(soothing music) >> Hey everyone, welcome to this event, "Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence." I'm your host, Lisa Martin. In the next 15 minutes or so my guest and I are going to be talking about redefining cloud operations, an application modernization for customers, and specifically how partners are helping to speed up that process. As you saw on our first two segments, we talked about problems enterprises are facing with cloud operations. We talked about redefining cloud operations as well to solve these problems. This segment is going to be focusing on how Hitachi Vantara's partners are really helping to speed up that process. We've got Johnson Controls here to talk about their partnership with Hitachi Vantara. Please welcome both of my guests, Prem Balasubramanian is with us, SVP and CTO Digital Solutions at Hitachi Vantara. And Suresh Mothikuru, SVP Customer Success Platform Engineering and Reliability Engineering from Johnson Controls. Gentlemen, welcome to the program, great to have you. >> Thank. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> First question is to both of you and Suresh, we'll start with you. We want to understand, you know, the cloud operations landscape is increasingly complex. We've talked a lot about that in this program. Talk to us, Suresh, about some of the biggest challenges and pin points that you faced with respect to that. >> Thank you. I think it's a great question. I mean, cloud has evolved a lot in the last 10 years. You know, when we were talking about a single cloud whether it's Azure or AWS and GCP, and that was complex enough. Now we are talking about multi-cloud and hybrid and you look at Johnson Controls, we have Azure we have AWS, we have GCP, we have Alibaba and we also support on-prem. So the architecture has become very, very complex and the complexity has grown so much that we are now thinking about whether we should be cloud native or cloud agnostic. So I think, I mean, sometimes it's hard to even explain the complexity because people think, oh, "When you go to cloud, everything is simplified." Cloud does give you a lot of simplicity, but it also really brings a lot more complexity along with it. So, and then next one is pretty important is, you know, generally when you look at cloud services, you have plenty of services that are offered within a cloud, 100, 150 services, 200 services. Even within those companies, you take AWS they might not know, an individual resource might not know about all the services we see. That's a big challenge for us as a customer to really understand each of the service that is provided in these, you know, clouds, well, doesn't matter which one that is. And the third one is pretty big, at least at the CTO the CIO, and the senior leadership level, is cost. Cost is a major factor because cloud, you know, will eat you up if you cannot manage it. If you don't have a good cloud governance process it because every minute you are in it, it's burning cash. So I think if you ask me, these are the three major things that I am facing day to day and that's where I use my partners, which I'll touch base down the line. >> Perfect, we'll talk about that. So Prem, I imagine that these problems are not unique to Johnson Controls or JCI, as you may hear us refer to it. Talk to me Prem about some of the other challenges that you're seeing within the customer landscape. >> So, yeah, I agree, Lisa, these are not very specific to JCI, but there are specific issues in JCI, right? So the way we think about these are, there is a common issue when people go to the cloud and there are very specific and unique issues for businesses, right? So JCI, and we will talk about this in the episode as we move forward. I think Suresh and his team have done some phenomenal step around how to manage this complexity. But there are customers who have a lesser complex cloud which is, they don't go to Alibaba, they don't have footprint in all three clouds. So their multi-cloud footprint could be a bit more manageable, but still struggle with a lot of the same problems around cost, around security, around talent. Talent is a big thing, right? And in Suresh's case I think it's slightly more exasperated because every cloud provider Be it AWS, JCP, or Azure brings in hundreds of services and there is nobody, including many of us, right? We learn every day, nowadays, right? It's not that there is one service integrator who knows all, while technically people can claim as a part of sales. But in reality all of us are continuing to learn in this landscape. And if you put all of this equation together with multiple clouds the complexity just starts to exponentially grow. And that's exactly what I think JCI is experiencing and Suresh's team has been experiencing, and we've been working together. But the common problems are around security talent and cost management of this, right? Those are my three things. And one last thing that I would love to say before we move away from this question is, if you think about cloud operations as a concept that's evolving over the last few years, and I have touched upon this in the previous episode as well, Lisa, right? If you take architectures, we've gone into microservices, we've gone into all these server-less architectures all the fancy things that we want. That helps us go to market faster, be more competent to as a business. But that's not simplified stuff, right? That's complicated stuff. It's a lot more distributed. Second, again, we've advanced and created more modern infrastructure because all of what we are talking is platform as a service, services on the cloud that we are consuming, right? In the same case with development we've moved into a DevOps model. We kind of click a button put some code in a repository, the code starts to run in production within a minute, everything else is automated. But then when we get to operations we are still stuck in a very old way of looking at cloud as an infrastructure, right? So you've got an infra team, you've got an app team, you've got an incident management team, you've got a soft knock, everything. But again, so Suresh can talk about this more because they are making significant strides in thinking about this as a single workload, and how do I apply engineering to go manage this? Because a lot of it is codified, right? So automation. Anyway, so that's kind of where the complexity is and how we are thinking, including JCI as a partner thinking about taming that complexity as we move forward. >> Suresh, let's talk about that taming the complexity. You guys have both done a great job of articulating the ostensible challenges that are there with cloud, especially multi-cloud environments that you're living in. But Suresh, talk about the partnership with Hitachi Vantara. How is it helping to dial down some of those inherent complexities? >> I mean, I always, you know, I think I've said this to Prem multiple times. I treat my partners as my internal, you know, employees. I look at Prem as my coworker or my peers. So the reason for that is I want Prem to have the same vested interest as a partner in my success or JCI success and vice versa, isn't it? I think that's how we operate and that's how we have been operating. And I think I would like to thank Prem and Hitachi Vantara for that really been an amazing partnership. And as he was saying, we have taken a completely holistic approach to how we want to really be in the market and play in the market to our customers. So if you look at my jacket it talks about OpenBlue platform. This is what JCI is building, that we are building this OpenBlue digital platform. And within that, my team, along with Prem's or Hitachi's, we have built what we call as Polaris. It's a technical platform where our apps can run. And this platform is automated end-to-end from a platform engineering standpoint. We stood up a platform engineering organization, a reliability engineering organization, as well as a support organization where Hitachi played a role. As I said previously, you know, for me to scale I'm not going to really have the talent and the knowledge of every function that I'm looking at. And Hitachi, not only they brought the talent but they also brought what he was talking about, Harc. You know, they have set up a lot and now we can leverage it. And they also came up with some really interesting concepts. I went and met them in India. They came up with this concept called IPL. Okay, what is that? They really challenged all their employees that's working for GCI to come up with innovative ideas to solve problems proactively, which is self-healing. You know, how you do that? So I think partners, you know, if they become really vested in your interests, they can do wonders for you. And I think in this case Hitachi is really working very well for us and in many aspects. And I'm leveraging them... You started with support, now I'm leveraging them in the automation, the platform engineering, as well as in the reliability engineering and then in even in the engineering spaces. And that like, they are my end-to-end partner right now? >> So you're really taking that holistic approach that you talked about and it sounds like it's a very collaborative two-way street partnership. Prem, I want to go back to, Suresh mentioned Harc. Talk a little bit about what Harc is and then how partners fit into Hitachi's Harc strategy. >> Great, so let me spend like a few seconds on what Harc is. Lisa, again, I know we've been using the term. Harc stands for Hitachi application reliability sectors. Now the reason we thought about Harc was, like I said in the beginning of this segment, there is an illusion from an architecture standpoint to be more modern, microservices, server-less, reactive architecture, so on and so forth. There is an illusion in your development methodology from Waterfall to agile, to DevOps to lean, agile to path program, whatever, right? Extreme program, so on and so forth. There is an evolution in the space of infrastructure from a point where you were buying these huge humongous servers and putting it in your data center to a point where people don't even see servers anymore, right? You buy it, by a click of a button you don't know the size of it. All you know is a, it's (indistinct) whatever that name means. Let's go provision it on the fly, get go, get your work done, right? When all of this is advanced when you think about operations people have been solving the problem the way they've been solving it 20 years back, right? That's the issue. And Harc was conceived exactly to fix that particular problem, to think about a modern way of operating a modern workload, right? That's exactly what Harc. So it brings together finest engineering talent. So the teams are trained in specific ways of working. We've invested and implemented some of the IP, we work with the best of the breed partner ecosystem, and I'll talk about that in a minute. And we've got these facilities in Dallas and I am talking from my office in Dallas, which is a Harc facility in the US from where we deliver for our customers. And then back in Hyderabad, we've got one more that we opened and these are facilities from where we deliver Harc services for our customers as well, right? And then we are expanding it in Japan and Portugal as we move into 23. That's kind of the plan that we are thinking through. However, that's what Harc is, Lisa, right? That's our solution to this cloud complexity problem. Right? >> Got it, and it sounds like it's going quite global, which is fantastic. So Suresh, I want to have you expand a bit on the partnership, the partner ecosystem and the role that it plays. You talked about it a little bit but what role does the partner ecosystem play in really helping JCI to dial down some of those challenges and the inherent complexities that we talked about? >> Yeah, sure. I think partners play a major role and JCI is very, very good at it. I mean, I've joined JCI 18 months ago, JCI leverages partners pretty extensively. As I said, I leverage Hitachi for my, you know, A group and the (indistinct) space and the cloud operations space, and they're my primary partner. But at the same time, we leverage many other partners. Well, you know, Accenture, SCL, and even on the tooling side we use Datadog and (indistinct). All these guys are major partners of our because the way we like to pick partners is based on our vision and where we want to go. And pick the right partner who's going to really, you know make you successful by investing their resources in you. And what I mean by that is when you have a partner, partner knows exactly what kind of skillset is needed for this customer, for them to really be successful. As I said earlier, we cannot really get all the skillset that we need, we rely on the partners and partners bring the the right skillset, they can scale. I can tell Prem tomorrow, "Hey, I need two parts by next week", and I guarantee it he's going to bring two parts to me. So they let you scale, they let you move fast. And I'm a big believer, in today's day and age, to get things done fast and be more agile. I'm not worried about failure, but for me moving fast is very, very important. And partners really do a very good job bringing that. But I think then they also really make you think, isn't it? Because one thing I like about partners they make you innovate whether they know it or not but they do because, you know, they will come and ask you questions about, "Hey, tell me why you are doing this. Can I review your architecture?" You know, and then they will try to really say I don't think this is going to work. Because they work with so many different clients, not JCI, they bring all that expertise and that's what I look from them, you know, just not, you know, do a T&M job for me. I ask you to do this go... They just bring more than that. That's how I pick my partners. And that's how, you know, Hitachi's Vantara is definitely one of a good partner from that sense because they bring a lot more innovation to the table and I appreciate about that. >> It sounds like, it sounds like a flywheel of innovation. >> Yeah. >> I love that. Last question for both of you, which we're almost out of time here, Prem, I want to go back to you. So I'm a partner, I'm planning on redefining CloudOps at my company. What are the two things you want me to remember from Hitachi Vantara's perspective? >> So before I get to that question, Lisa, the partners that we work with are slightly different from from the partners that, again, there are some similar partners. There are some different partners, right? For example, we pick and choose especially in the Harc space, we pick and choose partners that are more future focused, right? We don't care if they are huge companies or small companies. We go after companies that are future focused that are really, really nimble and can change for our customers need because it's not our need, right? When I pick partners for Harc my ultimate endeavor is to ensure, in this case because we've got (indistinct) GCI on, we are able to operate (indistinct) with the level of satisfaction above and beyond that they're expecting from us. And whatever I don't have I need to get from my partners so that I bring this solution to Suresh. As opposed to bringing a whole lot of people and making them stand in front of Suresh. So that's how I think about partners. What do I want them to do from, and we've always done this so we do workshops with our partners. We just don't go by tools. When we say we are partnering with X, Y, Z, we do workshops with them and we say, this is how we are thinking. Either you build it in your roadmap that helps us leverage you, continue to leverage you. And we do have minimal investments where we fix gaps. We're building some utilities for us to deliver the best service to our customers. And our intention is not to build a product to compete with our partner. Our intention is to just fill the wide space until they go build it into their product suite that we can then leverage it for our customers. So always think about end customers and how can we make it easy for them? Because for all the tool vendors out there seeing this and wanting to partner with Hitachi the biggest thing is tools sprawl, especially on the cloud is very real. For every problem on the cloud. I have a billion tools that are being thrown at me as Suresh if I'm putting my installation and it's not easy at all. It's so confusing. >> Yeah. >> So that's what we want. We want people to simplify that landscape for our end customers, and we are looking at partners that are thinking through the simplification not just making money. >> That makes perfect sense. There really is a very strong symbiosis it sounds like, in the partner ecosystem. And there's a lot of enablement that goes on back and forth it sounds like as well, which is really, to your point it's all about the end customers and what they're expecting. Suresh, last question for you is which is the same one, if I'm a partner what are the things that you want me to consider as I'm planning to redefine CloudOps at my company? >> I'll keep it simple. In my view, I mean, we've touched upon it in multiple facets in this interview about that, the three things. First and foremost, reliability. You know, in today's day and age my products has to be reliable, available and, you know, make sure that the customer's happy with what they're really dealing with, number one. Number two, my product has to be secure. Security is super, super important, okay? And number three, I need to really make sure my customers are getting the value so I keep my cost low. So these three is what I would focus and what I expect from my partners. >> Great advice, guys. Thank you so much for talking through this with me and really showing the audience how strong the partnership is between Hitachi Vantara and JCI. What you're doing together, we'll have to talk to you again to see where things go but we really appreciate your insights and your perspectives. Thank you. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Thanks Lisa, thanks for having us. >> My pleasure. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you so much for watching. (soothing music)

(Upbeat music playing) >> Hey everyone, thanks for joining us today. Welcome to this event of Building your Cloud Center of Excellence with Hitachi Vantara. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got a couple of guests here with me next to talk about redefining cloud operations and application modernization for customers. Please welcome Prem Balasubramanian the SVP and CTO at Hitachi Vantara, and Manoj Narayanan is here as well, the Managing Director of Technology at GTCR. Guys, thank you so much for joining me today. Excited to have this conversation about redefining CloudOps with you. >> Pleasure to be here. >> Pleasure to be here >> Prem, let's go ahead and start with you. You have done well over a thousand cloud engagements in your career. I'd love to get your point of view on how the complexity around cloud operations and management has evolved in the last, say, three to four years. >> It's a great question, Lisa before we understand the complexity around the management itself, the cloud has evolved over the last decade significantly from being a backend infrastructure or infrastructure as a service for many companies to become the business for many companies. If you think about a lot of these cloud bond companies cloud is where their entire workload and their business wants. With that, as a background for this conversation if you think about the cloud operations, there was a lot of there was a lot of lift and shift happening in the market where people lifted their workloads or applications and moved them onto the cloud where they treated cloud significantly as an infrastructure. And the way they started to manage it was again, the same format they were managing there on-prem infrastructure and they call it I&O, Infrastructure and Operations. That's kind of the way traditionally cloud is managed. In the last few years, we are seeing a significant shift around thinking of cloud more as a workload rather than as just an infrastructure. And what I mean by workload is in the cloud, everything is now code. So you are codifying your infrastructure. Your application is already code and your data is also codified as data services. With now that context apply the way you think about managing the cloud has to significantly change and many companies are moving towards trying to change their models to look at this complex environment as opposed to treating it like a simple infrastructure that is sitting somewhere else. So that's one of the biggest changes and shifts that are causing a lot of complexity and headache for actually a lot of customers for managing environments. The second critical aspect is even that, even exasperates the situation is multicloud environments. Now, there are companies that have got it right with things about right cloud for the right workload. So there are companies that I reach out and I talk with. They've got their office applications and emails and stuff running on Microsoft 365 which can be on the Azure cloud whereas they're running their engineering applications the ones that they build and leverage for their end customers on Amazon. And to some extent they've got it right but still they have a multiple cloud that they have to go after and maintain. This becomes complex when you have two clouds for the same type of workload. When I have to host applications for my end customers on Amazon as well as Azure, Azure as well as Google then, I get into security issues that I have to be consistent across all three. I get into talent because I need to have people that focus on Amazon as well as Azure, as well as Google which means I need so much more workforce, I need so many so much more skills that I need to build, right? That's becoming the second issue. The third one is around data costs. Can I make these clouds talk to each other? Then you get into the ingress egress cost and that creates some complexity. So bringing all of this together and managing is really become becoming more complex for our customers. And obviously as a part of this we will talk about some of the, some of the ideas that we can bring for in managing such complex environments but this is what we are seeing in terms of why the complexity has become a lot more in the last few years. >> Right. A lot of complexity in the last few years. Manoj, let's bring you into the conversation now. Before we dig into your cloud environment give the audience a little bit of an overview of GTCR. What kind of company are you? What do you guys do? >> Definitely Lisa. GTCR is a Chicago based private equity firm. We've been in the market for more than 40 years and what we do is we invest in companies across different sectors and then we manage the company drive it to increase the value and then over a period of time, sell it to future buyers. So in a nutshell, we got a large portfolio of companies that we need to manage and make sure that they perform to expectations. And my role within GTCR is from a technology viewpoint so where I work with all the companies their technology leadership to make sure that we are getting the best out of technology and technology today drives everything. So how can technology be a good compliment to the business itself? So, my role is to play that intermediary role to make sure that there is synergy between the investment thesis and the technology lures that we can pull and also work with partners like Hitachi to make sure that it is done in an optimal manner. >> I like that you said, you know, technology needs to really compliment the business and vice versa. So Manoj, let's get into the cloud operations environment at GTCR. Talk to me about what the experience has been the last couple of years. Give us an idea of some of the challenges that you were facing with existing cloud ops and and the solution that you're using from Hitachi Vantara. >> A a absolutely. In fact, in fact Prem phrased it really well, one of the key things that we're facing is the workload management. So there's so many choices there, so much complexities. We have these companies buying more companies there is organic growth that is happening. So the variables that we have to deal with are very high in such a scenario to make sure that the workload management of each of the companies are done in an optimal manner is becoming an increasing concern. So, so that's one area where any help we can get anything we can try to make sure it is done better becomes a huge value at each. A second aspect is a financial transparency. We need to know where the money is going where the money is coming in from, what is the scale especially in the cloud environment. We are talking about an auto scale ecosystem. Having that financial transparency and the metrics associated with that, it, these these become very, very critical to ensure that we have a successful presence in the multicloud environment. >> Talk a little bit about the solution that you're using with Hitachi and, and the challenges that it is eradicated. >> Yeah, so it end of the day, right, we we need to focus on our core competence. So, so we have got a very strong technology leadership team. We've got a very strong presence in the respective domains of each of the portfolio companies. But where Hitachi comes in and HAR comes in as a solution is that they allow us to excel in focusing on our core business and then make sure that we are able to take care of workload management or financial transparency. All of that is taken off the table from us and and Hitachi manages it for us, right? So it's such a perfectly compliment relationship where they act as two partners and HARC is a solution that is extremely useful in driving that. And, and and I'm anticipating that it'll become more important with time as the complexity of cloud and cloud associate workloads are only becoming more challenging to manage and not less. >> Right? That's the thing that complexity is there and it's also increasing Prem, you talked about the complexities that are existent today with respect to cloud operations the things that have happened over the last couple of years. What are some of your tips, Prem for the audience, like the the top two or three things that you would say on cloud operations that that people need to understand so that they can manage that complexity and allow their business to be driven and complimented by technology? >> Yeah, a big great question again, Lisa, right? And I think Manoj alluded to a few of these things as well. The first one is in the new world of the cloud I think think of migration, modernization and management as a single continuum to the cloud. Now there is no lift and shift and there is no way somebody else separately manages it, right? If you do not lift and shift the right applications the right way onto the cloud, you are going to deal with the complexity of managing it and you'll end up spending more money time and effort in managing it. So that's number one. Migration, modernization, management of cloud work growth is a single continuum and it's not three separate activities, right? That's number one. And the, the second is cost. Cost traditionally has been an afterthought, right? People move the workload to the cloud. And I think, again, like I said, I'll refer back to what Manoj said once we move it to the cloud and then we put all these fancy engineering capability around self-provisioning, every developer can go and ask for what he or she wants and they get an environment immediately spun up so on and so forth. Suddenly the CIO wakes up to a bill that is significantly larger than what he or she expected right? And, and this is this is become a bit common nowadays, right? The the challenge is because we think cost in the cloud as an afterthought. But consider this example in, in previous world you buy hard, well, you put it in your data center you have already amortized the cost as a CapEx. So you can write an application throw it onto the infrastructure and the application continues to use the infrastructure until you hit a ceiling, you don't care about the money you spent. But if I write a line of code that is inefficient today and I deploy it on the cloud from minute one, I am paying for the inefficiency. So if I realize it after six months, I've already spent the money. So financial discipline, especially when managing the cloud is now is no more an afterthought. It is as much something that you have to include in your engineering practice as much as any other DevOps practices, right? Those are my top two tips, Lisa, from my standpoint, think about cloud, think about cloud work, cloud workloads. And the last one again, and you will see you will hear me saying this again and again, get into the mindset of everything is code. You don't have a touch and feel infrastructure anymore. So you don't really need to have foot on the ground to go manage that infrastructure. It's codified. So your code should be managing it, but think of how it happens, right? That's where we, we are going as an evolution >> Everything is code. That's great advice, great tips for the audience there. Manoj, I'll bring you back into the conversation. You know, we, we can talk about skills gaps on on in many different facets of technology the SRE role, relatively new, skillset. We're hearing, hearing a lot about it. SRE led DevSecOps is probably even more so of a new skillset. If I'm an IT leader or an application leader how do I ensure that I have the right skillset within my organization to be able to manage my cloud operations to, to dial down that complexity so that I can really operate successfully as a business? >> Yeah. And so unfortunately there is no perfect answer, right? It's such a, such a scarce skillset that a, any day any of the portfolio company CTOs if I go and talk and say, Hey here's a great SRE team member, they'll be more than willing to fight with each of to get the person in right? It's just that scarce of a skillset. So, so a few things we need to look at it. One is, how can I build it within, right? So nobody gets born as an SRE, you, you make a person an SRE. So how do you inculcate that culture? So like Prem said earlier, right? Everything is software. So how do we make sure that everybody inculcates that as part of their operating philosophy be they part of the operations team or the development team or the testing team they need to understand that that is a common guideline and common objective that we are driving towards. So, so that skillset and that associated training needs to be driven from within the organization. And that in my mind is the fastest way to make sure that that role gets propagated across organization. That is one. The second thing is rely on the right partners. So it's not going to be possible for us, to get all of these roles built in-house. So instead prioritize what roles need to be done from within the organization and what roles can we rely on our partners to drive it for us. So that becomes an important consideration for us to look at as well. >> Absolutely. That partnership angle is incredibly important from, from the, the beginning really kind of weaving these companies together on this journey to to redefine cloud operations and build that, as we talked about at the beginning of the conversation really building a cloud center of excellence that allows the organization to be competitive, successful and and really deliver what the end user is, is expecting. I want to ask - Sorry Lisa, - go ahead. >> May I add something to it, I think? >> Sure. >> Yeah. One of the, one of the common things that I tell customers when we talk about SRE and to manages point is don't think of SRE as a skillset which is the common way today the industry tries to solve the problem. SRE is a mindset, right? Everybody in >> Well well said, yeah >> That, so everybody in a company should think of him or her as a cycle liability engineer. And everybody has a role in it, right? Even if you take the new process layout from SRE there are individuals that are responsible to whom we can go to when there is a problem directly as opposed to going through the traditional ways of AI talk to L one and L one contras all. They go to L two and then L three. So we, we, we are trying to move away from an issue escalation model to what we call as a a issue routing or a incident routing model, right? Move away from incident escalation to an incident routing model. So you get to route to the right folks. So again, to sum it up, SRE should not be solved as a skillset set because there is not enough people in the market to solve it that way. If you start solving it as a mindset I think companies can get a handhold of it. >> I love that. I've actually never heard that before, but it it makes perfect sense to think about the SRE as a mindset rather than a skillset that will allow organizations to be much more successful. Prem I wanted to get your thoughts as enterprises are are innovating, they're moving more products and services to the as a service model. Talk about how the dev teams the ops teams are working together to build and run reliable, cost efficient services. Are they working better together? >> Again, a a very polarizing question because some customers are getting it right many customers aren't, there is still a big wall between development and operations, right? Even when you think about DevOps as a terminology the fundamental principle was to make sure dev and ops works together. But what many companies have achieved today, honestly is automating the operations for development. For example, as a developer, I can check in code and my code will appear in production without any friction, right? There is automated testing, automated provisioning and it gets promoted to production, but after production, it goes back into the 20 year old model of operating the code, right? So there is more work that needs to be done for Devon and Ops to come closer and work together. And one of the ways that we think this is achievable is not by doing radical org changes, but more by focusing on a product-oriented single backlog approach across development and operations. Which is, again, there is change management involved but I think that's a way to start embracing the culture of dev ops coming together much better now, again SRE principles as we double click and understand it more and Google has done a very good job playing it out for the world. As you think about SRE principle, there are ways and means in that process of how to think about a single backlog. And in HARC, Hitachi Application Reliability Centers we've really got a way to look at prioritizing the backlog. And what I mean by that is dev teams try to work on backlog that come from product managers on features. The SRE and the operations team try to put backlog into the say sorry, try to put features into the same backlog for improving stability, availability and financials financial optimization of your code. And there are ways when you look at your SLOs and error budgets to really coach the product teams to prioritize your backlog based on what's important for you. So if you understand your spending more money then you reduce your product features going in and implement the financial optimization that came from your operations team, right? So you now have the ability to throttle these parameters and that's where SRE becomes a mindset and a principle as opposed to a skillset because this is not an individual telling you to do. This is the company that is, is embarking on how to prioritize my backlog beyond just user features. >> Right. Great point. Last question for both of you is the same talk kind of take away things that you want me to remember. If I am at an IT leader at, at an organization and I am planning on redefining CloudOps for my company Manoj will start with you and then Prem to you what are the top two things that you want me to walk away with understanding how to do that successfully? >> Yeah, so I'll, I'll go back to basics. So the two things I would say need to be taken care of is, one is customer experience. So all the things that I do end of the day is it improving the customer experience or not? So that's a first metric. The second thing is anything that I do is there an ROI by doing that incremental step or not? Otherwise we might get lost in the technology with surgery, the new tech, et cetera. But end of the day, if the customers are not happy if there is no ROI, everything else you just can't do much on top of that >> Now it's all about the customer experience. Right? That's so true. Prem what are your thoughts, the the top things that I need to be taking away if I am a a leader planning to redefine my cloud eye company? >> Absolutely. And I think from a, from a company standpoint I think Manoj summarized it extremely well, right? There is this ROI and there is this customer experience from my end, again, I'll, I'll suggest two two more things as a takeaway, right? One, cloud cost is not an afterthought. It's essential for us to think about it upfront. Number two, do not delink migration modernization and operations. They are one stream. If you migrate a long, wrong workload onto the cloud you're going to be stuck with it for a long time. And an example of a wrong workload, Lisa for everybody that that is listening to this is if my cost per transaction profile doesn't change and I am not improving my revenue per transaction for a piece of code that's going run in production it's better off running in a data center where my cost is CapEx than amortized and I have control over when I want to upgrade as opposed to putting it on a cloud and continuing to pay unless it gives me more dividends towards improvement. But that's a simple example of when we think about what should I migrate and how will it cost pain when I want to manage it in the longer run. But that's, that's something that I'll leave the audience and you with as a takeaway. >> Excellent. Guys, thank you so much for talking to me today about what Hitachi Vantara and GTCR are doing together how you've really dialed down those complexities enabling the business and the technology folks to really live harmoniously. We appreciate your insights and your perspectives on building a cloud center of excellence. Thank you both for joining me. >> Thank you. >> For my guests, I'm Lisa. Martin, you're watching this event building Your Cloud Center of Excellence with Hitachi Vantara. Thanks for watching. (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing)

(soothing music) >> Hey everyone, welcome to this event, "Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence." I'm your host, Lisa Martin. In the next 15 minutes or so my guest and I are going to be talking about redefining cloud operations, an application modernization for customers, and specifically how partners are helping to speed up that process. As you saw on our first two segments, we talked about problems enterprises are facing with cloud operations. We talked about redefining cloud operations as well to solve these problems. This segment is going to be focusing on how Hitachi Vantara's partners are really helping to speed up that process. We've got Johnson Controls here to talk about their partnership with Hitachi Vantara. Please welcome both of my guests, Prem Balasubramanian is with us, SVP and CTO Digital Solutions at Hitachi Vantara. And Suresh Mothikuru, SVP Customer Success Platform Engineering and Reliability Engineering from Johnson Controls. Gentlemen, welcome to the program, great to have you. >> Thank. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> First question is to both of you and Suresh, we'll start with you. We want to understand, you know, the cloud operations landscape is increasingly complex. We've talked a lot about that in this program. Talk to us, Suresh, about some of the biggest challenges and pin points that you faced with respect to that. >> Thank you. I think it's a great question. I mean, cloud has evolved a lot in the last 10 years. You know, when we were talking about a single cloud whether it's Azure or AWS and GCP, and that was complex enough. Now we are talking about multi-cloud and hybrid and you look at Johnson Controls, we have Azure we have AWS, we have GCP, we have Alibaba and we also support on-prem. So the architecture has become very, very complex and the complexity has grown so much that we are now thinking about whether we should be cloud native or cloud agnostic. So I think, I mean, sometimes it's hard to even explain the complexity because people think, oh, "When you go to cloud, everything is simplified." Cloud does give you a lot of simplicity, but it also really brings a lot more complexity along with it. So, and then next one is pretty important is, you know, generally when you look at cloud services, you have plenty of services that are offered within a cloud, 100, 150 services, 200 services. Even within those companies, you take AWS they might not know, an individual resource might not know about all the services we see. That's a big challenge for us as a customer to really understand each of the service that is provided in these, you know, clouds, well, doesn't matter which one that is. And the third one is pretty big, at least at the CTO the CIO, and the senior leadership level, is cost. Cost is a major factor because cloud, you know, will eat you up if you cannot manage it. If you don't have a good cloud governance process it because every minute you are in it, it's burning cash. So I think if you ask me, these are the three major things that I am facing day to day and that's where I use my partners, which I'll touch base down the line. >> Perfect, we'll talk about that. So Prem, I imagine that these problems are not unique to Johnson Controls or JCI, as you may hear us refer to it. Talk to me Prem about some of the other challenges that you're seeing within the customer landscape. >> So, yeah, I agree, Lisa, these are not very specific to JCI, but there are specific issues in JCI, right? So the way we think about these are, there is a common issue when people go to the cloud and there are very specific and unique issues for businesses, right? So JCI, and we will talk about this in the episode as we move forward. I think Suresh and his team have done some phenomenal step around how to manage this complexity. But there are customers who have a lesser complex cloud which is, they don't go to Alibaba, they don't have footprint in all three clouds. So their multi-cloud footprint could be a bit more manageable, but still struggle with a lot of the same problems around cost, around security, around talent. Talent is a big thing, right? And in Suresh's case I think it's slightly more exasperated because every cloud provider Be it AWS, JCP, or Azure brings in hundreds of services and there is nobody, including many of us, right? We learn every day, nowadays, right? It's not that there is one service integrator who knows all, while technically people can claim as a part of sales. But in reality all of us are continuing to learn in this landscape. And if you put all of this equation together with multiple clouds the complexity just starts to exponentially grow. And that's exactly what I think JCI is experiencing and Suresh's team has been experiencing, and we've been working together. But the common problems are around security talent and cost management of this, right? Those are my three things. And one last thing that I would love to say before we move away from this question is, if you think about cloud operations as a concept that's evolving over the last few years, and I have touched upon this in the previous episode as well, Lisa, right? If you take architectures, we've gone into microservices, we've gone into all these server-less architectures all the fancy things that we want. That helps us go to market faster, be more competent to as a business. But that's not simplified stuff, right? That's complicated stuff. It's a lot more distributed. Second, again, we've advanced and created more modern infrastructure because all of what we are talking is platform as a service, services on the cloud that we are consuming, right? In the same case with development we've moved into a DevOps model. We kind of click a button put some code in a repository, the code starts to run in production within a minute, everything else is automated. But then when we get to operations we are still stuck in a very old way of looking at cloud as an infrastructure, right? So you've got an infra team, you've got an app team, you've got an incident management team, you've got a soft knock, everything. But again, so Suresh can talk about this more because they are making significant strides in thinking about this as a single workload, and how do I apply engineering to go manage this? Because a lot of it is codified, right? So automation. Anyway, so that's kind of where the complexity is and how we are thinking, including JCI as a partner thinking about taming that complexity as we move forward. >> Suresh, let's talk about that taming the complexity. You guys have both done a great job of articulating the ostensible challenges that are there with cloud, especially multi-cloud environments that you're living in. But Suresh, talk about the partnership with Hitachi Vantara. How is it helping to dial down some of those inherent complexities? >> I mean, I always, you know, I think I've said this to Prem multiple times. I treat my partners as my internal, you know, employees. I look at Prem as my coworker or my peers. So the reason for that is I want Prem to have the same vested interest as a partner in my success or JCI success and vice versa, isn't it? I think that's how we operate and that's how we have been operating. And I think I would like to thank Prem and Hitachi Vantara for that really been an amazing partnership. And as he was saying, we have taken a completely holistic approach to how we want to really be in the market and play in the market to our customers. So if you look at my jacket it talks about OpenBlue platform. This is what JCI is building, that we are building this OpenBlue digital platform. And within that, my team, along with Prem's or Hitachi's, we have built what we call as Polaris. It's a technical platform where our apps can run. And this platform is automated end-to-end from a platform engineering standpoint. We stood up a platform engineering organization, a reliability engineering organization, as well as a support organization where Hitachi played a role. As I said previously, you know, for me to scale I'm not going to really have the talent and the knowledge of every function that I'm looking at. And Hitachi, not only they brought the talent but they also brought what he was talking about, Harc. You know, they have set up a lot and now we can leverage it. And they also came up with some really interesting concepts. I went and met them in India. They came up with this concept called IPL. Okay, what is that? They really challenged all their employees that's working for GCI to come up with innovative ideas to solve problems proactively, which is self-healing. You know, how you do that? So I think partners, you know, if they become really vested in your interests, they can do wonders for you. And I think in this case Hitachi is really working very well for us and in many aspects. And I'm leveraging them... You started with support, now I'm leveraging them in the automation, the platform engineering, as well as in the reliability engineering and then in even in the engineering spaces. And that like, they are my end-to-end partner right now? >> So you're really taking that holistic approach that you talked about and it sounds like it's a very collaborative two-way street partnership. Prem, I want to go back to, Suresh mentioned Harc. Talk a little bit about what Harc is and then how partners fit into Hitachi's Harc strategy. >> Great, so let me spend like a few seconds on what Harc is. Lisa, again, I know we've been using the term. Harc stands for Hitachi application reliability sectors. Now the reason we thought about Harc was, like I said in the beginning of this segment, there is an illusion from an architecture standpoint to be more modern, microservices, server-less, reactive architecture, so on and so forth. There is an illusion in your development methodology from Waterfall to agile, to DevOps to lean, agile to path program, whatever, right? Extreme program, so on and so forth. There is an evolution in the space of infrastructure from a point where you were buying these huge humongous servers and putting it in your data center to a point where people don't even see servers anymore, right? You buy it, by a click of a button you don't know the size of it. All you know is a, it's (indistinct) whatever that name means. Let's go provision it on the fly, get go, get your work done, right? When all of this is advanced when you think about operations people have been solving the problem the way they've been solving it 20 years back, right? That's the issue. And Harc was conceived exactly to fix that particular problem, to think about a modern way of operating a modern workload, right? That's exactly what Harc. So it brings together finest engineering talent. So the teams are trained in specific ways of working. We've invested and implemented some of the IP, we work with the best of the breed partner ecosystem, and I'll talk about that in a minute. And we've got these facilities in Dallas and I am talking from my office in Dallas, which is a Harc facility in the US from where we deliver for our customers. And then back in Hyderabad, we've got one more that we opened and these are facilities from where we deliver Harc services for our customers as well, right? And then we are expanding it in Japan and Portugal as we move into 23. That's kind of the plan that we are thinking through. However, that's what Harc is, Lisa, right? That's our solution to this cloud complexity problem. Right? >> Got it, and it sounds like it's going quite global, which is fantastic. So Suresh, I want to have you expand a bit on the partnership, the partner ecosystem and the role that it plays. You talked about it a little bit but what role does the partner ecosystem play in really helping JCI to dial down some of those challenges and the inherent complexities that we talked about? >> Yeah, sure. I think partners play a major role and JCI is very, very good at it. I mean, I've joined JCI 18 months ago, JCI leverages partners pretty extensively. As I said, I leverage Hitachi for my, you know, A group and the (indistinct) space and the cloud operations space, and they're my primary partner. But at the same time, we leverage many other partners. Well, you know, Accenture, SCL, and even on the tooling side we use Datadog and (indistinct). All these guys are major partners of our because the way we like to pick partners is based on our vision and where we want to go. And pick the right partner who's going to really, you know make you successful by investing their resources in you. And what I mean by that is when you have a partner, partner knows exactly what kind of skillset is needed for this customer, for them to really be successful. As I said earlier, we cannot really get all the skillset that we need, we rely on the partners and partners bring the the right skillset, they can scale. I can tell Prem tomorrow, "Hey, I need two parts by next week", and I guarantee it he's going to bring two parts to me. So they let you scale, they let you move fast. And I'm a big believer, in today's day and age, to get things done fast and be more agile. I'm not worried about failure, but for me moving fast is very, very important. And partners really do a very good job bringing that. But I think then they also really make you think, isn't it? Because one thing I like about partners they make you innovate whether they know it or not but they do because, you know, they will come and ask you questions about, "Hey, tell me why you are doing this. Can I review your architecture?" You know, and then they will try to really say I don't think this is going to work. Because they work with so many different clients, not JCI, they bring all that expertise and that's what I look from them, you know, just not, you know, do a T&M job for me. I ask you to do this go... They just bring more than that. That's how I pick my partners. And that's how, you know, Hitachi's Vantara is definitely one of a good partner from that sense because they bring a lot more innovation to the table and I appreciate about that. >> It sounds like, it sounds like a flywheel of innovation. >> Yeah. >> I love that. Last question for both of you, which we're almost out of time here, Prem, I want to go back to you. So I'm a partner, I'm planning on redefining CloudOps at my company. What are the two things you want me to remember from Hitachi Vantara's perspective? >> So before I get to that question, Lisa, the partners that we work with are slightly different from from the partners that, again, there are some similar partners. There are some different partners, right? For example, we pick and choose especially in the Harc space, we pick and choose partners that are more future focused, right? We don't care if they are huge companies or small companies. We go after companies that are future focused that are really, really nimble and can change for our customers need because it's not our need, right? When I pick partners for Harc my ultimate endeavor is to ensure, in this case because we've got (indistinct) GCI on, we are able to operate (indistinct) with the level of satisfaction above and beyond that they're expecting from us. And whatever I don't have I need to get from my partners so that I bring this solution to Suresh. As opposed to bringing a whole lot of people and making them stand in front of Suresh. So that's how I think about partners. What do I want them to do from, and we've always done this so we do workshops with our partners. We just don't go by tools. When we say we are partnering with X, Y, Z, we do workshops with them and we say, this is how we are thinking. Either you build it in your roadmap that helps us leverage you, continue to leverage you. And we do have minimal investments where we fix gaps. We're building some utilities for us to deliver the best service to our customers. And our intention is not to build a product to compete with our partner. Our intention is to just fill the wide space until they go build it into their product suite that we can then leverage it for our customers. So always think about end customers and how can we make it easy for them? Because for all the tool vendors out there seeing this and wanting to partner with Hitachi the biggest thing is tools sprawl, especially on the cloud is very real. For every problem on the cloud. I have a billion tools that are being thrown at me as Suresh if I'm putting my installation and it's not easy at all. It's so confusing. >> Yeah. >> So that's what we want. We want people to simplify that landscape for our end customers, and we are looking at partners that are thinking through the simplification not just making money. >> That makes perfect sense. There really is a very strong symbiosis it sounds like, in the partner ecosystem. And there's a lot of enablement that goes on back and forth it sounds like as well, which is really, to your point it's all about the end customers and what they're expecting. Suresh, last question for you is which is the same one, if I'm a partner what are the things that you want me to consider as I'm planning to redefine CloudOps at my company? >> I'll keep it simple. In my view, I mean, we've touched upon it in multiple facets in this interview about that, the three things. First and foremost, reliability. You know, in today's day and age my products has to be reliable, available and, you know, make sure that the customer's happy with what they're really dealing with, number one. Number two, my product has to be secure. Security is super, super important, okay? And number three, I need to really make sure my customers are getting the value so I keep my cost low. So these three is what I would focus and what I expect from my partners. >> Great advice, guys. Thank you so much for talking through this with me and really showing the audience how strong the partnership is between Hitachi Vantara and JCI. What you're doing together, we'll have to talk to you again to see where things go but we really appreciate your insights and your perspectives. Thank you. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Thanks Lisa, thanks for having us. >> My pleasure. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you so much for watching. (soothing music)

(Upbeat music playing) >> Hey everyone, thanks for joining us today. Welcome to this event of Building your Cloud Center of Excellence with Hitachi Vantara. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got a couple of guests here with me next to talk about redefining cloud operations and application modernization for customers. Please welcome Prem Balasubramanian the SVP and CTO at Hitachi Vantara, and Manoj Narayanan is here as well, the Managing Director of Technology at GTCR. Guys, thank you so much for joining me today. Excited to have this conversation about redefining CloudOps with you. >> Pleasure to be here. >> Pleasure to be here >> Prem, let's go ahead and start with you. You have done well over a thousand cloud engagements in your career. I'd love to get your point of view on how the complexity around cloud operations and management has evolved in the last, say, three to four years. >> It's a great question, Lisa before we understand the complexity around the management itself, the cloud has evolved over the last decade significantly from being a backend infrastructure or infrastructure as a service for many companies to become the business for many companies. If you think about a lot of these cloud bond companies cloud is where their entire workload and their business wants. With that, as a background for this conversation if you think about the cloud operations, there was a lot of there was a lot of lift and shift happening in the market where people lifted their workloads or applications and moved them onto the cloud where they treated cloud significantly as an infrastructure. And the way they started to manage it was again, the same format they were managing there on-prem infrastructure and they call it I&O, Infrastructure and Operations. That's kind of the way traditionally cloud is managed. In the last few years, we are seeing a significant shift around thinking of cloud more as a workload rather than as just an infrastructure. And what I mean by workload is in the cloud, everything is now code. So you are codifying your infrastructure. Your application is already code and your data is also codified as data services. With now that context apply the way you think about managing the cloud has to significantly change and many companies are moving towards trying to change their models to look at this complex environment as opposed to treating it like a simple infrastructure that is sitting somewhere else. So that's one of the biggest changes and shifts that are causing a lot of complexity and headache for actually a lot of customers for managing environments. The second critical aspect is even that, even exasperates the situation is multicloud environments. Now, there are companies that have got it right with things about right cloud for the right workload. So there are companies that I reach out and I talk with. They've got their office applications and emails and stuff running on Microsoft 365 which can be on the Azure cloud whereas they're running their engineering applications the ones that they build and leverage for their end customers on Amazon. And to some extent they've got it right but still they have a multiple cloud that they have to go after and maintain. This becomes complex when you have two clouds for the same type of workload. When I have to host applications for my end customers on Amazon as well as Azure, Azure as well as Google then, I get into security issues that I have to be consistent across all three. I get into talent because I need to have people that focus on Amazon as well as Azure, as well as Google which means I need so much more workforce, I need so many so much more skills that I need to build, right? That's becoming the second issue. The third one is around data costs. Can I make these clouds talk to each other? Then you get into the ingress egress cost and that creates some complexity. So bringing all of this together and managing is really become becoming more complex for our customers. And obviously as a part of this we will talk about some of the, some of the ideas that we can bring for in managing such complex environments but this is what we are seeing in terms of why the complexity has become a lot more in the last few years. >> Right. A lot of complexity in the last few years. Manoj, let's bring you into the conversation now. Before we dig into your cloud environment give the audience a little bit of an overview of GTCR. What kind of company are you? What do you guys do? >> Definitely Lisa. GTCR is a Chicago based private equity firm. We've been in the market for more than 40 years and what we do is we invest in companies across different sectors and then we manage the company drive it to increase the value and then over a period of time, sell it to future buyers. So in a nutshell, we got a large portfolio of companies that we need to manage and make sure that they perform to expectations. And my role within GTCR is from a technology viewpoint so where I work with all the companies their technology leadership to make sure that we are getting the best out of technology and technology today drives everything. So how can technology be a good compliment to the business itself? So, my role is to play that intermediary role to make sure that there is synergy between the investment thesis and the technology lures that we can pull and also work with partners like Hitachi to make sure that it is done in an optimal manner. >> I like that you said, you know, technology needs to really compliment the business and vice versa. So Manoj, let's get into the cloud operations environment at GTCR. Talk to me about what the experience has been the last couple of years. Give us an idea of some of the challenges that you were facing with existing cloud ops and and the solution that you're using from Hitachi Vantara. >> A a absolutely. In fact, in fact Prem phrased it really well, one of the key things that we're facing is the workload management. So there's so many choices there, so much complexities. We have these companies buying more companies there is organic growth that is happening. So the variables that we have to deal with are very high in such a scenario to make sure that the workload management of each of the companies are done in an optimal manner is becoming an increasing concern. So, so that's one area where any help we can get anything we can try to make sure it is done better becomes a huge value at each. A second aspect is a financial transparency. We need to know where the money is going where the money is coming in from, what is the scale especially in the cloud environment. We are talking about an auto scale ecosystem. Having that financial transparency and the metrics associated with that, it, these these become very, very critical to ensure that we have a successful presence in the multicloud environment. >> Talk a little bit about the solution that you're using with Hitachi and, and the challenges that it is eradicated. >> Yeah, so it end of the day, right, we we need to focus on our core competence. So, so we have got a very strong technology leadership team. We've got a very strong presence in the respective domains of each of the portfolio companies. But where Hitachi comes in and HAR comes in as a solution is that they allow us to excel in focusing on our core business and then make sure that we are able to take care of workload management or financial transparency. All of that is taken off the table from us and and Hitachi manages it for us, right? So it's such a perfectly compliment relationship where they act as two partners and HARC is a solution that is extremely useful in driving that. And, and and I'm anticipating that it'll become more important with time as the complexity of cloud and cloud associate workloads are only becoming more challenging to manage and not less. >> Right? That's the thing that complexity is there and it's also increasing Prem, you talked about the complexities that are existent today with respect to cloud operations the things that have happened over the last couple of years. What are some of your tips, Prem for the audience, like the the top two or three things that you would say on cloud operations that that people need to understand so that they can manage that complexity and allow their business to be driven and complimented by technology? >> Yeah, a big great question again, Lisa, right? And I think Manoj alluded to a few of these things as well. The first one is in the new world of the cloud I think think of migration, modernization and management as a single continuum to the cloud. Now there is no lift and shift and there is no way somebody else separately manages it, right? If you do not lift and shift the right applications the right way onto the cloud, you are going to deal with the complexity of managing it and you'll end up spending more money time and effort in managing it. So that's number one. Migration, modernization, management of cloud work growth is a single continuum and it's not three separate activities, right? That's number one. And the, the second is cost. Cost traditionally has been an afterthought, right? People move the workload to the cloud. And I think, again, like I said, I'll refer back to what Manoj said once we move it to the cloud and then we put all these fancy engineering capability around self-provisioning, every developer can go and ask for what he or she wants and they get an environment immediately spun up so on and so forth. Suddenly the CIO wakes up to a bill that is significantly larger than what he or she expected right? And, and this is this is become a bit common nowadays, right? The the challenge is because we think cost in the cloud as an afterthought. But consider this example in, in previous world you buy hard, well, you put it in your data center you have already amortized the cost as a CapEx. So you can write an application throw it onto the infrastructure and the application continues to use the infrastructure until you hit a ceiling, you don't care about the money you spent. But if I write a line of code that is inefficient today and I deploy it on the cloud from minute one, I am paying for the inefficiency. So if I realize it after six months, I've already spent the money. So financial discipline, especially when managing the cloud is now is no more an afterthought. It is as much something that you have to include in your engineering practice as much as any other DevOps practices, right? Those are my top two tips, Lisa, from my standpoint, think about cloud, think about cloud work, cloud workloads. And the last one again, and you will see you will hear me saying this again and again, get into the mindset of everything is code. You don't have a touch and feel infrastructure anymore. So you don't really need to have foot on the ground to go manage that infrastructure. It's codified. So your code should be managing it, but think of how it happens, right? That's where we, we are going as an evolution >> Everything is code. That's great advice, great tips for the audience there. Manoj, I'll bring you back into the conversation. You know, we, we can talk about skills gaps on on in many different facets of technology the SRE role, relatively new, skillset. We're hearing, hearing a lot about it. SRE led DevSecOps is probably even more so of a new skillset. If I'm an IT leader or an application leader how do I ensure that I have the right skillset within my organization to be able to manage my cloud operations to, to dial down that complexity so that I can really operate successfully as a business? >> Yeah. And so unfortunately there is no perfect answer, right? It's such a, such a scarce skillset that a, any day any of the portfolio company CTOs if I go and talk and say, Hey here's a great SRE team member, they'll be more than willing to fight with each of to get the person in right? It's just that scarce of a skillset. So, so a few things we need to look at it. One is, how can I build it within, right? So nobody gets born as an SRE, you, you make a person an SRE. So how do you inculcate that culture? So like Prem said earlier, right? Everything is software. So how do we make sure that everybody inculcates that as part of their operating philosophy be they part of the operations team or the development team or the testing team they need to understand that that is a common guideline and common objective that we are driving towards. So, so that skillset and that associated training needs to be driven from within the organization. And that in my mind is the fastest way to make sure that that role gets propagated across organization. That is one. The second thing is rely on the right partners. So it's not going to be possible for us, to get all of these roles built in-house. So instead prioritize what roles need to be done from within the organization and what roles can we rely on our partners to drive it for us. So that becomes an important consideration for us to look at as well. >> Absolutely. That partnership angle is incredibly important from, from the, the beginning really kind of weaving these companies together on this journey to to redefine cloud operations and build that, as we talked about at the beginning of the conversation really building a cloud center of excellence that allows the organization to be competitive, successful and and really deliver what the end user is, is expecting. I want to ask - Sorry Lisa, - go ahead. >> May I add something to it, I think? >> Sure. >> Yeah. One of the, one of the common things that I tell customers when we talk about SRE and to manages point is don't think of SRE as a skillset which is the common way today the industry tries to solve the problem. SRE is a mindset, right? Everybody in >> Well well said, yeah >> That, so everybody in a company should think of him or her as a cycle liability engineer. And everybody has a role in it, right? Even if you take the new process layout from SRE there are individuals that are responsible to whom we can go to when there is a problem directly as opposed to going through the traditional ways of AI talk to L one and L one contras all. They go to L two and then L three. So we, we, we are trying to move away from an issue escalation model to what we call as a a issue routing or a incident routing model, right? Move away from incident escalation to an incident routing model. So you get to route to the right folks. So again, to sum it up, SRE should not be solved as a skillset set because there is not enough people in the market to solve it that way. If you start solving it as a mindset I think companies can get a handhold of it. >> I love that. I've actually never heard that before, but it it makes perfect sense to think about the SRE as a mindset rather than a skillset that will allow organizations to be much more successful. Prem I wanted to get your thoughts as enterprises are are innovating, they're moving more products and services to the as a service model. Talk about how the dev teams the ops teams are working together to build and run reliable, cost efficient services. Are they working better together? >> Again, a a very polarizing question because some customers are getting it right many customers aren't, there is still a big wall between development and operations, right? Even when you think about DevOps as a terminology the fundamental principle was to make sure dev and ops works together. But what many companies have achieved today, honestly is automating the operations for development. For example, as a developer, I can check in code and my code will appear in production without any friction, right? There is automated testing, automated provisioning and it gets promoted to production, but after production, it goes back into the 20 year old model of operating the code, right? So there is more work that needs to be done for Devon and Ops to come closer and work together. And one of the ways that we think this is achievable is not by doing radical org changes, but more by focusing on a product-oriented single backlog approach across development and operations. Which is, again, there is change management involved but I think that's a way to start embracing the culture of dev ops coming together much better now, again SRE principles as we double click and understand it more and Google has done a very good job playing it out for the world. As you think about SRE principle, there are ways and means in that process of how to think about a single backlog. And in HARC, Hitachi Application Reliability Centers we've really got a way to look at prioritizing the backlog. And what I mean by that is dev teams try to work on backlog that come from product managers on features. The SRE and the operations team try to put backlog into the say sorry, try to put features into the same backlog for improving stability, availability and financials financial optimization of your code. And there are ways when you look at your SLOs and error budgets to really coach the product teams to prioritize your backlog based on what's important for you. So if you understand your spending more money then you reduce your product features going in and implement the financial optimization that came from your operations team, right? So you now have the ability to throttle these parameters and that's where SRE becomes a mindset and a principle as opposed to a skillset because this is not an individual telling you to do. This is the company that is, is embarking on how to prioritize my backlog beyond just user features. >> Right. Great point. Last question for both of you is the same talk kind of take away things that you want me to remember. If I am at an IT leader at, at an organization and I am planning on redefining CloudOps for my company Manoj will start with you and then Prem to you what are the top two things that you want me to walk away with understanding how to do that successfully? >> Yeah, so I'll, I'll go back to basics. So the two things I would say need to be taken care of is, one is customer experience. So all the things that I do end of the day is it improving the customer experience or not? So that's a first metric. The second thing is anything that I do is there an ROI by doing that incremental step or not? Otherwise we might get lost in the technology with surgery, the new tech, et cetera. But end of the day, if the customers are not happy if there is no ROI, everything else you just can't do much on top of that >> Now it's all about the customer experience. Right? That's so true. Prem what are your thoughts, the the top things that I need to be taking away if I am a a leader planning to redefine my cloud eye company? >> Absolutely. And I think from a, from a company standpoint I think Manoj summarized it extremely well, right? There is this ROI and there is this customer experience from my end, again, I'll, I'll suggest two two more things as a takeaway, right? One, cloud cost is not an afterthought. It's essential for us to think about it upfront. Number two, do not delink migration modernization and operations. They are one stream. If you migrate a long, wrong workload onto the cloud you're going to be stuck with it for a long time. And an example of a wrong workload, Lisa for everybody that that is listening to this is if my cost per transaction profile doesn't change and I am not improving my revenue per transaction for a piece of code that's going run in production it's better off running in a data center where my cost is CapEx than amortized and I have control over when I want to upgrade as opposed to putting it on a cloud and continuing to pay unless it gives me more dividends towards improvement. But that's a simple example of when we think about what should I migrate and how will it cost pain when I want to manage it in the longer run. But that's, that's something that I'll leave the audience and you with as a takeaway. >> Excellent. Guys, thank you so much for talking to me today about what Hitachi Vantara and GTCR are doing together how you've really dialed down those complexities enabling the business and the technology folks to really live harmoniously. We appreciate your insights and your perspectives on building a cloud center of excellence. Thank you both for joining me. >> Thank you. >> For my guests, I'm Lisa. Martin, you're watching this event building Your Cloud Center of Excellence with Hitachi Vantara. Thanks for watching. (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing)

(Upbeat music playing) >> Hey everyone, thanks for joining us today. Welcome to this event of Building your Cloud Center of Excellence with Hitachi Vantara. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got a couple of guests here with me next to talk about redefining cloud operations and application modernization for customers. Please welcome Param Balasubramanian the SVP and CTO at Hitachi Vantara, and Manoj Narayanan is here as well, the Managing Director of Technology at GTCR. Guys, thank you so much for joining me today. Excited to have this conversation about redefining CloudOps with you. >> Pleasure to be here. >> Pleasure to be here >> Param, let's go ahead and start with you. You have done well over a thousand cloud engagements in your career. I'd love to get your point of view on how the complexity around cloud operations and management has evolved in the last, say, three to four years. >> It's a great question, Lisa before we understand the complexity around the management itself, the cloud has evolved over the last decade significantly from being a backend infrastructure or infrastructure as a service for many companies to become the business for many companies. If you think about a lot of these cloud bond companies cloud is where their entire workload and their business wants. With that, as a background for this conversation if you think about the cloud operations, there was a lot of there was a lot of lift and shift happening in the market where people lifted their workloads or applications and moved them onto the cloud where they treated cloud significantly as an infrastructure. And the way they started to manage it was again, the same format they were managing there on-prem infrastructure and they call it I&O, Infrastructure and Operations. That's kind of the way traditionally cloud is managed. In the last few years, we are seeing a significant shift around thinking of cloud more as a workload rather than as just an infrastructure. And what I mean by workload is in the cloud, everything is now code. So you are codifying your infrastructure. Your application is already code and your data is also codified as data services. With now that context apply the way you think about managing the cloud has to significantly change and many companies are moving towards trying to change their models to look at this complex environment as opposed to treating it like a simple infrastructure that is sitting somewhere else. So that's one of the biggest changes and shifts that are causing a lot of complexity and headache for actually a lot of customers for managing environments. The second critical aspect is even that, even exasperates the situation is multicloud environments. Now, there are companies that have got it right with things about right cloud for the right workload. So there are companies that I reach out and I talk with. They've got their office applications and emails and stuff running on Microsoft 365 which can be on the Azure cloud whereas they're running their engineering applications the ones that they build and leverage for their end customers on Amazon. And to some extent they've got it right but still they have a multiple cloud that they have to go after and maintain. This becomes complex when you have two clouds for the same type of workload. When I have to host applications for my end customers on Amazon as well as Azure, Azure as well as Google then, I get into security issues that I have to be consistent across all three. I get into talent because I need to have people that focus on Amazon as well as Azure, as well as Google which means I need so much more workforce, I need so many so much more skills that I need to build, right? That's becoming the second issue. The third one is around data costs. Can I make these clouds talk to each other? Then you get into the ingress egress cost and that creates some complexity. So bringing all of this together and managing is really become becoming more complex for our customers. And obviously as a part of this we will talk about some of the, some of the ideas that we can bring for in managing such complex environments but this is what we are seeing in terms of why the complexity has become a lot more in the last few years. >> Right. A lot of complexity in the last few years. Manoj, let's bring you into the conversation now. Before we dig into your cloud environment give the audience a little bit of an overview of GTCR. What kind of company are you? What do you guys do? >> Definitely Lisa. GTCR is a Chicago based private equity firm. We've been in the market for more than 40 years and what we do is we invest in companies across different sectors and then we manage the company drive it to increase the value and then over a period of time, sell it to future buyers. So in a nutshell, we got a large portfolio of companies that we need to manage and make sure that they perform to expectations. And my role within GTCR is from a technology viewpoint so where I work with all the companies their technology leadership to make sure that we are getting the best out of technology and technology today drives everything. So how can technology be a good compliment to the business itself? So, my role is to play that intermediary role to make sure that there is synergy between the investment thesis and the technology lures that we can pull and also work with partners like Hitachi to make sure that it is done in an optimal manner. >> I like that you said, you know, technology needs to really compliment the business and vice versa. So Manoj, let's get into the cloud operations environment at GTCR. Talk to me about what the experience has been the last couple of years. Give us an idea of some of the challenges that you were facing with existing cloud ops and and the solution that you're using from Hitachi Vantara. >> A a absolutely. In fact, in fact Param phrased it really well, one of the key things that we're facing is the workload management. So there's so many choices there, so much complexities. We have these companies buying more companies there is organic growth that is happening. So the variables that we have to deal with are very high in such a scenario to make sure that the workload management of each of the companies are done in an optimal manner is becoming an increasing concern. So, so that's one area where any help we can get anything we can try to make sure it is done better becomes a huge value at each. A second aspect is a financial transparency. We need to know where the money is going where the money is coming in from, what is the scale especially in the cloud environment. We are talking about an auto scale ecosystem. Having that financial transparency and the metrics associated with that, it, these these become very, very critical to ensure that we have a successful presence in the multicloud environment. >> Talk a little bit about the solution that you're using with Hitachi and, and the challenges that it is eradicated. >> Yeah, so it end of the day, right, we we need to focus on our core competence. So, so we have got a very strong technology leadership team. We've got a very strong presence in the respective domains of each of the portfolio companies. But where Hitachi comes in and HAR comes in as a solution is that they allow us to excel in focusing on our core business and then make sure that we are able to take care of workload management or financial transparency. All of that is taken off the table from us and and Hitachi manages it for us, right? So it's such a perfectly compliment relationship where they act as two partners and HARC is a solution that is extremely useful in driving that. And, and and I'm anticipating that it'll become more important with time as the complexity of cloud and cloud associate workloads are only becoming more challenging to manage and not less. >> Right? That's the thing that complexity is there and it's also increasing Param, you talked about the complexities that are existent today with respect to cloud operations the things that have happened over the last couple of years. What are some of your tips, Param for the audience, like the the top two or three things that you would say on cloud operations that that people need to understand so that they can manage that complexity and allow their business to be driven and complimented by technology? >> Yeah, a big great question again, Lisa, right? And I think Manoj alluded to a few of these things as well. The first one is in the new world of the cloud I think think of migration, modernization and management as a single continuum to the cloud. Now there is no lift and shift and there is no way somebody else separately manages it, right? If you do not lift and shift the right applications the right way onto the cloud, you are going to deal with the complexity of managing it and you'll end up spending more money time and effort in managing it. So that's number one. Migration, modernization, management of cloud work growth is a single continuum and it's not three separate activities, right? That's number one. And the, the second is cost. Cost traditionally has been an afterthought, right? People move the workload to the cloud. And I think, again, like I said, I'll refer back to what Manoj said once we move it to the cloud and then we put all these fancy engineering capability around self-provisioning, every developer can go and ask for what he or she wants and they get an environment immediately spun up so on and so forth. Suddenly the CIO wakes up to a bill that is significantly larger than what he or she expected right? And, and this is this is become a bit common nowadays, right? The the challenge is because we think cost in the cloud as an afterthought. But consider this example in, in previous world you buy hard, well, you put it in your data center you have already amortized the cost as a CapEx. So you can write an application throw it onto the infrastructure and the application continues to use the infrastructure until you hit a ceiling, you don't care about the money you spent. But if I write a line of code that is inefficient today and I deploy it on the cloud from minute one, I am paying for the inefficiency. So if I realize it after six months, I've already spent the money. So financial discipline, especially when managing the cloud is now is no more an afterthought. It is as much something that you have to include in your engineering practice as much as any other DevOps practices, right? Those are my top two tips, Lisa, from my standpoint, think about cloud, think about cloud work, cloud workloads. And the last one again, and you will see you will hear me saying this again and again, get into the mindset of everything is code. You don't have a touch and feel infrastructure anymore. So you don't really need to have foot on the ground to go manage that infrastructure. It's codified. So your code should be managing it, but think of how it happens, right? That's where we, we are going as an evolution >> Everything is code. That's great advice, great tips for the audience there. Manoj, I'll bring you back into the conversation. You know, we, we can talk about skills gaps on on in many different facets of technology the SRE role, relatively new, skillset. We're hearing, hearing a lot about it. SRE led DevSecOps is probably even more so of a new skillset. If I'm an IT leader or an application leader how do I ensure that I have the right skillset within my organization to be able to manage my cloud operations to, to dial down that complexity so that I can really operate successfully as a business? >> Yeah. And so unfortunately there is no perfect answer, right? It's such a, such a scarce skillset that a, any day any of the portfolio company CTOs if I go and talk and say, Hey here's a great SRE team member, they'll be more than willing to fight with each of to get the person in right? It's just that scarce of a skillset. So, so a few things we need to look at it. One is, how can I build it within, right? So nobody gets born as an SRE, you, you make a person an SRE. So how do you inculcate that culture? So like Param said earlier, right? Everything is software. So how do we make sure that everybody inculcates that as part of their operating philosophy be they part of the operations team or the development team or the testing team they need to understand that that is a common guideline and common objective that we are driving towards. So, so that skillset and that associated training needs to be driven from within the organization. And that in my mind is the fastest way to make sure that that role gets propagated across organization. That is one. The second thing is rely on the right partners. So it's not going to be possible for us, to get all of these roles built in-house. So instead prioritize what roles need to be done from within the organization and what roles can we rely on our partners to drive it for us. So that becomes an important consideration for us to look at as well. >> Absolutely. That partnership angle is incredibly important from, from the, the beginning really kind of weaving these companies together on this journey to to redefine cloud operations and build that, as we talked about at the beginning of the conversation really building a cloud center of excellence that allows the organization to be competitive, successful and and really deliver what the end user is, is expecting. I want to ask - Sorry Lisa, - go ahead. >> May I add something to it, I think? >> Sure. >> Yeah. One of the, one of the common things that I tell customers when we talk about SRE and to manages point is don't think of SRE as a skillset which is the common way today the industry tries to solve the problem. SRE is a mindset, right? Everybody in >> Well well said, yeah >> That, so everybody in a company should think of him or her as a cycle liability engineer. And everybody has a role in it, right? Even if you take the new process layout from SRE there are individuals that are responsible to whom we can go to when there is a problem directly as opposed to going through the traditional ways of AI talk to L one and L one contras all. They go to L two and then L three. So we, we, we are trying to move away from an issue escalation model to what we call as a a issue routing or a incident routing model, right? Move away from incident escalation to an incident routing model. So you get to route to the right folks. So again, to sum it up, SRE should not be solved as a skillset set because there is not enough people in the market to solve it that way. If you start solving it as a mindset I think companies can get a handhold of it. >> I love that. I've actually never heard that before, but it it makes perfect sense to think about the SRE as a mindset rather than a skillset that will allow organizations to be much more successful. Param I wanted to get your thoughts as enterprises are are innovating, they're moving more products and services to the as a service model. Talk about how the dev teams the ops teams are working together to build and run reliable, cost efficient services. Are they working better together? >> Again, a a very polarizing question because some customers are getting it right many customers aren't, there is still a big wall between development and operations, right? Even when you think about DevOps as a terminology the fundamental principle was to make sure dev and ops works together. But what many companies have achieved today, honestly is automating the operations for development. For example, as a developer, I can check in code and my code will appear in production without any friction, right? There is automated testing, automated provisioning and it gets promoted to production, but after production, it goes back into the 20 year old model of operating the code, right? So there is more work that needs to be done for Devon and Ops to come closer and work together. And one of the ways that we think this is achievable is not by doing radical org changes, but more by focusing on a product-oriented single backlog approach across development and operations. Which is, again, there is change management involved but I think that's a way to start embracing the culture of dev ops coming together much better now, again SRE principles as we double click and understand it more and Google has done a very good job playing it out for the world. As you think about SRE principle, there are ways and means in that process of how to think about a single backlog. And in HARC, Hitachi Application Reliability Centers we've really got a way to look at prioritizing the backlog. And what I mean by that is dev teams try to work on backlog that come from product managers on features. The SRE and the operations team try to put backlog into the say sorry, try to put features into the same backlog for improving stability, availability and financials financial optimization of your code. And there are ways when you look at your SLOs and error budgets to really coach the product teams to prioritize your backlog based on what's important for you. So if you understand your spending more money then you reduce your product features going in and implement the financial optimization that came from your operations team, right? So you now have the ability to throttle these parameters and that's where SRE becomes a mindset and a principle as opposed to a skillset because this is not an individual telling you to do. This is the company that is, is embarking on how to prioritize my backlog beyond just user features. >> Right. Great point. Last question for both of you is the same talk kind of take away things that you want me to remember. If I am at an IT leader at, at an organization and I am planning on redefining CloudOps for my company Manoj will start with you and then Param to you what are the top two things that you want me to walk away with understanding how to do that successfully? >> Yeah, so I'll, I'll go back to basics. So the two things I would say need to be taken care of is, one is customer experience. So all the things that I do end of the day is it improving the customer experience or not? So that's a first metric. The second thing is anything that I do is there an ROI by doing that incremental step or not? Otherwise we might get lost in the technology with surgery, the new tech, et cetera. But end of the day, if the customers are not happy if there is no ROI, everything else you just can't do much on top of that >> Now it's all about the customer experience. Right? That's so true. Param what are your thoughts, the the top things that I need to be taking away if I am a a leader planning to redefine my cloud eye company? >> Absolutely. And I think from a, from a company standpoint I think Manoj summarized it extremely well, right? There is this ROI and there is this customer experience from my end, again, I'll, I'll suggest two two more things as a takeaway, right? One, cloud cost is not an afterthought. It's essential for us to think about it upfront. Number two, do not delink migration modernization and operations. They are one stream. If you migrate a long, wrong workload onto the cloud you're going to be stuck with it for a long time. And an example of a wrong workload, Lisa for everybody that that is listening to this is if my cost per transaction profile doesn't change and I am not improving my revenue per transaction for a piece of code that's going run in production it's better off running in a data center where my cost is CapEx than amortized and I have control over when I want to upgrade as opposed to putting it on a cloud and continuing to pay unless it gives me more dividends towards improvement. But that's a simple example of when we think about what should I migrate and how will it cost pain when I want to manage it in the longer run. But that's, that's something that I'll leave the audience and you with as a takeaway. >> Excellent. Guys, thank you so much for talking to me today about what Hitachi Vantara and GTCR are doing together how you've really dialed down those complexities enabling the business and the technology folks to really live harmoniously. We appreciate your insights and your perspectives on building a cloud center of excellence. Thank you both for joining me. >> Thank you. >> For my guests, I'm Lisa. Martin, you're watching this event building Your Cloud Center of Excellence with Hitachi Vantara. Thanks for watching. (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing)

>> Welcome back to The Cube's coverage of HPE's GreenLake announcements. My name is Dave Vellante and you're watching the Cube. I'm here with Holger Mueller, who is an analyst at Constellation Research. And Matt Maccaux is the global field CTO of Ezmeral software at HPE. We're going to talk data. Gents, great to see you. >> Holger: Great to be here. >> So, Holger, what do you see happening in the data market? Obviously data's hot, you know, digital, I call it the force marks to digital. Everybody realizes wow, digital business, that's a data business. We've got to get our data act together. What do you see in the market is the big trends, the big waves? >> We are all young enough or old enough to remember when people were saying data is the new oil, right? Nothing has changed, right? Data is the key ingredient, which matters to enterprise, which they have to store, which they have to enrich, which they have to use for their decision-making. It's the foundation of everything. If you want to go into machine learning or (indistinct) It's growing very fast, right? We have the capability now to look at all the data in enterprise, which weren't able 10 years ago to do that. So data is main center to everything. >> Yeah, it's even more valuable than oil, I think, right? 'Cause with oil, you can only use once. Data, you can, it's kind of polyglot. I can go in different directions and it's amazing, right? >> It's the beauty of digital products, right? They don't get consumed, right? They don't get fired up, right? And no carbon footprint, right? "Oh wait, wait, we have to think about carbon footprint." Different story, right? So to get to the data, you have to spend some energy. >> So it's that simple, right? I mean, it really is. Data is fundamental. It's got to be at the core. And so Matt, what are you guys announcing today, and how does that play into what Holger just said? >> What we're announcing today is that organizations no longer need to make a difficult choice. Prior to today, organizations were thinking if I'm going to do advanced machine learning and really exploit my data, I have to go to the cloud. But all my data's still on premises because of privacy rules, industry rules. And so what we're announcing today, through GreenLake Services, is a cloud services way to deliver that same cloud-based analytical capability. Machine learning, data engineering, through hybrid analytics. It's a unified platform to tie together everything from data engineering to advance data science. And we're also announcing the world's first Kubernetes native object store, that is hybrid cloud enabled. Which means you can keep your data connected across clouds in a data fabric, or Dave, as you say, mesh. >> Okay, can we dig into that a little bit? So, you're essentially saying that, so you're going to have data in both places, right? Public cloud, edge, on-prem, and you're saying, HPE is announcing a capability to connect them, I think you used the term fabric. I'm cool, by the way, with the term fabric, we can, we'll parse that out another time. >> I love for you to discuss textiles. Fabrics vs. mesh. For me, every fabric breaks down to mesh if you put it on a microscope. It's the same thing. >> Oh wow, now that's really, that's too detailed for my brain, right this moment. But, you're saying you can connect all those different estates because data by its very nature is everywhere. You're going to unify that, and what, that can manage that through sort of a single view? >> That's right. So, the management is centralized. We need to be able to know where our data is being provisioned. But again, we don't want organizations to feel like they have to make the trade off. If they want to use cloud surface A in Azure, and cloud surface B in GCP, why not connect them together? Why not allow the data to remain in sync or not, through a distributed fabric? Because we use that term fabric over and over again. But the idea is let the data be where it most naturally makes sense, and exploit it. Monetization is an old tool, but exploit it in a way that works best for your users and applications. >> In sync or not, that's interesting. So it's my choice? >> That's right. Because the back of an automobile could be a teeny tiny, small edge location. It's not always going to be in sync until it connects back up with a training facility. But we still need to be able to manage that. And maybe that data gets persisted to a core data center. Maybe it gets pushed to the cloud, but we still need to know where that data is, where it came from, its lineage, what quality it has, what security we're going to wrap around that, that all should be part of this fabric. >> Okay. So, you've got essentially a governance model, at least maybe you're working toward that, and maybe it's not all baked today, but that's the north star. Is this fabric connect, single management view, governed in a federated fashion? >> Right. And it's available through the most common API's that these applications are already written in. So, everybody today's talking S3. I've got to get all of my data, I need to put it into an object store, it needs to be S3 compatible. So, we are extending this capability to be S3 native. But it's optimized for performance. Today, when you put data in an object store, it's kind of one size fits all. Well, we know for those streaming analytical capabilities, those high performance workloads, it needs to be tuned for that. So, how about I give you a very small object on the very fastest disk in your data center and maybe that cheaper location somewhere else. And so we're giving you that balance as part of the overall management estate. >> Holger, what's your take on this? I mean, Frank Slootman says we'll never, we're not going halfway house. We're never going to do on-prem, we're only in the cloud. So that basically says, okay, he's ignoring a pretty large market by choice. You're not, Matt, you must love those words. But what do you see as the public cloud players, kind of the moves on-prem, particularly in this realm? >> Well, we've seen lots of cloud players who were only cloud coming back towards on-premise, right? We call it the next generation compute platform where I can move data and workloads between on-premise and ideally, multiple clouds, right? Because I don't want to be logged into public cloud vendors. And we see two trends, right? One trend is the traditional hardware supplier of on-premise has not scaled to cloud technology in terms of big data analytics. They just missed the boat for that in the past, this is changing. You guys are a traditional player and changing this, so congratulations. The other thing, is there's been no innovation for the on-premise tech stack, right? The only technology stack to run modern application has been invested for a long time in the cloud. So what we see since two, three years, right? With the first one being Google with Kubernetes, that are good at GKE on-premise, then onto us, right? Bringing their tech stack with compromises to on-premises, right? Acknowledging exactly what we're talking about, the data is everywhere, data is important. Data gravity is there, right? It's just the network's fault, where the networks are too slow, right? If you could just move everything anywhere we want like juggling two balls, then we'd be in different place. But that's the not enough investment for the traditional IT players for that stack, and the modern stack being there. And now every public cloud player has an on-premise offering with different flavors, different capabilities. >> I want to give you guys Dave's story of kind of history and you can kind of course correct, and tell me how this, Matt, maybe fits into what's happened with customers. So, you know, before Hadoop, obviously you had to buy a big Oracle database and you know, you running Unix, and you buy some big storage subsystem if you had any money left over, you know, you maybe, you know, do some actual analytics. But then Hadoop comes in, lowers the cost, and then S3 kneecaps the entire Hadoop market, right? >> I wouldn't say that, I wouldn't agree. Sorry to jump on your history. Because the fascinating thing, what Hadoop brought to the enterprise for the first time, you're absolutely right, affordable, right, to do that. But it's not only about affordability because S3 as the affordability. The big thing is you can store information without knowing how to analyze it, right? So, you mentioned Snowflake, right? Before, it was like an Oracle database. It was Starschema for data warehouse, and so on. You had to make decisions how to store that data because compute capabilities, storage capabilities, were too limited, right? That's what Hadoop blew away. >> I agree, no schema on, right. But then that created data lakes, which create a data swamps, and that whole mess, and then Spark comes in and help clean it out, okay, fine. So, we're cool with that. But the early days of Hadoop, you had, companies would have a Hadoop monolith, they probably had their data catalog in Excel or Google sheets, right? And so now, my question to you, Matt, is there's a lot of customers that are still in that world. What do they do? They got an option to go to the cloud. I'm hearing that you're giving them another option? >> That's right. So we know that data is going to move to the cloud, as I mentioned. So let's keep that data in sync, and governed, and secured, like you expect. But for the data that can't move, let's bring those cloud native services to your data center. And so that's a big part of this announcement is this unified analytics. So that you can continue to run the tools that you want to today while bringing those next generation tools based on Apache Spark, using libraries like Delta Lake so you can go anything from Tableaux through Presto sequel, to advance machine learning in your Jupiter notebooks on-premises where you know your data is secured. And if it happens to sit in existing Hadoop data lake, that's fine too. We don't want our customers to have to make that trade off as they go from one to the other. Let's give you the best of both worlds, or as they say, you can eat your cake and have it too. >> Okay, so. Now let's talk about sort of developers on-prem, right? They've been kind of... If they really wanted to go cloud native, they had to go to the cloud. Do you feel like this changes the game? Do on-prem developers, do they want that capability? Will they lean into that capability? Or will they say no, no, the cloud is cool. What's your take? >> I love developers, right? But it's about who makes the decision, who pays the developers, right? So the CXOs in the enterprises, they need exactly, this is why we call the next-gen computing platform, that you can move your code assets. It's very hard to build software, so it's very valuable to an enterprise. I don't want to have limited to one single location or certain computing infrastructure, right? Luckily, we have Kubernetes to be able to move that, but I want to be able to deploy it on-premise if I have to. I want to deploy it, would be able to deploy in the multiple clouds which are available. And that's the key part. And that makes developers happy too, because the code you write has got to run multiple places. So you can build more code, better code, instead of building the same thing multiple places, because a little compiler change here, a little compiler change there. Nobody wants to do portability testing and rewriting, recertified for certain platforms. >> The head of application development or application architecture and the business are ultimately going to dictate that, number one. Number two, you're saying that developers shouldn't care because it can write once, run anywhere. >> That is the promise, and that's the interesting thing which is available now, 'cause people know, thanks to Kubernetes as a container platform and the abstraction which containers provide, and that makes everybody's life easier. But it goes much more higher than the Head of Apps, right? This is the digital transformation strategy, the next generation application the company has to build as a response to a pandemic, as a pivot, as digital transformation, as digital disruption capability. >> I mean, I see a lot of organizations basically modernizing by building some kind of abstraction to their backend systems, modernizing it through cloud native, and then saying, hey, as you were saying Holger, run it anywhere you want, or connect to those cloud apps, or connect across clouds, connect to other on-prem apps, and eventually out to the edge. Is that what you see? >> It's so much easier said than done though. Organizations have struggled so much with this, especially as we start talking about those data intensive app and workloads. Kubernetes and Hadoop? Up until now, organizations haven't been able to deploy those services. So, what we're offering as part of these GreenLake unified analytics services, a Kubernetes runtime. It's not ours. It's top of branch open source. And open source operators like Apache Spark, bringing in Delta Lake libraries, so that if your developer does want to use cloud native tools to build those next generation advanced analytics applications, but prod is still on-premises, they should just be able to pick that code up, and because we are deploying 100% open-source frameworks, the code should run as is. >> So, it seems like the strategy is to basically build, now that's what GreenLake is, right? It's a cloud. It's like, hey, here's your options, use whatever you want. >> Well, and it's your cloud. That's, what's so important about GreenLake, is it's your cloud, in your data center or co-lo, with your data, your tools, and your code. And again, we know that organizations are going to go to a multi or hybrid cloud location and through our management capabilities, we can reach out if you don't want us to control those, not necessarily, that's okay, but we should at least be able to monitor and audit the data that sits in those other locations, the applications that are running, maybe I register your GKE cluster. I don't manage it, but at least through a central pane of glass, I can tell the Head of Applications, what that person's utilization is across these environments. >> You know, and you said something, Matt, that struck, resonated with me, which is this is not trivial. I mean, not as simple to do. I mean what you see, you see a lot of customers or companies, what they're doing, vendors, they'll wrap their stack in Kubernetes, shove it in the cloud, it's essentially hosted stack, right? And, you're kind of taking a different approach. You're saying, hey, we're essentially building a cloud that's going to connect all these estates. And the key is you're going to have to keep, and you are, I think that's probably part of the reason why we're here, announcing stuff very quickly. A lot of innovation has to come out to satisfy that demand that you're essentially talking about. >> Because we've oversimplified things with containers, right? Because containers don't have what matters for data, and what matters for enterprise, which is persistence, right? I have to be able to turn my systems down, or I don't know when I'm going to use that data, but it has to stay there. And that's not solved in the container world by itself. And that's what's coming now, the heavy lifting is done by people like HPE, to provide that persistence of the data across the different deployment platforms. And then, there's just a need to modernize my on-premise platforms. Right? I can't run on a server which is two, three years old, right? It's no longer safe, it doesn't have trusted identity, all the good stuff that you need these days, right? It cannot be operated remotely, or whatever happens there, where there's two, three years, is long enough for a server to have run their course, right? >> Well you're a software guy, you hate hardware anyway, so just abstract that hardware complexity away from you. >> Hardware is the necessary evil, right? It's like TSA. I want to go somewhere, but I have to go through TSA. >> But that's a key point, let me buy a service, if I need compute, give it to me. And if I don't, I don't want to hear about it, right? And that's kind of the direction that you're headed. >> That's right. >> Holger: That's what you're offering. >> That's right, and specifically the services. So GreenLake's been offering infrastructure, virtual machines, IaaS, as a service. And we want to stop talking about that underlying capability because it's a dial tone now. What organizations and these developers want is the service. Give me a service or a function, like I get in the cloud, but I need to get going today. I need it within my security parameters, access to my data, my tools, so I can get going as quickly as possible. And then beyond that, we're going to give you that cloud billing practices. Because, just because you're deploying a cloud native service, if you're still still being deployed via CapEx, you're not solving a lot of problems. So we also need to have that cloud billing model. >> Great. Well Holger, we'll give you the last word, bring us home. >> It's very interesting to have the cloud qualities of subscription-based pricing maintained by HPE as the cloud vendor from somewhere else. And that gives you that flexibility. And that's very important because data is essential to enterprise processes. And there's three reasons why data doesn't go to the cloud, right? We know that. It's privacy residency requirement, there is no cloud infrastructure in the country. It's performance, because network latency plays a role, right? Especially for critical appraisal. And then there's not invented here, right? Remember Charles Phillips saying how old the CIO is? I know if they're going to go to the cloud or not, right? So, it was not invented here. These are the things which keep data on-premise. You know that load, and HP is coming on with a very interesting offering. >> It's physics, it's laws, it's politics, and sometimes it's cost, right? Sometimes it's too expensive to move and migrate. Guys, thanks so much. Great to see you both. >> Matt: Dave, it's always a pleasure. All right, and thank you for watching the Cubes continuous coverage of HPE's big GreenLake announcements. Keep it right there for more great content. (calm music begins)

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto, in Boston bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is breaking analysis with Dave Vellante. >> SaaS companies have been some of the strongest performers in this COVID era. They finally took a bit of a breather this month, but they remain generally well-positioned for the next several years with their predictable models and cloud platforms. Meanwhile, the demise of on-prem legacy players from COVID shock, seems to have been overstated, in part because of the return of the laptop and in the case of Oracle with some see as a cloud play, Hmm. Then there's Bitcoin which is seeing public companies use their balance sheet liquidity to invest in the cryptocurrency. (chuckles) Wow. What does that all mean? I'll leave that for another day. Hello everyone and welcome to this week on Cube insights powered by ETR. On this breaking analysis, we'll pick out some of the more recent themes from this month and share our thoughts in some major enterprise software players, the future of on-prem, a review of our take on cloud and what cloud will look like in the 2020s. Wow. It's true, trees really don't grow to the moon. As predicted, the stock market has been a little bit crazy this month. February saw some leading SaaS names like Workday, Salesforce, and ServiceNow take a bit of a breather in the second half of the month. Workday and Salesforce announced earnings on the 25th. Workday had its first billion dollar subscription revenue quarter at 16% revenue growth a revenue and earnings beat. And of course the stock closed down Friday, more than 2%. Salesforce had a nearly $6 billion revenue quarter 20% growth, a revenue and earnings beat. And the day after it announced earnings the stock was down more than 6%. The market is worried about rising interest rates, and maybe concerned that an inflation fears are going to kill the stimulus bill. And so any whiff of caution by company managements is met with dampened enthusiasm. Meanwhile, it's looking like some of the big on-prem legacy firms, notably Dell, HPQ and HPE are making it through COVID, and might even come out in the other side stronger maybe. Dell handily beat expectations on the 25th on the strength of 17% growth in its client business. That's PCs. It's the gift that keeps on giving. HPQ had a strong beat as well, and we're anticipating a solid quarter from HPE next week on March 2nd. And then there's Oracle. Barron's had a big article on February 19th, entitled, "Oracle is turning into a cloud giant and why it's stock is a buy". It moved the market. And many investors rotated out of growth stocks, tech growth tech stocks into Oracle, others who had owned Oracle for a while scooped up some profits. Is Oracle a cloud giant? Hmm. We'll discuss that in a moment. And then there's all this Bitcoin mania. You know, our interest there is much more beyond the price fluctuations rather we're interested in the innovations in crypto. Look, we're going to table this for another day, but it's an interesting side note of this February madness. Let's take a look closer look at the February chill for SaaS companies. Here's a chart showing the relative performance of some of the big SaaS names in the latter half of this month. Now despite the strong earnings for Workday and Salesforce you can see the market's negative response on the 26th. Snowflake and ServiceNow they had epic runs last year, and they've been softening although on Friday morning ServiceNow shut down quickly on the open on sympathy with Workday and ServiceNow and then investors, you know, came back in. Very weird action in the market these days, again, not surprising. And look at the reaction investors had to the Barron's article on the 19th. They anointed Oracle as a cloud giant. Kudos to the Oracle PR team for that one. Now, let's take a look at these companies and put them in context. Even though they're not direct competitors it's instructive to model some of the top enterprise software players in positions, and line them up against each other. This chart here shows two dimensions from the ETR data. On the vertical axis is net score or customer spending momentum. And the horizontal axis is market share or pervasiveness in the survey. The table inset shows the net score measurement in the shared end. That's the metric that plots the dots. In both cases bigger is better. Note, that red dotted-line there is the 40% line. 40% to us is the magic number. Anything above that line is considered elevated. So we have ServiceNow and Salesforce they're up to the right. They're both big companies. They have significant market presence amongst the CIO and both have elevated spending velocity in the 50% range. And I've said for years, these two companies are on a collision course and I stand by that. It started happening and McDermott Bill McDermott, new CEO he's going to accelerate that in our view. We put a cloud around Snowflake tongue in cheek, because they are literally in the clouds on this chart. They stand alone, with a solid market presence that continues to grow in an off the charts net score of 83.3% now. For context you can see Oracle Fusion, NetSuite and Taleo. In addition, we put Slack and Coupa on the graphic, two names that have been on the radar lately and SAP, which continues to show decent spending momentum despite its challenges. All right, let me make a few comments on some of these companies. Snowflake, we've talked about a lot. I said earlier that their IPO, that if you really wanted to own it and couldn't wait for a better price, which I thought you'd get. And by the way you did, but then if you really wanted to own it on day one hold your nose and buy it and then wait a few years. So, you know, good luck. And I think you'll, it'll turn out okay for you. Now, the data really continues to show strong demand for Snowflake. There's no signs of them slowing down. So they announced earnings on March 3rd. We didn't have more data there. So we would expect confirmation of our analysis but you never know. Now Workday, here's our take. In our view the market is catching up to Workday. They had about a three-year lead at least in human capital management and the cloud and that whole model. And they had the best product. It was really simple and it was quite disruptive. But now you got Oracle, ADP, Ceridian they're catching up. Workday's expansion into financial management has been much more challenging and as it gets bigger, things get tougher. It's still though an enduring name. Salesforce, we see a bit differently. Salesforce is so big now, it's really hard for it to move the needle. And so it's been on an acquisition binge, and to grow that's likely going to continue. It could work well for the company. I mean, similar to the ways in which Oracle consolidated software names and picked up a lot of customers. Salesforce is a great name, and we think is going to continue to grow. ServiceNow is interesting. It's entering a new chapter under CEO, Bill McDermott, new CEO. He wants to double the company's revenue. And I think he's got a reasonable chance at that through a combination of great go-to-market and expanding the platform and in McDermott style doing acquisitions. SAP's market value tripled under his watch, and he knows the customers. And he's a magnet for attracting talent. Now ServiceNow is not without its challenges. Its customers often complain that ServiceNow is pricing is really high and it's becoming the Oracle of service management. But as McDermott aims more at SAP and Oracle customers, they create a nice umbrella for ServiceNow to work with. And technically, we think ServiceNow has other challenges around its multi-instance. We call it, if you can't fix it feature it architecture. That may present some issues down the road at scale. We don't have time to go into that in detail but suffice it to say that ServiceNow runs on its own cloud. So it's not running on a hyper scale cloud. Yeah. Good news it doesn't have to pay it through that. The bad news is, has got to manage all that infrastructure. It's basically be a cloud supply supplier but it doesn't do multi-tenant which means fundamentally, it has a more expensive cost structure. Okay. Let's turn our attention to what's happening on-prem with some of the big legacy names. Here's the same X Y chart with some of the big names that have a presence on-prem. First you can see VMware and Cisco, Oracle, Dell, IBM and HP. Look at them on the horizontal scale. They've got a large market share of presence in the ETR dataset. Unlike the larger SaaS companies however, none is above that magic 40% net scoreline. Pure, Dell's laptop business, Red Hat, OpenShift. They're above the line with Nutanix just about there at the line. The other major laptop players, Lenovo and HPQ showing momentum from the whole remote work trend. And for context, we put in NetApp so you can get a sense of where they're at. Pure beat its earnings last week but only grew 2% last quarter. Now remember the ETR survey, this is a forward-looking survey. So this potentially bodes well for the companies that are above that 40% line. Okay. So most so sorry of the companies on this chart only IBM and Oracle, those two own a public cloud. And we'll dig further into that in a moment, but virtually every name shown here, even Oracle has a mandate to redefine cloud. Meaning it has to put forth in our view in North star vision and execute on it. That will unify the experience between on-prem, hybrid cloud, public clouds, cross clouds and the edge. Now I say even Oracle, because in my view, Oracle is in a stronger position than the others, because of it's more coherent software architecture. Now the other companies on this chart, they have to architect a platform that abstracts the underlying complexity of clouds, leverage cloud native tooling in the respective public clouds. Connect on-prem infrastructure and build a layer, that stretches out and accommodates edge workloads. I think Oracle will follow suit and is actually ahead of most in a narrower context, i.e hybrid. But it doesn't have to race toward this vision. It can sit back as it often does, watch everyone else fumble around and make mistakes. And then Oracle will keep investing in R&D, watch the market, you know make its own experimental mistakes, and then enter the market and act like we invented it. Now, Cisco will come at this from a strong networking and security perspective. And it has a nice story on programmable infrastructure with Cisco DevNet. But unfortunately it does not own VMware as does Dell, but Dell is in the middle of a fairly remarkable journey. And it will be interesting to see what happens with the VMware spin-out and the cozy commercial relationship that Dell is structuring with VMware as you know, and as we've reported, Dell has used VMware's cash for a lot of this restructuring. And so we'll see, as it exits the current phase and enters a new phase, how it will be able to pursue that vision. It's going to be, whatever it does it's going to be much different than that vertically integrated Oracle approach, which of course brings me to IBM. Potentially Red Hat with OpenShift is the most powerful card in the deck right now. OpenShift I mean, it's open it's everywhere. It has momentum as we showed. And I like their position. My concern is IBM, IBM is still unwinding and restructuring its business. And it's taking a long time as we've seen, with its outsourcing business. And now the Watson health assets, Irvine is continuing that downsizing trend that we saw under Ginny, shedding non-strategic businesses that don't fit, Irvine has a lot to deal with. And I want to point out that this idea of an abstraction layer across clouds is not trivial. First, all of these companies have to stop being so defensive about the public cloud. To a large extent, VMware and Red Hat have found a happy place. But in my view, they all should be thanking AWS, Azure, and Google for building out this great global distributed system, that they can leverage and build on top of. And second, this is going to be expensive. And Cisco, Dell VMware, IBM, they're all really stretched thin from an R&D perspective. They a lot of mouths to feed across the portfolio. So is HPE stretched thin, and it doesn't have the R&D budget at less than $2 billion annually. So my concern is that we're going to have lots of complexity across these obstructions layers by vendor. Now maybe the good news for companies. This may be good news for companies like Hashi or specialists with a vision to do this within a domain like a clumial, or a vast data, but this is big, and they are small. So it's going to take the better part of a decade to play out. Now, let's take a quick look at the cloud players. OMG when I saw that article in Barron's last weekend my mouth dropped. What a headline and it had this illustration of a stout Larry Ellison rising above the clouds. Here's a picture of the ETR data for the cloud players. It's the same X, Y plotting or net score and market share. If you follow this program, you know we believe there are four and only four hyper scale cloud players, with the resources to compete and differentiate as horizontal infrastructure players, which really is how we view the origination of modern cloud computing. AWS created it with S3 and EC2 with 2006. Those four are AWS and Azure, which have a large lead over the pack. Google cloud and Alibaba. And you can see we've circled the on-prem pack which comprises Oracle and IBM along with Dell VMware. And we snuck Google just stuck them at the edge of that circle because the differentiate they're cozying up to companies with strong enterprise sales teams and Google's, they're smart, they're patient. And so we, by no means, count them out. They're spending like mad and they have a lot of cash. They've done some really interesting open source things with containers. And so, you know, no doubt they're a player, but they are behind. Now in that on-prem pack, IBM and Oracle they actually own their own public clouds. IBM, they acquired soft layer which was a bare metal hosting company at the time to get IBM into the game. They retooled the platform over several years. Now here's the thing, try and unpack IBM's cloud business looking at its financial or in earnings reports. It's just a mess. I hope Irvine cuts the nonsense and actually develops and reports a set of metrics that are meaningful to cloud observers and IBM observers, because the way IBM reports its cloud business today is opaque and it's nonsense. It's frankly embarrassing to the company. It needs to end sooner rather than later is fundamentally meaningless to any observers. Now observers of cloud. If you care about the big chunk of whatever then maybe it has meaning. Now Oracle for its part, they announced the public cloud years ago, its version of one datto cloud was crap. And the company, they hired a bunch of really smart cloud engineers and they spent a lot of money to fix that. Now neither IBM nor Oracle have the CapEx resources of the big four, not even close, yet they'll build out data centers and yes they'll have a play, but they're different and that's okay. Now in the Barron's article on Oracle, the author was quite positive on Oracle, noting that quote, "On a recent earnings call CEO Safra Catz said that Oracle cloud infrastructure revenue was up 139% for the quarter". So, (laughs) we have really no sense or a stake in the ground is to up from what? Anyway, noting further the author said, quote, "Alas! Oracle doesn't break out OCI sales and comps can be messy". Hmm, indeed. Oracle is hiding the ball on OCI, that's because if they did break it out, which by the way they used to report, AIS revenue explicitly, but if they did break it out, they would only be highlighting that they are a minor player in AIS. Further, the article continues, quote, "Catz says that hers is the only tech company that has both a global cloud and a full set of enterprise applications". Unquote, bingo. There it is. That's why Oracle is in a better position than many of or most of the on-prem players listed in this chart. By the way, I would argue that Microsoft has a pretty impressive set of enterprise applications in a fairly global cloud. But what Safra is talking about is applications that support the world's most mission critical work. And when it comes to that, Oracle is number one. Don't fool yourself and get caught up in the Oracle lock-in and high pricing narrative, thinking that they're going to get crushed. They're not. Oracle is the best in the mission critical workload game. There is no one better, period. But guys, come on. The big four last year grew 41% and accounted for $86 billion in AIS revenue, AKA real cloud revenue. And they're going to surpass $115 billion this year combined. Real cloud companies don't grow in the single digits today. So talk to me when we reach equilibrium on that front. Okay. So let's wrap by looking at what does a cloud company look like in the 2020s? Now, I'm not saying that the rest of the pack shouldn't redefine cloud they should. But I hope we can all agree by now that modern day cloud computing was defined in business terms by AWS. They are number one in cloud computing, make no mistake. However, AWS is bringing the cloud into the wheelhouse of the on-prem players, cleverly saying that it's bringing AWS to the edge and it looks at the data centers. Just another edge node is great positioning but that is not trivial. Just look it out posts and how AWS has had to evolve its pricing strategy in terms, can't just turn it off like you can, the public cloud. I have an entire rant on all the, SaaS service transformations. It's really interesting to watch as AWS goes out, and the on-prem players come in and go hybrid. I got a lot of thought on what's happening there both in terms of SaaS, which I think is an outdated pricing model, and the infrastructure as a service players that are really getting into this game, we would love to do a session on that sometime. And it's a real disruption I think coming. Anyway, AWS competitors should absolutely try to redefine cloud. By AWS moving to the edge, it's opened up the door to that possibility. Microsoft is obviously in the best position I think by far here. They've earned the right and I'll never accuse them of cloud washing. Google, they got some work to do in this regard, but they probably have the largest physical cloud infrastructure in the world. As I've said, they just need to pull their heads out of their ads and quadruple down on cloud. But this idea of abstracting away the underlying complexity of the cloud, leveraging cloud native capabilities and building on top of the shoulders of the cloud giants such as David Floyer has expressed in this chart, moving from stateless to state full, integrating across clouds, advancing automation not only through the stack, but across domains and ultimately using metadata to govern where workloads should live or be moved, be disintegrated and recombined with low latency and be highly secured. I look at this, I think about this and I say one there is this technically feasible and smart techies tell me yes, so I keep trying to dig here for signs and I definitely see some movement in this direction. And two, I don't think any one vendor is going to do this themselves. They're not going to, it's not going to be owned by one company. I think what's going to happen is you'll get successes within layers of the stack. I mean, think about Snowflakes data cloud. We're going to see that for storage. See it for backup, data management, security maybe security within different domains. You see endpoint and identity access management. Maybe that cloud comes together as cloud security. You see it in applications, but without clear standards, it's going to be a challenge. And with respect to my friends at Snowflake, we might even see it in database sometime LOL, but look you all have a lot of work to do. And to my CIO friends, you know the drill much better than I, technology is going to keep relentlessly coming at you and you can deal with that. It's the people and the change management in the culture. Those are your bigger challenges, but don't screw up the tech. Okay. Thanks for watching. Remember, these episodes are all available as podcasts wherever you listen, just search breaking analysis podcasts, and please subscribe to the series, we appreciate that. Check out ETR's website at ETR.plus sorry, ETR.plus. We also publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. You can email me at David.Vellante@siliconangle.com or DM me on Twitter at DVellante that's @DVellante or comment, excuse me on my LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Stay safe, be well, get the jab if you have an opportunity. And we'll see you next time. (soft music)

>> Welcome back, everyone, to our special live Silicon Angle presentation with Druva special live event. This is the Druva Cloud tech preview section with Prem Ananthakrishnan who is is the VP of Product. Prem, Welcome to this segment and giving a preview of the Druva Cloud Platform. We've got a demo coming up. But first, tell us, what is the Druva Cloud Platform? >> First of all, John, great to be here. Let me start off by summarizing what Jaspreet said earlier. So, Druva Cloud Platform brings to market a project called Druva One that we have been working internally for more than 18 months. What this provides is a product that provides a single pane of glass for organizations to protect, govern, and intelligently manage their data, irrespective of where that data resides. And if you really think about where the enterprise data is today, going back to the conversation that you had with Matt and Dave, a lot of the data is now distributed and highly fragmented, right? It's not really sitting behind the four walls of the firewall like it used to. And when you think about how do you manage data that is so distributed and decentralized, you have to think about a centralized approach to manage that data, and cloud becomes the obvious choice for managing that data. That's what Druva Cloud Platform does. It really unifies that management experience by bringing together data across end points, infrastructure, SaaS, and cloud applications, like Office 365, and providing the unified single pane of glass experience again for our customers. And, more importantly, unlike you know the solutions that are out there on the market which really force you to manage data in silos by using different application stacks or management consoles or even multiple logins. Druva provides a single unified interface from where you can easily manage this data. >> I get the unified approach. Let's drill into the as-a-service delivery piece. Why does it matter, and what's the impact to the customer? >> That's a great question. First of all, we are the only solution in the market that can provide data protection and management as a service. And the as-a-service piece, you know, there are multiple advantages to it. Let's start with the obvious one. The obvious one is where people can save a lot of money and also save on the total cost of ownership by really eliminating hardware and the infrastructure costs. But when you start thinking about what's going on in the market, you know, with cloud washing and also with people really overusing the term cloud, you have to really think about how your customers would really see the difference between the benefits you would get from an as-a-service solution versus just software that's hosted in the cloud. And you know, I got to say when you start looking at people who have gone down the path of hosting software in the cloud, a lot of times they underestimate the cost and complexity that comes with maintaining as well as deploying and supporting software in the cloud. And what the end result is, you know, they get a huge check from the cloud provider, and then they're all upset. They are like, wait a minute, this is not what I was promised and not what I expected, right? Because if you think about what really goes behind this, when you start putting software in the cloud, you're still leasing infrastructure from your cloud provider. But you, the customer, are responsible for managing the application stack, which means you're responsible for patching software, upgrading it, security, ensuring the service availability with that software. All those things still fall on you. And that stuff still costs you. People don't realize that. >> Yeah, and what's interesting, too, with DevOps, we've got this whole infrastructure as code concept, so the cloud is attractive from that standpoint because all these hidden costs around the glue layer, if you will, APIs, microservices. You've still got to put them together in an effective way, which is also going to be hard. How does the cloud platform you guys have with Druva help facilitate the customer journey to be simpler to execute if they're all API based or they love DevOps? How do you guys fit into that? That's a great question again. But first it starts with the as-a-service model itself. When you think about a true software as a service solution, like Druva, what we do is we bring together that customer experience. It's not just about you know, throwing software in the cloud and using it, as I mentioned earlier. You basically have a promise of SLA, our service guarantee. You also have a predictable cost. And you also have, you know, an underlying architecture that really supports all of that, right? And that's where this notion of APIs and microservices also comes in. When you talk about microservices, for example, that really provides our customers to scale pretty much infinitely to millions of users over zettabytes of data without having to worry about bottlenecks in performance or reliability or even resiliency. And that is huge, right? I mean, this kind of promise again you get with the cloud, but also with a true as-a-service experience in a true cloud world. >> Well, the big news here in this event we're doing digitally with you guys is obviously funding, but also the introduction of the Druva Cloud Platform preview. So let's get into the demo. You want to walk us through the solution? >> Absolutely. Let me switch over and walk you through the demo. So John, what you see here is the dashboard that an administrator would see once they log in to the Druva Cloud Platform management console. As you can see here, the dashboard gives you a quick summary of the total data protected and managed by Druva with a clear breakdown of that data based on different data sources, such as your cloud applications, data on your end points, file servers, as well as virtual servers. Again, bringing together that single pane of glass management experience across all your data sources. Once again, this is huge, right? When you start thinking about the legacy solutions, they offer this in piecemeal. We're able to bring this unified experience and being able to do that on a single management console, allowing our customers to protect and manage and govern all this data. And when you look at the service utilization piece here, that really tells you the value an organization can get from this platform. Not just in terms of your classic backup and restores, but also in terms of how their internal teams can use this platform to solve their use cases around e-discovery, or compliance. As you scroll down here, you can see some of the other elements of SaaS and you know the software as a service benefits that I talked about earlier. Things like service availability, supportability, and also a great user and learning experience. So when you talk about service availability, as you can see here, you can pretty much get a bird eye view of where your data is located anywhere in the world and also the operational status of the data center of a region. And once again, Druva is very uniquely positioned in the market when it comes to being able to spin new data centers anywhere in the world within a very short notice, maybe in just minutes or hours. And the reason, again, we are able to do that is because we're not constrained by the limitations of a software solution where you have to still install that on some server and bring up your application stack. We can pretty much orchestrate this anywhere in the world where we also obviously leverage the global footprint from our public cloud partners, like Amazon and Microsoft. >> So both clouds are there. I see Ransomware on there, that's cool. Is there any kind of Steve Jobs, one more thing, kind of feature you can show us? >> There is definitely that. >> You've got a one more thing? (laughs) >> There's always the one more thing. So let me get into that. (John laughs) Before I go into that, I want to mention one more thing. And then I'm going to dive into that real quick. So what you see here in the central panel here are also the different microservices, right? So again, the microservices provide a great way for our customers not only to scale to that terabytes of data and millions of users, it also gives Druva a great way to bring new products and services to our customers with agility and great go-to-market efficiency. So our customers can easily consume something that we bring to them right off of this console. They can subscribe to it, just like you would go to Amazon today and log in to that portal and consume let's say a storage service like S3, our customers can come to Druva and consume data protection at scale with a single click. Now with that, I'm going to go to the Steve Jobs question. There's always one more thing. >> John: One more thing! Saving the best for last! >> Prem: (laughs) Always! To think about the administrative challenges a lot of people go through when they manage products and go through the day to day administration, they always struggle with navigating the different sections of the product or the product documentation because that's how enterprise products are. They are fairly complex. They actually have multiple workflows. And then, especially when you think about remote offices, or locations where you have employees with limited IT skill set, then you have to think about how do they really get started? How do they really know where to go? How do you get from point A to point B? And we took this problem statement to our engineering team and told them to solve it. Our brilliant engineers came up with this really cool search utility that we are calling CAS, or context aware search. And Jaspreet sort of alluded to this earlier in the day. And if you look at what this does, as I start searching for any keyword, this is the kind of experience I'm sure you and I have seen with consumer websites. Let's say you go to a shopping site like Walmart or Amazon and when you're searching for whatever you're shopping for, the search tool uses your history, also has an intelligence of what other people have been looking for, and it comes back with results. >> John: Kind of like Google search for the enterprise. >> Prem: Exactly, but think about this, though. What this is doing now is Druva is bringing that consumer-like search experience into the enterprise. And now we're using that to solve this problem of administrators having to navigate through different parts of the product. So what you are able to do with this is now with a single click, you can easily navigate to any part of the product or the product documentation. So as an example, I'm just going to click on, I'll go back to that. I'm going to go back to Legal Hold. And I'm going to click on the Manage Legal Hold link. As you can see, with a single click, it takes me directly into that section of the product from where I can manage Legal Hold. Let's try another example. In this case, let's assume I'm not really ready to manage anything yet, but I still want to learn about Office 365 and how Druva integrates with Office 365. So as you can see, the search results have also been cleanly categorized into two sections. You have actions for configuration and you also have information links. So now I'm clicking on this link which allows me to quickly go to our documentation page and see how Druva can integrate with Office 365. So once again, the goal here is to make that administrative experience easier, intuitive, and allow them to navigate to any part of the product or product documentation with one single click. >> John: Truly a single pane of glass for the user. Discovery, learning, and all the knowledge center in there. Congratulations. So the question is, when can people get started? >> Great question. People can get started today with our end-user data protection as well as SaaS data protection and the infrastructure data protection products. There are free trials available at Druva.com. The Druva Cloud Platform will be available towards the later half of this calendar year, in Q4. But we are also starting early trials as early as next month. >> Prem, thanks so much. Great demo. Congratulations on the tech preview. Great demo. And our next segment will be talking about the $80 million financing with the CFO and the big time investors, on our next segment. Be right back.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with coverage of Yukon and Cloud. Native Con North America 2020 Virtual brought to you by Red Hat The Cloud, Native Computing Foundation and Ecosystem Partners. Hello, everyone. And welcome back to the cubes Ongoing coverage of Cuba con North America. Joe Fernandez is here. He's with Stephanie, Cheras and Joe's, the V, P and GM for core cloud platforms. That red hat and Stephanie is this s VP and GM of the Red Hat Enterprise. Lennox bu. Two great friends of the Cube. Awesome seeing you guys. How you doing? >>It's great to be here, Dave. Yeah, thanks >>for the opportunity. >>Hey, so we all talked, you know, recently, uh, answerable fest Seems like a while ago, but But we talked about what's new? Red hat really coming at it from an automation perspective. But I wonder if we could take a view from open shift and what's new from the standpoint of you really focus on helping customers, you know, change their operations and operationalize. And Stephanie, Maybe you could start, and then, you know, Joe, you could bring in some added color. >>No, that's great. And I think you know one of the things we try and do it. Red hat clearly building off of open source. We have been focused on this open hybrid cloud strategy for, you know, really years. Now the beauty of it is that hybrid cloud and open hybrid cloud continues to evolve right with bringing in things like speed and stability and scale and now adding in other footprints, like manage services as well as edge and pulling that all together across the whole red hat portfolio from the platforms, right? Certainly with Lennox and roll into open shift in the platform with open shift and then adding automation, which certainly you need for scale. But it's ah, it's continues to evolve as the as the definition of open hybrid cloud evolves. >>Great. So thank you, Stephanie jokes. You guys got hard news here that you could maybe talk about 46? >>Yeah. Eso eso open shift is our enterprise kubernetes platform. With this announcement, we announced the release of open ship 4.6 Eso eso We're doing releases every quarter tracking the upstream kubernetes release cycle. So this brings communities 1.19, which is, um but itself brings a number of new innovations, some specific things to call out. We have this new automated installer for open shift on bare metal, and that's definitely a trend that we're seeing is more customers not only looking at containers but looking at running containers directly on bare metal environments. Open shift provides an abstraction, you know, which combines Cuban. And he's, uh, on top of Lennox with RL. I really across all environments, from bare metal to virtualization platforms to the various public clouds and out to the edge. But we're seeing a lot of interest in bare metal. This is basically increasing the really three automation to install seamlessly and manage upgrades in those environments. We're also seeing a number of other enhancements open shifts service mesh, which is our SDO based solution for managing, uh, the interactions between micro services being able to manage traffic against those services. Being able to do tracing. We have a new release of that on open shift Ford out six on then, um, some work specific to the public cloud that we started extending into the government clouds. So we already supported AWS and Azure. With this release, we added support for the A W s government cloud as well. Azaz Acela's Microsoft Azure government on dso again This is really important to like our public sector customers who are looking to move to the public cloud leveraging open shift as an abstraction but wanted thio support it on the specialized clouds that they need to use with azure gonna meet us Cup. >>So, joke, we stay there for a minute. So so bare metal talking performance there because, you know, you know what? You really want to run fast, right? So that's the attractiveness there. And then the point about SDO in the open, open shift service measure that makes things simpler. Maybe talk a little bit about sort of business impact and what customers should expect to get out of >>these two things. So So let me take them one at a time, right? So so running on bare metal certainly performances a consideration. You know, I think a lot of fixed today are still running containers, and Cuban is on top of some form of virtualization. Either a platform like this fear or open stack, or maybe VMS in the in one of the public clouds. But, you know containers don't depend on a virtualization layer. Containers only depend on Lennox and Lennox runs great on bare metal. So as we see customers moving more towards performance and Leighton see sensitive workloads, they want to get that Barry mental performance on running open shift on bare metal and their containerized applications on that, uh, platform certainly gives them that advantage. Others just want to reduce the cost right. They want to reduce their VM sprawl, the infrastructure and operational cost of managing avert layer beneath their careers clusters. And that's another benefit. So we see a lot of uptake in open shift on bare metal on the service match side. This is really about You know how we see applications evolving, right? Uh, customers are moving more towards these distributed architectures, taking, you know, formally monolithic or enter applications and splitting them out into ah, lots of different services. The challenge there becomes. Then how do you manage all those connections? Right, Because something that was a single stack is now comprised of tens or hundreds of services on DSO. You wanna be able to manage traffic to those services, so if the service goes down, you can redirect that those requests thio to an alternative or fail over service. Also tracing. If you're looking at performance issues, you need to know where in your architecture, er you're having those degradations and so forth. And, you know, those are some of the challenges that people can sort of overcome or get help with by using service mash, which is powered by SDO. >>And then I'm sorry, Stephanie ever get to in a minute. But which is 11 follow up on that Joe is so the rial differentiation between what you bring in what I can just if I'm in a mono cloud, for instance is you're gonna you're gonna bring this across clouds. I'm gonna You're gonna bring it on, Prem And we're gonna talk about the edge in in a minute. Is that right? From a differentiation standpoint, >>Yeah, that That's one of the key >>differentiations. You know, Read has been talking about the hybrid cloud for a long time. We've we've been articulating are open hybrid cloud strategy, Andi, >>even if that's >>not a strategy that you may be thinking about, it is ultimately where folks end up right, because all of our enterprise customers still have applications running in the data center. But they're also all starting to move applications out to the public cloud. As they expand their usage of public cloud, you start seeing them adopted multi cloud strategies because they don't want to put all their eggs in one basket. And then for certain classes of applications, they need to move those applications closer to the data. And and so you start to see EJ becoming part of that hybrid cloud picture on DSO. What we do is basically provide a consistency across all those environments, right? We want run great on Amazon, but also great on Azure on Google on bare metal in the data center during medal out at the edge on top of your favorite virtualization platform. And yeah, that that consistency to take a set of applications and run them the same way across all those environments. That is just one of the key benefits of going with red hat as your provider for open hybrid cloud solutions. >>All right, thank you. Stephanie would come back to you here, so I mean, we talk about rail a lot because your business unit that you manage, but we're starting to see red hats edge strategy unfolded. Kind of real is really the linchpin I wanna You could talk about how you're thinking about the edge and and particularly interested in how you're handling scale and why you feel like you're in a good position toe handle that massive scale on the requirements of the edge and versus hey, we need a new OS for the edge. >>Yeah, I think. And Joe did a great job of said and up it does come back to our view around this open hybrid cloud story has always been about consistency. It's about that language that you speak, no matter where you want to run your applications in between rela on on my side and Joe with open shift and and of course, you know we run the same Lennox underneath. So real core os is part of open shift that consistently see leads to a lot of flexibility, whether it's through a broad ecosystem or it's across footprints. And so now is we have been talking with customers about how they want to move their applications closer to data, you know, further out and away from their data center. So some of it is about distributing your data center, getting that compute closer to the data or closer to your customers. It drives, drives some different requirements right around. How you do updates, how you do over the air updates. And so we have been working in typical red hat fashion, right? We've been looking at what's being done in the upstream. So in the fedora upstream community, there is a lot of working that has been done in what's called the I. O. T Special Interest group. They have been really investigating what the requirements are for this use case and edge. So now we're really pleased in, um, in our most recent release of really aid relate 00.3. We have put in some key capabilities that we're seeing being driven by these edge use cases. So things like How do you do quick image generation? And that's important because, as you distribute, want that consistency created tailored image, be able to deploy that in a consistent way, allow that to address scale, meet security requirements that you may have also right updates become very important when you start to spread this out. So we put in things in order to allow remote device mirroring so that you can put code into production and then you can schedule it on those remote devices toe happen with the minimal disruption. Things like things like we all know now, right with all this virtual stuff, we often run into things like not ideal bandwidth and sometimes intermittent connectivity with all of those devices out there. So we put in, um, capabilities around, being able to use something called rpm Austria, Um, in order to be able to deliver efficient over the air updates. And then, of course, you got to do intelligent rollbacks for per chance that something goes wrong. How do you come back to a previous state? So it's all about being able to deploy at scale in a distributed way, be ready for that use case and have some predictability and consistency. And again, that's what we build our platforms for. It's all about predictability and consistency, and that gives you flexibility to add your innovation on top. >>I'm glad you mentioned intelligent rollbacks I learned a long time ago. You always ask the question. What happens when something goes wrong? You learn a lot from the answer to that, but You know, we talk a lot about cloud native. Sounds like you're adapting well to become edge native. >>Yeah. I mean, I mean, we're finding whether it's inthe e verticals, right in the very specific use cases or whether it's in sort of an enterprise edge use case. Having consistency brings a ton of flexibility. It was funny, one of our talking with a customer not too long ago. And they said, you know, agility is the new version of efficiency. So it's that having that sort of language be spoken everywhere from your core data center all the way out to the edge that allows you a lot of flexibility going forward. >>So what if you could talk? I mentioned just mentioned Cloud Native. I mean, I think people sometimes just underestimate the effort. It takes tow, make all this stuff run in all the different clouds the engineering efforts required. And I'm wondering what kind of engineering you do with if any with the cloud providers and and, of course, the balance of the ecosystem. But But maybe you could describe that a little bit. >>Yeah, so? So Red Hat works closely with all the major cloud providers you know, whether that's Amazon, Azure, Google or IBM Cloud. Obviously, Andi, we're you know, we're very keen on sort of making sure that we're providing the best environment to run enterprise applications across all those environments, whether you're running it directly just with Lennox on Ralph or whether you're running it in a containerized environment with Open Chef, which which includes route eso eso, our partnership includes work we do upstream, for example. You know, Red Hat help. Google launched the Cuban community, and I've been, you know, with Google. You know, we've been the top two contributors driving that product that project since inception, um, but then also extends into sort of our hosted services. So we run a jointly developed and jointly managed service called the Azure Red Hat Open Shift Service. Together with Microsoft were our joint customers can get access to open shift in an azure environment as a native azure service, meaning it's, you know, it's fully integrated, just like any other. As your service you can tied into as you're building and so forth. It's sold by by Azure Microsoft's sales reps. Um, but you know, we get the benefit of working together with our Microsoft counterparts and developing that service in managing that service and then in supporting our joint customers. We over the summer announced sort of a similar partnership with Amazon and we'll be launching are already doing pilots on the Amazon Red Hat Open ship service, which is which is, you know, the same concept now applied to the AWS cloud. So that will be coming out g a later this year, right? But again, whether it's working upstream or whether it's, you know, partnering on managed services. I know Stephanie team also do a lot of work with Microsoft, for example, on sequel server on Lenox dot net on Lenox. Whoever thought be running that applications on Linux. But that's, you know, a couple of years old now, a few years old, So eso again. It's been a great partnership, not just with Microsoft, but with all the cloud providers. >>So I think you just shared a little little He showed a little leg there, Joe, what's what's coming g A. Later this year. I want to circle back to >>that. Yeah, eso we way announced a preview earlier this year of of the Amazon Red Hat Open ships service. It's not generally available yet. We're you know, we're taking customers. We want toe, sort of be early access, get access to pilots and then that'll be generally available later this year. Although Red Hat does manage our own service Open ship dedicated that's available on AWS today. But that's a service that's, you know, solely, uh, operated by Red Hat. This new service will be jointly operated by Red Hat and Amazon together Idea. That would be sort of a service that we are delivering together as partners >>as a managed service and and okay, so that's in beta now. I presume if it's gonna be g a little, it's >>like, Yeah, that's yeah, >>that's probably running on bare metal. I would imagine that >>one is running >>on E. C. Two. That's running an A W C C T V exactly, and >>run again. You know, all of our all of >>our I mean, we you know, that open shift does offer bare metal cloud, and we do you know, we do have customers who can take the open shift software and deploy it there right now are managed. Offering is running on top of the C two and on top of Azure VM. But again, this is this is appealing to customers who, you know, like what we bring in terms of an enterprise kubernetes platform, but don't wanna, you know, operated themselves, right? So it's a fully managed service. You just come and build and deploy your APS, and then we manage all of the infrastructure and all the underlying platform for you >>that's going to explode. My prediction. Um, let's take an example of heart example of security. And I'm interested in how you guys ensure a consistent, you know, security experience across all these locations on Prem Cloud. Multiple clouds, the edge. Maybe you could talk about that. And Stephanie, I'm sure you have a perspective on this is Well, from the standpoint of of Ralph. So who wants to start? >>Yeah, Maybe I could start from the bottom and then I'll pass it over to Joe to talk a bit. I think one of these aspects about security it's clearly top of mind of all customers. Um, it does start with the very bottom and base selection in your OS. We continue to drive SC Lennox capabilities into rural to provide that foundational layer. And then as we run real core OS and open shift, we bring over that s C Lennox capability as well. Um, but, you know, there's a whole lot of ways to tackle this we've done. We've done a lot around our policies around, um see ve updates, etcetera around rail to make sure that we are continuing to provide on DCA mitt too. Mitigating all critical and importance, providing better transparency toe how we assess those CVS. So security is certainly top of mind for us. And then as we move forward, right there's also and joke and talk about the security work we do is also capabilities to do that in container ization. But you know, we we work. We work all the way from the base to doing things like these images in these easy to build images, which are tailored so you can make them smaller, less surface area for security. Security is one of those things. That's a lifestyle, right? You gotta look at it from all the way the base in the operating system, with things like sc Lennox toe how you build your images, which now we've added new capabilities. There And then, of course, in containers. There's, um there's a whole focus in the open shift area around container container security, >>Joe. Anything you want to add to that? >>Yeah, sure. I >>mean, I think, you know, obviously, Lennox is the foundation for, you know, for all public clouds. It's it's driving enterprise applications in the data center, part of keeping those applications. Security is keeping them up to date And, you know, through, you know, through real, we provide, you know, securing up to date foundation as a Stephanie mentioned as you move into open shift, you're also been able to take advantage of, uh, Thio to take advantage of essentially mutability. Right? So now the application that you're deploying isn't immutable unit that you build once as a container image, and then you deploy that out all your various environments. When you have to do an update, you don't go and update all those environments. You build a new image that includes those updates, and then you deploy those images out rolling fashion and, as you mentioned that you could go back if there's issues. So the idea, the notion of immutable application deployments has a lot to do with security, and it's enabled by containers. And then, obviously you have cured Panetti's and, you know, and all the rest of our capabilities as part of open Shift managing that for you. We've extended that concept to the entire platform. So Stephanie mentioned, real core West Open shift has always run on real. What we have done in open shift for is we've taken an immutable version of Ralph. So it's the same red hat enterprise Lennox that we've had for years. But now, in this latest version relate, we have a new way to package and deploy it as a relic or OS image, and then that becomes part of the platform. So when customers want toe in addition to keeping their applications up to date, they need to keep their platform up to dates. Need to keep, you know, up with the latest kubernetes patches up with the latest Lennox packages. What we're doing is delivering that as one platform, so when you get updates for open shift, they could include updates for kubernetes. They could include updates for Lennox itself as well as all the integrated services and again, all of this is just you know this is how you keep your applications secure. Is making sure your you know, taking care of that hygiene of, you know, managing your vulnerabilities, keeping everything patched in up to date and ultimately ensuring security for your application and users. >>I know I'm going a little bit over, but I have I have one question that I wanna ask you guys and a broad question about maybe a trends you see in the business. I mean, you look at what we talk a lot about cloud native, and you look at kubernetes and the interest in kubernetes off the charts. It's an area that has a lot of spending momentum. People are putting resource is behind it. But you know, really, to build these sort of modern applications, it's considered state of the art on. Do you see a lot of people trying to really bring that modern approach toe any cloud we've been talking about? EJ. You wanna bring it also on Prem And people generally associate this notion of cloud native with this kind of elite developers, right? But you're bringing it to the masses and there's 20 million plus software developers out there, and most you know, with all due respect that you know they may not be the the the elites of the elite. So how are you seeing this evolve in terms of re Skilling people to be able, handle and take advantage of all this? You know, cool new stuff that's coming out. >>Yeah, I can start, you know, open shift. Our focus from the beginning has been bringing kubernetes to the enterprise. So we think of open shift as the dominant enterprise kubernetes platform enterprises come in all shapes and sizes and and skill sets. As you mentioned, they have unique requirements in terms of how they need toe run stuff in their data center and then also bring that to production, whether it's in the data center across the public clouds eso So part of it is, you know, making sure that the technology meets the requirements and then part of it is working. The people process and and culture thio make them help them understand what it means to sort of take advantage of container ization and cloud native platforms and communities. Of course, this is nothing new to red hat, right? This is what we did 20 years ago when we first brought Lennox to the Enterprise with well, right on. In essence, Carozza is basically distributed. Lennox right Kubernetes builds on Lennox and brings it out to your cluster to your distributed systems on across the hybrid cloud. So So nothing new for Red Hat. But a lot of the same challenges apply to this new cloud native world. >>Awesome. Stephanie, we'll give you the last word, >>all right? And I think just a touch on what Joe talked about it. And Joe and I worked really closely on this, right? The ability to run containers right is someone launches down this because it is magical. What could be done with deploying applications? Using a container technology, we built the capabilities and the tools directly into rural in order to be able to build and deploy, leveraging things like pod man directly into rural. And that's exactly so, folks. Everyone who has a real subscription today can start on their container journey, start to build and deploy that, and then we work to help those skills then be transferrable as you movinto open shift in kubernetes and orchestration. So, you know, we work very closely to make sure that the skills building can be done directly on rail and then transfer into open shift. Because, as Joe said, at the end of the day, it's just a different way to deploy. Lennox, >>You guys are doing some good work. Keep it up. And thanks so much for coming back in. The Cube is great to talk to you today. >>Good to see you, Dave. >>Yes, Thank you. >>All right. Thank you for watching everybody. The cubes coverage of Cuba con en a continues right after this.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Dell Technologies. World Digital experience Brought to you by Dell Technologies. Hello, everyone. And welcome back to the cubes. Continuing coverage of del Tech World 2020. This is David Want, and I'm here with Sam. Grow Kat. Who's the senior vice president of product marketing? Adele Technology. Sam. Great to see you. Welcome. >>Great to be here, Dave. >>All right, we're gonna talk generally about Cloud in the coming decade, but in really how the cloud models evolving. But I want to specifically ask them about the as a service news that Dell's making at DT W You know what those solutions look like? How they're gonna evolve. Maybe maybe Sam, we can hit on some of the customer uptake and the feedback as well. Is that sound good? >>Yeah, Sounds great. Let's dive right in. >>All right, let's do that. So, look, you've come from the world of disruptor. You know, when you joined Isil on that got acquired by M. C. And then Del So you've you've been on both sides of the competitive table and cloud is obviously a major force. Actually, you know, I'd say, the major disruptive force in our industry. So let's talk about how Dell's responding to the cloud trend generally. Then we'll get into the announcements. >>Yeah, certainly. And you're right. I've been on both sides of this, and there is no doubt if you look at just over the last decade or so, how customers are partners. We're really looking at evaluating how they can take advantage of the the value of moving workloads to the cloud. And we've seen it happen over the last decade or so, and it's happening at a more frequent pace. And there's no doubt that is really what planted the seed of this new operating experience. You know, kind of a new lifestyle, so to speak around as a service, because when you go to the cloud, that's the only way they roll is you get in as a service experience. Eso that really has started to come into the data centers organizations or moving specific workloads and applications to the cloud of Hey, how do I get that in a non premise experience? And I think throwing gasoline on that is certainly the pandemic, and Kobe, 19 has really made organizations evaluate how to move much quicker room or gradually by moving some applications to the cloud. Because, frankly, on Prem just wasn't able to move as fast as they like to see. So we're seeing that macro trend accelerate. And, you know, I think we're in good shape to take advantage of that as we go forward. >>Well, that brings us to the hard news of what you're calling Project Apex year as a service initiative. What specifically are you announcing this week? >>Yes. So Project Apex is one of our big announcements. And that's really where we're targeting how we're bringing together and unifying our product development or sales go to market, our marketing, go to market Everything coming together underneath Project Apex, which is our as a service and cloud like experience. Look, we know in that world where customers were constantly evaluating which applications stay on Prem, which applications and workloads should go to the cloud. I think the market has certainly voted clearly that it's gonna be both. It's gonna be a hybrid, multi cloud world, but what they absolutely or clear that they want is a simple, easy to use as a service experience, regardless of if their on primer off from. And that's where. Really, the traditional on premise solutions fall down because it's just too darn complex. Still, they've got many different tools managing many different applications that oversee their cloud operations, their various infrastructure, whether it's server or compute or networking. They all run different tools, so it's very, very complex. It also is very rigid to scale. You can't move as fast because they can't deploy as fast. It requires manual intervention toe by more you to think I got a get a sales rep in house to come in and, uh, extend your environment and grow your environment. And then, of course, the traditional method is very cap ex heavy. In a world where organizations air really trying thio preserve cash. Cash is king. It doesn't really give them the flexibility. Traditionally, um, are going forward that they'd like to see on that front. So what they want to see is a consistent operating experience for their on and off from, uh, environments. They want to see a single tool that can manage and report to grow and do commerce across that environment, regardless of its on or off friend. Uh, they want something that can scale quickly. Now look, when you're moving equipment on Prem, it's not gonna be a click of a button, but you should be able to buy and procure that with the click of a button and then very quickly, within less than a handful of days, that equipment should be stood up, deployed and running in their environment. And then, finally, it's got to deliver this more flexible finance model, whether it's leveraging flexible subscription models or optics friendly models. Customers were really looking for that more off X friendly approach, which we're gonna be providing with Project Apex so very, very excited about kind of the goals and the aspirations of Project Apex. We're going to see a lot of it come come to market early next year, but we're I think we're well situated, as I said, to take advantage of this opportunity. >>So when I was looking through the announcement in sort of squinting through it, the three things jumped out and you definitely hit on. Those. One is choice, but sometimes you don't wanna give customers too much choice, so it's gotta be simple, and it's got to be consistent. So It feels like you're putting this abstraction layer over your entire portfolio and trying to hit on those three items. Uh, which is somewhat of a balancing act. But is that right? >>Yeah. No, you're You're exactly right. The kind of the pillars of the project Apex value proposition, So to speak is simplicity, choice and consistency. So we've got to deliver that simple kind of end end journey view of their entire cloud and as his for his experience, that need span our entire portfolio. So whether it's servers or stores are networking or PCs or cloud, all of that needs to be integrated into essentially a large single Web interface that gives you visibility across all of that. And, of course, the ease of scale up and, frankly, scaled down. You should be able to do that in real time through the system, you know, choices a big, big factor for us. You know, we've got the broadest portfolio in the industry. We want to provide customers the ability to consume infrastructure anyway. They want clearly they consume consume it the traditional way. But this more as a service flexible consumption approach is fundamental to making sure people customers on Lee pay for what they use So highly metered environment pay for pay as they go. Leverage subscriptions essentially give them that op X flexibility that they've been looking for. And then finally, I think the rial key differentiator is that consistent operating experience. So whether you move workloads on or off, Prem, it's got to be in a single environment that doesn't require you to jump around between different application and management experiences. >>Right? So I gotta ask you the tough question. I want to hear your answer to it. I mean, we've seen the cloud model. Everybody knows it very well, But But why now? People going to say Okay, you're just responding to HP. What's what's different between what you're doing and what some of your competitors are doing? >>Yeah, so I think it really comes down Thio the choice and breadth of what we're bringing to the table. So, you know, we're not going to force our customers to go down one of these routes. We're gonna provide that ultimate flexibility. And I think what we're what will really define ourselves against them in China, ourselves against them is that consistent operating experience we've got that opportunity to provide both an on prem edge and cloud experience that doesn't require them to move out of that operating experience to jump between different tools. So whether you're running a storage as a service environment, which will have in the first after next year, um, looking through our new cloud console that is coming out early next year is Well, you're gonna be able to have that single view of everything that's going on across your environment. It also be able to move workloads from on Prem and off Prem without breaking that consistent experience. I think that is probably the biggest differentiator we're going to have when you when you ladder that onto just the General Dell Technologies value of being able to meet and deliver our solutions anywhere in the world at any point of the data center at the edge or even cloud native. We've got the broadest portfolio to meet our customer needs wherever we need to go. >>So my understanding is the offering is designed to encompass the entire Dell Technologies portfolio from applying solutions I s G etcetera, not VM where specifically But that Zraly, that whole Dell Technologies portfolio correct. >>Yeah. And look, over time we totally expectable transacted VM ware through this so way. Do expect that to be part of the solution eventually. Eso Yeah, it is across. You know, PCs. A service storage is a service infrastructure. As a service, our cloud offers all of our services traditional services, um that are helping to deliver this as a service experience. And even our traditional financial flexible consumption models will be included in this. Because again, we want to offer ultimate choice and flexibility. We're not gonna force our customers to go down any of these pads, but we want to do is present thes pads and go wherever they want to go. We've got the breath of the portfolio in the offers. Thio, Get them there. >>Okay, so it's it's really a journey. You mentioned storage as a service coming out first, and then Aziz. Well, if I understand it, the idea is that I'm gonna have visibility and control over my entire state on Prem Cloud edge. Kind of the whole enchilada. Maybe not right out of the chute. But that's the vision. >>Absolutely. You've got to be able to see all of that and we'll continue thio iterating over time and bring mawr environments more applications, more cloud environments into this. But that is absolutely the vision of Project Apex is to deliver that fully integrated core edge cloud. Uh, partner experienced thio all of the environments, our customers to be running it. >>I wanna put my my customer had on my CFO CEO had Okay, What's the fine print? You know, one of the minimum bars to get in. What's the minimum commitment I need to make? What are the some of those? Those nuances? >>Yeah. So you know both the storage is a service which will be our first offer of many in our portfolio and the cloud console, which will give you that single web interface to kind of manage report and kind of thrive in this as a service experience. All that will be released in the first half of the next year. So we're still frankly defining what that will look like. But we wanna make sure that we deliver a solution that can span all segments from small business, the media business to the biggest enterprises out there globally. Goal expansion through our channel partners, we're gonna have gos and Channel Partners fully integrated as well service providers as well as a fundamental important piece of our delivery model and delivering this experience for our customers. So the fine print day will be out early next year. Is we G A. These releases and bring in the market. But ultimate flexibility and choice up and down the stack and geographically wide is the goal of the intent. We plan to deliver that. >>Can you add any color to the sort of the sort of product journey, if you will, I even hesitate Sam to use the word product because you're really sort of transferring your mindset into a platform mindset in the services mindset as opposed to bolting services. On top of a product you sell a product is okay, service guys, you take it from here. It's really you have to sort of re think you know your how you deliver on DSO You say you start with storage on then So what can we expect over the next midterm? Long term? >>Yeah. I'll give you an example. Look, we sell a ton of as a service and flexible consumption today. We've been at it for 10 years. In fact, in Q two, we sold Our annual recurring revenue rate is 1.3 billion growing at 30% Very, very pleased. So this is not new to us. But how you described Dave is right. We adopt products customers in pick their product. They pick their service that they want a bolt on. Then they pick their financial payment model. They bolted on, so it's a very good, customized way to build it. That's great, and customers are going to continue to want that will continue to deliver that. But there is an emerging segment that wants more just kind of think of the big easy button they want to focus on an outcome. Storage is a service is a great, great example where they're less concerned about what individual product element is. Part of that, um, they want it fully managed by Dell Technologies or one of our partners. They don't want to manage it themselves. And of course, they want it to be paid for use on an op X plan that works for, works their business and gives them the flexibility. So when customers going forward want to go down this as a service outcome driven path. They're simply going to say, Hey, what data service do I want? I want file or block unified object. They pick their data service based on their workloads. They pick their performance and capacity tear. There is a term limit. You know, right now, we're playing 1125 years, depending on the amount of terms you want Dio. And then that's it. It's managed by Dell Technologies. It's on our books from Dell Technologies on bits, of course. Leveraging our great technology portfolio to bring that service and that experience to our customers. So the service is the product now it really is making that shift that we are. We're moving into a services driven, services outcome driven set of portfolio on solutions for our customers. >>So you actually have a lot of data on this? I mean, you talk about a billion dollar business, uh, maybe talk a little bit about customer uptake. Uh, you know, I don't know what you can share in terms of numbers and a number of subscription customers, but what I'm really interested in the learnings and the feedback and how that's informed your strategy? >>Yeah. I mean, you're right again. We've been at this for, you know, many, many years. We have over 2000 customers today that have chosen to take advantage of our flexible consumption and as a service offers that we have today never mind, kind of as we move into these kind of turn key easy button as a service offers that air to come that early next year. So we've leveraged all of that learnings, and we've heard all of that feedback. And it's why it's really important that choice and flexibility is fundamental to the project. APEC strategy. There are some of those customers that they want to build their own. They want to make sure they're running the latest power max or the latest power store. They want to choose their network. They wanna choose how they protect it. They want to choose what type of service they they want to cover some of the services. They may want very little from us or vice versa. And then they wanna maybe leverage additional, more traditional means to acquire that based on their business goals. That feedback has been loud and clear, but there is that segment that is a no No, no. I need to focus more on my business and not my infrastructure. And that's where you're going to see these more turnkey as a service. Solutions fit that need where they want to just define s l. A's outcomes. They want us to take on the burden of managing it for them so they can really thick focus on their applications in their business, not their infrastructure. So things like metering tons of feedback and how well wanna meter this, uh, tons of feedback on the types of configurations and scale they're looking for? The applications and workloads that they're targeting for this world is very different than the more traditional world. So we're leveraging all of that information to make sure we deliver our infrastructure as a service and then eventually solutions as a service you think about S A P is a service vb isa service ai machine learning as a service will be moving up the stack as well to meet more of a application integrated as a service experience as well. >>So I wanna ask you so I mean, you've given us a couple of data points, their billion dollar plus business couple 1000 customers is this? I mean, you've got decent average contract values. If if I do my math right s so it's not just the little guys. I mean, I'm sorry. It's not just the big guys, but there's some fat middle is, well, that they're taking this up. Is that fair to say >>totally? I mean, I would say frankly, you know, in the enterprise space, it's the mid the larger sides have historically and we expect they'll continue to want to kind of choose their best a breed apart. Best debris to products, best of breed services. Best to breed financial consumption. Great. And we're in great shape. There were very competitive, very, very confident or competitive and competing in that space. Today, I think going into the turkey as a service space that will play up market. But it will really play downmarket mid market, smaller businesses. It gives us the opportunity to really drive a solution there where they don't have. The resource is to maybe manage a large storage infrastructure or backup infrastructure, compute infrastructure. They're gonna frankly look to us to provide that experience for them. I think are as a service offers will really play stronger in that mid and kind of lower end of the market. >>So tell us again the sort of availability of the actual, like the console, for example, when when can I actually get? I mean, I can get I could do as a service today. I could buy subscriptions from you. This is where it all comes together. What's the availability and roll out details? >>Sure. So as we look to move, move to our integrated kind of turn key as a service offers the console or announcing at Dell Technologies World as it's in public preview now. So for organizations of customers that want to start using it, they can start using it. Now, Uh, the storage, as a service offers gonna be available in the first half of next year. So we're rapidly kind of working on that now, looking to early next year to bring that to market so you'll see the console and the first as a service offered with storage, is a service available in the first half of next year, readily available to any and everyone that wants to deploy it. So we're We're not that far off right now, but we felt it was really, really important to make sure our customers, our partners and the industry really understands how important this transformation to as a service and cloud is for Dell Technologies. That's why you know, frankly, externally and internally, Project Apex will be that North Star to bring our end end value together across the business, across our customers across our our teams. And that's why we're really making sure that everybody understands Project Apex and as a services is the future for Dell. And we're very much focused on that. >>So I mean, is the head of product marketing. This is really a mindset of cultural change, really. You're really becoming the head of service marketing. In a way, How are you guys thinking about you know, that mindset shift? >>What? Really, it's it's How am I thinking about it? How is the broader marketing organization thinking about it? How is engineering Clearly thinking about it? How is finance thinking about it? How its sale like this is transformative across every single function within Dell Technologies has a role to play to do things very differently. Now it's going to take time. It's not gonna happen overnight. You know, various estimates have. This is a fairly small percentage of business today in our segments. But we do expect that to start to and it has started to accelerate. Ramp. You know, we're preparing for a large percentage of our business to be consumed this way very, very soon. That requires some changes in how we sell changes in how we mark. It clearly changes in how we build products and so forth, and then ultimately, have you know how we account for this has to change. So we're approaching it, I think the right way, Dave, where we're looking at this truly end. And this isn't a a tweak and how we do things or in evolution, this is a revolution for us to kind of move faster to this model again building on the learnings that we have today with our strong customer base on experience. We built up over the years. But this is a This is a big shift. This isn't an incremental turn of the crank. We know that. I think you expect that our customers expect that, and that's that's the mission we're on with Project date. >>Well, I mean with 30% growth. I mean that za clear indicator and people like growth. We're going. I've no doubt that clients are. That's a clear indicator that customers are glomming onto this. And and I think many folks wanna buy this way. And I think increasingly, that's how they buy SAS. That's how they buy Cloud. You know, why not buy infrastructure the same way? Give us your closing thoughts, Sam. What are the big takeaways? >>Yeah, Big takeaways is from a Dell Technologies perspective. Project Apex is that strategic vision of bringing together or as a service and cloud capabilities into a easy to consume, simple, flexible offer that provides ultimate choice to our customers. Look, the market has spoken. We're gonna be living in a hybrid, multi cloud world. I think the market is also starting to speak, that they want that to be in as a service experience, regardless of its on or off ground. It's our job. It's our responsibility to bring that he's that simplicity and elegance to the on Prem world. It's not certainly not going anywhere. Eso That's the mission that we're on with Project Apex and I like the hand we've been dealt. I like the infrastructure and the solutions that we have across our portfolio. And we're gonna We're gonna be after this for the next couple of years to refine this and build this out for our customers. This is just the beginning. >>Well, it's awesome. Thank you so much for coming to the Cuban. We were seeing the cloud model. I mean, it's extending on Prem Cloud, multi clouds going to the edge. And the way in which customers want to transact business is moving at the same same direction. So, Sam, good luck with this. And thanks so much. Appreciate your time. >>Yeah. Thanks, Dave. Thanks, Everyone. Take care. >>All right. Thank you for watching. This is Dave Volonte for the Cuban. Our continuing coverage of Del Tech World 2020. The Virtual Cube will be right back right after this short break

>> Announcer: From the Cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCube Conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And welcome to this special presentation. We have a launch from Dell Technologies updates from the VxRail family. We're going to do things a little bit different here. We actually have a launch video Shannon Champion, of Dell Technologies. And the way we do things a lot of times, is, analysts get a little preview or when you're watching things. You might have questions on it. So, rather than me just wanting it, or you wanting yourself I actually brought in a couple of Dell Technologies expertS two of our Cube alumni, happy to welcome you back to the program. Jon Siegal, he is the Vice President of Product Marketing, and Chad Dunn, who's the Vice President of Product Management, both of them with Dell Technologies. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Good to see you Stu. >> Great to be here. >> All right, and so what we're going to do is we're going to be rolling the video here. I've got a button I'm going to press, Andrew will stop it here and then we'll kind of dig in a little bit, go into some questions when we're all done. We're actually holding a crowd chat, where you will be able to ask your questions, talk to the experts and everything. And so a little bit different way to do a product announcement. Hope you enjoy it. And with that, it's VxRail. Taking HCI to the extremes is the theme. We'll see what that means and everything. But without any further ado, let's let Shannon take the video away. >> Hello, and welcome. My name is Shannon Champion, and I'm looking forward to taking you through what's new with VxRail. Let's get started. We have a lot to talk about. Our launch covers new announcements addressing use cases across the Core, Edge and Cloud and spans both new hardware platforms and options, as well as the latest in software innovations. So let's jump right in. Before we talk about our announcements, let's talk about where customers are adopting VxRail today. First of all, on behalf of the entire Dell Technologies and VxRail teams, I want to thank each of our over 8000 customers, big and small in virtually every industry, who've chosen VxRail to address a broad range of workloads, deploying nearly 100,000 nodes today. Thank you. Our promise to you is that we will add new functionality, improve serviceability, and support new use cases, so that we deliver the most value to you, whether in the Core, at the Edge or for the Cloud. In the Core, VxRail from day one has been a catalyst to accelerate IT transformation. Many of our customers started here and many will continue to leverage VxRail to simply extend and enhance your VMware environment. Now we can support even more demanding applications such as In-Memory databases, like SAP HANA, and more AI and ML applications, with support for more and more powerful GPUs. At the Edge, video surveillance, which also uses GPUs, by the way, is an example of a popular use case leveraging VxRail alongside external storage. And right now we all know the enhanced role that IT is playing. And as it relates to VDI, VxRail has always been a great option for that. In the Cloud, it's all about Kubernetes, and how Dell Technologies Cloud platform, which is VCF on VxRail can deliver consistent infrastructure for both traditional and Cloud native applications. And we're doing that together with VMware. VxRail is the only jointly engineered HCI system built with VMware for VMware environments, designed to enhance the native VMware experience. This joint engineering with VMware and investments in software innovation together deliver an optimized operational experience at reduced risk for our customers. >> Alright, so Shannon talked a bit about, the important role of IT Of course right now, with the global pandemic going on. It's really, calling in, essential things, putting, platforms to the test. So, I really love to hear what both of you are hearing from customers. Also, VDI, of course, in the early days, it was, HCI-only-does-VDI. Now, we know there are many solutions, but remote work is putting that back front and center. So, Jon, why don't we start with you as the what is (muffled speaking) >> Absolutely. So first of all, Stu, thank you, I want to do a shout out to our VxRail customers around the world. It's really been humbling, inspiring, and just amazing to see The impact of our VxRail customers around the world and what they're having on on human progress here. Just for a few examples, there are genomics companies that we have running VxRail that have rolled out testing at scale. We also have research universities out in the Netherlands, doing the antibody detection. The US Navy has stood up a floating hospital to of course care for those in need. So we are here to help that's been our message to our customers, but it's amazing to see how much they're helping society during this. So just just a pleasure there. But as you mentioned, just to hit on the VDI comments, so to your points too, HCI, VxRail, VDI, that was an initial use case years ago. And it's been great to see how many of our existing VxRail customers have been able to pivot very quickly leveraging VxRail to add and to help bring their remote workforce online and support them with their existing VxRail. Because VxRail is flexible, it is agile, to be able to support those multiple workloads. And in addition to that, we've also rolled out some new VDI bundles to make it simpler for customers more cost effective cater to everything from knowlEdge workers to multimedia workers. You name it, you know from 250, desktops up to 1000. But again, back to your point VxRail, HCI, is well beyond VDI, it crossed the chasm a couple years ago actually. And VDI now is less than a third of the typical workloads, any of our customers out there, it supports now a range of workloads that you heard from Shannon, whether it's video surveillance, whether it's general purpose, all the way to mission critical applications now with SAP HAN. So, this has changed the game for sure. But the range of work loads and the flexibility of the actual rules which really helping our existing customers during this pandemic. >> Yeah, I agree with you, Jon, we've seen customers really embrace HCI for a number of workloads in their environments, from the ones that we sure all knew and loved back in the initial days of HCI. Now, the mission critical things now to Cloud native workloads as well, and the sort of the efficiencies that customers are able to get from HCI. And specifically, VxRail gives them that ability to pivot. When these, shall we say unexpected circumstances arise? And I think that that's informing their their decisions and their opinions on what their IP strategies look like as they move forward. They want that same level of agility, and ability to react quickly with their overall infrastructure. >> Excellent. Now I want to get into the announcements. What I want my team actually, your team gave me access to the CIO from the city of Amarillo, so maybe they can dig up that footage, talk about how fast they pivoted, using VxRail to really spin up things fast. So let's hear from the announcement first and then definitely want to share that that customer story a little bit later. So let's get to the actual news that Shannon's going to share. >> Okay, now what's new? I am pleased to announce a number of exciting updates and new platforms, to further enable IT modernization across Core, Edge and Cloud. I will cover each of these announcements in more detail, demonstrating how only VxRail can offer the breadth of platform configurations, automation, orchestration and Lifecycle Management, across a fully integrated hardware and software full stack with consistent, simplified operations to address the broadest range of traditional and modern applications. I'll start with hybrid Cloud and recap what you may have seen in the Dell Technologies Cloud announcements just a few weeks ago, related to VMware Cloud foundation on VxRail. Then I'll cover two brand new VxRail hardware platforms and additional options. And finally circle back to talk about the latest enhancements to our VxRail HCI system software capabilities for Lifecycle Management. Let's get started with our new Cloud offerings based on VxRail. VxRail is the HCI foundation for Dell Technologies, Cloud Platform, bringing automation and financial models, similar to public Cloud to On-premises environments. VMware recently introduced Cloud foundation for Delta, which is based on vSphere 7.0. As you likely know by now, vSphere 7.0 was definitely an exciting and highly anticipated release. In keeping with our synchronous release commitment, we introduced VxRail 7.0 based on vSphere 7.0 in late April, which was within 30 days of VMware's release. Two key areas that VMware focused on we're embedding containers and Kubernetes into vSphere, unifying them with virtual machines. And the second is improving the work experience for vSphere administrators with vSphere Lifecycle Manager or VLCM. I'll address the second point a bit in terms of how VxRail fits in in a moment for VCF 4 with Tom Xu, based on vSphere 7.0 customers now have access to a hybrid Cloud platform that supports native Kubernetes workloads and management, as well as your traditional VM-based workloads. So containers are now first class citizens of your private Cloud alongside traditional VMs and this is now available with VCF 4.0, on VxRail 7.0. VxRail's tight integration with VMware Cloud foundation delivers a simple and direct path not only to the hybrid Cloud, but also to deliver Kubernetes at Cloud scale with one complete automated platform. The second Cloud announcement is also exciting. Recent VCF for networking advancements have made it easier than ever to get started with hybrid Cloud, because we're now able to offer a more accessible consolidated architecture. And with that Dell Technologies Cloud platform can now be deployed with a four-node configuration, lowering the cost of an entry level hybrid Cloud. This enables customers to start smaller and grow their Cloud deployment over time. VCF and VxRail can now be deployed in two different ways. For small environments, customers can utilize a consolidated architecture which starts with just four nodes. Since the management and workload domains share resources in this architecture, it's ideal for getting started with an entry level Cloud to run general purpose virtualized workloads with a smaller entry point. Both in terms of required infrastructure footprint as well as cost, but still with a Consistent Cloud operating model. For larger environments where dedicated resources and role-based access control to separate different sets of workloads is usually preferred. You can choose to deploy a standard architecture which starts at eight nodes for independent management and workload domains. A standard implementation is ideal for customers running applications that require dedicated workload domains that includes Horizon, VDI, and vSphere with Kubernetes. >> Alright, Jon, there's definitely been a lot of interest in our community around everything that VMware is doing with vSphere 7.0. understand if you wanted to use the Kubernetes piece, it's VCF as that so we've seen the announcements, Dell, partnering in there it helps us connect that story between, really the VMware strategy and how they talk about Cloud and where does VxRail fit in that overall, Delta Cloud story? >> Absolutely. So first of all Stu, the VxRail course is integral to the Delta Cloud strategy. it's been VCF on VxRail equals the Delta Cloud platform. And this is our flagship on prem Cloud offering, that we've been able to enable operational consistency across any Cloud, whether it's On-prem, in the Edge or in the public Cloud. And we've seen the Dell tech Cloud Platform embraced by customers for a couple key reasons. One is it offers the fastest hybrid Cloud deployment in the market. And this is really, thanks to a new subscription offer that we're now offering out there where in less than 14 days, it can be still up and running. And really, the Dell tech Cloud does bring a lot of flexibility in terms of consumption models, overall when it comes to VxRail. Secondly, I would say is fast and easy upgrades. This is what VxRail brings to the table for all workloads, if you will, into especially critical in the Cloud. So the full automation of Lifecycle Management across the hardware and software stack across the VMware software stack, and in the Dell software and hardware supporting that, together, this enables essentially the third thing, which is customers can just relax. They can be rest assured that their infrastructure will be continuously validated, and always be in a continuously validated state. And this is the kind of thing that those three value propositions together really fit well, with any on-prem Cloud. Now you take what Shannon just mentioned, and the fact that now you can build and run modern applications on the same VxRail infrastructure alongside traditional applications. This is a game changer. >> Yeah, I love it. I remember in the early days talking with Dunn about CI, how does that fit in with Cloud discussion and the line I've used the last couple years is, modernize the platform, then you can modernize the application. So as companies are doing their full modernization, then this plays into what you're talking about. All right, we can let Shannon continue, we can get some more before we dig into some more analysis. >> That's good. >> Let's talk about new hardware platforms and updates. that result in literally thousands of potential new configuration options. covering a wide breadth of modern and traditional application needs across a range of the actual use cases. First up, I am incredibly excited to announce a brand new Dell EMC VxRail series, the D series. This is a ruggedized durable platform that delivers the full power of VxRail for workloads at the Edge in challenging environments or for space constrained areas. VxRail D series offers the same compelling benefits as the rest of the VxRail portfolio with simplicity, agility and lifecycle management. But in a lightweight short depth at only 20 inches, it's adorable form factor that's extremely temperature-resilient, shock resistant, and easily portable. It even meets milspec standards. That means you have the full power of lifecycle automation with VxRail HCI system software and 24 by seven single point of support, enabling you to rapidly react to business needs, no matter the location or how harsh the conditions. So whether you're deploying a data center at a mobile command base, running real-time GPS mapping on the go, or implementing video surveillance in remote areas, you can ensure availability, integrity and confidence for every workload with the new VxRail ruggedized D series. >> All right, Chad we would love for you to bring us in a little bit that what customer requirement for bringing this to market. I remember seeing, Dell servers ruggedized, of course, Edge, really important growth to build on what Jon was talking about, Cloud. So, Chad, bring us inside, what was driving this piece of the offering? >> Sure Stu. Yeah, yeah, having been at the hardware platforms that can go out into some of these remote locations is really important. And that's being driven by the fact that customers are looking for compute performance and storage out at some of these Edges or some of the more exotic locations. whether that's manufacturing plants, oil rigs, submarine ships, military applications, places that we've never heard of. But it's also about extending that operational simplicity of the the sort of way that you're managing your data center that has VxRails you're managing your Edges the same way using the same set of tools. You don't need to learn anything else. So operational simplicity is absolutely key here. But in those locations, you can take a product that's designed for a data center where definitely controlling power cooling space and take it some of these places where you get sand blowing or seven to zero temperatures, could be Baghdad or it could be Ketchikan, Alaska. So we built this D series that was able to go to those extreme locations with extreme heat, extreme cold, extreme altitude, but still offer that operational simplicity. Now military is one of those applications for the rugged platform. If you look at the resistance that it has to heat, it operates at a 45 degrees Celsius or 113 degrees Fahrenheit range, but it can do an excursion up to 55 C or 131 degrees Fahrenheit for up to eight hours. It's also resistant to heat sand, dust, vibration, it's very lightweight, short depth, in fact, it's only 20 inches deep. This is a smallest form factor, obviously that we have in the VxRail family. And it's also built to be able to withstand sudden shocks certified to withstand 40 G's of shock and operation of the 15,000 feet of elevation. Pretty high. And this is sort of like wherever skydivers go to when they want the real thrill of skydiving where you actually need oxygen to, to be for that that altitude. They're milspec-certified. So, MIL-STD-810G, which I keep right beside my bed and read every night. And it comes with a VxRail stick hardening package is packaging scripts so that you can auto lock down the rail environment. And we've got a few other certifications that are on the roadmap now for naval shock requirements. EMI and radiation immunity often. >> Yeah, it's funny, I remember when we first launched it was like, "Oh, well everything's going to white boxes. "And it's going to be massive, "no differentiation between everything out there." If you look at what you're offering, if you look at how public Clouds build their things, but I called it a few years or is there's a pure optimization. So you need to scale, you need similarities but you know you need to fit some, very specific requirements, lots of places, so, interesting stuff. Yeah, certifications, always keep your teams busy. Alright, let's get back to Shannon to view on the report. >> We are also introducing three other hardware-based additions. First, a new VxRail E Series model based on where the first time AMD EPYC processors. These single socket 1U nodes, offer dual socket performance with CPU options that scale from eight to 64 Cores, up to a terabyte of memory and multiple storage options making it an ideal platform for desktop VDI analytics and computer aided design. Next, the addition of the latest Nvidia Quadro RTX GPUs brings the most significant advancement in computer graphics in over a decade to professional work flows. Designers and artists across industries can now expand the boundary of what's possible, working with the largest and most complex graphics rendering, deep learning and visual computing workloads. And Intel Optane DC persistent memory is here, and it offers high performance and significantly increased memory capacity with data persistence at an affordable price. Data persistence is a critical feature that maintains data integrity, even when power is lost, enabling quicker recovery and less downtime. With support for Intel obtain DC persistent memory customers can expand in memory intensive workloads and use cases like SAP HANA. Alright, let's finally dig into our HCI system software, which is the Core differentiation for VxRail regardless of your workload or platform choice. Our joining engineering with VMware and investments in VxRail HCI system software innovation together deliver an optimized operational experience at reduced risk for our customers. Under the covers, VxRail offers best in class hardware, married with VMware HCI software, either vSAN or VCF. But what makes us different stems from our investments to integrate the two. Dell Technologies has a dedicated VxRail team of about 400 people to build market sell and support a fully integrated hyper converged system. That team has also developed our unique VxRail HCI system software, which is a suite of integrated software elements that extend VMware native capabilities to deliver seamless, automated operational experience that customers cannot find elsewhere. The key components of VxRail HCI system software shown around the arc here that include the extra manager, full stack lifecycle management, ecosystem connectors, and support. I don't have time to get into all the details of these elements today, but if you're interested in learning more, I encourage you to meet our experts. And I will tell you how to do that in a moment. I touched on the LCM being a key feature to the vSphere 7.0 earlier and I'd like to take the opportunity to expand on that a bit in the context of VxRail Lifecycle Management. The LCM adds valuable automation to the execution of updates for customers, but it doesn't eliminate the manual work still needed to define and package the updates and validate all of the components prior to applying them. With VxRail customers have all of these areas addressed automatically on their behalf, freeing them to put their time into other important functions for their business. Customers tell us that Lifecycle management continues to be a major source of the maintenance effort they put into their infrastructure, and then it tends to lead to overburden IT staff, that it can cause disruptions to the business if not managed effectively, and that it isn't the most efficient economically. Automation of Lifecycle Management and VxRail results in the utmost simplicity from a customer experience perspective, and offers operational freedom from maintaining infrastructure. But as shown here, our customers not only realize greater IT team efficiencies, they have also reduced downtime with fewer unplanned outages, and reduced overall cost of operations. With VxRail HCI system software, intelligent Lifecycle Management upgrades of the fully integrated hardware and software stack are automated, keeping clusters and continuously validated states while minimizing risks and operational costs. How do we ensure Continuously validated states for VxRail. VxRail labs execute an extensive, automated, repeatable process on every firmware and software upgrade and patch to ensure clusters are in continuously validated states of the customers choosing across their VxRail environment. The VxRail labs are constantly testing, analyzing, optimizing, and sequencing all of the components in the upgrade to execute in a single package for the full stack. All the while VxRail is backed by Dell EMC's world class services and support with a single point of contact for both hardware and software. IT productivity skyrockets with single click non disruptive upgrades of the fully integrated hardware and software stack without the need to do extensive research and testing. taking you to the next VxRail version of your choice, while always in a continuously validated state. You can also confidently execute automated VxRail upgrades. No matter what hardware generation or node types are in the cluster. They don't have to all be the same. And upgrades with VxRail are faster and more efficient with leapfrogging simply choose any VxRail version you desire. And be assured you will get there in a validated state while seamlessly bypassing any other release in between. Only VxRail can do that. >> All right, so Chad, the lifecycle management piece that Shannon was just talking about is, not the sexiest, it's often underappreciated. There's not only the years of experience, but the continuous work you're doing, reminds me back the early vSAN deployments versus VxRail jointly developed, jointly tested between Dell and VMware. So bring us inside why, 2020 Lifecycle Management still, a very important piece, especially in the VM family line. >> Yes, Stu, I think it's sexy, but, I'm pretty big nerd. (all laughing) Yeah, this is really always been our bread and butter. And in fact, it gets even more important, the larger the deployments come, when you start to look at data centers full of VxRails and all the different hardware software, firmware combinations that could exist out there. It's really the value that you get out of that VxRail HCI system software that Shannon was talking about and how it's optimized around the VMware use case. Very tightly integrated with each VMware component, of course, and the intelligence of being able to do all the firmware, all of the drivers, all the software all together in tremendous value to our customers. But to deliver that we really need to make a fairly large investment. So as Shannon mentioned, we run about 25,000 hours of testing across Each major release for patches, express patches, that's about 7000 hours for each of those. So, obviously, there's a lot of parallelism. And we're always developing new test scenarios for each release that we need to build in as we as we introduce new functionality. And one of the key things that we're able to do, as Shannon mentioned, is to be able to leapfrog releases and get you to that next validated state. We've got about 100 engineers just working on creating and executing those test cases on a continuous basis and obviously, a huge amount of automation. And we've talked about that investment to execute those tests. That's one worth of $60 million of investment in our lab. In fact, we've got just over 2000 VxRail units in our testbed across the US, Shanghai, China and Cork, Ireland. So a massive amount of testing of each of those components to make sure that they operate together in a validated state. >> Yeah, well, absolutely, it's super important not only for the day one, but the day two deployments. But I think this actually a great place for us to bring in that customer that Dell gave me access to. So we've got the CIO of Amarillo, Texas, he was an existing VxRail customer. And he's going to explain what happened as to how he needed to react really fast to support the work-from-home initiative, as well as we get to hear in his words the value of what Lifecycle Management means. So Andrew, if we could queue up that customer segment, please? >> It's been massive and it's been interesting to see the IT team absorb it. As we mature, I think they embrace the ability to be innovative and to work with our departments. But this instance, really justified why I was driving progress. So fervently why it was so urgent today. Three years ago, the answer would have been no. We wouldn't have been in a place where we could adapt With VxRail in place, in a week we spun up hundreds of instant balls. We spun up a 75-person call center in a day and a half, for our public health. We rolled out multiple applications for public health so they could do remote clinics. It's given us the flexibility to be able to roll out new solutions very quickly and be very adaptive. And it's not only been apparent to my team, but it's really made an impact on the business. And now what I'm seeing is those of my customers that work, a little lagging or a little conservative, or understanding the impact of modernizing the way they do business because it makes them adaptable as well. >> Alright, so great, Richard, you talked a bunch about the the efficiencies that that the IT put in place, how about that, that overall just managed, you talked about how fast you spun up these new VDI instances. need to be able to do things much simpler? So how does the overall Lifecycle Management fit into this discussion? >> It makes it so much easier. And in the old environment, one, It took a lot of man hours to make change. It was very disruptive, when we did make change, it overburdened, I guess that's the word I'm looking for. It really overburdened our staff to cause disruption to business. That wasn't cost efficient. And then simple things like, I've worked for multi billion dollar companies where we had massive QA environments that replicated production, simply can't afford that at local government. Having this sort of environment lets me do a scaled down QA environment and still get the benefit of rolling out non disruptive change. As I said earlier, it's allowed us to take all of those cycles that we were spending on Lifecycle Management because it's greatly simplified, and move those resources and rescale them in other areas where we can actually have more impact on the business. It's hard to be innovative when 100% of your cycles are just keeping the ship afloat. >> All right, well, nothing better than hearing it straight from the end user, public sector reacting very fast to the COVID-19. And, if you heard him he said, if this is his, before he had run this project, he would not have been able to respond. So I think everybody out there understands, if I didn't actually have access to the latest technology, it would be much harder. All right, I'm looking forward to doing the CrowdChat letting everybody else dig in with questions and get follow up but a little bit more, I believe one more announcement he can and got for us though. Let's roll the final video clip. >> In our latest software release VxRail 4.7.510, We continue to add new automation and self service features. New functionality enables you to schedule and run upgrade health checks in advance of upgrades, to ensure clusters are in a ready state for the next upgrade or patch. This is extremely valuable for customers that have stringent upgrade windows, as they can be assured the clusters will seamlessly upgrade within that window. Of course, running health checks on a regular basis also helps ensure that your clusters are always ready for unscheduled patches and security updates. We are also offering more flexibility and getting all nodes or clusters to a common release level with the ability to reimage nodes or clusters to a specific VxRail version, or down rev one or more nodes that may be shipped at a higher rate than the existing cluster. This enables you to easily choose your validated state when adding new nodes or repurposing nodes in a cluster. To sum up all of our announcements, whether you are accelerating data sets modernization extending HCI to harsh Edge environments, deploying an on-premises Dell Technologies Cloud platform to create a developer ready Kubernetes infrastructure. VxRail is there delivering a turn-key experience that enables you to continuously innovate, realize operational freedom and predictably evolve. VxRail provides an extensive breadth of platform configurations, automation and Lifecycle Management across the integrated hardware and software full stack and consistent hybrid Cloud operations to address the broadest range of traditional and modern applications across Core, Edge and Cloud. I now invite you to engage with us. First, the virtual passport program is an opportunity to have some fun while learning about VxRail new features and functionality and sCore some sweet digital swag while you're at it. Delivered via an augmented reality app. All you need is your device. So go to vxrail.is/passport to get started. And secondly, if you have any questions about anything I talked about or want a deeper conversation, we encourage you to join one of our exclusive VxRail Meet The Experts sessions available for a limited time. First come first served, just go to vxrail.is/expertsession to learn more. >> All right, well, obviously, with everyone being remote, there's different ways we're looking to engage. So we've got the CrowdChat right after this. But Jon, give us a little bit more as to how Dell's making sure to stay in close contact with customers and what you've got for options for them. >> Yeah, absolutely. So as Shannon said, so in lieu of not having done Tech World this year in person, where we could have those great in-person interactions and answer questions, whether it's in the booth or in meeting rooms, we are going to have these Meet The Experts sessions over the next couple weeks, and we're going to put our best and brightest from our technical community and make them accessible to everyone out there. So again, definitely encourage you. We're trying new things here in this virtual environment to ensure that we can still stay in touch, answer questions, be responsive, and really looking forward to, having these conversations over the next couple of weeks. >> All right, well, Jon and Chad, thank you so much. We definitely look forward to the conversation here and continued. If you're here live, definitely go down below and do it if you're watching this on demand. You can see the full transcript of it at crowdchat.net/vxrailrocks. For myself, Shannon on the video, Jon, Chad, Andrew, man in the booth there, thank you so much for watching, and go ahead and join the CrowdChat.

>> Announcer: From the Cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCube Conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And welcome to this special presentation. We have a launch from Dell Technologies updates from the VxRail family. We're going to do things a little bit different here. We actually have a launch video Shannon Champion, of Dell Technologies. And the way we do things a lot of times, is, analysts get a little preview or when you're watching things. You might have questions on it. So, rather than me just wanting it, or you wanting yourself I actually brought in a couple of Dell Technologies expertS two of our Cube alumni, happy to welcome you back to the program. Jon Siegal, he is the Vice President of Product Marketing, and Chad Dunn, who's the Vice President of Product Management, both of them with Dell Technologies. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Good to see you Stu. >> Great to be here. >> All right, and so what we're going to do is we're going to be rolling the video here. I've got a button I'm going to press, Andrew will stop it here and then we'll kind of dig in a little bit, go into some questions when we're all done. We're actually holding a crowd chat, where you will be able to ask your questions, talk to the experts and everything. And so a little bit different way to do a product announcement. Hope you enjoy it. And with that, it's VxRail. Taking HCI to the extremes is the theme. We'll see what that means and everything. But without any further ado, let's let Shannon take the video away. >> Hello, and welcome. My name is Shannon Champion, and I'm looking forward to taking you through what's new with VxRail. Let's get started. We have a lot to talk about. Our launch covers new announcements addressing use cases across the Core, Edge and Cloud and spans both new hardware platforms and options, as well as the latest in software innovations. So let's jump right in. Before we talk about our announcements, let's talk about where customers are adopting VxRail today. First of all, on behalf of the entire Dell Technologies and VxRail teams, I want to thank each of our over 8000 customers, big and small in virtually every industry, who've chosen VxRail to address a broad range of workloads, deploying nearly 100,000 nodes today. Thank you. Our promise to you is that we will add new functionality, improve serviceability, and support new use cases, so that we deliver the most value to you, whether in the Core, at the Edge or for the Cloud. In the Core, VxRail from day one has been a catalyst to accelerate IT transformation. Many of our customers started here and many will continue to leverage VxRail to simply extend and enhance your VMware environment. Now we can support even more demanding applications such as In-Memory databases, like SAP HANA, and more AI and ML applications, with support for more and more powerful GPUs. At the Edge, video surveillance, which also uses GPUs, by the way, is an example of a popular use case leveraging VxRail alongside external storage. And right now we all know the enhanced role that IT is playing. And as it relates to VDI, VxRail has always been a great option for that. In the Cloud, it's all about Kubernetes, and how Dell Technologies Cloud platform, which is VCF on VxRail can deliver consistent infrastructure for both traditional and Cloud native applications. And we're doing that together with VMware. VxRail is the only jointly engineered HCI system built with VMware for VMware environments, designed to enhance the native VMware experience. This joint engineering with VMware and investments in software innovation together deliver an optimized operational experience at reduced risk for our customers. >> Alright, so Shannon talked a bit about, the important role of IT Of course right now, with the global pandemic going on. It's really, calling in, essential things, putting, platforms to the test. So, I really love to hear what both of you are hearing from customers. Also, VDI, of course, in the early days, it was, HCI-only-does-VDI. Now, we know there are many solutions, but remote work is putting that back front and center. So, Jon, why don't we start with you as the what is (muffled speaking) >> Absolutely. So first of all, Stu, thank you, I want to do a shout out to our VxRail customers around the world. It's really been humbling, inspiring, and just amazing to see The impact of our VxRail customers around the world and what they're having on on human progress here. Just for a few examples, there are genomics companies that we have running VxRail that have rolled out testing at scale. We also have research universities out in the Netherlands, doing the antibody detection. The US Navy has stood up a floating hospital to of course care for those in need. So we are here to help that's been our message to our customers, but it's amazing to see how much they're helping society during this. So just just a pleasure there. But as you mentioned, just to hit on the VDI comments, so to your points too, HCI, VxRail, VDI, that was an initial use case years ago. And it's been great to see how many of our existing VxRail customers have been able to pivot very quickly leveraging VxRail to add and to help bring their remote workforce online and support them with their existing VxRail. Because VxRail is flexible, it is agile, to be able to support those multiple workloads. And in addition to that, we've also rolled out some new VDI bundles to make it simpler for customers more cost effective cater to everything from knowlEdge workers to multimedia workers. You name it, you know from 250, desktops up to 1000. But again, back to your point VxRail, HCI, is well beyond VDI, it crossed the chasm a couple years ago actually. And VDI now is less than a third of the typical workloads, any of our customers out there, it supports now a range of workloads that you heard from Shannon, whether it's video surveillance, whether it's general purpose, all the way to mission critical applications now with SAP HAN. So, this has changed the game for sure. But the range of work loads and the flexibility of the actual rules which really helping our existing customers during this pandemic. >> Yeah, I agree with you, Jon, we've seen customers really embrace HCI for a number of workloads in their environments, from the ones that we sure all knew and loved back in the initial days of HCI. Now, the mission critical things now to Cloud native workloads as well, and the sort of the efficiencies that customers are able to get from HCI. And specifically, VxRail gives them that ability to pivot. When these, shall we say unexpected circumstances arise? And I think that that's informing their their decisions and their opinions on what their IP strategies look like as they move forward. They want that same level of agility, and ability to react quickly with their overall infrastructure. >> Excellent. Now I want to get into the announcements. What I want my team actually, your team gave me access to the CIO from the city of Amarillo, so maybe they can dig up that footage, talk about how fast they pivoted, using VxRail to really spin up things fast. So let's hear from the announcement first and then definitely want to share that that customer story a little bit later. So let's get to the actual news that Shannon's going to share. >> Okay, now what's new? I am pleased to announce a number of exciting updates and new platforms, to further enable IT modernization across Core, Edge and Cloud. I will cover each of these announcements in more detail, demonstrating how only VxRail can offer the breadth of platform configurations, automation, orchestration and Lifecycle Management, across a fully integrated hardware and software full stack with consistent, simplified operations to address the broadest range of traditional and modern applications. I'll start with hybrid Cloud and recap what you may have seen in the Dell Technologies Cloud announcements just a few weeks ago, related to VMware Cloud foundation on VxRail. Then I'll cover two brand new VxRail hardware platforms and additional options. And finally circle back to talk about the latest enhancements to our VxRail HCI system software capabilities for Lifecycle Management. Let's get started with our new Cloud offerings based on VxRail. VxRail is the HCI foundation for Dell Technologies, Cloud Platform, bringing automation and financial models, similar to public Cloud to On-premises environments. VMware recently introduced Cloud foundation for Delta, which is based on vSphere 7.0. As you likely know by now, vSphere 7.0 was definitely an exciting and highly anticipated release. In keeping with our synchronous release commitment, we introduced VxRail 7.0 based on vSphere 7.0 in late April, which was within 30 days of VMware's release. Two key areas that VMware focused on we're embedding containers and Kubernetes into vSphere, unifying them with virtual machines. And the second is improving the work experience for vSphere administrators with vSphere Lifecycle Manager or VLCM. I'll address the second point a bit in terms of how VxRail fits in in a moment for VCF 4 with Tom Xu, based on vSphere 7.0 customers now have access to a hybrid Cloud platform that supports native Kubernetes workloads and management, as well as your traditional VM-based workloads. So containers are now first class citizens of your private Cloud alongside traditional VMs and this is now available with VCF 4.0, on VxRail 7.0. VxRail's tight integration with VMware Cloud foundation delivers a simple and direct path not only to the hybrid Cloud, but also to deliver Kubernetes at Cloud scale with one complete automated platform. The second Cloud announcement is also exciting. Recent VCF for networking advancements have made it easier than ever to get started with hybrid Cloud, because we're now able to offer a more accessible consolidated architecture. And with that Dell Technologies Cloud platform can now be deployed with a four-node configuration, lowering the cost of an entry level hybrid Cloud. This enables customers to start smaller and grow their Cloud deployment over time. VCF and VxRail can now be deployed in two different ways. For small environments, customers can utilize a consolidated architecture which starts with just four nodes. Since the management and workload domains share resources in this architecture, it's ideal for getting started with an entry level Cloud to run general purpose virtualized workloads with a smaller entry point. Both in terms of required infrastructure footprint as well as cost, but still with a Consistent Cloud operating model. For larger environments where dedicated resources and role-based access control to separate different sets of workloads is usually preferred. You can choose to deploy a standard architecture which starts at eight nodes for independent management and workload domains. A standard implementation is ideal for customers running applications that require dedicated workload domains that includes Horizon, VDI, and vSphere with Kubernetes. >> Alright, Jon, there's definitely been a lot of interest in our community around everything that VMware is doing with vSphere 7.0. understand if you wanted to use the Kubernetes piece, it's VCF as that so we've seen the announcements, Dell, partnering in there it helps us connect that story between, really the VMware strategy and how they talk about Cloud and where does VxRail fit in that overall, Delta Cloud story? >> Absolutely. So first of all Stu, the VxRail course is integral to the Delta Cloud strategy. it's been VCF on VxRail equals the Delta Cloud platform. And this is our flagship on prem Cloud offering, that we've been able to enable operational consistency across any Cloud, whether it's On-prem, in the Edge or in the public Cloud. And we've seen the Dell tech Cloud Platform embraced by customers for a couple key reasons. One is it offers the fastest hybrid Cloud deployment in the market. And this is really, thanks to a new subscription offer that we're now offering out there where in less than 14 days, it can be still up and running. And really, the Dell tech Cloud does bring a lot of flexibility in terms of consumption models, overall when it comes to VxRail. Secondly, I would say is fast and easy upgrades. This is what VxRail brings to the table for all workloads, if you will, into especially critical in the Cloud. So the full automation of Lifecycle Management across the hardware and software stack across the VMware software stack, and in the Dell software and hardware supporting that, together, this enables essentially the third thing, which is customers can just relax. They can be rest assured that their infrastructure will be continuously validated, and always be in a continuously validated state. And this is the kind of thing that those three value propositions together really fit well, with any on-prem Cloud. Now you take what Shannon just mentioned, and the fact that now you can build and run modern applications on the same VxRail infrastructure alongside traditional applications. This is a game changer. >> Yeah, I love it. I remember in the early days talking with Dunn about CI, how does that fit in with Cloud discussion and the line I've used the last couple years is, modernize the platform, then you can modernize the application. So as companies are doing their full modernization, then this plays into what you're talking about. All right, we can let Shannon continue, we can get some more before we dig into some more analysis. >> That's good. >> Let's talk about new hardware platforms and updates. that result in literally thousands of potential new configuration options. covering a wide breadth of modern and traditional application needs across a range of the actual use cases. First up, I am incredibly excited to announce a brand new Dell EMC VxRail series, the D series. This is a ruggedized durable platform that delivers the full power of VxRail for workloads at the Edge in challenging environments or for space constrained areas. VxRail D series offers the same compelling benefits as the rest of the VxRail portfolio with simplicity, agility and lifecycle management. But in a lightweight short depth at only 20 inches, it's adorable form factor that's extremely temperature-resilient, shock resistant, and easily portable. It even meets milspec standards. That means you have the full power of lifecycle automation with VxRail HCI system software and 24 by seven single point of support, enabling you to rapidly react to business needs, no matter the location or how harsh the conditions. So whether you're deploying a data center at a mobile command base, running real-time GPS mapping on the go, or implementing video surveillance in remote areas, you can ensure availability, integrity and confidence for every workload with the new VxRail ruggedized D series. >> All right, Chad we would love for you to bring us in a little bit that what customer requirement for bringing this to market. I remember seeing, Dell servers ruggedized, of course, Edge, really important growth to build on what Jon was talking about, Cloud. So, Chad, bring us inside, what was driving this piece of the offering? >> Sure Stu. Yeah, yeah, having been at the hardware platforms that can go out into some of these remote locations is really important. And that's being driven by the fact that customers are looking for compute performance and storage out at some of these Edges or some of the more exotic locations. whether that's manufacturing plants, oil rigs, submarine ships, military applications, places that we've never heard of. But it's also about extending that operational simplicity of the the sort of way that you're managing your data center that has VxRails you're managing your Edges the same way using the same set of tools. You don't need to learn anything else. So operational simplicity is absolutely key here. But in those locations, you can take a product that's designed for a data center where definitely controlling power cooling space and take it some of these places where you get sand blowing or seven to zero temperatures, could be Baghdad or it could be Ketchikan, Alaska. So we built this D series that was able to go to those extreme locations with extreme heat, extreme cold, extreme altitude, but still offer that operational simplicity. Now military is one of those applications for the rugged platform. If you look at the resistance that it has to heat, it operates at a 45 degrees Celsius or 113 degrees Fahrenheit range, but it can do an excursion up to 55 C or 131 degrees Fahrenheit for up to eight hours. It's also resistant to heat sand, dust, vibration, it's very lightweight, short depth, in fact, it's only 20 inches deep. This is a smallest form factor, obviously that we have in the VxRail family. And it's also built to be able to withstand sudden shocks certified to withstand 40 G's of shock and operation of the 15,000 feet of elevation. Pretty high. And this is sort of like wherever skydivers go to when they want the real thrill of skydiving where you actually need oxygen to, to be for that that altitude. They're milspec-certified. So, MIL-STD-810G, which I keep right beside my bed and read every night. And it comes with a VxRail stick hardening package is packaging scripts so that you can auto lock down the rail environment. And we've got a few other certifications that are on the roadmap now for naval shock requirements. EMI and radiation immunity often. >> Yeah, it's funny, I remember when we first launched it was like, "Oh, well everything's going to white boxes. "And it's going to be massive, "no differentiation between everything out there." If you look at what you're offering, if you look at how public Clouds build their things, but I called it a few years or is there's a pure optimization. So you need to scale, you need similarities but you know you need to fit some, very specific requirements, lots of places, so, interesting stuff. Yeah, certifications, always keep your teams busy. Alright, let's get back to Shannon to view on the report. >> We are also introducing three other hardware-based additions. First, a new VxRail E Series model based on where the first time AMD EPYC processors. These single socket 1U nodes, offer dual socket performance with CPU options that scale from eight to 64 Cores, up to a terabyte of memory and multiple storage options making it an ideal platform for desktop VDI analytics and computer aided design. Next, the addition of the latest Nvidia Quadro RTX GPUs brings the most significant advancement in computer graphics in over a decade to professional work flows. Designers and artists across industries can now expand the boundary of what's possible, working with the largest and most complex graphics rendering, deep learning and visual computing workloads. And Intel Optane DC persistent memory is here, and it offers high performance and significantly increased memory capacity with data persistence at an affordable price. Data persistence is a critical feature that maintains data integrity, even when power is lost, enabling quicker recovery and less downtime. With support for Intel obtain DC persistent memory customers can expand in memory intensive workloads and use cases like SAP HANA. Alright, let's finally dig into our HCI system software, which is the Core differentiation for VxRail regardless of your workload or platform choice. Our joining engineering with VMware and investments in VxRail HCI system software innovation together deliver an optimized operational experience at reduced risk for our customers. Under the covers, VxRail offers best in class hardware, married with VMware HCI software, either vSAN or VCF. But what makes us different stems from our investments to integrate the two. Dell Technologies has a dedicated VxRail team of about 400 people to build market sell and support a fully integrated hyper converged system. That team has also developed our unique VxRail HCI system software, which is a suite of integrated software elements that extend VMware native capabilities to deliver seamless, automated operational experience that customers cannot find elsewhere. The key components of VxRail HCI system software shown around the arc here that include the extra manager, full stack lifecycle management, ecosystem connectors, and support. I don't have time to get into all the details of these elements today, but if you're interested in learning more, I encourage you to meet our experts. And I will tell you how to do that in a moment. I touched on the LCM being a key feature to the vSphere 7.0 earlier and I'd like to take the opportunity to expand on that a bit in the context of VxRail Lifecycle Management. The LCM adds valuable automation to the execution of updates for customers, but it doesn't eliminate the manual work still needed to define and package the updates and validate all of the components prior to applying them. With VxRail customers have all of these areas addressed automatically on their behalf, freeing them to put their time into other important functions for their business. Customers tell us that Lifecycle management continues to be a major source of the maintenance effort they put into their infrastructure, and then it tends to lead to overburden IT staff, that it can cause disruptions to the business if not managed effectively, and that it isn't the most efficient economically. Automation of Lifecycle Management and VxRail results in the utmost simplicity from a customer experience perspective, and offers operational freedom from maintaining infrastructure. But as shown here, our customers not only realize greater IT team efficiencies, they have also reduced downtime with fewer unplanned outages, and reduced overall cost of operations. With VxRail HCI system software, intelligent Lifecycle Management upgrades of the fully integrated hardware and software stack are automated, keeping clusters and continuously validated states while minimizing risks and operational costs. How do we ensure Continuously validated states for VxRail. VxRail labs execute an extensive, automated, repeatable process on every firmware and software upgrade and patch to ensure clusters are in continuously validated states of the customers choosing across their VxRail environment. The VxRail labs are constantly testing, analyzing, optimizing, and sequencing all of the components in the upgrade to execute in a single package for the full stack. All the while VxRail is backed by Dell EMC's world class services and support with a single point of contact for both hardware and software. IT productivity skyrockets with single click non disruptive upgrades of the fully integrated hardware and software stack without the need to do extensive research and testing. taking you to the next VxRail version of your choice, while always in a continuously validated state. You can also confidently execute automated VxRail upgrades. No matter what hardware generation or node types are in the cluster. They don't have to all be the same. And upgrades with VxRail are faster and more efficient with leapfrogging simply choose any VxRail version you desire. And be assured you will get there in a validated state while seamlessly bypassing any other release in between. Only VxRail can do that. >> All right, so Chad, the lifecycle management piece that Shannon was just talking about is, not the sexiest, it's often underappreciated. There's not only the years of experience, but the continuous work you're doing, reminds me back the early vSAN deployments versus VxRail jointly developed, jointly tested between Dell and VMware. So bring us inside why, 2020 Lifecycle Management still, a very important piece, especially in the VM family line. >> Yes, Stu, I think it's sexy, but, I'm pretty big nerd. (all laughing) Yeah, this is really always been our bread and butter. And in fact, it gets even more important, the larger the deployments come, when you start to look at data centers full of VxRails and all the different hardware software, firmware combinations that could exist out there. It's really the value that you get out of that VxRail HCI system software that Shannon was talking about and how it's optimized around the VMware use case. Very tightly integrated with each VMware component, of course, and the intelligence of being able to do all the firmware, all of the drivers, all the software all together in tremendous value to our customers. But to deliver that we really need to make a fairly large investment. So as Shannon mentioned, we run about 25,000 hours of testing across Each major release for patches, express patches, that's about 7000 hours for each of those. So, obviously, there's a lot of parallelism. And we're always developing new test scenarios for each release that we need to build in as we as we introduce new functionality. And one of the key things that we're able to do, as Shannon mentioned, is to be able to leapfrog releases and get you to that next validated state. We've got about 100 engineers just working on creating and executing those test cases on a continuous basis and obviously, a huge amount of automation. And we've talked about that investment to execute those tests. That's one worth of $60 million of investment in our lab. In fact, we've got just over 2000 VxRail units in our testbed across the US, Shanghai, China and Cork, Ireland. So a massive amount of testing of each of those components to make sure that they operate together in a validated state. >> Yeah, well, absolutely, it's super important not only for the day one, but the day two deployments. But I think this actually a great place for us to bring in that customer that Dell gave me access to. So we've got the CIO of Amarillo, Texas, he was an existing VxRail customer. And he's going to explain what happened as to how he needed to react really fast to support the work-from-home initiative, as well as we get to hear in his words the value of what Lifecycle Management means. So Andrew, if we could queue up that customer segment, please? >> It's been massive and it's been interesting to see the IT team absorb it. As we mature, I think they embrace the ability to be innovative and to work with our departments. But this instance, really justified why I was driving progress. So fervently why it was so urgent today. Three years ago, the answer would have been no. We wouldn't have been in a place where we could adapt With VxRail in place, in a week we spun up hundreds of instant balls. We spun up a 75-person call center in a day and a half, for our public health. We rolled out multiple applications for public health so they could do remote clinics. It's given us the flexibility to be able to roll out new solutions very quickly and be very adaptive. And it's not only been apparent to my team, but it's really made an impact on the business. And now what I'm seeing is those of my customers that work, a little lagging or a little conservative, or understanding the impact of modernizing the way they do business because it makes them adaptable as well. >> Alright, so great, Richard, you talked a bunch about the the efficiencies that that the IT put in place, how about that, that overall just managed, you talked about how fast you spun up these new VDI instances. need to be able to do things much simpler? So how does the overall Lifecycle Management fit into this discussion? >> It makes it so much easier. And in the old environment, one, It took a lot of man hours to make change. It was very disruptive, when we did make change, it overburdened, I guess that's the word I'm looking for. It really overburdened our staff to cause disruption to business. That wasn't cost efficient. And then simple things like, I've worked for multi billion dollar companies where we had massive QA environments that replicated production, simply can't afford that at local government. Having this sort of environment lets me do a scaled down QA environment and still get the benefit of rolling out non disruptive change. As I said earlier, it's allowed us to take all of those cycles that we were spending on Lifecycle Management because it's greatly simplified, and move those resources and rescale them in other areas where we can actually have more impact on the business. It's hard to be innovative when 100% of your cycles are just keeping the ship afloat. >> All right, well, nothing better than hearing it straight from the end user, public sector reacting very fast to the COVID-19. And, if you heard him he said, if this is his, before he had run this project, he would not have been able to respond. So I think everybody out there understands, if I didn't actually have access to the latest technology, it would be much harder. All right, I'm looking forward to doing the CrowdChat letting everybody else dig in with questions and get follow up but a little bit more, I believe one more announcement he can and got for us though. Let's roll the final video clip. >> In our latest software release VxRail 4.7.510, We continue to add new automation and self service features. New functionality enables you to schedule and run upgrade health checks in advance of upgrades, to ensure clusters are in a ready state for the next upgrade or patch. This is extremely valuable for customers that have stringent upgrade windows, as they can be assured the clusters will seamlessly upgrade within that window. Of course, running health checks on a regular basis also helps ensure that your clusters are always ready for unscheduled patches and security updates. We are also offering more flexibility and getting all nodes or clusters to a common release level with the ability to reimage nodes or clusters to a specific VxRail version, or down rev one or more nodes that may be shipped at a higher rate than the existing cluster. This enables you to easily choose your validated state when adding new nodes or repurposing nodes in a cluster. To sum up all of our announcements, whether you are accelerating data sets modernization extending HCI to harsh Edge environments, deploying an on-premises Dell Technologies Cloud platform to create a developer ready Kubernetes infrastructure. VxRail is there delivering a turn-key experience that enables you to continuously innovate, realize operational freedom and predictably evolve. VxRail provides an extensive breadth of platform configurations, automation and Lifecycle Management across the integrated hardware and software full stack and consistent hybrid Cloud operations to address the broadest range of traditional and modern applications across Core, Edge and Cloud. I now invite you to engage with us. First, the virtual passport program is an opportunity to have some fun while learning about VxRail new features and functionality and sCore some sweet digital swag while you're at it. Delivered via an augmented reality app. All you need is your device. So go to vxrail.is/passport to get started. And secondly, if you have any questions about anything I talked about or want a deeper conversation, we encourage you to join one of our exclusive VxRail Meet The Experts sessions available for a limited time. First come first served, just go to vxrail.is/expertsession to learn more. >> All right, well, obviously, with everyone being remote, there's different ways we're looking to engage. So we've got the CrowdChat right after this. But Jon, give us a little bit more as to how Dell's making sure to stay in close contact with customers and what you've got for options for them. >> Yeah, absolutely. So as Shannon said, so in lieu of not having done Tech World this year in person, where we could have those great in-person interactions and answer questions, whether it's in the booth or in meeting rooms, we are going to have these Meet The Experts sessions over the next couple weeks, and we're going to put our best and brightest from our technical community and make them accessible to everyone out there. So again, definitely encourage you. We're trying new things here in this virtual environment to ensure that we can still stay in touch, answer questions, be responsive, and really looking forward to, having these conversations over the next couple of weeks. >> All right, well, Jon and Chad, thank you so much. We definitely look forward to the conversation here and continued. If you're here live, definitely go down below and do it if you're watching this on demand. You can see the full transcript of it at crowdchat.net/vxrailrocks. For myself, Shannon on the video, Jon, Chad, Andrew, man in the booth there, thank you so much for watching, and go ahead and join the CrowdChat.

>> Live from Miami Beach, Florida it's the CUBE covering VeeamON 2019 brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to Miami everybody, you're watching the CUBE the leader in live tech coverage as we go out to the events and we extract the signal from the noise, this is day one of VeeamON 2019 the CUBE's third year covering Veeam first year we were in New Orleans, last year Chicago, very cool and hip location here at the Fontainebleau Hotel, I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Peter Boroughs. Colin Chatelier is here, he's the manager of storage and compute for Europe at Rabobank, Colin thanks for coming on the CUBE it's good to see you. >> Yeah glad to be here. >> So tell us about Rabobank, what are you guys all about? >> Okay, so Rabobank is obviously a bank we have two main focuses, first of all we're trying to be the biggest high street bank in the Netherlands, biggest retail bank in the Netherlands and we've got 7.3 million customers there, in an adult population of 14 million so that's not bad. And secondly the Netherlands is only of certain size and we're not going to grow it that much so the biggest part of our new business is international. And that's the bank is all focused on providing food and agriculture expertise loans, FX, spot work, anything that can help people or help businesses improve their efficiencies and get more food from spade to plate. >> So what are some of your, the drivers in your business that are affecting your technology strategy? >> Drivers in a business I guess again we've got two different parts of the bank I should probably explain, so two years ago we brought the IT of those two different parts of the bank together. >> [Dave} That's the Retail And The International? >> The retail and the international and if you think about it the international is all wholesale work, the retail is all high street banking so the retail those people really want to see their data, they want to see it on the, on the web, their check and balances, transferring pocket money to their kids and if that doesn't happen, that's a tragedy and embarrassing. So we can't be responsible for that as a result one of our watch words is always on, so we need to make sure that data is always available and we need to make sure that systems are always up for them. Part of that really is, occasionally it won't always be on so you need to be able to recover very quickly and getting a product that's simple to use for recovery and fast to recover was really part of that strategy, that's where Veeam came in. >> So when you had to merge those two IT operations, obviously it was more than the data protection side of things, but talk generally about what the challenges were but then specifically about the data protection piece. >> Okay, so bringing two IT departments together of course gives you a choice, "am I going to use product A or product B?" "Or sometimes product A and product B and not C." That gave us an opportunity to really do something that's not that common in the backup world and introduce a bit of churn, especially in retail environments, we have monthly backups, sorry especially in wholesale we have monthly backups. And those monthly backups go for anything from one year to ten years. So trying to get away from a backup product where there's ten years worth of legacy there, to recover, it's very tricky. But bringing the two banks together gave us that opportunity to say, okay well we'll invest in in a move and we really put a whole series of criteria together to try and figure out which one we were going to use. We moved from vmware and Hyper-V we're moving everything to vmware and from, we have a number of other backup products which I won't name because we're moving away from them. And Veeam was the winner there. Now, why? We needed something that would recover quickly we needed something that would scale to the enterprise, we have 13 thousand VMs being backed up today. We needed something that we could deploy reasonably quickly and without too much effort and actually when we deployed Veeam, we started off in November last year and by the end of January we were finished. Now there were a couple of thousand VMs on Veeam at that point >> Hold on, I'm sorry so it took you two months to effectively move out an old backup infrastructure and move in a new one? >> Sort of correct yes, for dailies. For monthly's we haven't touched that yet so we decide to just bite off one chunk at a time. >> Because you've got ten years of legacies with your monthly's... >> We have at least ten years, yeah >> All right but still >> That's pretty quick >> Yeah, yeah yeah >> Now what about cloud, every conference you go to you see the sign, cloud data management everything is cloud, cloud, cloud it used to be in your business, the financial services business, that cloud was an evil word >> Yeah >> Is it still? What's your clod strategy and how does data protection fit in? >> Well we have a strategy of public cloud first, that's a lot easier to do for new applications than it is for existing applications of course. So it tends to be that the existing applications are waiting for a technical refresh or are waiting for a an application re-write and new applications are going straight into the cloud. How we are protecting that, at the moment most of our data is held on prem where as a lot of our applications which can easily be refreshed and re-published is held on the cloud so we, those guys, the dev ops teams are performing their own backup, their own recovery. >> So are you able to sort of, for the on prem stuff are you trying to sort of make that cloud-like so it'll substantially mimic the cloud are you able to do that? You know, Peter you're always talking about bringing the cloud experience to your data, is that something that you're able to do or is that just sort of good marketing tagline? >> It's something that we are just starting to do again, so a year ago we had a private cloud that was just on the verge of being deployed, but we decided then that strategically we'd mothball that and encourage everybody to go to public cloud, and not confuse them with two different choices. That's proving a little difficult so one of the things that we find is development teams who are currently in the cloud can develop things with software defined infrastructure but when they try and interface with the data or with some of the systems that are on prem, then they come to a dramatic holt and they have to wait for the normal on prem processes to kick through. So what we're looking at doing now is we just started a new process or a new project an on prem, proof of concept, on prem cloud that will interact with the off prem cloud and give the cloud-like experience. So we'll see. >> So you have that challenge of agile meets waterfall and now you're trying to create some kind of equilibrium or really trying to modernize the on prem, what's the strategy there? >> Well I don't think it's agile meets waterfall I think its dev ops meets traditional process. It's and, yeah... (laughter) But how are we going to do it you say? >> Yeah, well I guess what I'm getting to is are you gong to find sort of a common ground or are you really going to try to drive that sort of dev ops mentality into the legacy process? >> We'll, continue to have a traditional or legacy, depending on what you want to call it, environment there, but we'll also have a software to find infrastructure environment on prem, if this proof of concept works, it's being built at the moment or being designed at the moment based on a vmware stack. >> What role will containers and microservices play in terms of facilitating that transformation? >> At the moment we have containers on prem which are coming with applications but we don't have a specific container platform which we're offering as a service on prem That's just where, there's containers off prem of course you know as Euro Cloud. >> Right, right, so for the on prem stuff what does that do for you and where do you see that going? >> For containers? >> Yeah >> At the moment we have a policy of not providing a container service on prem >> Oh, oh, oh, sorry, I heard wrong, sorry. Okay so that's not a direction that you're going currently? >> No but it maybe, because we're feeling our way forward I think. >> As you think about, for example banks or financial services companies have been at the Vanguard of a lot of digital business practices because you're core offering is data and how it gets used so is your overall business starting to rethink this notion of backup and restore from something that's just there to you know, make sure the data's available to becoming an essential strategic capability that can span between the two modes that you're describing but a common approach to making sure the data assets aren't compromised by vendor relationships, by application development style, by locations, is that, are you thinking in those terms of a federated approach to ensure the services on the data that you need? >> Okay well that was a very long question >> Yes >> But it's quite a short answer, yes we're thinking about it, no we haven't done it yet. So, but I think you're absolutely right, one of the problems could be for example we deploy in I don't know as your AWS, Google, and we fall out with one of those cloud providers and we try and move our backup data from provider A to provider B, is it transportable? You know, is, have we got the same policy that's been deployed in each of them so that whole thing needs to be... >> You don't want to recreate that problem that you got with those ten years of monthly backups with the new stuff too? >> Exactly, yeah yeah, we've already made that mistake. >> What are the other challenges, well but you made it for good reason, that was the state of the technology at the time and you had to have hardened processes and that was how you did it you know, ten or fifteen years ago. What are the other problems or challenges that you hear from when we talk to financial services organizations is if their data exists, they're data companies as Peter said but their data exits in hardened silos, again for good reason, you had to protect that data it was mission critical family jewels type of stuff >> Regulatory reasons >> Now as you transform into the so-called digital business everybody wants access to that data and so you've got that tough balancing act so, is that obviously a challenge for you, how are you dealing with that challenge and data protection generally was unique to each of those silos, so how are you thinking about data protection going forward in terms of busting those silos? >> Well, I don't think we've eve had silos in data protection, I think we've, our data protection has been uniform across the two banks of course >> Yeah, right. >> So now we've brought them together again, we have what, different retention characteristics, different ways of using the product. But over the last year and a half, two years we've pretty much brought in the same processes. But I don't think that any application on prem or any that will be on the private cloud or on the prem cloud will have anything different. It will use the same product, the same processes and perhaps have more access by the development teams, dev ops teams to be able to fire off their own backups at the right time. >> You're talking from a data protection perspective >> Perspective, yeah >> And then potentially other things like microservices or containers over time? >> Yeah >> Yeah, okay what's happening at the show here? Things you've learned, anything you've seen that's exciting you? Any announcements? >> Well, it's early days isn't it? It's early days so I think the, the best thing for the show so far was last night when it, going on the boat, meeting some of the other execs and sharing some experiences with them. I think, you know one of the things I always think is the best practice comes from worst experience and I don't want to have all that worst experience myself I wouldn't mind it from everybody else. (laughter) So I think you can learn more in an hour in a social situation then you can perhaps in two hours in the conference room there. >> So what are yo hearing from your peers, what are they doing, some of the challenges they're facing this digital business stuff is it real? How are they dealing with it? >> Okay, my peers, I think what they're feeling is that the traditional backup solution, the traditional backup providers are just not quick enough on their feet, agile in a real sense rather than a >> Quotes >> Quotes and marketing sense yeah, and I think the traditional providers tend to be, less grateful for the business perhaps. You know I heard about the number of new customers that Veeam are getting today but they seem to give a lot of attention to those new customers. Now deploying 13 thousand vms in a relatively short period of time we needed a lot of help from Veeam to overcome the obstacles as we hear them and they were there when we needed them and you know that makes a difference I think especially when you're protecting your data and you need to be ale to restore that data you need a partner not a vendor. >> So it's as much the relationship as the technology is what I'm hearing? >> I don't think we would get into bed with a vendor who wasn't a partner as well. >> Or in manner respects it's almost like Veeam understands how to solve the problem and their technology is a way of doing it easily, and simply, and reliably? >> Exactly yeah. >> I want to follow up on that because some of the large companies that can infer what you're talking about, they might have big established direct sales forces, meat eating guys that are in the field that just go belly to belly. You know Veeam all channel, all indirect how are they successfully partnering with you in ways that the other guys may not be with that type of go to market model? >> So we used a company called Pro*Act a reseller to buy into Veeam, I guess Veeam trained them up well because they had all the information at their finger tips and they represented us in the negotiation with Veeam, so it took away perhaps some of the conflict that you would get in an early situation. And then when we needed the direct help from Veeam, Veeam stepped up to the board and started giving that direct help and not cut out the reseller but the reseller wasn't needed anymore at that point. >> And that was help from a technology stand point or a business terms stand point or both? >> Technology, just over coming the problems, you know a big organization has got a lot of networks a lot of lans, v-lans, and we need to be able to punch holes through those v-lans so it's quite interesting to be able to be told up front where we need to punch. >> Make this work >> Yeah >> Great, all right Colin, well thanks very much for coming to the CUBE, it was great having you, give your final thoughts on Miami, you're coming in from out of town and you got the tour last night on the boat, and what'd you think and impressions of the conference? >> Well Miami first of all, it looks like a nice place to live as we cruised past all of those gigantic homes, I didn't notice anyone in them so, perhaps one's going cheap. The conference it looks good, I am always surprised by how big it is, it's my second event and yeah, they've got a hell of a lot of customers and seem to be loyal customers as well, nobody has a bad thing to say. >> Were you here in Chicago last year? >> I wasn't I was here in New Orleans >> New Orleans, yeah, two years ago, all right great well thanks very much of coming to the CUBE we appreciate it >> Thank you >> All right keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest you're watching the CUBE live from VeeamON 2019, be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida It's the que covering accelerate nineteen. Brought to you by important >> Welcome back to the Cube. Live from Orlando, Florida at Fortinet Accelerate twenty ninety nine. Lisa Martin Joining and welcoming to the queue for the first time, the CEO and president of Novy Flow. Dominique Jordan. Dominic. Great to have you joining on the Cube at accelerate. So here we are in Orlando, talking about all things cyber security. I just came from the keynote session where Fortinet was talking about how much they're innovating. What? How they're leading from a competitive perspective. What customers air saying why their security fabric is so differentiated? No, the flow is one of their security fabric ready partners. But before we talk about that, why don't you take a minute or two to describe to our audience who know the flow is and what you guys are doing in cybersecurity? >> Yeah, way We came in a little bit by accident. The cyber security. We we've been founded seven years ago, and the idea was to create the very programmable networks. It's very much in line with what we heard today on the keynote, and we became a technology leader in that field as the and software defined networking. And three, four years ago, customers started to use our product, obviously for cybersecurity application. We didn't even know about that. They don't necessarily tell us, and we spend a bit more focus into it. And over time we started to work with fortunate, for example. And now we have a developing. Is Greg relationship great solutions? Also for the for the customers. >> So one of the things that we understand from Fortinet and from all of the conversations that the Cube has globally is is that digital transformation is fundamental to every business to compete right. But as is secure transformation and security transformation, very challenging to do as businesses. And you think of any industry, financial services, retail, consumer packaged goods. As they expand digitally, so does the attack surface. So one of the things that fourteen it talks about is it's not enough anymore to have these point solutions pointed at different, you know, on Prem Cloud edge that the entire infrastructure as it's changing and they attacked services expanding has got to be protected more from an integrated perspective. This notion of the of the security fabric. Talk to us about a fabric ready partnership. What that means to know that though I know that's only in the last six months or so. So walk us through what you did to become a fabric ready partner and what it is that you in forging that are seeing in the market as challenges that you're helping to results. >> Yeah, what we see. Actually, I like to decide the defined that as a battlefield, the attacks are being waged, really, and and the band we feel is the networks of those carriers. There was a government agencies, large enterprise, etcetera, and those those companies are not really taking advantage of their position because, in fact, with the right network fabric the right tools to be able to react, they could actually be very much more powerful. So this is where we are working with forty nine to equip those customers with solutions that are much more agile, more programmable because the network is also evolving. It's not only that the attacks are broader, they also changing the nature of it is changing, and the fact that we came from a background of working at the edge of the networks mostly. Well, I wouldn't mention that before we deployed. Typically at the large tier one carriers all around the world are mentioned. A few tell Strike group, wait deployed at the Hutchison Group Young law, etcetera. And also a two of these five eyes. So government agencies that are engage in fighting these attacks. So So we come with a background of working in a decentralized approach anyway, So it was a very natural evolution. Work was done with Fortinet so far. So what we built so far together we built some integrated solutions s So far, we have two solutions that we are demonstrating two customers. The first one is to allow the large. It tends to be the larger customer fortunate that are making the transition from a in existing appliance to virtual eyes solutions. That's an area where we are very effective at helping them to scale. And those would be for customers that would have say, hundred gig of traffic or more. So we're fortunate we built a and undermanned solution. It's an integrated solution that enables those carriers to are. Those customers could be other kind of customers to gradually grow the number of the EMS that are used in real time for doing whatever Sabbath security job they have to do. And if they the demand comes down, these v EMS were released in the customer data centers. To do some other jobs like this is one of the products that we built together, and we are demonstrating. The second one is a. A feature of that is that we can process about the way this is Ah is able to scale all the way up to six point five terra bits per second. I'Ll repeat that six point five terror bits per second. This is a unheard of and this is, I think one of the interests of Fortinet is working with no visible. We already have developed not really the metal ring system, but all the O. N m features that you demand as a customer to be deployed in the real world. So so that's that. That's the base on. The second option is that we developed is a carry Great Nat again. Same idea. We can scale the Terra great net analysis up to one point six terabit per second. Former, very powerful. They're powerful solutions to meet this this raising the man which you talked about? They say this literally a wave of attacks coming more and more. >> So you mentioned some customers by name. Telstra, for example. CEO to CEO conversations tells, has been around for a long time as the organization expands digitally. And we talked about a minute ago as this the attack surface. What are some of the conversations that you're having with the scene? The C suite about security? It's not just talking to, you know, network security admits. Right? What are those conversations that you're having with the CEO in the C suite that are where they're saying these are my business problems? Dominic, help us solve these problems. >> Well, it comes to two words, basically its scale and are slow flexibility. It comes to that simple. Is this so they are struggling to see how they can cope with the especially the ones that are virtual izing because you end up. Imagine the model is that you go from a very powerful appliance and once you virtual eyes this appliance, you might end up with thirty different servers, you know, running in parallel, you have to have low balancers in front of it. That makes for a very complex and very expensive solution. So that's that's are they searching for? How can we reduce the complexity, for example, one of the advantages of our product working side by side with fortunate. Since we worked at six point five terabytes per second, we do some of the pre processing of the traffic before it hits the virtualized solution forty gate, for example. We have built some blacklist white list we can do also the load balancing. No need to install some additional law balancing can have. That is a kind of a black box I get that does all the required feature to increase the scaling off those those combined solution and the second, the second party flexibility. You got to be able to evolves your solution in time as these attacks are revolving now or product is built from bottom up, and it's built on and infrastructure typically white boxes that are running chips that are programmable by us. So the software, the NASA's it's Gone, is complemented by some very easy to use porting layers if you like. So the Fortinet solution could be easily adapted to this platform and And that's how we can achieve this kind of throughput. And in fact, I will tell to your viewers that we already have built live demos of those solutions in the Sofia anti police lab in France. The labs of Fortinet, Where were you? We're doing demos for the for customers of those solutions. >> So I'MA tell Stir, though, and you said speed and flexibility scale rather the other sailor disability scale. Inflexibility. What are some? How does my business? What am I looking to achieve? A. My looking to scale to x number of users X number of regions. How does how is that measured from, say, a Telstra's perspective as a big business impact that Novy Flow and Fortinet are helping to them to achieve? >> Yeah, the It's really all dimensions way have some challenge just by handling the raw volume of traffics. Sometimes some customers are pumping terra bits of traffic between one country and the other, so that's one. And but it's also geography because your attack and come and any anywhere in your network that the periphery or inside your network so you have to be able to in a centralized away once you detect there's an attack you have to be able to respondent and in some time, and that's how we can do with our programmable infrastructure can actually reprogrammed those air routing tables. You can take some mitigation action, for example, some of some of the bad traffic on the blacklist. If you've looked at it, perhaps you could put it on a white list for serpent of time. Don't don't look at it over and over. Just wait, maybe a little bit those kind of off measures to alleviate the load. So, in fact, it's work more intelligently with the raw volume of traffic that comes to you. So this is one of the real advantage of is the end. So after defined networking applied to a cyber security problem, >> what are some of the other industries that you are seeing that have potential to dramatically benefit from suffer to find networking in cyber security? Knowing that he d threat landscape, it is exponentially growing. Yes, we've got tools like a I and Machine Learning, which we'LL talk about later on the program today with respective forty Gar labs, for example. But of course, so do the attackers have access to utilize artificial intelligence to create even smarter attacks. But from your perspective, what are some of the other industries that are really right to take advantage of SGN and cyber security practices? >> You know, I think all industries are moving to data. There's no exception. I was talking to some guy, an interpreter in Montreuil yesterday's doing farming, but it's high tech farming with several earlier. It's all based on a I. It's all based on data, even those industry that the forming industry thing that may be so every industry will rely on data, and that means it will rely on a network, and it all comes down to the network. You gotta be able to build a cyber security network ready fabric from the bottom up so that your network is one of the key features is actually stop the attacks, and that doesn't matter in which industry you are. I think they you can think about the industry where you have vast volumes of data. They will be most likely the first one to take benefit of these. You know, we talk about countries before, and this is one such an industry, but it certainly where you process the vast amount of traffic. So they taking advantage of our technology, for example. And but I think it will be probably most of the industry will be affected by that shorter later >> and hopefully sooner rather than later, considering how fast all of these opportunities, good and bad, are growing. One of the things sporting that talked a lot about this morning during this section and some of the press releases is this growth that they've experienced growing twenty percent year on year from last year one point eight billion in revenue over three hundred eighty five thousand customers. You're one of the fabric ready partners, of which there are fifty seven. So a lot of growth, a lot of potential. What excites you as the head of no be Flo and your recent and developing partnership with Fortinet for twenty nineteen and beyond were gonna latch onto that growth trajectory. >> Absolute well, you know, when you mentioned high volume of traffic that plays to our cards. So the market is actually coming where we are way have our product runs at six for five terabytes per second, and that's today because we have a *** plans to move to twelve Tara bits and so forth. So for us, it's exciting because we feel we have the right scaling platform and the right program ability. So our customers, fortunate customers together with us can start with the existing. They're powerful platform. But should that evolved, they'LL be able to move to a new level of software new capacity gradually over time. So that's very exciting for us. >> But what about some of the announcements that came out this morning? Over three hundred new features added, for example, that's a tremendous amount of innovation since last year's accelerate. >> Yeah, well, the's features needs also have the right, I would say filtered level of data to be able to do it more efficiently. And that's where we commend we're not inside the subway Security company. We are really complimenting the product of forty nine by playing upstream and doing a pre filtering controlled by the policy management of the Fortunate, the equipment but nevertheless taking up some of the load of it so that the equipment could be more efficient. But just as an example, I read in a magazine a couple days ago that Google is building a A two hundred fifty terabyte cable between North America and Europe. Think about that. It's it's mindboggling is three time Library of Congress per second. And those are the kind of volume of data did you see coming so suddenly? Six point five terabytes per second doesn't sound so big, does it? But in fact, that's the world win today, and we're lucky it may be flow. We invested early on in the software layer that runs on top of these extremely powerful white boxes and were taking advantage of it with Fortinet. >> Gotta deliver that scale, that flexibility and his son's more and more like Speed. Dominic, thank you so much for stopping by the Cuban joining me on the program today, talking about Novy float what you're doing with Fortinet and what excites you about the year ahead >> was a pleasure, Liza. Thank you for >> mine as well. I want to thank you for watching the Cube Lisa Martin live on the Cube from Fortinet Accelerate twenty nineteen in Orlando. Thanks for watching

>> Announcer: From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> A couple of years ago the research analysts at Wikibon coined the term "true private cloud" and it was based on the recognition from talking to practitioners in our community, that they weren't really able to reshape and reform their business and stuff it into the cloud. Rather, what they wanted to do was bring the cloud experience, the cloud operating model, to their data, wherever that data existed. My name is Dave Vellante. Welcome everybody to this Cube Conversation. HCI, the fundamental foundation for IT transformation. I'm here with Jon Siegal who's the Vice President of Product Marketing at Dell EMC. Good to see you again. Thanks for coming out. >> Yeah, good to see you as always. >> So what's happening in the world of HCI? It's hot, it's exploding. Give us the update. >> Wow, is it hot. I mean 2017 has been quite a year when it comes to the hyper-converged infrastructure. It's the hottest IT infrastructure segment in terms of growth right now. 40, 50, 60% a year, depending on who you talk to. Regardless, it's big. A couple billion dollars this year and it's going to be up to 10 billion dollars by 2021. So we're talking big, big, big. And I think really what this has to do is the fact that it's really gone mainstream. Right? It's really crossed the chasm and for a couple reasons. One is I think what you just referred to is what you're calling the "true private cloud," if you will, experience that customers want. This is really a de facto, HCI is the de facto now, foundation for what customers really need to build a private cloud, number one. >> Okay, so what about HCI, I mean, I understand why it's growing because it essentially does bring that cloud experience. What about HCI makes it that foundation for cloud? Can you elaborate a little bit? >> Absolutely, first of all it's software-defined. It's dirt simple. We essential make it a Turn-Key. So really what we're helping customers do is build a foundation so they can build an IAS, or a platform as a service on top. In order to build the foundation, you have to make it as simple and Turn-Key as possible. So what we've done is, we've made sure that there's a single throat to choke. We made sure that we it there the automation for deployment, for day-to-day management, all the way through lifecycle management. We made sure that we have a platform, if you will, that now allows it now to enable self-service. You can start small and grow. The pay-as-you-grow model, for example, that has really been, I think, widely received very positively in the cloud space. As you said, we're bringing the cloud-like attributes to on prem with HCI as a foundation. >> So let's unpack those a little bit. So, one of the things you think about with the cloud vendor, public cloud. I swipe the credit card. I have a relationship with that vendor. It's a single throat to choke. Is that the relationship that I have with you when I do business with you? >> Yes. So, Dell EMC, and one of the reasons that Dell EMC has become number one in this space, is because we've made it simple for customers. We have the HCI appliance called VxRail. It's the only HCI appliance on the market that's co-engineered with VMware, to insure that we have that single throat to choke for our customers. >> Okay, so there's an integration component. I mean, you don't go all the way up to the highest level application, but from an infrastructure standpoint, services are fully integrated. Is that right? And you come in, and when I install it, all those services are there? It's not like I'm rolling my own? >> This is fully integrated in Turn-Key. Really what, you know, again, the reason I think we're seeing HCI take off like we are, is because we've taken a lot of that pain, and the aggravation that customers have to spend trying to build to maintain their core infrastructure, We've taken that on. Right? And we're actually doing that for them. So that when it arrives, from day one, all the way through day 365, we've taken care of the automation for them, and this allows them to spend much more time focused up the stack. Right? So they can actually start to figure out where hey can differentiate their business with IT, because IT plays a critical role in how customers are going to transform their business and go from really a traditional IT model, to a digital transformation model. In order to do that, they need to spend less time building and maintaining the infrastructure, and that's really what HCI has done for our customers. >> Well, I think that's a really important point, and it's a big reason why it's growing so fast. Just to throw some data in there, we see about 150 billion dollars over the next 10 years exiting, what you were talking about, that low level infrastructure management, shifting labor resource up to whatever, AI, or, doing other types of application development work, digital business transformation. So let me ask you, am I correct that you can manage your hyper converged products as a single entity of pools of resource? >> Exactly right. So really what we've done is we've simplified the infrastructure, like I said. What we're doing is, we're bringing the cloud like experience to on prem, like you said. And that means we need to simplify management, as well, and that's a key part of it. So that the entire virtual infrastructure, right, can be easily managed by a VMware administrator. >> So let's test that a little bit. There are two attributes that people in our community talk about when they talk about the cloud and all. There's the self service component, and the pay by the drink. >> Yes. >> Can I actually use your products to create that type of capability for my business? >> Absolutely. So, we have a couple different options here. So, first of all, HCI, the basic premise of HCI, is that it allows customers to start small and grow. Right? And we're basically able to tailor the hyper converged, configuration to whatever our customers need. So they only buy what they need, and then they can easily grow, and seems to grow to what they want, number one. Number two, is we have capabilities, things like cloud flex, flexible financing models, and financing structures, so that customers can literally pay as they grow, much like they do in the cloud space. >> How about hybrid? Is the, I mean, everybody talks about hybrid. Hybrid cloud is the future, but can you accommodate, sort of, hybrid models with HCI? >> Absolutely. So again, HCI is that foundation for the cloud, and then we seamlessly integrate with tools, with VMwear, for example, like vRealize automation, and other things like that. And that allows things like self service which allow customers to first of all, manage their on prem, like a cloud. And then we also have capabilities for customers to even tier their data, if you will, to public clouds, as well. >> Can you give us a little bit more detail, Jon, on the underlying technology here. What are the key enablers? You mentioned, software defined. How should we think about the technology enablers to HCI? >> I think the technology enablers t6o HCI first and forward is software defined. It is based on software defined capabilities out there. VCN's a very popular one, as an example, which is really greatly simplifying moving customers away from that three tier, kind of, infrastructure model, to a new two tier model. Right? And customers really can appreciate the simplicity of this. So this allows them, again, from day one all the way through day 365, to be able to automate the deployment, automate the management, automate the life cycle management, all the way across the board. >> How about the family? You're part of Dell, now, Dell Technologies. What's that like? What's Dell bring to the HCI conversation? Talk about that a little bit. >> It's been tremendous. First and foremost, what we've done with HCI is we've leveraged, essentially, our partnerships across the Dell technologies companies. For example, I don't think there's a better example at Dell Technologies of where their groups are working together.6 We have, for example, VxRail is a perfect example of how we have Vmware and Dell EMC working, essentially, very, very closely together to ensure that we have a seamless experience for our customers. It's the only co-engineered, HCI appliance on the market with VMware, number one. Number two is we're also working very closely with Pivotal, because what customers need is they build that on prem cloud. They start with HCI, and then on top of that you can then add Turn-Key IAS which his our integration with Vmware. You can add Turn-Key platform as a service which is integration with Pivotal. So, all together what we're trying to do is enable our customers to have that on prem, cloud experience. >> All right, give us the summary. So, specifically the announcements, and what's the portfolio look like, post announcement? >> Yeah, so, what we're announcing today, we're real excited about. We're taking the simplicity, if you will, of HCI, and marrying that to the power and the flexibility of 14th generation PowerEdge servers, because what's really interesting is that, yes, HCI is defined by software. But really what it's all about is how well you integrate the software with the hardware, to ensure a Turn-Key experience for our customers, and that's what we've done introducing our VxRail and XC series appliances based on 14th generation PowerEdge6 servers. >> Okay, so you've got, sort of, horses for courses, I like to say. Different work loads are going to require different configurations. You know Dell EMC, you've been known for your large portfolio. The saying is, "Better to have overlap, than it is to have gaps." You feel like you've got the gambit covered, here? >> We do. So up until now, I think, we've seen HCI, as I said, cross the chasms. For HCI, last couple of years, was traditionally used for noncritical workloads, whether it was VDI projects, it could be test DEV. Sometimes it was small consolidation projects, and then we've started to see over the past year, it started to be applied to the majority of virtualized workloads. And now with this announcement, we think it now can apply to all workloads across the data center. That's because what 14th generation PowerEdge servers bring to the table, is first and foremost, it brings together powerful, and predictable performance. We're talking double the IOPs. Right? We're talking more predictable performance where actually customers can now expect less than a millisecond response time for their key applications. Applications like online transaction processing which in the past, hadn't necessarily been applied to HCI. So really what I think this announcement is doing overall, is we set HCI as the foundation for the on prem cloud, and up until now, we've support some workloads in the data center. But now, with this announcement, with 14th generation PowerEdge servers running our HCI solutions, we can now extend HCI across the data center, and extend that cloud like experience now, to all the applications in the data center. >> Great. Okay, let's wrap. Where do people go to find more information and dig into the product details? >> Oh, yeah. We make it really simple Again, that's HCI, it's simple, right? So, DellEMC.com/HCI is where you can go. We're also going to have a crowd chat, hashtag Nextgenhci. I believe it's going to be December 1st, so we'd love to have customers tune in and check that out, and participate, as well. >> Excellent, Jon, thanks very much for coming back to theCUBE. >> All right. >> Great to see you again. >> Great as always, thanks a lot. >> Appreciate it. Thanks for watching everybody. We'll see you next time. This is Dave Vellante. We're out. (upbeat jazz music)