(bright intro music) >> The cloud has popularized many useful concepts in the past decade, working backwards from the customer to pizza teams and DevOps mindset, the shared responsibility model, and security, of course, the shift from CapEx to OPEX, and as a service consumption models. The last item is what we're here to talk about today. Pay for consumption is attractive because you're not over provisioning, at least not the way you used to. You'd have to buy for peak capacity events, but there are always two sides to every story, and while pay for use more closely ties IT consumption to business value, procurement teams don't always love the uncertainty of the cloud bill each month, but consumption pricing and as a service models are here to stay in software and hardware. Hello, I'm Dave Vellante and welcome to "At Your Storage Service" made possible by Pure Storage, and with me is Prakash Darji who's the General Manager of the Digital Experience Business Unit at Pure. Prakash, welcome to the program. >> Thanks Dave. Thanks for having me. >> You bet. Okay, we've seen this shift to as a service, the as a service economy, subscription models, and this as a service movement have gained real momentum. It's clear over the past several years. What's driving this shift? Is it pressure from investors and technology companies that are chasing the all important ARR, their annual recurring revenue stream? Is it customer driven? Give us your insights. >> Well, look, I think we'll do some definitional stuff first. I think we often mix the definition of a subscription and a service, but, you know, subscription is, "Hey, I can go for a pay up front or pay as I go." Service is more about, "How do I not buy something just by the outcome?" So, you know, the concept of delivering storage as a service means, what do you want in storage, performance, capacity, availability? Like that's what you want. Well, how do you get that without having to worry about the labor of planning, capacity management? Those labor elements are what's driving it. So I think in the world where you have to do more with less and in a world where security becomes increasingly important where standardization will allow you to secure your landscape against ransomware and those types of things, those trends are driving the SaaSification of storage, and the only way to deliver that is storage as a service. >> So that's good. You maybe thinking about it differently than some of the other companies that I talked to, but so you've made inroads here, pretty big inroads actually, and changed the thinking in enterprise data storage with a huge emphasis on simplicity. That's really Pure's raison d'etre. How does storage as a service fit in to your innovation agenda overall? >> Well, our innovation agenda started, as you mentioned, with the simplicity, you know, a decade ago with the Evergreen Architecture. That architecture was beyond the box. How do you go ahead and say, "I can improve performance or capacity as I need it." Well, that's a foundational element to deliver a service because once you have that technology, you can say, "Oh, you know what? You've subscribed to this performance level. You want to raise your performance level and yes, that'll be a higher dollar per gig or dollar per terabyte," but how do you do that without a data migration? How do you do that with a non-disruptive service change? How do you do that with a delivery via software update? Those elements of non-disruptive updates, when you think SaaS, Salesforce, you don't know when Salesforce doesn't update. You don't know when they're increasing something, adding a new capability. It just shows up. It's not a disruptive event. So to drive that standardization and SaaSification in service delivery, you need to keep that simplicity of delivery first and foremost, and you can't allow, like, if the goal was, "I want to change from this service here to that service here," and a person needed to show up and do a day data migration, that's kind of useless. You've broken the experience of flexibility for a customer. >> Okay, so I like the Salesforce analogy, but I want to jump out do a little side for a second. So I've got to make some commitment to Pure, right? Some baseline commitment, and if I do, then I can dial up and then pay for what I use, and I can dial it down, correct? >> Correct. >> Okay. I can't do that with Salesforce, all right? I could dial up, but then I'm stuck with those licenses. So you have a better model in Salesforce, I would argue. Okay. >> Yeah. I would agree with that. >> Okay, so, and I got to pay for everything up front. Anyway, let's go back to I was kind of pushing at you a little bit at my upfront, you know, about, you know, the ARR model, the all-important, you know, financial metric, but let's talk from the customer standpoint. What are the benefits of consuming storage as a service from your customer's perspective? >> Well, one is when you start your storage journey, do you really know what you need? And I would argue, most of the time, people are guessing, right? It's like, "Well, I think I need this. This is the performance I think I need or this is the capacity I think I need," and, you know, with the scientific method, you actually deploy something, and you're like, "Do I need more? Do I need less?" You find out as you're deploying. So in a storage as a service world, when you have the ability to move up performance levels or move out capacity levels, and you have that flexibility, then you have the ability to just to meet demand as you deploy, and that's the most important element of meeting business needs today. The applications you deploy are not in your control when you're providing storage to your end consumers. >> Yeah. >> They're going to want different levels of storage. They're going to want different performance thresholds. That's kind of a pay, you know, pay for performance type culture, right? You can use HR analogy for it. You pay for performance. You want top talent, you pay for it. You want top storage performance, you pay for it. You don't, you can pay less, and you can actually get lower performance tiers. Not everything is a tier one application, and you need the ability to deploy it, but when you start, how do you know the way your end customers are going to be consuming or do you need a dictated upfront? 'Cause that's infrastructure dictating business inflexibility, and you never want to be in that position. >> I got another analogy for you. It's like, you know, we do a lot of hosting at our home and you know, like Thanksgiving, right? And you go to the liquor store and say, "Okay, what should I get, should we get red wine? We got to go white wine, we got to get some beer. Should I get bubbles? Yeah, I get some bubbles." 'Cause you don't know what people are going to have, and so you over provision everything and then there's a run on bubbles and you're like, "Ah, we're running the bubbles," so you just over buy, but there's a liquor store that actually will take it back. So I got to do business with those guys every time 'cause it's way more flexible. I can dial up capacity or I can dial up performance, and dial it back down if I don't use it. >> Where you're going to be drinking a lot more the next few weeks. >> Yeah, exactly, like which is the last thing you want. Okay, so let's talk about how Pure kind of meets this as a service demand. You've touched upon your differentiators from others in the market. You know, love to hear about the momentum. What are you seeing out there? >> Yeah, look, our business is growing well largely built on, you know, what customers need. Specifically, where the market is at today is there's a set of folks that are interested in the financial transformation of CapEx to OPEX. Like that definitely exists in the industry around, "How do I get a paper use model?" The next kind of more advanced customer is interested in, "How do I go ahead and remove labor to deliver storage?" And a service gets you there on top of a subscription. The most sophisticated customer says, "How do I separate storage production with consumption and production of storage?" Being a storage producer should be about standardization so I could do policy based management. Why is that important? You know, coming back to some of the things I said earlier, in the world where ransomware attacks are common, you need the standardized security policies. Linux has new vulnerabilities every other day, like find two, three critical vulnerabilities a week. How do you stay on top of it? The complexity of staying on top of it should be, "Look, let's standardize and make it a vendor problem, and assume the vendor's going to deliver this to me." So that standardization allows you to have business policies that allow you to stay current and modern. I would argue in, you know, the traditional storage and appliance world, you buy something and the day after you buy it, it's worthless. It's like driving a car off a lot, right? The very next day, the car's not worth what it was when you bought it. Storage is the same way. So how do you ensure that your storage stays current? How do you ensure that it gets a like a fine line that gets better with age? Well, if you're not buying storage and you're buying a performance SLA, it's up to the vendor to meet that SLA so it actually never gets worse over time. This is the way you modernize technology and avoid technology debt as a customer. >> Yeah, I mean, just even though words you're using and the way you're thinking about this precaution, I think are different, and I love the concept of essentially taking my labor cost and transferring them to Pure's R&D. I mean, that's essentially what you're talking about here. So let's stick with the tech for a minute. What do you see as new or emerging technologies that are helping accelerate this shift toward the as a service economy? >> Well, the first thing is I always tell people you can't deliver a service without monitoring because if you can't monitor something, how you're going to know whether you're meeting your service level obligation, right? So everything starts with data monitoring. The next step layering on the technology differentiation is if you need to deliver a service level obligation on top of that data monitoring, you need the ability to flexibly meet whatever performance obligations you have in a tight time window. So supply chain and being able to deliver anywhere becomes important. So if you use the analogy today of how Tesla works or a IoT system works, you have a SaaS management that actually provides instructions that pushes those instructions and policies to the edge. In Tesla's case, that happens to be the car. It'll push software updates to the car. It'll push new map updates to the car, but the car is running independently. It's not like if the car becomes disconnected from the internet, it's going to crash and drive you off the road. In the same way, what if you think about storage as something that needs to be wherever your application is? So people think about cloud as a destination. I think that's a fallacy. You have to think about the world in the view of an application. An application needs data, and that data needs to sit in storage wherever that application sits. So for us, the storage system is just an edge device. It can be sitting in your data center it can be sitting in a Equinix. It can be sitting in hosted and MSP can run it. It can even be sitting in the public cloud, but how do you have central monitoring and central management where you can push policies to update all those devices, very similar to an IOT system? So the technology advantage of doing that means that you can operate anywhere and ensure you have a consistent set of policies, a consistent set of protection, a consistent set of, you know, prevention against ransomware attack regardless of your application, regardless of, you know, where it sits, regardless of what content in it you're on. That approach is very similar to the way the IoT industry has been updating and monitoring edge devices, nest thermostats, you know, Tesla cars, those types of things. That's the thinking that needs to come to storage, and that's the foundation on which we built Pure as a service. >> So that implies or, at least I infer, that you've, obviously, got control of the experience on prem, but you're extending that into AWS, Google, Azure, which suggests to me that you have to hide the underlying complexity of the primitives and APIs in that world, and then eventually, actually today, 'cause you're treating everything like the edge out to the edge, you know, maybe mini Pure at some point in time, but so I call that super cloud, that abstraction layer that floats above all the clouds on-prem and adds that layer of value and is a singular experience, what you're talking about pushing, you know, policy throughout. Is that the right way to think about it? And how does this impact the ability to deliver true storage as a service? >> Oh, that's absolutely the right way of thinking about it. The things that you think about from an abstraction kind of fall in three buckets. First, you need management. So how do you ensure consistent management experience, creating volumes, deleting volumes, creating buckets, creating files, creating directories like management of objects and create a consistent API across the entire landscape? The second one is monitoring. How do you measure utilization and performance obligations or capacity obligations or, you know, policy violations, wherever you're at? And then the third one is more of a business one, which is procurement because you can't do it independent of procurement, meaning what happens when you run out? Do you need to increase your reserve commits? Do you want to go on demand? How do you integrate it into company's procurement models such that you can say, "I can use what I need," and any, it's not like every change order is a request of procurement. That's going to break an as a service delivery model. So to get embedded in a customer's landscape where they don't have to worry about storage, you have to provide that consistency on management, monitoring, and procurement across the tech, and yes, this is deep technology problems, whether it's running our storage on AWS or Azure or running it on prem or, you know, at some point in the future, maybe even, you know, Pure mini at the edge, right? So, you know, all of those things are tied to our Pure as a service delivery. >> Yeah, technically, non-trivial, but hey, you guys are on it. Well, we got to leave it there, Prakash. Thank you, great stuff, really appreciate your time. >> All right, thanks for having me, man. >> You're very welcome. Okay, in a moment, Steve McDowell. For more insights and strategies, he's going to give us the analyst perspective on as a service. You're watching "theCUBE", the leader in high tech enterprise coverage. (bright outro music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome to the special Cube conversation that we're launching in conjunction with Pure Accelerate. Prakash Darji is here, is the general manager of Digital Experience. They actually have a business unit dedicated to this at Pure Storage. Prakash, welcome back, good to see you. >> Yeah Dave, happy to be here. >> So a few weeks back, you and I were talking about the Shift 2 and as a service economy and which is a good lead up to Accelerate, held today, we're releasing this video in LA. This is the fifth in person Accelerate. It's got a new tagline techfest so you're making it fun, but still hanging out to the tech, which we love. So this morning you guys made some announcements expanding the portfolio. I'm really interested in your reaffirmed commitment to Evergreen. That's something that got this whole trend started in the introduction of Evergreen Flex. What is that all about? What's your vision for Evergreen Flex? >> Well, so look, this is one of the biggest moments that I think we have as a company now, because we introduced Evergreen and that was and probably still is one of the largest disruptions to happen to the industry in a decade. Now, Evergreen Flex takes the power of modernizing performance and capacity to storage beyond the box, full stop. So we first started on a project many years ago to say, okay, how can we bring that modernization concept to our entire portfolio? That means if someone's got 10 boxes, how do you modernize performance and capacity across 10 boxes or across maybe FlashBlade and FlashArray. So with Evergreen Flex, we first are starting to hyper disaggregate performance and capacity and the capacity can be moved to where you need it. So previously, you could have thought of a box saying, okay, it has this performance or capacity range or boundary, but let's think about it beyond the box. Let's think about it as a portfolio. My application needs performance or capacity for storage, what if I could bring the resources to it? So with Evergreen Flex within the QLC family with our FlashBlade and our FlashArray QLC projects, you could actually move QLC capacity to where you need it. And with FlashArray X and XL or TLC family, you could move capacity to where you need it within that family. Now, if you're enabling that, you have to change the business model because the capacity needs to get build where you use it. If you use it in a high performance tier, you could build at a high performance rate. If you use it as a lower performance tier, you could build at a lower performance rate. So we changed the business model to enable this technology flexibility, where customers can buy the hardware and they get a pay per use consumption model for the software and services, but this enables the technology flexibility to use your capacity wherever you need. And we're just continuing that journey of hyper disaggregated. >> Okay, so you solve the problem of having to allocate specific capacity or performance to a particular workload. You can now spread that across whatever products in the portfolio, like you said, you're disaggregating performance and capacity. So that's very cool. Maybe you could double click on that. You obviously talk to customers about doing this. They were in pain a little bit, right? 'Cause they had this sort of stovepipe thing. So talk a little bit about the customer feedback that led you here. >> Well, look, let's just say today if you're an application developer or you haven't written your app yet, but you know you're going to. Well, you need that at least say I need something, right? So someone's going to ask you what kind of storage do you need? How many IOPS, what kind of performance capacity, before you've written your code. And you're going to buy something and you're going to spend that money. Now at that point, you're going to go write your application, run it on that box and then say, okay, was I right or was I wrong? And you know what? You were guessing before you wrote the software. After you wrote the software, you can test it and decide what you need, how it's going to scale, et cetera. But if you were wrong, you already bought something. In a hyper disaggregated world, that capacity is not a sunk cost, you can use it wherever you want. You can use capacity of somewhere else and bring it over there. So in the world of application development and in the world of storage, today people think about, I've got a workload, it's SAP, it's Oracle, I've built this custom app. I need to move it to a tier of storage, a performance class. Like you think about the application and you think about moving the application. And it takes time to move the application, takes performance, takes loan, it's a scheduled event. What if you said, you know what? You don't have to do any of that. You just move the capacity to where you need it, right? >> Yep. >> So the application's there and you actually have the ability to instantaneously move the capacity to where you need it for the application. And eventually, where we're going is we're looking to do the same thing across the performance hearing. So right now, the biggest benefit is the agility and flexibility a customer has across their fleet. So Evergreen was great for the customer with one array, but Evergreen Flex now brings that power to the entire fleet. And that's not tied to just FlashArray or FlashBlade. We've engineered a data plane in our direct flash fabric software to be able to take on the personality of the system it needs to go into. So when a data pack goes into a FlashBlade, that data pack is optimized for use in that scale out architecture with the metadata for FlashBlade. When it goes into a FlashArray C it's optimized for that metadata structure. So our Purity software has made this transformative to be able to do this. And we created a business model that allowed us to take advantage of this technology flexibility. >> Got it. Okay, so you got this mutually interchangeable performance and capacity across the portfolio beautiful. And I want to come back to sort of the Purity, but help me understand how this is different from just normal Evergreen, existing evergreen options. You mentioned the one array, but help us understand that more fully. >> Well, look, so in addition to this, like we had Evergreen Gold historically. We introduced Evergreen Flex and we had Pure as a service. So you had kind of two spectrums previously. You had Evergreen Gold on one hand, which modernized the performance and capacity of a box. You had Pure as a service that said don't worry about the box, tell me how many IOPS you have and will run and operate and manage that service for you. I think we've spoken about that previously on theCUBE. >> Yep. >> Now, we have this model where it's not just about the box, we have this model where we say, you know what, it's your fleet. You're going to run and operate and manage your fleet and you could move the capacity to where you need it. So as we started thinking about this, we decided to unify our entire portfolio of sub software and subscription services under the Evergreen brand. Evergreen Gold we're renaming to Evergreen Forever. We've actually had seven customers just crossed a decade of updates Forever Evergreen within a box. So Evergreen Forever is about modernizing a box. Evergreen Flex is about modernizing your fleet and Evergreen one, which is our rebrand of Pure as a service is about modernizing your labor. Instead of you worrying about it, let us do it for you. Because if you're an application developer and you're trying to figure out, where should I put my capacity? Where should I do it? You can just sign up for the IOPS you need and let us actually deliver and move the components to where you need it for performance, capacity, management, SLAs, et cetera. So as we think about this, for us this is a spectrum and a continuum of where you're at in the modernization journey to software subscription and services. >> Okay, got it. So why did you feel like now was the right time for the rebranding and the renaming convention, what's behind? What was the thing? Take us inside the internal conversations and the chalkboard discussion? >> Well, look, the chalkboard discussion's simple. It's everything was built on the Evergreen stateless architecture where within a box, right? We disaggregated the performance and capacity within the box already, 10 years ago within Evergreen. And that's what enabled us to build Pure as a service. That's why I say like when companies say they built a service, I'm like it's not a service if you have to do a data migration. You need a stateless architecture that's disaggregated. You can almost think of this as the anti hyper-converge, right? That's going the other way. It's hyper disaggregated. >> Right. >> And that foundation is true for our whole portfolio. That was fundamental, the Evergreen architecture. And then if Gold is modernizing a box and Flex is modernizing your fleet and your portfolio and Pure as a service is modernizing the labor, it is more of a continuation in the spectrum of how do you ensure you get better with age, right? And it's like one of those things when you think about a car. Miles driven on a car means your car's getting older and it doesn't necessarily get better with age, right? What's interesting when you think about the human body, yeah, you get older and some people deteriorate with age and some people it turns out for a period of time, you pick up some muscle mass, you get a little bit older, you get a little bit wiser and you get a little bit better with age for a while because you're putting in the work to modernize, right? But where in infrastructure and hardware and technology are you at the point where it always just gets better with age, right? We've introduced that concept 10 years ago. And we've now had proven industry success over a decade, right? As I mentioned, our first seven customers who've had a decade of Evergreen update started with an FA-300 way back when, and since then performance and capacity has been getting better over time with Evergreen Forever. So this is the next 10 years of it getting better and better for the company and not just tying it to the box because now we've grown up, we've got customers with like large fleets. I think one of our customers just hit 900 systems, right? >> Wow. >> So when you have 900 systems, right? And you're running a fleet you need to think about, okay, how am I using these resources? And in this day and age in that world, power becomes a big thing because if you're using resources inefficiently and the cost of power and energy is up, you're going to be in a world of hurt. So by using Flex where you can move the capacity to where it's needed, you're creating the most efficient operating environment, which is actually the lowest power consumption environment as well. >> Right. >> So we're really excited about this journey of modernizing, but that rebranding just became kind of a no brainer to us because it's all part of the spectrum on your journey of whether you're a single array customer, you're a fleet customer, or you don't want to even run, operate and manage. You can actually just say, you know what, give me the guarantee in the SLA. So that's the spectrum that informed the rebranding. >> Got it. Yeah, so to your point about the human body, all you got to do is look at Tom Brady's NFL combine videos and you'll see what a transformation. Fine wine is another one. I like the term hyper disaggregated because that to me is consistent with what's happening with the cloud and edge. We're building this hyper distributed or disaggregated system. So I want to just understand a little bit about you mentioned Purity so there's this software obviously is the enabler here, but what's under the covers? Is it like a virtualizer or megaload balancer, metadata manager, what's the tech behind this? >> Yeah, so we'll do a little bit of a double tech, right? So we have this concept of drives where in Purity, we build our own software for direct flash that takes the NAND and we do the NAND management as we're building our drives in Purity software. Now ,that advantage gives us the ability to say how should this drive behave? So in a FlashArray C system, it can behave as part of a FlashArray C and its usable capacity that you can write because the metadata and some of the system information is in NVRAM as part of the controller, right? So you have some metadata capability there. In a legend architecture for example, you have a distributed Blade architecture. So you need parts of that capacity to operate almost like a single layer chip where you can actually have metadata operations independent of your storage operations that operate like QLC. So we actually manage the NAND in a very very different way based on the persona of the system it's going into, right? So this capacity to make it usable, right? It's like saying a competitor could go ahead name it, Dell that has power max in Isilon, HPE that has single store and three power and nimble and like you name, like can you really from a technology standpoint say your capacity can be used anywhere or all these independent systems. Everyone's thinking about the world like a system, like here's this system, here's that system, here's that system. And your capacity is locked into a system. To be able to unlock that capacity to the system, you need to behave differently with the media type in the operating environment you're going into and that's what Purity does, right? So we are doing that as part of our direct Flex software around how we manage these drives to enable this. >> Well, it's the same thing in the cloud precaution, right? I mean, you got different APIs and primitive for object, for block, for file. Now, it's all programmable infrastructure so that makes it easier, but to the point, it's still somewhat stovepipe. So it's funny, it's good to see your commitment to Evergreen, I think you're right. You lay down the gauntlet a decade plus ago. First everybody ignored you and then they kind of laughed at you, then they criticized you, and then they said, oh, then you guys reached the escape velocity. So you had a winning hand. So I'm interested in that sort of progression over the past decade where you're going, why this is so important to your customers, where you're trying to get them ultimately. >> Well, look, the thing that's most disappointing is if I bought 100 terabytes still have to re-buy it every three or five years. That seems like a kind of ridiculous proposition, but welcome to storage. You know what I mean? That's what most people do with Evergreen. We want to end data migrations. We want to make sure that every software updates, hardware updates, non disruptive. We want to make it easy to deploy and run at scale for your fleet. And eventually we want everyone to move to our Evergreen one, formerly Pure as a service where we can run and operate and manage 'cause this is all about trust. We're trying to create trust with the customer to say, trust us, to run and operate and scale for you and worry about your business because we make tech easy. And like think about this hyper disaggregated if you go further. If you're going further with hyper disaggregated, you can think about it as like performance and capacity is your Lego building blocks. Now for anyone, I have a son, he wants to build a Lego Death Star. He didn't have that manual, he's toast. So when you move to at scale and you have this hyper disaggregated world and you have this unlimited freedom, you have unlimited choice. It's the problem of the cloud today, too much choice, right? There's like hundreds of instances of this, what do I even choose? >> Right. >> Well, so the only way to solve that problem and create simplicity when you have so much choice is put data to work. And that's where Pure one comes in because we've been collecting and we can scan your landscape and tell you, you should move these types of resources here and move those types of resources there, right? In the past, it was always about you should move this application there or you should move this application there. We're actually going to turn the entire industry on it's head. It's not like applications and data have gravity. So let's think about moving resources to where that are needed versus saying resources are a fixed asset, let's move the applications there. So that's a concept that's new to the industry. Like we're creating that concept, we're introducing that concept because now we have the technology to make that reality a new efficient way of running storage for the world. Like this is that big for the company. >> Well, I mean, a lot of the failures in data analytics and data strategies are a function of trying to jam everything into a single monolithic system and hyper centralize it. Data by its very nature is distributed. So hyper disaggregated fits that model and the pendulum's clearly swinging to that. Prakash, great to have you, purestorage.com I presume is where I can learn more? >> Oh, absolutely. We're super excited and our pent up by demand I think in this space is huge so we're looking forward to bringing this innovation to the world. >> All right, hey, thanks again. Great to see you, I appreciate you coming on and explaining this new model and good luck with it. >> All right, thank you. >> All right, and thanks for watching. This is David Vellante, and appreciate you watching this Cube conversation, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

[Music] welcome to thecube's coverage of pure accelerate 2021 i'm lisa martin pleased to be welcoming back one of our alumni to the cube prakash darjee is here the vp and gm of the digital experience business unit at pure storage prakash it's great to have you back on the program yeah lisa thanks for having me it's been i don't know more than a year since i've seen the cube right pre-covered so it's been a little while recover copa remember those days well thank you for joining us virtually we appreciate that and also excited to hear some of the things that are going to be coming out at accelerate an event that i've covered in person several times so talk to me about this digital experience business unit this is relatively new what does it encompass what are you hoping to deliver from a portfolio perspective to your customers well what's interesting is it's new and it's not right because we've we've been as a company a sas company that happened to ship storage boxes on premise so we've had pure one which was largely used for monitoring and supporting our fleet like a sas company would do and customers had access to that as their single pane of class but as we expanded beyond just observability and monitoring we realized that we could use this observability to do more for customers and we introduced our pure as a service offering about three years ago now which customers just sign up for slas like you know they would on a cloud you sign up i want this performance i want this capacity it's storage so you know why don't you just sign up for what you need and we uh created the dx business unit the digital experience business units to bring those things together because frankly we're using pier one to monitor manage and allow customers to sign up for their slas in a very digital way and i guess the world's changed a little bit because you know previously you would you know call up your sales rep to do things and then it happened and i think a lot of people got a little bit of zoom fatigue um and therefore you know we see a lot of traction right now in terms of people just self-serving and going up and signing up for the slas they need talk to me about some of those slas that customers are signing up for what is it that they know with pure as a service for example in pure one that they can get well you want storage you want storage that's high performing you want storage that supports your applications you know number one thing with storage is you're signing up for capacity and performance right when you think storage you're like oh you know i need to store my videos or i need to store my apps or i need to store something and you know right now we've got customers and uh you know multiple hundreds of petabytes range right like big customers lots of storage um and we got small customers as well you know five to ten terabytes of storage as well so um but across that entire range in storage you're basically want to make sure you don't lose your data it's protected it's safe um the world's becoming a little less secure ransomware and attacks and all of those types of things so we've introduced concepts of ransomware assessment and capabilities like that but the performance of capacity are the two things you want to sign up for so what if you just said i want it this fast and i want this much space and all of the other technology problems you give to pure right because you know what you run out of space we'll ship the box we'll manage it you don't need to call us you don't need to order you don't need to do that so it's more than just a i think when people think about services they think about subscriptions right capex versus opex and sure there's an element to capex versus optics but that's not really what a service is that's just a subscription a service is hey i just want this performance in this capacity who's going to run it and operate it and manage it for me you know when you sign up for a sas service you don't really care when you sign up for salesforce how it runs who's running it etc you just want to manage your crm pipeline and you know we're bringing that same sas experience to storage you do expect that you bring up a good point when you're when you're talking about sas applications one of the things that we saw in the last year is this massive proliferation or acceleration of companies in every industry dependent on so many sas apps just for collaboration alone internally let alone externally brought up ransomware it's something i've been talking a lot about in the last year how that's been on the rise talk to me about you know as enterprise enterprises need storage to do more than just that talk to me about how you're working with customers to ensure that this data across the enterprise is secure well so it's interesting um when i talk to people and they ask me are you secure i'm like well that's kind of a silly question um because you know if you think about security there's always more you could do it's not am i secure it's how secure am i and you want to be the nsa where everything's under a lock and key you can do that and it's just going to be really expensive to do so the what we're the way we're approaching it is we're giving customers levels of ransomware that they can actually implement um for protection level zero right the simplest is make sure that i've got you know an air gap of my data and a copy of it to prevent you from altering it for up to 30 days or some time period which you know is the first level of threat that you know someone can't hold you hostage by encrypting your data those types of things and we've done that for our whole portfolio we provide that and we now even give customers an assessment to tell them you know whether they can go into our digital experience and do an assessment to see how secure are they but that's only the first step hackers are actually getting more sophisticated now on air gap and just saying well what if i do a time delayed encryption thing that overcomes the 30-day thing and you know like the world's evolving so the next level is a physical gap where you take it off the primary system and you actually put it on a secondary system your data well so you know your virtual air gaps one thing your physical distance provides another layer of security because now it's another physical asset with another copy of your data sure it costs more money because you're storing it twice so you have to decide based on the sensitivity of your information how many layers of security you want to build it you can even build in a third layer that says if something happens i don't want to pay the ransomware i just need to be able to recover quickly so let me have a rapid recovery sla and you know we use our flash play to deliver that because it's one of the you know fastest recovery products on the planet based on the performance threshold so you know we've seen a lot of companies now adopt and use flashblade is kind of that level three for rapid recovery in instead of paying for the insurance they're paying for the remediation you know what i mean so it's a different it's interesting how the landscape has evolved right and as the threat actors have access to more and more sophistication obviously that becomes a challenge but you bring up a good point and that is it's sort of it's not a matter of is it going to happen to us it's it's when and it's kind of that tolerance level based on the data but the modern data experience here's been talking about this obviously the modern data experience has changed a lot in the last year talk to us about what that is how does the modern data experience are pure one and pure as a service foundational to that and talk to me about the benefits in it for customers well so when we think about the modern data experience there's really three pillars we talk about in the modern day experience the first one is just innovation leadership pure's got a little bit of a history of redefining storage first of all flash first the unified fast fallen object you know we're on a third generation of qlc technology so we figure if we don't invent the future who else is going to you know we look around the landscape and there's a lot of data technology so we need to invent a future that people have a blueprint to copy like and that's that's our goal of modernizing the landscape you know we don't see a lot of original and innovative thought happening in the industry so we have to create the blueprint of the future right we pride ourselves on that innovation leadership um and evergreen which you know we've introduced is an innovation where you know if people buy a 500 terabytes of storage today they don't have to re-buy it every three to five years that innovation that we introduced is still unmatched in industry after we've been in industry for 10 years because companies haven't figured out how to copy it evergreen is still a differentiator it sounds like the modern data experience what you're looking to do is also define it with and for customers and have that be a unique differentiator for what care delivers 100 um so you know this innovation leadership's big um making sure that you can run your landscape like a cloud you know have a service catalog you know service catalog for developers as containers and you know we we lean very heavily into what we're doing for devops and developers not just storage administrators and you know part of the modern data experience is being cloud ready and container ready and then finally just having the best digital experience which you know pier one and peer piers of services foundational tube uh where customers can go in procure easy support easy and all of it starts with the data like if i was to say hey you're gonna get a get into a tesla right and you're gonna turn on the self-driving mode would you turn it on if you knew that there were zero miles clocked on the odometer right where no like yeah you're the first we haven't really trained this yet right no one would turn that on so for you to be able to offer a digital experience and a service experience to a customer it's all about miles driven and since we've introduced pier one five years ago you know now on a yearly basis we're collecting over 20 petabytes of data tons of signals training the algorithms around giving customers recommendations which we've been doing now customers can get performance recommendations and upgrade recommendations and now we've used the recommendations are such high fidelity that because of our miles driven we're using that internally to run and operate our services on behalf of customers and when companies think about disruptive events let me take my old portfolio and create a new one you're resetting the odometer at zero so without something like evergreen it makes no sense in terms of how do you get to as a service you can get to capex versus opex right and you know we were the first people to do that in storage with peers of service three plus years ago but we've moved beyond a financial offering now to talk about you know how do you run and operate performance and capacity slas well your point is so much more that customers need especially as there's more and more data being generated um you know the edge is exploding iot devices are exploding and there's more challenges that customers have to do but it's also being able to get those fast insights from data to be able to make those data-driven decisions which it sounds like what you're doing from all of the mileage that pure1 and pure as a service have so talk to me about some of the things that are being announced with respect to the digital experience of pure one at accelerate so there's three primary announcements um we've moved beyond observability first to do assessments so you know we can now say you know instead of just monitoring and watching what's going on we can give you a threat level assessment specific to ransomware that's a new capability we're introducing we've also been you know in monitoring monitoring storage and monitoring virtual machines for a while but we've if you take a look at how people deploy on storage they deploy vms and they deploy containers we've seen very little like they also have bare metal right but between those three now you cover how people are using storage from a deployment model and we've brought container monitoring into pier one for end-to-end traceability monitoring for you know both your container landscape as well as your storage landscape underneath with our flash frame flash plate so you know this observability and assessment space has a lot of new capabilities we're bringing the second piece is recommendations so previously we've had this data and customers could go into pure one and use the data they could simulate adding performance they could simulate adding capacity they could simulate moving this workload from here to here but now instead of you doing it we've we've created a recommendation engine where we'll tell you what to do because we actually tracked you know how much time is spent with people trying to figure out what to do there were times when storage admins were in the products like let me try moving it from here to here and see what would happen let me try moving it from here to here if you've got thousands of volumes and hundreds of arrays and that type of thing um you could spend weeks trying to figure out what to do by running permutational combinatorics so instead we've used our ai engine now to simulate taking into account customer preference load capacity previous buying patterns etc to create high fidelity recommendations for performance capacity placing new workloads workflow rebalancing and even for pure as a service which sla should i sign up for when you go to amazon one of the biggest problems on the on the cloud is too much choice there's like 300 items on the service catalog even in storage there's like i don't know 20 30 options of should i pick this storage type or this storage type for that storage type how do you even know um because we've been the miles driven analogy because we now know how customers have been deploying you can choose your workloads and based on what we've seen based on the wisdom of what we've collected across all the other customers we can tell you which service instance type you need so this recommendation approach is big and then the last one is self-service so customers now can control and set their reserved instances expand set their renewals we've even introduced a partner persona where partners can manage things on behalf of a customer and see transparency in billing and order traffic so all of those things that you're used to in kind of a commerce and a cloud experience we've brought that to traditional storage so some pretty big changes there and i like how how here has always been very bold in defining its differentiators using its own data to make better decisions as you you said customers have a ton of choice which is great it's also challenging at the same time for them to be able to understand objectively what is it that my environment needs talk to me a little bit about some of the changes that you saw in the last year as companies shifted almost overnight to a remote working situation can't get into my data center what are some of the ways in which pure has helped organizations with the advancements that you've made in your services portfolio well so the first thing we did and we did this kind of literally i think last february when you know everything immediately went into lockdown we introduced a zero touch provisioning category you don't want people in the data data data center right you like you need to obviously if there's physical stuff you have to rack stack and cable but beyond that everything else should be zero touch and so we've introduced zero patch provisioning capability immediately and some of like the largest uh one of the largest you know video conferencing providers on the planet um happened to call us immediately saying look we can't even get stuff to keep up with the demand and overnight we were able to go ahead and work with them to you know get them the efficiency that they needed so you know if i take a look at our supply chain throughout covid we were able you know to meet most shipments in some four days throughout covid even in a globally disrupted supply chain because of the agility and the flexibility we have in our portfolio and frankly just a phenomenal supply chain team as well so you know that that approach has engendered a ton of trust whenever you do anything like you know in this environment covid pandemic etc people are under stress it creates stress for human beings it even creates stress for families right have two small children it creates stress [Music] what do you how do you get through that stress all the things that are unnecessary are things you just forget about and to get the things that are necessary done you go to the people you trust so that's a great that's a great point you bring up about trust because that is table stakes for an organization to trust its partners or its customers to be able to trust that it's going to deliver what it needs it's no longer a nice to have i think this one of the things that coveted clement has shown us is that it's absolutely essential last question progression i want to get to you is let's talk about ai ops for a second we're seeing more and more organizations turning to ai ops for more intelligent operations what is it what are some of the benefits that pure can deliver in that response well look i have a lot of opinions on aiops but the first one is like saying aaiops now was like saying web 2.0 a few years ago right um it's a hot term everyone likes to talk about it and very few people actually do anything real ai right it's like well let me tell you something so as you think about aiops today you need to first get the data in the miles driven manner the second thing you need to do is you could use that data and create a ton of recommendations that you tell send to customers and you will be the equivalent of facebook ads right like click click click click click some of these are relevant some of these aren't right if all you do is create recommendations you're creating a spam flow to your customers the number one thing to really make it learning based is if someone rejects a recommendation you now have to collect that and train your algorithms to say you know what this person doesn't need that right and maybe the other person accepted that same recommendation and they do so the time isn't just about data collection and miles driven but the amount of recommendations that customers accept and reject can train and personalize how you do your ai operations and i feel like this economy because aiops is hot everyone's just like i have ai ops and it's just so facetious you need to think about how you're going to continually evolve and train and learn and who's going to train the way you train support is support personnel and bug fixes you need to monitor how your support personnel fixes things to be able to replicate and have higher efficiencies and support so even small customers can get the same level of support as the large customers because you know it's not like the big guys get 50 people and the small guys only get one right you need to use software as the great equalizer and the same thing goes in sales when you're approaching customers with offers and recommendations or when customers whether they need performance or capacity the fidelity matters and data and technology will only go so far you need to use the human feedback loop to train your ai if you don't do that you're missing the concept of machine learning agreed to last question since we have about 30 seconds left or so talk to me about how pure is going to continue to utilize ai and to your point not just throw out recommendations but actually have learning going on so that the right relevant offers for example can be delivered to the right customer at the right time well we pride ourselves on simplicity and customer first right our net promoter score is you know one of the top trust scores in the industry and because of that we've got a very vibrant and active customer community that goes into you know pure one on a daily basis to monitor the landscape to see what's going on to create support cases whatever it may be and because of that we're going to continue engaging and learning from our customers and you know i think you can't do it without the trust and you know a large portion of our business is large sas providers so you know you think about you know very very large sas companies we service them because of our evergreen model and now bringing this level of predictability creates a level of efficiency for sas companies um that means they could do more with less and that's what this industry is about well said prakash thank you so much for joining me at your our coverage of accelerate excited to see what's going on with the modern data experience how you're getting in there and working and partnering with customers using the data to learn and tweak and improve uh excited to hear some of the other stuff that comes up but i appreciate you joining me this morning thanks for having me lisa i enjoy the conversation excellent for prakash darjee i'm lisa martin you're watching thecube's coverage of pure accelerate 2021.

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

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering AWS re:Invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, here on theCUBE we continue our coverage AWS re:Invent. We are at the Sands Expo, 40,000 strong, maybe more attending this year's show and once again this show floor is packed and it is a quite impressive display. There are a lot of great exhibits, a lot of excitement in the air here. Along with Justin Warren, I'm John Walls. Again, welcome back here on theCUBE. We're joined now by Prakash Darji, who is the general manager of FlashArray Pure Storage. Prakash, good morning to you. >> Yeah, good morning, glad to be here. >> Thank you for being with us here. Alright, so you've got some, the exciting new direction that you guys are going, looking at cloud data services. Tell us a little bit about that. About entry into that world. >> Well, it's interesting. Most people Pure as an all-Flash company. That's how we started. But if you actually take a look at what Pure's really great at is its building software for platforms or technology that might not be mature. So Pure made an early investment in consumer-grade Flash when the market was going to enterprise and said, you know what, consumer-grade Flash doesn't have the resiliency or the enterprise-grade characteristics that people need. And in that early entrance, we built software to deal with the crappy hardware, basically, at the end of the day. And that's generally worked out well for Pure in the all-Flash market. And what we realized is the same value propositions we were able to build around higher-performance and reliability and enterprise-grade characteristics were some of the characteristics that were missing on another platform that we saw, which was cloud infrastructure as a service. And, you know, circling the show floor, it's interesting, I was talking to some of the customers and I'm hearing a lot of feedback around the "what are you really doing with our cloud data services?" And really what we're doing is we're trying to say, you know what, you shouldn't have to compromise between on-premises and cloud. You should get the same enterprise-grade characteristics you have on-premises in the cloud and frankly, if the API and the software is the same, then you can lift and shit and move back and forth. >> Right. >> So from a value proposition standpoint, cloud provides you the instant available capacity and agility, on-premises typically has been optimized for a high degree of performance, cost, and resiliency. And now you have the ability to add agility to that angle and start anywhere and move anywhere. That's really the goal of what we're trying to do with our cloud data services. >> Yeah, that is a thing we've been hearing so far in the show over the last couple of days, that there is this realization that workloads can live in multiple locations and that maybe the cloud isn't right for all of them or maybe it's not right right now or maybe we try something in the cloud and then we actually want to move it to somewhere else. So being able to do that is what a lot of enterprise customers certainly want to do. And we're hearing from a lot of vendors that that's what they're trying to enable and it sounds like that's what you're trying to do here with Pure is opening up this new avenue for "well you like Pure here on-site, we would love to use some Pure over there in the cloud," and now you can. >> Well, that's one part of it. Because people always have to, like, when you're making a decision, you have to decide where you're going to develop. Am I going to develop on premises or am I going to develop in the cloud? And typically, I like to liken it to center of gravity. Where's your center of gravity? And data has a lot of gravity. So if your data's primarily here, that might be like hey, I'll develop here. If it's something new and you don't have a lot of data gravity, you might decide to develop in cloud. But increasingly, we see applications being hybrid applications. For example, today, Salesfloor CRM is a SAS application. You can argue that that's completely cloud, right? But anything you sell needs to book in a finance system, most of which is on-premises today. >> Right. >> So the application workflow crosses both anyway, the data workflow crosses both anyway. But in IT management, IT management is just different across both of those worlds. So we increasingly see the need for hybrid applications where you can use the best of what's available where. If you want to use AI algorithms in one cloud and you want to use office services from another cloud, and you want to use infrastructure build services from a cloud and data from an on-premises system to go ahead and build and orchestrate your app why shouldn't you be able to? >> Yeah. >> The only way to do that is to bring the application architectures together and between VMware, cloud, KUBRA meetings, that's starting to happen. But in storage, no one's really bridging that divide in terms of making storage look the same on both sides. And that's what we're doing. >> So the big challenge with storage that everyone knows, like, state management is hard, as well, but being able to move that data, like you said, it has gravity. What if I make a choice today and then the pace of innovations is so fast, then, I'm likely to need to change my mind later on and I'm going to have to move data around. How do I do that? How do I, if I've chosen some here in the cloud and I want to bring it back on-site, how would I do that? >> Well so it's interesting, there's multiple ways to move the data. The challenge isn't actually in the data movement itself, it's because the data has gravity you always build things around it. Meaning, you have applications sitting on it, you have interfaces connecting to it, you have workflows such as, I'm doing development and I have have APIs that are spinning up new volumes. >> Yeah. >> All of those workflows and all of those integrations have to be re-done if you want to move it. Like, moving the data could be as simple as like, dump it to a file, ship it over there, and upload it, you know what I mean? And there's more sophisticated ways to move. So the data movement isn't the challenge. >> Kay. >> All the integrations and workflows you build around your data is. So really, what's most important is ensuring you build a consistent API across both environments. So the way we enable that today is we've taken the same Pure software that we've built and optimized for our FlashArray M or an X and we've now optimized it for a third platform called AWS Infrastructure. >> Right. >> And we'll probably do a fourth and a fifth if you read the tea leaves for the future as well in cloud environments. But that software's the same. Meaning, I met a customer that was interested in, they've built on AWS today but they have online curriculums for college education. And they have to take snapshots for curriculum development every semester that they send to multiple locations to build coursework. >> Okay. >> And what they're planning on doing now is setting up a directed connected in Equinox FlashArray, that they're basically synchronically replicating between our cloud block store in AWS and taking their snapshots from this environment because they're space saving snapshots and they get to save on the export taxes. So, when you treat the software the same, it's amazing how people will start using it. Because, you know, at the end of the day, your orchestrations, your APIs, all of your workflows are the same. So now you want to move, there isn't a tax to rewrite anything. >> Yeah. >> You just move the data. And once we add other platforms, then you have the ability to use the best capability that's available where. >> Is there any kind of a danger, or, I wouldn't say danger, that might not be the right word, the fact that you can make these transfers you know, relatively frictionless, or at least a lot simpler, a lot more convenient now. All of a sudden, I want to move everything. I don't know, and I'm not as selective as I might've been before and I'm just take it and dump it and move it and I don't have to identify what's really necessary, what's valuable, instead I'm just taking the simple way out as a customer, as a client. Would you coach them along in that way at all, to help them prioritize just because we can do it doesn't mean we have to do it? >> Yeah, we've started getting into that discussion around education. What's interesting is as we've been having these customer discussions, we find that the level of education in the cloud is pretty disparate. Some people who are very cloud-first, I'm going all-in, now know the challenges and we don't really have a lot of education to do. They've got a cost model, they've got performance comparisons, they've got reliability comparisons. >> Right. >> So, they know that from a performance cost reliability standpoint, you know, having control over your own infrastructure provides the most control over those elements. But they know that's not the most agile way to do things. So they're treating the public cloud as an instantly-available agility capacity and as they mature, they're moving certain things back into more hosted or private. On the flip side, we have other customers that have started on-premises, even a lot of our own customers who are using FlashArray in a hosted way, and they're saying, you know what, there are certain workloads that need to sit closer to different locations in the field. We don't have the networks for that. So we're going to actually leverage the public cloud for that and given that we can move it, we're going to do that. So what we're finding is people that are educated are making these as very conscious decisions. I find that the market that is uneducated is an interesting market where I've met a customer a few weeks ago in the oil and gas, big oil and gas company, that everything's going to the public cloud. But they have nothing there right now. >> Right. >> Right? And, you know, like any hype cycle, it's like, hey, we're going to do this, we're going all-in, and I'm like, have you thought about this, this, this, this, this? And they're like, no, we're going all-in, we want to get out of data centers. So, you know, we're like, okay, we'll support you in that journey, but we're going to guide you in terms of like, hey, it's a deep pool. You probably want a floatie or two so you don't sink. And we're giving you the floatie. (laughs) >> That's a good analogy. >> I love your analogy, that's right. Prakash, thanks for being with us. And I assume you brought some floaties with you in case you need to hand them out on the floor this week, just in case. >> Yeah, we've got Pure Storage here, we've got a nice presence, we're handing out some nice swag like everyone here. >> Excellent, good deal. Well, thank you for being with us, we appreciate it. >> Alright, thanks for having me. >> Thank you, Prakash, for joining us here from Pure Storage. Back with more at AWS re:Invent. We are live in Las Vegas and you're watching theCUBE.

Right, welcome to the studios here in Palo Alto. I'm John Three cohost in the queue. We here for Special News Conversation with Prakash, dodgy general manager of the flash array business at pure storage, some exciting cloud news for pure storage. Great to see you prakash. Thanks for coming in. Thanks for having us. So you guys got some big news. So I'm excited by this because I've been ranting and raving about how cloud native has been impacting the enterprise. It's pretty well documented that everyone's going going cloud operations. You guys are announcing a kind of a historic milestone for pure storage in that you guys had been doing great on the storage side within covering new since inception, but now as you guys continue to grow, you now have a new offering that's in the cloud. This is new for you guys. Talk about this announcement. What does it mean? You're an on premises storage, has done great to grow. Has Been Amazing gun public that now with the cloud growth you have a cloud offering. What's going on? Well, interestingly people were looking at storage for performance, cost and reliability reasons. That's kind of the three holy grails that you know, everyone expects out of storage. We added a fourth dimension in simplicity. Storage didn't need to be hard, and that's kind of the brand of pier and as we took a look, there was a fifth dimension that we realized was somewhat missing. While we made things simple. We didn't have the agility that public cloud offered. So as we were taking a liquid like, okay, public cloud brings to this instant available capacity, agility model, but do you have to trade off on the other dimensions? Performance costs for liability or simplicity, and our goal to bring customer value was to avoid tradeoffs. So why would you have to trade off on any of those dimensions? And then the second piece was why do you have to choose? Why do you have to choose between on premises or public cloud? And if you make the wrong choice, how do you have freedom to move? So the problem set that we were trying to address was that unification across all those dimensions, the onboarding of agility and frankly the ability to avoid people having to choose between them and use the best of what's available. Where know, I think you nailed something important that I want to get into the why you guys are doing this little bit deeper, but this notion of tradeoffs is an old it kind of philosophy. I got to trade this off to get that. Whether it's, you know, I want compute and stability or flexibility, agility, but with cloud and cloud operations, the operating model now is you choose, as you said, so this cloud operations on premises and cloud has to look the same. This is what we're hearing from Ceos and practitioners, cloud architects, they're re architecting their enterprises now because you know, the, the three main of it, storage, networking and compute never go away. It's just changing. This is a critical, fundamental piece of the architecture of it operations. Why now? Why cloud was the customer demand? Was it a natural progression for you guys? Explain. Explaining the why now. Well, I'll start with not the storage computer networking, but what they're used for and fundamentally the world's using those three dimensions for long, one of two sites, either building applications or building automation. That's kind of the two major trends in the industry. Now if we take a look, if you are running an application, primarily you would choose am I running it on premises or in the public cloud and as as the journeys emerged like public cloud probably introduction of as around 15 years ago, but initially there was this enamored. Everything's going there and then people settled down to some things will go here and some things will go here, but we believe that's a middle state where people are actually trying to do is deliver applications that solve problems and we believe that future is a hybrid application. Now, what is a hybrid application today? If you've got an on premises finance system, should you be able to use ai algorithms from Google's cloud? They book journal Entries for month end close. Let me, because it's now not a choice of am I using pads for the. That doesn't mean the whole application needs to sit in platform as a service. You should be able to use the best capabilities of what's available, where the same way today, anyone who is selling anything and using salesforce crm needs to ensure that what you've sold is booked in a finance system. That could be an sap finance system on premises, so what is the APP? It's an APP without borders now and these are modern day hybrid applications now coming and bringing that down to compute storage and networking. Trying to bring that together and actually deliver that in a consistent and operational way is difficult. It's a difficult across your application architectures. There are different. It's different across your management, even your consumption and how you bill cap ex versus Opex, but the big difference is that the storage layer, because the application architecture on premises relies on your storage for your reliability, but in the cloud they've actually moved that reliability characteristic to the middle tier. You're sharding and doing scaleout distributed application because you can't rely on the same characteristics out of your storage and we found this as an opportunity to bring these two worlds together. We call it the cloud divide. Talk about the cloud device. I think that's important because one of the things we talked with a lot of the end user customers, your customers and others, their challenges again, to focus on the outcomes that they want, the application that's going to drive their and and the value, not so much what the infrastructure, they have them create an infrastructure to enable that. What is this cloud divide when it comes to storage? In your mind, what did you guys discover? What were the key pain points? What were the, what was the customer's telling you around what and what is the cloud divide? No. Uh, the cloud divided, coming back to it is how you deal with applications, how you deal with management and how you deal with storage different between the enterprise in the cloud. We like to say the enterprise is not very cloudy, meaning you don't have instant available capacity in the cloud is not very enterprisey. Now what does that mean? What do we call enterprise? And there's a how it works with the rest of my landscape, what the API is our, uh, what the reliability characteristics, our performance and cost characteristics are also different. So if you want to adopt public cloud, you have to go ahead and say, I got to do a hard left, right? Because you're kind of going down this way and you got to choose a different path. And if you choose that hard left, you're now stuck on that road. It's a one way road. And we're trying to do is say, you know what, what if we could bridge these environments, like let's dig into the application architecture on the cloud divide. Pretty much people are using scale up or scale out as application architectures and then they're deciding, you know, vms or containers yet a, that those are common application development paradigms. What if you could use either one anywhere, right? Those technologies. Now, if you look at what vm ware is doing with Vm ware cloud and you look at what kubernetes is doing across on premise and cloud, there is now a unification happening at application architecture across management. What if you could have a seamless api in a seamless pane of glass around how you manage your applications? That's emerging, but as we looked around, no one was unifying the storage paradigm and actually that was the hardest we we thought that to unify the hardware or the storage paradigm, you have to build a data centric architecture and that's what we've been focused on doing. We've introduced our concept of data centric architecture a year ago and we're now extending that concept to the public cloud. What I like about what you guys are doing here, and I want to get your thoughts on this because this is. I think the trend that's really big in here is that you guys have been great storage provider since again, since inception can been following you guys and you have hardware and hardware has been a rack and stack kind of enterprise paradigm enterprises. We've got gear, we protected, we secure, but now with public cloud becoming more secure and more mainstream and with the Dev ops application environment developing. You mentioned the ems, the containers and Guth Coobernetti's. You're now having an operating model that's changing. You guys are doing software, so it's not a boxer. You're not shipped boxes to Amazon. They have stores. You got s three right out of the services. You're now extending the software component of your business. I want you to take a minute to explain for the people that might not know the extent of the software business at pure and specifically the cloud component software piece. It's not hardware and software, but it works with on premises. Talk about that dynamic of software in the cloud and the impact of the on premise piece of it. Well, I'll rewind a little back intel. What peers been known for peers been known as kind of this all flash company, but if you unwind that. When I took a look at it as I've joined pier actually about six months ago, what I realized is the unique skill that peer has is software engineering. To get the best out of any infrastructure that you give it. The medium happened to be flash initially, so what we've built with our direct flash and NBME and a lot of the advancements in our software has been to deal with the flash medium, but the core skill in Ip we have is software development to get the best out of a medium. What we've introduced is another medium. This medium is infrastructure as a service. We treat that as another medium and we believe that we're uniquely qualified to get the most out of that medium, which is the cloud. Alright, so I want to get into the infrastructure piece. You guys are well known for being a cloud, a data infrastructure component or data infrastructure. You mentioned the history of flash storage has been a great place to store data on premises. When you get into the cloud, you guys call this cloud data services and I'm going to get in another video on that, on the details of that, but when you hear about cloud data services, but pops in my mind is more is coming. You need to store it somewhere. You have to manage that data for applications, hybrid applications. You need to store the protect that data. You need to make that data available. They'll be able to recover all the same things that get done with data in the past on storage has to happen at a whole nother level. Describe what is cloud data services mean? What does that mean to you guys at pure and what does it mean to your customers? If you back up a little bit where we started and where a lot of our initial customers were at where sas customers and what we delivered to them was what we called cloud data infrastructure. That cloud data infrastructure allowed some of the largest sas companies, either consumer or enterprise to go ahead and use peer to build their sass applications. Companies like service now workday, those types of companies, but what was missing was how do you get that same value on infrastructure as a service environments, aws, Azure and GCP. So what we realized was the consistency model was not the same. The apis were not the same and you had to choose or not. And so our cloud data services are a set of services that give you, for example, the same block storage that you had on premises in the public cloud, gives you the same Api. And from a management and operations standpoint, we have pure one which is a cloud data management solution where all of your data, wherever it sits, because as you said, data is growing. You can see all of your Ras. It was interesting as we built the software, uh, when we first built it internally, we realized that hey, we went into pier one and we see all these storage volumes, but we didn't know which ones were on premises or cloud because our software is the same. We actually had to do some engineering to make it look different. Like, Hey, let's color the cloud volumes different. Or we had to actually think about that because we started from the place of driving consistency. And then we've extended the cloud data services dead. Go ahead and say not only can we allow you to run in either place, but how do you extend that to data protection? Because today, as you mentioned earlier on premises, people have workflows for backup and data protection and initially those workflows could have been disk to disk to tape to truck and we see that there's now a more modern way where you can do flash to flash to cloud where you can have your primary mission critical applications and flash and if you want one hop for backup, people looked at backup as an insurance policy. What happens if something goes wrong, but what's really important is when something goes wrong, how quickly can you recover? So providing flash in that second medium and then third, extending the step for cost optimization by leveraging public cloud in s three allows us to drive a consistency model and we can drive that same workflow on premises or in the public cloud. So the consistency to me, I should maybe put you on the spot here. So and consistency. Are we talking about if I'm a pure customer and I'm running pure on premises and I'm using, I'm using all the management something pure one, all this other great stuff and I want to use cloud. Does my job change at all? Does it look the same? So as a dashboard into the storage and the data because I want, I want, I want persistent data, I want ai and I want analytics now. Now I've got cloud going on. There's a lot of things out there, sage maker, tensorflow on the AI side. Lot of things. Goodness out there. What changes for me or does it change and how do you guys solve that problem? Because what I don't want is I don't want to have to hire developers to go do an integration with Amazon and Azure and Google cloud. I want to have a single consistent environment. Do you guys provide that from a data standpoint? We do. So this is a journey because when you start, you need to ensure that your data consistency and management across all of those environments, aws, azure and Google and on premises is the same. So we're introducing our solution cloud data services on Amazon first, but we are planning on extending that to the azure and Google environments in the cloud standpoint. So let's take Amazon. So I said, hey, I want to use some of that cloud. I just go to Amazon. It's extensible, fully extensible as if I'm using pure cloud formation template on Amazon. You just go in, it's there, you can pick it up, you could choose it, use it, and then what really is the difference is your platform services at a higher layer, maybe a little bit different because some of the things you mentioned and the pads are Amazon specific. Yeah. So if you start using pads services, it could impact your application development architecture, but the good news is if your goal is to drive the ability to use, what's the best thing that's available where as you take a look at evolutions in Vm ware, cloud and Coobernetti's combined with our cloud data services, you're now able to put together a use. Best of what available wherever you guys. I mean that's the. That's the application side. So you guys are providing a consistent layer for the data and the storage. Absolutely. That's going to. If I'm building an Amazon as a developer, I'm going to use those anyway. So it's not like it's a dependency per se, it's just you're going to allow for those hybrid apps to run across premises and in cloud and all the data takes care of itself. Right? It's like they get that, right? Yeah, and what's great about it is we've learned some things along the way. For example, we've been trying to get the best out of the flash medium in the past by enhancing performance characteristics or efficiency characteristics for cost optimization. We can bring some of those same value props to the Amazon world. So if you need to aggregate iops, we can do that. If you need to go ahead and drive efficiency, we have techniques to drive efficiency around thin provisioning. Those types of opens up more use cases for the customer to add more policy based things to their application. It makes data programmable. Well, it's interesting. There was one customer that we were speaking to a as part of our alpha usage and it's a online education company. They do curriculum development and that type of thing and they brought this use case to us. They have their APP that they've built for their curriculum on Amazon and then they want to take a lot of snapshots. So what they. One of the technologies, we have his space saving snapshots so they're like, oh, that'd be great if I could use your cloud block store data service on Amazon that way. But then they thought about it and they're like, well, every time we develop a new curriculum we have to send a snapshot out to a different location and site and what we could do is set up a your hardware in a direct attached way to Amazon because your software is the same. And we have active synchronous replication technology where we can now synchronously replicated between the public cloud and this private hosted direct attached diversion. And then they can do work here or even take snapshots from here. And the reason they were doing it was go ahead and say, use that space saving snapshot to reduce their overall cost profile on exports. That's a great example of cloudifying being cloudified, but more options. This brings up the question about competition. How do you guys compare to the competition? So you guys are. It's the first move for you guys in the cloud, within this operating model, which is consistent, you know, pure on premises and the cloud, get the consistency, loved the agility of the ability for applications and get all that goodness. What about the competition? How do you guys stand versus the competition? Well, when we take a look at what was going on, I think a lot of people wanted to check the box on cloud. So let's throw something out there and you know, see how people use. As we've done this market introduction, we've been very careful about that because peer has a certain brand reputation around when we say we're going to deliver some of these characteristics, we deliver and deliver those characteristics. And we didn't want to lose the value proposition of simplicity and agility. So as we launched this, we didn't just say let's throw it out there and see what happens. We did it with the deliberate intent of saying we want to provide agility is a characteristic that people could use and we want to deliver that agility with the same simplicity that they've come to know and love with peer. So those are the principles that we're focused on and as we take a look at the competition, you know, they've thrown their software out there but we don't see that it's been broadly adopted and then they're still the tradeoffs of should I go on premises or public cloud so they're stuck in the divide and that they're in the storage or the cloud, divide on premise, different operating models. And our goal is to really enable that replicates those guys are stuck on the divide. Yeah, and if you think about these hybrid applications that we see the world moving to think about it this way, the world's evolving where you're going to have more application to application integration. Gone is the days where you're going to have one monolithic application doing everything. So what's evolved is the application to application integration is exponentially growing. Now, if you assume that if you need to do a production to Dev test copy, do you need to do it for one app or for that entire set of apps that you treat as one monolithic entity because now they're all connected. He otherwise you have to decide, okay, I'm snapshotting this one and then I got to choose this one and I got to choose that one. So you, there's now a need to go ahead and consolidate a lot of application workloads and treat the management and operations of that as a unique entity. So hybrid apps are actually making you rethink how you deal with management of compute networking and storage. Yeah, I think that's a great example. I think application to application integration and totally agree with you is going to be happening at a much accelerated rate, but it changed the role of data. The role of data is central to that because as you mentioned, that other example, if you're doing a financial app and you want to use some ai from a cloud over here, the best tool for the job needs to be integrated in seamlessly and storage. Should they be part of that conversation? It should just be stored somewhere. That's what you guys are doing with this announcement and you guys are bringing that to the table. Um, so I got to get. I guess I'll ask you the final question here because it's exciting news. You guys are cloudified it made it. He bridged the divide on the storage cloud storage divide. What's the bottom line for this announcement? As you look at this impact to customers, what's the impact to pure customers and what does it mean for prospects that aren't yet your customers? What's the bottom line? This announcement? Well, I'll give it to you. For me, each perspective for our existing customers, this adds the agility tool set to their bag of tricks they've got and it does it in a way where they can start, get that instant available capacity and if they want, they can go ahead and now start benchmarking across both environments without having to re architect because the kpis are the same and for net new customers and prospects. It's interesting. As we speak to customers, we find that people are on a different educated education journey in the public cloud. Some are already using the public cloud and as we've been discussing this with them, they're like, hey, this could improve on some of these characteristics. Either I have performance challenges, cost challenges, reliability or manageability challenges. So we find that the customers or the prospects that are most educated or the ones that have already leaped, right? They've jumped in the pool and now they realize, hey, you know what? The water's cold and I need something, and there's another set of customers that are still haven't jumped in that pool. And what we're saying is for those customers, you have to make a choice. Right now you have to decide between multiple public clouds, you have to decide between on premise and what we're doing is we're de-risking that choice by allowing them to get the best of what's available where and most importantly ensuring that if they've chosen, if they've chosen something but one of the other choices evolves or matures to be a better option for them, they have the ability to move and I think also the focus we hear from the practitioners that they are investing more and more of their time and energy on building applications, hybrid applications as you're calling them, ones that are going to be a in the cloud or on premises, but solving a problem. They want to shift their resources and attention from mundane storage admin like maintenance problems and make the storage invisible to them. So the developer that they said, I know my thing's working great in the cloud. One of my apps are productive. My developers are programming and the storage resources are invisible and it's never a headache. That's kind of what you guys are getting at here. You're making storage pervasive and important to the developers and the it so that it kind of goes away in their mind, isn't it the sleep better at night, Kinda well, take Kubernetes, for example, um, a lot of application developers using it, but storage is not necessarily transparent. We, six months ago we introduced a pure service orchestrator that made storage transparent, so you have a block file object interface you, you just call and use storage, spin it up, use it as you need and let go, but you should not have to worry about, let me go phone someone creative volume decider either. So you need that transparent and elasticity and we've been focused on delivering that and now few modernize were kind of application development is going, we can provide that. It's always on. It always works. It's globally consistent, it shared, and it's easy to manage from wherever you're saying progress. Thanks for coming in and sharing the news on the new hybrid cloud applications that are hitting the market. Of course, having the right solutions and having the cloud data services available from pure storage. I'm here percussion, just general manager of the flash of rapists and pure storage. This is a special cube conversation. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.

>> From the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas, It's theCUBE, covering HoshoCon 2018. Brought to you by Hosho. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We're here for CUBE's live coverage here in Las Vegas for HoshoCon. This is the first industry conference where the smartest people in security are together talking about blockchain security. That's all they're talking about here. It's a bridge between multiple diverse communities from developers, white hat hackers, technologist, the business people all kind of coming together. This is theCUBE's coverage, I'm John, for our next guest Anand Prakash, who's the founder for AppSecure. He's also the number one bounty hunter in the world. He's hacked everything you could think of; exchanges, crypto exchanges, Facebook, Twitter, Uber. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for joining me. >> Uh, thank you John. >> So, you've hacked a lot of people, so let's, before we get started, who have you hacked? You've hacked an exchange. >> Yeah. >> Exchanges plural? >> Most of the exchanges. >> Mostly the exchanges? >> Yeah, ICOs. >> ICOs? >> Yeah, and bunch of other MNCs. >> Twitter, Facebook? >> Twitter, Uber, Facebook, and then Tinder. Yeah. >> A lot. >> Yeah, a lot. I cannot say the name. >> You're the number one bounty hunter. Just to clarify you're a white hat hacker, which means you go out and you do a service for companies. And it's well known that Facebook has put bounties out there. So, you take them up on their offer, or-- >> Yeah, so basically companies say us, hack us, and we'll pay you. So, we go and try to hack their systems, and say this is how we are able to discover a vulnerability, and this is how it can be exploited against your users to steal data, to hack your systems. And then they basically say, this is how much we are going to pay you for this exploit. How did you get into this, how did you get started? >> So, it started with a simple Phishing hack in 2008. It was an Orkut phishing hack, and one of my friend telling me to hack his Orkut account. And I Googled, how to hack Orkut account, and I wasn't having any technical knowledge at that point of time. No coding, no knowledge, nothing. I just Googled it and found ten steps, and I followed that ten steps. Created a fake page, I sent it to my friend, and he basically clicked on it, and there it is, username and password. (laughs) >> He fell for the trap >> Definitely, >> right away. >> Yeah. >> So, quick Google kiddie script kind of thing going on there, which is cool. Okay, now you're doing it full-time, and it's interesting here, this is the top security conference. Those are big names up there, Andreas was giving keynote. But I was fascinated by your two discussion panels, or sessions. Yesterday you talked about hacking an exchange, and today it was about how to hack Facebook, Twitter, these guys as part of the bounties. This is fascinating because everyone's getting hacked. I mean you see the numbers. >> Yeah. >> I mean, half a billion dollars, 60 million here, 10 million. So, people are vulnerable and it's pretty easy. So, first question for you is how easy is it these days and how hard is it to protect yourself? >> So, the attacks, the technologies, and then attacks are getting more sophisticated, and hackers are trying newer and newer exploits. So, it's good for companies and descryptpexion just to employ ethical hackers, white hat hackers, and moodapentas, and bunch of other stuff to secure their assets. So, it's, you wouldn't say for companies not doing security, then it's very easy for someone like us to hack their systems, but there were companies doing Golden Security. They are already have an internal security team, external folks securing their systems, then it's difficult. But, it's not that difficult. Let's talk about your talk yesterday about the exchange. Take us through what you talked about there that got some rave reviews. How did you attack the exchange? What did you learn? Take us through some of the exchanges you hacked and how, and why the outcome? >> Yeah, so, we have been auditing bunch of ISOs and exchanges from past two months, and quite a good number. So, what we see is most of them, don't have security, basic security text in place. So I can log into anyone's account. They have a password screen on the UA, but I can simply type it in without, without no indication or alteration, I can just log into anyone's account, and then I can get fund's out of their system. Very similar to, one issue which we found in talk in sale, was we were able to see PIA information of all the users. All the passwords details and everything, who has done KYC. So, there are lot of information disclosures in the API. And the main thing which we hackers do is we try to test this systems manually instead of going more into an automated kind of approach, running some scanner to figure out sets of hues. So, scanners are, sorry. Scanners are obviously good, but they're not that much good in finding out all the logical loopholes. >> So, you manually go in there, brute force, kind of thing? >> Yeah, not exactly, not that brute forcing, >> Not brute force. >> but of our own ways of doing things, and there are lot of good bounty hunters or white hat hackers, who are better than me and who are doing things. So, it becomes more and more sophisticated. We don't know when you get hacked. >> So, when the bounties are out there, does Facebook just say, hey, go to town? Or they give you specific guidance, so, you just, they say go at us? What do you do? >> Yeah, so basically the publicist sends some kind of legal documentation around it, and some kind of scoping on the top targets to hack. And then, they basically publish their reward size, and everything, and the policy and everything around. And then we just go through it. We try to hack it and then we report it to their team, via channel, and then they fix it, and then they come back to us saying, this is how we fixed it and this is what the impact was, and this is how much we're going to pay you. >> And then they just they pay you. >> Yeah, my yesterday's talk was mainly focused on hacking these ICOs, and descryptpexion in the past. Some of the case studies which we have done in the past, and obviously we can't disclose customer names, but we directed some of the information, and showed them how we helped them. >> What should ICO's learn, what should exchanges learn from your experience? What's the walkaway for them? Besides being focused on security. What specifically do you share? >> Yeah, so to be very frank, I know few of the companies and bunch of companies who don't appreciate white hat hackers at all. So, these are ICOs and crypexinges. So, the first and foremost thing they should do is, if they are not having any internal, external, if they are having any internal security team right now, then they should go further back down the program to make sure people like us, or people like other white hat hackers, go and hack their systems and tell them ethically. >> How does a bounty, how does someone set that up? >> So, uh-- >> Have you helped people do that? >> Yeah, so, our company does that. We help them setting up a bug bounty program from scratch, and we manage it by our typewriting platforms, and we invite private, and we do it privately, and we invite ethical hackers to hack into their systems ethically. And then we do have arguments with bunch of them, and that's how they're going to secure. >> So, how does that work, they call you up on the phone? Or they send you an email? They send you a telegram? How do they get in touch with, the website? They do face-to-face with you? They have to do it electronically? What's the process? >> For the bounty hunting? >> Yeah, for setting up a bounty program. >> Yeah, for setting up a bounty program with our company, we basically get on Skype call with them, we explain them what is going to be their budget and everything. How good their security team is, and if they are not having any internal security team, what I know, then we never suggest them going for the bounty program because they may end up paying huge amount of money. (John laughs) So, then we basically sell our pen testing services to them, and say, this is, you should go out for a pen testing service first, and then you should go for a bounty program. >> Because they could be paying way too much in bounties. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Yeah, 'cause they don't know what their exposure is. So, you do some advisory, consulting, get them set up, help them scale up their security practice basically. >> Yes, yes, yes. Their entire security team. >> So what was the questions at the sessions? What were some of the things the audience was asking you? Did any good questions come out that you were surprised by, or you expected? >> No, so, all of, so, for the very first talk, about the hacking the crypexion and all, all of them were surprised. They thought putting up a two-factor authentication, or something like that, makes their account secure. But it's not like that. (both laughing) We hack on the APIs. So, it's very, very, very super easy for us most of the time. >> So, the APIs are where the vulnerabilities are? >> Yeah. >> Mainly. >> The APIs, the URLs. >> Yeah. So, you guys use cloud computing at all? Do you use extra resource? I saw a bunch of stories out there about quantum computers, and that makes things better on the encryption side. What's your thoughts on all that, and hubbub? >> Yeah, so mainly we use anomaly intercepting proxy to intercept these calls, which are going on a straight to PS outputting, out of our own SSLP, 'cause the safety we get, and then trusting it. So, we try to plane to the APIs and them doing stuff. We don't need a big, high-end machine to hack into services. >> Gotcha, so you're dealing with them in the wire transmission. So, what do you, tell me about the conference here, what of some of the hallway conversations you've had? What's your observation? The folks that could not make it here, what's it like? What's the vibe like? What's it like here? >> So, they missed lot of things. (both laughing) And um, it was first Blockchain Security Conference, and I've been flying from all over doing the art, to just attend this conference. I was here one month back for Defcon and Black Hat, and for some other hacking event. >> So, you wanted to come here? >> Yeah. >> Yeah, I meet a lot of cool people here. I met so many great people. >> I planned it out even before Defcon Black Hat. (laughs) >> Okay, go 'head. >> I had to go to Hosho. (giggles) >> I think this is an important event 'cause I think it's like a new kind of black hat. Because it's a new culture, new architecture. Blockchain's super important, there's a lot of interest. And there's a lot of immature companies out there that are building fast, and they need to ramp up. And they're getting ICO money, which is like going public, so, it's like being grown-up before you're grown-up. And you got to get there faster. And I mean, that seems to be, do you agree with that? >> Um, yeah, definitely so. A lot of people love putting money into ICOs then what if they go tag, then people don't know about security that much, so, it's a big-- >> So, what are you excited about? Stepping back from the bounty hunter that you are, as you look at the tech industry, security, and blockchain in general, what are you most excited about? What are you working on? >> So, frankly saying, so, I'm looking forward to hack, articulately hack more and more exchanges, and uh, I believe none of them should die the legal tag, but, that's where most of the money is going to be in the future. So, that's the most interesting thing. Blockchain security is the most-- >> Yeah, that's where the money is. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> The modern day bank robbery. It's happening. Global, modern, bank robbery. (Anand laughs) Andreas is right, by the way. (Anand giggles) He talked about that today. It's not like the old machine gun, give me the teller way. Give me your cash drawer, on, it's-- >> That was a very nice talk. >> It's other people from other banks with licenses. >> Yup. >> The new bank robbers. Well, thanks for coming on theCUBE, sharing your story, appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Great to have you on. >> Thank you for inviting me. >> You're a real big celebrity in the space, and your work's awesome, and love the fact that you're ethically hacking. >> Yeah, by the way, I'm not the world's number one bounty hunter. I'm just-- >> Number two. >> Not number two, maybe, there are lot people out there. >> You're up there. >> I'm just learning and-- >> We could do a whole special or a Netflix series on the bounty hunting. >> Yeah, yeah. (laughs) >> And follow you around. (both laughing) And now, thanks for coming out, appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Good to see you. >> Good to see-- >> All right. More CUBE coverage after this short break, stay with us. Here, live, in HoshoCon. First security conference around Blockchain. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live 2018 brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE's live coverage here in Orlando, Florida, for Cisco Live 2018. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Stu Miniman, my co-host, for the next two more days. We're in three days of coverage. Our next two guests here from Cisco Ronnie Ray, Vice President of Cisco, and Prakash Rajamani, Director of Project Management at Cisco. Guys, welcome to theCube. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, John. >> So all the buzz is about the DevNet developer aspect, the rise of the network engineer moving up to the stack while taking care of business in the software-defined data center, software-defined service provider. Everything is software-defined. You guys are involved in the DNA Center Platform. We talked about the DNA Center, the product. This is a real innovation environment for you guys, so take a minute to explain, what is the DNA Center Platform? And how does that compare from the DNA Center? How should customers think about this? What is it? what's the offering? >> Absolutely. So if we just walk back about a year. A year ago we launched DNA Center. DNA Center is the product, and that supported things, like SD-Access, which is absolutely a new innovation about Software-Defined campuses. Through the year, we've launched showrooms, through the year we've launched Enterprise Network Functions Virtualization, we have capabilities in automation, and these are all product capabilities that DNA Center has. What we're doing today and this week in Cisco live and in the DevNet area right now is that we have launched DNA Center platform, which is the ability to open up and expose all of the APIs and the STKs that now makes DNA Center a product that our customers, our partners and developers out there can now work on and create new value. It could be apps, it could be integrations, it could be new devices, third-party devices that Cisco's never supported before, but they can now make that supportable in DNA Center because we're giving them the tools to do that. >> So this is not so much a customer thing, it's more of a partner or app, is that kind of how this goes? So if I'm a partner, makes sense. is this kind of where it's different? I mean, where's the line here, or is it open for everybody? >> It is for everybody. If you are a networking expert and you've done CLI in the past, what we are doing is making API simpler, we are making them intent-based, which means that they can achieve a lot more and this is open to you as a networking expert, you as an application developer, you as a partner that is providing, creating your services for your end customer or client. All of you can now use DNA Center platform to create new value. >> This is great, it's for everyone. So this is where, if I get this right, we love this notion of DevOps on cloud, Susie and you guys have been talking about network programmability. Is this kind of where it is? We're talking about network programmability, is this where the APIs shine, and what's our vision? >> This is truly network programmability, in fact in the past what we've talked about is device programmability, but now what you're doing in DNA Center platform is really expressing intent and using APIs that apply across the whole network. Prakash can probably give you some examples of what these intent APIs look like. >> I think as Ronnie said, we like to call it Network DevOps, I think Susie calls it that too. And this is the way in which Network DevOps is conductible. There are two kinds of target market that we look at. One is the network engineer who understands everything network-centric, who knows all the nuances, and are very comfortable with those, but then being able to achieve those through a programmable API, that's one market. The way we want to go with the intent API is for the software engineers who want to be able to say, I want to prioritize YouTube traffic less than my network, and I want to prioritize my custom-built app as the most critical for my enterprise, as the most critical on my network. And I want to express that as an intent through an API, and then let the DNA Center platform take care of making that real on the network without having to worry about all the technologies and all the, >> How to provision it, what's going on under the hood, essentially to them it's a call. >> To them it's a call, and it's taken care of. >> That is actually seamless to the software developer, by the way, who doesn't want to get in the weeds of networking. The networking guys who are under the hood, what does it mean for them? They get to provide services to the developers, so it sounds like everyone's winning here. What's the benefit to the network engineers? They get scalability? I see the benefits to the software developer, that's awesome, but where's the network engineer, what are they getting out of it? >> They can achieve more things faster, they can get deeper, and this is absolutely making it simpler for them operationally to run their network. So they can basically free up time to do other tasks, like design and architecture that typically is, very hard to explain. >> Cooler tasks. (laughs) Not boring, mundane, cut and paste the scripts, CLI scripts, to another device. >> Absolutely and that's one part. The other part is about the cool new apps that they can create because there are use cases, even if you look at all the show floor, the companies that are here in Cisco Live and that they come every year, there are use cases out there that even collectively as an industry we cannot solve, that needs to be solved in the context of the company and the environment that you're in and so the network expert that's sitting in a customer environment can say, "Okay, I have this problem, let me solve it, "let me go build-" >> But they're gettable problems to solve now. Because now you're taking off more time, but also cloud and some of the software-defined things are now at the disposal to create that creativity. Is that what you're getting at, this is the new opportunity. Is that what Chuck was kind of referring to in his keynote around getting at these new use cases? >> Certainly, this opens up a new use case because this is a new way to program across the entire network in a much more simpler fashion than it's ever been done before. >> So when I hear a new way to program, I want to understand, what's the learning curve for this? If somebody understands the rocky APIs, is this a short learning curve, if they don't, is it a longer learning curve? >> So what we have done from a learning curve perspective, we have worked with a development team, we have learning labs where somebody who's not familiar with programming completely can start with the basics of, okay, how do I get started with DNA Center platform APIs and get started and go through a sequence of learning labs to get them completely familiarized with everything. Somebody like what you said, like a Meraki person, who's already using the Meraki API, for them, anybody who understands REST XML APIs can just turn around and there's a bunch of new APIs available that they can understand, program, try within the product, and then get sample codes and then build on top of that. So it's that easy as that. >> It was interesting, I was walking through the show floor, talking to some of the customers here, and for some of them, what's off the shelf is good, but I hear them griping about, not about Cisco, some of the partners, like "I can't customize what I need." One of the challenges we've always had in IT is, it's great if you can take the off the shelf, but everybody needs to tweak and adjust what they have. How's that addressed with this solution? >> From a customer's perspective, because we provide in our product we provide a specific set of capabilities, but when it comes to API, we make it much, much, much richer and granular so that people can create any workflow that they want. The workflows that we create in the API context is in three formats. We have what we call as tasks, which are individual operations that we perform, and then we group the tasks and offer them as workflows. And we group the workflows and offer them as an intent. So as a user, based on what level of granular they need, you can go to the lowest level task, or you can go all the way up to the intent based on your skillset and then use them and customize them as it fits your needs. >> So they can get up and running pretty quickly, sounds like, and if you know APIs then it's just JSON, it's all the same XML, all the great stuff, but I gotta ask where this goes from here because one of the things we were talking about before we came on camera is, we've been covering all the Linux Foundation, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, CNCF, you've got Docker Containers, and containers now have been a great thing. Pretty much check, standard, everyone's using containers. And it's great, put a container around it, a lot of great things could happen. Kubernetes and then microservices around Service Meshes, Diane Greene mentioned in her keynote with Chuck Robbins, Istio was a big hot, one of the hottest projects in the Linux foundation, so that's kind of microservices, this sounds like it's got a lot of levels of granularity. I love that word because now when you get to that point, you can really make the software targeted and strong and bullet-proof. How is that on the road map, where does someone who's actually looking at microservices as a North Star, what does your offering mean for them? Is it right in line? What's the progression, what's the road map? >> So, from a microservice perspective, DNA Center as a product itself is completely microservice-based architecture. There's 110 microservices today that make up what is DNA Center. This gives us a flexibility to really update every single service, every single capability, and make it almost like giving customers ability to do this every two weeks or every four weeks, new changes, new announcements, in a very simple fashion. That's kind of how the part is being built. What we eventually want to do is extend the platform as an ability for partners and others to build microservices that can be built and deployed within DNA Center over time. That's further down the road, but given that solution and given the strategy where we are as a product architecture that lends us to extend that to them. >> It's natural extension, so basically you're cloudified. You've got all the APIs, so if a customer wants to sling APIs, customers want to integrate in, like you mentioned, ServiceNow, they can do that easily today, and then you've got some extensibility in the road map to be kind of Cloud Native when things start growing. Timing's everything, it's kind of evolving right now heavily at the Cloud Native. >> I mean that's the benefit of this architecture, that you can really pick and choose where you want to run over time. We are right now on a box, an appliance that helps us solve the solution, but there's nothing that stops us from going anywhere. >> So Ronnie, I want you to talk about the significance, this is an open platform. I've watched Cisco my entire career, and always Cisco's been heavily involved in standards, but takes arrows from people as to how they do this. This is open, what does that mean? And what's that mean to your customers? >> Absolutely, this is basically opening up Cisco to industry-wide innovation. So until now, if you look at everything that we've done on DNA Center and on some of the other Cisco platforms that Cisco developed, but we are now getting to a point where with DevNet, now with 500,000 developers registered, we have the critical mass to basically say the industry can come and develop on top of Cisco platforms. And so this is completely new kinds of innovation that we will see, use cases that we've never thought of, and this will happen. And of course we will continue to contribute to all whether it's IETF or whether it's OpenConfig, all of these in with the YANG models that we are doing across the industry, those will continue, the open source confirmations that we do, but this is really saying, okay, let's provide our best customers and our partners and of course the individual developer that's out there a way to today build new creations and maybe tomorrow there's a part to monetize that. >> It's interesting you bring that up, I love the open. We love open, we're open content. You guys are now open networking, for lack of a better description. Chuck Robbins talked about in his keynote, one of the things I was really impressed on, he highlighted something that we've been talking about, is that the geo-political, the geo-technical world, is a huge factor, you look at just cloud computing, you've got Regis, you've got GDPR, I mean all these things going on, you mentioned assurances off camera, this is like a huge deal, right. You've got a global tech landscape, you've got global tech compliance issues, so you got this now open source and it's whatever fourth generation where it's part of the entrepreneurial fabric. So Ronnie, I've got to ask you, you've been an entrepreneur before. With bringing entrepreneurship into networking, what's the guiding principles, what's your inspirational view on this because this is really, not only save time for engineers, it makes them part of an open collaborative culture, like open source which you're used to, bringing an entrepreneurial vibe to it. >> Absolutely. >> This is a big dynamic, what's your view on this? >> It's a huge dynamic and I can talk from personal experience, you know when I've done start-ups and I've raised money or put my own money into it, 70% of your calories go in building a platform. So you're just looking at how do I store data, how do I process data, how to I look at availability of systems, and 30% of it really goes into building a use case. What we are doing with DNA Center platform is basically saying forget about the 70%. We will give you normalized data, whether it's for Cisco equipment or whether it's for third-party equipment. So the STK will allow you to bring in Juniper or Huawei or Aruba or whoever that's out there and you can bring that into DNA Center, so now you have a view of the entire network, Cisco and Non-Cisco. You have normalized data for all of those and you can configure all of those, you can image update all of those. It's very very powerful. Just from an ISV standpoint, individual available standpoint now you are kind of unlocking, making this almost democratic. >> You've done the heavy-lifting. >> Yep, absolutely. >> That's what Cloud is all about, but talk about the creativity because you mentioned that entrepreneurial, a lot of the energy goes into trying to find the fatal flaw, is the product gonna be product-market fit, you do all that heavy-lifting and bootstrap it, right now it's simply, okay, I can sling some APIs together, get a prototype, then the creativity starts. Talk about the creativity impact. How do you see that impacting some of these new use cases, these hard problems. This is gonna come from, not some guy coming out of business school saying, "Hey, I'm gonna go hire "some engineers and solve that big, hard problem." It's gonna come organically, this is a huge deal. >> This is a huge deal, and because we're making it simpler it can come from any quarters, it doesn't have to be an established company, it can be an individual person that can't solve any use case, and then we ask Cisco, not only do we have, and of course the majority share in the market, but will also we have the platforms, like DevNet, and DevNet now has an equal system exchange, so if something that's cool can float up in the exchange can be voted on, can become something that becomes an absolutely easy part to monetization for somebody, that basically saying, "Okay, how do I marry business "and how do I take network and bring them together." >> This is awesome and it's also external to Cisco, but talk about the global impact. Just outside North America, massive growth, you're seeing things going on in Europe, but really in the Asia and China, huge growth markets going on. When you go to China, talk about mobility, they have mobility nailed down. India is absolutely on fire, growing like crazy. The talent, this is a melting pot of tech talent. How do you make all that work from a Cisco standpoint because what you want to do is bring the goods to everybody, that's open source. >> Absolutely, so think about any of the logical place that people go to with, given the way that the platform is already built, which is, it is Cloud Native. We've not in the cloud yet, but at some point the platform will go to cloud. And we are looking at harnessing the creative talent worldwide, whether it be in Asia or whether it be in Europe, or whether it be in the Americas, really doing that new value creation and taking that to the masses. And Cisco has the right to claim this market, we are absolutely in support of folks that want to do that. That's why DevNet has all of the learning labs and the sandboxes and everything else that's there in support, these are free to use. We want people to come and learn and co-create on the platform. >> And making it open and collaborative, the community aspect of it. >> Absolutely. >> Alright, final question while you guys are here, obviously you're at the Cisco perspective, but put your industry landscape hat on, people who couldn't make Cisco Live this year here in Orlando, they might be watching this video either live or on demand when it goes up to YouTube. What's the big story, I mean obviously what you guys are doing, across the whole show, what's the most important stories that are developing here this week that people should pay attention to deeply? >> So in terms of looking at the openness of the platform, Cisco is an open platform, API is really the new CLI because that's the way that you'll talk to the network. And think about what Chuck said at the opening keynote, this starts from the user, the things that you want to do to the applications, wherever they live, whether it be in a cloud, in a multi-cloud environment, Cisco is bringing all of that together. >> Prakash, what's your thoughts? >> Adding on to Ronnie's point, the openness and something that new that we are doing, not just from campus perspective, but campus, branch, data center, and making it open across everything, which is what Dave Goeckeler covered today in his keynote, I think that's something that Cisco is not just looking at one infrastructure, but across all of his portfolio and making it unique is really something that people should take away from this one. >> That's awesome. Great stuff, well guys, thanks for sharing. Thanks for co-sharing, co-developing content with us. I gotta say just from the hallway conversations, people are impressed that you guys are taking a very practical approach, not trying to boil over the ocean here with all these capabilities and announcements, focusing on the network value, where it fits in, and being Cloud Native from day one with microservices is a good start, so congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for sharing. Live coverage here in theCUBER. Day two of Cisco Live, I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. More live coverage, stay with us here at day two as we start winding down day two here at Cisco Live in Orlando, Florida, be right back.

(techno music) >> Announcer: From the Corinium Chief Analytics Officer Conference Spring San Francisco. It's theCUBE. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown San Francisco at the Parc 55 Hotel at the Corinium Chief Analytics Officer Spring 2018 event, about 100 people, pretty intimate affair. A lot of practitioners here talking about the challenges of Big Data and the challenges of Analytics. We're really excited to have a very special Cube guest. I think he was the first guy to launch his company on theCUBE. It was Big Data New York City 2013. I remember it distinctly. It's Prakash Nanduri, the co-founder and CEO of Paxata. Great to see you. >> Great seeing you. Thank you for having me back. >> Absolutely. You know we got so much mileage out of that clip. We put it on all of our promotional materials. You going to launch your company? Launch your company on theCUBE. >> You know it seems just like yesterday but it's been a long ride and it's been a fantastic ride. >> So give us just a quick general update on the company, where you guys are now, how things are going. >> Things are going fantastic. We continue to grow. If you recall, when we launched, we launched the whole notion of democratization of information in the enterprise with self service data prep. We have gone onto now delivered real value to some of the largest brands in the world. We're very proud that 2017 was the year when massive amount of adoption of Paxata's adaptive information platform was taken across multiple industries, financial services, retail, CPG, high tech, in the OIT space. So, we just keep growing and it's the usual challenges of managing growth and managing, you know, the change in the company as you, as you grow from being a small start-up to know being a real company. >> Right, right. There's good problems and bad problems. Those are the good problems. >> Yes, yes. >> So, you know, we do so many shows and there's two big themes over and over and over like digital transformation which gets way over used and then innovation and how do you find a culture of innovation. In doing literally thousands of these interviews, to me it seems pretty simple. It is about democratization. If you give more people the data, more people the tools to work with the data, and more people the power to do something once they find something in the data, and open that up to a broader set of people, they're going to find innovations, simply the fact of doing it. But the reality is those three simple steps aren't necessarily very easy to execute. >> You're spot on, you're spot on. I like to say that when we talk about digital transformation the real focus should be on the deed . And it really centers around data and it centers around the whole notion of democratization, right? The challenge always in large enterprises is democratization without governance becomes chaos. And we always need to focus on democratization. We need to focus on data because as we all know data is the new oil, all of that, and governance becomes a critical piece too. But as you recall, when we launched Paxata, the entire vision from day one has been while the entire focus around digitization covers many things right? It covers people processes. It covers applications. It's a very large topic, the whole digital transformation of enterprise. But the core foundation to digital transformation, data democratization governance, but the key issue is the companies that are going to succeed are the companies that turn data into information that's relevant for every digital transformation effort. >> Right, right. >> Because if you do not turn raw data into information, you're just dealing with raw data which is not useful >> Jeff: Right >> And it will not be democratized. >> Jeff: Right >> Because the business will only consume the information that is contextual to their need, the information that's complete and the information that is clean. >> Right, right. >> So that's really what we're driving towards. >> And that's interesting 'cause the data, there's so many more sources of data, right? There's data that you control. There's structured data, unstructured data. You know, I used to joke, just the first question when you'd ask people "Where's your data?", half the time they couldn't even, they couldn't even get beyond that step. And that's before you start talking about cleaning it and making it ready and making it available. Before you even start to get into governance and rights and access so it's a really complicated puzzle to solve on the backend. >> I think it starts with first focusing on what are the business outcomes we are driving with digital transformation. When you double-click on digital transformation and then you start focusing on data and information, there's a few things that come to fore. First of all, how do I leverage information to improve productivity in my company? There's multiple areas, whether it is marketing or supply chain or whatever. The second notion is how do I ensure that I can actually transform the culture in my company and attract the brightest and the best by giving them the the environment where democratization of information is actually reality, where people feel like they're empowered to access data and turn it into information and then be able to do really interesting things. Because people are not interested on being subservient to somebody who gives them the data. They want to be saying "Give it to me. "I'm smart enough. "I know analytics. "I think analytically and I want to drive my career forward." So the second thing is the cultural aspect to it. And the last thing, which is really important is every company, regardless of whether you're making toothpicks or turbines, you are looking to monetize data. So it's about productivity. It's about cultural change and attracting of talent. And it's about monetization. And when it comes to monetization of data, you cannot be satisfied with only covering enterprise data which is sitting in my enterprise systems. You have to be able to focus on, oh, how can I leverage the IOT data that's being generated from my products or widgets. How can I generate social immobile? How can I consume that? How can I bring all of this together and get the most complete insight that I need for my decision-making process? >> Right. So, I'm just curious, how do you see it your customers? So this is the chief analytics officer, we go to chief data officer, I mean, there's all these chief something officers that want to get involved in data and marketing is much more involved with it. Forget about manufacturing. So when you see successful cultural change, what drives that? Who are the people that are successful and what is the secret to driving the cultural change that we are going to be data-driven, we are going to give you the tools, we are going to make the investment to turn data which historically was even arguably a liability 'cause it had to buy a bunch o' servers to stick it on, into that now being an asset that drives actionable outcomes? >> You know, recently I was having this exact discussion with the CEO of one of the largest financial institutions in the world. This gentleman is running a very large financial services firm, is dealing with all the potential disruption where they're seeing completely new type of PINTEC products coming in, the whole notion of blockchain et cetera coming in. Everything is changing. Everything looks very dramatic. And what we started talking about is the first thing as the CEO that we always focus on is do we have the right people? And do we have the people that are motivated and driven to basically go and disrupt and change? For those people, you need to be able to give them the right kind of tools, the right kind of environment to empower them. This doesn't start with lip service. It doesn't start about us saying "We're going to be on a digital transformation journey" but at the same time, your data is completely in silos. It's locked up. There is 15,000 checks and balances before I can even access a simple piece of data and third, even when I get access to it, it's too little, too late or it's garbage in, garbage out. And that's not the culture. So first, it needs to be CEO drive, top down. We are going to go through digital transformation which means we are going to go through a democratization effort which means we are going to look at data and information as an asset and that means we are not only going to be able to harness these assets, but we're also going to monetize these assets. How are we going to do it? It depends very much on the business you're in, the vertical industry you play in, and your strengths and weaknesses. So each company has to look at it from their perspective. There's no one size fits all for everyone. >> Jeff: Right. >> There are some companies that have fantastic cultures of empowerment and openness but they may not have the right innovation or the right kind of product innovation skills in place. So it's about looking at data across the board. First from your culture and your empowerment, second about democratization of information which is where a company like Paxata comes in, and third, along with democratization, you have to focus on governance because we are for-profit companies. We have a fiducial responsibility to our customers and our regulators and therefore we cannot have democratization without governance. >> Right, right >> And that's really what our biggest differentiation is. >> And then what about just in terms of the political play inside the company. You know, on one hand, used to be if you held the information, you had the power. And now that's changed really 'cause there's so much information. It's really, if you are the conduit of information to help people make better decisions, that's actually a better position to be. But I'm sure there's got to be some conflicts going through digital transformation where I, you know, I was the keeper of the kingdom and now you want to open that up. Conversely, it must just be transformational for the people on the front lines that finally get the data that they've been looking for to run the analysis that they want to rather than waiting for the weekly reports to come down from on high. >> You bet. You know what I like to say is that if you've been in a company for 10, 15 years and if you felt like a particular aspect, purely selfishly, you felt a particular aspect was job security, that is exactly what's going to likely make you lose your job today. What you thought 10 years ago was your job security, that's exactly what's going to make you lose your job today. So if you do not disrupt yourself, somebody else will. So it's either transform yourself or not. Now this whole notion of politics and you know, struggle within the company, it's been there for as long as, humans generally go towards entropy. So, if you have three humans, you have all sort of issues. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> The issue starts frankly with leadership. It starts with the CEO coming down and not only putting an edict down on how things will be done but actually walking the walk with talking the talk. If, as a CEO, you're not transparent, it you're not trusting your people, if you're not sharing information which could be confidential, but you mention that it's confidential but you have to keep this confidential. If you trust your people, you give them the ability to, I think it's a culture change thing. And the second thing is incentivisation. You have to be able to focus on giving people the ability to say "by sharing my data, "I actually become a hero." >> Right, right. >> By giving them the actual credit for actually delivering the data to achieve an outcome. And that takes a lot of work. But if you do not actually drive the cultural change, you will not drive the digital transformation and you will not drive the democratization of information. >> And have you seen people try to do it without making the commitment? Have you seen 'em pay the lip service, spend a few bucks, start a project but then ultimately they, they hamstring themselves 'cause they're not actually behind it? >> Look, I mean, there's many instances where companies start on digital transformation or they start jumping into cool terms like AI or machine-learning, and there's a small group of people who are kind of the elites that go in and do this. And they're given all the kind of attention et cetera. Two things happen. Because these people who are quote, unquote, the elite team, either they are smart but they're not able to scale across the organization or many times, they're so good, they leave. So that transformation doesn't really get democratized. So it is really important from day one to start a culture where you're not going to have a small group of exclusive data scientists. You can have those people but you need to have a broader democratization focus. So what I have seen is many of the siloed, small, tight, mini science projects end up failing. They fail because number one, either the business outcome is not clearly identified early on or two, it's not scalable across the enterprise. >> Jeff: Right. >> And a majority of these exercises fail because the whole information foundation that is taking raw data turning it into clean, complete, potential consumable information, to feed across the organization, not just for one siloed group, not just one data science team. But how do you do that across the company? That's what you need to think from day one. When you do these siloed things, these departmental things, a lot of times they can fail. Now, it's important to say "I will start with a couple of test cases" >> Jeff: Right, right. >> "But I'm going to expand it across "from the beginning to think through that." >> So I'm just curious, your perspective, is there some departments that are the ripest for being that leading edge of the digital transformation in terms of, they've got the data, they've got the right attitude, they're just a short step away. Where have you seen the great place to succeed when you're starting on kind of a smaller PLC, I don't know if you'd say PLC, project or department level? >> So, it's funny but you will hear this, it's not rocket science. Always they say, follow the money. So, in a business, there are three incentives, making more money, saving money, or staying out of jail. (laughs) >> Those are good. I don't know if I'd put them in that order but >> Exactly, and you know what? Depending on who are you are, you may have a different order but staying out of jail if pretty high on my list. >> Jeff: I'm with you on that one. >> So, what are the ambiants? Risk and compliance. Right? >> Jeff: Right, right. >> That's one of those things where you absolutely have to deliver. You absolutely have to do it. It's significantly high cost. It's very data and analytic centric and if you find a smart way to do it, you can dramatically reduce your cost. You can significantly increase your quality and you can significantly increase the volume of your insights and your reporting, thereby achieving all the risk and compliance requirements but doing it in a smarter way and a less expensive way. >> Right. >> That's where incentives have really been high. Second, in making money, it always comes down to sales and marketing and customer success. Those are the three things, sales, marketing, and customer success. So most of our customers who have been widely successful, are the ones who have basically been able to go and say "You know what? "It used to take us eight months "to be able to even figure out a customer list "for a particular region. "Now it takes us two days because of Paxata "and because of the data prep capabilities "and the governance aspects." That's the power that you can deliver today. And when you see one person who's a line of business person who says "Oh my God. "What used to take me eight months, "now it's done in half a day". Or "What use to take me 22 days to create a report, "is now done in 45 minutes." All of a sudden, you will not have a small kind of trickle down, you will have a tsunami of democratization with governance. That's what we've seen in our customers. >> Right, right. I love it. And this is just so classic too. I always like to joke, you know, back in the day, you would run your business based on reports from old data. Now we want to run your business with stuff you can actually take action on now. >> Exactly. I mean, this is public, Shameek Kundu, the chief data officer of Standard Chartered Bank and Michael Gorriz who's the global CIO of Standard Chartered Bank, they have embraced the notion that information democratization in the bank is a foundational element to the digital transformation of Standard Chartered. They are very forward thinking and they're looking at how do I democratize information for all our 87,500 employees while we maintain governance? And another major thing that they are looking at is they know that the data that they need to manipulate and turn into information is not sitting only on premise. >> Right, right. >> It's sitting across a multi-cloud world and that's why they've embraced the Paxata information platform to be their information fabric for a multi-cloud hybrid world. And this is where we see successes and we're seeing more and more of this, because it starts with the people. It starts with the line of business outcomes and then it starts with looking at it from scale. >> Alright, Prakash, well always great to catch up and enjoy really watching the success of the company grow since you launched it many moons ago in New York City >> yes Fantastic. Always a pleasure to come back here. Thank you so much. >> Alright. Thank you. He's Prakash, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from downtown San Francisco. Thanks for watching. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from midtown Manhattan, it's theCUBE covering Big Data New York City 2017. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media and it's ecosystem sponsors. (upbeat techno music) >> Hey, welcome back, everyone. Here live in New York City, this is theCUBE from SiliconANGLE Media Special. Exclusive coverage of the Big Data World at NYC. We call it Big Data NYC in conjunction also with Strata Hadoop, Strata Data, Hadoop World all going on kind of around the corner from our event here on 37th Street in Manhattan. I'm John Furrier, the co-host of theCUBE with Peter Burris, Head of Research at SiliconANGLE Media, and General Manager of WikiBon Research. And our next guest is one of our famous CUBE alumni, Prakash Nanduri co-founder and CEO of Paxata who launched his company here on theCUBE at our first inaugural Big Data NYC event in 2013. Great to see you. >> Great to see you, John. >> John: Great to have you back. You've been on every year since, and it's been the lucky charm. You guys have been doing great. It's not broke, don't fix it, right? And so theCUBE is working with you guys. We love having you on. It's been a pleasure, you as an entrepreneur, launching your company. Really, the entrepreneurial mojo. It's really what it's all about. Getting access to the market, you guys got in there, and you got a position. Give us the update on Paxata. What's happening? >> Awesome, John and Peter. Great to be here again. Every time I come here to New York for Strata I always look forward to our conversations. And every year we have something exciting and new to share with you. So, if you recall in 2013, it was a tiny little show, and it was a tiny little company, and we came in with big plans. And in 2013, I said, "You know, John, we're going to completely disrupt the way business consumers and business analysts turn raw data into information and they do self-service data preparation." That's what we brought to the market in 2013. Ever since, we have gone on to do something really exciting and new for our customers every year. In '14, we came in with the first Apache Spark-based platform that allowed business analysts to do data preparation at scale interactively. Every year since, last year we did enterprise grade and we talked about how Paxata is going to be delivering our self-service data preparation solution in a highly-scalable enterprise grade deployment world. This year, what's super exciting is in addition to the recent announcements we made on Paxata running natively on the Microsoft Azure HDI Spark system. We are truly now the only information platform that allows business consumers to turn data into information in a multi-cloud hybrid world for our enterprise customers. In the last few years, I came and I talked to you and I told you about work we're doing and what great things are happening. But this year, in addition to the super-exciting announcements with Microsoft and other exciting announcements that you'll be hearing. You are going to hear directly from one of our key anchor customers, Standard Chartered Bank. 150-year-old institution operating in over 46 countries. One of the most storied banks in the world with 87,500 employees. >> John: That's not a start up. >> That's not a start up. (John laughs) >> They probably have a high bar, high bar. They got a lot of data. >> They have lots of data. And they have chosen Paxata as their information fabric. We announced our strategic partnership with them recently and you know that they are going to be speaking on theCUBE this week. And what started as a little experiment, just like our experiment in 2013, has actually mushroomed now into Michael Gorriz, and Shameek Kundu, and the entire leadership of Standard Chartered choosing Paxata as the platform that will democratize information in the bank across their 87,500 employees. We are going in a very exciting way, a very fast way, and now delivering real value to the bank. And you can hear all about it on our website-- >> Well, he's coming on theCUBE so we'll drill down on that, but banks are changing. You talk about a transformation. What is a teller? An Internet of Things device. The watch potentially could be a terminal. So, the Internet of Things of people changes the game. Are the ATMs going to go away and become like broadcast points? >> Prakash: And you're absolutely right. And really what it is about is, it doesn't matter if you're a Standard Chartered Bank or if you're a pharma company or if you're the leading healthcare company, what it is is that everyone of our customers is really becoming an information-inspired business. And what we are driving our customers to is moving from a world where they're data-driven. I think being data-driven is fine. But what you need to be is information-inspired. And what does that mean? It means that you need to be able to consume data, regardless of format, regardless of source, regardless of where it's coming from, and turn it into information that actually allows you to get inside in decisions. And that's what Paxata does for you. So, this whole notion of being information-inspired, I don't care if you're a bank, if you're a car company, or if you're a healthcare company today, you need to have-- >> Prakash, for the folks watching that might not know our history as you launched on theCUBE in 2013 and have been successful every year since. You guys have really deploying the classic entrepreneurial success formula, be fast, walk the talk, listen to customers, add value. Take a minute quickly just to talk about what you guys do. Just for the folks that don't know you. >> Absolutely, let's just actually give it in the real example of you know, a customer like Standard Chartered. Standard Chartered operates in multiple countries. They have significant number of lines of businesses. And whether it's in risk and compliance, whether it is in their marketing department, whether it's in their corporate banking business, what they have to do is, a simple example could be I want to create a customer list to be able to go and run a marketing campaign. And the customer list in a particular region is not something easy for a bank like Standard Charter to come up with. They need to be able to pull from multiple sources. They need to be able to clean the data. They need to be able to shape the data to get that list. And if you look at what is really important, the people who understand the data are actually not the folks in IT but the folks in business. So, they need to have a tool and a platform that allows them to pull data from multiple sources to be able to massage it, to be able to clean it-- >> John: So, you sell to the business person? >> We sell to the business consumer. The business analyst is our consumer. And the person who supports them is the chief data officer and the person who runs the Paxata platform on their data lake infrastructure. >> So, IT sets the data lake and you guys just let the business guys go to town on the data. >> Prakash: Bingo. >> Okay, what's the problem that you solve? If you can summarize the problem that you solve for the customers, what is it? >> We take data and turn it into information that is clean, that's complete, that's consumable and that's contextual. The hardest problem in every analytical exercise is actually taking data and cleaning it up and getting it ready for analytics. That's what we do. >> It's the prep work. >> It's the prep work. >> As companies gain experience with Big Data, John, what they need to start doing increasingly is move more of the prep work or have more of the prep work flow closer to the analyst. And the reason's actually pretty simple. It's because of that context. Because the analyst knows more about what their looking for and is a better evaluator of whether or not they get what they need. Otherwise, you end up in this strange cycle time problem between people in back end that are trying to generate the data that they think they want. And so, by making the whole concept of data preparation simpler, more straight forward, you're able to have the people who actually consume the data and need it do a better job of articulating what they need, how they need it and making it presentable to the work that they're performing. >> Exactly, Peter. What does that say about how roles are starting to merge together? Cause you've got to be at the vanguard of seeing how some of these mature organizations are working. What do you think? Are we seeing roles start to become more aligned? >> Yes, I do think. So, first and foremost, I think what's happening is there is no such thing as having just one group that's doing data science and another group consuming. I think what you're going to be going into is the world of data and information isn't all-consuming and that everybody's role. Everybody has a role in that. And everybody's going to consume. So, if you look at a business analyst that was spending 80% of their time living in Excel or working with self-service BI tools like our partner's Tableau and Power BI from Microsoft, others. What you find is these people today are living in a world where either they have to live in coding scripting world hell or they have to rely on IT to get them the real data. So, the role of a business analyst or a subject matter expert, first and foremost, the fact that they work with data and they need information that's a given. There is no business role today where you can't deal with data. >> But it also makes them real valuable, because there aren't a lot of people who are good at dealing with data. And they're very, very reliant on these people to turn that data into something that is regarded as consumable elsewhere. So, you're trying to make them much more productive. >> Exactly. So, four years years ago, when we launched on theCUBE, the whole premise was that in order to be able to really drive towards a world where you can make information and data-driven decisions, you need to ensure that the business analyst community, or what I like to call the business consumer needs to have the power of being able to, A, get access to data, B, make sense of the data, and then turn that data into something that's valuable for her or for him. >> Peter: And others. >> And others, and others. Absolutely. And that's what Paxata is doing. In a collaborative, in a 21st Century world where I don't work in a silo, I work collaboratively. And then the tool, and the platform that helps me do that is actually a 21st Century platform. >> So, John, at the beginning of the session you and Jim were talking about what is going to be one of the themes here at the show. And we observed that it used to be that people were talking about setting up the hardware, setting up the clutters, getting Hadoop to work, and Jim talked about going up the stack. Well, this is one of the indicators that, in fact, people were starting to go up the stack because they're starting to worry more about the data, what it can do, the value of how it's going to be used, and how we distribute more of that work so that we get more people using data that's actually good and useful to the business. >> John: And drives value. >> And drives value. >> Absolutely. And if I may, just put a chronological aspect to this. When we launched the company we said the business analyst needs to be in charge of the data and turning the data into something useful. Then right at that time, the world of create data lakes came in thanks to our partners like Cloudera and Hortonworks, and others, and MapR and others. In the recent past, the world of moving from on premise data lakes to hybrid, multicloud data lakes is becoming reality. Our partners at Microsoft, at AWS, and others are having customers come in and build cloud-based data lakes. So, today what you're seeing is on one hand this complete democratization within the business, like at Standard Chartered, where all these business analysts are getting access to data. And on the other hand, from the data infrastructure moving into a hybrid multicloud world. And what you need is a 21st Century information management platform that serves the need of the business and to make that data relevant and information and ready for their consumption. While at the same time we should not forget that enterprises need governance. They need lineage. They need scale. They need to be able to move things around depending on what their business needs are. And that's what Paxata is driving. That's why we're so excited about our partnership with Microsoft, with AWS, with our customer partnerships such as Standard Chartered Bank, rolling this out in an enterprise-- >> This is a democratization that you were referring to with your customers. We see this-- >> Everywhere. >> When you free the data up, good things happen but you don't want to have IT be the constraint, you want to let them enable-- >> Peter: And IT doesn't want to be the constraint. >> They don't. >> This is one of the biggest problems that they have on a daily basis. >> They're happy to let it go free as long as it's in they're mind DevOps-like related, this is cool for them. >> Well, they're happy to let it go with policy and security in place. >> Our customers, our most strategic customers, the folks who are running the data lakes, the folks who are managing the data lakes, they are the first ones that say that we want business to be able to access this data, and to be able to go and make use out of this data in the right way for the bank. And not have us be the impediment, not have us be the roadblock. While at the same time we still need governance. We still need security. We still need all those things that are important for a bank or a large enterprise. That's what Paxata is delivering to the customers. >> John: So, what's next? >> Peter: Oh, I'm sorry. >> So, really quickly. An interesting observation. People talk about data being the new fuel of business. That really doesn't work because, as Bill Schmarzo says, it's not the new fuel of business, it's new sunlight of business. And the reason why is because fuel can only be used once. >> Prakash: That's right. >> The whole point of data is that it can be used a lot, in a lot of different ways, and a lot of different contexts. And so, in many respects what we're really trying to facilitate or if someone who runs a data lake when someone in the business asks them, "Well, how do you create value for the business?" The more people, the more users, the more context that they're serving out of that common data, the more valuable the resource that they're administering. So, they want to see more utilization, more contexts, more data being moved out. But again, governance, security have to be in place. >> You bet, you bet. And using that analogy of data, and I've heard this term about data being the new oil, etc. Well, if data is the oil, information is really the refined fuel or sunlight as we like to call it. >> Peter: Yeah. >> John: Well, you're riffing on semantics, but the point is it's not a one trick pony. Data is part of the development, I wrote a blog post in 1997, I mean 2007 that said data's the new development kit. And it was kind of riffing on this notion of the old days >> Prakash: You bet. >> Here's your development kit, SDK, or whatever was how people did things back then Enter the cloud, >> Prakash: That's right. >> And boom, there it is. The data now is in the process of the refinery the developers wanted. The developers want the data libraries. Whatever that means. That's where I see it. And that is the democratization where data is available to be integrated in to apps, into feeds, into ... >> Exactly, and so it brings me to our point about what was the exciting, new product innovation announcement we made today about Intelligent Ingest. You want to be able to access data in the enterprise regardless of where it is, regardless of the cloud where it's sitting, regardless of whether it's on-premise, in the cloud. You don't need to as a business worry about whether that is a JSON file or whether that's an XML file or that's a relational file. That's irrelevant. What you want is, do I have the access to the right data? Can I take that data, can I turn it into something valuable and then can I make a decision out of it? I need to do that fast. At the same time, I need to have the governance and security, all of that. That's at the end of the day the objective that our customers are driving towards. >> Prakash, thanks so much for coming on and being a great member of our community. >> Fantastic. >> You're part of our smart network of great people out there and entrepreneurial journey continues. >> Yes. >> Final question. Just observation. As you pinch yourself and you go down the journey, you guys are walking the talk, adding new products. We're global landscape. You're seeing a lot of new stuff happening. Customers are trying to stay focused. A lot of distractions whether security or data or app development. What's your state of the industry? How do you view the current market, from your perspective and also how the customer might see it from their impact? >> Well, the first thing is that I think in the last four years we have seen significant maturity both on the providers off software technology and solutions, and also amongst the customers. I do think that going forward what is really going to make a difference is one really driving towards business outcomes by leveraging data. We've talked about a lot of this over the last few years. What real business outcomes are you delivering? What we are super excited is when we see our customers each one of them actually subscribes to Paxata, we're a SAS company, they subscribe to Paxata not because they're doing the science experiment but because they're trying to deliver real business value. What is that? Whether that is a risk in compliance solution which is going to drive towards real cost savings. Or whether that's a top line benefit because they know what they're customer 360 is and how they can go and serve their customers better or how they can improve supply chains or how they can optimize their entire efficiency in the company. I think if you take it from that lens, what is going to be important right now is there's lots of new technologies coming in, and what's important is how is it going to drive towards those top three business drivers that I have today for the next 18 months? >> John: So, that's foundational. >> That's foundational. Those are the building blocks-- >> That's what is happening. Don't jump... If you're a customer, it's great to look at new technologies, etc. There's always innovation projects-- >> RND, GPOCs, whatever. Kick the tires. >> But now, if you are really going to talk the talk about saying I'm going to be, call your word, data-driven, information-driven, whatever it is. If you're going to talk the talk, then you better walk the walk by delivering the real kind of tools and capabilities that you're business consumers can adopt. And they better adopt that fast. If they're not up and running in 24 hours, something is wrong. >> Peter: Let me ask one question before you close, John. So, you're argument, which I agree with, suggests that one of the big changes in the next 18 months, three years as this whole thing matures and gets more consistent in it's application of the value that it generates, we're going to see an explosion in the number users of these types of tools. >> Prakash: Yes, yes. >> Correct? >> Prakash: Absolutely. >> 2X, 3X, 5X? What do you think? >> I think we're just at the cusp. I think is going to grow up at least 10X and beyond. >> Peter: In the next two years? >> In the next, I would give that next three to five years. >> Peter: Three to five years? >> Yes. And we're on the journey. We're just at the tip of the high curve taking off. That's what I feel. >> Yeah, and there's going to be a lot more consolidation. You're going to start to see people who are winning. It's becoming clear as the fog lifts. It's a cloud game, a scale game. It's democratization, community-driven. It's open source software. Just solve problems, outcomes. I think outcome is going to be much faster. I think outcomes as a service will be a model that we'll probably be talking about in the future. You know, real time outcomes. Not eight month projects or year projects. >> Certainly, we started writing research about outcome-based management. >> Right. >> Wikibon Research... Prakash, one more thing? >> I also just want to say that in addition to this business outcome thing, I think in the last five years I've seen a lot of shift in our customer's world where the initial excitement about analytics, predictive, AI, machine-learning to get to outcomes. They've all come into a reality that none of that is possible if you're not able to handle, first get a grip on your data, and then be able to turn that data into something meaningful that can be analyzed. So, that is also a major shift. That's why you're seeing the growth we're seeing-- >> John: Cause it's really hard. >> Prakash: It's really hard. >> I mean, it's a cultural mindset. You have the personnel. It's an operational model. I mean this is not like, throw some pixie dust on it and it magically happens. >> That's why I say, before you go into any kind of BI, analytics, AI initiative, stop, think about your information management strategy. Think about how you're going to democratize information. Think about how you're going to get governance. Think about how you're going to enable your business to turn data into information. >> Remember, you can't do AI with IA? You can't do AI without information architecture. >> There you go. That's a great point. >> And I think this all points to why Wikibon's research have all the analysts got it right with true private cloud because people got to take care of their business here to have a foundation for the future. And you can't just jump to the future. There's too much just to come and use a scale, too many cracks in the foundation. You got to do your, take your medicine now. And do the homework and lay down a solid foundation. >> You bet. >> All right, Prakash. Great to have you on theCUBE. Again, congratulations. And again, it's great for us. I totally have a great vibe when I see you. Thinking about how you launched on theCUBE in 2013, and how far you continue to climb. Congratulations. >> Thank you so much, John. Thanks, Peter. That was fantastic. >> All right, live coverage continuing day one of three days. It's going to be a great week here in New York City. Weather's perfect and all the players are in town for Big Data NYC. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris. Be back with more after this short break. (upbeat techno music).

(techno music) >> Narrator: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering AWS Summit 2017. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hi, welcome back to theCUBE. We are live in San Francisco at Moscone Center at the AWS Summit. And I'm Lisa Martin, joined with my co-host Jeff Frick. We're very excited to have the chief architect and co-founder of Nextdoor, Prakash Janakiraman, on the program, welcome. >> Thank you for having me. >> For those of you who missed the keynote this morning, Prakash, you did a really fantastic keynote in the session that Werner did, and I loved how you positioned what Nextdoor is. If there's anyone out there that actually doesn't know, give us for those who didn't see the keynote just how you positioned it and talk to us about what you guys are doing, how you've achieved 70% of US neighborhoods covered, over 135,000 neighborhoods in the US. You're expanding globally. Give us in a few minutes this back story on Nextdoor. >> Yeah, so we think of Nextdoor as sitting kind of alongside Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. People are using Facebook to communicate with their friends and family all over the world, and Twitter to connect with people with whom they share common interests. And despite having hundreds of Facebook friends and thousands of Twitter followers, in my own neighborhood I only knew a couple of my neighbors, and it's sort of unfortunate. Your neighbors are a great resource that you should know, right, in a local context. So we feel like Nextdoor is bringing back a sense of community to the neighborhood by connecting people in the medium that we use today, which is this virtual medium, online social networking. So we kind of sit alongside of those. And as you think about the difference between what Facebook has been able to do, or an Instagram or a SnapChat, they really leverage existing connections, and when most people don't know their neighbors we have our work cut out for us, because we need to go build those connections. And once those connections are built, they're really, really valuable, right? All of a sudden you didn't know how to find the local electrician or a handyman, or how to reunite with a lost pet, or what happened with this rash of break ins in the neighborhood. Or who do you go to if there's a natural disaster that's happening in your community? How do you band together? How do you even communicate with other people? And so we think we're bringing that basic connectivity to these neighborhoods. >> What was the secret sauce? Because obviously you can't just authorize integration to my contacts, because by definition they're not in my contacts. So how did you kind of crack that code? >> There were a couple of things. So number one was we made a very deliberate decision, we'll get to why this was important, to verify each of our members as being actual residents of a neighborhood community. In our parlance, a neighborhood is really a geographically bounded region. Every single neighborhood in the Nextdoor (mumbles) is started by one member. The member draws the neighborhood boundaries, and then subsequent members-- >> Jeff: They draw the boundaries. >> They do, they do. >> They define it. >> That's right. And so every member that joins has to actually prove that they're residents of the community, and that raises trust. And all these neighborhoods have grown because of word of mouth. People go out, they tell their neighbors, "Hey, you should come on to Nextdoor. "It's a great place for us to connect. "I just heard something interesting "that happened on Nextdoor." But then we also use a variety of different mechanisms to invite people that are a little unusual for internet companies. For example, we allow our members to send out postcard invitations, because again, they don't have phone numbers, they don't have emails or electronic correspondence. So we've had to resort to some non-traditional types of marketing to get the word out about Nextdoor. >> Don't share any secrets, but what percentage of new members come through a postcard sent by a neighbor? >> Well, not isolating postcards, the vast majority of our members are coming in because of a referral from another member, of which postcards are one of those mechanisms. >> Are one piece. >> Yeah. >> With all apps and stuff there's kind of the moment, right, the CNN moment, whatever, where things kind of catch. Is there a particular type of activity in the neighborhood that is the one that kind of catalyzes people where you get that little spike? >> Well, it depends. In a lot of different cases, I remember an example from really the early days of the company, a community in Woodside, California, which is just right down the road from here, a small child in that neighborhood had developed meningitis, and meningitis if you don't know is hugely contagious. It's really bad news. And so lots and lots of members got the word out about this, and that brought new members in because they were saying, "Well, wait a minute, what do I do about meningitis? "Do we need to get immunizations? "Do we need to do something else? "Do we need to quarantine our kids?" So sometimes it's bad news like that. In other cases it's good news, it's about neighborhood events, it's about bringing people together. One of our very first neighborhoods organized a Halloween party, a Halloween parade in their neighborhood, and they used Nextdoor to organize the entire thing, and they had like 50% participation in the neighborhood. It was a small neighborhood of 90 households, but to see all the kids, and them taking pictures and publishing them on Nextdoor, it created this connectivity that just didn't exist before, so. >> And that's such great point, because we are so used to be connecting with everything, and we think we're so connected, we all have over 500 LinkedIn connections, and Twitter followers and Facebook friends, but it's very abstracted. It actually can be very isolating. So it seems like it probably was like a no brainer from an investment perspective to go, this is the, as you said in your keynote, paraphrase, this is the original social network. So talk to us about how you built that on AWS, how you've leveraged the power of AWS, the technologies, to gain what you have done so far. >> It's interesting, because prior to starting this company I was at Google, and we always felt like one of our technology advantages at Google was that we had near infinite computing resources, and that the computing resources were abstracted away from the developers so that they could just go in and build applications and not need to worry about what actually powered those applications under the hood. You said, "I needed some RAM. "I needed some disk. "I need some CPU," and boom, you're off to the races. So coming out of Google, and this is a long time ago now in 2008, seeing that AWS was just getting started with EC2 and S3, and that the playing field was leveled for developers in such a way that you no longer had to rack and stack servers, you didn't need to have a physical data center, you didn't have to have people managing that data center, and that you could use hardware as software really, you could interface with it as software, was hugely powerful. So we started out on EC2 and S3, and over time, and as we fast forward to today, we're using almost 30 different AWS services, including DynamoDB, ECS, Redshift, Kinesis, and so all of these components fit together in running our business. >> Right. Early lines, right, for AWS. It's a data center as an API is one of my favorites, just those little lines, but one of the, so security, all that stuff is kind of done talking about security for a publisher in the cloud, but one other thing that still is out there is at some point, you know, you rent, rent, rent, and at some point you pass a milestone where it's more economical to buy. Clearly you guys didn't buy. Netflix hasn't bought. There's plenty of cases, but from your point of view as a founder and a businessman, and also an operator, when you looked at that, has that ever come up in your discussion as your Amazon bills get bigger and bigger and bigger, and if so, kind of what's the internal discussion and why are you where you are today? >> So we, like a lot of startups, we really value speed and we want to focus on the things that we're really good at, and the things that we're good at are building great products. So we are so advantaged by the fact that we do not have to manage our own infrastructure, that we can use these component parts from which to build our applications, and nowhere is this more apparent than in prototyping new features, right? When you don't necessarily know if something is going to work, you don't want to go make a big investment in procuring resources for that. You want to just be able to spin something up on demand and try it out, and if it doesn't work you shut it back down. And so for us it's a TCO, total cost of ownership, type of question. And along with having on premises data centers and infrastructure comes overhead for maintenance and having teams that do that, and right now, for all of these neighborhoods that we support, 135,000 neighborhoods in the US, right, we only have two people that manage our underlying infrastructure, two dev-ops folks. >> And how many people do you have in the whole company? >> The entire company is about 150 people, and we have 60 of them in engineering, so we're a really, really, really lean team, and we're supporting massive scale with that small team because of the help of something like AWS. And this would've never been possible 10 years ago, so. >> And you'd rather spend that next marginal dollar on another developer, or marketing, or sales, or community, or something, than a piece of metal and a rack. >> We want to put that money towards making a better user experience for our users, and whether that means going into new communities, places where we aren't already, or improving engagement in communities where we already have the product, in either case that's a better dollar spent for us. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> So along those lines, how do you do that? How are you taking user feedback and determining kind of what the next steps are even within the US, but also is there, as Andy Jessie actually talked about in his fireside chat, the GOs that they're expending, they're in 16 now, is there maybe a model to kind of follow along where AWS has a footprint? I'd love to know what that customer engagement is to help really refine that user experience. >> Yeah, there's a few different ways that we can get customer feedback. One is sort of implicit. So we have lots of data that we collect and look at and trying to understand like what features are really popular, what features are taking off, what features aren't really as popular as others, and we do a lot of A/B and split testing to understand how these features perform. But the other way is just good old fashioned qualitative feedback from our users. So we have a couple of different ways that we do that. One, we have a neighborhood operations team that's always in contact with our communities. We have leads in our communities that serve as sort of moderators and the folks that manage the community's activity, and so we lean on them heavily for feedback. And then we have a national leads forum where they all come together and they exchange their own experiences building their community. And from that, it's a treasure trove of information where we communicate with them, we participate in those forums, and then we build the features that we think that they want. >> It's funny, this theme of competing for speed, you're competing against time has come up a number of times today, in Werner's keynote, you mentioned it, it came up again in Andy's fireside chat. I thought it was interesting in your keynote piece how the measure of speed and deployment has so radically changed. It used to be one push a day was crazy. And you talked about a concept of democratization of deployment, which I thought was interesting. Because in the big data world we're always talking about democratizing big data, get it out of the hands of data scientists, let everybody make better decisions based on data, but you talked about democratization of deployments which I've never heard before. Wondering if you could share that story, because again, one a day, that's no longer the measure of success. >> No. So the way that we think about this and the reason that I call it democratization of deployment is as you invest more in automation and you turn down the kind of batching of releases together, the batches of commits together, you can now isolate their impact, and you can move faster by doing more frequent, smaller releases. And part of that is each developer is responsible for their own code going out to production. So what we've invested in is a lot of automation that makes it possible for any one of our developers to push a button, a metaphorical button, and actually push code out to the site, observe how that code performs, and then we can move onto the next one. So in the old world people would often hire a release engineer, and the release engineer's job was really to coordinate all of the activities of the developers, build packages, get them staged and ready for QA, and the overhead on that just does not scale well as a company gets bigger and bigger. And so what we've said is, "Listen developers, "you guys are responsible. "You guys know how your code works. "Let's make it possible for you "to minimize the amount of time "between you committing a piece of code "and that code being live to our users." And so that's what I kind of was talking about in terms of democratization of the release process, making sure that everyone can do it. >> What I thought just was fascinating is on one end everybody is talking about smaller, marginal units of compute and store, etc., right, and yet on the other hand you were basically doing, basically duplicating your entire production environment in kind of this red black strategy, build it up, make that one go, crash the other one. Build up a fresh one, make that one go, crash the old one, and leveraging what are basically infinite resources behind the AWS screen in a really innovative way that you could never do that with your own hardware. >> Well, a lot of credit goes to Netflix. We saw a presentation that they did a few years ago at Reinvent that inspired us to build our own kind of version of the red black deployment system. But again, because these resources are ephemeral, you can spin them up and shut them down, that's what makes any of that possible. So it's really, really awesome for us, because we're moving fast. In fact, I don't even know how many deploys we've done today, but every time a deploy is done we get a message in a Slack channel that says, "Hey, somebody pushed." And it says who the conductor of the train that actually pushed out the commit is, and so you have full accountability in this like living log of what's going on in your production environment, and anyone can do it. Even our interns are allowed to do it, and so it's really, really empowering for our developers to be able to do that. >> I was going to say, that was the word that I heard when you were talking earlier. It's really this empowerment, which is huge for productivity. And speaking of productivity, you guys have really achieved some pretty significant technology achievements that are presumably in this feedback circle going back and making the experience for your mother in law, your mom, probably my mom, even better. What are some of those technology achievements? You mentioned a few of them on the keynote. I'd love for our guests to hear some of those big things that you've achieved. >> Yeah, I think when we think about the technology stack there are two things that we're trying to do. Number one is build for our developers so that they can push features out faster, but then the second and the most important is that we improve the user experience for our users. And most recently, we've done a few different things. Number one is we've introduced this concept around personalization, and it's very lightweight at this point where we can try and understand, what is your experience? If you're not a parent, do you really care about play dates and all of the information about kids? If you don't have a pet, do you care about what's going on with pets? Do you not like the classified ads? And so we're starting to look at data, this is where the big data stack becomes very interesting, and say, "Okay, let's see if we can "match the content in your neighborhood "to the things that you're interested in," and sort of making a lot of investments in that area. And then the second is we're making a lot of investments in search, because we think a lot of people will come to Nextdoor with an intent in mind. They'll say, "Hey, you know what? "I need to find a handyman or a plumber." And what's the natural way to do that is to go into a search box and say, "Handyman," right, and look for handymen in your local community. And so we're making a lot of investments on both fronts that will make it easier for our users to get connected to the information that's most important to them. >> That personalization is so key because we sort of, as consumers and as people who expect things immediately, we want what we want, we want what's relevant. And we know a lot of companies, whether they're banks or whatnot, retailers, spend a tremendous amount of time and dollars investing to know how do I make this experience unique to Jeff, or unique to Prakash, or unique to Lisa. And so I think that there's so much capabilities. I have to ask you though, you must have the most connected neighborhood. You must have the best block parties. (laughing) >> Me personally? >> Yeah. >> You know, it's interesting. The product takes on the identity of each of our communities. And so in an urban community like in San Francisco I'll say that I still don't know all of my neighbors, but it's really, really comforting to know that I know by name and by face who they are even if I haven't had in person interactions. But one of the things that we always talk about, which is pretty cool, and it's happened to me in my own community, is we talk about this concept of bits that move atoms, and using our platform, which is really exchanging information electronically, to facilitate in person interactions, and those are the atoms. And it's definitely happened to me where I've seen someone on the street and I just say, "Hello," right, because I'm like, "Oh yeah, I saw your post. "Did you get your dog back? "Were you able to sell that television?" And so it's really interesting that this is actually happening, and ultimately that's our goal is to bring back that sense of community to neighborhoods and to make neighborhoods stronger and safer, and the way you do that is by connecting people in the community. >> Right, right. >> Absolutely. >> It's a neighborhood watch on steroids kind of, right? >> Totally, yeah. >> Yeah. >> It's fantastic. And I'm sure they would be blown away if they knew they were talking to the guy behind Nextdoor. >> Prakash: One of them. >> One of them. >> One of them. >> Well Prakash, thank you so much for sharing your story with us on theCUBE. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> It's so exciting to get back to the original social network and really kind of, I love that. I think people might even be learning how to write again rather than type. >> My handwriting is terrible. >> We can only hope. >> Reaching, you're reaching there. >> Well Prakash, thank you so much. Continued success with Nextdoor. >> Thank you very much. >> We so much appreciate your time here. >> For my co-host Jeff Frick, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching theCUBE. Don't go anywhere. We'll be right back. (techno music)

live from san francisco extracting the signal from the noise it's the cute covering oracle openworld 2015 brought to you by oracle now your host John furrier okay welcome back everyone we are here live in San Francisco on Howard Street for oracle openworld special presentation of the cube so looking ankles flagship program we go out to the events and extract the system noise i'm john furrier founder of SiliconANGLE join my next to gas prakash ramamurthy senior vice president systems and cloud management basically management cloud at oracle and mary johnson Turner research vice president enterprise systems management IDC welcome to the cube thank you so I think take my glasses off to read read the intro there but I want to just get your take on it because we just had to admit on Lavery talk about the plowed and one question I didn't get to ask him was a success mark hurry was talk about the pipeline of customers already in motion on the cloud so I wanted to ask him which is great timing for you guys is how do they integrate it which he talked about but then how do they manage if this is a big issue and he you know ease of use is something that he was generally throwing around there so what is the status of the management cloud because that will be a differentiator like security and to end as a differentiator management certainly will be to me not just table stakes it's really differentiated absolutely i think we're here because we're launching it today actually the management cloud and the interesting thing is this which is today if you look at it whether it's on our cloud or on-premise the rate of innovation is very very robust right i mean you have a mobile phone you're seeing your apps getting refresh twice a week or or even faster than that so what it means is you need the next generation monitoring solution that can monitor all of that so our goal with oracle management flower is to help you manage and monitor your solutions independent of where they are deployed if you deploy it on oracle cloud you little come bake with it to be able to monitor it right from the get-go or if you still have it on premise we will allow you to monitor it and break down those data I low so it is very effective so like you said is very very critical that people look at what their challenges are today in terms of proactive monitoring and troubleshooting to get to the next generation solutions we are providing theory I want to ask you a question on the trends but before that I want to just say that one of things i love about doing the oracle shells are six year the cube here is that for an old-timer like me seen the client-server live the client-server Revolution which is now kind of almost a point in time now it's almost it's over now we're into the cloud cloud modern error it's interesting to see because the same same things keep coming up again it's like the platform's the tool is so I got to ask you the question on what is the key trends that are driving this new application space because if you look at the client-server one of the big things that really was huge was the application market mean that would grant it was siloed up by you know by vendors but now with open source this is a huge application boom right now that's gonna impact IT operations sure yeah I think that if you look at it there's been like you said a couple of generations of technology we had mainframes things changed really slow right then we had client server which was to give business units and developers more control and things started to speed up and change a little more quickly but now in our current and cloud native cloud based development real-time microservice open source-based kind of world the rating pays the change is almost constant you're seeing so many organizations that are moving to continuous delivery modes much of it hosted on public cloud or hybrid private public cloud and they're changing features and functions every day and that creates huge management challenges in terms of just trying to understand is the end-to-end application performing effectively are the end-users getting what they need are the business decision-makers really understanding the impact of those outages or upgrades and it's so it's very complex and then I think it's raising the set of requirements for a particular application performance monitoring and IT operations and log analytics I was Oracle addressing these trends because one of the things that people like tonight I'd like to put things into two camps rip and replace okay or evolutionary development and we're clearly on the McCloud evolutionary because Oracle has it's not gonna be it's not gonna go away right so you can say Oracle native is the cloud strategy to all the Oracle customers but yet now with open source there's net new applications that do you got cha vows to 20 years anniversary so there's new stuff going on IOT is a huge application market right now now I can run an IOT thing in the cloud somewhere else or maybe on Amazon or somewhere else but the other day I have run through my operational assistance assistance of engagements this is a record which is Oracle right so is it an Oracle native cloud and the cloud data mean it how do you see oracle addressing that dynamic are they well positioned well i think oracle has a pretty broad portfolio you know they've had again from a management perspective they had Oracle Enterprise Manager on Prem for many many years i think that the new offerings that are being announced today really are interesting that they extend Oracles of monitoring and analytics to a whole range of cloud-based solutions many of which may not necessarily have been born on the Oracle platforms so I think it's a good recognition of the need for heterogeneity and the need to recognize that it is going to be a very hybrid world for many many years so I think that those are all real you know positive factors and then the new releases and it was talking about the integrated pass perform as a service Enchantix connect those environments but on the management side what are you guys delivering because that's going to be the challenge Prakash to talk about the specific things that you guys are announcing and delivering the customers today so specifically we are delivering three services first one is around application performance monitoring that allows our customers to stay ahead of their customers and their problems and give them the best user experience and monitor that and troubleshoot that and then the second service is around managing your logs and extracting IT operational data and business data out of it today if you look at it the most common thing people do with the log is to archive them and put it away because they don't want that to interrupt their production systems but that has a ton of good information so we have that second service eight exhaust becomes gold exactly so today what happens is they just get put away they get archived and that has real nuggets of business information and IT information being able to collect all of that and use it for your rapid troubleshooting as well so that's the second service the set third one is around IT analytics I call those first two services kind of like the Fitbit for your applications you're constantly getting vitals out of it and white throw that away if you don't have an issue still use it to run some interesting capacity friends and forecasting and all of that so use your real data to forecast your IT health as opposed to using a spreadsheet with some random data that you collected in a point in time so that's what we are announcing three services application performance monitoring log analytics and long term trending and forecasting with IT analytic Isis plunks been doing some log files how they were born people's blunt their data exactly they are trying to kind of get into that how do you guys compared to things like splunk and other tools I know tableau is a new relationship that was announced for the data visualization yeah Larry kind of talked about that yesterday talk about that how people are using that data exhaust give me some examples so the most fundamental difference in what we are doing is this which is we do not differentiate the sources of data and the classes of data when we bring it to the cloud so it could be metric data but with that you can collect based on your monitoring your health of your applications which splunk doesn't do for example and then log data but collect all of that and correlate it together so that in essence what we want to do is this which is the enterprise's today don't have a really a data problem they'd have an insight problem which is they want to be able to just see the right amount of data when they have a problem not all the data when they have a problem depends how you look at the data problem they'll have a Jerry problems you define that as they get all this data so you're plenty of data that's the problem there's no dearth of data problem yeah so that's what I'm i know i know i just kind of making this fun was good comment because i like that because that's that is really not an issue the data is coming yeah and that's you know Brandon whole know the problem you guys have scale now with that but the I don't Linux is a big thing I wanna talk about that because it can be problematic I'm a talk to some customers all the time and they say if someone comes in here and sells me another dashboard I'm gonna shoot myself exactly so it's like because and I said what do you mean by that he goes well there's so many alarms going off I don't know what to pay attention to that's where we start to see machine learning from these tools can you share any color what your great wine Larry I'm it's exactly right which is one of the underpinnings for us is to be able to automatically generate baseline and detect anomalies the last thing I mean our product support our own public cloud and I hear from the guys who run the cloud saying don't just give me another alert tell me what I need to do with an alert because I need to be able to disposition the alert so what we want to do is to understand the normal behavior of your application and only alerts you when there's an anomaly okay so that's part of our machine learning and prioritisation learning some learning algorithms in volved understand some pattern recognition that's right things and only tell you what the outlier is and when and and ask determine what the outlier is that suppose you setting thresholds for us to know it because sometimes things change if you are an e-commerce application or the day before Thanksgiving would have a different pattern than the third week of January right me just that the way the world works so what I want to talk to you about Larry made a comment yes in the key no I just like to take a dig at work day but you know in the way he likes work day because you know it's competition and also highlights from the features that Oracle has but what work days actually losing some share to service now a company in here in Silicon Valley that is an itsm IT service management company and they have been very successful their developer program which actually is starting to nibble away at work shares market share because they're building these developers are building these really focused age are apps that is not flat point it's a tool I know like an offense report for example and works really really well but work day has a plethora of features and they don't always have the best in class features uh-huh so that brings up the whole developer angle what do you and you guys have a story there for developers api's how do you talk to the absolutely share absolutely we have a rest api that the developers can use to collect the data from there into their own dashboards if they want to and also for example you can automatically deploy our agents when you're using our Java cloud service so that monitoring gets baked into it so we have api's for both inputting data and torque loud and extracting data back from the cloud will have api's for you to take the events that we generate into your own event dashboard that you have I'm a developer have a team like I could do some stuff filled my own kind of visualization UI and just have JSON endpoints come right into the absolution absolutely maybe I know she smirked when I said service now you will share some insight it's a this dynamic because this is kind of what's happening on the cloud these tools are popping up yeah well yeah and again I think what we're talking about today is to be able to monitor and analyze and optimize a lot of those different tools and deliver them via cloud platform and I think that we are finding that DevOps organizations are very interested in cloud-based solutions that help them do this better cheaper or faster so I think that you know I think it's an opportunity service now has currently been a pioneer in the delivery of system management as a cloud based model and I think it's interesting that Oracle is actually choosing to enter that market in in a different place yeah I mean actually I just a strength and you got the systems of record a on the right and and really talk from your really you know to Prakash this point really focusing on data because managing effectively managing the performance and operation of applications and complex environments it's all it is a huge data problem and you've got data coming from so many sources so many formats and being able to take that in rapidly to transform it normalize it and make it digestible for humans it's something that is really important in these complex environments and yes I think it's going to be interesting to see I think it's a great try or agree with you I think it's a great strategy by focusing on the data you have a lot of range and I wrote a blog post in 2007 now I'm going way back date is a new developer kit and now that's actually happening you look at data people are playing with the data like a developer place with function calls if you will so we're seeing now is a data rich environment hence the not not a problem of having enough data laying around the problem is how do you use the data you're getting all the products yeah inside is a huge problem and that's only an accelerated by faster performance machines in easy-to-use environment like I'd better analytics because you you want if the user knows what the problem is that they're looking for there are a lot of tools that will help you find it yeah but if you do not know what the problem is and to guide them towards the problem is is where where there's real opportunity and there's a real pain point in these enterprises especially now that you and I don't tolerate a downtime so you never cut anybody slack saying oh the website is slow but they've been innovating I'm gonna give them some slack nobody does that yeah yeah so and because now everything is measurable now for the first time in the history of business everything is measurable that's right and that's like just mind-blowing to me but i think is a huge app i only get your thoughts on the application market because I just see a massive tsunami coming of third-party developers and I'm not sure Oracle can handle that I didn't that's my personal opinion counter that I mean I people want to know can Oracle handle an ecosystem of third-party developers absolutely we have shown that before with with Java and I think you see every one of four services having open api's we are coating third-party developers we will be continuing to support them and I think we'll be able to handle it and we need to do that as a part of this ecosystem yeah I mean it's a platform yeah so you have to enable absolutely and that's the open message exactly all right so gosh what's your advice for the people at oracle openworld here and the people watching let's start with the people here on site if they catch this video when are we putting up some snippets before you even get off the set here so one what session should they attend what's where should I get more information what sessions and breakouts and then presentations they goes I have a keynote tomorrow at 11am that I would love for them to attend and outside of that there are some hands-on labs here that they should go look at the products and people who are remote they should go to cloud.oracle.com / management where we have all the services listed and take a look at it and we are really really going to be putting out a very differentiated solution than what is available in the marketplace and I would love for them to check it out and give us feedback for the folks watching online and customers in general when they squint through all the activities a lot of bombs dropping here at Oracle I mean a lot of announcements this is pretty pretty unprecedented what should they look for what are the if you at the point of someone to 11 point data point within your world that's going to get their attention and have them dive in deep what should they look at if they're having issues with their applications today if they're hearing about their application issues first from their customers and not by themselves they should be looking at our solutions to see how they can get ahead of the customers and that's what that's one precise message they can take back

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is theCUBE conversation. >> Everyone welcome to this special CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here in our Palo Alto studios. During this time of the pandemic, we're doing a lot of remote interviews, supporting a lot of events. theCUBE virtual is our new brand because there's no events to go to, but we certainly want to talk to the best people and get the most important stories. And today I have a great segment with a world-class entrepreneur, Ajeet Singh co-founder and executive chairman of ThoughtSpot. And they've got an event coming up, which is going to be coming up in December 9th and 10th. But this interview is really about what it takes to be a world-class leader and what it takes to see the future and be a visionary, but then execute an opportunity because this is the time that we're in right now is there's a lot of change, data, technology, a sea change is happening and it's upon us and leadership around technology and how to capture opportunities is really what we need right now. And so Ajeet I want to thank you for coming on to theCUBE conversation. >> Thanks for having me, John. Pleasure to be here. >> For the folks watching, the startup that you've been doing for many, many years now, ThoughtSpot you're the co-founder executive chairman, but you also were involved in Nutanix as the co-founder of that company as well. You know, a little about unicorns and creating value and doing things early, but you're a visionary and you're a technologist and a leader. I want to go in and explore that because now more than ever, the role of data, the role of the truth is super important. And as the co-founder, your company is well positioned to do that. I mean, your tagline today on the website says insight is the speed of thought, but going back to the beginning, probably wasn't the tagline. It was probably maybe like we got to leverage data, take us through the vision initially when you founded the company in 2012. What was the thinking? What was on your mind? Take us through the journey. >> Yeah. So as an entrepreneur, I think visionary is a very big term. I don't know if I qualify for that or not, but what I'm really passionate about is identifying very large markets, with very, very big problems. And then going to the white board and from scratch, building a solution that is perfectly designed for the big problem that the market might be facing from scratch. And just an absolute honest way of approaching the problem and finding the best possible solution. So when we were starting ThoughtSpot, the market that we identified was analytics, analytics software. And the big problem that we saw was that while on one hand, companies were building very big data lakes, data warehouses, there was a lot of money being spent in capturing and storing data how that data was consumed by the end-users, the non-technical people, the sales, marketing, HR people, the doctors, the nurses, that process was not changing. That process was still stuck in old times where you have to ask an analyst to go and build a dashboard for you. And at the same time, we saw that in the consumer space, when anyone had a question they wanted to learn about something, they would just go to Google and ask that question. So we said, why can't analytics be as easy as Google? If I have a question, why do I have to wait for three weeks for some data experts to bring some insights to me for most simple questions, if I'm doing some very deep analysis, trying to come up with fraud algorithms, it's understood, you know, you need data expert. But if I'm just trying to understand how my business is doing, how my customers are doing, I shouldn't have to wait. And so that's how we identified the market and the problem. And then we build a solution that is designed for that non-technical user with a very design thinking UX first approach to make it super easy for anyone to ask that question. So that was the Genesis of the company. >> You know, I just love the thinking because you're solving a problem with a clean sheet piece of paper, you're looking at what can be done. And it's just, you can bring up Google because you know, you think about Google's motto was find what you're looking for. And they had a little gimmicky buttons, like I'm feeling lucky, which just took you to a random webpage at that time while everyone else was tryna build these walled gardens and this structural apparatus, Google wanted you in and out with your results fast. And that mindset just never came over to the enterprise and with all that legacy structure and all the baggage associated with it. So I totally loved the vision, but I got to ask you, how did you get to beachhead? How did you get that first success milestone? When did you see results in your thinking? >> Yeah, so I mean, I believe that once you've identified a big market and a big problem, it comes down to the people. So I sort of went on a recruit recruiting mission and I recruited perhaps the best technology and business team that you can find in any enterprise segment, not only just analytics, some of the early engineers, my co-founder, he was at Google before that, Amit Prakash, before that he was at Microsoft working on Bing. So it took a lot of very deliberate effort to find the right kind of people who have a builder's mentality and are also deep experts in areas like search large-scale distributed systems. Very passionate about user experience. And then you start building the product, you know, it took us almost, I would say one and a half three years to get the initial working version of the product. And we were lucky enough to engage with some of the largest companies in the world, such as Walmart who are very interested in our solution because they were facing these kinds of problems. And we almost co-developed this technology with our early customers, focusing on ease of use, scale, security, governance, all of that, because it's one thing to have a concept where you want to make access to data as easy as Google, you have a certain interface people can type and get an answer. But when you are talking about enterprise data and enterprise needs, they are nowhere similar to what you have in consumer space. Consumer space is free for all, all the information is there you can crawl it and then you can access it. In enterprise, for you to take this idea of search, but make it production grid, make it real and not just a concept card. You need to invest a lot in building deep technology and then enabling security and scalability and all of that. So it took us almost , I would say a two and a half to three years to get to the initial version of the product and the problem we are solving and the area of technology search that we are working on. We brought it to the market. It's almost an infinite game. You know, you can keep making things easier and easier. And we've seen how Google has continued to evolve their search over time And it is still evolving. We just feel so lucky to be in this market, taking the direction that we have taken. >> Yeah. It's easy to talk a big game in this area because like you said, it's a hard technical problem because it'll structural data, whether it's schema databases or whatever, legacy baggage, but to make it easy, hard. And I like what you guys go with this, find the right information and put it in the right place, the right time. It's a really hard problem. And the beautiful thing is you guys are building a category while there's spend in the market that needs the problem today. So category creation with an existing market that needs it. So I got to ask you, if you could do me a favor and define for the audience, what is search-driven analytics? What does that mean from your standpoint? >> Yeah, what it means is for the end user, it looks like search but under the hood is driving large scale analytics. I like to say that our product looks like a search engine on the surface, but under the hood, it's a massive number crunching machine. So Search and AI driven analytics. There's two goals there. One, if the user has, any user and we're talking about non-technical users here, we're not talking about necessarily data experts, but if a user has a question, they should be able to get an answer instantly. They shouldn't have to wait. That is what we achieve with Search and with Spot IQ, our AI engine, we help surface insights where people may not even know that those are the questions they should be asking because data has become so complex. People often don't even know what question they should be asking. And we give them a pool that's very easy to use, but it helps surface insights to them. So there is both a pool model that we enabled through Search and a push model that we enable through Spot IQ. >> So I have to ask you that you guys are pioneering this segment you're in first. And sometimes when you're first, you have arrows in your back as you know, it's not all the beginners survive, they get competition copies, but you guys have had a lead. You had success. What's different today as you have competition coming in trying to say, "Oh, we got Search too." So what's different today with ThoughtSpot? How are you guys differentiated? >> Yeah. I mean, that's always a sign of success. If what you are trying to do, if others are saying we have it too, you have done something that is valuable. And that happens in all industry. I think the best example is Tesla. They were the first to look at this very well-known problem. I mean, we haven't had a very sort of unique take on the existence of the problem itself. Everybody knows that there is a problem with access to data, but the technology that we have built is so deep that it's very, very hard to really copy it and make it work in real world with Tesla in automotive industry in cars, there is obviously so many other companies that have launched battery powered cars, electric cars, but there is Tesla and there is all the other electric cars which are a bit of an afterthought, because if you want to build an analytics product, where Search is at the core, Search cannot be added on the top, Search has to be the core, and then you build around it. And that requires you to build a fundamental architecture from the ground up. And you can't take an existing BI product that is built for dash boarding and add a search bar. I have always said that adding a search bar in a UI is perhaps, you know, 10 to 20 lines of JavaScript code. Anyone can add it and there is so much open source stuff out there that you can just take it and plug it. And many people have tried to do that, but taking off the shelf, Search technology that is built for unstructured data and sticking it on to a product that is required to do analytics on enterprise data, that doesn't work. We built a search technology that understands enterprise data at a very deep level, so that when our customers take our product and bring it into their environment, they don't have to fundamentally change how they manage their data. Our goal is to add value to their existing enterprise data Cloud Data Warehouses and deliver this amazing Search experience where our Search engine is enable to understand what's in their data Lake, what's in their Cloud Data Warehouse. What are the schema, the tables, the joints, the cardinality, the data archive, the security requirements, all of things have to be understood by the technology for you to deliver the experience. So now that said, we pride ourselves in not resting on our laurels. You know, we have this sort of motto in the company. We say we are only 2% done. So we are on our own sort of a continuous journey of innovation. And we have been working on taking our Search technology to the next level. And that is something really powerful that we are going to unveil at our upcoming conference, Beyond, in December. And that is one to create even more distance between us and the competition. And it's all driven by what we have seen with our customers, how they're using our product or learnings what they like, what they don't like, where we see gaps and where we see opportunity to make it even easier to deliver value to our customers and our users. >> I think that's a really profound insight you just shared, because if you look at what you just said around thinking about Search as an embedded architectural foundational, you know, embedded in the architecture, that's different than bolting on a feature where you said Java code or some open source library. You know, we see in the security market, people bolted on security had huge problems. Now, all you hear is, "Oh, you got a big security in from the beginning." You actually have baked Search into everything from the beginning. And it's not just a utility, it's a mindset. And it's also a technology metadata data about data software, and all kinds of tech is involved. Am I getting that right? I mean, cause I think this is what I heard you say. It's like, you got to have the data. >> This is totally right. I mean, if I can use an analogy, there is Google search and obviously Yahoo also tried to bring their own search Yahoo search Yahoo actually, Yahoo versus Google is a perfect example or a perfect analogy to compare with ThoughtSpot versus other BI product Yahoo was built for predefined content consumption. You know, you had a homepage, somebody defined it. You could make some customizations. And there is predefined content you can consume it. Now, they also did add search, but that didn't really go so far. While Google said, we will vary from scratch ability to crawl all the data, ability to index all the data and then build a serving infrastructure that deliver this amazing performance and interactivity and relevance for the user. Relevance is where Google already shined. And you can't do those things until you think about the architecture from the ground up. >> Ajeet I'm looking forward to having more deep dive conversations on that one topic. But for the folks who might not be old enough, like me to remember Google back at that time, Yahoo was the best search engine and it was directory basically with a keyword search. It was trivial, technically speaking, but they got big. And then the portal wars came out, we got to have a portal. Google was very much not looked down as an innovator, but they had great technical chops and they just stayed the course. They had a mission to provide the best search engine to help users find what they're looking for. And they never wavered. And it was not fashionable about that time to your point. And then Yahoo was number one, then Google just became Google and the rest is history. So I really think that's super notable because companies face the same problem. What looks like fashionable tech today might not be the right one. I think that's... >> Yeah, and I totally agree. And I think a lot of times in our space, there's a lot of sort of hype around AI and machine learning. We as a company have tried to stay close to our customers and users and build things that will work for them. And a lot of stuff that we are doing, it has never been done before. So it's not to say that along the way, we don't have our own failures. We do have failures and we learn from them. >> Yeah. Yeah. Just don't make the same mistake twice. >> Yeah, I think if you have a process of learning quickly, improving quickly, those are the companies that will have a competitive advantage. In today's world, nobody gets it right the first time. If you're trying to do something fundamentally different, if you're copying somebody else, then you're too late already. >> I totally agree. >> If you do something new, it's about how fast you penetrate And that's... >> That's a great mindset. That's a great mindset. And I think that's worth capturing calling out, but I got to ask you because what's first of all, distinguished history and I love your mindset and just solving problems, big problems. All great. I want to ask you something about the industry and where you guys were in 2012 alright when you started the company, you were literally in what I call the before Cloud phase. Cause it was before Cloud companies and then during Cloud companies and then after Cloud, you know, Amazon clearly took advantage of that for a lot of startups. So right around 2012 through 2016, I'd call that the Amazon is growing up years. How did the Cloud impact your thinking around the product and how you guys were executing because you were right on that wave. You were probably in the sweet spot of your development. >> Yeah. >> Pre business planning. You were in the pre-business planning mode, incomes, Amazon. I'm sure you're probably using Amazon cause your starters and all start up sort of use Amazon at first, but I just think about, do we all have found premise with a data center? How did that impact you guys? And how does that change today? >> Certainly. Yeah it's been fascinating to see how the world is evolving how enterprises have also really evolved in depth, thinking on how they leverage the cloud infrastructure now. In the Cloud, there is the compute and storage infrastructure. And then you have a Cloud Data Warehouse, the analytics stack in the Cloud. That's becoming more popular now with a company like Google, having BigQuery and then Snowflake really amazing concepts and things like that. So when we started, we looked at where our customers are , where is their data. And what kind of infrastructure is available to us at the time there wasn't enough compute to drive the search engine that we wanted to build. There were also not any significant Cloud Data Warehousing at the time, but our engineering team our co-founders, they came from companies like Google, where building a Cloud based architecture and elastic architecture, service oriented architecture is in their DNA. So we architected the product to run on infrastructure that is very elastic that can be run practically anywhere. But our initial customers and applies the Global 2000. They had their data on-prem. So we had started more with on-prem as a go-to-market strategy. and then about four and a half years ago, once cloud infrastructure I'm talking about the compute infrastructure started to become more mature, we certified our software, to run on all three clouds So today we have more than 75 to 80% of our customers already running our software in the Cloud. And as now, because we connect to our primary data sources, our Cloud Data Warehouses, Cloud Data Lakes. Now with Snowflake and BigQuery and Synapse and Redshift, we have enough of our customers who have deployed Cloud Data Warehouses. So we are also able to directly integrate with them. And that's why we launched our own hosted SaaS Offering about a month ago. So I would say our journey in this area has been sort of similar to companies like Splunk or Elastic, which started with a software model initially deployed more on-prem, but then evolved with the customers to the Cloud. So we have a lot of focus and momentum and lot of our customers, as they're moving their data to the Cloud, they're asking us as well to be in the Cloud and provide a hosted offering. And that is what we have built for the last one year. And we launched it a month ago. >> It's nice to be on the right side of history. I got to say, when you're on the way to be there. And that also makes integrations easy too. I love the Cloud play. Let's get to the final segment here. I want to get your thoughts on your customers, your advice. There's a huge untapped opportunity for companies when it comes to data, a lot of them are realizing that the pandemic is highlighting a lot of areas where they have to go faster and then to go to Cloud, they're going to build modern apps more data's coming in than ever before. Where are these untapped opportunities for customers to take advantage of the data? And what's your opinion on where they should look and what they should do? >> Yeah, I really think that the pandemics has shown for the first, the value of data to society at large, there is probably more than a billion people in the world that have seen a chart for the first time in their life. Everybody is being... and COVID has done some magic. But everybody was looking at charts of infection and so on and so forth. So there is a lot more broad awareness of what data can do in improving our society at large for the businesses of course, in the last six, seven months, you heard it enough from lot of leaders that digital transformation is accelerating. Everybody is realizing that the way to interact in the world is becoming more and more digital expecting your customers to come to your branch to do banking is not really an option. And people are also seeing how all the SaaS companies and SaaS businesses, digital businesses, they have really taken off. So if a company like Zoom can suddenly have a a hundred, $150 billion valuation, because you are able to do everything remote, all the enterprises are looking to really touch their customers and partners in a lot more digital way than they could do before. And definitely COVID has also really created this almost, you know, pool buckets of organization. There is lot of companies that have tremendously benefited from it. And there a lot of companies that have been poorly affected, really in a difficult place. And I think both of them for the first category, they are looking at how do I maintain this revenue even after COVID, because one of this thing, you know, hopefully early next year we have a vaccine and things can start to look better again sometime next year. But we have learned so much. We have attracted so many new customers, how do we retain and grow them further? And that means I need to invest more and more in my technology. Now, companies that are not doing well, they really want to figure out how to become more operationally efficient. And they are really under pressure to get more value from there and both categories, improving your revenue, retaining customers. You need to understand the customer behavior. You need to understand which products they are buying at a fine grain level, not with the law of averages, not by looking at a dashboard and saying our average customer likes this kind of product. That one doesn't really work. You have to offer people personalized services and that personalization is just not possible at scale, without really using data on the front lines. You can't have just manager sitting in their office, looking at dashboards and charts and saying these are the kinds of campaigns I need to run because my average customer seems to like these kinds of offers. I need to really empower my sales people, my individual frontline workers, who are interfacing with the customer to be able to make customized offers of services and products to them. And that is possible on the data. So we see a really, a lot more focus in getting value from data, delivering value quickly and digital transformation broadly but definitely leveraging data in businesses. There is tremendous acceleration that is happening and, you know, next five years, it's all going to be about being able to monetize data on the front lines when you are interfacing with your customers and partners >> Ajeet, that's great insight. And I really appreciate what you're saying. And you know, I wrote a blog post in 2007. I said, data will be the new development kit. Back then we used to call development kits, software user development. >> John, you are the real visionary. It took me until 2012 to be able to do this. >> Well, it wasn't clear, but you saw other data was going to have to be programmed be part of the programming. And I think, what you're getting at here is so profound because we're living 2020 people can see the value of data at the right time. It changes the conversations, it changes what's going on in the real time communications of our world with real-time access to information, whether that's machine to machine or machine to human, having data in the right place, changes the context. >> Yap. >> And that is a true, not a tech thing, that's just life, right? I think this year, I think we're going to look back and say, this was the year that everyone realized that real time communications, real-time society needs real time data. And I think it's going to be more important than ever. So it's a really big problem and important one. And thank you for sharing that. >> Yeah. And actually you bring up a very good point programming, developing big data. Data as a development kit. We are also going to announce a new product at Beyond, which will be about bringing ThoughtSpot everywhere, where a lot of business users are in their business applications. And by using ThoughtSpot product, using our full experience, they can obviously do enterprise wide analytics and look at all the data. But if they're looking for insights and nuggets, and they want to ask questions in their business workflows. We are also launching a product capability that will allow software developers to inject data in their business applications and enable and empower their own business users to be able to ask any questions that they might have without having to go to yet another BI product. >> It's data as code. I mean, you almost think about like software metaphors, where's the compiler? Where's the source code? Where's the data code? You start to get into this new mindset of thinking about data as code, because you got to have data about the data. Is it clean data, dirty data? Is it real time? Is it useful? There's a lot of intelligence needed to manage this. This is like a pretty big deal. And it's fairly new in the sense in the science side. Yeah, machine learning has been around for a while and you know, there's tracks for that. But thinking of this way as an operating system mindset, it's not just being a data geek. You know what I'm saying? So I think you're on the right track Ajeet. I really appreciate your thoughts here. Thank you. >> Thank you John. >> Okay. This is a cube conversation. Unpacking the data. The data is the future. We're living in a real-time world and in real-time data can change the outcomes of all kinds of contexts. And with truth, you need data and Ajeet Singh co-founder executive chairman of ThoughtSpot shares his thoughts here in theCUBE. I'm John furrier. Thanks for watching. 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from the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas it's the cube recovering no joke on 2018 brought to you by Osho okay welcome back everyone we're here live here at hosts show con in Las Vegas the first security conference for blockchain its inaugural event and we're here with Gabriel Shepherd VP of strategy at Global Strike for host show they're the hosts of the event although it's an industry conference for the entire community all coming together Gabriel thanks for coming on and spend the time yeah thanks for having me thanks for you know supporting the event and we appreciate your team coming out and covering what we're trying to build here well we think it's super important now so you guys are doing a great service for the industry and stepping up and put in the event together and so props to you guys thank you this is not a hosts show sales like conference you guys aren't selling anything you're doing the service for the community so props to you guys in the team great stuff and we know this is a kernel of all the smartest people and its really an industry event so it shows in the session so appreciate that yes we think it's important because you know we see a lot of trends the queue has a unique advantage in how we cover hundreds of events and yeah so we get to go we see a horizontal observation space from the industry and when you have formation like this with the community this is important you guys have up leveled the conversation focused the conversation around blockchain where security is the top-level conversation that's it no I feel pitches right so for the folks watch and this is really one of those events where it's not a huge number of people here like the thousands and thousands of other blockchain shows that make money off events this is about community and around getting the conversations and having substantive conversations so great job so for the folks watching the content agenda is super awesome host show con-com you go browse it but give us some color commentary on some of the types of speakers here the diversity yeah I think I think the first thing that we wanted to accomplish was with Hojo Khan was we we wanted to put front and center the conversations that were not taking place at other events there are plenty of platforms and opportunities for companies early-stage companies to go pitch there are other great conference organizers that do events and have their own wheelhouse but what we wanted to do was put together a conference that was focused around a type of conference that we ourselves would want to attend as a cybersecurity firm and you know after traveling the world I mean you know you you and artesia spoke many times and hosho has sponsored quite a few events around the world after attending by the end of 2018 will attended something like a hundred plus events in some capacity and so it was clear to us early on that companies weren't our conferences weren't going to focus on security or at least put them on the main stage where I believed that they should be at least with all the hacks happening so what we wanted to do was bring together thought leadership with respect to security technical leadership with respect to developers and security engineers and we wanted to bridge those two what I mean by that is we wanted thought leadership that could get executives to start the non-technical people so start thinking about security in the larger format and how it's applicable to their company but what we also wanted to do is we wanted to connect these non-technical people with the technical people in an intimate setting where they could learn think about the brain power that we have in this hotel for hosho Khan you've got the minds of Andre Assante innopolis Diego's LDR of RSK Michael berkland of shape-shift josub Kuan of hosho we've got Ron stone from c4 you've got an on Prakash a world-class white hat bug bounty hunter consider what he's top-5 bug bounty hunter for our top top bug bounty hunter for Facebook five years in a row the the level of the calibre of technical talent in this building has the potential to solve problems that Enterprise has been trying to solve individually for years but those conversations don't take place in earnest with the non-technical people and so the idea behind hoshikawa was to bridge those to provide education that's what we're doing things like workshops sure we have keynotes and panels but we also have the ability to teach non-technical people how to enable two-factor authentication how to set up PGP for your email how to set up your hardware wallet these things aren't these conversations are not the bridge is a clearly established we interview people from on the compliance side all the way down to custodial services which again the diversity is not a group think events just giving them more props here because I think you guys did a great job worthy of promotion because you not only bridge the communities together you're bringing people in cross functionally colonizing and the asset test for me is simple the groupthink event is when everyone's kind of rah rah each other I know this conditions we got Andre is saying hey if you put database substitute database for blockchain and it reads well it's not a real revolutionary thing and oh all you custodian services you're screwed I mean so you have perspectives on both side that's right and there's contentious conversation that's right and that to me proves it and as well as the sessions are highly attended or we don't want it we don't want a panel of everybody in agreeance because we know that's not reality i mean that you you bring up the issue of curse of custody a prime example is we had a great talk a four-person panel led by Joe Kelly who's the CEO of Unchained Capital he had a panel with traditional equities custodian Paul pooi from edge wallet Joseph Kwon is the CEO of hosho and there was clear differences of opinion with respect to custody and it got a little contentious but isn't that the point yeah it's to have these conversations in earnest and let's put them out in the public on what's right and what's wrong for the community and let the community to decide the best way forward that's the best is exactly what you want to do I gotta ask you what are the big surprises for you what have you learned what's the big reveal for you that you've super surprised you or are things you expected what were some of the things that went on here yeah I think the biggest surprise to me was the positive feedback that we received you know I understand that we know people maybe looked at how shock on year one and said hosho like they're a cybersecurity firm what are they doing running a conference right but my background is a you know I've produced conferences I have a former employee of South by Southwest I believe a big an experience and so when we started to put this together we thought we knew we would make mistakes and we certainly made mistakes with respect to programming and schedule and just things that we had didn't think about attention to detail but we had plans far in that the mistakes were mitigated that they weren't exposed to the public right there behind the scenes fires that kind like a wedding or a party but no one actually really notices sure we put them out behind the scenes nobody that the our guests don't notice and that was my biggest concern I'm pleasantly surprised at the positive feedback we've yet to get any negative feedback publicly on Twitter telegram anecdotally individually people now they made just being nice to my face but I feel good about what the response that we've got it's been good vibes here so I gotta ask you well sure the DJ's were great last night good experience yeah experience and knowledge and and networking has been a theme to correct I lost him the networking dynamics I saw a lot of people I had I had ran to some people I met for the first time we've had great outreach that with the queue was integrated in people very friendly talked about the networking and that's been going on here yeah I mean this panels are great I'd love to hear from from panels and solo presentations but a lot of work gets done in the hallways and we have a saying in the conference business hallway hustlers right the ones that are hustling in the hallways are those early stage entrepreneurs or trying to close deals trying to figure out how to get in front of the right person serendipitously are at the bar at the same time as somebody they want to meet that is to me conference 101 that is the stuff I grew up on and so we wanted to make sure that we were encouraging those interactions through traffic flow so you'll notice that they're strategically the content rooms are strategically placed so that when you're changing rooms people are forced to cross interact with each other because they're forced to bump into each other and if you look at the programming we purposefully to our demise to be honest year one put a lot of programming that was conflicted with each other we made people make a decision about what talk they wanted to go to because there were two really compelling people at the same time or 10 minutes off yeah and so you had to make a decision vote with your feet you got to vote with your feet and and and from a conference perspective we call that FOMO right we want our guests to FOMO not because we want them to miss a particular talk but because we want them to be so overwhelmed with content and opportunity with networking that they when they walk away they've had a good experience they're fulfilled but they they think I got to go back here too because that thing I missed I'm not gonna miss this yeah we will point out to you guys made a good call on film all the session everything so everything's gonna be online we'll help guys do that yep so the video is gonna be available for everyone to look on demand you also had some good broadcast here we had a couple shows the cubes been here your mobile mention the DJs yeah yeah so good stuff so okay hallway conversations our lobby con as we call it when people hang up a lot on it's always good hallway con so what Gabriel in your mind as you walked around what was some of the hallway culture that you overheard and and that you thought were interesting and what hall would cartridges were you personally involved in the personal conversations I was involved with is why isn't somebody not this station why someone not Gardens but I will tell you i from what I heard from from conference attendees the conversations that I heard taking place were and I hope Jonathan doesn't mind but Jonathan Nelson from hack fund spoke on our main stage and I hope he doesn't mind me speaking out of turn but he came to me said this is one of the best run blockchain conferences I've ever been to and to have somebody like Jonathan say that who has done hundreds of talks and thousands was really meaningful but but what was more important is to talk to him and him feel comfortable enough to sit down with me and just talk generally that's the vibe we want for every attendant we want you to feel comfortable meeting with people in the hallway who you've never met and be vulnerable from a security perspective you know Michael Turpin for example sitting down and talking proactively about being the AT&T hack great these are opportunities for people to really talk about what's happened and be vulnerable and have the opportunity to educate us all how to get better as an industry you know the other thing I want to get your thoughts on is obviously the program's been phenomenal in the content side thank you but community is really important to us we're of a community model to q you guys care about the community aspect of this and as a real event you want to have an ongoing year after year and hopefully it'll get bigger I think it will basically our results we're seeing talk about the community impact because what you're really talking about there is community that's right well I mean Vegas we talk about there's multiple communities right regionally post-show is a Vegas based company we're born here we close I think forty some employees all based here in Las Vegas which is our home so the first thing that we did with respect to community as we created a local local price if you're a Nevada resident we didn't want you to have to invest a significant amount of money to come to something in your own town the second thing we did is we've invited the local Vegas Bitcoin meet up in aetherium meet ups to come and partake and not only participate but contribute to the content and opening day in fact there was so much influx of people from those meetups it wasn't official it wasn't like a program where we had actually a VTEC set up I thought I was gonna be like a meet-up there were so many people that attended we had to on the fly provide AV because we were overwhelmed with the amount of people that showed up so that's a regional community but with respect to the community from blockchain community what we wanted to do is make sure we brought people of all ethnicities all countries we have 26 countries represented in the first blockchain security conference and you had some big-name celebrities here yeah Neil Kittleson Max Keiser you go mama Anan Prakash Yakov Prensky a layer from your side pop popcorn kochenko has some big names yeah I'll see andreas yes here keynoting yeah I'm Michel parkland andreas Diego Zaldivar I mean these lena katina Viren OVA I mean these are big names yeah these big names okay what so so what's your takeaway of you as you know my takeaway is that there's a there's a yearning for this type of event my takeaway is that we're doing something right we have the luxury as hosho and that we're not an events company people think that might be a disadvantage to run a confident you're not a cotton vent company I think it's an advantage yeah because it holds my feet to the fire yeah much closer than an event organiser who doesn't have a company reputation and brand to protect hosho as you know has a good brand in the cybersecurity world with respect to blockchain we don't have the luxury of throwing a poor event giving you a bad experience because that would tarnish house of but also your in the community so you're gonna have direct feedback that's right the other thing too I will say I'm gonna go to a lot of events and there are people who are in the business of doing events and they have a profit motive that's right so they'll know lanyards are all monetize everything is monetized yeah and that sometimes takes away from the community aspect correct and I think you guys did a good job of you know not being profligate on the events you want to yeah a little bit of cash but you didn't / yeah / focus on money-making finding people right for the cash you really needed about the content yeah and the experience for and with the community and I think that's a formula that people want yeah I would like to see the model I would like to see the model changed over time if I'm being honest a majority of crypto conferences today are paid to play so a lot of the content you're getting this sponsored so I'm okay with that but I think it should be delineated between con disclose your disclosure you don't want water down the country but but the conference circuit and crypto is not ready for that it hasn't rest in my opinion hasn't reached that level of maturation yet like I told you I I'm a former South by Southwest guy that like my belief is you create the content and the sponsors will come I don't I don't begrudge conference organizers for for for sponsoring out events because they're really really expensive a cost per attend to manage demand to this hype out there yeah hundreds of dollars per attendee I get it I understand why they do it but what I would like to see is the model change over time whereas as we get more sophisticated as a technology space we should also grow as a vent and conference circuit as well what I mean by that is let's change the model that eventually someday it's free for all attendees to come and those conferences and the costs associated with them are subsidized by companies that want access to the people that are tending them it sounds like an upstream open source project sure how open source became so popular you don't screw with the upstream yep but you have downstream opportunities so if you create a nice upstream model yep that's the cube philosophy as well we totally agree with you and I think you guys are onto something pioneering with the event I think you're motivated to do it the community needs it yeah I think that's ultimately the self governing aspect of it I think you're off to something really good co-creation yeah I'll see we believe in that and the results speak for themselves congratulations thank you so much I appreciate you guys coming here and investing your time and I hope that all our staff has been accommodated and the hard rock is treated you well you guys been great very friendly but I think again you know outside of you guys is a great company and great brand and you guys and speaks for itself and the results this is an important event I agreed because of the timing because of this focus its crypto its crypto revolution its cybersecurity and FinTech all kind of coming together through huge global demand I mean we haven't gotten into IOT and supply chain yeah all the hacks going on with China and these things being reported this is serious business is a lot on the line a lot and you guys having a clear focus on that is really a service business Thank You staff doing it alright our cube coverage here in Las Vegas for host Joe Kahn this is the first conference of its kind where security is front and center it is the conference for security and blockchain bringing the worlds together building the bridges and building the community bridges as well we love that that's our belief as well as the cube coverage here in Vegas tigress more after this short break