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

(upbeat music) >> Live from Barcelona, Spain. It's theCUBE covering Cisco Live Europe, brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here in Barcelona, Spain for Cisco Live Europe 2019. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, with Stu Miniman and Dave Alonte also here doing interviews. Our next guests, two guests from the DNA center platform, Cisco, the agent platform team, Prakash Rajamani, director of product management, Cisco and Ronnie Ray, vice president of product management, Cisco, the DNA center platform growing 70% of the use cases, software distractions, API automation. Congratulations. Great success. Thanks for joining us. >> Thanks John. >> Big Fan of the DNA center. You guys have made great progress. Take a step through us. The positioning, how things are rolling, what's some of the feedback? Where's the DNA center platform at right now for Cisco? >> Yup. >> So DNA center was launched about 80 months back and it's probably one of the products in Cisco that has completely started to transform how we do the selling motions. So this is one of the key drivers of Cisco moving into light sensing mode switch, more software like. Now as part of how we do management Typically and traditionally it has been very much a manual driven process there's some reporting but it is a lot of expert light capabilities that you need to have to do management of the infrastructure then it's kind of moving that access to where you can now do machine-lift management. Of course it doesn't solve all the use cases absolutely as you mentioned, more than 70% but there's a whole host of new capabilities that you have to put on top and that's where developers come in because this is a platform that's built for developers to be able to extend it's capabilities to really look at solving problems for our customers. >> I think you know, after listening to all the announcements in temp based networking, ACI anywhere, hyperflex anywhere, data at the center of the value, data centered as you guys say, it's clever but I think it highlights what you guys are doing because you're talking about programmability of the network as two worlds collide actually three worlds collide, Cloud, On Premises and Edge into one network, you have a network, the network is key it's getting bigger, to cross domains is a big theme here, these are hard problems that are being solved by Cisco more complex cause there's more moving parts but it still has to operate as one network. This is essentially highlights the success of the DNA platform, am I kind of getting it right or is that kind of in line with how you guys see it? >> Sure, I mean I think Cisco DNA centered I mean if you look at the evolution we started in the network domain. You're absolutely right we have kind of extended to the brand change, there's nine integrations that are happening with the data center integrations, happening with the cloud, so yeah absolutely looking at the fabric that we launched about 18 months back now extending and stretching to all of those domains and wherever users connect and wherever users go to and that's of Cisco data center but think about that as we kind of do that, yes there is a change that also required not just in the product but also in the IT process because earlier companies had silos of things and now those silos will be forced to work together and CI was one that our network folks that support us because really they want to see cross domain bring power to the organizations but we are the enabler of making that happen. >> No brainer. >> Prakash, I'd love for you to take us inside ya know, we love looking at the product management piece here because you've had a lot of constituencies. You've got the internal product teams that all I'm sure want to get in and mature and expand their used cases. You've got all your partners that are building the platform. You've got the customers asking for feedback You've got a - ya know, a lot of options to choose from which is a good thing but you've obviously got limited resources. So take us inside that, what you've learned over the last year and how you helped prioritize and move this product forward so fast over the last 18 months. >> So one of the main things we did when we started with Data Center is to start thinking and having the vision to get a data center platform. With that in mind, every feature, every capability that we built in the product was built API first before we built a UI around it. Right? That has helped us immensely in the last couple releases we've started delivering features as APIs even before it had a face to it, and I think that has helped us prioritize and make sure that we are able to meet the demands going demands of customer or partner we had a customer who was like "I need this feature now" and we were hands strapped, we had a big back log, we couldn't get things done but the fact that we were able to get the APIs we were able to work with the customer and say "Hey here you can wire these three APIs and you can get what you're looking for" and he was like "Wow, that's so simple and I'm on my own" he was happy, we are happy we are able to manage our back log better. So I think the main strategy for us that's working is going API first on a pragmatic basis. This is us moving completely software driven as Ronnie was highlighting earlier in that relevant process that is helping us get there and that's part of it >> Well, it's customers a lot I mean they get to roll their own if you will without having be customized, it's still standardized with the APIs >> That's right, right? I mean the benefit is as you start getting into the 30% used case where "Hey, what's coming out of the box is not meeting exactly what I do today" we provide very grander APIs to very business driven, simplified interned APIs. The grander APIs allows the customer who wants to say I want A, B and then D and E to move forward compared to intern based API who is using the pride in the simplicity in driving that formula. >> Yeah, Ronnie I'm wondering if we can up level for a second here cause feedback I've gotten over the last year. Ya know, a year ago we heard Cisco is moving heavily towards software. When I talked to a lot of the partners both technology partners and channel partners they said this had a ripple effect inside Cisco it's not so much okay here's the skews and here's the new boards and here's the products but I need to sell a solution and therefore that's platforms that I have to have and therefore everything needs to work together and I have to think API first and like it does significant changes to how Cisco is, the joke I used to have is Cisco is like 100 companies and some people were like "Well, maybe it's 100, maybe it's 200." But today it's now something like platform is a unifying place, is that what is your solution set part of that drive and is that something you're seeing more broadly inside Cisco? >> Certainly, I think you're absolutely right that is does have a unifying effect if I might put it that way. >> Yeah Right? Because there's so many different capabilities that existed in different tools that are coalescing on Cisco data central and which is becoming part of the platform which is now customizable by our entire development community but think how fast that happens in a now within the sales force, within Cisco as a company there is no more cross domain knowledge that'll be required because now it operates different parts it can tune different things, that also means that is supposed to change the business model because going into software and kind of bringing it together and is increasing Cisco is obviously ya know foyering into softer subscriptions, this is a key product that's kind of supporting that, so in many ways it's not just the technology, it's not just APIs but also as a business process that's changing Cisco just like it'll change customers. >> One of the things we're seeing is a lot of design thinking principles this year. Love the new positioning bridged to the future bridged to tomorrow, wherever it goes but it's clean. Connecting the worlds are connecting together through the network get that. What has been some of the challenges and opportunities you guys are seeing around simplicity? Love this API, exposing API allows for customization, I love the broader intent based templates are great but it's hard to make things simple. Can you just elaborate on how you guys are thinking about the product short, medium, long term in terms of continuing to work the back log, I'm sure the feature list is growing like crazy but you got a challenge to make it simpler. >> Absolutely >> How hard is it? What does it entail? Share some insight there. >> So lets take the question in two parts and Prakash can talk to the product simplicity because that is a certainly something that we've got to manage very very carefully but think about also when simple doesn't just mean usable product, it also means a product that can fit into the ecosystem and make the process simpler. So there's a lot of deeper understanding that we are developing through the learning as we work with customers and how do we embed how do we make customers life easier how do we make the process easier and then after goal is how do we make their operational expenses lower? Because we want them to go faster, we want them to go faster at a lower cost and so there's a certainly both learning and investment that's happening there and the product side Prakash. >> On the product side it's about how we used to build to how we are building right now the way we used to do was a new feature comes in it goes to the device layer first the device team builds it puts CLI around it ships it off, sends it to the management team and the management team says "Oh, I got to support this feature" They go, they wrap a UI around it to support the feature, ships. Now we have flipped it turn completely around we start with like what is a customer's work field? What do they need to do and how can we do it in the minimal steps? Once we identify that we push that down to saying "Here is what the user interface looks like here are the three steps that they need to do. That trickles down to saying what we need as an APA on the device layer to develop the feature so we've gone down from going a bottom up way to build a product to a top down, customer driven, used case driven way to build a product. That means we are addressing the customer head on from a simplicity perspective and that's basically what has made us successful in moving the ball forward on this one. >> What has been some of the customer feedback? Can you share some anecdotes around some of the early customers you started rolling this out and what are the ones receiving on the receiving end today saying? >> So when you see from a simplicity feedback perspective I have a large retail store rolling out like maybe 60 APs in a single store over night and they've gone from having that be done over three nights to one person spending 20 minutes putting all the APs up going to the tool and the tool recognizing everything that's come up and deployed. So it's a night and day transformation on how it used to be to how it is right now. So the simplicity >> Sounds like the old way was >> Sounds like you saved a night in a day >> Manually configure, go put a wireless ping to it >> Yep, the old way was yeah you go you plugged the AP, you come back you look at the tool, the AP is there >> Check the channel, stuff is there. >> Map it to the right controller, do all the mappings Now you don't have to do anything just plug the APs and upload preloaded to say these APs are going to the store. The tool takes care of the rest of the stuff that's how simple it is become >> It's almost like old way new way What why are we doing that? And it's good when they have consistent environments with policies there's definitely more expansion. I get that, what about other used cases? Wireless is one hot one, I could see that branch off it's deployments what are some of the popular used cases that you're seeing in the customer base I know you got a broad base but what are the ones what are the patterns that are emerging out of this? >> So let me start another then have Ronnie chime in on the used cases he's seen. Some of the ones that are probably very transformational is that on the policy based used case, we have companies turning around and creating small subdivisions within their organizations. We have a large government in Yasha who is deploying that, they have 20 divisions. Earlier to do that it's extremely complex. They have to go in, they have to understand what division, who is using on which device, which ports mapped to them, just planning that it says it's so huge. For the new policy different approach that we have going, they don't have to know about anything they just need to know Prakash works for division A, Ronnie works for division B assign me to respective divisions, as I come in my policy gets right over to the network. I deploy the network as is, as I speak that is basically the level of simplicity that has changed and that all ties back to doing your network from a policy perspective not a networking from a feature perspective. >> Got it, Ronnie any comments on used case on your end? >> Yeah absolutely so think about we've talked about assurance we launched segmentation that's doing very very well of course even with when all of the public acknowledgement that goes with it but an interesting used case that's come up which is in fact in the keynote this week at Cisco live is about IUT extensions. So Data seto owa is extending to the factory floor, the production equipment and transportation and these are tremendous neo opportunities that are both for companies to kind of look at IT and OT and how this comes together, again going back to the unification simplification theme that do many more things at the same time they try to make it in a rationally much more operable. >> Okay so lot of progress in 18 months give us the road map going forward. We're at the beginning of 2019 what you'll be looking for, can a high level show show us what we should expect to see down the road >> K so from a road map perspective it's in a think about that we've been very focused on getting the customer value. Now the lens is kind of shifting to how do we deal with large enterprise capabilities? So both the hardening of the system itself, how do we look at, for example multiple clusters opening up in diverse locations will give us geo diversity and support there from that perspective and high availability. So these are enterprise class features every large customer requires it and as they move from smaller deployments to full scale deployments that is something that the labs look to need >> Yeah, Prakash when I heard you talking about things I need to think a little bit differently. It's like okay I'm used to going into the deploy and it's going to take me three days wait how do I learn about the fact that I can do it now in a couple of hours? What kind of training or retraining or education is that part of what you're doing in your team or where does that happen? >> It's part of the education, part of the videos we double up and publish to customers so that they don't think about this as I'm going to approach my same 20 steps and think that I'm going do that through data center except that I'm going to do that through a user interface. The first thing that we tell them is like "You're going to do 20" You're going to do two. Right? So the immediate feedback is oh does it address everything I want to do? And so that's the 70% used case more would rather say yes it addresses only thing is we have simplified it, we have compressed it so you don't have to go and go through all these 20 steps but instead get it done in two, so the watts have helped some of the trainings that you have done has helped even talking to from a sales process the customer to know "Hey this is what I'm embracing" so when they come in they don't come in with I'm going to run my network the same way but no no I'm going to run it differently has helped us immensely to make the transition >> Well guys, congratulations on a great successful product, big fan I love that thing, I think it's going to be the future there's a lot more head room there that's cause we're looking at automations the devnet zone we're in is showing massive growth. The appetite for automation the appetite for configuration and scale and managing the complexity is a sweet spot I think that you guys had a nice formally hear looking forward to it. Final question for these guys Ronnie and Prakash are going to both answer it. Say something about DNA center platform that people should pay attention to that they might not hear in the mainstream chatter that's important that they should maybe want to kick the tires or understand it further, an area that they should know about that they might not hear about or they should know about what's the most important feature. Share some, share some insight. >> So again just looking at a little bit into the future of Cisco data center platform, right now we're kind of talking of APIs, there's capability that's coming in the future that will also deal with work flows and the work flows will be built on something which is machine built so there will be a lot of analytics in fact in a data center not only does automation but also extends data analytics so a lot of cool stuff that'll come there and again we'll talk about it more as we get to the next Cisco live. >> Prakash anything? >> I'm going to go a little more ground level people tend to talk about simplicity, talk about how we can do things way differently with data center and people tend to forget that we have not forgotten the network engineer who has been managing the network. We have APIs for you to do the same things you've done all along, create articles create re-lance, do some of the basic networking stuff so that it's not about this just as simple we also have the more detailed breakdown of the API so that you can still continue to know the nuts and the bolts and other things as well as much as the simple stuff so it's the >> It's an empowering all personas in the network from network engineer low level getting down and dirty to large scale automations, whatever the use case is you got the empowerment. >> Yep that's basically what I would like to >> That's awesome, well congratulations Again big fan, DNA center takeover here in the Devnet zone I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman Cube coverage day two of three days stay with us for more after this short break. (electronic music plays)

>> Narrator: From San Mateo, California, it's theCUBE, covering SnapLogic Innovation Day 2018. Brought to you by SnapLogic. >> Hey, welcome back here, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the crossroads, it's 101 and 92 in San Mateo, California. A lot of popular software companies actually started here, I can always think of the Siebel sign going up and we used to talk about the movement of Silicon Valley from the chips down in the South Bay and Sunnyvale, and intel, really to a lot of software here in the middle of the peninsula. We're excited to be here at SnapLogic's headquarters for Innovation Day, and our next guest is Craig Stewart, he's the VP of product management. Craig, great to see you. >> Thank you very much. Welcome. >> Absolutely So, we're talking about API's, and we go to a lot of tech shows and the API economy is something that's talked about all the time. But really that has evolved for a couple reasons. One, is the proliferation of Cloud services, and the proliferation of applications in the Cloud services. We all know if you go to Google Cloud Next or Amazon re:Invent, the logo slide of absent services available for these things is tremendous. Give us kind of an update, you've been involved in this space for a long time, how its evolving what you guys are are working on here at SnapLogic. >> What we've seen change of late, is that not only is there a requirement for our customers to build API's, but also to then allow those API's to be consumed by their partners and networks out there. As a part of that, they may need to have more management of those API's, then we provide. We're very good at creating API's with inbound and outbound payload, parameters, all of those things, so we can create those data services via our API's, but customers then need to have a requirement now to add some functionality around. What about when I have a thousand users of these, and I need to be able to throttle them and those kinds of things. What we've seen happening is there's been this space of the full lifecycle API management technologies, which have been available for some time, and amongst those we've had Google Apigee kind of being the benchmark of those with the Apigee Edge platform, and in fact what we've done in this latest release is we've provided engineered integration into that Apigee Edge platform so that the API's that we create, we can push those directly into the Apigee Edge platform for them to do the advanced authentication, the monetization, the developer platform around it to develop a portal, all of those kind of things. In addition to that, we've also added the functionality to generate the open API specification, Swagger, as it's known, and to be able to take that Swagger definition to having generated it, we can then actually drop it into the API gateways provided by all of the different Cloud vendors. Whether it's Amazon with their API gateway or the Aggre gateway, all you need to do is then take that generated Swagger definition, and this literally is a right-mouse button, "open" API, and it generates the file for you, from there just drop that into those platforms and now they can be actually managed in those services directly. >> I want to unpack API lifecycle management, cos just for a 101 for people that aren't familiar. We think of API's and we know applications or making calls, and it's, "I'm sending data from this app to that app, "and this is pulling information from that app to this app." That's all pretty straightforward, but what are some of the nuances in lifecycle management of API's that your typical person really hasn't fought through that are A, super important and only increasing in relevance as more and more of these systems are all tied together. >> The use of those API's, some of the things around them that those platforms provide is some advanced authentication. They may be using, wanting to use OWA two-factor authentication, those kind of things. They may want to do some protocol translation. Many customers may know how to consume a SOAP service... generally Legacy, these days-- >> So funny that SOAP is now Legacy (laughs) >> It just cracks me up. I remember, the hottest thing since sliced bread >> Oh yeah! Oh yeah! I still have the Microsoft Internet Explorer four T-shirt-- >> When it was 95 Box too, I'm sure. But that's another conversation for another day. (laughs) >> The management of those API's adding that functionality to do advanced authentication, to do throttling... If you have an API, you don't want all of your back end systems to suddenly be overwhelmed. >> Jeff: Right. Right. >> One of those things that those full lifecycle platforms can do is throttle so that you can say this user may have only 10 requests a minute or something like that, so that stops the back end system being overwhelmed in the event of a spike in usage. That helps with denial of service attacks and those kind of things where you're protecting the core systems. Other things that they can do is the monetization. If you want to atrially expose an API for partners to consume but you want to charge them on that basis, you want to have a way of actually tracking those things to then be able to monetize that and to provide the analytics and the billing on top of it. There's a number of those different aspects that the full lifecycle provides on top of what we provide which is the core API that we're actually creating. >> Right. Is it even feasible to plug an API into a Cloud-based service if your service isn't also Cloud-based cos as you're speaking and talking about spikes, clearly that's one of the huge benefits of Cloud, is that you have the ability to spike whether it's planned or unplanned to massive scale depending on what you're trying to do and to turn that back down. I would imagine (laughs) if your API is going through that platform and you're connecting to another application, and it's Pepsi running a promotion on Superbowl Sunday, hopefully your application is running in a very similar type of infrastructure. >> Absolutely. You do have to plan for that elastic scalability. And that's one of those things with the SnapLogic platform, is it has been built to be able to scale in that way. >> Right. Now there's a lot of conversation too around iPass and integration platforms as a service. How do you see that mapping back to more of a straightforward API integration. >> What we're talking about in terms of API integration here, and the things that we've just recently added, this is the consumption of our API's. The iPass platform that we actually provide consumes API's, all sorts of different API's, whether they're SOAP or REST and different native API's of different applications. That we do out of the box. That is what we are doing, is API integration. >> Right. >> The new functionality that we've introduced is this added capability to then manage those API's from external systems. That's particularly where those external systems go beyond the boundaries of a company's own domain. It's when they need to expose those API's to their partners, to other third parties that are going to want to consume those API's. That's where you need those additional layers of protection. Most customers actually use those API's internally within their organization, and they don't need that extra level of management. >> Right. Right. But I would imagine it's an increasingly important and increasingly common and increasingly prolific that the API integration and the API leverage is less and less inside the building and much much more outside the building. >> It is certainly going a lot more outside the building because customers are recognizing their data is an asset. >> Right. Right. Then having it be a Cloud broker, if you will, just adds a nice integration point that's standardized, has scale, has reliability, versus having all these point-to-point solutions. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> I was going to say, As you look forward, I can't believe we're May 16 of 2018 already (laughs), the years halfway over, but what are you looking forward to next? What's kind of on the roadmap as this API economy continues to evolve, which is then going to increase the demands on those API's integration, those API's in management, as you said the lifecycle of the way all this stuff works together, what's kind of on the roadmap if we talk a year from now, what are we going to be talking about? >> There's a lot of... settling down of what we've delivered that's going to take place, and on top of that, then the capabilities that we can add to add some additional capabilities that the customers want to use, even internally. Because even internally where they're not using a Cloud service, they have requirements to identify who in an organization is utilizing those things. So additional capabilities without having to go beyond the boundaries of the customers own domain. That's going to be some things like authentication, it's going to be some additional... Metrics of what's actually being used in those API's, the metrics on the API's themselves in terms of how are they performing, how frequently are they being called, and in addition to that, what's the response time on those things? So there's additional intelligence that we're going to be providing over and above the creation of the API's that we're looking to do for those customers, particularly inside the organization. >> It's very similar requirements but just different, right, because organizations, take a company like Boeing, or something, is actually not just one company, there's many, many organizations, you have all kinds of now with GDPR coming out, cut of data, privacy and management restrictions, so even if it's inside your four walls, all those measures, all those controls are still very very relevant. >> Very much so. Providing some additional capabilities around that is pretty important for us. >> Alright. Well Craig, you're sitting right on top of the API economy, so I think you'll keep busy for a little while. >> (laughs) That's for sure. >> Thanks for taking a few minutes to stop by. >> Thank you. >> He's Craig Stewart, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE from SnapLogic in San Mateo, California. Thanks for watching. (techno music)

(car engines) >> [Voiceover] Live from Silicon Valley, it's theCube, covering Mobile World Congress 2017. Brought to you by Intel. >> Okay welcome back everyone, we are here live in Palo Alto for the Cube's special coverage of two days of wall to wall coverage of Mobile World Congress 2017, we're doing it here in Palo Alto, covering what's happening in Barcelona, with folks over there, we've got analysts, we've got reporters, and we have friends there phoning in and sharing their commentary, certainly on Twitter as well. And we're doing it from inside our new studio in Palo Alto, and we're going to break it down. As their day ends, we're going to be analyzing and discussing the future implications of what it all means, teasing out the top news, giving our opinion and our commentary in reaction to all the breaking news. I'm John Furrier with Silicon Angle and theCube. I think the next guest is Willie Lu, who is a Facebook friend who I've been having conversations with, it's great to meet in person. He's a wireless guru, going back to his ph.D in the 90s, now chairman of the Palo Alto Research Group. Extensive experience in dealing with fixed wireless, mobile wireless, but more importantly, creating the technologies with industry to understand what's it going to take to invent the future. Willie, great to have you inside the studio. >> Thank you very much, John. >> One of the great things about having the Palo Alto studio is while everyone's out in Barcelona right now having dinner, probably going out for the evening, we get to sit inside the studio and talk about what they did today. So the big story inside Mobile World Congress in Barcelona was obviously, the devices. You're seeing Blackberry making a comeback, Nokia, you know, pumping their new muscles, bringing back the old Nokia Phone, and rolling out their new ones. Huawei, you got bringing in their Apple killer, they want to go up and down the stack. So certainly the device centric jewelry, if you will, the phone, the eye candy, the VR, the AR, the virtual reality. But also 5G. Intel, Qualcomm, Ericsson, Nokia, all the major telcos are rolling out essentially what they are calling 5G and beyond, which is essentially not just wireless, but an end to end network to be the new fabric of wireless. Not only for the devices in the phones, but the devices being the people in the cars. And the factories, and the cities, and the entertainment, this is an area that you have a lot of work in at a technical level. So I went to spend this segment talking about the picture of the future. Right? You know, obviously we need that next step up function of architecture, we need that next network. We need those next devices, that's something that you're thinking a lot about. What's your picture, what's the future look like for you? >> Yeah, thanks John. I'm the wireless mobile system architect for almost 25 to 30 years. So from my point of view, because I'm the technical eyes, from a technical point of view, when you're talking about mobile communications, normally we have three factors we have to trade off, compromise each other, okay? The first is high speed transmission, the second one is mobility, fluid mobility, the third one is capacity. Make sure capacity, right? Make sure the operator make money, right? So, before, previously in the last 20 or 30 years, our phones from the step-by-step, from 2G which is GSM or CDMA, the basic CDMA which is IS-95 to 3G which is WCDMA to the 4G which is OFGMA, including LTE. And these phones basically is still focused on one issues, even mobility issue, even high speed issue, but in the future in the 4G, 5G, 6G whatever, you know we need a very high speed. Very high speed, one giga beyond, over there. We also need a mobility, frame mobility, right? We also make sure able to make money, the operator make money, right? >> That's the number one. >> So how to, we want three, we want mobility, high speed, capacity. We, everything we need. And then single one standard is not going to work, because if you want pick LTE, a very high speed, you lose the mobility. If you pick free mobility, you lose the bandwidth. So the issue, that's the issue. We, 20 years ago, when I do the ph.D and when I was Stanford professor， I was a consulting professor at Stanford, we started the open wireless access, it's means converge a multiple standard together, converge the wifi, LTE, and the broadband wide access together in a same device. So when you have a wifi, you can go to wifi, which is very high speed, can be very very high speed in the future right? And then you go to the highway, where very fast there, you cannot get a wifi, but you can get LTE, or 3G or 2G, that's fine. So that's the research we are working on the open wireless access or open wireless architecture or OWA. And there's, it's the (inaudible) map is from TGMA, CGMA, OFDMA, to OWA. Okay, that's the technical point side. And for the device design side, my picture is for the next five years, ten years, fifteen years, twenty years, which very clear, okay? Before that, in the last 20 years, everybody their mobile phones, is still a carrier-centric mobile phone. Is means when I have a mobile phone, it's AT&T, it's AT&T, it's locked to AT&T or it's AT&T phone, right? And right now, from last year to this year, we are on a very important transition from the carrier-centric phone to a user-centric phone. Yeah probably, couple of company, Google, other company, they are working on the, on the virtualization, mobile virtualization right? Means what? Means a user can pick up different operators on the way, right? So this phone, if I don't have signal, I don't have T-mobile signal, I can using AT&T to get a LTE. And if I don't have AT&T, I can use Verizon. So we are on the way from the carrier-centric to a user-centric at the moment. >> [John] So let's stop right there, 'cus I really think you're onto something really important and I think this is, there's some history to look at. I mean if you look at wireless, I agree, this is a very carrier-centric. And for the consumers out there, you can think of just the basic concepts of most people's experience: I want to unlock my phone, right? These are kind of known terms of consumers, whether they're, it's my kids or adults. "I don't want to be stuck to the carrier" "on their plan." "I want to move my phone around." But that's just on the service. Now you want to decouple it further to the person. So, take a car. I might want to have a relationship with my car, as if I'm, going to be never buying a car, I might use autonomous cars or Uber or other services. And I get into the car and I need personalization. So this is the user-centric thing is that super important point. But now we are stuck, still stuck, in my opinion, in siloed telco stacks, meaning I'm stuck to the carrier, I have limited services, and now I want to shift that to better performance. I mean you can't look any further than hyper convergence or converged infrastructure on the data centers. So where it's networking combining. So are you taking that same approach to say that you think wireless will converge in? Is that the idea? >> Yes, when you wireless converging. Take examples: wifi, LTE, and converge together. So your phone basically is running on wifi. Actually in the priority order, wifi first. Wifi first, and then second is LTE, and then probably 3G is the second one there. So, and then if you have wifi you go wifi, and if car, the car also can be a micro base station, okay, to connect to the wifi, LTE together, and then distribute to the passengers in the car, so this is also we can, for the future, work in mobile office project. I can stay in the car, and the car itself is a sub base station, and then connect each other. There also, okay let's talking about the future picture, okay. In the next five years, okay, there's a couple companies working, already working on the mobile wifi network. So it's means if I am living in Palo Alto there, I'm moving around in my neighborhood in Palo Alto, I don't have, I don't even add AT&T, Verizon operator, I can have a mobile service because I can share all neighbor's wifi networks together as a mobile protocol. Then I can moving, I can hike, I jogging, your house, my house to there. We can share the wifi together, we call. We divide the wifi into the home wifi, and the visitor wifi we can rent the service to outside. So this called community mobile network based on wifi. That's the next five years picture. >> [John] How does that happen? I mean I just found, first of all I believe, and that's a great philosophy. And you're starting to see Xfinity do that with their current wifi, creating a little metro neighborhood network. That's really hard to pull off 'cus of the security concerns. Is it viable in the next five years, do you think that is even doable? What has to happen to make that happen? >> I think this going to be not a major issue because wifi still have a lot of bandwidth, right? And you can exchange bandwidth with security issue there. So wifi is more easy to the security than LTE, because LTE for the similar network, the spectrum is very expensive right? So that's why we cannot using a lot of overheads for security. So I always say, the most secure is wifi, then LTE. 'Cus LTE, the data, right? When you open it, there's not much overhead available for secure encryption, whatever there. So wifi you can, >> [John] So they're maximizing their signal for performance, not security. >> Yeah, not security. And wifi you can take like 40%, 30% the overhead load for the security and it's very secure. So that's not issue, that's why. That's the five, next five moment. Okay and then beyond that, when the mobile wifi neighborhood is built, right? Then we back to the traditional settled operator networks there. We'll converge together, then user for the next ten years, after ten years, user can pick up his preferred operators as he like. For example, if I'm in Palo Alto and then AT&T give me a good package, right? They give an offer, and I click my AT&T, it's go to AT&T. And I back to the Cupertino and Cupertino, >> [John] It's like network hopping. >> Yeah. >> It's like not radio hop, frequency hopping, it's network hopping. >> That's an idea, right right right. But still you need a converging network info together. >> So let's take it back to Mobile World Congress. So right now the current present is, that they're painting the picture of a 5G world where autonomous vehicles, entertainment, smart cities, and smart home are all being powered by an end-to-end, from the network to the edge, software and capabilities, from silicon software to device. >> Yes. >> So that's cool, makes a lot of sense. Now is 5G truly the enabler, that 5, 6 G is the wireless enabler for this in your view? In your picture of the future, what role does wireless play in creating this new fabric? >> Yeah, I think it's very much possible because when I say when we converge the different wireless solutions together then you have more space to focus on one direction, you focus on very high speed. We can one giga, two giga, even ten giga is enough right? And the other side, we increase the mobility issue, right? And then the other side we converge on the operator side. In the future, I mean AT&T, Verizon, it's not, they're not going to just provide the cellular mobile access only, they want to provide more service around its 5G, 6G, be new business model right? For traditional business model, you just provide the radio, the hand phone access. But in future, this operator is going to help provide more service, service-oriented platform. >> Is that consistent, that service business model, is that viable in your vision of the future. What is, or let me ask differently. What is the business model for the operator, in your vision of this multi-network world? What do they do, what kind of services are they delivering? >> I think in the future, very important service, around the ten years, around the time frame, is very important service is called mobile virtualization service. So in the future, Google can run mobile service, but they're working with AT&T and Verizon. >> [John] It's like MVL on steroids, basically, it's all doing pipe management. >> Yeah and then let's say for example, Google did a contract with AT&T for how much bandwidth every year, probably one P, or a large bandwidth. And then AT&T provides its bandwidth to Google, right? And then AT&T can do other service also, so AT&T save a lot of cost in the individual marketing. You know, right now the operator spend a lot of money for the marketing, right? But later they can cut off this cost, because Google can do marketing, right? >> [John] So it's, this is economic reconfiguration. >> [Willie] Yes. >> Okay, so here's the next question. In today's landscape of the marketplace, what would be bad behavior from your standpoint, that would screw up that future? What would be the signs that it's not going the right way in the ecosystem, because part of the things that I'm seeing with things like Intel and the big players is there's an ecosystem that needs to get agreement; That to accelerate the future, there has to be a new model, a new network. What are some signs that are warning signs for you? You know, people holding onto a certain thing, certain technology. What would be a red flag for you, if you look at the marketplace, what kind of activities would say "woah, that's not good." >> Okay, I think it depends on, for the operator, I think it's not good, in the future it's not good, you just focus on making money from the access size. Because in the future, access will be cheaper, cheaper, cheaper, cheaper. So if AT&T just focus on access revenue, it's going to red flag, okay? So you have to provide total solution, right? And from the vendor side, you cannot support one single standards. You only support LTE, it's going to dangerous. So you have to be open. So in the future, I think in the future, from my personal point of view, Comcast, AT&T, all these company, they are going to merge together. Because they want provide a converged solution, right? So in the future access will be cheaper, cheaper, cheaper, cheaper. And then you have to, they have another revenues from the other sides. >> [John] I wrote a paper in 2001 called "Broadband Starvation". And it was the beginning before wifi really hit, and then wifi hit and New York Times picked it up, was one of those stories. But we talked about the starvation from America for more bandwidth. Obviously even outside the US, you saw accelerated bandwidth, broadband penetration. I called it the "Broadband Starvation" because broadband starvation was in rural areas, so it always was limited by the actual physical connection. You know, the cable, the last mile. We all know the history of the policy side of the Arbox and the days of you know, the telephone companies. But now Comcast and now AT&T (laugh), they're the fiber to the home, there's some, or the coaxial to the home. They bring in, off the street and terminate it into the house. Wireless changes that. Is that a scenario where you see 5G going where ultimately, this notion of fiber to the home could be you know, ancient history? Or, 'cus that always, there's still construction. You got to still trench, you still got provisions, and the circuits to the homes. You know, is wireless an opportunity there? And will that free up more competition? >> Yeah, I think that's a big question, and a big picture, okay. I think from my personal experience, when we design technology for next 10 years, 15 years, the very big picture you think about is very important is: we're on the way to transition, to transition from the mobile communication to a personal communication. So previously, the mobile communication >> Personal communication, you mean people-centric? >> Yeah, people-centric. So mobile communication, previously we call mobile communication is a telecom term. Is means just for connection, just for envisioning connection, right? But in future >> [John] Endpoint, that's it. >> Yeah that's right. So we're on the way. Even at some universities, they change the course from mobile communication to personal communication. Personal communication means is: everything is personal. Personal-centric, right? So in a personal-centric, so in the future, the operator, the vendor, the provider think about, in the future, you're not only provider, information connection only, you provide anything a person needed for his life, including health, security, right? Everything there. >> [John] Transportation. >> Transportation, yeah. >> [John] Could be all digital services. >> The transportation, security. >> healthcare. >> And everything there and then each application will need a different requirements of the bandwidth, right? Especially for the health, we need lots of lots of video transmission, right? And this is going to, that's why we need a WLAN, a wireless network, is converging together. And then wireless is still a lots, lots of way we have to invent. >> The word "convergence" is back again, it's happening everywhere. Willie, thanks so much for the commentary. Love this, this is consistent with, Wikibonds had a research, siliconANGLE had a research, Peter Burris who was on our opening segment talking about not IOT, only IOT, internet of things, but IOT and P, people. Internet of People. >> [Willie] Yes, and think about IOT, okay? What's the major technologies inside the IOT? One is sensing technology, okay? The other one is wireless connection, right? You want to connect to that billion billion nodes together, so we need a multidimensional, different wireless technology. How to connect this billion billion nodes together? That's also we need wireless technology. >> I worry about that not happening because I think the telcos have been slow, and I think I'm seeing movement now with the telcos, that now is the time to make their move. NFV's viable, and now their business model is somewhat emerging. The question is, will they be fast enough to move? That's the question. >> Yeah, I think. >> Are they? >> That's also my question, because the moving, the virtualization like from Google, they're moving very fast than a traditional telco, right? So telco have to change their way of thinking in the business, right? >> I think Google should be the telco, take over the telco. >> That's why in the the next five, ten years, people just go to Google, using Google account to get access to the phone, to the mobile phone. You get a phone number from Google, right? >> They're going to call it Apple World Congress, or Google World Congress. Uber World Congress, if we don't. >> But anyway, we still need everybody work together. It's like different wireless standards converge together. And different company they also want to converge together. And then eventually, the target is very simple. It's the personal, it's the personal centric, user centric, the wireless world. That's the future. >> [John] Willie Lu here from Palo Alto Research. In here Palo Alto, a good Facebook friend guru in the wireless area all the way down from back in his ph.D days, as a practitioner and inventing the future. Great vision, I agree with it 100%. I think Intel and all the big players would agree. The ecosystem of smart movement right now is critical, and I think there's a huge opportunity to, to tie it all together there in IOT and people, a people-centric world. Congratulations on your work at the Wireless Mobile Congress that you started, and also the open, this open alliance, open wireless alliance. Congratulations. Willie Lu here inside theCube, I'm John Furrier, for more exclusive coverage of Mobile World Congress here in Palo Alto after the short break. (electronic music) (cheerful electronic music)