those tools aren't really communicating with each other. So what we heard from the responders was that on average they were on like 32 tools, 22% was on 50 or more tools, which is crazy. But what the question we asked them was, you know, are you, are you looking to consolidate? Are you looking to go more tools or less tools? Like what are your thoughts on that? And a significant majority of them, like about 77% said they are actively trying to reduce the number of technologies that they're trying to use because they want to actually achieve better security outcomes. >> I wonder if you could comment on this. So early on in the pandemic, we have a partner, survey partner ETR, Enterprise Technology Research. And we saw a real shift of course, 'cause of hybrid work toward endpoint security, cloud security, they were rearchitecting their networks, a new focus on, you know, different thinking about network security and identity. >> Yeah. >> You play in all of those in partner for identity. >> Zeynep: Yeah. >> I almost, my question is, is was there kind of a knee jerk reaction to get point tools to plug some of those holes? >> Zeynep: Yes. >> And now they're...'cause we said at the time, this is a permanent shift in thinking. What we didn't think through it's coming to focus here at this conference is, okay, we did that, but now we created another problem. >> Zeynep: Yeah. Yeah. >> Now we're- >> Yes, yes. You're very right. I think, and it's very natural to do this, right? >> Sure. >> Every time a problem pops up, you want to fix it as quickly as possible. And you look... you survey who can help you with that. And then you kind of get going because cybersecurity is one of those areas where you can't really wait and do, you know, take time to fix those problems. So that happened a lot and it is happening. But what happened as a result of that. For example, I'll give you a data point from the actual survey that answers this very question. When we asked these executives what keeps them like up at night, like what's their biggest concern? A significant majority of them said, oh we're having difficulty with data management. And what that means is that all these tools that they've deployed, they're generating a lot of insights and data, but they're disconnected, right? So there is no one place where you can say, look at it holistically and come to conclusions very fast about how threat actors are moving in an organization. So that's a direct result of this proliferation of tools, if you will. And you're right. And it will...it's a natural thing to deploy products very quickly. But then you have to take a step back and say, how do I make this more effective? How do I bring things together, bring all my data together to be able to get to threats detect threats much faster? >> An unintended consequence of that quick fix. >> And become cyber resilient. We've been hearing a lot about cyber resiliency. >> Yes, yes. >> Recently and something that I was noting in the survey is only 25% of execs said, yeah, our cyber resilience and readiness is high. And you found that there was a lack of alignment between the boards and the executive levels. And we actually spoke with I think BJ yesterday on how are you guys and even some of your partners >> Yeah. >> How are you helping facilitate that alignment? We know security's always a board level- >> Zeynep: Yes. >> Conversation, but the lack of alignment was kind of surprising to me. >> Yeah. Well I think the good news is that I think we... cybersecurity is taking its place in board discussions more and more. Whether there's alignment or not, at least it's a topic, right? >> Yeah. That was also out of the survey that we saw. I think yes, we have a lot of, a big role to play in helping security executives communicate better with boards and c-level executives in their organizations. Because as we said, it's a very complex topic, and it has to be taken from two angles. When there's...it's a board level discussion. One, how are you reducing risk and making sure that you're resilient. Two, how do you think about return on investment and you know, what's the right level of investment and is that investment going to get us the return that we need? >> What do you think of this? So there's another interesting stat here. What keeps executives up at night? >> Mmhm. >> You mentioned difficulty of data management. Normally, the CISO response to what's your number one problem is lack of talent. >> Zeynep: Number three there, yes. Yeah. >> And it is maybe somewhat related to difficulty of data management, but maybe people have realized, you know what? I'm never going to solve this problem by throwing bodies at it. >> Yeah. >> I got to think of a better way to consolidate my data. Maybe partner with a company that can help me do that. And then the second one was scared of being left behind changes in the tech stack. So we're moving so fast to digitize. >> Zeynep: Yes. >> And security's still an afterthought. And so it's almost as though they're kind of rethinking the problems 'cause they know that they can't just solve the issue by throwing, you know, more hires at it 'cause they can't find the people. >> That is...you're absolutely spot on. The thing about cybersecurity skills gap, it's a reality. It's very real. It's a hard place to be. It's hard to ramp up sometimes. Also, there's a lot of turnover. But you're right in the sense that a lot of the manual work that is needed for cybersecurity, it's actually more sort of much easier to tackle with machines- >> Yeah. >> Than humans. It's a funny double click on the stat you just gave. In North America, the responders when we asked them like how they're coping with the skills shortage, they said we're automating more. So we're using more AI, we're using more process automation to make sure we do the heavy lifting with machines and then only present to the people what they're very good at, is making judgements, right? Very sort of like last minute judgment calls. In the other parts of the world, the top answer to that question is how you're tackling cybersecurity skill shortage was, we're actually trying to provide higher wages and better benefits to the existing p... so there's a little bit of a gap between the two. But I think, I think the world is moving towards the former, which is let's do as much as we can with AI and machines and automation in general and then let's make sure we're more in an automation assisted world versus a human first world. >> We also saw on the survey that ransomware was, you know, the big concern in the United States. Not as much, not that it's not a concern >> Lisa: Yeah. >> In other parts of the world. >> Zeynep: Yeah. >> But it wasn't number one. Why do you think that is? Is it 'cause maybe the US has more to lose? Is it, you know, more high profile or- >> Yeah. Look, I mean, yes you're right? So most responders said number one is ransomware. That's my biggest concern going into 2023. And it was for JAPAC and I think EMEA, Europe, it was supply chain attacks. >> Dave: Right. >> So I think US has been hit hard by ransomware in the past year. I think it's like fresh memory and that's why it rose to the top in various verticals. So I'm not surprised with that outcome. I think supply chain is more of a... we've, you know, we've been hit hard globally by that, and it's very new. >> Lisa: Yeah. >> So I think a lot of the European and JAPAC responders are responding to it from a perspective of, this is a problem I still don't know how to solve. You know, like, and it's like I need the right infrastructure to...and I need the right visibility into my software supply chain. It's very top of mind. So those were some of the differences, but you're right. That was a very interesting regional distinction as well. >> How do you take this data and then bring it back to your customers to kind of close the loop? Do you do that? Do you say, okay, hey, we're going to share this data with you, get realtime feedback- >> Zeynep: Yes. >> Dave: We often like to do that with data- >> Zeynep: Absolutely. >> Say okay...'cause you know, when you do a survey like this, you're like, oh, I wish we asked A, B and C. But it gives you, informs you as to where to double click. Is there a system to do that? Or process to do that? >> Yes. Our hope and goal is to do this every year and see how things are changing and then do some historical analysis as to how things are changing as well. But as I said in the very beginning, I think we take this and we say, okay, there's a lot of alignment in these areas, especially for us for our products to see if where our products are deployed to see if some of those numbers vary, you know, per product. Because we address as a company, we address a lot of these concerns. So then it's very encouraging to say, okay, with certain customers, we're going to go, we're going to have develop certain metrics and we're going to measure how much of a difference we're making with these stats. >> Well, I mean, if you can show that you're consolidating- >> Yeah. >> You know, the number of tools and show the business impact- >> Right. >> Exactly. >> Home run. >> Exactly. Yes- >> Speaking of business outcomes, you know, we have so many conversations around everything needs to be outcome-based. Can security become an enabler of business outcomes for organizations? >> Absolutely. Security has to be an enabler. So it's, you know, back to the security lagging behind the evolution of the digital transformation, I don't think it's possible to move fast without having security move fast with digital transformation. I don't think anybody would raise their hands and say, I'm just going to have the most creative, most interesting digital transformation journey. But, you know, security is say, so I think we're past that point where I think generally people do agree that security has to run as fast as digital transformation and really enable those business outcomes that everybody's proud of. So Yes. Yes it is. >> So...sorry. So chicken and egg, digital transformation, cyber transformation. >> Zeynep: Yes. >> Lisa: How are they related? Is one digital leading? >> They are two halves of the perfect solution. They have to coexist because otherwise if you're taking a lot of risk with your digital transformation, is it really worth going through a digital transformation? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> So there's a board over here. I'm looking at it and it started out blank. >> Yes. >> And it's what's next in cyber and basically- >> That's this. Yes. >> People can come through and they can write down, and there's some great stuff in there: 5G, cloud native, some technical stuff, automated meantime to repair or to remediation. >> Yeah. >> Somebody wrote AWS. The AWS guys left their mark, which is kind of cool. >> Zeynep: That's great. >> And so I'm wondering, so we always talk about... we just talked about earlier that cyber is a board...has become a board level you know, issue. I think even go back mid last decade, it was really starting to gain strength. What I'm looking for, and I dunno if there's anything in here that suggests this is going beyond the board. So it becomes this top down thing, not just the the SOC, not just the, you know, IT, not just the board. Now it's top down maybe it's bottom up, middle out. The awareness across the organization. >> Zeynep: Absolutely. >> And that's something that I think is that is a next big thing in cyber. I believe it's coming. >> Cybersecurity awareness is a topic. And you know, there are companies who do that, who actually educate just all of us who work for corporations on the best way to tackle, especially when the human is the source and the reason knowingly or unknowing, mostly unknowingly of cyber attacks. Their education and awareness is critical in preventing a lot of this...before our, you know tools even get in. So I agree with you that there is a cybersecurity awareness as a topic is going to be very, very popular in the future. >> Lena Smart is the CISO of MongoDB does... I forget what she calls it, but she basically takes the top security people in the company like the super geeks and puts 'em with those that know nothing about security, and they start having conversations. >> Zeynep: Yeah. >> And then so they can sort of be empathic to each other's point of view. >> Zeynep: Absolutely. >> And that's how she gets the organization to become cyber aware. >> Yes. >> It's brilliant. >> It is. >> So simple. >> Exactly. Well that's the beauty in it is the simplicity. >> Yeah. And there are programs just to put a plug. There are programs where you can simulate, for example, phishing attacks with your, you know employee base and your workforce. And then teach them at that moment when they fall for it, you know, what they should have done. >> I think I can make a family game night. >> Yeah. Yeah. (group laughs) >> I'm serious. That's a good little exercise For everybody. >> Yes. Yeah, exactly. >> It really is. Especially as the sophistication and smishing gets more and more common these days. Where can folks go to get their hands on this juicy survey that we just unpacked? >> We have it online, so if you go to the Palo Alto Networks website, there's a big link to the survey from there. So for sure there's a summary version that you can come in and you can have access to all the stats. >> Excellent. Zeynep, it's been such a pleasure having you on the program dissecting what's keeping CXOs up at night, what Palo Alto Networks is doing to really help organizations digitally transform cyber transformation and achieve that nirvana of cyber resilience. We appreciate so much your insights. >> Thanks very much. It's been the pleasure. >> Dave: Good to have you. >> Thank you >> Zeynep Ozdemir and Dave Vellante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live and emerging tech coverage. (upbeat music)

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

(bright music) >> Hello everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent 22. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Got some great coverage here talking about software supply chain and sustainability in the cloud. We've got a great conversation. Gunnar Hellekson, vice president and general manager at Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Business Unit of Red Hat. Thanks for coming on. And Adnan Ijaz, director of product management of commercial software services, AWS. Gentlemen, thanks for joining me today. >> It's a pleasure. (Adnan speaks indistinctly) >> You know, the hottest topic coming out of Cloud Native developer communities is slide chain software sustainability. This is a huge issue. As open source continues to power away and fund and grow this next generation modern development environment, you know, supply chain, you know, sustainability is a huge discussion because you got to check things out, what's in the code. Okay, open source is great, but now we got to commercialize it. This is the topic, Gunnar, let's get in with you. What are you seeing here and what's some of the things that you're seeing around the sustainability piece of it? Because, you know, containers, Kubernetes, we're seeing that that run time really dominate this new abstraction layer, cloud scale. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah, so I, it's interesting that the, you know, so Red Hat's been doing this for 20 years, right? Making open source safe to consume in the enterprise. And there was a time when in order to do that you needed to have a long term life cycle and you needed to be very good at remediating security vulnerabilities. And that was kind of, that was the bar that you had to climb over. Nowadays with the number of vulnerabilities coming through, what people are most worried about is, kind of, the providence of the software and making sure that it has been vetted and it's been safe, and that things that you get from your vendor should be more secure than things that you've just downloaded off of GitHub, for example. Right? And that's a place where Red Hat's very comfortable living, right? Because we've been doing it for 20 years. I think there's another aspect to this supply chain question as well, especially with the pandemic. You know, we've got these supply chains have been jammed up. The actual physical supply chains have been jammed up. And the two of these issues actually come together, right? Because as we go through the pandemic, we've got these digital transformation efforts, which are in large part, people creating software in order to manage better their physical supply chain problems. And so as part of that digital transformation, you have another supply chain problem, which is the software supply chain problem, right? And so these two things kind of merge on these as people are trying to improve the performance of transportation systems, logistics, et cetera. Ultimately, it all boils down to, both supply chain problems actually boil down to a software problem. It's very interesting. >> Well, that is interesting. I want to just follow up on that real quick if you don't mind. Because if you think about the convergence of the software and physical world, you know, that's, you know, IOT and also hybridcloud kind of plays into that at scale, this opens up more surface area for attacks, especially when you're under a lot of pressure. This is where, you know, you have a service area on the physical side and you have constraints there. And obviously the pandemic causes problems. But now you've got the software side. How are you guys handling that? Can you just share a little bit more of how you guys looking at that with Red Hat? What's the customer challenge? Obviously, you know, skills gaps is one, but, like, that's a convergence at the same time more security problems. >> Yeah, yeah, that's right. And certainly the volume of, if we just look at security vulnerabilities themselves, just the volume of security vulnerabilities has gone up considerably as more people begin using the software. And as the software becomes more important to, kind of, critical infrastructure. More eyeballs around it and so we're uncovering more problems, which is kind of, that's okay, that's how the world works. And so certainly the number of remediations required every year has gone up. But also the customer expectations, as I mentioned before, the customer expectations have changed, right? People want to be able to show to their auditors and to their regulators that no, in fact, I can show the providence of the software that I'm using. I didn't just download something random off the internet. I actually have like, you know, adults paying attention to how the software gets put together. And it's still, honestly, it's still very early days. I think as an industry, I think we're very good at managing, identifying remediating vulnerabilities in the aggregate. We're pretty good at that. I think things are less clear when we talk about, kind of, the management of that supply chain, proving the providence, and creating a resilient supply chain for software. We have lots of tools, but we don't really have lots of shared expectations. And so it's going to be interesting over the next few years, I think we're going to have more rules are going to come out. I see NIST has already published some of them. And as these new rules come out, the whole industry is going to have to kind of pull together and really rally around some of this shared understanding so we can all have shared expectations and we can all speak the same language when we're talking about this problem. >> That's awesome. Adnan, Amazon web service is obviously the largest cloud platform out there. You know, the pandemic, even post pandemic, some of these supply chain issues, whether it's physical or software, you're also an outlet for that. So if someone can't buy hardware or something physical, they can always get to the cloud. You guys have great network compute and whatnot and you got thousands of ISVs across the globe. How are you helping customers with this supply chain problem? Because whether it's, you know, I need to get in my networking gears and delay, I'm going to go to the cloud and get help there. Or whether it's knowing the workloads and what's going on inside them with respect to open source. 'Cause you've got open source, which is kind of an external forcing function. You've got AWS and you got, you know, physical compute stores, networking, et cetera. How are you guys helping customers with the supply chain challenge, which could be an opportunity? >> Yeah, thanks John. I think there are multiple layers to that. At the most basic level, we are helping customers by abstracting away all these data center constructs that they would have to worry about if they were running their own data centers. They would have to figure out how the networking gear, you talk about, you know, having the right compute, right physical hardware. So by moving to the cloud, at least they're delegating that problem to AWS and letting us manage and making sure that we have an instance available for them whenever they want it. And if they want to scale it, the capacity is there for them to use. Now then, so we kind of give them space to work on the second part of the problem, which is building their own supply chain solutions. And we work with all kinds of customers here at AWS from all different industry segments, automotive, retail, manufacturing. And you know, you see the complexity of the supply chain with all those moving pieces, like hundreds and thousands of moving pieces, it's very daunting. And then on the other hand, customers need more better services. So you need to move fast. So you need to build your agility in the supply chain itself. And that is where, you know, Red Hat and AWS come together. Where we can enable customers to build their supply chain solutions on platforms like Red Hat Enterprise Linux RHEL or Red Hat OpenShift on AWS, we call it ROSA. And the benefit there is that you can actually use the services that are relevant for the supply chain solutions like Amazon managed blockchain, you know, SageMaker. So you can actually build predictive analytics, you can improve forecasting, you can make sure that you have solutions that help you identify where you can cut costs. And so those are some of the ways we're helping customers, you know, figure out how they actually want to deal with the supply chain challenges that we're running into in today's world. >> Yeah, and you know, you mentioned sustainability outside of software sustainability, you know, as people move to the cloud, we've reported on SiliconANGLE here in theCUBE, that it's better to have the sustainability with the cloud because then the data centers aren't using all that energy too. So there's also all kinds of sustainability advantages. Gunnar, because this is kind of how your relationship with Amazon's expanded. You mentioned ROSA, which is Red Hat, you know, on OpenShift, on AWS. This is interesting because one of the biggest discussions is skills gap, but we were also talking about the fact that the humans are a huge part of the talent value. In other words, the humans still need to be involved. And having that relationship with managed services and Red Hat, this piece becomes one of those things that's not talked about much, which is the talent is increasing in value, the humans, and now you got managed services on the cloud. So we'll look at scale and human interaction. Can you share, you know, how you guys are working together on this piece? 'Cause this is interesting, 'cause this kind of brings up the relationship of that operator or developer. >> Yeah, yeah. So I think there's, so I think about this in a few dimensions. First is that it's difficult to find a customer who is not talking about automation at some level right now. And obviously you can automate the processes and the physical infrastructure that you already have, that's using tools like Ansible, right? But I think that combining it with the elasticity of a solution like AWS, so you combine the automation with kind of elastic and converting a lot of the capital expenses into operating expenses, that's a great way actually to save labor, right? So instead of like racking hard drives, you can have somebody do something a little more like, you know, more valuable work, right? And so, okay, but that gives you a platform. And then what do you do with that platform? You know, if you've got your systems automated and you've got this kind of elastic infrastructure underneath you, what you do on top of it is really interesting. So a great example of this is the collaboration that we had with running the RHEL workstation on AWS. So you might think, like, well why would anybody want to run a workstation on a cloud? That doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Unless you consider how complex it is to set up, if you have, the use case here is like industrial workstations, right? So it's animators, people doing computational fluid dynamics, things like this. So these are industries that are extremely data heavy. Workstations have very large hardware requirements, often with accelerated GPUs and things like this. That is an extremely expensive thing to install on-premise anywhere. And if the pandemic taught us anything, it's if you have a bunch of very expensive talent and they all have to work from home, it is very difficult to go provide them with, you know, several tens of thousands of dollars worth of workstation equipment. And so combine the RHEL workstation with the AWS infrastructure and now all that workstation computational infrastructure is available on demand and available right next to the considerable amount of data that they're analyzing or animating or working on. So it's a really interesting, it was actually, this is an idea that was actually born with the pandemic. >> Yeah. >> And it's kind of a combination of everything that we're talking about, right? It's the supply chain challenges of the customer, it's the lack of talent, making sure that people are being put to their best and highest use. And it's also having this kind of elastic, I think, OpEx heavy infrastructure as opposed to a CapEx heavy infrastructure. >> That's a great example. I think that illustrates to me what I love about cloud right now is that you can put stuff in the cloud and then flex what you need, when you need it, in the cloud rather than either ingress or egress of data. You just get more versatility around the workload needs, whether it's more compute or more storage or other high level services. This is kind of where this next gen cloud is going. This is where customers want to go once their workloads are up and running. How do you simplify all this and how do you guys look at this from a joint customer perspective? Because that example I think will be something that all companies will be working on, which is put it in the cloud and flex to whatever the workload needs and put it closer to the compute. I want to put it there. If I want to leverage more storage and networking, well, I'll do that too. It's not one thing, it's got to flex around. How are you guys simplifying this? >> Yeah, I think, so, I'll give my point of view and then I'm very curious to hear what Adnan has to say about it. But I think about it in a few dimensions, right? So there is a technically, like, any solution that Adnan's team and my team want to put together needs to be kind of technically coherent, right? Things need to work well together. But that's not even most of the job. Most of the job is actually ensuring an operational consistency and operational simplicity, so that everything is, the day-to-day operations of these things kind of work well together. And then also, all the way to things like support and even acquisition, right? Making sure that all the contracts work together, right? It's a really... So when Adnan and I think about places of working together, it's very rare that we're just looking at a technical collaboration. It's actually a holistic collaboration across support, acquisition, as well as all the engineering that we have to do. >> Adnan, your view on how you're simplifying it with Red Hat for your joint customers making collaborations? >> Yeah, Gunnar covered it well. I think the benefit here is that Red Hat has been the leading Linux distribution provider. So they have a lot of experience. AWS has been the leading cloud provider. So we have both our own points of view, our own learning from our respective set of customers. So the way we try to simplify and bring these things together is working closely. In fact, I sometimes joke internally that if you see Gunnar and my team talking to each other on a call, you cannot really tell who belongs to which team. Because we're always figuring out, okay, how do we simplify discount experience? How do we simplify programs? How do we simplify go to market? How do we simplify the product pieces? So it's really bringing our learning and share our perspective to the table and then really figure out how do we actually help customers make progress. ROSA that we talked about is a great example of that, you know, together we figured out, hey, there is a need for customers to have this capability in AWS and we went out and built it. So those are just some of the examples in how both teams are working together to simplify the experience, make it complete, make it more coherent. >> Great, that's awesome. Next question is really around how you help organizations with the sustainability piece, how to support them simplifying it. But first, before we get into that, what is the core problem around this sustainability discussion we're talking about here, supply chain sustainability, what is the core challenge? Can you both share your thoughts on what that problem is and what the solution looks like and then we can get into advice? >> Yeah. Well from my point of view, it's, I think, you know, one of the lessons of the last three years is every organization is kind of taking a careful look at how resilient it is, or I should say, every organization learned exactly how resilient it was, right? And that comes from both the physical challenges and the logistics challenges that everyone had, the talent challenges you mentioned earlier. And of course the software challenges, you know, as everyone kind of embarks on this digital transformation journey that we've all been talking about. And I think, so I really frame it as resilience, right? And resilience at bottom is really about ensuring that you have options and that you have choices. The more choices you have, the more options you have, the more resilient you and your organization is going to be. And so I know that's how I approach the market. I'm pretty sure that's how Adnan is approaching the market, is ensuring that we are providing as many options as possible to customers so that they can assemble the right pieces to create a solution that works for their particular set of challenges or their unique set of challenges and unique context. Adnan, does that sound about right to you? >> Yeah, I think you covered it well. I can speak to another aspect of sustainability, which is becoming increasingly top of mind for our customers. Like, how do they build products and services and solutions and whether it's supply chain or anything else which is sustainable, which is for the long term good of the planet. And I think that is where we have also been very intentional and focused in how we design our data center, how we actually build our cooling system so that those are energy efficient. You know, we are on track to power all our operations with renewable energy by 2025, which is five years ahead of our initial commitment. And perhaps the most obvious example of all of this is our work with ARM processors, Graviton3, where, you know, we are building our own chip to make sure that we are designing energy efficiency into the process. And you know, the ARM Graviton3 processor chips, they are about 60% more energy efficient compared to some of the CD6 comparable. So all those things that also we are working on in making sure that whatever our customers build on our platform is long term sustainable. So that's another dimension of how we are working that into our platform. >> That's awesome. This is a great conversation. You know, the supply chain is on both sides, physical and software. You're starting to see them come together in great conversations. And certainly moving workloads to the cloud and running them more efficiently will help on the sustainability side, in my opinion. Of course, you guys talked about that and we've covered it. But now you start getting into how to refactor, and this is a big conversation we've been having lately is as you not just lift and shift, but replatform it and refactor, customers are seeing great advantages on this. So I have to ask you guys, how are you helping customers and organizations support sustainability and simplify the complex environment that has a lot of potential integrations? Obviously API's help of course, but that's the kind of baseline. What's the advice that you give customers? 'Cause you know, it can look complex and it becomes complex, but there's an answer here. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah, I think, so whenever I get questions like this from customers, the first thing I guide them to is, we talked earlier about this notion of consistency and how important that is. One way to solve the problem is to create an entirely new operational model, an entirely new acquisition model, and an entirely new stack of technologies in order to be more sustainable. That is probably not in the cards for most folks. What they want to do is have their existing estate and they're trying to introduce sustainability into the work that they are already doing. They don't need to build another silo in order to create sustainability, right? And so there has to be some common threads, there has to be some common platforms across the existing estate and your more sustainable estate, right? And so things like Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which can provide this kind of common, not just a technical substrate, but a common operational substrate on which you can build these solutions. If you have a common platform on which you are building solutions, whether it's RHEL or whether it's OpenShift or any of our other platforms, that creates options for you underneath. So that in some cases maybe you need to run things on-premises, some things you need to run in the cloud, but you don't have to profoundly change how you work when you're moving from one place to another. >> Adnan, what's your thoughts on the simplification? >> Yeah, I mean, when you talk about replatforming and refactoring, it is a daunting undertaking, you know, especially in today's fast paced world. But the good news is you don't have to do it by yourself. Customers don't have to do it on their own. You know, together AWS and Red Hat, we have our rich partner ecosystem, you know, AWS has over 100,000 partners that can help you take that journey, the transformation journey. And within AWS and working with our partners like Red Hat, we make sure that we have- In my mind, there are really three big pillars that you have to have to make sure that customers can successfully re-platform, refactor their applications to the modern cloud architecture. You need to have the rich set of services and tools that meet their different scenarios, different use cases. Because no one size fits all. You have to have the right programs because sometimes customers need those incentives, they need those, you know, that help in the first step. And last but not least, they need training. So all of that, we try to cover that as we work with our customers, work with our partners. And that is where, you know, together we try to help customers take that step, which is a challenging step to take. >> Yeah, you know, it's great to talk to you guys, both leaders in your field. Obviously Red Hats, I remember the days back when I was provisioning and loading OSs on hardware with CDs, if you remember those days, Gunnar. But now with the high level services, if you look at this year's reinvent, and this is kind of my final question for the segment is, that we'll get your reaction to, last year we talked about higher level service. I sat down with Adam Saleski, we talked about that. If you look at what's happened this year, you're starting to see people talk about their environment as their cloud. So Amazon has the gift of the CapEx, all that investment and people can operate on top of it. They're calling that environment their cloud. Okay? For the first time we're seeing this new dynamic where it's like they have a cloud, but Amazon's the CapEx, they're operating. So, you're starting to see the operational visibility, Gunnar, around how to operate this environment. And it's not hybrid, this, that, it's just, it's cloud. This is kind of an inflection point. Do you guys agree with that or have a reaction to that statement? Because I think this is, kind of, the next gen supercloud-like capability. We're going, we're building the cloud. It's now an environment. It's not talking about private cloud, this cloud, it's all cloud. What's your reaction? >> Yeah, I think, well, I think it's very natural. I mean, we use words like hybridcloud, multicloud, I guess supercloud is what the kids are saying now, right? It's all describing the same phenomena, right? Which is being able to take advantage of lots of different infrastructure options, but still having something that creates some commonality among them so that you can manage them effectively, right? So that you can have, kind of, uniform compliance across your estate. So that you can have, kind of, you can make the best use of your talent across the estate. I mean this is, it's a very natural thing. >> John: They're calling it cloud, the estate is the cloud. >> Yeah. So yeah, so fine, if it means that we no longer have to argue about what's multicloud and what's hybridcloud, I think that's great. Let's just call it cloud. >> Adnan, what's your reaction, 'cause this is kind of the next gen benefits of higher level services combined with amazing, you know, compute and resource at the infrastructure level. What's your view on that? >> Yeah, I think the construct of a unified environment makes sense for customers who have all these use cases which require, like for instance, if you are doing some edge computing and you're running WS outpost or you know, wavelength and these things. So, and it is fair for customer to think that, hey, this is one environment, same set of tooling that they want to build that works across all their different environments. That is why we work with partners like Red Hat so that customers who are running Red Hat Enterprise Linux on-premises and who are running in AWS get the same level of support, get the same level of security features, all of that. So from that sense, it actually makes sense for us to build these capabilities in a way that customers don't have to worry about, okay, now I'm actually in the AWS data center versus I'm running outpost on-premises. It is all one. They just use the same set of CLI, command line APIs and all of that. So in that sense it actually helps customers have that unification so that consistency of experience helps their workforce and be more productive versus figuring out, okay, what do I do, which tool I use where? >> Adnan, you just nailed it. This is about supply chain sustainability, moving the workloads into a cloud environment. You mentioned wavelength, this conversation's going to continue. We haven't even talked about the edge yet. This is something that's going to be all about operating these workloads at scale and all with the cloud services. So thanks for sharing that and we'll pick up that edge piece later. But for re:Invent right now, this is really the key conversation. How to make the sustained supply chain work in a complex environment, making it simpler. And so thanks you for sharing your insights here on theCUBE. >> Thanks, thanks for having us. >> Okay, this is theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent 22. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (bright music)

foreign welcome back to re invent 2022 we're wrapping up four days well one evening and three solid days wall-to-wall of cube coverage I'm Dave vellante John furrier's birthday is today he's on a plane to London to go see his nephew get married his his great Sister Janet awesome family the furriers uh spanning the globe and uh and John I know you wanted to be here you're watching in Newark or you were waiting to uh to get in the plane so all the best to you happy birthday one year the Amazon PR people brought a cake out to celebrate John's birthday because he's always here at AWS re invented his birthday so I'm really pleased to have two really special guests uh former Cube host Cube Alum great wikibon contributor Stu miniman now with red hat still good to see you again great to be here Dave yeah I was here for that cake uh the twitterverse uh was uh really helping to celebrate John's birthday today and uh you know always great to be here with you and then with this you know Awesome event this week and friend of the cube of many time Cube often Cube contributor as here's a cube analyst this week as his own consultancy sarbj johal great to see you thanks for coming on good to see you Dave uh great to see you stu I'm always happy to participate in these discussions and um I enjoy the discussion every time so this is kind of cool because you know usually the last day is a getaway day and this is a getaway day but this place is still packed I mean it's I mean yeah it's definitely lighter you can at least walk and not get slammed but I subjit I'm going to start with you I I wanted to have you as the the tail end here because cause you participated in the analyst sessions you've been watching this event from from the first moment and now you've got four days of the Kool-Aid injection but you're also talking to customers developers Partners the ecosystem where do you want to go what's your big takeaways I think big takeaways that Amazon sort of innovation machine is chugging along they are I was listening to some of the accessions and when I was back to my room at nine so they're filling the holes in some areas but in some areas they're moving forward there's a lot to fix still it doesn't seem like that it seems like we are done with the cloud or The Innovation is done now we are building at the millisecond level so where do you go next there's a lot of room to grow on the storage side on the network side uh the improvements we need and and also making sure that the software which is you know which fits the hardware like there's a specialized software um sorry specialized hardware for certain software you know so there was a lot of talk around that and I attended some of those sessions where I asked the questions around like we have a specialized database for each kind of workload specialized processes processors for each kind of workload yeah the graviton section and actually the the one interesting before I forget that the arbitration was I asked that like why there are so many so many databases and IRS for the egress costs and all that stuff can you are you guys thinking about reducing that you know um the answer was no egress cost is not a big big sort of uh um show stopper for many of the customers but but the from all that sort of little discussion with with the folks sitting who build these products over there was that the plethora of choice is given to the customers to to make them feel that there's no vendor lock-in so if you are using some open source you know um soft software it can be on the you know platform side or can be database side you have database site you have that option at AWS so this is a lot there because I always thought that that AWS is the mother of all lock-ins but it's got an ecosystem and we're going to talk about exactly we'll talk about Stu what's working within AWS when you talk to customers and where are the challenges yeah I I got a comment on open source Dave of course there because I mean look we criticized to Amazon for years about their lack of contribution they've gotten better they're doing more in open source but is Amazon the mother of all lock-ins many times absolutely there's certain people inside Amazon I'm saying you know many of us talk Cloud native they're like well let's do Amazon native which means you're like full stack is things from Amazon and do things the way that we want to do things and you know I talk to a lot of customers they use more than one Cloud Dave and therefore certain things absolutely I want to Leverage The Innovation that Amazon has brought I do think we're past building all the main building blocks in many ways we are like in day two yes Amazon is fanatically customer focused and will always stay that way but you know there wasn't anything that jumped out at me last year or this year that was like Wow new category whole new way of thinking about something we're in a vocals last year Dave said you know we have over 200 services and if we listen to you the customer we'd have over two thousand his session this week actually got some great buzz from my friends in the serverless ecosystem they love some of the things tying together we're using data the next flywheel that we're going to see for the next 10 years Amazon's at the center of the cloud ecosystem in the IT world so you know there's a lot of good things here and to your point Dave the ecosystem one of the things I always look at is you know was there a booth that they're all going to be crying in their beer after Amazon made an announcement there was not a tech vendor that I saw this week that was like oh gosh there was an announcement and all of a sudden our business is gone where I did hear some rumbling is Amazon might be the next GSI to really move forward and we've seen all the gsis pushing really deep into supporting Cloud bringing workloads to the cloud and there's a little bit of rumbling as to that balance between what Amazon will do and their uh their go to market so a couple things so I think I think we all agree that a lot of the the announcements here today were taping seams right I call it and as it relates to the mother of all lock-in the reason why I say that it's it's obviously very much a pejorative compare Oracle company you know really well with Amazon's lock-in for Amazon's lock-in is about bringing this ecosystem together so that you actually have Choice Within the the house so you don't have to leave you know there's a there's a lot to eat at the table yeah you look at oracle's ecosystem it's like yeah you know oracle is oracle's ecosystem so so that is how I think they do lock in customers by incenting them not to leave because there's so much Choice Dave I agree with you a thousand I mean I'm here I'm a I'm a good partner of AWS and all of the partners here want to be successful with Amazon and Amazon is open to that it's not our way or get out which Oracle tries how much do you extract from the overall I.T budget you know are you a YouTube where you give the people that help you create a large sum of the money YouTube hasn't been all that profitable Amazon I think is doing a good balance of the ecosystem makes money you know we used to talk Dave about you know how much dollars does VMware make versus there um I think you know Amazon is a much bigger you know VMware 2.0 we used to think talk about all the time that VMware for every dollar spent on VMware licenses 15 or or 12 or 20 were spent in the ecosystem I would think the ratio is even higher here sarbji and an Oracle I would say it's I don't know yeah actually 1 to 0.5 maybe I don't know but I want to pick on your discussion about the the ecosystem the the partner ecosystem is so it's it's robust strong because it's wider I was I was not saying that there's no lock-in with with Amazon right AWS there's lock-in there's lock-in with everything there's lock-in with open source as well but but the point is that they're they're the the circle is so big you don't feel like locked in but they're playing smart as well they're bringing in the software the the platforms from the open source they're picking up those packages and saying we'll bring it in and cater that to you through AWS make it better perform better and also throw in their custom chips on top of that hey this MySQL runs better here so like what do you do I said oh Oracle because it's oracle's product if you will right so they are I think think they're filing or not slenders from their go to market strategy from their engineering and they listen to they're listening to customers like very closely and that has sort of side effects as well listening to customers creates a sprawl of services they have so many services and I criticized them last year for calling everything a new service I said don't call it a new service it's a feature of a existing service sure a lot of features a lot of features this is egress our egress costs a real problem or is it just the the on-prem guys picking at the the scab I mean what do you hear from customers so I mean Dave you know I I look at what Corey Quinn talks about all the time and Amazon charges on that are more expensive than any other Cloud the cloud providers and partly because Amazon is you know probably not a word they'd use they are dominant when it comes to the infrastructure space and therefore they do want to make it a little bit harder to do that they can get away with it um because um yeah you know we've seen some of the cloud providers have special Partnerships where you can actually you know leave and you're not going to be charged and Amazon they've been a little bit more flexible but absolutely I've heard customers say that they wish some good tunning and tongue-in-cheek stuff what else you got we lay it on us so do our players okay this year I think the focus was on the upside it's shifting gradually this was more focused on offside there were less talk of of developers from the main stage from from all sort of quadrants if you will from all Keynotes right so even Werner this morning he had a little bit for he was talking about he he was talking he he's job is to Rally up the builders right yeah so he talks about the go build right AWS pipes I thought was kind of cool then I said like I'm making glue easier I thought that was good you know I know some folks don't use that I I couldn't attend the whole session but but I heard in between right so it is really adopt or die you know I am Cloud Pro for last you know 10 years and I think it's the best model for a technology consumption right um because of economies of scale but more importantly because of division of labor because of specialization because you can't afford to hire the best security people the best you know the arm chip designers uh you can't you know there's one actually I came up with a bumper sticker you guys talked about bumper sticker I came up with that like last couple of weeks The Innovation favorite scale they have scale they have Innovation so that's where the Innovation is and it's it's not there again they actually say the market sets the price Market you as a customer don't set the price the vendor doesn't set the price Market sets the price so if somebody's complaining about their margins or egress and all that I think that's BS um yeah I I have a few more notes on the the partner if you you concur yeah Dave you know with just coming back to some of this commentary about like can Amazon actually enable something we used to call like Community clouds uh your companies like you know Goldman and NASDAQ and the like where Industries will actually be able to share data uh and you know expand the usage and you know Amazon's going to help drive that API economy forward some so it's good to see those things because you know we all know you know all of us are smarter than just any uh single company together so again some of that's open source but some of that is you know I think Amazon is is you know allowing Innovation to thrive I think the word you're looking for is super cloud there well yeah I mean it it's uh Dave if you want to go there with the super cloud because you know there's a metaphor for exactly what you described NASDAQ Goldman Sachs we you know and and you know a number of other companies that are few weeks at the Berkeley Sky Computing paper yeah you know that's a former supercloud Dave Linthicum calls it metacloud I'm not really careful I mean you know I go back to the the challenge we've been you know working at for a decade is the distributed architecture you know if you talk about AI architectures you know what lives in the cloud what lives at the edge where do we train things where do we do inferences um locations should matter a lot less Amazon you know I I didn't hear a lot about it this show but when they came out with like local zones and oh my gosh out you know all the things that Amazon is building to push out to the edge and also enabling that technology and software and the partner ecosystem helps expand that and Pull It in it's no longer you know Dave it was Hotel California all of the data eventually is going to end up in the public cloud and lock it in it's like I don't think that's going to be the case we know that there will be so much data out at the edge Amazon absolutely is super important um there some of those examples we're giving it's not necessarily multi-cloud but there's collaboration happening like in the healthcare world you know universities and hospitals can all share what they're doing uh regardless of you know where they live well Stephen Armstrong in the analyst session did say that you know we're going to talk about multi-cloud we're not going to lead with it necessarily but we are going to actually talk about it and that's different to your points too than in the fullness of time all the data will be in the cloud that's a new narrative but go ahead yeah actually Amazon is a leader in the cloud so if they push the cloud even if they don't say AWS or Amazon with it they benefit from it right and and the narrative is that way there's the proof is there right so again Innovation favorite scale there are chips which are being made for high scale their software being tweaked for high scale you as a Bank of America or for the Chrysler as a typical Enterprise you cannot afford to do those things in-house what cloud providers can I'm not saying just AWS Google cloud is there Azure guys are there and few others who are behind them and and you guys are there as well so IBM has IBM by the way congratulations to your red hat I know but IBM won the award um right you know very good partner and yeah but yeah people are dragging their feet people usually do on the change and they are in denial denial they they drag their feet and they came in IBM director feed the cave Den Dell drag their feed the cave in yeah you mean by Dragon vs cloud deniers cloud deniers right so server Huggers I call them but they they actually are sitting in Amazon Cloud Marketplace everybody is buying stuff from there the marketplace is the new model OKAY Amazon created the marketplace for b2c they are leading the marketplace of B2B as well on the technology side and other people are copying it so there are multiple marketplaces now so now actually it's like if you're in in a mobile app development there are two main platforms Android and Apple you first write the application for Apple right then for Android hex same here as a technology provider as and I I and and I actually you put your stuff to AWS first then you go anywhere else yeah they are later yeah the Enterprise app store is what we've wanted for a long time the question is is Amazon alone the Enterprise app store or are they partner of a of a larger portfolio because there's a lot of SAS companies out there uh that that play into yeah what we need well and this is what you're talking about the future but I just want to make a point about the past you talking about dragging their feet because the Cube's been following this and Stu you remember this in 2013 IBM actually you know got in a big fight with with Amazon over the CIA deal you know and it all became public judge wheeler eviscerated you know IBM and it ended up IBM ended up buying you know soft layer and then we know what happened there and it Joe Tucci thought the cloud was Mosey right so it's just amazing to see we have booksellers you know VMware called them books I wasn't not all of them are like talking about how great Partnerships they are it's amazing like you said sub GC and IBM uh with the the GSI you know Partnership of the year but what you guys were just talking about was the future and that's what I wanted to get to is because you know Amazon's been leading the way I I was listening to Werner this morning and that just reminded me of back in the days when we used to listen to IBM educate us give us a master class on system design and decoupled systems and and IO and everything else now Amazon is you know the master educator and it got me thinking how long will that last you know will they go the way of you know the other you know incumbents will they be disrupted or will they you know keep innovating maybe it's going to take 10 or 20 years I don't know yeah I mean Dave you actually you did some research I believe it was a year or so ago yeah but what will stop Amazon and the one thing that worries me a little bit um is the two Pizza teams when you have over 202 Pizza teams the amount of things that each one of those groups needs to take care of was more than any human could take care of people burn out they run out of people how many amazonians only last two or three years and then leave because it is tough I bumped into plenty of friends of mine that have been you know six ten years at Amazon and love it but it is a tough culture and they are driving werner's keynote I thought did look to from a product standpoint you could say tape over some of the seams some of those solutions to bring Beyond just a single product and bring them together and leverage data so there are some signs that they might be able to get past some of those limitations but I still worry structurally culturally there could be some challenges for Amazon to keep the momentum going especially with the global economic impact that we are likely to see in the next year bring us home I think the future side like we could talk about the vendors all day right to serve the community out there I think we should talk about how what's the future of technology consumption from the consumer side so from the supplier side just a quick note I think the only danger AWS has has that that you know Fred's going after them you know too big you know like we will break you up and that can cause some disruption there other than that I think they they have some more steam to go for a few more years at least before we start thinking about like oh this thing is falling apart or anything like that so they have a lot more they have momentum and it's continuing so okay from the I think game is on retail by the way is going to get disrupted before AWS yeah go ahead from the buyer's side I think um the the future of the sort of Technology consumption is based on the paper uh use and they actually are turning all their services to uh they are sort of becoming serverless behind the scenes right all analytics service they had one service left they they did that this year so every service is serverless so that means you pay exactly for the amount you use the compute the iops the the storage so all these three layers of course Network we talked about the egress stuff and that's a problem there because of the network design mainly because Google has a flatter design and they have lower cost so so they are actually squeezing the their their designing this their services in a way that you don't waste any resources as a buyer so for example very simple example when early earlier In This Cloud you will get a VM right in Cloud that's how we started so and you can get 20 use 20 percent of the VM 80 is getting wasted that's not happening now that that has been reduced to the most extent so now your VM grows as you grow the usage and if you go higher than the tier you picked they will charge you otherwise they will not charge you extra so that's why there's still a lot of instances like many different types you have to pick one I think the future is that those instances will go away the the instance will be formed for you on the fly so that is the future serverless all right give us bumper sticker Stu and then Serb G I'll give you my quick one and then we'll wrap yeah so just Dave to play off of sharp G and to wrap it up you actually wrote about it on your preview post for here uh serverless we're talking about how developers think about things um and you know Amazon in many ways you know is the new default server uh you know for the cloud um and containerization fits into the whole serverless Paradigm uh it's the space that I live in uh you know every day here and you know I was happy to see the last few years serverless and containers there's a blurring a line and you know subject we're still going to see VMS for a long time yeah yeah we will see that so give us give us your book Instagram my number six is innovation favorite scale that's my bumper sticker and and Amazon has that but also I I want everybody else to like the viewers to take a look at the the Google Cloud as well as well as IBM with others like maybe you have a better price to Performance there for certain workloads and by the way one vendor cannot do it alone we know that for sure the market is so big there's a lot of room for uh Red Hats of the world and and and Microsoft's the world to innovate so keep an eye on them they we need the competition actually and that's why competition Will Keep Us to a place where Market sets the price one vendor doesn't so the only only danger is if if AWS is a monopoly then I will be worried I think ecosystems are the Hallmark of a great Cloud company and Amazon's got the the biggest and baddest ecosystem and I think the other thing to watch for is Industries building on top of the cloud you mentioned the Goldman Sachs NASDAQ Capital One and Warner media these all these industries are building their own clouds and that's where the real money is going to be made in the latter half of the 2020s all right we're a wrap this is Dave Valente I want to first of all thank thanks to our great sponsors AWS for for having us here this is our 10th year at the cube AMD you know sponsoring as well the the the cube here Accenture sponsor to third set upstairs upstairs on the fifth floor all the ecosystem partners that came on the cube this week and supported our mission for free content our content is always free we try to give more to the community and we we take back so go to thecube.net and you'll see all these videos go to siliconangle com for all the news wikibon.com I publish weekly a breaking analysis series I want to thank our amazing crew here you guys we have probably 30 35 people unbelievable our awesome last session John Walls uh Paul Gillen Lisa Martin Savannah Peterson John Furrier who's on a plane we appreciate Andrew and Leonard in our ear and all of our our crew Palo Alto Boston and across the country thank you so much really appreciate it all right we are a wrap AWS re invent 2022 we'll see you in two weeks we'll see you two weeks at Palo Alto ignite back here in Vegas thanks for watching thecube the leader in Enterprise and emerging Tech coverage [Music]

(gentle music) >> Hello, beautiful humans and welcome back to fabulous Las Vegas, where we are combating the dry air of the desert and all giggling about the rasp of our voice at this stage. We're theCUBE and we are live from AWS reinvent. I am Savannah Peterson, joined by the fabulous Paul Gillin. Paul, how are you holding up? How are your feet doing? >> My feet are, I can't feel them anymore. (both laugh) >> We can't feel much after these feet. >> Two miles. Just to get from, just to get to to the keynotes this morning. >> Did you do your cross training to prepare >> For, >> Apparently not well enough. (Savannah laughs) Not well enough. >> Well, it's great to have you here >> likewise. and I'm very excited for our next conversation. We've got Ramesh from Prosimo. >> Thank you. >> Savannah: Welcome to the show. How is the show going for you? How's your voice? >> Oh my God. I woke up this morning and I could not hear my own voice. I'm like, this is not me. I think it's the dry air here, so if I cough, I apologize in advance. But no, the show has been great. It's been nonstop at the booth. It's wonderful to see all the customers in one place so you don't have to schedule lots of meetings spread across three, four weeks. So you get to >> Savannah: Right. I, yeah >> So yesterday was like eight to six, nonstop and it was awesome, right? Because you get to meet all these guys. The other important thing is the focus on the right layer, right? Like, I loved the keynote from Adam. It was about applications, services, data. Nowhere in there was there like infrastructure. Like we are infrastructure, right? I actually love that because that's where the focus should be and that's what customers are caring about right? So it's, it's been great so far. >> Yeah. I'm so happy to hear your booth's packed. I know exactly what you mean. I mean, we're going to be talking about optimization. It's a theme, but we also optimize our time here >> Ramesh: Yeah. >> on the show floor by getting to engage with our community. Prosimo's been around for three years just in case folks aren't familiar, give us the pitch. >> Sure. We are in the cloud networking space, solving for two problems. What happens within the cloud as you bring up VPCs, vnet and workloads, how are they able to talk to each other, secure each other, and how to use those access workloads? Those are the two problems that we solve for. It stemmed from really us seeing a complete diversion in what cloud wants versus what network really focuses on. Cloud has been always focused on applications and speed of operations and network has always been about reliability, scalability, and robust architecture. And we didn't really see these things come together. So that's when prosimo was born. >> So what are some of the surprises newcomers to the cloud may encounter with networking, with cloud networking that was not a factor when they were fully on-prem? >> So the first thing is in the cloud, you can't deal with the workload the same way you dealt with in the data center. In the data center, you usually had pools of service. They were all allocated some level of addressing. And it was not about the workload, it was more about the identity, IP addresses and so forth. In the cloud, those things have completely gotten demolished, right? You have to refer to a S3 service as an S3 service. It's not an IP endpoint. IP endpoint comes and goes, right? >> Savannah: Yeah. >> And so you have to completely shift around that, right? >> Now, this actually challenges almost 10 years, 12, 20 years maybe, of networking that we knew about, right? So that's why cloud networking is almost night and day difference compared to regular networking right? And, we're seeing that and that's what we are really helping customers with. >> What are some of the trends that you're seeing? I, well actually, let me ask you this question. Do you, is there an industry or vertical you work with specifically? I would imagine most people across, >> Ramesh: The Yeah, across. >> Yeah. >> Anybody that has workloads in the cloud right? >> Yeah, right. >> Ramesh: That's, >> I mean I can't imagine any companies that would have that. >> Exactly. (Savannah laughs) >> What are some of the trends that you're seeing? I know we talk about time to value. We talk about cost optimization. Is that the top priority for your customers? >> Yeah. Up until end of last year, a lot of the focus was about speed of operations. And so people would look at what are the type of workloads? How do I enable things? How do I empower my development team? So, if I'm the cloud platform team responsible for connecting, securing and making sure my applications can get deployed smooth and fast, that was the primary focus. Fast forward to this year, we started to see this a little bit at the beginning of the year. Now it's in full force. It's about cost control, right? It's about egress charges coming out of the cloud. Suddenly the cloud bill and every single line item on the cloud bill is in focus, right? And so that has a direct impact on what does this mean for networking. Cloud networking for many may not be familiar, it's about 14% of the cloud bill. And so anything that materially moves the needle on the cloud networking costs can actually have a have a big impact, right? And so we have seen the focus on the speed of operations are still there but cloud cost control has become a big part of it. >> So where are the excesses? I mean, it's, it's a big part of the bill. Where can company, where do companies typically waste money in networking costs? >> So, if you bring a person who understands networking and networking architecture really, really well, they'll can build a solid architecture, but they'll not focus on operations and automation. If you bring a 25 year old, they will automate the heck out of it. They know python day in and day out. And so they'll automate the heck out of it but it will not be with a robust architecture, right? And so you, on one hand, you end up wasting because you do things very suboptimally. It's a solid architecture, it's a really good design but it's really bad for operations. In the other hand, with push of a button you can get anything done but underneath the covers, underneath the hood, if you look at it, it's a mess, right? And so you have more competence than necessary. And so, what customers want is really a best of both, right? You need solid architecture that has all the right principles but also you need the automation so that you don't employ four, five people and a whole toolkit in order to make things work, right? And that's where we see most of the efficiencies come from >> You said you were you were super busy at your booth. Do customers understand that this is a problem now? >> So more so now than I would say last year. The last reinvent when we had a session. >> Yeah. >> We had to educate a lot of people on these are the requirements for cloud networking. Thanks to Gartner, thanks to many of the sessions you guys have been doing as well. The focus and the education for what cloud networking requires has started to come about. Now, this is where the savviness of the customer is important, right? Like there are customers in different stages of their journey. Those that have been operating in the cloud for three years plus, know that they've crossed that initial phase, right? Like you have basic hygiene, you have certain things and moving from hundreds of VPCs to maybe about thousand, right? And so at that time, the set of challenges I need to work with are very, very different, right? So now increasingly we are seeing at the booth the challenges are, "Hey, I know how to operate in the cloud". Right? Like, "Don't talk to me about that." Right? "But how do I get from hundred to a thousand?" Because I have a gun to my head. My CIO has said, I need to decommission my data centers in the next couple of years and I need to go all in on cloud. Help me with that, right? And so it's the, I wouldn't call it like massive scale it's the scale from kind of the trivial to the next stage that's actually causing a lot of these problems to surface. >> It's that layer of transformation. >> Ramesh: Yeah. It's when you've made the commitment and now we've got to catch everything up >> [Ramesh} exactly. >> across the company locations and probably a variety of different silos doing different things. >> Ramesh: Exactly. Yeah. >> Super complex. So, how do folks get started with you? >> Yeah, so typically we start with like, even if the customer says, "Here's what my blueprint looks like." We say, "Bring two regions." That's it, two regions, a few workloads. We'll help you set up the connectivity, set up the secure access required, set up the foundational things There's a certain level of automation, right? Let's get to that point because governance is different. The cloud privileges are different so let's work through all of that, right? Usually this takes about a week or so. The actual proof of concept, proof of value can be done in a day, but getting permissions and what not takes about, about a week, right? And once you show two regions then it's actually game on, right? Then you go from 10 VPCs to a hundred to a thousand and it's just like one to one thing after another. So that's usually how we see customers get started. We have a full stack that covers kind of what does this mean for the network to application services to kind of layer seven and so forth. We tell the customer, as much as we want you to focus on the entire stack, let's start with one, right? Start baby steps, start with one. Because for many, cloud itself is, I wouldn't say new but they're in a region that's not comfortable, right? So you wannna, you don't want to throw too much at them. >> Savannah: Right. >> So we help them kind of progressively move towards different types of workplace. >> Savannah: Yeah. >> And you have a multicloud story as well. >> Ramesh: That's correct. >> So when companies begin to cross clouds with workloads, move them between clouds, what kinds of issues emerge then? >> Yeah, so there are two parts for this, right? There is the AWS and data center and then there is the AWS plus other clouds. Two different set of problems, actually, >> Paul: Hm-hmm. Hm-hmm. The AWS plus connectivity, back into my data center almost every single enterprise. We deal with kind of the global 2000. Every single one of them has that, right? And so we kind of, we go through a series of steps, come up with an architecture, deploy a solution. After that, it's, Hey, I have BigQuery in Google that needs to talk back to an S3 bucket out here. Like, no networking solution can help you with that. Like, you need like cloud native principles in order to come into the picture. So increasingly we are seeing requests for, hey I have a distributed workload. It's not, it's not that one single application is spread across multiple clouds, but I have these islands of workloads that all need to talk to each other. >> Paul: Right. And what I don't want to do is actually build highways that actually connect all these things together because that's a waste of time. I actually want to make sure that only these applications that care about the talking to each other, are allowed to talk to each other. So that's kind of one foundational thing that we see. A few others are around compliance and governance. So we say, Hey, if I'm a retailer, I need to have some workloads in Azure some in the GCP and so forth. So it depends on kind of the industry compliance, regulatory requirements and so forth. >> So many different needs >> Ramesh: Exactly. for so many different types of companies. But also, you know, creating that efficiency is so great. >> Ramesh: Yup. >> And especially that time to value tune, cost reduction >> Ramesh: Yup. doing a lot of great things for your customers. There's a note on my run sheet here that you've seen some success with Topgolf and I suspect we have some golfers in the audience. John even used to be a caddy. We had a caddy segment with someone who was a pro caddy. Drew, when we were at Cape Con. Tell us about that story. >> So it was a really wild idea. We said, okay people are going to be walking around 22,000 steps right? >> Savannah: Yeah. >> And so >> Like Paul, >> And, they're going to be talking to people, listening to sessions. So we said, let's, what do most others do? You set up some time in a restaurant, you come, you have a social time, and what not. We said, let's give people something different. So we reserve the Topgolf here and we opened it up. We initially paid for a certain number of things. It's actually gone three x of that right now. So we had in the Topgolf, can you give us like the entire thing? I think people just want to go do something different, right? >> Savannah: Yeah. >> And of course the topic is important but equally important is like, I just want to have a good time, right? >> Yeah. And if you, hit a few And there you go. >> It doesn't have to relate back to network >> Cloud, network. >> Yeah, exactly. And so >> Well, it's all about building community. >> Exactly. >> And especially right now, we all, you know, we're stronger together. >> Ramesh: Yup. We're entering a unique time, we're coming out of a unique time. >> Ramesh: Exactly. >> And, no, I think that's great. And we actually do a swag segment here on theCUBE, differentiating on the show floor. I mean, it's clear because of how thoughtful you are >> Ramesh: Yeah. there's a reason that your, that your booth is so busy. >> Ramesh: That's right. >> So what's next? What can you, can you give us a little sneak preview? What's coming out for you? >> Yeah, so, I'm sensitive and sympathetic to all the macroeconomic conditions that are happening but there's been, we have not skipped a beat. So our business is growing really well. Thanks to all the things that are happening in the cloud. Increasingly, folks are looking at, you know, how how do I move in mass into the cloud? And so a few themes have come about as a result. One, certainly around cost control. How do I, how do I make, how do we make sure that we help our customers in that journey, right? So we have a few things around those lines. Modernization, especially after you go through the first few workloads, the next few that come about are invariably modern workloads. And modern workloads is this sensitive thing where I think the ultra savvy developers know what to do but the infrastructure guys don't know what to do in order to serve, right? And so we have actually developed a set of capabilities to help with that kind of modernization, right? Because it's not enough if your apps are modernized, your infrastructure that serves the apps also need to be modernized. And so those are the, those are the things and certainly, getting our customers less than us. We want to get our customers to talk. And so you'll see quite a bit of that as well. >> I want to ask you about a statement that was in the notes that we were reading, running up this interview. Zero Trust network access is the next solution that will be disrupted. What do you mean by that? >> So, when we started the company about three years ago, zero test network access was there. It was about maybe two, three years old at that time. And so we said, it needs to be done differently in the cloud. Why? Because you are a user. You're trying to access an application in the cloud. Do you care what's in the middle? You really don't, you just want to be able to open up your laptop, go to dub dub something.com and you should be able to access, right? But that's not how the experience is today. There's invariably something that comes, a middle mile solution that comes in the middle, right? And then the guy needs to operationalize all of that. And that now passes on to you. You need to launch a an agent on your thing, connect into something. It just brings a lot of complexity, right? So we looked at that problem and we said, cloud has done really really a few things really, really well, right? It's literally at your doorstep. Cloud presence is literally at your doorstep. So as you open up your browser, connect from your home, I don't need anything in the middle. I am jumping straight into the cloud. And so when you do that, then you actually have the luxury of bringing a few capabilities to the entry point of the cloud so that security can be done better, posture control can be done better and so on and so forth. So we developed those capabilities almost three years ago. We have quite a few large enterprises that have deployed this. And we fundamentally believe on building on top of the hyperscale network because billions of tens of billions of dollars go into the investment here. And we want to be building a layer of value on top, right? And so we've been working closely with our AWS buddies here and actually built capabilities so that the infrastructure presence, the massive reach and also the underlying capabilities for zero trust are provided. But what the customer regains in terms of value is through our platform, right? And so we'll see a whole lot more innovation along these lines. Probably bad news for the Middle Mile provider who sit in the, in the middle because hey AWS is literally at your doorstep, so you have to rethink your strategy. >> Going to be a lot of agility >> Ramesh: Yes, absolutely. >> In a very different context than we normally use it in Nerdland. And no, I think that's great. So we have, it's an exciting time for you as a company. We have a new challenge here at Reinvent. >> Okay. >> On theCUBE. I know you're a venerable alumni. >> Yep. >> You have been on theCUBE multiple times with multiple companies which is very impressive. Which says a lot about you. Although given how fun this interview's been, I'm not surprised. Give us your 30 second, Instagram real highlight, sound bite on the biggest or most important theme or takeaway from this year's show. >> From this show? Yeah, so if you look across the keynotes in all the sessions, the focus is on data, services and the applications. So the biggest takeaway I would offer anybody is focus on that first because that's where the outcome needs to shine. The rest of the stuff is a means to an end. I am an infrastructure guy through and through, I have been for the last 20 years. It hurts me to say infrastructure is a means to end but it is, right. Let the people dealing with the infrastructure deal with the infrastructure. If you are a customer or a client of the service, focus on the outcome, focus on the apps, focus on the services focus on on the data. That would be the biggest takeaway. >> Savannah: I appreciate your >> Paul: Words of wisdom >> Savannah: transparency. Yeah, no, exactly. Words of wisdom and very honest words of wisdom. Really great to talk to you about intelligent infrastructure. >> Absolutely. >> Savannah: Thank you so much for being on the show, Ramesh. >> Thank you. >> Savannah: It's been, it's been awesome. Paul, it's always a pleasure. >> Likewise. Thank you all for tuning in today here live from the show floor at AWS, reinvent in beautiful sin city, in the high desert and the high end dry desert with Paul Gillin. My name is Savannah Peterson and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. (gentle music)

(calming music) >> Hello and welcome back to fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. We're here at AWS re:Invent day three of our scintillating coverage here on theCUBE. I'm Savannah Peterson, joined by John Furrier. John Day three energy's high. How you feeling? >> I dunno, it's day two, day three, day four. It feels like day four, but again, we're back. >> Who's counting? >> Three pandemic levels in terms of 50,000 plus people? Hallways are packed. I got pictures. People don't believe it. It's actually happening. Then people are back. So, you know, and then the economy is a big question too and it's still, people are here, they're still building on the cloud and cost is a big thing. This next segment's going to be really important. I'm looking forward to this next segment. >> Yeah, me too. Without further ado let's welcome our guests for this segment. We have Brad from AMD and we have Rahul from you are, well you do a variety of different things. We'll start with CloudFix for this segment, but we could we could talk about your multiple hats all day long. Welcome to the show, gentlemen. How you doing? Brad how does it feel? We love seeing your logo above our stage here. >> Oh look, we love this. And talking about re:Invent last year, the energy this year compared to last year is so much bigger. We love it. We're excited to be here. >> Yeah, that's awesome. Rahul, how are you feeling? >> Excellent, I mean, I think this is my eighth or ninth re:Invent at this point and it's been fabulous. I think the, the crowd, the engagement, it's awesome. >> You wouldn't know there's a looming recession if you look at the activity but yet still the reality is here we had an analyst on yesterday, we were talking about spend more in the cloud, save more. So that you can still use the cloud and there's a lot of right sizing, I call you got to turn the lights off before you go to bed. Kind of be more efficient with your infrastructure as a theme. This re:Invent is a lot more about that now. Before it's about the glory days. Oh yeah, keep building, now with a little bit of pressure. This is the conversation. >> Exactly and I think most companies are looking to figure out how to innovate their way out of this uncertainty that's kind of on everyone's head. And the only way to do it is to be able to be more efficient with whatever your existing spend is, take those savings and then apply them to innovating on new stuff. And that's the way to go about it at this point. >> I think it's such a hot topic, for everyone that we're talking about. I mean, total cost optimization figuring out ways to be more efficient. I know that that's a big part of your mission at CloudFix. So just in case the audience isn't versed, give us the pitch. >> Okay, so a little bit of background on this. So the other hat I wear is CTO of ESW Capital. We have over 150 enterprise software companies within the portfolio. And one of my jobs is also to manage and run about 40 to 45,000 AWS accounts of our own. >> Casual number, just a few, just a couple pocket change, no big deal. >> And like everyone else here in the audience, yeah we had a problem with our costs, just going out of control and as we were looking at a lot of the tools to help us kind of get more efficient one of the biggest issues was that while people give you a lot of recommendations recommendations are way too far from realized savings. And we were running through the challenge of how do you take recommendation and turn them into real savings and multiple different hurdles. The short story being, we had to create CloudFix to actually realize those savings. So we took AWS recommendations around cost, filtered them down to the ones that are completely non-disruptive in nature, implemented those as simple automations that everyone could just run and realize those savings right away. We then took those savings and then started applying them to innovating and doing new interesting things with that money. >> Is there a best practice in your mind that you see merging in this time? People start more focused on it. Is there a method or a purpose kind of best practice of how to approach cost optimization? >> I think one of the things that most people don't realize is that cost optimization is not a one and done thing. It is literally nonstop. Which means that, on one hand AWS is constantly creating new services. There are over a hundred thousand API at this point of time How to use them right, how to use them efficiently You also have a problem of choice. Developers are constantly discovering new services discovering new ways to utilize them. And they are behaving in ways that you had not anticipated before. So you have to stay on top of things all the time. And really the only way to kind of stay on top is to have automation that helps you stay on top of all of these things. So yeah, finding efficiencies, standardizing your practices about how you leverage these AWS services and then automating the governance and hygiene around how you utilize them is really the key >> Brad tell me what this means for AMD and what working with CloudFix and Rahul does for your customers. >> Well, the idea of efficiency and cost optimization is near and dear to our heart. We have the leading. >> It's near and dear to everyone's heart, right now. (group laughs) >> But we are the leaders in x86 price performance and density and power efficiency. So this is something that's actually part of our core culture. We've been doing this a long time and what's interesting is most companies don't understand how much more efficiency they can get out of their applications aside from just the choices they make in cloud. but that's the one thing, the message we're giving to everybody is choice matters very much when it comes to your cloud solutions and just deciding what type of instance types you choose can have a massive impact on your bottom line. And so we are excited to partner with CloudFix, they've got a great model for this and they make it very easier for our customers to help identify those areas. And then AMD can come in as well and then help provide additional insight into those applications what else they can squeeze out of it. So it's a great relationship. >> If I hear you correctly, then there's more choice for the customers, faster selection, so no bad choices means bad performance if they have a workload or an app that needs to run, is that where you you kind of get into the, is that where it is or more? >> Well, I mean from the AMD side right now, one of the things they do very quickly is they identify where the low hanging fruit is. So it's the thing about x86 compatibility, you can shift instance types instantly in most cases without any change to your environment at all. And CloudFix has an automated tool to do that. And that's one thing you can immediately have an impact on your cost without having to do any work at all. And customers love that. >> What's the alternative if this doesn't exist they have to go manually figure it out or it gets them in the face or they see the numbers don't work or what's the, if you don't have the tool to automate what's the customer's experience >> The alternative is that you actually have people look at every single instance of usage of resources and try and figure out how to do this. At cloud scale, that just doesn't make sense. You just can't. >> It's too many different options. >> Correct The reality is that your resources your human resources are literally your most expensive part of your budget. You want to leverage all the amazing people you have to do the amazing work. This is not amazing work. This is mundane. >> So you free up all the people time. >> Correct, you free up wasting their time and resources on doing something that's mundane, simple and should be automated, because that's the only way you scale. >> I think of you is like a little helper in the background helping me save money while I'm not thinking about it. It's like a good financial planner making you money since we're talking about the economy >> Pretty much, the other analogy that I give to all the technologists is this is like garbage collection. Like for most languages when you are coding, you have these new languages that do garbage collection for you. You don't do memory management and stuff where developers back in the day used to do that. Why do that when you can have technology do that in an automated manner for you in an optimal way. So just kind of freeing up your developer's time from doing this stuff that's mundane and it's a standard best practice. One of the things that we leverage AMD for, is they've helped us define the process of seamlessly migrating folks over to AMD based instances without any major disruptions or trying to minimize every aspect of disruption. So all the best practices are kind of borrowed from them, borrowed from AWS in most other cases. And we basically put them in the automation so that you don't ever have to worry about that stuff. >> Well you're getting so much data you have the opportunity to really streamline, I mean I love this, because you can look across industry, across verticals and behavior of what other folks are doing. Learn from that and apply that in the background to all your different customers. >> So how big is the company? How big is the team? >> So we have people in about 130 different countries. So we've completely been remote and global and actually the cloud has been one of the big enablers of that. >> That's awesome, 130 countries. >> And that's the best part of it. I was just telling Brad a short while ago that's allowed us to hire the best talent from across the world and they spend their time building new amazing products and new solutions instead of doing all this other mundane stuff. So we are big believers in automation not only for our world. And once our customers started asking us about or telling us about the same problem that they were having that's when we actually took what we had internally for our own purpose. We packaged it up as CloudFix and launched it last year at re:Invent. >> If the customers aren't thinking about automation then they're going to probably have struggle. They're going to probably struggle. I mean with more data coming in you see the data story here more data's coming in, more automation. And this year Brad price performance, I've heard the word price performance more this year at re:Invent than any other year I've heard it before, but this year, price performance not performance, price performance. So you're starting to hear that dialogue of squeeze, understand the use cases use the right specialized processor instance starting to see that evolve. >> Yeah and and there's so much to it. I mean, AMD right out of the box is any instance is 10% less expensive than the equivalent in the market right now on AWS. They do a great job of maximizing those products. We've got our Zen four core general processor family just released in November and it's going to be a beast. Yeah, we're very excited about it and AWS announced support for it so we're excited to see what they deliver there too. But price performance is so critical and again it's going back to the complexity of these environments. Giving some of these enterprises some help, to help them understand where they can get additional value. It goes well beyond the retail price. There's a lot more money to be shaved off the top just by spending time thinking about those applications. >> Yeah, absolutely. I love that you talked about collaboration we've been talking about community. I want to acknowledge the AWS super fans here, standing behind the stage. Rahul, I know that you are an AWS super fan. Can you tell us about that community and the program? >> Yeah, so I have been involved with AWS and building products with AWS since 2007. So it's kind of 15 years back when literally there were just a handful of API for launching EC2 instances and S3. >> Not the a hundred thousand that you mentioned earlier, my goodness, the scale. >> So I think I feel very privileged and honored that I have been part of that journey and have had to learn or have had the opportunity to learn both from successes and failures. And it's just my way of contributing back to that community. So we are part of the FinOps foundation as well, contributing through that. I run a podcast called AWS Insiders and a livestream called AWS Made Easy. So we are trying to make sure that people out there are able to understand how to leverage AWS in the best possible way. And yeah, we are there to help and hold their hand through it. >> Talk about the community, take a minute to explain to the audience watching the community around this cost optimization area. It's evolving, you mentioned FinOps. There's a whole large community developing, of practitioners and technologists coming together to look at this. What does this all mean? Talk about this community. >> So cost management within organizations is has evolved so drastically that organizations haven't really coped with it. Historically, you've had finance teams basically buy a lot of infrastructure, which is CapEx and the engineering teams had kind of an upper bound on what they would spend and where they would spend. Suddenly with cloud, that's kind of enabled so much innovation all of a sudden, everyone's realized it, five years was spent figuring out whether people should be on the cloud or not. That's no longer a question, right. Everyone needs to be in the cloud and I think that's a no-brainer. The problem there is that suddenly your operating model has moved from CapEx to OpEx. And organizations haven't really figured out how to deal with it. Finance now no longer has the controls to control and manage and forecast costs. Engineering has never had to deal with it in the past and suddenly now they have to figure out how to do all this finance stuff. And procurement finds itself in a very awkward way position because they are no longer doing these negotiations like they were doing in the past where it was okay right up front before you engage, you do these negotiations. Now it's kind of an ongoing thing and it's constantly changing. Like every day is different. >> And you got marketplace >> And you got marketplace. So it's a very complex situation and I think what we are trying to do with the FinOps foundation is try and take a lot of the best practices across organizations that have been doing this at least for the last 10, 15 years. Take all the learnings and failures and turn them into hopefully opinionated approaches that people can take organizations can take to navigate through this faster rather than kind of falter and then decide that oh, this is not for us. >> Yeah. It's a great model, it's a great model. >> I know it's time John, go ahead. >> All right so, we got a little bumper sticker exercise we used to say what's the bumper sticker for the show? We used to say that, now we're modernizing, we're saying if you had to do an Instagram reel right now, short hot take of what's going on at re:Invent this year with AMD or CloudFix or just in general what would be the sizzle reel, that would be on Instagram or TikTok, go. >> Look, I think when you're at re:Invent right now and number one the energy is fantastic. 23 is going to be a building year. We've got a lot of difficult times ahead financially but it's the time, the ones that come out of 23 stronger and more efficient, and cost optimize are going to survive the long run. So now's the time to build. >> Well done, Rahul let's go for it. >> Yeah, so like Brad said, cost and efficiencies at the top of everyone's mind. Stuff that's the low hanging fruit, easy, use automation. Apply your sources to do most of the innovation. Take the easiest part to realizing savings and operate as efficiently as you possibly can. I think that's got to be key. >> I think they nailed it. They both nailed it. Wow, well it was really good. >> I put you on our talent list of >> And alright, so we repeat them. Are you part of our host team? I love this, I absolutely love this Rahul we wish you the best at CloudFix and your 17 other jobs. And I am genuinely impressed. Do you sleep actually? Last question. >> I do, I do. I have an amazing team that really helps me with all of this. So yeah, thanks to them and thank you for having us here. >> It's been fantastic. >> It's our pleasure. And Brad, I'm delighted we get you both now and again on our next segment. Thank you for being here with us. >> Thank you very much. >> And thank you all for tuning in to our live coverage here at AWS re:Invent, in fabulous Sin City with John Furrier, my name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. (calm music)

>>Welcome back here on the Cube. I'm John Walls. We are in Las Vegas at the Venetian, and this is Reinvent 22 in the Executive Summit sponsored by Accenture. Glad to have you with us here as we continue our conversations. I'm joined by Paul Puckett, who's the former director of the Enterprise Cloud Management Services at the US Army. Paul, good to see you sir. Hey, you as well, John. Thank you. And Justin, she who is managing director and cloud go to market lead at Accenture Federal Services. Justin, good morning to you. Good morning, John. Yeah, glad to have you both here on the cube. First time too, I believe, right? Yes sir. Well, welcome. I wish we had some kind of baptism or indoctrination, but I'll see what I can come up with in the next 10 minutes for you. Let's talk about the Army, Paul. So enterprise cloud management, US Army. You know, I can't imagine the scale we're talking about here. I can't imagine the solutions we're talking about. I can't imagine the users we're talking about. Just for our folks at home, paint the picture a little bit of what kind of landscape it is that you have to cover with that kind of title. >>Sure. The United States Army, about 1.4 million people. Obviously a global organization responsible for protecting and defending the United States as part of our sister services in the Department of Defense. And scale often comes up a lot, right? And we talk about any capability to your solution for the United States Army scale is the, the number one thing, but oftentimes people overlook quality first. And actually when you think of the partnership between the Army and Accenture Federal, we thought a lot when it came to establishing the enterprise Cloud management agency that we wanted to deliver quality first when it came to adopting cloud computing and then scale that quality and not so much be afraid of the, the scale of the army and the size that forces us to make bad decisions. Cuz we wanted to make sure that we proved that there was opportunity and value in the cloud first, and then we wanted to truly scale that. And so no doubt, an immense challenge. The organization's been around for now three years, but I think that we've established irreversible momentum when it comes to modernization, leveraging cloud computing >>For the army. So let's back up. You kind of threw it in there, the ecma. So this agency was, was your a collaboration, right? To create from the ground up and it's in three years in existence. So let's just talk about that. What went into that thinking? What went into the planning and then how did you actually get it up and run into the extent that it is today? >>Sure. Well, it was once the enterprise cloud management office. It was a directorate within the, the CIO G six of the United States Army. So at the headquarters, the army, the chief information Officer, and the G six, which is essentially the military arm for all IT capability were once a joint's organization and the ECMO was created to catalyze the adoption of cloud computing. The army had actually been on a, a cloud adoption journey for many years, but there wasn't a lot of value that was actually derived. And so they created the ecma, well, the ECMO at the time brought me in as the director. And so we were responsible for establishing the new strategy for the adoption of cloud. One of the components of that strategy was essentially we needed an opportunity to be able to buy cloud services at scale. And this was part of our buy secure and build model that we had in place. And so part of the buy piece, we put an acquisition strategy together around how we wanted to buy cloud at scale. We called it the cloud account management optimization. OTA >>Just rolls right off the >>Tongue, it just rolls right off the tongue. And for those that love acronyms, camo, >>Which I liked it when I was say cama, I loved that. That was, that was, >>You always have to have like a tundra, a little >>Piece of that. Very good. It was good. >>But at the time it was novetta, no, Nevada's been bought up by afs, but Novea won that agreement. And so we've had this partnership in place now for just about a year and a half for buying cloud computing net scale. >>So let's talk about, about what you deal with on, on the federal services side here, Justin, in terms of the army. So obviously governance, a major issue, compliance, a major issue, security, you know, paramount importance and all that STEM leads up to quality that Paul was talking about. So when you were looking at this and keeping all those factors in, in your mind, right? I mean, how many, like, oh my God, what kind of days did you have? Oh, well, because this was a handful. >>Well, it was, but you could see when we were responding to the acquisition that it was really, you know, forward thinking and forward leaning in terms of how they thought about cloud acquisition and cloud governance and cloud management. And it's really kind of a sleepy area like cloud account acquisition. Everyone's like, oh, it's easy to get in the cloud, you know, run your credit card on Amazon and you're in, in 30 seconds or less. That's really not the case inside the federal government, whether it's the army, the Air Force or whoever, right? Those, those are, they're real challenges in procuring and acquiring cloud. And so it was clear from, you know, Paul's office that they understood those challenges and we were excited to really meet them with them. >>And, and how, I guess from an institutional perspective, before this was right, I I assume very protective, very tight cloistered, right? You, you, in terms of being open to or, or a more open environment, there might have been some pushback was they're not. Right? So dealing with that, what did you find that to be the case? Well, so >>There's kind of a few pieces to unpacking that. There's a lot of fear in trepidation around something you don't understand, right? And so part of it is the teaching and training and the, and the capability and the opportunity in the cloud and the ability to be exceptionally secure when it comes to no doubt, the sensitivity of the information of the Department of Defense, but also from an action acquisition strategy perspective, more from a financial perspective, the DOD is accustomed to buying hardware. We make these big bets of these big things to, to live in today's centers. And so when we talk about consuming cloud as a utility, there's a lot of fear there as well, because they don't really understand how to kind of pay for something by the drink, if you will, because it incentivizes them to be more efficient with their utilization of resources. >>But when you look at the budgeting process of the d od, there really is not that much of incentive for efficiency. The p PPE process, the planning program, budgeting, execution, they care about execution, which is spending money and you can spend a lot of money in the cloud, right? But how are you actually utilizing that? And so what we wanted to do is create that feedback loop and so the utilization is actually fed into our financial systems that help us then estimate into the future. And that's the capability that we partnered with AFS on is establishing the closing of that feedback loop. So now we can actually optimize our utilization of the cloud. And that's actually driving better incentives in the PPE >>Process. You know, when you think about these keywords here, modernized, digitized, data driven, so on, so forth, I, I don't think a lot of people might connect that to the US government in general just because of, you know, it's a large intentionally slow moving bureaucratic machine, right? Is that fair to characterize it that way? It >>Is, but not in this case. Right? So what we done, >>You you totally juxtapose that. Yeah. >>Yeah. So what we've done is we've really enabled data driven decision making as it relates to cloud accounts and cloud governance. And so we have a, a tool called Cloud Tracker. We deployed for the army at a number of different classifications, and you get a full 360 view of all of your cloud utilization and cloud spend, you know, really up to date within 24 hours of it occurring, right? And there a lot of folks, you know, they didn't never went into the console, they never looked at what they were spending in cloud previously. And so now you just go to a simple web portal and see the entire entirety of the army cloud spend right there at your fingertips. So that really enables like better decision making in terms of like purchasing savings plans and reserved instances and other sorts of AWS specific tools to help you save money. >>So Paul, tell me about Cloud Tracker then. Yeah, I mean from the client side then, can you just say this dashboard lays it out for you right? In great detail about what kind of usage, what kind of efficiencies I assume Yeah. What's working, what's not? >>Absolutely. Well, and, and I think a few things to unpack that's really important here is listen, any cloud service provider has a concept. You can see what you're actually spending. But when it comes to money in the United States government, there are different colors of money. There's regulations when it comes to how money is identified for different capabilities or incentives. And you've gotta be very explicit in how you track and how you spend that money from an auditability perspective. Beyond that, there is a move when it comes to the technology business management, which is the actual labeling of what we actually spend money on for different services or labor or software. And what Cloud Tracker allows us to do is speak the language of the different colors of money. It allows us to also get very fine grain in the actual analysis of, from a TBM perspective, what we're spending on. >>But then also it has real time hooks into our financial systems for execution. And so what that really does for us is it allows us to complete the picture, not just be able to see our spend in the cloud, but also be able to able to see that spending context of all things in the P P P E process as well as the execution process that then really empowers the government to make better investments. And all we're seeing is either cost avoidance or cost savings simply because we're able to close that loop, like I said. Yep. And then we're able to redirect those funds, retag them, remove them through our actual financial office within the headquarters of the army, and be able to repurpose that to other modernization efforts that Congress is essentially asking us to invest >>In. Right. So you know how much money you have, basically. Exactly. Right. You know how much you've already spent, you know how you're spending it, and now you how much you have left, >>You can provide a reliable forecast for your spend. >>Right. You know, hey, we're, we're halfway through this quarter, we're halfway through the, the fiscal year, whatever the case might be. >>Exactly. And the focus on expenditures, you know, the government rates you on, you know, how much have you spent, right? So you have a clear total transparency into what you're going to spend through the rest of the fiscal. Sure. >>All right. Let's just talk about the relationship quickly then about going forward then in terms of federal services and then what on, on the, the US Army side. I mean, what now you've laid this great groundwork, right? You have a really solid foundation where now what next? >>We wanna be all things cloud to the army. I mean, we think there's tremendous opportunity to really aid the modernization efforts and governance across the holistic part of the army. So, you know, we just, we want to, we wanna do it all with the Army as much as we can. It's, it's, it's a fantastic >>Opportunity. Yeah. AFS is, is in a very kind of a strategic role. So as part of the ecma, we own the greater strategy and execution for adoption of cloud on behalf of the entire army. Now, when it comes to delivery of individual capabilities for mission here and there, that's all specific to system owners and different organizations. AFS plays a different role in this instance where they're able to more facilitate the greater strategy on the financial side of the house. And what we've done is we've proven the ability to adopt cloud as a utility rather than this fixed thing, kind of predict the future, spend a whole bunch of money and never use the resource. We're seeing the efficiency for the actual utilization of cloud as a utility. This actually came out as one of the previous NDAs. And so how we actually address nda, I believe it was 2018 in the adoption of cloud as a utility, really is now cornerstone of modernization across all of the do d and really feeds into the Jo Warfighting cloud capability, major acquisition on behalf of all of the D O D to establish buying cloud as just a common service for everyone. >>And so we've been fortunate to inform that team of some of our lessons learned, but when it comes to the partnership, we just see camo moving into production. We've been live for now a year and a half. And so there's another two and a half years of runway there. And then AFS also plays a strategic role at part of our cloud enablement division, which is essentially back to that teaching part, helping the Army understand the opportunity of cloud computing, align the architectures to actually leverage those resources and then deliver capabilities that save soldier's >>Lives. Well, you know, we've, we've always known that the Army does its best work on the ground, and you've done all this groundwork for the military, so I'm not surprised, right? It's, it's a winning formula. Thanks to both of you for being with us here in the executive summit. Great conversation. Awesome. Thanks for having us. A good deal. All right. Thank you. All right. You are watching the executive summit sponsored by Accenture here at Reinvent 22, and you're catching it all on the cube, the leader in high tech coverage.

>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to Las Vegas. The cube is live at the Venetian Expo Center for AWS Reinvent 2022. There are thousands and thousands and thousands of people here joining myself, Lisa Martin at Dave Valante. David, it's great to see the energy of day one alone. People are back, they're ready to be back. They're ready to hear from AWS and what it's gonna announce to. >>Yeah, all through the pandemic. Of course, we've talked about digital transformation, but the conversation is evolving beyond that to business transformation now, deeper integration of the cloud to really transform fundamental business operations and And that's a new era. >>It is a new era. It's exciting. We've got a couple of guests that we're gonna unpack that with. Anan. Beji joins us, the President Digital Business Services at HCL Tech and Prar, SVP and Global head of AWS business unit. Also from HCL Tech. Guys, welcome. Thank >>You. Thank you, >>Thank you. >>Let's talk about some of the latest trends anon. We'll start with you. What are some of the latest trends in digitalization, especially as it relates to cloud adoption? What are you hearing out in the marketplace? >>Yeah, I think you said it right. The post pandemic, every industry, every enterprise and every industry realize that for resilience, for their ability to change and adapt change and their ability to increase, you know, velocity of change so that they can move fast and keep up the expectations of their consumers, their partners, their employees, they need to have composability at the core and resilience at the core. And so, digital transformation became all about the ability to change, an ability to pivot faster. Now, it's easier said than done, right? Larger enterprises, especially as you move into complex regulated industries, you know, oil and gas, manufacturing, life sciences, healthcare, utilities, these are industries that are not easy to change. They're not adaptable to change, and yet they had to really become more adaptable. And they saw cloud as an enabler to, to all of that, right? So they started looking at every area of their business, business processes that make up their value chains and really look at how can they increase the adaptability and the ability to change these value chains so that they can engage with their customers better, their partners, better their employees better, and also build some of the composability. >>And what might mean that is that just kind of like Lego blocks, they don't have to make changes that are sweeping and big that are difficult to make, but make them in parts so that they can make them again and again. So velocity of change becomes important. Clouds become an enabler to all of this. And so if I look at the last four years, every industry, whether regulated or not b2c, B2B to C, B2B is adopting cloud for digital acceleration. >>I'm curious to what you're seeing on the front lines, given the macro headwinds. You mentioned business resilience and during the pandemic, it was a lot of CIOs told us, wow, we were, we were kind of focused on disaster recovery, but our business wasn't resilient. We were really optimizing for efficiency. And then they started to okay, build in that business resilience. But now you got the economic headwinds. Yes. People are tapping their brakes a little bit. There's some uncertainty, a longer sales cycle, even the cloud's not immune. Yeah. Even though it's still growing at 30% plus per year. What are you guys seeing in the field with the AWS partnership? How are customers, you know, dealing with some of those more strategic transformation projects? Yeah, >>Yeah. So you know, first off, one thing that's changed and is different is every industry realizes that there is no choice. They don't have a choice to not be resilient. They don't have a choice to not be adaptable. The pandemic has taught them that the markets and the macros are increasingly changing supply chains. It's changing customer behavior for their own industries. It's changing their pricing and their cost models. And for all of that, they need to continue on their digital journeys. Now, what's different though is they wanna prioritize. They wanna prioritize and do more with less. They want to adapt faster, but also make sure that they don't, they don't just try to do everything together. And so there's a lot of focus on what do we prioritize? How do we leverage cloud to move faster, you know, and cheaper in terms of our change. >>And also to decide where do we consume and where do we compose? We'll talk a little bit more about that. There are certain things that you don't want to invent yourself. You can consume from cloud providers, whether it's business features, whether it is cloud capabilities. And so it's, there is a shift from adopting cloud just for cost takeout and just for resilience, but also for composability, which means let's consume what I can consume from the cloud and really build those features faster. So squeeze the go to market time, squeeze the time to market and squeeze the price to market, right? So that's the >>Change and really driving those business outcomes. As we talked about Absolut ard, talk to us about how hcl tech and AWS are working together. How are you enabling customers to achieve what an was talking about? >>Oh, absolutely. I mean, our partnership has started almost 10 years back, but over the last one year, we have created what we call as AWS dedicated business unit to look at end to end stock from an AWS perspective. So what we see in the market as a explained is more drive from clients for optimization, driving, app modernization, driving consolidation, looking at the cost, sustainability angles, looking at the IOT angle, manufacturing platforms, the industry adoption. All this is actually igniting the way the industry would look at AWS and as well as the partnership. So from an HCL tech and AWS partnership, we're actually accelerating most of these conversations by building bespoke accelerated industry solutions. So what I mean is, for example, there is an issue with a manufacturing plant and take Covid situation, people can't get into a a manufacturing plant. So how can AWS help put it in the cloud, accelerate those conversations. So we are building those industry specific solutions so that it can be everybody from a manufacturing sector can adopt and actually go to market. As well as you can access all this applications once it is in the cloud from anywhere, any device with a scalable options. That's where our partnership is actually igniting lot of cloud conversations and playing conversations in the market. So we see a lot of traction there. Lisa, on >>That, incredibly important during the last couple of years alone. >>Absolutely. I mean, last couple of years have been groundbreaking, right? Especially with the covid, for example, Amazon Connect, we use, we used Amazon Connect to roll out, you know, call center at the cloud, right? So you don't have to walk into an office, for example. People are working in the banking sector, especially in the trading platform. They were, they were not able to get there. So, but they need to make calls. How do you do the customer service? So Amazon Connect came right at the junction, so call center in the cloud and you can access, dial the number so the customer don't feel the pain of, you know, somebody not answering. It's accessible. That's where the partnership or the HCL tech partnership and AWS comes into play because we bring the scale, the skill set capability with the services of, you know, aws, Amazon, and that forms a concrete story for the client, right? That's one such example. And you know, many such examples are in the market that we are accelerating in the, in the discussions. >>And connect is a good example. Lisa, we were talking earlier about Amazon doubling down on the primitives, but also moving up up market as well, up chain up the value chain. And it needs partners like HCL to be able to go into various industries and apply that effectively. Absolutely. And that's where business transformation comes >>In. Absolutely. Absolutely. I think some of the aspects that we are looking at is, you know, while we do most of this cloud transformation initiatives from an tech perspective, what we are doing is we are encompassing them into a story, which we call it as cloud smart, right? So we are calling it as cloud smart, which is a go-to market offering from Atcl Tech, where the client doesn't have to look at each of these services from various vendors. So it's a one stop shop, right? From strategy consulting, look, implementation, underpinned by app modernization, consolidation, and the operational. So we do that as end to end service with our offerings, which is why helping us actually accelerate conversations on the crowd. What happen is the clients are also building these capabilities more and more often. You see a lot of new services are being added to aws, so not many clients are aware of it. So it is the responsibility of system integrator like us to make them aware and bring it into a shape where the client can consume in a low cost option, in an optimized way. That's where I think it's, it's, it's working out very well for us. With the partnership of, so >>You curate those services that you know will fit the customer's business. You, you know, the ingredients that you could put together, the, the dinner. >>Absolutely. You're preparing a dish, right? So you're preparing a dish, you know where the ingredients are. So the ingredients are supplied by aws. So you need to prepare a pasta dish, right? So you, you how spicy you want to make it howland, you want to make it, you know what source you want to use. How do you bring all those elements together? That's what, you know, tech has been focusing on. >>And you use the word curation, right? Curation is really industry process down, depending on your industry, every industry, every enterprise, there are things that are differentiating them. There's a business processes that differentiate you and there are business processes that don't necessarily differentiate you but are core to you. For example, if you're a retailer, you know, you're retailing, you're merchandising, how you price your products, how you market your products, your supply chains, those differentiate you. How you run your general ledger, your accounting, your payables. HR is core to your business but doesn't differentiate you. And the choices you make in the cloud for each of these areas are different. What differentiates you? You compose what doesn't differentiate you consume because you don't want to try and compose what >>Telco Exactly. Oh my gosh. >>Our biggest examples are in Telco, right? Right. Their omnichannel marketing, you know, how they connect with their consumers, how they do their billing systems, how they do their pricing systems. Those are their differentiations and things that don't they want to consume. And that's where cloud adoption needs to come with really a curation framework. We call it the Phoenix framework, which defines what differentiates you versus not. And based on that, what are the architectural choices you make at the applications layer, the integration layer, the data layer, and the infrastructure layer all from aws and how do you make those choices? >>Talk about a customer example anon that really articulates that value. >>Yeah, I'll give you an example that sort of, everybody can relate to a very large tools company that manufactures tools that we all use at home for, you know, remodeling our houses, building stuff, building furniture. Their business post pandemic dramatically shifted in every way possible. Nobody was going anymore to Home Depot and Lowe's to buy their tools, their online business surge by 200%. Their supply chains were changing because their manufacturers originally were in China and Malaysia. They were shifting a lot of that base to Taiwan and Germany and Latin America. Their pricing model was changing. Their last mile deliveries were changing cuz they were not used to delivering you and me last mile deliveries. So every aspect of their business was changing. They hadn't thought of their business in the same way, but guess what? That business was growing, but the needs were changing and they needed to rethink every value chain in their business. >>And so they had to adopt cloud. They leverage AWS at their core to rethink every part of their business. Rebuilding their supply chain applications, modernizing their warehouse management systems, modernizing their pricing systems, modernizing their sales and marketing platforms, every aspect you can think of and all of that within 24 months. Cuz otherwise they would lose market share, you know, in any given market. And all of this, while they were, you know, delivering their day to day business, they were manufacturing the goods and they were shipping products. So that was quite a lot to achieve in 24 months. And that's not just one example is across industries, examples like that that we have. That's >>One of the best business transformation examples I think I've heard. >>Absolutely. Absolutely. And so cloud does need to start with a business transformation objective. And that's what's happening to the cloud. It's changing away from an infrastructure consolidation discussion to business task. >>Because I know you guys have a theater session tomorrow on, on continuous modern, it was experiencing cloud transformation and continuous modernization. That's the theme. Pre-cloud. It was just a, you'd, you'd live, you'd rip and replace your infrastructure and it was a big application portfolio assessment and rationalization. It was just, it just became this years long, you know, like an SAP installation. Yes. How has cloud changed that and what's, tell us more about that session and that continuous modernization. Yeah, >>So, so we are doing a John session with a client on how HCL Tech helped the client in terms of transforming the landscape and adopting cloud much faster, you know, into the ecosystem. So what we are currently doing is, so it's a continuous process. So when we talk about cloud adoption transformation, it doesn't stop there. So it, it needs to keep evolving. So what we came up with a framework for the all such clients who are on the cloud transformation part need to look at which we call it a smart waste cloud, cloud smart. Where once it is in the clouds, smart waste to cloud for cloud and in the cloud. So what happens is, when it is to cloud, what do you do? What are the accelerators? What are the frameworks? Smart waste for clouds? How do you look at the governance of it? >>Okay? Consolidation activities of it, once it is in the cloud, how do we optimize, what do you look at? Security aspects, et cetera. So the client doesn't have to go to multiple ecosystem partners to look at it. So he is looking at one such service provider who can actually encompass and give all this onto the plate in a much more granular fashion with accelerated approach. So we build accelerated solutions frameworks, which helps the client to actually pick and choose in a much lower cost, I think. And it has to be a continuous modernization for the client. So why we are calling it as a continuous modernization is we are also also creating what we call cloud foundries and factories. What happens is the client can look at not only in a transformation journey, but also futuristic when there are new services are adapted, how this transformation and factories helping them in a lower cost option and driving that a acceleration story. So we are addressing it in multiple ways. One on the transformation front, one on the TCO front, one on the AX accelerated front, one on the operational front. So all this combined into one single framework, which is what is a continuous modernization of clouded option from xgl tech. >>When you apply this framework with customers, how do you deal with technical debt? Can you avoid technical debt? Can you hide technical debt? Or is it like debt and taxes? We're always gonna have technical debt because Amazon, you know, they'll talk about, they don't ever deprecate anything. Yeah. You know, are they gonna, are we gonna see Amazon take on tech? How do you avoid that? Or at least shield the customer for that technical debt. >>So every cio, right? Key ambitions are digital cloud, TCO optimization, sustainability. So we have a framework for that. So every CIO will look at, okay, I wanna spend, but I want to be optimized. My TCO should not go up. So that's where a system integrator like us comes. We have AOP story where, which does the complete financial analysis of your cloud adoption as to what estate and what technical client already has. How can we optimize that and how can we, how can we overlay on top of that our own services to make it much more optimized solution for the client? And there are several frameworks that we have defined for the CIO organizations where the CIO can actually look at some of these elements and adopt it internally within the system. You wanna pick it from there? >>Yeah, I think, I think it's, it's, it's a great question. First of all, there's a generational shift in the last three years where nobody's doing lift and shift of traditional applications or traditional data systems to the cloud. As you said, nobody's taking their technical debt to the cloud anymore. >>Business value's not there. >>There's no business value, right? The value is really being cloud native, which means you want to continuously modernize your value chains, which means your applications, your integration, your data to leverage the cloud and continuously modernize. Now you will still make priority decisions, right? Things that really differentiate you. You will modernize them through composition things that don't, you'll rather consume them, but in both factors, you're modernizing, I use the word surround and drown enterprises are surrounding their traditional, you know, environments and drowning them over a period of time. So over the next five years, you'll see more and more irrelevant legacy because the relevance is being built in the cloud, cloud for the future. That's the way I see it. >>Speaking of, take us out here, speaking of business value and on, we're almost outta time here. If there's a billboard on 1 0 1 in Palo Alto regarding HCL tech, what's the value prop? What does it say? >>It's a simple billboard. We say we are super charging our customers, our partners, our employees. We are super charging progress. And we believe that the strength that we bring from learnings of over 200,000 professionals that work at hcl working with over half of, you know, 500 of the, the largest Fortune thousands in the world is, is really bringing those learnings that we continuously look at every day that we live with, every day across all kind of regulations, all kind of industries, in adopting new technologies, in modernizing their business strategies and achieving their business transformation goals with the velocity they want. That's kind of the supercharging progress mantra, >>Super charging progress. Love it. Guys, thank you so much for joining. David, me on the program talking about, thank you for having a conversation. Our pleasure. What's going on with HCL Tech, aws, the value that you're delivering for customers. Thank you so much for your time. Thank >>You. Thank you. Thanks. Have a great time. >>Take care for our guests. I'm Lisa Martin, he's Dave Valante. 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