>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC, and it's ecosystem partners. >> And welcome back to Las Vegas, as thCUBE continues our coverage here of Dell Technologies World 2018. So glad to have you along here for our Day Three coverage. Along with Stu Miniman, I'm John Walls. It's now a pleasure to welcome David Comroe with us. David is the Senior Director of Client Technology Services at the Wharton School of Business, at the University of Pennsylvania. David, thanks for being with us. >> No problem. Glad to be here. >> Thank for sharing your time with us. First off let's just talk about, about the scope of your work. Again, you take care of all the obviously IT needs for the largest business school faculty in the world. Right? No pressure on you there. But talk about day to day, those responsibilities. >> As you mentioned my title is Senior Director for Client Technology Services. I'm essentially responsible for providing the support and services to four very distinct user groups that we happen to have at a university. That's of course our wonderful faculty, our staff that make everything happen, our incredible students, and of course our alumni group, which is about 100,000 people strong at this point. Just Wharton alums that are again, very important. Give back to the school. Provide mentorship and job opportunities for our graduates. Again very distinct needs for each of those four groups. We provide a high quality, and all the buzzwords. You know, secure, safe, efficient, highly available services to these groups. That's kind of what I do all day. >> One of the cool things, I love acronyms. Not that this industry doesn't have a few, as you know Stu. But WHOOPPEE. I absolutely love making whoopie. But not what you might think. But walk us through that and what it stands for, and what you did in it. It really was groundbreaking. >> You're putting me on the spot with this one. So WHOOPPEE is the Wharton, let's see if I can get this, Online Ordinal Peer Performance Evaluation Engine. One of our incredible faculty, Pete Fader, came up with this idea. It's no secret that grading is kind of bad. Faculty grading students. There's all kinds of challenges. >> It's tedious. >> Well it's tedious. There's inherit biases when you're, the larger the class. And when you have to grade 80 papers, or 100 papers or 200 papers. It's really hard to keep consistency across when your grading paper one through paper 100 through paper 200. Plus when you start divvying up the work between TA's and different faculty teaching the same class. Again fraught with bias. A number of people, again Pet Fader's idea, to come up with basically an algorithm that helps the grading process. And basically what happens is, is students are grading themselves. What we'll do is we'll give them five papers or five projects to grade. And they don't actually grade. All they have to do is rank it. You know, this is the best one. This is number one. This is the worst one. This is number five. And then there's this magic behind the scenes that that runs in our local infrastructure, in our cloud infrastructure. That basically runs an algorithm. And that algorithm is the secret sauce that some of our statistical geniuses at the Wharton school, of which we have many, came up with. And it has all kinds of cool features. You can say, well this batch of five papers might be harder. I might have the five best papers in the class. That's not fair. They still have to rank one the worst. You know, five. You can't say these two are the best. And this one's third. You actually, the students have to read the paper, and just rank it. I like this one the best. I like second, third, fourth, fifth. The algorithm takes into account difficulty of batches of papers. You could literally have the five best or the five worst papers in the class. And that's still going to provide meaningful data to the algorithm. So when you have 50, 100, 500 batches of five. They all start to figure it out. And the algorithm will actually figure out what the best paper is in the class. And what the maybe again at the Wharton. But not so great, greatest paper in the class. >> But not the worst. Just not so great. Again cause our students are brilliant. It basically goes on the fact that if you do a quality paper. If the algorithm says you're the best. Your weight means more than someone who might not have done such a good job on the paper. And you're considered a better grader. And it's weighted towards the better graders. There's all kinds of really cool stuff in there that we think is going to change... Get rid of some of that bias that I spoke about before. And help provide. And the data we've seen is, frankly the students like doing it. They don't like the additional work involved with it. We're seeing some empirical evidence, and some in person interviews. That they're learning more. They're reading five other student's papers. They're getting five other perspectives. They're saying, hey I didn't think about that. Or even, hey they're all wrong here. My paper was much better than theirs. But again that doesn't necessarily matter when we start running the ranks. And we're getting much better, much better grading, which is hard to quantify, but the folks that are on the academic team that are doing that, have some really great data. With the data. Yup, mm-hm. >> David, one of the themes we keep hearing in this show is about transformation. Is change happening? You're talking about IT, how it's working with the business more and more. Bring us inside university life in general and specifically. You work with one of the ancient eight. How does cutting edge technology fit in with - >> That's really interesting. I do have a couple thoughts on that. My boss has a picture in his office, of a Penn classroom from I think it's like 1908 or 1910. And there's literally a bunch of students sitting around. There's a faculty member standing up. And there's a candle-powered projector, which I didn't know is a thing but it's in the picture, projecting an image onto the wall. From over 100 years ago. What's different about our classrooms today? Everything's the same, except the projector's now in LED. Or a L3D projector. We still got people sitting around the room, standing up. I think what we're seeing now in probably the previous ten years from now and to the next ten years is education's probably going to change more in those 20 years than it has in 2,000 years since Socrates was standing around with a stone tablet or whatever they were doing. Things like globalization, online courses, the MOOC space, where Wharton is huge in the MOOC space. Wharton online programs. Where students can take, not even students, anybody! If you're in China or Africa or South America. You can take an introduction to Wharton, introduction to marketing class from a Wharton professor for free. I mean we're a business school. We sell some of that content as well. But you can get verified certificates. We're seeing a lot of stuff change. The students today expect more. We can get into, we won't though, we can get into the whole millennial issue and short attention span and all that kind of stuff. Students today expect their faculty to be technology savvy. They expect content to be online. They expect to use devices. The expect to use... We got tablets, and laptops and phones. They want to be able to consume this content on multiple devices. We're seeing significant transformations in education. Which is, hasn't necessarily changed much in 2,000 years. Or even 200 years, right? So there's that. Speaking specifically about Wharton, one of the things I really thought is interesting, is I've been there 13 years now. When I first started working there, I'm going to make some generalizations here, a lot of our student wanted to go work in iBanking. They wanted to go work for the big banks. They wanted to go work for Goldman Sachs and things like that. In the last five, seven, ten years ago. They wanted to create their own company. Start up their own company. Be entrepreneurial. Have their app. Have their their big idea. Start the next whatever dot com. And be successful that way. Now in the last two or three, four years. We're seeing a lot of our students analytics. We're putting analytics with everything. Companies, businesses, organizations, no matter what you are, we have huge amounts of data available. How can we make meaningful decisions based on that data? Our dean. I guess I can't call him our new dean. He's been there three or four years at this point. Really wants to position Wharton as the analytics school. Every company in the world is trying to hire these kinds of people. There just frankly aren't enough of them out there. The thing we're trying to teach our students is, or one of the many things, is how to analyze data. How to make meaningful decisions based on that data. And of course when you have more data, you need more storage. You need more infrastructure. You need more processing. All the stuff that you know, Dell and Nutanix are providing us, with their hyper convergence infrastructure. Their cloud offerings. Whether private cloud, public cloud, hybrid cloud. All that kind of stuff is... Positioning us as the analytics school requires a significant amount of technology on the backend. And again working with our trusted partners like Dell and Nutanix we can provide that seamlessly in the backend. They don't necessarily know, is it in our data center? Is it in the cloud? And they don't care. They shouldn't care. But as they're collecting huge amounts of data, running these reports, and creating it, and going back to creating these algorithms that do incredible things. And these secret sauces. We need the infrastructure to run that kind of stuff. That's I think one of the greatest things that Wharton Computing provides the Wharton School of Business, and their business, which is creating and disseminating knowledge. >> David, I think you've encapsulated something that I've been hearing from lot's of users over the last year or so. The vendors sometimes, it's private, it's hybrid, it's public. From the user standpoint it's like, no well we have a cloud strategy that we're working on. Can you bring us inside a little bit? How did you get to where you are today? How do you choose who you're partnering with? What leads to some of those decisions? >> I love the word partner. I hate the word vendor. One of the great things about working at Wharton is, is we get to have these awesome partners. I want someone... When we're going to make an IT spend, we want someone who cares about our business. We don't want somebody who just, will come in, give you a dog and pony show, write us a check. And when you want more stuff call us. We want folks that are going to provide the support. You know, pre-sales during installation. Post-sales when they're coming out with new features. We want them to be invested in what we do. I can truly say that Nutanix is a fantastic partner of ours. Dell-Nutanix are great partners. Dell is a great partner of Wharton and Penn as well. That's what we really look for, is someone who is willing to invest their time, their smart people. Tell us about the new features and functionality that are coming out. Call on us and say, hey how are thing going? It's not just the little things. But those little things really mean a lot to us as we're picking an IT partner. Because when you're working for the best business school in the world. Having the best students, the brightest faculty, the best, hardest working staff. We want to provide them a very, very high quality IT support. We need high quality partners. And not just vendors who care about the transaction. That's really the bottom line for us. When we're choosing our partners. >> When you were talking about analytics, and Wharton being the school of data analytics. What are your measuring sticks? In terms of what are you looking at? You're talking about four very separate groups of constituencies. What are you doing to evaluate your performance? And what's critical? >> I think it all comes down to, what do our business units think about us? We're a service organization. Almost all IT shops are. If the business units aren't successful, they don't need an IT department. If we're not providing them high quality IT services, we're not going to get the best faculty. We're not going to get the brightest students. We're not going to get the alumni engagement. They want to be wowed by their IT support. That's a big part of my job, is providing that quality of support. Helping train. Technology breaks, right? How do you deal with the problem? Nobody runs at rock solid 100% infrastructure. Murphy's Law always comes into play. Problems always happen. How do you deal with the cracks in the armor as they come off? I think that's what our business units want. I think we're fortunate that we're computing. Our team, our staff, our CIO. My colleagues, my peers, my team. Our team, right? They're very well thought of, hopefully, by our clients. And that's how we're measured is by their success. We want to help them, empower them to do their job at the highest level. We are playing in pretty rare air, when it comes to the faculty, staff, students and alumni, that we attract to Penn and Wharton. We want to keep doing that. One of the things I love best, and I tell our wonderful faculty when we meet with them, is don't tell me we did a great job. Here's what I want you to tell me. I want you to say, three years ago I was at, I'm not going to name drop schools, but I was at this school and I asked them to do this thing, that you said, sure, no problem to. And they couldn't do it, wouldn't do it, didn't have the ability, the infrastructure in place to do that. But you guys with a smile on your face just made it happen. Stuff like WHOOPPEE. Stuff like the analytics stuff. All the, tying it back to why we're here today, is our partners and our technology partners that help us provide scalable, flexible solutions. That's how we're measured. >> Higher learning. >> Higher learning, absolutely. >> David, thanks for being with us. >> No problem, it was great. >> David Comroe from the Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania. Back with more live coverage here from Dell Technologies World 2018. Right after this break. You're watching theCUBE.

>>I'm really glad to have you with us today, john, I know you stepped out of vacation so thanks very much for joining us. >>No, it's great to be joining you from Hawaii and I love the partnership with H. P. E. And the way you're reinventing an industry, >>well, you've always excelled john at catching market transitions and there are so many transitions and paradigm shifts happening in the market and text specifically right now as you see, companies rush to accelerate their transformation. What do you see as the keys to success? >>Well, I, I think you're seeing actually an acceleration following the covid challenges that always faced and I wasn't sure that would happen. It's, it's probably at three times the paces before. There was a discussion point about how quickly the companies need to go digital. Uh, that's no longer discussion point. Almost all companies are moving with tremendous speed on digital and its ability as the cloud moves to the edge with compute and security uh, at the edge and how you deliver these services to where the majority of applications uh reside are going to determine. I think the future of the next generation company leadership and it's the area that Neil we're working together on in many, many ways. So I think it's about innovation. It's about the cloud moving to the edge and an architectural play with silicon to speed up that innovation. >>Yes, we certainly see the our customers of all sizes trying to accelerate what's next and get that digital transformation moving even faster as a result of the environment the world living in. And we're finding that workload focus is really key customers and all kinds of different scales are having to adapt and support the remote workforces with beady eye. And as you say, john they're having to deal with the deployment of workloads at the edge, with so much data getting generated at the edge and being acted upon on the edge. The analytics and the infrastructure to manage that as these processes get digitized and automated is so important for so many workflows. We really believe that the choice of infrastructure partner that underpins those transformations really matters. A partner that can help create the financial capacity that can help optimize your environments and enable our customers to focus on supporting their business are all super key to success. And you mentioned that in the last year there's been a lot of rapid course correction for all of us, a demand for velocity and the ability to deployed resources. That scale is more and more needed, maybe more than ever. What are you hearing customers looking for as they are rolling out their digital transformation efforts? >>Well, I think they're being realistic that they're going to have to move a lot faster than before and they're also realistic on core versus context. Their their their core capability is not the technology themselves, it's how to deploy it and there were looking for partners that can help bring them there together, but there can also innovate. And very often the leaders who might have been a leader in a prior generation may not be on this next move. Hence the opportunity for HP and startups like Monsanto to work together as the cloud moves to the edge and perhaps really balanced or even challenge some of the big, big incumbents in this category as well as partners uniquely with our joint customers on how do we achieve their business goals? Tell me a little bit more about how you move from this being a technology position in for a J e to literally helping your customers achieve their outcomes they want and and how are you changing hb in that way? >>Well, I think when you consider these transformations the infrastructure that you choose to underpin, it is incredibly critical. Our customers need a software defined management plane that enables them to automate so much of their infrastructure. They need to be able to take faster action where the data is and to do all of this in a cloud like experience where they can deliver their infrastructure as code anywhere from exa scale through the enterprise data center to the edge. And really critically, they have to be able to do this securely, which becomes an ever increasing challenge and doing it at the right economics relative to the alternatives. And part of the right economics, of course includes adopting the best practices from web scale architectures and bringing them to the heart of the enterprise. And in our partnership with Pensando, we're working to enable these new ideas of Web scale architecture and fleet management for the enterprise at scale. >>You know, what is fun is HP has an unusual talent from the very beginning Silicon Valley of working together with others and creating a win win innovation approach. If you watch what your team has been able to do. And I want to say this for everybody listening, you work with startups better than any other company I've seen in terms of how you do win win together and pennsylvania is just the example of that. Uh this startup, which by the way, is the ninth time I have done with this team, a new generation of products and we're designing that together with H. P. E. In terms of as the cloud moves to the edge, how do we get the leverage out of that and produce results for your customers on this? Uh, to give the audience appeal for it. You're talking with Manzano alone in terms of the efficiency versus an amazon amazon web services of an order of magnitude. I'm not talking 100% grader, I'm talking 10 X grader and things went through, Put number of connections, you do the jitter capability, etcetera. And it talks how to companies uniquely who believe in innovation and trust with each other and have very similar cultures can work uniquely together on it. How do you bring that to life with an H. B? How do you get your company to really say that's harvest the advantages of your ecosystem in your advantages of startups? >>Well, you say more and more companies are faced with these challenges of hitting the right economics for the infrastructure. And we see many enterprises of various sizes trying to come to terms with infrastructures that look a lot more like a service provider that require that software defined management plane and the automation to deploy at scale. And with the world we're doing with Pensando, the benefits that we bring in terms of the observe ability and the telemetry and the encryption and the distributed network functions. But also a security architecture that enables that efficiency on the individual nodes is just so key to building a competitive architecture moving forwards for an on prem private cloud or internal service provider operation. And we're really excited about the work we've done to bring that technology across our portfolio and bring that to our customers so that they can achieve those kind of economics and capabilities and go focus on their own transformations rather than building and running the infrastructure themselves. Artisanal e and having to deal with integrating all of that great technology themselves >>makes tremendous sense. You know, Neil you and I work on a board together etcetera. I've watched your summarization skills and I always like to ask a question after you do a quick summary like this, what are the three or four takeaways we would like for the audience to get out of our conversation? >>Well, that's a great question. Thanks john we believe that customers need a trusted partner to work through these digital transformations that are facing them and confront the challenge of the time that the covid crisis has taken away. As you set out front, every organizations having to transform and transform more quickly and more digitally. I'm working with a trusted partner with the expertise that only comes from decades of experience is a key enabler for that, a partner with the ability to create the financial capacity to transform the workload expertise to get more from the infrastructure and optimize the environment so that you can focus on your own business, a partner that can deliver the systems and the security and the automation that makes it easily deployable and manageable anywhere you need them at any scale, whether the edge, the enterprise data center or all the way up to exa scale in high performance computing and can do that all as a service as we can at H P E through H PE Green Lake enabling our customers most critical workloads. It's critical that all of that is underpinned by an A I powered, digitally enabled service experience so that our customers can get on with their transformation and running their business instead of dealing with their infrastructure. And really only H PE can provide this combination of capabilities and we're excited and committed to helping our customers accelerate what's next for their businesses >>Neil. It's fun. I love being your partner and your wingman or values and cultures are so similar. Thanks for letting me be a part of this discussion today. >>Thanks for being with us, john, it was great avenue here. >>Oh, his friends were like.

(bright music) >> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS Global Partner Network. >> Okay, welcome back everyone to theCUBE Virtual Experience here for re:Invent coverage 2020 virtual. Normally we're in person doing interviews face to face, but we're remote this year because of the pandemic. We're here for the APN partner experience, kickoff coverage with two great guests, Rima Olinger, of global lead for VMware cloud on AWS. And Aarthi Raju, Senior Manager Solutions Architecture for Amazon Web Services. Thanks for coming on, appreciate it. >> Good to be with you John, thank you. >> So I got, want to get it out there this partner network experience, it's really about the ecosystem. And VMware has been one of the biggest success stories. They've been around for a long time, and not one of the earliest ecosystem partners, but a big success. 2016, when that announcement happened, a lot of people were like, whoa, we VMware is giving into Amazon. And Amazon was like, no, that's not how it works. So turns out everyone was been proven wrong, it's been hugely successful beneficial to both. What's the momentum, share an update this year on the AWS VMware momentum. >> So John, as you know, we're into our third anniversary, and the relationship cannot be any stronger. We see customers are leaning into the service very heavily. We see great adoption across multiple industries. As some data points for you, if we look at October of this year to October prior year, we're seeing the number of active nodes, or the number of consuming host and active VMS, nearly doubled year over year. we also continue to see greater partner interest in the solution, we have over 300 ISVs that have validated the services on VMC. And we see over 600 plus partners that continue to take the competencies and build practices around it. So the momentum is very strong, for years still today. >> One of the comments I made when the naysayers were like kind of pooh-poohing the deal, I was like, no, no, the cloud growth is going to be a factor at that time, then, the trendy thing was software's eating the world, was a big trend there. If you look at the growth of cloud scale, and software innovation, and the operating side of it, 'cause VMware runs IT, they let operators running IT. There's no conflict because Amazon's growing and now the operator roles growing and changing. So you have two dynamics going on. I think this is a really nuanced point for the VMware, AWS relationship around, how they both fit together. Because it's a win win better together scenario, and it is on AWS, which is a distinction. Can you guys share your reaction to kind of that dynamic of operating software at scale, and how this translates for customers? >> Absolutely, we see a lot of benefits that this service is bringing to the customers. Because what it's doing is providing them with this consistent infrastructure and operations across hybrid cloud environments. And in this way, they have the choice of where to place their applications on-prem or in the cloud, specifically. And this is one of the reasons why AWS is a VMware's preferred cloud provider for all vSphere workloads. We see the customers gravitate towards it and be receptive to it specifically because they say I accelerate my path towards migrating and modernizing my application. It provides me with consistent as I mentioned, operations and infrastructure. And it also helps them with factoring, and helps us scale their business and very fast, very seamless fashion. Aarthi what is your perspective, maybe additional things. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, from a technical innovation perspective, the momentum, John has been very strong, especially, listening to what customers have been asking us the past couple of years. 2020 has been a big year for us in terms of launching some giant innovations. A couple of things to call out is, we launched the VMware Transit Connect. This was announced during VMworld this year and customers have been telling us, hey, we are migrating workloads from on premises to the cloud, we need a simplified way of connecting all these resources on-prem resources, resources on VMware cloud on AWS, and their AWS native resources as well. So, the VMware Transit Connect, uses the AWS transit gateway that we launched at re:Invent two years back to provide that simplified connectivity model for our customers. The next big thing this year was, we introduced a new instance type i3en.metal, So customers have been telling us they want denser nodes for especially storage heavy workload. So we launched this i3en, that comes with approximately, like 45 terabytes of storage per node. So that's a lot of storage for individual nodes. So customers have been taking advantage of these dense nodes as well. There was other areas that we kind of focused on from a lower entry point for our customers. When we initially started the service, John, you know that we had, the minimum entry point as four nodes, we've scaled that down to three, and now we've come to two nodes, giving the same production SLA for customers. The other big launch this year was the acquisition of Datrium by VMware and how we introduce the VMware cloud disaster recovery. Datrium uses the eight native AWS services like S3 and EC2, providing customers this low cost TR options. We're talking about the APN here and for partners, we launched the VMware cloud Director Service, which delivers multi-tenancy to our managed service providers, so that they can cater to small, to medium sized enterprises. >> What are some of the other use cases that are the key in these migrations, because this becomes a big benefit we're hearing, certainly, during the partner day, here at re:Invent, is, migration, cloud SaaSification, getting to a SaaS, but not losing the business model. Either was on premises or born in the cloud, this done new operating models, the key thing, what are some of the key use cases for partners? >> The most widely adopted use case that John, which you rightfully touched on, is really the cloud migration. We see around 41% of customers use the service just for cloud migrations. Now, this could be an application migration, like SAP, SQL server or Oracle Applications, or it could be a complete data center evacuation. And we see that with some customers who have a cloud mandate, or they have refresh cycles that are coming up, or maybe they're in a colo, and they're not happy with their SLA. I could use the example of William Hill, is one of the customers largest betting and gaming companies that are in the UK. And what's the use case was, a combination of a data center extension as well as a capacity expansion specifically. And what William Hill was able to do is, move 800 on-premise servers, and they decommission them in the first 12 months. And they also migrated 3000 VM. So that is cloud migrations is a big use case. The second big use case, as I mentioned earlier, is the data center extension that includes also VDI, the combination of both is around 42% of the use cases, with around 26%, I would say for data center extension and 16% for VDI. Why, customers want to expand their footprint, they want to go to a new region, and they want to meet on demand, cyclical capacity needs, or sometimes temporary needs for some events or some seasonal spikes. So we see that as a second big use case. A third one equally important, tend to be disaster recovery. Now, this is either to augment an existing DR. Replace a DR that is already in place, or start a new DR, and that constitutes around 17% of the use cases that we see. Because customers want to reduce their DR, avert some cost by moving to the cloud. And one example that comes to mind is Pennsylvania Lumbers Men's Mutual Insurance, it was a DR use Case. They worked with an external storage partner of ours faction in order to put that in place. So overall a great use cases across the board. And I know a big one is application modernization, Aarthi, I know you work with your teams on that, if there's any feedback from you on that. >> Yeah, the next generation applications or application modernization comes a lot. We talk to like AWS customers who are migrating from on-premises to the cloud using VMware cloud on AWS. And three or four years back as we were building the service and architecting, one thing was very evident, like we wanted to make sure that as we were building the service, we wanted to ensure that customers can take advantage of the native AWS services. We've got 175 plus services and new services launching at re:Invent, So we wanted to make sure that there is this, seamless mechanism and seamless path for customers to modernize using native AWS services. So what we've done as part of like onboarding for customers and as customers built on VMware cloud on AWS, is provide them both the network path and data path. So they can as your into the same availability zone or region, they're like, hey, I can use S3 for backups. I can use EFS, for file shares, etcetera. So we're seeing a wide range of next generation application use cases that customers are building on. >> Why would I get at the reasons why customers are continuing to adopt VMware cloud on AWS? Can you guys share an update, I'll show you the obvious reasons, the beginning was nice strategy for VMware, it's proven to be clear. But where's the innovation coming from? What's the key drivers for the adoption of VMware cloud on AWS? >> So one of the key patterns that we are seeing is, customers who used to be risk averse, customers will be invested a lot in VMware. And at the point, they did not want to move their workloads or applications to the cloud because of the risk involved, or sometimes they didn't want to refactor, or they were worried about the investment in tools, resources, they tend to gravitate towards this solution. The fact that you could provide your customers with this consistent infrastructure and operations across on premise, as well as on the cloud environment. The fact that you do not need to do an application refactoring. You could optimize your workload placement, based on your business needs, you could move your workloads bidirectionally, you could either leave it on-prem, or move it to the cloud, and vice versa. We've also noticed that there is a lower TCO associated with the use of the service. We know from a study that VMware commissioned Forrester in 2019, for that study, that 59%, there is a recurring savings in terms of infrastructure, and operational savings that is related to that. Customers tell us that, this consistency in infrastructure is translating it, into zero refactoring. This consistency in operations, is leading them to use their existing skill sets. And with the ability to relocate the workload skill into the environment that best suits them, that is providing customers with maximum flexibility. So I would say it is delivering on the promise of accelerating the migration and the modernization of our customers applications so that they can continue to respond to their business needs and continue to be competitive in the marketplace. >> Aarthi I want you to weigh in and get reaction to that. Because again, I've talked publicly and also privately with Ragu, for instance, at VMware, when this was all going down. It's a joint integration, so there's a lot of things going on under the hood that are important, what are the most important things that people should pay attention to around this partnership? Could you share your opinion? >> Yeah, sure, John. So one of the most common questions that we get from customers is, hey, this is giant integration, we can take use of make use of native AWS services, but what are some of the use cases that we should be targeting, right? As we talk to customers, some of the common use cases to think about is, it also depends on the audience. Remember, admin scoring example, who might not be familiar with the AWS side of services, they can start with something simple like backing up. So S3, which is our simple storage service, we see that use case way more often with our VMware cloud on AWS customers. This also ties with that Datrium integration that I talked about with the VCD or the VMware cloud disaster recovery, providing that low cost TR option. We are also starting to see customers offload database management, for example, with Amazon RDS, and taking advantage of the manage database service. As we talk to more customers, some of the use cases that comes up are like, hey, how do I build this data lake architecture? I've migrated to the cloud, I want to make use of the data that I have in the cloud now, how do I build my data lake architecture or perform analytics or build this operation resiliency across both these environments, their VMware cloud on AWS, as well as their native AWS environments? So we've got that seamless connectivity that they can take advantage of with VMware Transit Connect, we've got the cross account ENI model that we built, that they can take advantage of. And he talks about this one, and talks about the security is always job zero for us. And we're also seeing customers that take advantage of the AWS services like the web application firewall or shield, and integrating it with the VMware cloud on AWS environment. And that provides a seamless access right? You now have all these security services that AWS provides, that allows you to build a secure environment on VMware cloud on AWS. So providing customers the choice has always been a priority, right? We're talking about like infrastructure level services. As we move up the stack, and as customers are going through this modernization journey, like VMware provides containerization option using VMware Tanzu, that came out at VMworld. And then they also have the native options, we provide a EKS, which is our Kubernetes as a managed service. And then we also have other services that enables customers to take that jump into that modernization journey. One customer we've been working very recently with is PennyMac. They migrated their VDI infrastructure into VMware cloud on AWS. And that's allowed them to scale their environment for the remote workers. But what they are doing as part of their modernization journey, is now we're helping them build this completely serverless architecture, using Lambda on the AWS cloud. >> Yeah, that's really where they see that, the value is high level services, the old expression prima, they use the hockey from Wayne Gretzky skate to where the puck is going to be, or, get to where the ball will be in the field. This is kind of what's happening, and I'm kind of smiling, when Aarthi was talking because, I've been saying it's been, going to, IT operations, and IT serviceman's is going to change radically so years ago. But you're really talking about here is the operating side of IT coming together with cloud. VMware, I think is a leading indicator of, you still got to operate IT, you still got to operate stuff. Software needs to be operated apps need to be operated. So this new operating model is being shown here with cloud, this is the theme with and without IT. With automation, this is the big trend from re:Invent this year. Obviously AI machine learning, you still got to operate the stuff. It's IT, depends on, we got lammed in automation doesn't go away, the game is still the same, isn't it what's happening here? >> Absolutely, so what we're saying is, once there's that you're absolutely right about the fact that they needed to, worry about the operations, once they migrate their workloads, they're taking their data, they're saying, how do I make sure that I put in place operational excellence, and this is where, AWS comes in, and we provide them with the tools needed to do that. And then step number two, say, what can I do with this data? How do I translate it into a business benefit? And this is where the AI ML tools come in place, and so forth. And then the third step, which is all right, what can I do to modernize these applications further. So you're spot on, John, in saying that this is like a transformation, it is no longer a discussion about, migration anymore, it is more of a discussion about modernizing what you have in place. And this is, again, where this brilliancy between the collaboration, between VMware and AWS, is bringing to the table, sets of tools and framework for customers, whether it's security framework or networking framework, to make the pieces fit together. So I'm very excited about this partnership. And we continue to innovate, as you heard in prior discussions with our executives on behalf of our customers, we spoke about the RDS Amazon, relational database service on vSphere. We spoke about how to post on VMware cloud on AWS, to bring the cloud to the customers data center for specific needs that they have in spite. And we're not stopping here. We are continuing not to make more joint engineering and more announcements, hopefully in the future to come. >> That's great insight. And a lot of people who were commenting, three, four years ago, when this is all going down, they're on the wrong side of history, that the data is undeniable, refutable, it's a success. Aarthi give us the final word, modern applications, modern infrastructure, what does that mean, these days? What's the bottom line when you talk to people out there? When you're at a party or friends or on zoom, or a Jime, in conference? What do you tell people when they say, what's a modern application infrastructure look like? >> Yes, the word modern application, the good or bad thing is it's going to, what I said yesterday could be different from what I'm saying today. But in general, I think modern application is where we enable our customers to focus more on their business priorities using our services, versus worrying about the infrastructure or worrying about like, hey, should I be worrying about capacity? Should I be worrying about my operational needs or monitoring? I think we want to abstract all that. We want to take that heavy lifting off of customers and help them focus on their business. >> Horizontally scalable and leveraging software in the application, can't go wrong with that formula in the cloud. Thanks for coming on, and thanks for the awesome conversation. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you John. >> Thank you >> Okay, it's theCUBE Virtual for re:Invent Experience 2020, this is virtual, not in person this year. I'm John Furrier, your host from the theCUBE, thanks for watching. (bright music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World Digital Experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Hi welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE coming to you from our Palo Alto studios, with our ongoing coverage of the Dell Technology World 2020, the digital experience, we can't be together this year, but we can still get together this way. And we're excited for our very next segment, really talking about one of the big leverage points that the Dell VMware relationship can result in, so we're excited. Joining us our next guest is Guy Bartram, he is the Director of Product Marketing for Cloud Director, for VMware. Guy great to see you, where are you coming in from? >> Thanks for having me on Jeff. >> Where are you coming in from today? (Guy chuckles) >> So this yeah, this London for me, this is from London. >> Excellent, great to see you. >> In the UK. >> And also joining us, Doug Lieberman, he is the Global Solutions Director for Dell Technology, Doug, great to see you, where are you coming in from today? >> Well, thanks for having me, I'm calling in from just outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the United States. >> Excellent, love Philly's lived there for a couple of years and man, there's some terrific food in that part of the world, I tell yah. So let's get into--- >> You say--- >> Are you Pat's or Geno's. >> Actually I'll eat either one but I think I prefer Pat. >> Okay buddy, I used to get one of each and eat half and half and piss people off that were the purest, but that's a difference--- >> That's the right way to do it. (Jeff and Guy laughs) >> Right, so let's get into it, you know, before we turned on the cameras, you guys were talking about this exciting announcement that you've been working on for a really long time. So before we get kind of into the depths and the importance, why don't we just go ahead and tell us, what is the big announcement that we're sharing today? Go to you Guy. >> And so VMware and Dell really have worked together and we both have partner programs that are focused on service providers, Cloud Service providers, and systems integrators and strategic outsourcers. And what we've done is work together to build a solution that is really targeted towards them in the cloud arena, so taking our cloud capabilities and solutions and optimizing it for cloud providers and doing that through what we call, leveraging our Dell Technologies Cloud Platform and putting VMware Cloud Director on top of that. >> So that's pretty amazing, and really, to you Guy, what does that enable Cloud Service providers to do that they couldn't do so well before? >> It brings a whole lot of benefits to a Cloud Service provider, I mean, for cloud providers, historically they've had to have infrastructure services that've been, you know, quite heavy for them to build, taken a long time to get the market, and really had a high burn and operational costs and this solution VMware Cloud Director on Dell Technologies Cloud Platform is going to bring them the multitenancy aspects of cloud director and all of the speed and efficiencies in application and infrastructure delivery to enable them to address the common need now around hybrid cloud management and hybrid cloud operations. >> And you talked about before, I'm sorry, go ahead, Doug. >> No, I was saying, you know, I think that the big key piece is that, there're special requirements that cloud providers really need from their infrastructure, from their cloud, that makes it special to their business model, and what this aims to do, is to provide those capabilities in a easily consumable and rapid implementation format so that they can get to revenue faster and they can get to higher level services faster. >> It's funny, you talked about getting to revenue faster, back in the day I worked at Intel and Craig Barrett was famous for TTM. TTM, everyone used to think it was time to market bringing a new product to market, and he said, no, no, no, it's time to money, right, how fast can you get operational, so that you can basically get this thing to start generating revenue, I always think of that when you look at seven 37 sitting at a gate, you know, how do you get it operational? So Doug, what were some of those special challenges that they have in their market and how are you helping them solve them? >> So it's a great question, Jeff, as we work with service providers all over the world, they've given us a consistent message, that the days of the value in their service being, how they build the underlying cloud and how they do that orchestration automation are really behind us, right, they're expecting today, an end to end capability delivered as sort of an appliance for that underlying infrastructure for the cloud components, so that they can focus on the higher level services and the things that provide more value and more margin for them, and so, you know, the as a service offerings that run on top of the underlying cloud. And so what this joint solution does is really provide a validated design so that they can redirect their engineering resources from figuring out how to make that base cloud work in a service provider format, with multitenancy, chargeback, showback, portals, et cetera, and get that up and running faster and not have to worry about how to automate all that themselves, so they can focus their engineering efforts on those higher level services that provide greater value to their bottom line, to be honest, >> Great, that's great, and Guy, I want to go back to you, you know, the Cloud Service providers probably don't get as much of publicity as you know, we hear all the time about the big public Cloud Providers, you know, the big three or four or however you want to count them and we hear a lot about data centers and staff migrating between those two, we don't hear a lot of conversation in kind of the hybrid or the multicloud discussion about the role of the smaller Cloud Service providers. So I wonder if you can share a little bit about how they play in the market, you know why this is a really important segment for everyone's, you know, kind of architecture and ability to deliver applications. >> That's great common, I mean, one of the things we tend to call on our partners internally is the fall of mega cloud, that you know you really haven't heard of, there's 4,000 partners in our partner program and all of them are providing very valuable cloud services. They provide cloud services they've in all areas of cloud, so this could be into Azure, Google, AWS or in their own data centers, and many of them have come from infrastructure rich environments or what we call asset heavy environments and delivering services in these environments. The recent kind of drive to cloud adoption and digital transformation has meant that there's been a growing demand for Cloud Service providers to deliver valuable managed services and professional services to help customer do that digital transformation and really help the customer identify, where their customer's workloads, would be best apt and running. And, you know, cloud providers specialize in delivering these services like Doug was saying, they're looking at that higher value and they brought a lot of skills and capability in those areas. >> That's great, 'cause it's really good to keep in mind they pay a really important role in this whole thing. And Doug I want to go back to you in terms of working together with VMware in the solution space, right, so it's one thing to talk about a relationship between two companies, it's one thing to see Michael Dell and Pat Gelsinger on stage together, it's a whole nother deal to get together and put in the investment in these joint solutions. So I wonder if you could share a little bit more color on not only today's announcement, but what this really means for you guys going forward and more importantly, your customers, and ultimately your customer's customers. >> Absolutely, so Dell and VMware are both committed to really driving the success of our Cloud Provider partners all over the world, and to do that, we recognize that there's an additional level of capabilities that we need to bring together and jointly do that. And so we agreed to work together to go build a series of capabilities that are really targeted at going beyond just the basic HCI market and the basic cloud market and extending that for capabilities that are targeted specifically and built specifically for our service providers. And so this solution that we're announcing today is the first step on a journey, but we both committed to and made investments in, continuing that and adding more and more capabilities as we move forward and really addressing that very specific market. And working with our Cloud Service provider partners to figure out what is the next step, what do they need from us, at the end of the day, we're looking to jointly help them be more successful and accelerate their time to market and their go to market capabilities. >> Right, that's great, and Guy back to you, you actually had some numbers, some IDC numbers that you can share in terms of some of the real measurable benefits of this. >> That's right Jeff, yeah, we have, IDC did a recent analysis for us with about 12 partners interviewed across the globe, and some of the results that came back were pretty astounding actually, this pay-for is available on our VCE product page on vmware.com. But just as kind of summarize, you know, we talk about getting to revenue faster, they found that on average service providers were able to onboard customers, i.e migrate them, into their cloud environment around 72% faster, 57% faster delivery of new services and we all know that, you know, portfolio and construction of services takes a long time, but you get business units to buy in to give it support services, so 57% faster delivery of services is incredible. And then, you know, obviously getting to revenue 32% more revenue from VCD services than without VCD and 51% overall more growth with VCD from things like more efficient operations, which are also marked at like 31%. So, you know, significant advantages to having Cloud Director bringing those economies of scale, bringing that capability to migrate from a customer premise into service providers cloud, and then obviously be able to utilize multiple larger clouds across multiple regions. >> That's great, and Doug, I wonder if you could share, are there some specific applications that are driving this more than others, is there any particular kind of subset of the solutions that you can highlight where you're getting the most demand and where you see kind of the both short term opportunity as well as mid and longterm opportunity? >> A great question, I think it really evolves around a couple of different aspects. So one is from a pure security standpoint and things like data sovereignty, we're seeing an increased demand for the service providers that are our partners, as in the ecosystem of cloud, there will always be a role for the hyperscaler clouds as well as the role of these independent Cloud Service providers that are at the next tier down, both for the data sovereignty issues, things like GDPR, but as well as kind of that personal feel, that personal touch and specialty in applications, some of the specific areas we're seeing are things like business process management capabilities, database as a service, VDI as a service, but even more critically things like cyber recovery and backup as a service we're seeing, especially in the current situation that we're in, really an uptick in the cyber attacks and the ransomware, et cetera, and so solutions such as our cyber recovery are critical in those capabilities and those higher level services tied into and integrated with an overall service provider framework are key. And so in the area that we're really seeing uptake are really the business critical mission functions that enterprises are looking to run in a trusted partner's data center, and that's what we're seeing, where we're a lot of traction for this Dell Technologies Cloud Platform, combining VCD and VCF together to give you all those features and enterprise reliability. >> Right, and I didn't ask you Guy kind of the partnership question about having the opportunity to put your capability, you know, on the Dell Cloud Platform, opens up a whole new set of field resources, a whole new set of technical resources, you know, a whole different resources, not that VMware's short on resources by any stretch of the imagination, but it's certainly an additive, you know, kind of one plus one makes three opportunity. >> Yeah, I mean, it's great to be doing this and we've actually already been doing this on a couple of other initiatives, so from my perspective, I, you know, I manage Cloud Director Portfolio and we've already integrated Dell, Data Domain Dell, Avamar backup solutions, Data Protection Suite, into VCD as self service and we've already put in quite a bit of work, working together with Dell on that, as we go forward we're going to be putting more work into supporting VCD on the Dell Technologies Cloud Platform and integrating more services from Dell and from other vendors into the solution as well. So all we want to really provide is the capability for service provider to have the easy to consume hardware model, easy to consume subscription software model, with our program, and then the extensibility of services over and above just the infrastructure layer. So looking at things like object storage, and as Doug said, data protection, migration services, container cluster services, there's a myriad of services that VCD provides today out the box, and then there's the a whole extensibility framework, which we use when we work with partners, like we've done with Dell to deliver things like data protection. >> Yeah, I want to go back to you Doug, in terms of kind of a higher level, this whole transition to as a service, you've been in the business for a long time, you've been in the solutions a long time, but, you know, switching everything to as a service, as often as we can, and as frequently as we can, and as broadly across portfolio is really a terrific response to what the customers now, are looking for. So I'm wondering if you share some color on, you know, this philosophy of trying to get to, as a service, as much as you can, across the broadest solution set as you can. >> Yeah and if you look over the last decade, and decade and a half, there has been this increasing trend to moving to as a service offerings and the public clouds really drove a large part of that, than in tier two service providers around the globe. The key piece especially in the current business model, then going forward is how do you optimize, your CapEx versus OPEX and how do you really leverage the IT infrastructure to the maximum extent possible, based upon current business conditions, and that means the ability to grow and train and the ability to only consume what you need. In the past, when we had traditional data centers, you basically built for the worst case, and so the worst case was you had, an accounting run that happened at the end of the month that required a lot of processing power, then you built to that and that's what you use, and for the rest of the month, it really mostly idle. The cloud model really gives you the ability to A, improve their, or only use what you need and consume when you want to use it, but also adds in really shifting the responsibility for the management and the operations into someone, people who are experts in that area, so that again, you as a business can focus on your mission critical aspects of what you do whether that's developing a drug, building cars, making pizza, whatever it is, really as a service model enables your business to drive their core competency and not have to worry about the IT infrastructure that other people can do more efficiently and with better value than you could do it internally. And all that drive to that as a service model with the additional financial models that really aligned to the business paradigm that really companies are looking for. >> As you're saying that I'm thinking, wow, remember those days when our worst case scenario, was running a big batch load at the end of the month or the end of the quarter, and that would be re-missed, right, we are 2020, we're spread out all over the country and the world on both sides of the Atlantics. If I didn't say something about, you know, kind of the COVID impacts in terms of this accelerate, 'cause we hear it all the time in social media, right, who's driving your digital transformation, is it the CEO, the CIO, of COVID, and we've moved from this kind of light switch moment and then merged to, hey, this is an ongoing thing, and you know, kind of the new normal, is the new normal. And it's really shifted, a lot of people are talking about, you know, kind of shifts in the cloud infrastructure, the direction of the traffic, right, from going now from East to West and it's North to South, 'cause it's going to everybody's home. I wonder, I'll go back to you Guy, in terms of, the response that you've heard from some of your customers, in a response to, you know, kind of A, let's put a stop gap in early March that was interesting, and critical, and done, but now, kind of looking forward as to, you know, kind of a redistribution of workloads and architecture and users and I think Doug talked about security. How are you seeing any kind of ongoing effects and how is this impacting, you know, kind of you go to market and what you guys are bringing to market. >> Yeah, we're definitely seeing a lot of change in the way that service providers are trying to address this now. At the start of COVID, it was really a struggle, I think, for everyone to get the resources that they required to keep customers up from running, a lot of people started re-examining their disaster recovery contingency planning, and realizing that actually, what has happened in the last couple of years is, you know, workloads have exploded, a lot of patient workloads have completely gone through the roof and container workloads have grown drastically, and what's happened is the contingency plans behind all this stuff haven't changed and they just simply can't keep up the dynamic nature of the way we're doing business. Quite simply put technology is outpacing our weight, our ability to deal with that, so, you know, service providers need to provide a platform solution that enables them to be able to orchestrate at scale and enables them to orchestrate securely at scale, and really that means they've got to move away from this is hardware analog and move into virtual resourcing, cloud resource pooling elasticity, and particularly hypothesy. I know VMware we talk a lot about hybrid solutions and multicloud, but it's a reality when you look at where customers are today in their cloud journey, most of them have a footprint in their premise, have a footprint in a cloud provider premise and have multiple footprints in public cloud environments, so they need to have that consistent security model across that, they need to have data contingency and backup solutions, and someone needs to be in that to manage that, and that's where the service providers come in. They need to move away from the kind of infrastructure day to day operations that they were doing before and scale it out to now application protection and application development environments. >> Right, so Doug, I'm going to give you the last word as we wrap up this segment, you know, it's easy for us and pundits and people to write about multicloud and hybrid cloud and all these concepts, you guys actually have to make it work on the ground with real customers and real workloads. So I wonder if you could just kind of, you know, share your perspective, you've been working on this Dell Cloud Platform, you know, kind of how you see this evolving over time, and again, kind of what gets you up in the morning as you look forward as to what this journey is going to be over the next six months, one year, two year, three years down the road. >> Brought a lot of functionality capabilities to the world, right, the ability to consume things as you need them, the ability to really rely on a combined set of clouds and multicloud, and if you look at any enterprise that by any estimate, any company of any size, it's probably got 12, 15 clouds that contain their multicloud between using hyperscalers, tier two service providers, as well as cloud based services like Salesforce.com or Office 365, and you combine all those together and what that provides is a lot of flexibility, a lot of functionality, but also an extreme amount of complexity. And that complexity is really where Dell Technologies Cloud and Dell Technologies Cloud Platform is looking to help and to reduce that complexity, 'cause ultimately a successful enterprise is going to leverage the best from multiple clouds across multiple different implementations in order to provide the end to end IT experience that they need for both their external facing and internal IT operations. And with Dell Technologies Cloud Platform and working with our service providers, what we aim to do is to simplify the implementation of those multiple clouds and how they work together and make it as seamless as possible to shift workloads where they need to be, see your entire virtual enterprise IT environment, no matter where it's running, and to really optimize on your business to understand how you're using cloud, where you're using cloud, and how those clouds work together. And so the integration of all the different features with VMware and Dell bring together that end to end capability to significantly simplify the multicloud experience, and then ultimately our service provider partners, can help you on that journey to provide that management and orchestration across those different clouds and the data transformation, the digital transformation necessary in order to drive success. >> That's great, well, thank you Doug, for putting a nice big bow on it, and congratulations to you both for getting this release out, I know there's a lot of hard work and effort behind it, so it's always kind of good to finally get to expose it to the real world, so thanks for taking a few minutes with us. >> Great, thank you for having us. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah thanks Jeff, thank you. >> All right, he's Guy, he's Doug, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, the digital experience. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (soft upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. (soft music) >> Hi, Lisa Martin, with theCUBE here, talking with Caitlin Gordon, the VP of Product Marketing, at Dell technologies. Caitlin how are you? It's great to see you. >> I'm doing very well Lisa, thank you so much for having me. >> Nice to see you back on theCUBE. So lots of stuff going on in the news the last few months or so. A lot of stuff with respect to Cyber Recovery, Cyber Security, but talk to us about what's happening in the Purpose-Built Appliance Backup Appliance market. This market is growing. What's happening there, and talk to me about Dell's leadership role. >> Yeah, we've kind of come full circle. I've been in the data protection space for a while and I would say that, you know now we're looking at this as a $4 billion industry and security and protection has bubbled backup to the top of the list from an IT perspective. And one of the simplest, fastest ways to improve data protection is leveraging Backup Appliances. And there's really two segments within that. There's what I'll refer to as the target appliances and the integrated appliances. And we actually have had leadership in this space, since really the beginning. You know 50 cents of every dollar in this market is spent on Dell equipment. Where we see massive growth is really in that integrated appliance market. And those integrated appliances really simplify the deployment of not only the protection storage, but the protection software. So you can modernize your data protection, get much faster recovery, faster backups, as well as really get a smaller footprint, better efficiency, all in one single solution. And that's really where we've seen a lot of growth in the appliance market recently. >> Yeah. So as that, an integrated appliance market is growing twice as fast as targeted, give us a picture. You mentioned a few things, but kind of dig deeper into why customers are opting more and more for the integrated approach. >> Yeah that comes back to kind of a lot of the trends we see in IT overall. It's simplicity. It's ease of, how can you get to a better solution, a better outcome faster. And when it comes to integrated data protection appliances, it really it takes the guesswork out of it. You know, you have software and hardware, that's optimized to work together. You're really quick and easy to deploy, really simple to manage, 'cause it's all fully integrated and you get to a solution where you can get things like 65 one data reduction, get a very small footprint, get really fast improvements to not only backups, but probably even more importantly to recovery, get instant access to that data. And you really are able to with one purchase, transform all of your data protection. Now there's still a lot of great uses for target appliances as well of better flexibility. But, we've seen this overall you've seen this Lisa, every trend in probably IT and life, right? Simplicity. How can you get a faster, better answer? And integrated appliances really lean into that. It's as similar to what we see in the hyperconverged space, kind of in the primary storage and compute side of things. >> Yeah, I think we all want faster, simpler, better in every walk of life. One of the things this year that, in all of that lack of simplification, the complexity that we're living in that we've seen, is the rise of ransomware. It's not only on the rise, it's getting more personal. We've seen, you know, big companies, Garmin was attacked, one of the Cruise Lines was attacked, The New Zealand Stock Exchange, Facebook and Tik Tok were hacked. So we're starting to see so much more vulnerability and the ability of these hackers to expose more vulnerabilities. Have you seen that impacting your customers saying, "Hey, we need help here because now we have so many employees and devices, scattered." >> Yeah, unfortunately we have. You know, we've been talking about Ransomware Protection, Cyber Resiliency, Cyber Recovery with our customers for quite a number of years. And, now it's not a niche conversation just with financial institutions, it's a conversation with all of our customers. 'Cause either they've felt it or they've seen their competitors feel it and they need to protect themselves. So it has really become a conversation but it's not only our specialty sellers, but all of our sellers are having with our customers. And, it's really about not only being able to protect against them, which is an important part, but also recover from them. And that's really what our PowerProtect Cyber Recovery Solution is all about. And the exciting thing for us is that we actually have recently become the first Cyber Recovery Solution endorsed by Sheltered Harbor. Which really gives you an idea of the level of investment that we've made to provide that secure, automated air gap solution to give our customers that peace of mind. Because unfortunately this is becoming table stakes for any data protection out there today. >> Well, and as more and more, we see every company either becoming a data company or needing to become a data company to not just survive these times, but become successful as time goes on. To a point, it's one thing about protecting the data, but the actual need is to recover it should anything happen. Tell us a little bit more about Sheltered Harbor and what you guys were the first there to receive? Tell me a little bit more about that. >> Yeah, absolutely. Okay a little bit more on overall our solution and Sheltered Harbor is actually a consortium of organizations, primarily financial institutions that have really come together to define the standards, of what we need or Cyber Resiliency for Cyber Recovery. And for us with PowerProtect Cyber Recovery, we've worked closely with that organization, to meet those standards. And with that work and with that actual deploying in with one of our customers, we were able to become the first Cyber Recovery Solution endorsed by Sheltered Harbor to meet their standards there. And what's an important about our solution is that it's both that automated air-gapped solution for the data isolation, which is a part of it. But it's also, we have the CyberSense analytics and forensic tools that give you the ability to discover, to diagnose and to remediate against these attacks. So it gives you both sides of protecting that data air-gapping it, but also being able to intelligently discover and remediate against those attacks, if they do indeed happen. >> As VP of Product Marketing, I'm sure you're with customers often these days virtually. When you're having customer conversations, as you were singing out data protection and being able to recover and remediate, should anything like a ransomware attack happen, that's business critical. That's, you know, lifeline kind of stuff we're talking about. Have you seen the conversations within customer organizations shifts or is this now a board level or a C-level conversation in terms of data protection? >> Yeah, it's interesting. It's become a more frequent conversation. The people involved, are different. It's not just the backup administrators that are involved, it's really about the overall compliance strategy, the CSOs that are involved here. And it's becoming a corporate mandate as it really unfortunately needs to be at this point. So it's coming up more frequently, but also the types of people involved in that conversation have really changed the types of things we're having to talk about and build solutions for. So it's really changed that dynamic for us. And it's been great to really be on the front lines of that with our customers. You know, it started with those financial institutions and now it's really commonplace, to talk about this with everyone. >> So let's talk customers. Give us an example or two of some customers that are leveraging this new technology that are really achieving like the big deduplication ratio that you talked about, but also enabling their business to move forward. >> Yeah. One of my favorite ones for a couple of reasons I'll confess is, World Candy. Actually there are a World Corporation, but to me, they're a candy company. They actually make some chocolate out of Pennsylvania one of my favorites, chocolate covered pretzels. And they're a great example, right? 'Cause they're certainly not an IT specialty organization. They're trying to contract manufactured candy and they want to get things done as efficiently as possible. So they were looking a solution to overall modernize, their overall IT and that came with the combination of an Integrated Data Protection Appliance, as well as VXRail. And by implementing that, they were able to reduce their backup times from running overnight all night, to just two hours. They were able to get dedupe ratios of a 12O to one, 99.2% reduction, which is just incredible. And they were able to reduce their physical server footprint by 60%. So you can just imagine with an organization like this, that needs to run things as efficiently, as simply, as quickly as possible, how transformational that is. And, probably one of the other things that we find out of customers like this is, it's really about finding them a partner that can solve all of their problems in one place. And for data protection that's certainly one of the biggest things for PowerProtect is we now have a one-stop shop appliances software for all your data protection needs, large and small. And my favorite thing is actually our quote from this customer which is, he calls it a perfect partnership and that they have a single hand to high five. And we love to get those high fives from our customer and we really like to be that partner for them and to help them solve these challenges really no matter where their data is or what their challenges are. >> I like that a single can for a virtual high five. Speaking of partners, what's the channel play here? >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, for us, Dell Technology is overall channel partners are absolutely critical and in the data protection space, probably even more so. So channel partners are a huge part of our go-to-market. And one of the reason that channel partners really like to work with us, with Dell technologies on the data protection side, is because of the breadth of that portfolio. And now with our most recent enhancements on the appliance side, you now have a full PowerProtect portfolio. Target appliances, integrated appliances, physical, virtual, as well as modern data protection software with PowerProtect data manager. And for our partners, and for us, it's so important that they can have one vendor to offer all of these solutions because we know that our customer's challenges are complex, they're diverse, their data sets are diverse and they need to be able to partner with someone, leverage us as a vendor, leverage our partners, leveraging us as a vendor to really give our customers that answer. And that could be very different needs. They have traditional applications, they have new modern applications in Kubernetes and the growth of, and the importance of those types of applications. Our partners don't want and our customers don't want to have to deal with multiple vendors. Multiple vendors actually can increase risk, increase costs. They want to keep that simple, efficient. And that's why partnering with us, with Dell Technologies, why our channel partners really find us to be such a critical vendor to work with on the data protection side. >> So you've shared some impressive stats about what the technology is able to deliver. You gave us the great World Candy company example in terms of the things I heard a big workforce productivity there, they've got big deduplication there. They're able to sounds like reduce their on-prem footprint. From an economic value perspective, help us understand what the economic value of the DP series and even maybe feedback from the analyst community. >> Yeah, we've actually got a recent study which I'd encourage you guys to go read and I will just kind of give you the Cliffs Notes version of it. Which shows you the advantages of leveraging Dell Technologies portfolio for data protection. You can have your cost to protect as low as 1 cent per gigabyte per month, which is impressive. And that's that efficiency that you can get with PowerProtect. It's a reduction in the administration costs for data reduction of 22%, a reduction of 84% in your Cloud resources and services. We all know that people have moved to Public Cloud and probably one of the biggest concerns is the cost of that. By implementing the right data protection solutions, leveraging our in-cloud backup and protection, you can actually significantly reduce that because of the way that we've implemented it. And overall, you can't argue with anything that reduces costs by 98%. So you can reduce your storage resource costs by 98% by leveraging the PowerProtect portfolio. And again, it's a recent ESG study, which you can find on our website and read more about that study and the economic elements that lead into that. But you can just see the dramatic impact that can have, not only are you protecting your most valuable asset of data, but you're doing so in a way that saves the company money, and time and resources. And we all know that's never been more critical than ever. >> Those are very impressive, but compelling stats. Last question, talking about the three waves that we know Dell technologies is writing, we've got VMware, Cloud, Cyber Recovery, give us a flavor of the launch and the news and the new capabilities for this one-stop shop with perspective of what's happening in Cyber Recovery today. >> Yeah, so we've got enhancements on all fronts. So we, let me go in order there. So we've got on the Cloud front our PowerProtect data manager, which we've talked about a lot this year. We continued to really enhance that. Some recent enhancements, the ability to deploy that in Azure and AWS Cloud, to be able to do in-Cloud data protection. On the VMware side as we talked about just recently at VMworld, we've got new integrations with Storage Based Policy Management to really simplify and automate protection for the Vadmins as well as protection administrators. The ability to support, real mission critical applications and VMs, that are something we're working on to be able to more intelligently protect those VMs that have become more challenging to protect in traditional methods as well as integration with protect VCF. And then lastly, I think we've covered a bit today is certainly on that Cyber Recovery, Cyber Resiliency solution. First one to be endorsed by Sheltered Harbor in providing that air gap solution, as well as that ability to discover to remediate from those attacks. And you can kind of get a sense of, where we're really focused on. Those are our big three areas in both our appliance as well as our software portfolio really focused on simplifying that for our customers. >> Well Caitlin, we thank you for joining us as per what theCUBE has seen for many years with Dell Technologies. Lots of innovation, continued innovation. We thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE today. >> Thanks so much for having me. It was great to be here, Lisa. >> Excellent. With Caitlin Gordon, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE. (soft music)

>> Woman: From theCube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is theCube conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCube coming to you from our Palo Alto studios to have a Cube conversation with a real leader in the industry he's been publishing for a long, long time. I've been following him in social media. First time I've ever get the met in person and kind of a virtual COVID 20, 20 way. And we're excited to welcome into the studio. Bob Evans. He's a founder and principal analyst, the Cloud Wars Media coming to us. Bob where are you coming to us from today? >> In Pittsburgh today. Jeff. Good to see you. >> Awesome. Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. There's a lot of Fricks in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania cause Henry Clay was there many moons ago so that's a good town. So welcome. >> Thank you, Jeff. Thanks. Great to be here. And I look forward to our conversation. >> Absolutely. So let's, let's jump into it. So I know you attended today, the Citrix Cloud Summit you know, we've covered Citrix energy in the past this year, they decided to go we'll obviously virtual like everybody did but they, you know, they did something a little creative I think as, and they broke it into pieces, which, which I think is the way of the future. There's no reason to necessarily aggregate all of your news, all of your customer stuff, all your customer appreciation, the party the partners, all for three days in Vegas. Cause that's the only time you could get the Science Convention Center. So today was the Cloud Summit all day long. First off, just, you know, your general impressions of the event, >> Jeff, you know, I just thought that the guys had hit a really good note about what's going on in the outside world. You know, sometimes I think it's a little awkward when tech companies come in and the first thing they want to talk about is themselves, which I guess in some ways fine but I think the Citrix guys did a really good job at coming outside in here's what's going on in the outside world. Here's how we as a technology player trying to adapt to that and deliver the maximum value to our customers in this time of unprecedented change. So I thought they really nailed that with cloud and some of the other big topics that they laid out >> Great. And you've been covering cloud for a long time and, and you know, COVID is, we're still in it. There's a lot of really bad things that are happening. There's hundreds of thousands of people that are dying and a lot of businesses are getting crushed especially hospitality, travel you know, anything that relies on an aggregation of people. Conversely though we're, we're fortunate to be in the IT industry and in the information industry. And for a lot of industries, it's actually been kind of an accelerant. And one of the main accelerants is this, you know kind of digital transformation and new way to work. And some of these things that were initiatives in play but on March 15th, approximately it was go, right? It was Light switch no more planning, no more talking, it's here now. Ready, set, go. And it's in, you know, Citrix is in a pretty good position in terms of the products that they offer, the services that they offer, the customer base that they have to take advantage of that opportunity and, and you know, go to this, we've all seen the social media memes right? Who's driving your digital transformation the CEO, the CIO, or COVID. And we all know what the answer to the question is. They're pretty well positioned and it seems like, you know, they're doing a good job kind of doubling down on the opportunity. >> Jeff. Yeah. And I'd sure echo your, your initial point there about the nightmare that everybody's experienced over the last six or seven months. There's, there's no way around that yet. It has forced in these categories like, you know, that we've all heard hundreds of thousand time digital transformation to the point where the term almost becomes a cliche but in fact right? You know, it has become something that's really you know, one of the driving forces, touching everybody in the planet, right? There's, and I think digital transformation. Isn't so much about the technology, of course but it's because, you know, there's a couple billion people around the world who want to live digitally enhanced digitally driven lifestyles. And the pandemic only accelerated that as you said. So it triggered things you know, in our personal lives and our new set of requirements and expectations sort of rippled up to the B2C companies and from them back up to the B2B companies So every company on earth, every industry has had to do this. And like you said, if they were, deluding themselves maybe telling themselves these different companies that yeah, we're going fast, we're aggressive. Well, when this thing hit earlier this year as you said, they just had to really slam their foot down. I think that David Henshall from Citrix said that they had some companies that had, they were compressing three years into five months or he said in some cases even weeks. So it's really been extraordinary. And cloud has been the vehicle for these companies to get over into their digital future. >> Right. And let's talk about that for a minute because you know, Moore's law is my favorite law that nobody knows which was, you know, we tend to underestimate, excuse me we tend to overestimate the impact of technology in the short term of specific technology and underestimate the longterm impact. You know, Gardener kind of uses a similar thing with the hype cycle. And then you know, the thing goes at the end, you know, had COVID hit five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago you know, the ease in which the information workers were able to basically just not show up and turn on their computer at home and have access to most of their tools and most of the security and most of their applications that wasn't even possible. So it's a really interesting, you know, just validation on the enabler that we are actually able to not go to work on Tuesday the 16th or whatever the day was. And for the most part, you know, get most of our work done. >> Yeah. Yeah. Jeff, you know, I've thought about it a lot over the last several months. Remember the big consultant companies used to try to do these measures of technology and they'd always come out and say, well, we've done all these studies. And despite the billions of dollars of investment we can't show that IT has actually boosted productivity or, you know, delivered an ROI that customers should be happy with. I was always puzzled by some of the things that went into those. But I would say that today over these last six or seven months to your point, we have seen extraordinary validation of these investments in technology broadly. But specifically I think some of these things that are happening with the cloud, you know, as you've said how fast some companies have been able to do this and then not remarkable thing, Jeff right. About human nature. And we hear a lot about in, in when companies change that relative to changing human behavior changing technology is somewhat easy but you try to change human behavior and it's wicked. Well, we had this highly motivating force behind it, of the pandemic. So you had a desire on the part of people to change. And as you pointed out, there's also this corresponding thing of, you know, the technology was here. It was right. You've got a fast number of companies delivering some extraordinary solutions. And, you know, I thought it was interesting. I think it was a Kirsten Kliphouse from Google cloud. One of Citrix's partners who said that we're two best of breed companies, Citrix and Google cloud. So I thought that, that coming from Google you know, that is very high praise. So again, I think the guys at Citrix are sort of coming into this at the right time with the right set of outside in-approaches and having that flexibility to say that we're moving into territory nobody's ever been both been in before. So we better be able to move as fast as possible. >> Right. Right. And, and just to keep going down the quote line, you know once everyone is taken care of and you, you deal with the health and safety of your people which is a number one, right? The other thing is the great Winston Churchill quote which has never let a good crisis go to waste. And I think you know, David talked about in that, in his keynote that this is an opportunity, He said to challenge assumptions, challenge the models of the past. So, you know get beyond the technology discussion and use this really as a catalyst to rethink the way that you do things. And, you know, I think it's a really interesting moment because there is no model right? There is no, there is no formula for how do you reopen, there was no playbook for how do you shut down? You know, it was, everybody's figuring it out. And you've got kind of all these concurrent processes happening at the same time as everyone tries to figure it out and come to solutions. But clearly, you know, the path to, to leverage as much as you can, is the cloud and the flexibility of the cloud and, you know the ability to, to expand, add more applications. And so, you know, Citrix again, right place, right time right. Solution, but also you know, taking an aggressive tact to take advantage of this opportunity, both in taking care of their customers, but really it's a real great opportunity for them to change a little bit. >> It is. And Jeff, you know, I think if I could just piggyback on you know, your, your guy there Winston Churchill, one of his other quotes, I love it too. And he said, if find yourself crawling through hell, keep going. And I think so many companies have really had to do that now. It's, it's not ideal. It's not maybe the way they plan it but this is the reality we're facing here in 2020 and a couple of things right? I think it requires a new type of leadership within the customer companies right? What, how the CEO gets engaged in saying, I, I'm not going to relegate this to the CIO for this to happen and something else to the CMO. They've got to be front and center on this because people are pretty smart. And then the heightened sensitivity that everybody in every business has around the world today if you think your CEO is just paying lip service to this stuff about digital transformation and all these changes that everybody's going to make, the people aren't going to buy into it. So you've got the leadership thing happening on the one side and into that it's not a vacuum, but into that void or that opportunity of this unprecedented space that you mentioned come the smart, capable forward-looking technology companies that are less concerned with the stuff that they've dragged along with them for years or decade or more. But instead of trying to say, what is the new stuff that people are going to be desperately in need of and how can I help these customers do things that they never did before? It's going to require me as a tech company to do stuff that I've never done before. So I, I've just been really inspired by seeing a lot of the tech companies doing what they are helping their customers to do which is take a product development cycle, look at all the new stuff that came out around COVID and back to work, workspaces. And so on what Citrix, you know others are doing like this, the product development cycles Jeff, you study this stuff closely. It's, it's almost unimaginable. If you had said that somebody within three months within two months, we're going to have a new suite of product available we would have said it just, it's not possible the nice idea but it can't work, but that's happening now, right? >> Yeah. Isn't it interesting that had you asked them on March 10th, they would have told you it's not possible. And by March 20th, they were doing it. >> Yeah. >> At scale, huge companies. And to your point, I think that the good news is they had kind of their own companies to eat their own dog food and get their own employees you know, working from home and then, you know, bake that into the way that they had their go to market. But let's talk a little bit more specifically about work from home or work from anywhere or the new way to work. And it's funny cause that's been bantered about for, for way too long, but now, now it's here. And most indications are that for many people, many companies are saying you're not going to go back for a while. And even when you do go back it's going to be a lot different. So, you know, the new way to work is really important. And there's so much that goes into that. And one of the big pieces that I'm encouraged to hear is how do you measure work? And, you know, there's a great line I heard where, you know work is an output. It's not a place to go. And, you know, I had Martin Michaelson early on in this thing, and he had the great line, you know it's so easy to fake it at work, you know, just look busy and walk around and go to all the meetings where with a work from home or work from anywhere. What the leadership needs to do is, is a couple of things. One, is measure output right? Not activity. And you know, it's great. People can have dinner with their family or go see the kid's baseball game. Or I guess they don't have a baseball games right now but, you know, measure output, not activity which is, doesn't seem to be that revolutionary. But I think it kind of is. And, and then the other thing is really be an enabler and be a, an unblocker for people in terms of a leadership role right? Get out, help get stuff out of the way. And, but unfortunately, the counter is, you know how many apps does a normal person have to interact with every day? And how many notifications do those apps fire off every day between Slack and Asana and Salesforce and, and texts and tweets and everything else. You know, I think there's a real opportunity to take a whole nother level of productivity improvement by removing these, these silly distractions automating, you know, as much of the crap away as we can to enable people to use their brains and have some quiet time and think about things and deliver much better value than this constant reaction to nonstop notifications. >> Yeah. Yeah. Jeff, you know, I loved your point there about the difference between people's outlook on March 10th versus on March 20th. And I believe that, you know, all limitations are self-imposed, right? We tend to form constructs around how we think and allow those then to shape and often restrict or confine our behavior. And here's an example of the CEO of Novartis Pharmaceutical Company. He said, we have been brought up in the pharmaceutical industry to believe that it is immutable law of physics that it's going to take 12 and a half years and two and a half billion dollars to get a new drug approved. And he said in the past with the technology and the processes and the capabilities that that was true it is not true today yet too often, the pharmaceutical industries behave like those external limitations are put in there. So flip that over to one of the customers that, that was at the Citrix Cloud Summit today Jim Noga, who's the CIO at Mass General Brigham. I thought it was remarkable what he said when you asked about how are things going with this work from home? Well, Jim Noga the CIO there said that we had been averaging before COVID 9,000 virtual visits a month. And he said since then that number has gone up to a quarter of a million virtual visits a month or it's 8,000 a day. So they're doing an a day what they used to do in a month. Like, you said it, you tell them that on March 10th, they're not going to believe it but March 20th, it started to become reality. So I think for the customers, they're going to be more drawn to companies that are willing to say, I see your need. I see how fast you want to move. I see where you need to go and do things you never did before. I'm willing to lock elbows with you, and go in on that. And the tech number is that sort of sit back and say, ah well, I'd like to help you there, but that's not what I do. They're going to get destroyed. They're going to get blown out. And I think over the next year or two, we're going to see this massive forcing function in the tech industry. That's going to separate the companies that are able to move at the pace of market and keep up with their customers versus those that are trapped by their past or by their legacy. And it is, going to be a fascinating talk. >> So I throw on a follow up to make sure I understand that number. Those are patient visits per unit time. >> Yeah. At Mass Brigham. So he said 9,000 virtual visits a month is what they're averaging before COVID. He said, now we're up to 250,000 virtual visits per month. >> Wow. >> So it's 8,000 a day. >> Wow. I mean the thing that highlights to me, Bob, and the fact that we're doing this right now, and none of us had to get on an airplane is, you know, I think when people think back or sit back and look at what does this enable? right? What does digital enable? Instead of saying instead of focusing what we can't do, like we can't go out and get a cup of coffee after this is over and we can't and that would be great and we'd have a good time but conversely, there's so many new things that you can do right? And you can reach so many more people than you could physically. And, and for like, you know, events like the one today. And, you know, we cover events all the time. So many more people can attend if they don't have the expense, of flying to Vegas and they don't have to leave the shop or, you know, whatever the limitations are. And we're seeing massive increases in registrants for virtual events, massive increase in new registrants. Who've never attended the, the events before. So I think he really brings up a good point, which is, you know, focus on what you can do and which is a whole new opportunity a whole new space, if you will, as opposed to continuing to whine about the things that we can't do because we can't do anything about those anyway >> No, and you know, that old line of a wish in one hand and spit in the other and see which one fills up first (laughs) you know, one of the other guests that that was on the Cloud Summit today Jeff, I don't know if you got to see 'em, but Steve Shute from SAP who heads up their entire 40,000 person customer success organization he said this about Citrix. "Citrix workspace is the foundation to provide secure cloud based access for this new generation of remote workers." So you get companies like SAP, and, you know, you want to talk about somebody that has earned its way into the, you know the biggest companies in the world and how they go along. You know, it's pretty powerful. They end up, your point Jeff, about how things have changed, focus on what we can do. The former CEO of SAP, Bill McDermott. He recently said, we think of phones as, you know, devices that help us be more productive. We think of computers as devices that help us be more productive. He said, now the world's going to start thinking of the office or the headquarters. It's a productivity tool. That's all it is. It's not the place that measures Hey, he was only at work, four days today. So, you know, he didn't really contribute. It's going to be a productivity tool. So we're going to look at a lot of concepts and just flip them upside down what they meant in February. Isn't going to to mean that much after this incredible change that we've all been through. >> Right. Right. Another big theme I wanted to touch base with you on it was very evident at the at the show today was multicloud right and hybrid cloud. And, you know, I used to work for Oracle in, in the day. And you know Amazon really changed the game in, in public cloud. The greatest line, one of Jeff's best lines is you know, we had seven year headstart. Nobody even was paying attention to the small book seller in Seattle and they completely changed enterprise technology. But what came across today pretty clearly right? As horses for courses, and really focusing at the application first right? The workload first and where that thing runs and how that thing runs, can be any place in that in a large organization you know, this is pick an airline or, or a big bank right? They're going to have stuff running at Oracle. They're going to have stuff running at AWS. They're going to have stuff running on Google. They're going to to have stuff running in Azure. They're going to have stuff running in their data center. IBM cloud, Ali Baba. I mean there's restrictions for location and, and data sovereigncy and all these things that are driving it. And really, you know, kind of drives this concept where the concept of cloud is kind of simple but the actual execution day to day at the enterprise level and managing and keeping track of this stuff, it is definitely a multicloud hybrid cloud. Pick your, pick your, your adjective but it's definitely not a single cloud world. That's for sure. >> Yeah. Yeah. And Jeff, you know, the Citrix customer that I mentioned earlier, Jim Noga is that the CIO at mass General Brigham, one of the other points he made about this was he said he's been very pleased about some of the contributions that cloud has made in, in, in his hospital organizations, you know transformation, what they've been able today and all the new things that they're capable of doing now that they were not people poor. But he said, you know, cloud is a tool. He said, it's not Nirvana. It's not a place for everything. He said, we have some on-premises systems. He said, they're more valuable now than they were a couple of years ago. And then we've got edge devices and we have something else over here. He said, so I think his point was it's important to put the proper value on cloud for all the things it can do for a specific organization, but not the thing that it's a panacea for everything though, big fan, but also a realist about it. >> Great. >> And so from that to the hybrid stuff and multicloud and I know all the big tech vendors would love it and say Oh no, it's not a multicloud, but just be my cloud. Just, just use my stuff. Everything will be easy, but that's not true. So I think Citrix position itself really well big emphasis on security, big emphasis on the experience that employees need to have. It isn't just sort of like a road war you loose five or seven years ago, as long as he, or she can connect through email and, you know, sending a sales data back and forth, they're all set. Now. It's very different. You've got people sitting in a wildly different environments for, you know, six, eight, 10 hours a day and chunk of an hour or two or three here or there. But that, that seamless experience always dependable, always reliable is just, you know, it can't be compromised. And I just thought you have one you know, high level thought about what happened. It was impressive for me to see that Citrix certainly a fine company put it. It's not one of the biggest tech companies in the world but look at the companies we have, the Microsoft, SAP talking about Google Cloud, AWS, you know, up and down the line. So I just thought it was really impressive how they showed their might as sort of a part of a network effect that is undeniable right now. >> Right. Right. And I think it's driven, you know, we hear over and over right? I mean, co-opertition is a very Silicon Valley thing. And ultimately it's about customer choice and the customer's going to choose you know, kind of by workload, even if you will or by budget as to what they're going to do where so you have to be able to operate in that world or you're going to be you're going to get, you're going to get left out unless you're just super dominant and it's a single application and they built it on you and that's it. But that's not realistic. I want to shift gears a little bit Bob, since I'm so happy to be talking to you on another topic, that's, that's a big mega trend and we're slowly seeing more and more applications. That's machine learning and artificial intelligence and you know, and, and the generic conversations about these remind me of the old big data conversations. It's like okay. So what you know, who cares? It doesn't really matter until you apply it. And with all these new applications and even just around the work from home that we discussed earlier, you know, there's so many opportunities to apply machine learning and AI, to very specific functions and tasks to, again, help people prioritize what they're going to do help people not have to deal with the crap that they shouldn't have to do. And really, you know at a whole another level of, of productivity really, based on a smarter way to help them figure out what am I going to do in my next, my next marginal minute? You know, cause ultimately that's the decision that people make when they're sitting down getting work, done it, how do they do the best work? And I think the AI and machine learning opportunities are gargantuan. >> Jeff. The point you made a few minutes ago about, you know, we tend to overestimate the impact of a new technology in the short term and underestimate it, what it'll be overtime well, we've been doing that with AI for the last 40 years but this is going to be sort of the golden age of it. And one of the reasons why I have been so bullish on cloud is it presents like the perfect delivery system for it. This is we see in medicine, there's sometimes breakthroughs at the laboratory level where they've got the new breakthrough medication but they don't have the bullet. They don't have the delivery system to get it in there, cloud's going to be an accelerator for that. And it gives the tech companies, which and this is going to be very good for customers, every big tech company. Now as a data company, every company says, it's an analytics. Everybody says I'm into AI. Every company says I'm into ML. And in a way that's real good for customers cause the competitive level is going to soar. It's going to bring more choice. As you said, the more customers more types of solutions, more sorts of innovation. And it's also going to be incumbent on those tech vendors. You've got to make it as easy as possible, as fast as possible for these customers to get the benefit of it. I think it was Thomas Kurian, the CEO of Google cloud said, Hey, you know, if, if a shoe company or a retailer or a bank had fantastic expertise in data science, they could go out and hire 200 data scientists do this all themselves. He said, but that's not what they do. And they don't want to do that. >> Right. >> So he said, come to the companies who can do it. And I think that we will see changes in how business works driven by ML and AI, unlike anything that we've ever seen. >> Yeah. >> And that's going to happen over the next 12, 18 months. >> Yeah. Baked into everything. Well, Bob, I really am excited that we finally got to catch up in, in person COVID style. Like I said, I've been following you for a long time. So I just gave you the last word before we sign off. You know, you've been in this business for a long time. You've seen lots and lots of waves. You know, this is just another wave with this, with this, you know, gasoline thrown on the fire with, with COVID in terms of the rate of change. And the, you know there's no more talking, the time to move is now, share kind of your perspective as to kind of where we are. And, you know, we're, we're not that far from flipping the calendar to 2021, which is a good thing you know, as you, as you look forward a little bit you know, what's in your mind, what's getting you excited. What's getting you up in the morning. >> Yeah. Jeff, I guess it comes down to this thing of, we, I think here late in 2020, everybody's got a reason to be pretty proud of what we have done, not only in the last six months but over the last several years, if you look at the improvements that have been made in health care and making it available to more people, in education the things that teenagers or young teenagers or even pre-teenagers can do now to learn and explore the world and communicate with people from all over the globe, there's a lot of great things going on, but I think we're going to look back on this point and say, this was, this was a pivot point here in mid and late 2020, when we stopped letting in some ways, as you described it earlier worrying so much about the things we can't do. And instead put more time into what we can do, what breakthroughs can we make. And I think these things we've talked about with AI and ML are going to be a big part of that, the computer industry or the tech industry, maturing and understanding they're not in charge. It's the customers who are in charge here. And the tech companies have to reorient themselves and reimagine themselves to meet the demands of this new fast changing world. And so I think those are some of the mega trends and more and more Jeff, I think these tech companies are going to say that the customers are demanding that the tech companies give them the gift of speed, give them the gift of engaging with customers in new ways, give them the gift of seeing the world as other people see it rather than just through the narrow lens of, you know sometimes the tech bubble that can percolate somewhere out sometimes out in the Palo Alto area. So I, I'm incredibly optimistic about what the future is going to bring. >> Well, Thank you. Thanks for Bob for sharing your insight. You can follow Bob on Twitter. He's got podcasts, he's very prolific writer and again, really, really a great to meet you in person. And thanks for sharing your thoughts >> Jeff, thanks so much. You guys do a fantastic job and it's been a pleasure to be with you. >> Thank you. Allright. He's Bob Evans. I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCube from our Palo Alto studios. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (soft music)

>> From the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman And we're digging in with the VMware cloud on AWS update, of course, an important solution set we've been talking about for a couple of years. If you see we've done interviews with some of the VMware and AWS executives, we did a deep dive on some of the technology. And now we get to dig in with one of the users of the technology. Of course, the executive talk about the proof of how many customers have been using it. So happy to welcome to the program I have two guests from PLM insurance. First, sitting right next to me on the screen is BJ Gardner, who's the lead system architect. Next to him is Dave Zeigenfuss, who is a senior systems architect. BJ and Dave, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you for having us. All right. So BJ, just for our audience that does not know, Pennsylvania Lumberman's Mutual Insurance Company, give us a little bit about The company 125 years in history, obvious with the name, it's in the insurance business but help us understand, you know, what your business is and what you and Dave do for the organization. >> Sure, so Pennsylvania Lumbermens has been around for under 125 years, we just celebrated the 100 and 25th year. This February Actually, we are commercial insurance company, property Casualty. And we specialize in the wood niche. So we cover everything from lumber yards to auto fleets that have anything to do with moving wood selling wood. So we're pretty niche, we're pretty specific in our brand. And we're a mutual insurer. We're one of the few if not only one, left that does not offer insurance on mutual space >> Alright, and BJ give us a little bit of snapshot from an IT standpoint, obviously, you're using VMware, cause you're here, talk to us about what data centers and cloud usage looks like for PLM. >> So I've been without Pennsylvania Lumbermens for about 15 years, and we were operating in full on-prem with bare metal servers, and 2007-2008, We started with the VMware product set. And since then we've been moving little by little to the cloud. We have many of our core applications are sitting with vendors in the cloud as of right now, we have a small data center in Philadelphia that is an on prem. And then we have, which we'll talk about, why have cloud data center as a service model with the VMware Certified cloud partner called Faction. And then we also now have our disaster recovery as a cloud product. >> Excellent. Since we're talking about the the VMware cloud on AWS bring us inside a little bit,that DR In this case that you're using. That hybrid model, help tease that out. BJ will Start with you. And I'm sure, Dave will have some color to give after you share. >> Sure, I mean, you know, when you're talking about disaster recovery in general, the need to maintain business continuity, while keeping a lean IT staff and with no extended downtime and data loss is just... it's not an option. You can't afford to be down, you can't afford to lose data. So having a cloud service now for disaster recovery, or at least the concept of that helps us more IT shop, in the way of resources that we just don't have on hand on staff. So, that's, pretty much the biggest goal for us, is to maintain business continuity and you know, with our lean staff at the same time. >> Echoing BJ a bit, having an on prem solution and really, to BJ'S point about our lean staff, It made things quite cumbersome for us with maintaining backups replications and such. There was a lot involved. It was very time consuming. So the handoff to utilizing VMware cloud for our disaster purposes really, really helped that benefit our team as a whole. >> All right, you mentioned your partner on this solution is Faction. Help us understand how you made the decision to go down this path. >> So I can give you a quick... a quick rundown here how Faction came to be. so we're located our corporate is in fellow Philadelphia PA. We occupied two floors in an office building. Our data center was on the one floor we were consolidating. And we moved up to just one single floor. So we basically lost the footprint of the data center. So I went out hunting for co location type vendor, and hooked up with Faction. And yeah, so we've been with Faction for since 2015. We've had their, I call it kind of co lo, plus data centers as a service model, since then, since 2015. And we've been with them doing different initiatives here and there over the years and disaster recovery as a service is now one of them. >> Great, Dave, you've maybe supply a little more color on that piece. >> Yeah, sure. Yeah, the use of VMware cloud with Site Recovery Manager. Again, from a technical standpoint, it was second to none as far as the flexibility it gave us to grow our workloads, to maintain them. Recovery point objective was what really sold me. It allowed us to get extremely granular from a business continuity perspective. And, yeah, I'm a fan. I just, I really like VMware cloud with SRM. It's proven to be top notch. >> Yeah, maybe follow up on that, you've been a VMware customer for a number of years, you're familiar with the tooling, and everything else like that. So, how long did a solution like this take to roll out? >> So, I will guess so, absolutely, there was a good portion from when we started, so you have to kind of put it in perspective, because we had a data center in Atlanta, Georgia, that was our data recovery site with action. So we had a two fold project, we were going into a contract year, a renewal year. And Faction pitched, the AWS VMware on AWS service. So we were decommissioning a data center at the same time as we were rolling it out. So I'll just give you the quick timeline. So November of 2018, was basically the contract negotiations. We finalized everything kind of in February of 2019. As far as kicking off the call on how we are going to actually do the project. Work began around April of 2019. Faction went ahead and set up the AWS DDC environment in early May. Faction builds out the environment for the rest of May. June, we did some non disruptive load testing on the environment in AWS. We set up the replication recovery group build out throughout the summer of 2019. And then we had a full sign off in September 17th actually 2019 so I'll just kind of highlight though, in that process, that it took roughly about four months to do the full build out testing and the Atlanta data center decommissioning. >> Okay, and PJ after having done this, we've now got DR as a Service, what are the hero numbers? Have you reduced their cost savings loannes, How do you report up? The success or result of what you've done so far? >> Yeah, so speaking to that, so when we did the contract negotiation, in November of 2018, one of the things we realized when we were pitching the cloud disaster recovery as a service model, we saw roughly about a 20% annual savings in moving to this cloud service. So, a breakdown of what kind of the savings is it's pretty much in Atlanta we have some resource costs because we're running basically on a pillow type environment with with Baxter. and then we had a circuitry call, so we had a point to point line that would run out to, actually to New Jersey and then down to Atlanta. So we that cost as well. So we saved basically, we ripped out the point circuit And we got we offloaded some resource costs. So, like I said about a roughly about a 20% cost savings. >> Alright, so that that's some of the hard figures. Dave, bring us inside a little bit operationally, obviously, there's got to be a little bit of changes to how you manage things, automation is, has been hot for years, but even more so when you talk about cloud environments. So, how is this deployment, changed what the workers are doing and beyond that? >> Well, it's it's simplified things quite a bit, just by the partnership with Faction and in conjunction with VMware cloud for our disaster recovery solution, It's offered many benefits. For one, we had a primary engineer who left the company, we found some benefits to not having to fill that staff resource, so that that was also a positive from a money aspect. But as far as the day to day functioning where we go about doing things up, it really took things off my plate, off the rest of the teams plate And just really, really gave us a peace of mind as it pertains to our, our infrastructure and our data being secured. >> All right, well, I want to give you both the final word. What learnings do you have out of this? Any best practices you'd share? Or there's also some updates coming, taking VMware being able to take advantage of the latest bare metal offering from Amazon? I'll let you choose maybe BJ, we'll start with you and wrap with you Dave as to that those final words that you would share with your peers >> Yeah, I'll certainly start it off. I mean, coming from my perspective as kind of the manager of the team here, our goal as a company, our goal as an IT shop, our goal as an operations team, is to ensure the company's technology needs, will be met after, in the event of a disaster. And that is the key. You want to protect itself, you want to protect the data, you want to protect the customers. So, in the case of the cloud for us, is maintaining business continuity while reducing physical footprint and keeping the IT operations lean, like I had stated before. And one of the most important things and this is not just about disaster recovery, but establishing good partnerships with vendors, is absolutely imperative. Because I don't care how big your shop is, and again, we're on the small side, obviously, but you can't you can't do it alone. So you need really good strong partnerships and good relationships with them. >> And I would say, make sure you are Identify your critical business workloads. Know your environment, absolutely. It's imperative. Get it, you have to plan efficiently. And by all means, test, test test test, you can't test the solution enough. So that's really about all I have. >> All right, Well, David, BJ, thank you so much for joining us appreciate you sharing your your journey along and wish you the best of luck with the solution going forward. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> And thank you for joining us for this update VMware cloud on AWS, be sure to check out the cube.net for all the rest of the coverage we have both in the VMware and AWS ecosystems. I'm Stu Miniman And thank you as always for watching the cube. (upbeat music)

>> Voiceover: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome to this announcement with VMware cloud on AWS update. Happy to welcome back to the program, Matt Morgan. He is the Vice President of global marketing with VMware cloud services. And welcome into the program Fred Wurden, he's the general manager of EC2 enterprise at Amazon Web Services. Thank you so much both for joining us. >> Good to see you Stu. >> Same, thanks Stu. >> Matt, and Fred, the VMware AWS partnership is one that has gotten a lot of attention. I know any time back in the day when we used to go to physical trade shows, I could know when there was a session talking about this because it was usually full and overflowing. When I've written about this topic or doing videos about it it definitely gets quite a lot of attention. So it's been over three years since the partnership was announced but still, when I talk to people, they don't necessarily really understand the depth of the integration and the work that gets done on both sides even though you get clear messages from both Andy Jassy and Pat Gelsinger about how important this is. Matt, maybe start with you and Fred would love your commentary as to this three year partnership and where we are today here in 2020. >> Absolutely, since the initial announcement of the VMware AWS relationships, we have actually built a very special cloud service. And today, we're actually deepening our partnership. In fact, today, VMware goes to market saying that AWS and only AWS is our preferred public cloud partner for all vSphere based workloads. VMware cloud on AWS is a jointly engineered service. Meaning, our product teams our r&d teams are all working together to deliver VMware enterprise class Software Defined data center solution to the AWS cloud. VMware Cloud foundation is the core technology that's behind our service. And it gives us the capability to deliver that same level of infrastructure familiarity and consistency that our customers use today, across every data center location, the edge and of course inside the public cloud. VMware cloud on AWS attracts an enormous amount of interest from customers. And these customers are in every vertical, whether you're speaking of healthcare, media and entertainment, transportation, financial services, manufacturing, energy, government, education, professional services, and of course technology. And together with AWS, we're bringing together services that are being used across the whole portfolio of cloud optionality. This includes cloud migration from whether you're talking about a single app or complete data center, disaster recovery, whether you're talking about replacing a legacy system or building new disaster recovery in the cloud. Data center extension building that hybrid cloud. And of course, modernizing applications which we classify under the term application modernization. >> Great, and Fred from the Amazon side. >> Yeah, the partnership is been fantastic over three years. And I can't express enough how hard it is to actually deliver a simple solution that customers are asking for from all levels of both organizations. And to do that it takes both AWS and VMware to deliver a solution that allows companies to leverage what they know today and extend that into the cloud. And leverage all of the benefits that we're going to go over and a rapid delivery of new features which they haven't had before ever. So it's fantastic a partnership. I love what we've been doing at all levels. And I say it's going to continue. The scale at which we're growing is fantastic. And with that, I'm happy to go over some of the announcements and why we're doing what we're doing which is all based on listening and what our customers want. >> Excellent. Well, Fred, hey, we're glad first of all, that it did not get called VMC on AWS SS. Because we have enough acronyms already in tech. Matt, VMware and AWS, of course, clear leadership in the marketplace. With three years, bring us inside as to you talked about all the verticals that were used, but where's the proof on the adoption of this technology? Love to hear a little bit about that. >> Yeah, absolutely. So we have customer examples across the verticals we spoke of, but it's the customer stories that are the real value demonstrator. Let's pick up a couple of those. IHS market, they were able to move 1000 plus workloads to the public cloud. And that story is kind of common in the world. But what's unique about this particular story is IHS market moved them in just six weeks. If you look at the cloud migration strategy in general, for someone to move that fast with that many workloads, it's unheard of. VMware empowers that because the operating setup that organizations have standardized in their data center is identical in the public cloud. So organizations can move workloads we see them move hundreds of workloads in a week from their data center up to the public cloud. In addition to that, we have customer examples like the Pennsylvania Lumberman's Mutual Insurance Company. They were able to demonstrate 20% cost savings by moving their disaster recovery systems to VMware cloud on AWS. And that was initial savings right off the rip. Other customers like William Hill, George St. PA, Stage Coast, PHS Mortgage, they're all demonstrating the significant value adds when people move over to the public cloud, but leverage that VMware cloud solution. >> And Fred obviously, AWS also plays across these environments. We would like to hear your side too. >> Yeah, a couple examples like S&P global ratings, they spin up a new application environment in a few hours instead of months. Let alone taking all the burden off of their supply chain and management of that. Like Matt said in terms of seeing cost savings. So agility and speed allows them to really focus on their applications and start to modernize and innovate in areas that really differentiate them. They've had 100% uptime for regulatory applications and a 50% improved disaster recovery time. Other customers have built out a disaster recovery plan and then actually spun to VMware cloud on AWS as their primary because they had better performance. So it's the whole range of options in terms of better performance, better TCL and economics and mostly agility on what they can do going forward with applications that may already be built on AWS as well with native services. >> Matt, you touched on some great customer examples, maybe maybe give us some, broad themes as to what are the key drivers as to why customers are adopting VMware cloud on AWS? >> Yeah, absolutely. As with any infrastructure conversation, total cost of ownership is a big piece of the equation. Organizations want to look at their footprint today. They want to look at their footprint next year, and then of course, many years out. So when you look at the public cloud, cloud economics are a big driver. VMware, of course adopts the whole concept of cloud economics whole full horse. Meaning that we give you the capability to recognize the advantages of an apex object model, the ability to have on demand services, the ability to have a managed IaaS, all of that is part and parcel to our service. But on top of that, there's unique capabilities that VMware cloud on AWS delivers that deliver unique economic value. The first is this concept of zero refactoring. Our customers tell us that this alone allows them to eliminate what they call is rework, sometimes called the rework tax. Which prevents organizations from moving applications to the cloud without reworking them, without working their data layer, re architecting how they run, they can move them because the operating layer is consistent. Another area of value that's unique to VMware cloud on AWS is the leverage of existing skill sets. Today's operators are trained on vCenter. They're trained on all the supporting infrastructure around VMware. All of that applies with VMware cloud on AWS. So the ability to translate those skills into a cloud skill set right off the bat is of enormous value. Of course flexibilities another big one, as organizations embrace what it being seen as composite applications, which are applications that span the data center, the public cloud out to the edge. The ability to move logic as needed to be able to have portability is something we deliver. Again, that's an economic value that we are able to provide. Now this has been quantified by third parties. There's been several major third parties, including Forrester, including IDC, that have published value added statements around the total economic impact of VMware cloud on AWS. In fact, just last year, there was a study that was commissioned by Forrester that demonstrated a 59% reoccurring savings in terms of infrastructure and operating savings, compared to an on premise implementation. When you look at migration that accelerates to 69% 'cause organizations can save almost 70% of moving applications by eliminating rework and refactoring. That's an IDC statistic. >> All right Matt. Maybe it would make sense to talk about just overall adoption of the solution. I believe you've got some stats you can share. >> So yeah, if you look at the adoption, we have delivered enormous growth over the last year of the service. Total number of hosts year over year are up 2.5x. Total number of running VMs year over year is actually larger at 3.5x. Which indicates that customers are not just adopting, but they're accelerating their adoption. We now have 21,000 plus number of hands on labs that have been consumed since July of 2019, a year ago. And there are now 300 plus validated technology partner solutions available. And on top of that, 530 channel partners with VMware cloud service competency are now registered and available to assist. These are tremendous statistics for 12 short months. >> Well, congratulations on to both VMware and AWS on that progress. Maybe talk a little bit about trends. Just briefly, if I look over the last three months we've talked about AWS and VMware customers. Obviously, with the global pandemic, there's been certain things that they've needed to rapidly do things like, VDI, end user computing, remote contact centers are something that they need to rapidly expand on. But, is there anything different or general trends that that you would both like to share? Matt, we'll once again, start with you and then Fred get your take on it. >> Yeah, there's a regional school district in the US that in light of COVID, needed to spin up 10,000 plus people working remotely. And by leveraging VMware cloud on AWS, they were able to conduct virtual classrooms in very short order by leveraging this broad scale infrastructure powered by VMware cloud on AWS. Over time, that provided flexibility and agility, but it also reduced their costs. They've been able to eliminate hardware replacement plans that were going to cost significant amount of money. In fact, they're showing and telling us that they're able to save 75% of those forecasted costs. But everything is really about business continuity today. Today's unfortunate economic environment where we're working through this pandemic, this global pandemic, IT organizations and businesses, they're embracing a tried and true understanding of what it means to move to the cloud. But they're embracing it in a more aggressive way because the supply chain has been disrupted. If you think about a traditional supply chain, where organizations have to receive machines, set up those machines, have them wired in have certain people on site to get those machines configured, move application. That's a lot of steps in the process, many of which have been totally disrupted during the pandemic. The idea of VMware cloud on AWS is that you replace an analog supply chain with a digital supply chain. We can now help organizations get new equipment, new capacity, new resources up and running instantly. They don't have to worry about all the steps that were previously required that have been disrupted in a pandemic. The cloud provides that operating environment that maps one for one to the realities of today's world. And they're also able to understand that looking forward, that that setup enables them to be more future ready. Ready for whatever comes next to deliver what the business needs. >> Yeah, there's a number of reasons that you just touched on Matt, that are examples that we can bring out on that elasticity. For example, Penny Mac, anytime there are changes in the market, for example, on either both for VDI or just on processing of loans. When the pandemic hit, a lot of people actually paused on both looking and or changing their patterns. And this solution has been fantastic for either scaling up or scaling down both ways. And they can do it very quickly. They can do it within a number of a variety of means whether it's a single VM, or it's moving an entire migration into VMware cloud on AWS. So great results there. The case studies speak for themselves. There's a lot of examples that we have up on both of our sites. We'd really be good to take a look at those in detail if you're interested, it's fun to see. Helps a lot of people out. >> If I could follow up with you on something here. I want to talk about I go to the cloud, often that movement is step one, how do I take advantage of modernization, whether that be for my application standpoint, or leveraging new services? I wonder you can give me the AWS side there? And, Matt would love to hear how VMware is helping customers along this journey too. >> Well, the first is we want to meet people they're at with their knowledge set and their skill set. And this is a fantastic part. Customers can move quickly with the domain knowledge that they've go. We can assist in translating and making sure that the environment and the STDC is set up in a way that is tailored to what their needs are. Whether it's an extension, or if it's a complete migration of step one. But step two really is once they're leveraging VMware cloud on AWS is they have a lot of needs in terms of their CICD, their development tools, or samples and applications around automation. And we can take and help them with that. That content is already posted on our developer tool site and our developer center for this solution. It really assists them in learning about how to leverage the elasticity and the security and the networking capabilities that allow them to go in and then use all the rest of the rich AWS services as well. So, if you look at some of the things that are coming out for example, VMware Transit Connect. Which allows, a layer three solution to be built on top of our AWS transit gateway so that we can interconnect multiple VPCs in an environment that may be running either software as a solution on AWS or a native application that was built with managed services, completely in sync and in harmony, with VMware cloud on AWS. So that's what's happening at a rapid pace. It allows people to bite off the chunks that they want to modernize and reuse tools that are either familiar with them, and or automation improvements that we've got between code tools across the board. So it's great to see the work that they're doing >> Great, and Matt on the modernization piece. >> Yeah, so our surveys tell us that customers want to modernize their existing applications. But those same customers don't want to start over. So this is an important value proposition that we deliver in partnership with AWS. Organizations can take a business process application, they can migrate it to the cloud, they can extend and reach that application with AWS services. They can extend and reach that applications with additional machine learning capabilities, they can extend it with containerized extensions. They can support a broader modern agenda without having to start over. And I think that that is a value proposition that resonates with everyone, because people often need must leverage what they already have built with what the baseline is for the business itself. In addition to this, composite applications are now becoming the norm. With data and processing being more CO located, end to end Applications often consist of processing and data for certain tasks to be either pushed out to the edge or remain on premises in the data center in addition to the cloud. That value proposition of VMware delivering a hybrid cloud with consistent infrastructure and operations enables those composite applications to be built and deployed in a highly efficient way, which is a big piece to the modernization story. In addition to this with tons of Kubernetes grid as a customer managed option, organizations can run those containerized components right on top of our service, all of which integrates very cleanly with a whole library of services that AWS offers. End to end, you have all the optionality you need plus the speed of migration and capabilities once you get up to the public cloud. >> All right, let's get into the new pieces of the partnership here. Matt, first of all, when I think about VMware cloud on AWS, the customers that I've mostly spoken to over the last couple of years have tended to be some of the larger enterprises. I've heard you're alluding towards some capabilities to the small and medium business. I know I'm looking forward to talking to PLM insurance, one of the companies that are leveraging this solution as part of this announcement. What's new and the impact that this will have on the addressable market that VMware cloud can hit for AWS? >> Yeah, so with this announcement, VMware cloud on AWS, we're extending it to offer three new capabilities. Three new announcements of capabilities. The first one is all about what you just spoke of. Which is about extending the VMware cloud on AWS value proposition to more customers. So currently, customers can spin up production clusters with three hosts are, of course much more than that. But three hosts was kind of the entry level for a production cluster. What we're announcing is the ability to create production clusters with all the capable abilities that go into what we define as a production cluster with just two hosts. That means customers will be able to deploy production environments with two hosts in a cluster, dramatically reducing their costs. In fact, the traditional costs will come down by 33%. So this is all about providing the full capabilities of VMware cloud on AWS, but to be able to do it at a smaller investment envelope. So in addition to this, we're rolling out enhancements to VMware cloud director offering it as a service. VMware cloud director now will deliver multi tenancy to VMware cloud on AWS specifically designed for MSPs. As you know VMware partner ecosystem is filled with managed service providers. We have a mean enormous collection of these that add value on top of VMware cloud on AWS. Here by using VMware vcloud director service, they can deliver multi tenancy to their customers. And this is designed specifically to serve the needs of small to medium sized enterprises. These capabilities enable MSPs to serve those needs and it will be available initially in North America. And this will give them the opportunity to say, hey, if you want to get started on VMware cloud on AWS, we can give you bite sized pools designed specifically for what you need. And this is a very asset light pay as you grow model, which aligns specifically to that market. >> It's fascinating to watch Matt, I think, not that many years ago, if I had attended VMworld and talked to the MSPs. And they talk how deeply they appreciate the VMware partnership and that cloud company was the enemy. And, today AWS and VMware partnering with them, helping to make sure that in this hybrid world that they play a role to help get to the enterprise. Fred, anytime we go to reinvent, new announcements usually come to a huge fanfare, even something like a new bare metal instance. Last year it was the I3en metal instance. People get pretty excited. Help us understand you know what this really means, what advantages it has? Are there any limitations? What should we know about the capabilities AWS has now available to the VMware cloud? >> Well, first off, thanks Stu, I3en is really exciting that we're launching. It will meet the need of storage intensive workloads. And it'll do it far better than what we've had before. It takes advantage of all the learnings and the investments that we put into instances across the board for AWS such as Nitro. If you have, high random IO access, such as needed for relational database or workloads that have additional security that we have baked in, it's going to meet those needs. Compared to I3 metal, it has more memory, more usable, high performance storage and additional security. The example of a yield compared to I3 is about a 22% performance improvement and value. We're delivering four times the raw storage for about 2.2 times the cost. So in essence, you're getting raw storage at half the cost of an I3. So customers are excited. it's one of many instances that we will launch in the future for VMware cloud on AWS. And that's one of the advantages, is people can instantly take advantage of these innovations that we have. Just like we've done across all of the other instance families to meet workloads that customers are talking to us about that they want to run on this platform. >> Excellent, well, we really look forward. I know we're going to have a deep dive with Colbert to go into a little bit under the hood. And as I mentioned, got one of your joint customers PLM Insurance to understand their use case and how they're doing it. Matt and Fred, if you could just give us final takeaway, VMware cloud on AWS, Matt, and then Fred. >> Well, first off, thank you Stu for this opportunity to speak. I always enjoy spending time with you and certainly with Fred. We're just super excited and thrilled about our partnership. VMware couldn't be happier with our partnership with AWS from engineering to marketing, customer experience. Our teams are working together hand in glove to ensure success for our customers. VMware cloud on AWS is a truly unique service. Customers can continue business operations with minimal disruption in case of any uncertain event, they can migrate their workloads fast in a very cost effective manner with minimal risk. And we're really all about helping large enterprises as well as small and medium businesses accelerate their cloud migration and modernization journey. In fact, if you look across the board, we have seen enormous uptake. And now with these new offerings that we talked about, especially the two hosts production cluster, and VMware cloud Director service, we believe we're going to be more attractive to more organizations of various sizes. We're excited about the road ahead. >> And Fred. >> Customers are excited about this road, I would add. One, thank you guys for having us on. It's great to tell this story. The feedback has been phenomenal . The growth in the adoption and what we're seeing in terms of the use cases across the board is much stronger than we could have imagined. So it's really great to see this work that is hard to do to really merge the best of VMware and the best of AWS in a true deep partnership. And that takes work at all layers, whether it's a commerce system integration, or if it's the instance engineering and roadmap work across the board or networking. And customer support across the board for solutions that run on this platform. Both of us are joined to make sure customers are satisfied regardless of what it takes. That's something that no one else has. And it is unique. And it's a long term commitment that we have with each other to do the right thing for the solution. 'Cause we can't do it individually. This is something that truly only a joint partnership as strong as this is, and has gotten stronger can deliver. So we're super excited about it. I think you're going to continue to see the pace of innovation on what we're delivering increase. And so, with that, it's been great to work with VMware on this. It's really fun. >> Well, thank you, Fred. Thank you, Matt. Yeah, congratulation to your team. And of course, love hearing the customer stories and feedback. >> Thank you Stu. >> All right. Be sure to check out the other interviews as part of this announcement and check out theCUBE.net of course, we're covering VMware and AWS deeply including their shows whether they are in person or virtual. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE.

(upbeat electronic music) >> Announcer: From the CUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hey welcome back already, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studios today having a Cube conversation. You know nobody can really travel, conference seasons are all kind of on hold, or going to digital, so there's a lot of interesting stuff going on. But thankfully we've got the capability to invite some of our community in. We're really interested in hearing from some of the leaders that we have in the community about what's going on in their world and you know, what they're telling their people. And what can we learn. So we're excited to have a good friend of mine who went to business school together, God it seems like it was over 20 years ago. He's Ben Nelson, the chairman and CEO of the Minerva Project. Ben great to see you and welcome. >> Thanks so much, great to be here. >> Yeah. So, you have always been kind of a trailblazer, I mean way back in the day I think that you've only had like two jobs in all this time, you know. (laughing) You know kind of changing the world of digital photography. >> Yeah three or four, three or four. >> Three or four. >> Yeah. (laughing) >> And after a really long run, you made this move to start something new in education. >> Yeah. >> Education's a big hairy monster. There's a lot of angles. And you started the Minerva Project, and I can't believe I looked before we got on today that that was nine years ago. So tell us about the Minerva Project, how you got started, kind of what's the mission, and then we'll get into it. >> Yeah so Minerva exists and it sounds somewhat lofty for an organization, but we do exist to serve this mission which is to nurture critical wisdom for the sake of the world. We think a wiser world is a better world. We think that really wisdom is the core goal of education and we decided that higher education is the area that is both most in need of transformation and also one that we're most capable of influencing. And so we set about actually creating our own university demonstrating an example of what a university can do. And then, helping tool other institutions to follow in those footsteps. >> Yeah it's a really interesting take. There's often times we're told if a time traveler came here from 1776, right, and walked around and would look at the way we drive, look at the way we communicate, look at the way we transact business. All these things would be so new and novel inventive. If you walked them over to Stanford or Harvard he'd feel right at home, you know. >> Yeah. >> So the education is still kind of locked in to this way that it's always been. So for you to kind of take a new approach, I mean I guess it did take actually starting your own school to be able to execute and leverage some of these new methods and tools, versus trying to move what is a pretty, you know, kind of hard to move institutional base. >> Yeah absolutely. And it's also you know, because we have to remember that universities as an institution started before the printing press. So if you go and talk to pretty much any university president, and ask him or her what is the mission of a university, generically, forget you know your university or what have you. They'll say, "Well generically universities exist "to create and disseminate knowledge." That's why they've been founded 1000 years ago and that's why they exist today. And you know, creation of knowledge I think there's a good argument to be made that the research mission of a university is important for the advancement of society and that it needs to be supported. Certainly directly in that regard. So much of you know the innovation that we benefit from today came from university labs and research. That's an important factor. But the dissemination of knowledge is a bit of an odd thing. I guess before the printing press, sure, yeah, I mean kind of hard to disseminate knowledge except for if you gather a whole bunch of people in a room and talk at them. Maybe they scribble notes very quickly. Well that's a decent way of disseminating knowledge because they can you know, one mouth and many pieces of paper and then they can read it later or study it. I guess that makes sense it's somewhat efficient. But after the printing press and certainly after the internet, the concept of a university needing to disseminate knowledge as it's core mission seems kind of crazy. It can't be that that's what universities are for. But effectively they're still structured in that way. And I don't think any university president when actually challenged in that way would argue the point. They would say, "Oh yes of course, "well what we really need to do is teach people "how to use knowledge or evaluate knowledge "or make sure that we communicate effectively "or understand how that knowledge can interact "with other pieces of knowledge and you know, "create new ways of thinking, et cetera." But that isn't the dissemination of knowledge. And that isn't the way that universities are actually structured. >> But it's funny that you say that. Even before you get to whether they should be still trying to disseminate knowledge, they're not even using the new tools now that they had the printing press that come along. (laughing) To disseminate knowledge. You know it's really interesting as we're going through this time right now with the coronavirus and a lot of things that were kind of traditional are moving in to digital and this new tool called Zoom which never fails to amaze me how many people are having their first Zoom call ever, right. >> Right, right. >> Ever, right I mean how long ago was Skype, how long ago was WebX. These tools have been around for a really interesting time, a long time. But now, you know, kind of a critical mass of technology that anybody can flip their laptop up, or their phone and go. You know you guys just in terms of a pure kind of tools play you know took advantage of the things that are available here in 2020 and 2019. So I wonder if you can share with the folks that don't have experience kind of using remote learning and remote access, you know what are some of the lessons you learned what are some of the best practice. What should people kind of think about what's capable and the things you can do with digital tools that you can't do when you're trying to get everybody in a classroom together at the same time. >> Right, so I think first and foremost, there's kind of the nuts and bolts. The basics. Right. So one of the things that you know, education environments have always been able to get away with is when you've got everyone in a room and you know, you're kind of cutting them off from the rest of life, you sometimes don't realize that you're talking into thin air, right. That maybe speaking students are not listening, they're not absorbing what you're saying. But you know they have to show up, at least in K 12, and higher ed they don't bother showing up and so the 15 people who do wind up showing up from the 100 person lecture I guess you do you say, "Oh at least they're listening." But the reality is that when you're online, you're competing with everything. You're competing with the next tab, you're competing with just not showing up. It's so much easier to just, you know, open up some game or something, some YouTube video. And so you've got to make this engaging. And making it engaging isn't about being entertaining. And that's actually one of the major problems of assessing who is a good professor and who isn't. You know people look at student reviews, right. They say, "Oh, you know such and such "was such a great professor." But when you actually track student reviews of professors to learning outcomes, there's a slight negative correlation. Right which means that the better the students believe the professor is actually that is an indicator that they've learned a little bit less. >> Right. >> That's really bizarre, intuitively. But when you actually think about it deeply, you realize that entertaining students isn't the job of a professor. It's actually teaching them. It's actually getting them to think through the material. And learning is hard, it's not easy. So you have to bring some of those techniques of engagement into online. And you can do that but it requires a lot of interactivity. So that's aspect number one. But really the much bigger idea isn't that you just do what you do offline and then put it online, right. Technology isn't at it's best when it mimics what you do without it, right. Technology didn't build an exact replica of the horse. >> Right, right. >> And said you know, ride that. Right. It doesn't make any sense, right. Instead, what technology should do is things you cannot do offline. One of the things that worked 300, 400 years ago is that you could study a subject matter in full. One professor, one teacher could teach you pretty much everything that people needed to know in a given field. In fact, the fields themselves were collapsed, right. Science, mathematics, you know, ethics were all put under this idea called philosophy. Philosophy was everything. Right. And so there's really we didn't have much to learn. But today, because we have so much information and so many tools to be able to process through that information, what happens is that education gets atomized. And you know you go through a college education you're you know, being taught by 25, 30 some different professors. But one professor really has no idea what you've learned previously. Even when they're in a 101, 102 sequence. How many times have we been in kind of the 102 class where in the first month all the professor did was repeat what happened in the 101 class because they didn't feel comfortable that you actually learned it. Or if the professor before them taught it the way they wanted it taught. >> Right, right. >> And that's because education is done offline with no data. If you actually have education in a data rich environment you can actually design cross cutting curriculum. You can shift the professor's role from disseminating knowledge to actually having students or mentoring students and guiding them in how to apply that knowledge. And so, once you have institutional views of curricula, you can use technology to deliver an institution wide education. Not by teaching you a way of thinking or a set of content, but giving you a set of tools that broadly any professor can agree on, and then apply them to whatever context professors want to present. And that creates a much more holistic education, and it's one that only can be done using technology. >> Ben that was a mouthful. You got into all kinds of good stuff there. (laughing) So let's break some of it down. That was fascinating. I mean I think you know the asynchronous versus synchronous opportunity if you will, to as you said kind of atomize education to the creation of content right the distribution of content and more importantly the consumption of content. Because why should I have to change my day if the person I want to hear is only available next Tuesday at noon pacific, right. It makes no sense anymore. And the long tail opportunities for this content that lives out there forever is pretty interesting. But it's a very interesting you know, kind of point of view if you assume that all the knowledge is already out there and now your job as an educator is to help train people to critically think about what's out there. How do I incorporate that, what are the things I should be thinking about when I'm integrating that into my decision. It's a very different way. And as you said, everything is an alt tab away. Literally the whole world is an alt tab away from that webinar. (laughing) Very good stuff. >> Exactly right. >> And the other piece I want to get your take on is really kind of lifetime learning. And I didn't know that you guys were you know kind of applying some of your principles oh my goodness where you actually measure effectiveness of teaching. And measure how long people hang out in the class. And measure whether it's good or not. But you're applying this really now in helping companies do digital transformation. And I think, you know, coming at that approach from a shift in thinking is really a different approach. I was just looking at an Andy Jassy keynote from a couple years ago yesterday, and he talked about the A number one thing in digital transformation is a buy in at senior leadership and a top down priority. So you know, what do you see in some of your engagements, how are you applying some of this principles to help people think about change differently? >> Yeah you know I think recessions are a very telling time for corporate learning. Right. And if you notice, what is the first budget that gets cut when economic times get tough it's the you know employee learning and development. Right. Those budgets just get decimated. Right off the bat. And that's primarily because employees don't see much value out of it, and employers don't really measure the impact of those things. No one's saying, "Oh my God, 'this is such an incredible program. "My employees were able to do x before this program, 'and then they were able to do one point five x afterward." You know, if people had that kind of training program in the traditional system, then they would be multi-billion dollar behemoths in the space. And there really are not. And that's because again, most of education is done in content land. And it's usually very expensive, and the results are not very good. Instead, if you actually think about learning tools as opposed to information, and then applying those tools in your core business, all of a sudden you can actually see transformation. And so when we do executive education programs as an example, you know we ask our learner how much of what you've learned can you apply to your job tomorrow? Right. And we see an overwhelming majority of our students are saying something like more than 80 to 90% of what they learned they can apply immediately. >> Wow, that's impressive. >> That's useful. >> Right. And why do you think is it just kind of institutional stuck in the mud? Is it the wrong incentive structure? I mean why you're talking about very simple stuff right. >> Yeah. >> Why don't you actually measure outcomes and adjust accordingly, you know. Use a data centric methodology to improve things over time, you know. Use digital tools in way that they can get you more than you can do in a physical space. I mean is it just inertia? I mean I really think this is a watershed moment because now everybody is forced into using these tools. Right. And there's a lot of, you know kind of psychology around habits and habit forming. >> Right, exactly. >> And if you do something for a certain amount of time every single day you know it becomes a habit. And if these stay in place orders which in my mind I think we are going to be doing it for a while, kind of change people's behavior and the way they use technology to interact with other folks. You know it could be a real, you know, kind of turning point in everyone's opening eyes that digital is different than physical. It's not exactly the same. There are some things in physical that are just better, but, you know there's a whole realm of things in digital that you cannot do when you're bound by time, location, and space. >> Exactly right. That's right. And I think the reason that it's so difficult to shift the system is because the training of people in the system, and I'm speaking specifically about higher education, really has nothing to do with education. Think about how a university professor becomes a university professor. How do they show up in a classroom? They get a bachelor's degree, where they don't learn anything about how to teach or how the mind works. They get a PhD, in which they learn nothing about how to teach or how the mind works. They do a post-doctoral research fellowship where they research in their field, right. Then they become an associate professor or an assistant professor and non-tenure, right. And in order to get tenure they've got seven years in order to make it on a publishing track, because how they teach is irrelevant. And they don't get any formal training on how to teach or how the brain works, right. Then they become you know, a junior tenured professor. A full tenured professor, right. And then maybe they become an administrator. Right. And so if you think about it, all they know is their field. And I've had conversations with academics which are to me befuddling, in the sense that you know they'll say, "Oh, you know, "everyone should learn how to think "like a historian. "Oh no everybody should learn to think "like an economist. "Everyone should learn to think "like a physicist." And you kind of unpack it, you say, "Well why?" And it's, "Oh well because we deploy pools "that nobody else deploys and it's so great." Right. And so it's OK give me an example. I had this conversation with a university president who was a historian. And that president said, "Look, you know, "what we do is we look at you know, "primary source materials hundreds of years ago "and learn to interpret what they say to us "and ascertain truth from that. "That's an incredibly important skill." I said, "OK, so what you're saying is you "examine evidence and evaluate that evidence "to see what it can actually tell you. "Isn't that what every single scientist, "social scientist, no matter what field they're in does? "Isn't that what a physicist does? "Isn't that what an economist does? "Isn't that what a psychologist does? "Right, isn't that what an English professor does?" Right actually thinking about I remember I took a mini module when I was an undergraduate with Rebecca Bushnell who is a literature professor, eventually became the dean of the college of arts and science at the University of Pennsylvania. And, we basically looked at a text written 400 years before, and tried to figure out what parts of the text were written by the author, what were transcription errors, and what was censored. That's looking at evidence. >> Right, right. >> This was an English professor. It's the exact same process. But because people know about it in their field and they think the only way to get to it is through their field, as opposed to teaching the tool, it can't get out of their own way. >> Yeah. >> And that's why I think education is so stuck right now. >> Yeah. That's crazy. And you know we're all victims of kind of the context in which we look through everything, and the lens in which we apply to everything that we see which is you know one of my things that there isn't really a kind of a truth it's what is your interpretation. And that's really you know, what is in your head. But I want to close it out. And Ben I really appreciate your time today. It's been a great conversation. And really kind of take it back to your mission which is around critical thinking. You know there's a lot of conversation lately, you know, this kind of rush to STEM as the thing. And there's certainly a lot of great job opportunities coming out of school if you're a data scientist and you can write in R. But what I think is a more interesting conversation is to get out of your own way. You know is the critical thinking as you know the AI and RPA and all these other things kind of take over more of these tasks and really this higher order need for people to think through complex problems. >> Right. >> I mean like we're going through today. Thank God people who are qualified and can see ahead and saw an exponential curve potential just really causing serious damage when we're still to head into this thing to take aggressive action. Dr. Sarah Cody here locally here you know, telling the San Jose Sharks you can't play. You know that is not an easy decision. But thankfully they did and they had the data. But really just your kind of thoughts on why you prioritize on critical thinking and you know can what you see with your students when they get out into the real world applying critical thinking not necessarily equations. >> Yeah look I think there's no better demonstration of how important critical thinking is than when you look at the kinds of advances that STEM is trying to make. Right. What happens any time we get a demonstration of the power of artificial intelligence, right. You remember a few years ago when Microsoft released it's AI engine. Right. Smartest engineers working on it, and all of a sudden it you know spat back misogynist racist types of perspectives. Why? The training set was garbage. It wasn't that the technology was bad, actually it was amazing technology. But the people who were writing it couldn't think. They didn't know how to think two steps ahead and say, "Wait a second, if we train "the information, kind of the random comments "we see on the internet, you know, "who bothers to write anonymomys comments?" Trolls, right. And so if we train it on a troll data set, it'll become an artificial intelligent troll. Right. It doesn't take a lot of critical thinking to actually realize that, but it takes some. >> Right. >> Right. And when you focus merely on those technical skills what you wind up doing is wasting it. Right. And so if you ground people in critical thinking, and we see this with our graduate. You know we graduated our very first class in May. And we had what as far as I can tell is the best graduate school placement of any graduating class in the country. As far as the quality of offers they got. We had a 94% placement rate in jobs in graduate positions. Which I think is tied with the very best ivy league institutions. And the kinds of jobs that the students are getting and six months into them the kinds of reviews that their employers are giving us looks nothing like a recent undergraduate. These are oftentimes types of jobs that are unavailable to recent undergraduates. And you know we had one student recently actually just told me, fresh in my mind, even though he was the youngest person in his company, when the CEO of his company has a strategic question he comes to him. And when he's in a meeting, full of PhDs, everybody looks to him to run the meeting and set the agenda. He's six months out of undergrad, right. And you know I can give you story after story after story about each and every one of these graduate. And it's not because they were born with it. They actually had a wise education. >> Yeah. Ben well that's a great story. And we'll leave it there. Congratulations again to you and the team at Minerva and what you've built and your first graduating class. Great accomplishment and really great to catch up, it's been too long. And when this is all over we'll have to get together and have an adult beverage. >> That would be wonderful. >> All right Ben thanks a lot. >> Thanks so much Jeff. >> All right. You've been watching theCUBE. Great check in with Ben Nelson. Thanks for watching. Everybody stay safe and we'll see you next time. (upbeat electronic music)

(funky upbeat music) >> Live from Barcelona, Spain. It's theCUBE covering Cisco Live! Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Barcelona everybody we're wrapping up day one of Cisco Live! Barcelona CUBE coverage. I'm Dave Vellante, he's Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. Donnie Williams is the IT Director at Scott Equipment out of Louisiana and Eric Herzog is back. He's the CMO of IBM Storage. Gentlemen, good to see you, welcome. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> You're very welcome. So tell us about Scott Equipment. What do you guys do? What's the company all about? >> We're a heavy equipment dealer, so we've been in the business for 80 years, privately owned company. And so we started out in farm implement 80 years ago by the founder Tom Scott which is where the name Scott Equipment comes from. And so we transitioned over the years to construction equipment and we're now, so back in 2014 we sold all of our, the farm stores that handle all of that equipment, and now we're strictly servicing the construction industry and petrochemical industry. >> So you're a dealer of large equipment. And you service it as well, or? >> Yes we service it. We're primarily a rental company first. Then we also sell what we rent. We service it and it also parts as well. >> So we're talking massive? >> Yes big. If you think, one of our main clients is Volvo which if you've seen the show Gold Rush, that Volvo equipment that you see there, that's what we sell. >> It's incredible machines. >> Yeah, yeah they are I had a chance to play with one. I went to a Shippensburg Pennsylvania where their North America office is and had a chance to play with their largest excavator. That was fun. >> So is a lot of you IT centered on sort of the maintenance business and the service business or? >> Yes. Mostly Mirror is like a car dealership. So like I said, we do sale service, parts, all of that. >> So the business flow starts after the sale is made, obviously. >> Exactly, yes, we sell, yeah, exactly. We get the equipment out there in the territory and then the revenue continues to come in. >> So what are some of the challenges, the external challenges that are driving your business? >> So really, our, the whole heavy equipment industry is, is kind of behind the times in my, from a dealership perspective. From a manufacturer perspective. They're somewhat up with technology, especially Volvo, but from a dealership, they're mainly privately owned, so they're not, there's not a whole lot of resources in technology. That's not a focus for them. They're focused on the business side of it, so. When I first started at the company 10, 11 years ago now, there was one guy servicing 600 employees. And it was-- >> One IT person? >> One IT person. So, as you can imagine, it was a nightmare. I mean it's not the guy's fault. I don't blame him at all. It's just the way that they had done business and not changed. >> He was a bummed out IT person. >> Yeah, right exactly, yeah. >> Now how'd you guys find them? >> So they're a customer of ours for the verses stack. We have a partner that they've been buying their IBM and their Cisco gear from, and then when they were doing a modernization effort, the reseller talked to Scott and said, Donnie, what d'ya think? How about doing this converge infrastructure. Easier to employ at sep-tor. So it all came through their existing channel partner that they were using for both IBM gear and Cisco gear. >> So you wanted a solution that one guy could run, right? >> We've now at least grown that, our company to, now we have six total in our department. So we've changed a lot since I started 11 years ago. >> And what are they spending their time doing? >> Primarily, we do a lot of help desk, assistant administration, we do mostly, my focus is to make sure that our employees are satisfied so they can take care of the customer. And that's the primary goal and along with that comes systems administration, as well, so. >> But you know, a full stack like this. I mean the joke. You need more than one person. >> Right. But it's going to be simplified, you know what you're buying, >> Right, exactly. >> It's predictable, and therefore, you shouldn't need to be seen on a day to day basis. >> Yes, I like keeping things simple, simple as possible. So, that makes my job easier, it makes my team's job easier, as well. >> So what kind of things are you driving? Is it, ya know, data protection? Is it, what sort of, you know, use cases do you have on your stack? >> We're from our, we're servicing on our, with Cisco, I'm sorry, verses stack. It's mostly it's all private cloud. We're servicing applications that supplement our core ERP system. So, we have reporting solutions. When we first bought the verses stack, we were considering moving to another ERP system, and we would have that infrastructure in place to migrate to that. So we still have that, actually, element table as an option for us. >> The migration to a new ERP system? >> Yes. >> We should talk afterwords. >> We're avoiding that all costs. >> Right, well, of course. You don't want to convert if you don't have to. Yeah but sometimes it's a business case. Sometimes it's hard to make. We'll talk. >> Exactly. >> Cloud in your future or present? >> We're doing some-- >> SAS stuff, or? >> Yeah a little of that. I mean anything. I mean things that make sense for us to do cloud. Security services. We're doing, of course, probably the most common is hosting email. We're doing a lot of that. Share point. That type of solution in the cloud. >> How long you've been with the company? >> 11 years. >> 11 years, okay, so, thinking about the last decade, I mean a lot has changed. >> Yes. >> What are you most proud of? What's like your biggest success that you can share with us? >> Really building the IT department and bringing our company into the 21st century from a technology perspective. I mean, like I said, we had one person that was handling it. It was really impossible. I mean, you couldn't depend on one person and expect the company to survive long term. >> Yeah, that one person had to say no a lot. >> Exactly, right. He just couldn't get everything done. >> So, really that modernization and that's kind of where you guys came in, right? >> IT modernization play. The verses stack is heavily used for that and, you know, as we've said on the earlier interview, we had a CSPN. We've also used it to go to the next level from an IT transformation to the future. 'Cause in that case, as you know, that was a CSP who uses it to service, you know, hundreds of customers all across the UK in a service model. And in this case, this is more of a IT modernization, take the old stuff, upgrade it to what it was. They even had an old IBM blade servers. That's old this stuff was. Old XE6 Blade servers that must've been 10 years old before they went to the verses stack. >> How many people in the company? Roughly? >> Right now, we've actually sold off side since I've been with the company, we've sold off some of our nonperforming business units. We're probably roughly around 550 now. >> Okay. >> So I mean, we're actually more profitable now than we were 11 years ago. We have less employees, but our profitability is actually exceeded. >> Theme of simplification. >> Exactly, right. >> So what's the biggest challenge you face as the head of IT, today? >> The biggest, probably the biggest challenge would be me wanting to implement technologies that are not ready. I want to have the competitive edge of the industry. I want to be able to be ahead of the curve. And that's probably the biggest challenge. >> And you're saying you can't because the tech isn't ready? Or it's a skills issue? >> It's just the industry. Just trying to work with vendors and getting them to be ready for, I say vendors, manufacturers. They're our vendors. To get them to, and know their dealers as well. To all be acceptable to the technology's that's been there 20 years. >> What would you say is the top, number one, or the top things IBM has done to make your life easier? And what's the one thing they could to do that they're not doing that could make your life easier? What's the, start with what they've done. You know what the success is that have helped. >> Really, we've been a longtime IBM customer. We have not just the verses stack, but we also have the power system, which actually runs our core ERP. >> Ah, okay, so. >> So I mean, we've had long standing relationship with IBM. Reliability is there. The trust is there, as well. >> Yeah, long term partnership. Alright, what's the one thing they could do? If you could wave a wand and you said, IBM will to X, what would x be to make your life better? >> Cut the price. >> Ah, here we go! (all laughing) I should've prefaced that soon! Besides cut the price. Alright we'll leave it there on that topic. But you know, the power system thing brings up, you know, our friend Bob Piccano's running the cognitive systems group now. You guys doing some stuff with AI. Maybe talk about that a little bit. >> So what we've done is two things. First of all, we've imbued inside of our systems AI all over the place. So for example, we tier data which can do not only to own array, but literally to 440 arrays that have someone else's logo on them. It's all AI done. So when the data's hot, it's on the fastest tier. So if you have 15,000 RPM drives and 7,200 RPM drives, it goes to 15,000 when it cools off. AI automatically moves it. The storage admin does nothing. You don't set palsies AI takes care of it. We have Flash, and you have hard drives. Same thing. It'll move around. And you could have an IBM array talking to an EMC array. So all sorts of technology that we've implemented that's AI in the box. Then on top of that, what we've done is come up with a series of AI reference architectures for storage as one of the critical elements of the platform. So what we've done is create what we call a data pipeline. It involves not only our storage arrays, but four pieces or our software, spectrum scale, which is giant scale off file system, in fact, the two fastest supercomputers in the world have almost half an exabyte of that software, storage with that software. Our spectrum discover, which we announced in CUBE 4, which is all about better management of metadata. So, for AI workloads, big data analytic workloads, the data scientist doesn't prep the data. They can actually talk to what we do, and you can create all these metadata templates, and then boom, they run an AI workload on Thursday, and then run an analytic workload on Friday, but all automated. Our archive, and then our cloud object storage. So, all that is really, think about it more as an oval, because when you're doing an AI system, you're constantly learning. So the thing you got to do is, one, you've got to have high performance and be able to handle the analytics which you we do on Flash. 'Kay, so the Flash is connected. You've got to be able to move the data around and part of the thing with the Spectrum Discover is that we can talk through an API, to a piece of AI software, to piece of analytic software, to a piece of big data software. And they can literally go through that API, create templates for the metadata, and then automatically suck what they need into their app and then munge it and then spew it back out. And then obviously on the archive side, want to be able quickly recall the data because if you think about an AI system, it's like a human. So let's give you my Russian example. So I'm old enough, when I was a kid, there were bomb shelters in my neighborhood that people dug in the backyard. Then we have, you know, Nixon lighting up the Chinese. Then we have Reagan and Gorbachev. Next thing you know, the wall comes down, right? Then the next thing you know, there's no longer a Soviet Union. All of a sudden, ah, the Russians might be getting a little aggressive even though they're no longer communist, and now you see, depending on which political party, that they're totally against us, or they're totally helping us, but, you know, if they really were hacking systems, whatever political party you're in, they really were hacking our systems trying to manipulate the election. Pro or con, the point is that's kind of like a cyber attack. And that's not a good thing. So we learn and it changes. So an AI system needs to understand and change, constantly learn, if all of a sudden you have flying cars, that's going to be different than a car with tires. Now a lot of it may be the same. The interior, all the amenities, but the engines going to be different, and there are companies, including the big three, four, five, auto, who are actually working on flying cars. Who knows if it'll happen, but the AI system needs to understand and learn that and constantly learn. And so, the foundation has to heavily resilient, heavily performant, heavily available, last thing you want is an AI system going down on you. Especially if you're in healthcare, or big giant manufacturing, like Volvo, his customer. When they're building those cranes and things, they must cost 50, 60 million dollars. If that assembly line goes down, it's probably a big deal for them. So you need AI systems that always keep your other systems up and running. So you have to have that solid foundation of storage underneath. >> Awesome, alright, we got to leave it there. Give the customer the last word. Donnie, first time in Barcelona, right? >> Yes it is. >> How are you finding the show and the city? >> Oh it's awesome. This is my fifth Cisco Live. First time in Europe, so yeah. Enjoying it. >> Good, good. Well thank you guys for coming to theCUBE. >> Great thank you for coming. >> Thank you! >> Really appreciate it. >> You're welcome. Alright keep it right there everybody. We'll be back to wrap day one Cisco Live! Barcelona. You're watching theCUBE. (techno music)

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain. It's the cue covering Sisqo Live Europe, brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back >> to Barcelona. Everybody would adapt. Wrapping up day one of Sisqo live Barcelona Cube coverage. I'm David. Long day. He's stupid men. You're watching the Cube. The leader in live tech coverage. Donnie Williams is it director at Scott Equipment out of Louisiana. And Eric hurts August back. He's the CMO of IBM storage. Gentlemen, good to see you. Welcome. >> Thank you for having us. >> You're very welcome. So tell us about Scott equipment. What do you guys do? Look, what's the company all about were >> a heavy equipment dealer, So we've been we've been in the business for eighty years, privately owned company. And so we're we're We started out and farm implement eighty years ago by the founder, Thomas Scott, which is where the name Scott equipment comes from. And so we transition over the years, Teo construction equipment, Andi were now back in two thousand fourteen, we sold all of our the farm stores that handled all of that equipment. And now we're We're strictly servicing the construction industry and petrochemical in >> history. So your dealer of exactly what equipment and your services as well? >> Yes. We service that we were primarily a rental company. First then then we We also sell what we rent. We service service it and and also parts as well. So we're talking massive? Yes, they got. If you if you think our one of our main lines is Volvo, which you have you have you seen the show? Gold rush that that Volvo equipment you see there, that's that's what we sell. So is incredible machine. Yeah, Yeah, they are. Hada chance tio to play with one. I went Teo Shippensburg, Pennsylvania. Where were their North America offices and had a chance to play with their largest excavator? That was That was >> fun. So is a lot of your Senate on sort of the maintenance business in the service business? >> Yes. So we were just mostly. Mirror is like a car dealership. If if you so we were like I said, we do sale service parts, all of that. >> So the business flow starts after the sale is made on >> exactly. Yes. We still like, Yeah, exactly. We get. We get equipment out there in the in the in the territory, and then the revenue continues tio to come in. >> So what are some of the challenges? The external challenges that are driving your business? You really >> are. The whole heavy equipment industry is It's kind of behind the times in my from a dealership perspective from from a manufacturer perspective there. They're somewhat up with technology, especially especially Volvo. But from a dealership there, there might mainly privately owned. So they're not there's not a whole lot of resource is in, and ah, in technology they don't. That's not a focus for them that they're they're focused on the business side of it. So what? We we're not When I first started the company ten, eleven years ago, now there was one guy servicing six hundred employees and and it was one eyed person, one i t person. So, as you can imagine, it was, it was a nightmare. Go. I mean, it's not the guy's fault. I don't blame him at all. Is this Is this the way that they had done business and not change bombed out, >> right? Exactly. Yeah. Guys >> find them. >> So their customer of ours for the versus stack, we have, ah, partner that they've been buying their IBM in their Cisco gear from. And then when they were doing a modernization effort, the reseller talk to Scott and said, Dani, what do you think? How about doing this? Converge infrastructure. Easier to play. It's after. So it all came through their existing channel. Part of that they were using for both IBM gear and Cisco Gear. >> So you wanted a solution. That one guy could run, right? We've now at least growing that company to house. We have six total in our in our department. So we've changed a lot since I started the eleven years ago. >> And why are they spending their time doing what? Premier >> Li? We do a lot of help desk on systems administration way do mostly, uh, are My focus is to make sure that our employees are satisfied that so they could take care of the customer, and that's that's the primary goal. And along with that comes comes systems administration. A cz. Well, so, But, >> you know, a full stack like this. I mean, the joke. You need more than one person, but it's going to be simplified. You know what you're buying, right? Predictable. And therefore, you shouldn't need to be seen on a basis. >> Yes, I like keeping things simple. Simple as possible. So that makes that makes my job easier. It makes my team's job easier. What >> kind of >> things you driving? Is it? You know, data protection, is it? You know what? What? What? What sort of, you know, use cases do you have on your stack >> on that Were from our were servicing on our with Francisco verse. Sorry versus stack. We are mostly it is all profit cloud were servicing applications. That's the supplement. Our court system. So we have reporting solutions. We were when we first bought it. The vs stack way were considering moving to another Air P system. Oh, and we would have that that infrastructure in place tio migrate to that. So we see what we still have that that actually on the table as a as an option >> for us, but the migration to a new Europe E system. Yes, we should talk afterwards. No, you >> were warning that it >> all about you. Of course, you don't want to convert if you don't have to write. But sometimes there's a business case. Sometimes it's hard to make you talk. Cloud in your in your future president were doing some that's ass stuff. >> Yeah, a little of that. I mean, anything. I mean things that that makes sense for us to to cloud I security services we're doing. Of course, probably most common is hosting email. Were doing a lot of that share point that that type of solution in the cloud >> How long you been with the company? Eleven years. Eleven years. Okay, So, thinking about the last decade, I mean, it's a lot of lot has changed. Yes. What's your What do you most proud of? What you like your biggest success that you can share with us. Oh, >> really? Building my the that dude the I T department and bringing our company into the twenty first system century from a from a technology perspective. I mean, like I said, we had one person that was that was handing. It was really impossible. I mean, you couldn't depend. Depends on one person. And and and, yeah, expect the company's or saw survive long term. Yeah, That one person had to say no a lot. Exactly. Right. Why would he? Just couldn't get everything >> done right? So that really that modernization? Yes, I know where you guys >> can. Ninety Mater, My team modernization play. The versus stack is heavily used for that. And, you know, as we said, on the earlier and every we had to see ESPN, we've also used it to do you know, to the next level from a night transformation to the future. Because in that case, as you know that was a CSP who uses it to service. You know, hundreds of customers all across the UK in a service model. And in this case, this is more of a mighty modernization. Take the old stuff, upgraded to what it was. They even have old IBM blade servers. That's how old the stuff wass old, actually, six played servers that must have been ten years old before they went to the Versus Stack. >> How many people in the company >> right now? We've actually sold off side since I've been with the company we sold off. Some of our non performing business units were probably roughly around five hundred fifty now. Okay, so I mean, we're Ah, we're actually more profitable now than we were eleven years ago from Ah, I mean, we have less employees, but our profitability is actually exceeded >> the name of simplification. Exactly. Right. So what's the biggest challenge you face Is the head of it today? The biggest, Probably >> the biggest challenge would be me wanting to implement technologies. They're not really not ready. I want it. I want tohave the competitive edge, that of the industry. I want to be able to be ahead of of the ahead of the curve. Uh, and that's probably the probably biggest challenge. And you're >> saying you can't Because the tech is ready or skills >> is just is just the industry just trying Teo. I work with vendors and getting getting them to be ready for I say, vendors, manufacturers, they're our vendors. Toe Get them Tio and other dealers as well. Teo Teo Albee. Acceptable to technology that's been there twenty years. >> What would you say is the but the top number one or the top things that IBM has done to make your life easier? And what's the one thing they could do that they're they're not doing that could make your life easier. What's the start with what they've done? You know whether successes, you know that >> really? Really. I mean, we've been a long time IBM customer. We have not, not just the versus Stack, but we also have the power system, which were actually runs are our core AARP. Um, okay. And so that we had long standing relationship with IBM, and the reliability is there. The trust is, >> there's well, a long term partnership. But what's the one thing they could do? One thing that you could If you could wave a wand and IBM will do x what would x B to make your life better? Uh, cut the price way. Go >> way. I should have prefaced that something that size >> on that topic. But you know, the power system thing brings up. You know, our friend Bob. Pity on who's running the cognitive systems group now You guys do with some stuff in a I talked about that a little bit. >> So what we've done is two things. First of all, we've been beauty inside of our system's ai ai all over the place. So, for example, we tear data which can weaken due not only to our own array, but literally two four hundred forty rays that have someone else's logo on them. It's all a eye dunce. When the data is hot, it's on the fastest here. So if you have fifteen thousand rpm drives in seventeen hundred rpm drives, it goes to fifteen thousand. When it cools off A. I automatically moves that the storage admin does nothing. You don't set policies, A takes care. We have flash and you have hard drive's same thing. It'll move around and you could have on IBM array talking to any AMC array. So all sorts of technology that we implement, that's a I in the box. Then, on top of that, what we've done is come up with a Siri's of a reference architectures for storage, as one of the critical elements in the platform. So we've done is create what we call a data pipeline. It involves not only our storage raise, but four pieces of our software spectrum scale, which is giant scale out file system, in fact, to fastest super computers in the world have almost half an exabyte of that software storage. With that software, our spectrum discover which we announced in queue for which is all about better management of metadata. So for a I workloads, big get anally work loves the data scientist doesn't prep the data. They can actually talk to what we do, and you could create all these meditate a template, then boom. They run a a ay workload on Thursday and then run a analytic workload on Friday. But all automated our archive and then our cloud objects towards. So all that is really think about it. Maura's an oval because when you're doing an A I system, you're constantly learning. So the thing you got to do is one you've got to have high performance and be ableto handle the analytics, which we do on flash. Okay, so the flashes connected, you've got to be able to move the date around. And part of thing with the spectrum Discover is that we can talk through an A P I to a piece of a AI software two piece of analytic software to piece of big data software, and they can literally go through that. AP I create templates for the metadata and then automatically suck what they need into their app and then munge it and then spirit back out and then obviously on the archives side, you want to be able to quickly recall the data, because if you think about a I system, it's like a human. So it's giving my Russian example. So I'm old enough. When I was a kid, there were bomb shelters in my neighborhood that people dug in the backyard. Then we have, you know, Nixon lightening up with the Chinese and we have Reagan and Gorbachev next, You know, the wall comes down right then. Next thing you know, there's no longer Soviet Union. All of a sudden, no, the Russians might get a little aggressive, even though they're no longer communist. And now, you see, depending on which political party. Either they're totally against us where they're totally helping us. But, you know, if they really were hacking systems whose whatever political party urine, they really were hacking our system, tried to manipulate the election pro or con. The point is, that's kind of like a cyber attack, and that's not a good thing. So we learn and it changes. So when a I system needs to understand and change constantly, learn. If all of a sudden you have flying cars, that's going to be different than a car with tires. Now, a lot of it, maybe the same, the interior, all the amenities. But the engine is going to be different. And there are companies, including the big Big three, four five who are actually working on flying cars, knows it will happen. But the A I system needs to understand and learn that and constantly learning. So the foundation has to be heavily resilient, heavily performance, heavily available, lasting one is an A I system going down on you, especially if you're in health care or big giant manufacturing. Like Volvo, his customer. When they're building those cranes and things, they must cost fifty sixty million dollars at that assembly line goes down its prey a big deal for them. So you need a I systems that always keep your other systems up and running. So you have to have that solid foundation storage underneath. >> Awesome. All right, we got to leave it there. Give the customer the last word. Donnie. First time in Barcelona, right? Yes. It ISS how you find in the show and the >> syphilis is awesome. This's my, actually my fifth, uh, Cisco lifers our first time in Europe, so yeah, enjoying it. >> Good. Good. Well, thank you, guys. For German of the >> correct. Thank you. Have you appreciate it? >> You're welcome. Alright. Keep right there, everybody. We'll be back to rap Day one. Sisqo live Barcelona watching you.

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We're joined by Sameer Nori, he is the director of product marketing at Cohesity. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, Sameer. >> Thanks Rebecca, and thanks Stu, and thanks for having me on theCUBE. I'm exciting to be here. >> So you are a tech veteran you've been in this industry for a long time, you've worked at a lot of kinds of companies, what drew you to Cohesity? >> That's a great question, so when I was at MAPR, and as you are familiar, MAPR sits at the intersection of big data and storage, and what I saw very interesting and fascinating about Cohesity was a similar hypothesis in terms of, having built its own file system but then really applying it to a different realm of the market, in terms of secondary data and applications starting with backup as the foundation. And as you are aware, analytics is a part of our road map and a solution that we enabled. But you know, some starter things there, but that's kind of actually what really drove me and the opportunity to really try and be part of another hybrid company and apply my experience from prior industries into different segments. >> So you lead outbound marketing for Cohesity's Cloud Solutions, tell our viewers a little about what you do, and what your day is like? >> Sure, so my day oscillates and changes between developing value prop and messaging for our solutions, working with customers to understand their pain points and challenges, being able to translate that into tangible benefits for customers to parley off of, and then really enabling and working with our sales teams closely to help them, arm them with the necessary things they need to go succeed in the market. >> Sameer you've got an interesting space, questions I think we all get in the industry is, things are changing a lot, what do I do with my applications? If you look at the enterprise, most enterprises have hundreds, if not thousands of applications, and it's not a trivial thing to say, oh well, yeah we'll just put everything in the cloud, that'll be real easy, right? You've got SaaS, Microsoft opened the door of the flood gates really pushing everybody to Office 365 to SaaS-ify a lot of what you are doing. Public cloud is a big growth and then private cloud really modernizing the environment, what are you seeing and hearing from customers as to how they deal with the portfolio of their applications mobility of what they're doing? Where does Cohesity play and advise and help with those solutions? >> Sure, that's a great question too. So I think really what we see from customers is a combination of a couple of things. As you said, they've got thousands or probably hundreds of applications, they are not going to take a big chunk of those and just move them to the cloud as is, right? You got to select the right workloads and the right data and do the assessment and the viability fit, in terms of what makes sense. I think where our sweet spot really is is kind of back to what I said earlier. Really sort of using back up as the foundation for what customers can do and our core hypothesis has always been that backup should not be just an insurance policy. You can do a whole lot more with it. So what we see customers doing is taking their backups on premises, which are often times just idle with alternative solutions, reusing them in the cloud for test dev purposes, where it makes sense. So the easy way to convert formats, so if you are in VMDK format to the VHD format in Azure. Spin it up, run your test of processes. At the end when you're done, you can move those things back on premises and really use it in that context. So for us really I think it's a combination of assessing the right use case and the right application of the workload. And then making that, helping customers with understanding that and making that shift in that case. >> So talk a little bit about the biggest customer pain points and how you develop the right solution for them in this customized and tailored way. >> Sure, so I think for us, from our perspective, what we are seeing with challenges, customers their back up data is sitting idle. It's shocking actually sometimes to hear that, if we're talking to IT and storage teams, and the application test and development teams with their peers, they often have to wait weeks, or sometimes even months, to get a copy of data that they need. I think in today's world that shouldn't be the case, right? Our value prop really there is to help eliminate those expensive copies of data that are getting made. And because our platform is so purpose built and agile with the effect of reusing that backup data for test dev, that's actually where we really see the sweet spot coming together. Customers have even asked us, for example in our UI, can you actually provision test dev data and make it more self-service in nature right from that view point. I think that is something we are looking into. Into what makes sense there from a capability. But that's kind of really actually where we see the challenge and how we are enabling customers into solving that. >> Yeah Sameer, I want to go back to something you said at the beginning about the premise of, I've got all my applications, and I'm going to have intelligence, usually called machine learning and the like. How are these going to come together? We hear Microsoft really talking about that's the future. Satya Nadella is well-known, you know AI, AI, AI, is one of the main things that he talks about. How is that similar with the Cohesity division? >> Yeah, so I think when we think about the application world and how we are taking advantage of things, like AI and machine learning. Our recently announced capability and product are on Helios, which is from our perspective the global management piece to manage all your secondary apps. We've injected machine learning and AI capabilities there to help customers with smart assistant type of mode and capability to help them predict their, how much, when they need more capacity. Smart alerts to tell them what's happening in their system. And that's kind of both on premises and in the cloud. For us really, I think where we see specifically AI and machine learning coming together. I think as customers are injecting those in the applications they are using. I think definitely the data side of it and how that effects the underlying data landscape will make a difference, in terms of how we accommodate that. But I think from a core ML and AI perspective, Helios is our focal point in terms of what we are doing to bring those capabilities to bear. >> So what has the customer response been to them? It sounds very cool. Are customers using it? Are they finding that it is being very, that it is helping them a lot, in terms of, as you said, notifying if they need more capacity. >> Yeah, so I think it's early days for us when it comes to Helios, right? It's a pretty new product, but we're working with customers actively, especially our existing base, to get them really on board with a product and really the service. Be able to collect and assimilate all of their data, and help them with the usage of it. I think the more data we collect, as you know with machine learning and AI, the more data you collect the richer sample set you have. You can do a whole lot more with it. I think when it comes to the application side of it, the discussion we had earlier on application mobility and making that. I think the University of Pennsylvania is an interesting example of a customer we have where they have about forty different websites internally and externally. They had a planned power, building shutdown for like a day. They had a problem where they couldn't get to recreate those sites easily from their prior infrastructure. So our CloudSpin capability, which is what really helps customers take their on premises VMs and reuse them in the cloud, really came to their rescue with helping them very easily make these websites quickly operational. For them it's been a few simple clicks, and then when they are done with that, when the disaster, in this case, a planned disaster was done, they both go back to their operational on premises. So that's I think a great example of our capabilities coming to light, and really shining in the app mobility arena. But also actually spill over in a sort of disaster recovery. >> Sameer, I'm curious. One of the other things in the application space is a lot of the new appplications, call them cloud native apps if you will, what are you hearing from customers, and does Cohesity, is there something different about new type of architectures and how that ties into Cohesity's solutions? >> Yeah, absolutely so I think what we are seeing from customers is when it comes to everything that's our applications born in the cloud. Often times I think what we see as backup is kind of actually a rear guard, it's not even thought of in the context of cloud native. I think we see that being a challenge because customers, I think what they've with backup in the cloud today, they've got either a combination of manual scripts, they've got some, you know, processes they're running there. There is a lack of automation. So we have actually integrated with the snapshot API of Azure, for instance, and Azure disks. We bring through a combination of what we do on the platform side and that integration we're actually able to bring enterprise class backup capabilities to that cloud native app. The backup they can experience there. So that's kind of I think where we are looking actually to do more, in terms of that. I think we are starting to see more demand, in terms of more cloud native backup as it relates to applications that are more born in the cloud. I think with us the beauty is it's a single platform that's going to work on premises and in the cloud. And not have a separate solution that's quote unquote, just for the cloud versus one that's for on premises. >> One of the biggest challenges that so many companies have regardless of their industry is getting employees to adopt new technologies. I'm wondering how closely you work with your customers to make sure that there is a wide spread adoption and a real embrace of the Cohesity solutions. >> Sure, I think to me what's fascinating is a big value prop and message for our customers with us is the simplicity. That ranges all the way from the way they can do their upgrades with us. The way actually our interface presents itself. So in most cases, actually I think what we've heard from customers is with little to minimal training they're able to actually get up and going with Cohesity. That actually speaks volumes, to the fact, in terms of how the product and the UI and everything else was designed. We definitely have a support and services team that is, as we are starting to grow more enterprise and work with larger customers, it's starting to have those programs in place to enable customers to get up to speed quickly. But actually, in often times, more often than not, it's more the case of, I could just set it up get it up and going and I'm off to the races. >> Sameer, it's our first time here at Microsoft Ignite, over 30,000 people are here, 5,000 organizations, what takeaways do you have for people that haven't been able to attend this show? What have you seen so far? >> Sure, no, I think what I've seen is that from our viewpoint, we've seen lot of customers. We've had some great sessions with customers. We've got a couple more coming up. I think the hybrid cloud message is definitely mainstream, right? I think for customers who are not taking advantage of the services that A, Microsoft has to offer, and then B, others ISVs like us plug into that ecosystem very closely. I think customers definitely should be embracing that in full steam and moving forward with their hybrid cloud initiatives. >> Great, well Sameer, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, it was great having you. >> Thanks, Rebecca. Thanks, Stu, I appreciate it. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Stu Miniman We will have more from Microsoft Ignite in just a little bit. (upbeat music)

(energetic music) >> Live from Orlando Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Stu Miniman. We're joined by Lynn Lucas. She is the CMO of Cohesity. Thanks so much for coming on the program, Lynn. >> Oh, just so excited to be here with you guys and host you in the Cohesity booth for the first time at Microsoft Ignite. >> It's been a lot of fun. There's a lot of buzz around here, and it's fun to be right, to be your neighbor. Exactly. >> Great. >> So today, there's been a lot of news, some new exciting announcements of integrations with Microsoft. I wonder if you can walk our viewers a little bit through what Cohesity announced today. >> Absolutely. So, we have been partners with Microsoft for some time, and today, we announced extensions to our capabilities with Microsoft Azure and Office 365. So Cohesity now extends data protection and backup for Office 365, including granular recovery of mailboxes and granular search for discovery purposes. We also have extended our integration with the Azure data box, and we also are increasing our DR capabilities for our customers with Azure so we now have fail back from the Azure Cloud for disaster recovery purposes. So, just continuing to see tremendous growth, hundreds of Microsoft customers with Cohesity, and these new capabilities are going to expand the possibilities for them. >> Lynn, it's an interesting conversation these days 'cause, you know, in our research, and we've talked about this, data's at the center of everything, and the challenge for customers is data's everywhere. You look here at the Microsoft show, well, I've got all my traditional stuff, I've got my SaaS stuff, my PubliCloud stuff, now Edge with the data box things there. Microsoft plays across there, and it sounds like Cohesity is playing in all of these areas, too. >> Absolutely, and I thought, you know, Sacha did such a good job in the keynote yesterday of really laying out the imperative for digital transformation, data being at the heart of it, but also laying out one of the key challenges which he pointed out, which is the data silos. And, I think Cohesity is right smack in the center of that conversation because we've always been about consolidating secondary data silos. And, you know, our partnership with Microsoft, really, I think, reinforces what they've been talking about, which is also a hybrid strategy that the bulk of customers that we talk to see that their data is going to be on premise, it's going to be in the cloud, and increasingly, it's goinna at the Edge, and we span all of those locations to create this one operating environment so that things like the new open data initiative, I think, will be much easier for customers because they won't be wondering, well, is my data all in one place to be operated on? >> So, talk about the problem of the data silos, because, as you said, it's one of the biggest challenges that companies face today. They are data rich and yet, this data's here and this data's here. Can you describe a little bit about what kind of problems this is for companies, and why this matters? >> So, I think it's just something folks are starting to really get a handle on. As I talked to individual folks here at the show, you'd be surprised at how many aren't even really sure, maybe, how many islands they have, you know, so, even mapping where is all my data, I think, is a capability that many organizations are still getting their arms around. And the challenge, of course, is that in today's world, it's very expensive to move large data sets, and so you want to bring compute to the data, which is what a hyper-convergence in Cohesity is about. And, when you look at the imperatives at the board level, the CEO level, they increasingly see that data becomes really the true competitive advantage for most organizations, and yet, if they can't operate or bring compute to that data and do something with it, they're really at a handicap. We call, you know, some of the newer companies are kind of data-centric or data natives, the Air BNB's, the, maybe, Netflixes of the world, not everyone aspires to be them. As well, not everyone has the resources that those companies may have had or just stay short period of time. Most organizations have the benefit of years of data. We want to level the playing field and allow them to become competitive with their data by providing that single foundation. >> Yeah, Lynn, it's a big show here. They said thirty thousand people and a really diverse ecosystem. What really surprised me is the spectrum of customers that you have here. I mean, we know Microsoft has a long history in higher education. We spoke to one of your customers, Brown University, and of course, long history they have with Microsoft. What are some of the things that you're hearing from customers, maybe, what's different at this show than some of the other, cloud and kind of younger shows that we might go to. This show's been around about almost thirty years now, so. >> Yeah, you know, isn't it, you know, I hate to give our ages but, I think we've been doing this for a while now, right? And Microsoft has been part of the IT ecosystem in a major way, and it's great to see the vibrancy here and how they're talking about AI and ML and moving forward with it. You know, what strikes me here is that a lot of the organizations here are now really understanding the pragmatism of having a hybrid strategy of what makes sense in the cloud as well as what may continue to be on prem for them. I think we complement that well. I'm really excited, too, about the idea that we are going to be using machine learning to be doing a lot more that humans simply can't keep up with in terms of the data growth and then doing something productive with that. And I think that's a conversation that we're just tapping the surface of here at this show. >> Yeah, you've said something that really resonated with me. You know, we have people that have been in the industry a while and, I look at you, your founder, Mohit, and this isn't his first rodeo. He'd been looking at data back from a couple of generations of solutions, and people are very excited. Machine learning, as you said, we used to talk about automation and intelligence around this environment. Now, I lived in the storage industry for quite a while, and we've talked about it but it feels more real when I talk to the architects and the people building this stuff. They are just so excited about what we will be able to do today that we talked about a decade or so ago but now really can make reality for customers. >> No, absolutely, and I think, you know, we have our own investment in that. Helios, which we announced just last month, you know, provides that machine learning capability because what we hear from our customers is what they love is the ability to have simplicity because, let's face it, IT environments continue to grow in complexity. They're looking for ways to subtract that complexity so they can apply their talents to solving the primary mission, as I call it, of their organization, whether that be public sector or private sector, adoing that in a simpler way. You know, look, one of the great stories that one of our customers is talking about here is how Cohesity helped him with a standard thing that most IT organizations have, which is, we're going to do a power shut down and we've got to perform a DR failover, and this particular organization, University of Pennsylvania Annenberg, had a set of twelve websites which, the professors and the students rely on, and it was going to take them literally almost a month to try to move them, and they didn't have that kind of time, and with Cohesity, with our DR capabilities, he was able to do that literally with a few clicks, kept the community of professors and students happy, and didn't spend, more importantly, twenty days trying to rebuild websites for a standard IT event, right? That's the kind of real life story in terms of what IT gets back that they can invest in other more important focus areas for their business. >> Well, for their business and also, just for their lives giving people their time back, their weekends back, their time at night >> Weekends and nights, right? >> With their families, yeah. >> We all need that. >> Satya Nadella is such a proponent of an improving workplace productivity, even five percent, he says, can make this big difference. Can you talk a little bit about how you view that workplace productivity at Cohesity and your approach to giving people either time to concentrate on more value for their companies or just their lives? >> So, again, a super story that we have from another customer that is here at Microsoft, and is an Azure customer, and a Cohesity customer. HKS, one of the world's most respected architectural firms, designed AT&T Stadium, there's a new major pediatric hospital going in in Dubai. They operate in ninety-four countries with remote designers and architects, and because of their inefficient backup processes and archive processes, they literally were having their associates have to work weekends as well as losing time on their projects, and time is money, and they, you know, in some cases, are penalized if they don't make certain dates. And so, I think, these are really pragmatic examples. On average here, pulling some of the folks here, I've heard that they can get a day a week back, sometimes for their administrator who now doesn't have to do repetitive manual tasks anymore. >> One of the things we always love digging into is, you talk about people's jobs and some of the new careers that are happening. We talked to one guest earlier this week. He said, if you're a customer and you learn Azure as what you're doing, like, you're resume is gold. We've talked to, and the really early Edge, like site reliability engineering, he said, don't put SRE on your resume or every recruiter will be calling you up and you won't even be able to answer your phone. Cohesity, you're doing a bit of hiring also. Maybe you could talk about- >> We are! >> What are you seeing from customers and what are you looking for internally? >> We have tremendous good fortune, we grew three hundred percent in revenues year over year, we're hiring in our RTP offices, in our San Jose, in India, around the globe. You know, we look for the best and the brightest, a lot of engineering talent, marketing talent as well, really, across the board but, you know, I think to the point you just made for the IT folks that are here, looking forward as to how you are going to help your business with your data infrastructure or data flows throughout their organization is, to me, where some of the career movement is happening when you hear the talk about how important it is to so many aspects of the business. >> And what are the sort of challenges that you're having with hiring, or are you? I mean, you're a red hot company, but, are you finding it difficult to find the kind of skills, the kind of talent that you want? I mean, what is, what's the candidate pool like? >> You know, so, I think what's really interesting, we are red hot, we have a lot of applicants so, I'd say, in general, no, we're very blessed that way. I think, though, more businesses, including ours, are finding it's difficult to get, say, those data scientists, right? Some of these also front end or back end developers, you know, it's not just the technical companies that are recruiting for that anymore. It's not just the Cohesitys and the Microsofts that are looking for that talent, but it's now also the Netflixes or, you know, the eBays, et cetera, right? They are all looking for the type of talent that we are and so, in general, I think that this bodes well for young people or folks really anywhere in their career watching about, thinking about, where the talent needs are, and there's a lot of activity and interest in people with those kinds of skills. >> You know, let me just follow up on that. So, Cohesity is a Silicon Valley-based company but, as you mentioned, you've got an RTP location. We've seen quite a lot of Silicon Valley-based companies that are starting to do a lot more hiring outside 'cause it's, I'm going to be honest, really expensive to live in the valley these days. So, any commentary on that dynamic? >> Well, you know, I think you're in Boston, not the lowest cost market either in the country. >> True, it's true! >> Yeah, you know, I think with a lot of the technology that's out there, you know, people don't have to be co-located, and we certainly also look to develop and invest in other communities around the globe, so we're not looking solely in San Jose but also in RTP, we've got headquarters in Europe as well as, of course, in India. So we look for talent everywhere, and, my own personal team, you know, I have folks basically around the US as well as across parts of the globe because talent, in many cases, is what matters and where you are physically, you know, some of the great technology that's out there can help break down those barriers of time and distance. >> Finally, this conference, it's thirty thousand people from five thousand different companies around the world. What is going to be, I mean, we're only on day two, but, what's been your big take-away so far? What's the vibe you're getting here at Ignite? >> You know, the vibe has been one of energy, of excitement. I've talked to a lot of folks from around the globe. I've been actually, pretty amazed at some of the people from different countries around the globe that are here, which is fantastic to see that draw in, and I feel like there's a general sense of excitement that technology and what Microsoft's doing can help solve some of the bigger challenges that are here, in the world, and for their own businesses, and we really look forward to Cohesity helping them lay that great data infrastructure foundation, consolidate their silos and help them build a foundation for, you know, doing more with their data. >> Great. Lynn Lucas, thank you so much for coming on theCube. It was great, great talking to you. >> Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more from Microsoft Ignite and theCube's live coverage coming up in just a little bit. (electronic music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. We are continuing our coverage of VMworld 2018 day 3. I'm Lisa Martin, with two very stylish men next to me. I'm quite impressed. Dave Vellante, my esteemed co-host. >> Oh shucks. >> Rocking the salmon, King Salmon Vellante. And The Zog is back, Eric Herzog. Great to have you back. I was looking at you on Twitter and you have been on theCUBE 17 times. Is this 18 or 19? >> You know, I think Dave said I was on one of the very first CUBEs way back in 2010. So I've been on a few. >> That's a whole other criteria of VIP level. Well thank you for coming back. You have been, not only is he, you can't do a CUBE without Eric Herzog. You've been everywhere all over VMworld. I saw you're speaking at IBM booth on VMware and IBM, you're at Cisco, you're giving sessions. How do you fit it all in and still have time for us? >> Well, I always make time for theCUBE. >> Always? Thank you, thanks for that. >> Always make time for you guys. Love talking to CUBE. You guys have been very helpful. We appreciate everything that you do. Love doing shows, love 'em. I may be 60 years old, but I'm really 18 down underneath, so if I only sleep three hours a night, not a problem. >> What do you love about them? I mean, is it? >> Number one is meeting customers. Customers and channel partners, right? Well, all of the employees of all the various companies here get a paycheck from whoever that may be, me, IBM, someone from other companies, people from VMware. That's not who pays your salary. It's the end-users and the channel partners, if they buy through the channel. They're the ones that really pay your salary. So being close to the customers and the partners is number one. Second thing, of course, is seeing all the cool technology. You know, seeing what's going on, what's hot, what can we leverage from our perspective, what can we tie ourselves to. So for example, the hot things, that IBM's really been doing from a storage perspective. Cloud and modern data protection. Those are the two big things we've been focused on for the last couple of years. And how do we integrate our storage solutions and our modern data protection with cloud infrastructure, and then also how do we, if you're not in the cloud, how do we help customers protect their data better in a modern way and reuse their secondary data, instead of making 27,000 copies of the same data. >> So when theCUBE first started at VMworld, modern data protection at the time was dealing with the lack of physical resources, 'cause you went from 10 servers down to one, and you didn't have all that excess capacity to do a run up back up job anymore. Today, modern data protection is all around cloud and multi-cloud and software defined, so I wonder if you can help us sort of paint a picture of what modern data protection is for IBM? >> Sure, I think there's a couple, couple aspects too. So, first of all, you have to support the cloud, and that's two ways. So for us, several of our backup products are used by cloud service providers. In some cases they use our name, and say, "Featuring IBM Spectrum Protect or Spectrum Protect Plus." Other cases, they have their own brand but it's our software underneath the hood so that if the end user is backing up to their cloud, they're actually using our software. So that's item number one. The second thing is you need to make sure that your traditional storage software can TEAR to the cloud, can migrate data to the cloud, can transparently move data to the cloud in an automated fashion using AI. So using artificial intelligent when the data's hot if you connote a target, and that target could be a cloud, and when the data's hot it TEARs the data to the cloud. Sorry, when it's cold. When it's hot it pulls it back in and that needs to be all automated through AI base. So we've done both, we have our backup software which is available from several cloud providers as a backup as a service, we also offer it through the cloud so IBM Cloud actually sells spectrum protect backup as a service solution All of our primary storage software and even our spectrum scale software can automatically TEAR data to a cloud target device. >> Eric I got to ask you so TEARing used to be predominantly, correct me if you disagree but, it used be a one way trip to the bit-bucket. You just described going there and coming back. Has cloud changed that because of big data, analytics? Where people want to pull back data increasingly? >> So I think of a couple of things. So first of all, there's no doubt that the world is data driven. The most valuable asset isn't gold, it's not silver, it is absolutely not oil, it's not diamonds. It is data. And it doesn't matter whether you're one of the largest banks in the world, you're in manufacturing, you're in the government, or whether you're Herzog's barn grill. The data is your most valuable asset. What you do with your customer data, how you manage your business, what you do with your supply chain if your a services company, how are you servicing, what are you charging, what are you billing, all of that is the most critical thing that you have. So in a data driven world, its critical that you use the data. And that also means that because of valued data, when you backup the data or you snapshot or replicate the data, you now created a secondary copy. Well what if you could use it to do tests? What if you could use it to do big data analytics? What if you could use it for DevOps? So instead of making one copy for tests, one copy for disaster recovery, one copy for this, and have basically a plethora of copies all over the place, with what we've provided in modern data protection, you can use a backup, you can use a snap or a replica, and you can use that to do tests or development or to do big data analytics. And using that one copy not making multiple copies. So that's- >> I just want to pick up on something you said there's going to be some folks in our audience like, "yeah yeah we hear that data is more valuable than oil or more valuable than gold, et cetera, more valuable than platinum." There's evidence, if you look at the market value of the top five companies, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, they've surpassed the banks, they've surpassed the energy companies, and I would argue its cuz of data. People are recognizing that they're data companies, you agree? >> But if you look at that name the only one that actually builds anything of substance, as a fair amount of their volume of revenue, is Apple. >> Is Apple, right. >> Amazon doesn't, they ship stuff. Facebook clearly doesn't, Google has a few things but not really builds stuff its really about the data. Absolutely and if your a more traditional company like a bank or someone building the table. Whoever builds this table if they have their act together and they're using that data right, they're building the table cheaper than anyone else, they're shipping it to theCUBE cheaper than anyone else could ship it to you. They got more colors because they know what their doing. And they ship you the right color table and they don't screw it up and send you a black table when you want it this color table because black won't show up on theCUBE very well. The more you do that the more money you make. Even something as simple as a table manufacturer. And that's all about the data and how you use that data. >> So Eric you love talking with customers which is great as the CMO for IBM storage. Got to talk to those customers. Let's talk about how you're seeing customers take the efficiencies of what IBM is doing with data protection, storage, et cetera. to be able to harness the power of AI, the superpowers that Pat Gelsinger talked about on Monday, and transform their businesses. Give us some of your favorite customer examples where its really revolutionary. >> So we had a great example today, we did a panel with a bunch of end users as part of the show agenda. And one of the customers is a provider of softwares of service to universities and schools. 45,000 customers between the universities, junior colleges, schools districts, et cetera. In North America so Canada and the U.S. And they are doing softwares of service so for them performance is critical, they can't go down. All of the college bookstores, if you go into a college bookstore, all of the infrastructure behind that is them. So they're called Follet. So a couple of things, one because they're doing softwares of service and managing all that. Its critical, can't go down. Got to be available, it's got to be performant, it's got to be resilient, it's got to be reliable. So that's how the storage melds in. From modern data protection the way it melds in is how many books did Dave buy? What did Eric buy? Oh is Dave buying a used book? Or is Eric buying a new book? Okay say we know that the propensity is certain of members of the community. I went to UC Davis, University of California Davis, are going to buy used books, Dave, whereas Herzog's going to buy new. They can figure that out, how many used books they need, how many new books they need, that's all about efficiency and how they make more money. What are the store hours? Certain universities it's this, other universities it's that. What do they do in the winter time? At UC Davis you can go in the winter time, I know you went to school in Boston its probably snowing, no one's going in the bookstore in the wintertime. >> Trend towards book rentals, how do we capitalize on that? >> That's all they do. One of the things they talked about was how they always have to protect that data and back it up. The other thing they talked about was they have to assume a lot of capacity. So what they do is they bought assuming they would have to refresh in 18 months. And because our storage arrays have a ton of different data reduction technology whether that be block, D2, compression, et cetera. And they have petabytes of data. Petabytes. 12 Petabytes. They've actually calculated it out they won't need to buy new storage for 36 months instead of 18 so they just saved on CapX. Through the intelligence of the storage. So in that case you've got both modern data protection and you've got a storage message. One of our other customers who's a public reference, not here at the show, which is a hospital, they were backing up all their data, both cloud and on premise with our backup software, and they went down and their entire system went down and they didn't lose one stitch of data and its a hospital. It's a teaching hospital, think they're in Pennsylvania, and in the public reference in the video he said, "and we went down and off that backup we were able to get all of the data back. We didn't lose any patient data, we didn't lose any research data, we didn't lose any billing data, if you break your arm they do bill you, they didn't lose anything." >> That's not just money, that's lives so that's huge. >> Absolutely. >> I want to ask you about you know that table example you were giving, and we were talking about the big five companies in terms of market cap being data orientated. There seems to be a gap between those sort of traditional companies and those data companies and that gap tends to be the data is often is often in silos its human expertise or expertise around a bottling plant or the manufacturing plant or whatever it is versus a data model with humans who understand how to leverage that data. Do you see, whether its through new data protection techniques or other storage techniques that IBM is working on, ways to help customers break down those data silos so they can become more digital and be able to take advantage of data? >> So I think there's a couple of things. So first of all at the very tactical level we provide this automated IA based data TEARing. We can tear from anything to anything so we can take data from an IBM array and TEAR it to an EMC array. We can take data from an EMC array and TEAR it to a net app array. A net app array to a Tachi array, an HP array back to our array, so we can do this transparent data move based on hot and cold. Not only does that allow you to control CapX and OpX you can move the data from array to array, and once you move that data set it might be working that other array could be hooked up to a different set of servers through the SAN that's running a different workload and then takes that dataset and use it with that other piece of software out on the server side. So that's item number one. Item number two is IBM not just in the storage but overall has a global program where IBM is promoting, through universities all over the world, data scientists. Part of that is training data scientists not only how to do the science of data and analyzing data and mining data and doing it, but to break down those walls. The value is more there. And we also have from a storage perspective some products are spectrum scale products, one of our customers who's one of the largest banks in the world they run 300,000 servers attached to a giant spectrum scale repository, petabytes and petabytes, and they do real time data analytics to see if Dave Vellante or Lisa's credit card was stolen. >> Thank you! >> Oh yes, thank you! >> So that's real world analytics they run but they need petabytes of data. And then with our IBM cloud object storage technology where we have several customers at the exabyte level in production with an exabyte of data, you put the data out when its cold but guess what, if you want to mine it you might want to pull it back and guess what, you can TEAR data from spectrum scale to IBM cloud object storage and then spectrum scale can pull it back in to do the big data analytic workloads. >> And that AI you're using is it heavy open source? Is there a little bit of Watson sprinkled in there? >> It's stuff the storage division developed years ago and then has peppered in the AI based technology into that software to determine when the dataset is hot or cold and then move it back or forth. We also do the old style, so if you go back 10 years ago, the automation of storage was policy based. So we had it way back when which was if the data is 30 days old move it to this array. >> The old HSM kind of... >> Yeah and it was automated so once it hit 30 days, but now what we've done is, we started with that, what I would call automation, and now we've moved that to AI. And by the way, if you still want to do it the old way and say move this data when its 60 days old, you can still do that. But the modern way is let the storage figure out for you and move it back and forth whether it be to the cloud or whether it be on premises. >> So it's intelligent hierarchical storage management? So if the characteristics change the system knows what to do as opposed to- >> So when it's hot it'll pull the data back into flash, for example, when its cold it'll put it out to cloud, it'll put it out to tape or it'll put it out to slow hard drives, either way. >> Alright Eric, so we're almost out of time here. You've been at IBM a long time, IBM's been around a long time, you said you even have customers at exabyte scale. I'm hearing heterogeneity, customer choice, but if I'm a small hospital in the middle of America and I have choice with data protection vendors, storage vendors, some smaller than IBM that might be able to move faster, what are the top three differentiators of why I would want to go with IBM's storage solutions? >> Sure so the first thing is our broad portfolio. Whether it be file block or object, whether it be modern data protection, whether it be archiving if you still want to use tape, we're the number one provider of tape in the world and we sell gobs of it to the web scale guys. >> Of course you do. >> They're the guys that buy it. >> Cuz its cost effective. >> So we've got one throat to choke, all of it talks to each other, and happens to work with all the cloud vendors not just IBM cloud. We work with Amazon, we work with Microsoft, we work with Google, and we work with IBM's own cloud. So we can work with anything. That's out of mind. Second thing, for smaller shops we have a network of business partners all over the world, some of them even deal with the big global Fortune 500 and others deal with small accounts. And then really the third thing is that IBM makes sure that our stuff works with everyone else's stuff. Whether that be cloud, our spectrum tech software which has been around for years and is the leading enterprise backup package, the bulk of what it backs up is not IBM storage. The vast bulk of it is from two of the competitors on the floor of this show, they also back up our stuff too. And we backup everyone's. There's probably 20 storage vendors we backup every one of their data. So if someone buys storage from XYZ, call me, we can back it up. If someone buys it from one of the big competitors we back it up, from us we back it up. So the fact that our software works with everyone's gear is of an advantage for both the small shop and the big shop. We make sure that our software, whether its embedded in our arrays or whether we sell it as just a pieces storage software and we are the number one storage software provider on the planet as well, we can meet the needs of any company big or small because we have this flexibility of working with our stuff and working with everybody else stuff and most of the other guys don't do that. If its a small shop their stuff usually only works with their stuff. >> And from a support perspective, you play with everybody? >> Global network. I mean we're known for our support whether it be IBM direct or what we do with our partners all the partners are certified, its a big certification process, and if they can't certify the product they can't sell IBM's stuff. That's just how we operate. Other people, if they can move a lot of boxes but they don't have anyone pick up the phone or can come out to Dave's house to install, they let them sell, we don't do that at IBM. We don't use those box mover types we go for guys that add value and know how to work with the cloud, know how to do hybrid cloud. One of our resellers designed a Watson based AI system that's used in bottle factories. Packaging. Beer, soda, milk, and it can figure out if its full or not full, if the bottle or can or carton is damaged. And they used Watson to do it. Now they're regular resell. They resell all the storage, they resell our power, they resell mainframe, but they've gone into the software development side using this Watson thing and they're selling a full solution with the software included to bottling plants all over the world. >> Wow, Eric. This has been a super charged conversation. Thanks for stopping by and talking with Dave and me about not just your excitement about talking with customers but really how IBM is really empowering customers of any size worldwide to succeed. We know we'll see you again soon but thanks for stopping by a couple of times this week. >> Great well thank you. Thank you, really appreciate the time. >> And the outfit choices are just on point guys, you blend well too. For Eric, Dave Vellante, I am Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live from VMworld 2018 day 3. Stick around, we'll be back with our next guest after a short break. (electro music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. We are continuing our coverage of VMworld 2018 day 3. I'm Lisa Martin, with two very stylish men next to me. I'm quite impressed. Dave Vellante, my esteemed co-host. >> Oh shucks. >> Rocking the salmon, King Salmon Vellante. And The Zog is back, Eric Herzog. Great to have you back. I was looking at you on Twitter and you have been on theCUBE 17 times. Is this 18 or 19? >> You know, I think Dave said I was on one of the very first CUBEs way back in 2010. So I've been on a few. >> That's a whole other criteria of VIP level. Well thank you for coming back. You have been, not only is he, you can't do a CUBE without Eric Herzog. You've been everywhere all over VMworld. I saw you're speaking at IBM booth on VMware and IBM, you're at Cisco, you're giving sessions. How do you fit it all in and still have time for us? >> Well, I always make time for theCUBE. >> Always? Thank you, thanks for that. >> Always make time for you guys. Love talking to CUBE. You guys have been very helpful. We appreciate everything that you do. Love doing shows, love 'em. I may be 60 years old, but I'm really 18 down underneath, so if I only sleep three hours a night, not a problem. >> What do you love about them? I mean, is it? >> Number one is meeting customers. Customers and channel partners, right? Well, all of the employees of all the various companies here get a paycheck from whoever that may be, me, IBM, someone from other companies, people from VMware. That's not who pays your salary. It's the end-users and the channel partners, if they buy through the channel. They're the ones that really pay your salary. So being close to the customers and the partners is number one. Second thing, of course, is seeing all the cool technology. You know, seeing what's going on, what's hot, what can we leverage from our perspective, what can we tie ourselves to. So for example, the hot things, that IBM's really been doing from a storage perspective. Cloud and modern data protection. Those are the two big things we've been focused on for the last couple of years. And how do we integrate our storage solutions and our modern data protection with cloud infrastructure, and then also how do we, if you're not in the cloud, how do we help customers protect their data better in a modern way and reuse their secondary data, instead of making 27,000 copies of the same data. >> So when theCUBE first started at VMworld, modern data protection at the time was dealing with the lack of physical resources, 'cause you went from 10 servers down to one, and you didn't have all that excess capacity to do a run up back up job anymore. Today, modern data protection is all around cloud and multi-cloud and software defined, so I wonder if you can help us sort of paint a picture of what modern data protection is for IBM? >> Sure, I think there's a couple, couple aspects too. So, first of all, you have to support the cloud, and that's two ways. So for us, several of our backup products are used by cloud service providers. In some cases they use our name, and say, "Featuring IBM Spectrum Protect or Spectrum Protect Plus." Other cases, they have their own brand but it's our software underneath the hood so that if the end user is backing up to their cloud, they're actually using our software. So that's item number one. The second thing is you need to make sure that your traditional storage software can TEAR to the cloud, can migrate data to the cloud, can transparently move data to the cloud in an automated fashion using AI. So using artificial intelligent when the data's hot if you connote a target, and that target could be a cloud, and when the data's hot it TEARs the data to the cloud. Sorry, when it's cold. When it's hot it pulls it back in and that needs to be all automated through AI base. So we've done both, we have our backup software which is available from several cloud providers as a backup as a service, we also offer it through the cloud so IBM Cloud actually sells spectrum protect backup as a service solution All of our primary storage software and even our spectrum scale software can automatically TEAR data to a cloud target device. >> Eric I got to ask you so TEARing used to be predominantly, correct me if you disagree but, it used be a one way trip to the bit-bucket. You just described going there and coming back. Has cloud changed that because of big data, analytics? Where people want to pull back data increasingly? >> So I think of a couple of things. So first of all, there's no doubt that the world is data driven. The most valuable asset isn't gold, it's not silver, it is absolutely not oil, it's not diamonds. It is data. And it doesn't matter whether you're one of the largest banks in the world, you're in manufacturing, you're in the government, or whether you're Herzog's barn grill. The data is your most valuable asset. What you do with your customer data, how you manage your business, what you do with your supply chain if your a services company, how are you servicing, what are you charging, what are you billing, all of that is the most critical thing that you have. So in a data driven world, its critical that you use the data. And that also means that because of valued data, when you backup the data or you snapshot or replicate the data, you now created a secondary copy. Well what if you could use it to do tests? What if you could use it to do big data analytics? What if you could use it for DevOps? So instead of making one copy for tests, one copy for disaster recovery, one copy for this, and have basically a plethora of copies all over the place, with what we've provided in modern data protection, you can use a backup, you can use a snap or a replica, and you can use that to do tests or development or to do big data analytics. And using that one copy not making multiple copies. So that's- >> I just want to pick up on something you said there's going to be some folks in our audience like, "yeah yeah we hear that data is more valuable than oil or more valuable than gold, et cetera, more valuable than platinum." There's evidence, if you look at the market value of the top five companies, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, they've surpassed the banks, they've surpassed the energy companies, and I would argue its cuz of data. People are recognizing that they're data companies, you agree? >> But if you look at that name the only one that actually builds anything of substance, as a fair amount of their volume of revenue, is Apple. >> Is Apple, right. >> Amazon doesn't, they ship stuff. Facebook clearly doesn't, Google has a few things but not really builds stuff its really about the data. Absolutely and if your a more traditional company like a bank or someone building the table. Whoever builds this table if they have their act together and they're using that data right, they're building the table cheaper than anyone else, they're shipping it to theCUBE cheaper than anyone else could ship it to you. They got more colors because they know what their doing. And they ship you the right color table and they don't screw it up and send you a black table when you want it this color table because black won't show up on theCUBE very well. The more you do that the more money you make. Even something as simple as a table manufacturer. And that's all about the data and how you use that data. >> So Eric you love talking with customers which is great as the CMO for IBM storage. Got to talk to those customers. Let's talk about how you're seeing customers take the efficiencies of what IBM is doing with data protection, storage, et cetera. to be able to harness the power of AI, the superpowers that Pat Gelsinger talked about on Monday, and transform their businesses. Give us some of your favorite customer examples where its really revolutionary. >> So we had a great example today, we did a panel with a bunch of end users as part of the show agenda. And one of the customers is a provider of softwares of service to universities and schools. 45,000 customers between the universities, junior colleges, schools districts, et cetera. In North America so Canada and the U.S. And they are doing softwares of service so for them performance is critical, they can't go down. All of the college bookstores, if you go into a college bookstore, all of the infrastructure behind that is them. So they're called Follet. So a couple of things, one because they're doing softwares of service and managing all that. Its critical, can't go down. Got to be available, it's got to be performant, it's got to be resilient, it's got to be reliable. So that's how the storage melds in. From modern data protection the way it melds in is how many books did Dave buy? What did Eric buy? Oh is Dave buying a used book? Or is Eric buying a new book? Okay say we know that the propensity is certain of members of the community. I went to UC Davis, University of California Davis, are going to buy used books, Dave, whereas Herzog's going to buy new. They can figure that out, how many used books they need, how many new books they need, that's all about efficiency and how they make more money. What are the store hours? Certain universities it's this, other universities it's that. What do they do in the winter time? At UC Davis you can go in the winter time, I know you went to school in Boston its probably snowing, no one's going in the bookstore in the wintertime. >> Trend towards book rentals, how do we capitalize on that? >> That's all they do. One of the things they talked about was how they always have to protect that data and back it up. The other thing they talked about was they have to assume a lot of capacity. So what they do is they bought assuming they would have to refresh in 18 months. And because our storage arrays have a ton of different data reduction technology whether that be block, D2, compression, et cetera. And they have petabytes of data. Petabytes. 12 Petabytes. They've actually calculated it out they won't need to buy new storage for 36 months instead of 18 so they just saved on CapX. Through the intelligence of the storage. So in that case you've got both modern data protection and you've got a storage message. One of our other customers who's a public reference, not here at the show, which is a hospital, they were backing up all their data, both cloud and on premise with our backup software, and they went down and their entire system went down and they didn't lose one stitch of data and its a hospital. It's a teaching hospital, think they're in Pennsylvania, and in the public reference in the video he said, "and we went down and off that backup we were able to get all of the data back. We didn't lose any patient data, we didn't lose any research data, we didn't lose any billing data, if you break your arm they do bill you, they didn't lose anything." >> That's not just money, that's lives so that's huge. >> Absolutely. >> I want to ask you about you know that table example you were giving, and we were talking about the big five companies in terms of market cap being data orientated. There seems to be a gap between those sort of traditional companies and those data companies and that gap tends to be the data is often is often in silos its human expertise or expertise around a bottling plant or the manufacturing plant or whatever it is versus a data model with humans who understand how to leverage that data. Do you see, whether its through new data protection techniques or other storage techniques that IBM is working on, ways to help customers break down those data silos so they can become more digital and be able to take advantage of data? >> So I think there's a couple of things. So first of all at the very tactical level we provide this automated IA based data TEARing. We can tear from anything to anything so we can take data from an IBM array and TEAR it to an EMC array. We can take data from an EMC array and TEAR it to a net app array. A net app array to a Tachi array, an HP array back to our array, so we can do this transparent data move based on hot and cold. Not only does that allow you to control CapX and OpX you can move the data from array to array, and once you move that data set it might be working that other array could be hooked up to a different set of servers through the SAN that's running a different workload and then takes that dataset and use it with that other piece of software out on the server side. So that's item number one. Item number two is IBM not just in the storage but overall has a global program where IBM is promoting, through universities all over the world, data scientists. Part of that is training data scientists not only how to do the science of data and analyzing data and mining data and doing it, but to break down those walls. The value is more there. And we also have from a storage perspective some products are spectrum scale products, one of our customers who's one of the largest banks in the world they run 300,000 servers attached to a giant spectrum scale repository, petabytes and petabytes, and they do real time data analytics to see if Dave Vellante or Lisa's credit card was stolen. >> Thank you! >> Oh yes, thank you! >> So that's real world analytics they run but they need petabytes of data. And then with our IBM cloud object storage technology where we have several customers at the exabyte level in production with an exabyte of data, you put the data out when its cold but guess what, if you want to mine it you might want to pull it back and guess what, you can TEAR data from spectrum scale to IBM cloud object storage and then spectrum scale can pull it back in to do the big data analytic workloads. >> And that AI you're using is it heavy open source? Is there a little bit of Watson sprinkled in there? >> It's stuff the storage division developed years ago and then has peppered in the AI based technology into that software to determine when the dataset is hot or cold and then move it back or forth. We also do the old style, so if you go back 10 years ago, the automation of storage was policy based. So we had it way back when which was if the data is 30 days old move it to this array. >> The old HSM kind of... >> Yeah and it was automated so once it hit 30 days, but now what we've done is, we started with that, what I would call automation, and now we've moved that to AI. And by the way, if you still want to do it the old way and say move this data when its 60 days old, you can still do that. But the modern way is let the storage figure out for you and move it back and forth whether it be to the cloud or whether it be on premises. >> So it's intelligent hierarchical storage management? So if the characteristics change the system knows what to do as opposed to- >> So when it's hot it'll pull the data back into flash, for example, when its cold it'll put it out to cloud, it'll put it out to tape or it'll put it out to slow hard drives, either way. >> Alright Eric, so we're almost out of time here. You've been at IBM a long time, IBM's been around a long time, you said you even have customers at exabyte scale. I'm hearing heterogeneity, customer choice, but if I'm a small hospital in the middle of America and I have choice with data protection vendors, storage vendors, some smaller than IBM that might be able to move faster, what are the top three differentiators of why I would want to go with IBM's storage solutions? >> Sure so the first thing is our broad portfolio. Whether it be file block or object, whether it be modern data protection, whether it be archiving if you still want to use tape, we're the number one provider of tape in the world and we sell gobs of it to the web scale guys. >> Of course you do. >> They're the guys that buy it. >> Cuz its cost effective. >> So we've got one throat to choke, all of it talks to each other, and happens to work with all the cloud vendors not just IBM cloud. We work with Amazon, we work with Microsoft, we work with Google, and we work with IBM's own cloud. So we can work with anything. That's out of mind. Second thing, for smaller shops we have a network of business partners all over the world, some of them even deal with the big global Fortune 500 and others deal with small accounts. And then really the third thing is that IBM makes sure that our stuff works with everyone else's stuff. Whether that be cloud, our spectrum tech software which has been around for years and is the leading enterprise backup package, the bulk of what it backs up is not IBM storage. The vast bulk of it is from two of the competitors on the floor of this show, they also back up our stuff too. And we backup everyone's. There's probably 20 storage vendors we backup every one of their data. So if someone buys storage from XYZ, call me, we can back it up. If someone buys it from one of the big competitors we back it up, from us we back it up. So the fact that our software works with everyone's gear is of an advantage for both the small shop and the big shop. We make sure that our software, whether its embedded in our arrays or whether we sell it as just a pieces storage software and we are the number one storage software provider on the planet as well, we can meet the needs of any company big or small because we have this flexibility of working with our stuff and working with everybody else stuff and most of the other guys don't do that. If its a small shop their stuff usually only works with their stuff. >> And from a support perspective, you play with everybody? >> Global network. I mean we're known for our support whether it be IBM direct or what we do with our partners all the partners are certified, its a big certification process, and if they can't certify the product they can't sell IBM's stuff. That's just how we operate. Other people, if they can move a lot of boxes but they don't have anyone pick up the phone or can come out to Dave's house to install, they let them sell, we don't do that at IBM. We don't use those box mover types we go for guys that add value and know how to work with the cloud, know how to do hybrid cloud. One of our resellers designed a Watson based AI system that's used in bottle factories. Packaging. Beer, soda, milk, and it can figure out if its full or not full, if the bottle or can or carton is damaged. And they used Watson to do it. Now they're regular resell. They resell all the storage, they resell our power, they resell mainframe, but they've gone into the software development side using this Watson thing and they're selling a full solution with the software included to bottling plants all over the world. >> Wow, Eric. This has been a super charged conversation. Thanks for stopping by and talking with Dave and me about not just your excitement about talking with customers but really how IBM is really empowering customers of any size worldwide to succeed. We know we'll see you again soon but thanks for stopping by a couple of times this week. >> Great well thank you. Thank you, really appreciate the time. >> And the outfit choices are just on point guys, you blend well too. For Eric, Dave Vellante, I am Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live from VMworld 2018 day 3. Stick around, we'll be back with our next guest after a short break. (electro music)

(light techno music) >> Announcer: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's The Cube. Covering ZertoCon 2018. Brought to you by Zerto. >> This is The Cube. We're at ZeratoCon 2018, Hines Convention Center in Boston. My name's Paul Gillin. My guest is John White, the VP of Product Strategy at Expedient. Why don't you start off by giving us just the elevator pitch on what Expedient is all about. >> Sure, Expedient is a cloud-service provider as well as managed service provider, and we also have data centers that we operate here mainly on the east coast. We have seven cities and 11 data centers. Those are in Boston here, locally as well as Baltimore, Maryland, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, and Memphis, Tennessee. And then we actually, we'll put our private cloud services really anywhere. So we actually will put 'em on the customer's premises to meet that need as well as in partner data centers anywhere over the world, if they have to deal with compliance, security, whatever it might be, we'll go and tackle those problems for them. So our goal is to be an infrastructure as a service provider for, you know, really all the enterprise. >> So, when would a company do business with you verses a Microsoft or an Amazon? >> Yeah, so, if you kind of look at really three ways to kind of go cloud, right? You can still do it yourself. You can build some cloud-based services. And that's, again, you're in it on your own. You can go all the way to the extreme, which is the AWS or the Azures, and that's more, again, you're kind of in a do-it-yourself type of mentality. And your support structure there is a little bit different. It's maybe a little bit more mechanical, a little bit more robotical. If you need help in transitioning and figuring out where your workload should sit, and maybe creating more of a hybrid cloud so it's maybe on your premises, it's inside one of our data centers, and then maybe it's even in one of those AWS or Azures. You're going to work with a company like Expedient to go and help you figure out where you should put your workloads, first off. And then how to create that long-term strategy so you get the best of all worlds that are out there, not just one prescriptive cloud. >> So, you're kind of a high-touch cloud provider then. >> Very, very high touch, yeah. Our whole product service is actually a la carte menus. So you pick and choose what you want. We can manage servers, we can provide virtual infrastructure, we can do things like DR as a service, backups as a service, all those pieces. So you build, basically, your perfect IT strategy with us. And then direct connects into AWS and Azure and some other cool products coming soon to kind of make your life a little bit easier, consuming and running your work loads in public clouds. >> Well we hear a lot these days about multi-cloud, about customers wanting to shift their work load seamlessly around between multiple back-end cloud providers. Certainly vendors talk about that a lot. Do you hear customers talking about it? >> Yeah, we have some customers starting to talk about it. And, you know, in the beginning, they just wanted to see, okay, I'm running workloads in AWS, I'm running workloads in Expedient, I'm multi-cloud. And then they start to understand. well, our management's really hard. And the network's really hard, and the security's really hard. And we're doing backups another way than we've done it traditionally. And we're helping customers bridge that gap and saying, we can take some of the security policies that we've been running internally in our data center, and maybe you've been doing inside your data center, and take those out into the public cloud. Simplifying things with networking. We're a pretty big VM or NXS shop. So doing something where you can create tagging and policies local inside the Expedient data center, and then being able to translate those up into AWS and Azure, to make it, basically, one seamless network, is really, really big and key for our customers. It's something that I think is still new. We have a handful of customers that we're working on a lot of cool research projects on. But I think it's going to be something that's going to be the dominant force here in the next few years. >> You mention disaster recovery as a service. Now is that where Zerto fits into your plan? >> Correct, yeah. We've been working with Zerto for quite some time now really since they were just comin' to Boston. And we worked and spent a ton of time with them getting them to understand the needs of service providers, 'cause they were traditionally enterprise focused. And that partnership that we've built over the years has done tremendous value for not only our customers but our businesses. And we've actually had two year-over-year growth for the last three years with them. And actually, we just won the Service Partner Growth Partner of the Year Award with them. So we're creating some pretty cool solutions around DR as a service, and taking some of our network background and actually simplifying DR for our customers that way. So, we use Zerto as well as VM Ware, and some of our own product connectivity, NSX, to actually simplify the package of DR to get the recovery time objective down into 10, 15 minutes, instead of four hours or eight hours or multiple days that really most people are experiencing right now. >> So when you look at the landscape, there are a lot of disaster recovery solution providers you could've worked with. What does Zerto do that's really different? >> The part, well, on a technology wise, watching them take a look at the change block that's occurring that's out of the VM1 environment, making an agnostic from a storage layer, that was really big for us in the beginning on the technical tip-in. And then the partnership, as of late, really since the beginning, was the big value differentiator that we just couldn't find in other companies that're out there. We locked arms with their product management team and their product strategy team right away. We gave them literally two sheets of paper and said these are the things we need to be successful as a service provider using your software. They went down, checked 'em all off. We started goin' at it, and we started then growing that year-over-year for the last three years. So, it's been an amazing partnership. They have a strategic team that understands where the marketing industry's going. And we're going to use them, and leverage them, as much as we possibly can to help out our customers, give 'em the best outcomes they can possibly get. >> When your customers talk to you about backup, where do you see them going? Where is that market headed? >> So backup, traditional backup is something we've been doin' for quite some time. We do petabytes of backups every year for customers. Still using tape, believe it or not, as well. We have a lot of discs-- >> Tape will never die. >> Tape is still out there. I actually have a bumper sticker that I think EMC made when they bought Avamar saying Tape is Dead. And I don't think it's going to die anytime soon. >> Mainframe was dead, too. >> Yeah, right, mainframe has been dead and we still roll new ones into our data centers on a regular basis and then put cloud beside it. But on the backup side of it, if you look at some of the new disasters, right? Look at Atlanta. Their disaster was different. It wasn't a natural disaster, it was a-- >> Radsomeware attack. >> Ransomeware attack. Right, that's a new disaster. We're going to find new disasters, and you can't go and restore back from 24 hours ago and think that that's good. We don't live in that world anymore. It needs to be from five minutes, seven minutes, 30 minutes, whatever it might be. So, we use their journaling today to actually get those quick recoveries. And if they can extend that out, I think it's going to be pretty powerful for customers to say, okay, I want to go back to two years, three days, and six hours from now. And say, gimme that point in time, snap. That's the way I want to actually restore that data. Succeeding in that vision I think will definitely change the game for how we actually look at doing backup and restores in the future. >> A lot of talk at this conference about resilience. >> John: Um hmm. >> Is that a concept that you think customers, your customers, have really internalized? They understand what that means? >> They're getting it, yeah, definitely. I mean, DR even was something that we had to kind of walk them into. But now, if they have an outage, it's not just money that they're losing. It's the reputation. And as we all know now, reputation is key. And you look at Twitter. When somebody has an outage, or has a problem, I mean, their users essentially just blow 'em up and there's memes and all kinds of other stuff. There's a lot of funny ones for the airlines, from Delta and Southwest havin' those challenges. And so, our customers today are realizing that yeah, we can't go a day or two without having service to our customers. We can maybe go a minute or two, but that's about it. We need to make sure we're being resilient with our data. We need to make sure we're protecting it, we'll be able to create ways to quickly roll it back to make sure our customers are up on line. Because they just can't go down anymore. >> How important is security as a driver of resilience and spending on disaster recovery now? >> Yeah, security is definitely, with being able to quickly restore from like a ransomware, it's startin' to bring that infrastructure that has been, security's been a little different there, and where network security's been a little bit different, kind of bringing them together to create, say, we need to have a full package. We not only need to figure out how we're blocking it at the edge and blocking it internally east west, but we need to figure out, if we're going to get breached, 'cause we're going to get breached, how can we quickly restore from that? How can we make sure we're not being held ransom for Bitcoin or whatever the next currency's going to be that they're going to be held ransom for that they just can't pay because maybe it would knock them out of business. >> So, John, Expedient, being a small, specialized cloud service provider, you're kind of dancing with elephants when you're out there with Amazon and Microsoft. What's the secret? What keeps you guys successful and how do you keep viable? >> There's a lot of different things. I think the way we focus on technologies is a little bit unique. I mean, we're there to design the best technical solution for that customer. And not maybe fit them into a one-size-fits-all outfit. The other side of it is, a lot of our customers like the local touch and feel. Majority of our customers are at and around our data centers. That way they can get to learn the facility, they can, even if they're running cloud services with us, they know where it lives. That maybe eases their minds from a compliance standpoint, security standpoint. Or just in a trust, saying, I'm going to take my data that's been living inside of my data center, that's key to my business, and I'm going to give it to somebody, I at least want a face and a name so I can know who to call and who to talk to if there is ever a problem. >> Face to face still matters. >> It does, and I think it's always going to matter. And I think we're always going to have some sort of high interaction with every enterprise out there. And that's what they're going to need. 'Cause this stuff can never commoditize all the way. Creating the solution is still hard. Maybe the bits and pieces underneath it are a little bit easier, but the whole packages is going to always be unique and really hard to define in a one-size-fits-all for a lot of those enterprises. >> John White, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> We'll be back from Zertocon 2018 here in Boston. I'm Paul Gillin, this is The Cube. (light techno music)