(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, guys and girls. We're so happy that you're with us. This is our first full day of coverage live on theCube at AWS re:Invent '22. We're in Vegas, as I said at the Venetian Expo one of the biggest places to host, and there's probably about 50,000 people here or so. Lisa Martin and Dave Vellante Dave, we've had such great conversations. We talked about data, data, data. Every company is a data company. The most important thing is to make sure that data is accessible, that there's insights gained from it, but that it's protected and recoverable should anything happen. >> Yeah, security is the most important topic right now. We all know that it's the number one priority. The Cloud has changed the security model. the shared responsibility model is great, but at the same time, now you got shared responsibilities across multiple clouds, your developers are being asked to do more, right? It kind of the audit is like the last line of defense. So what the ecosystem does with AWS is really make the CISO's job easier. As opposed to, I mean AWS is a friendly place for security companies and I'm excited to talk about that. >> Yeah, we're going to be unpacking that. Rick Holtman is here, the VP of Advertising and Media Security at Human Security. Rick, welcome to theCUBE. >> Oh, thank you so much. Thanks for having me on. >> Pleasure to have you on here. So talk to us about Human Security. What do you do, what are the differentiators and what's in the name? >> Sure. Human is a cybersecurity company. It's been around for about 12 years right now, and our mission is truly to disrupt the economics of cyber crime. And right now, businesses are under attack like they have not been before. There's been a proliferation of bots on site that are truly hitting people's businesses. And what everyone will understand is that when bots hit your site and permeate your business, you'll never end up with a positive business outcome. >> Let's just say. What are in terms of competitive differentiators, when you're in customer conversations, what are those top three things that you say, this is why you go Human. >> Yeah, and that's great. This is why you go Human. We have a tremendous sensor network and what that gives us is observability. Because of our clients and partners, we're actually able to see 20 trillion transactions a week that we filter. And what that does is enables us to look across a broad spectrum of industry. Because of our partner networks, we're able to see all the media transacted across this ecosystem. And what we're working to do is preserve and protect that. So when we work with an SSP, DSP, ad servers and truly the pillars of technology across media, those are our core clients. And we very quickly, in under 10 milliseconds, let them know is this a bot or a human being you're about to serve an ad to, which is paramount to saving them money and not wasting their precious ad dollars. >> So what am I buying from you? Is it a subscription? Explain that. >> Sure. You're buying a subscription to the Human Defense Platform, and across that platform we've got multiple cyber tools. And what we do is we'll take different combinations of those tools and create a specific solution to address a use case. Each one of these businesses is very unique, so we had to be very flexible and malleable with the tools that we use and be able to create custom solutions, which is really what sets us apart in market. >> What are some of the key use cases that you're helping customers to address? >> Sure. It can be anything from simply guarding a website, and actually providing insights and the ability to mitigate bots, it can be guarding against account takeover, form fills. There are so many ways and attack vectors right now for people to get us at that we've got multiple disciplinary ways of looking at how to deploy solutions. It is going to continue to grow because we're seeing more and more new platforms and new types of innovation. A great example is in-game advertising. It is very new, but the industry is starting to look at it and say, hey, we know as growth comes, we're going to see fraud. How do we get out in front of that? How do we make sure that we don't have the same issue we had with CTV? Explosive growth happen before standards were in place, and now we're playing catch up and it's a huge issue. >> How are you doing that as the fraudsters are just getting more and more sophisticated? >> And that's really the problem. I think you hit it on the head. They'll continually change how they attack. They'll continually put resources behind it. And that's why I talk about disrupting the economics of cyber crime because the more we're able to mitigate and stop this, we actually make the cost of attack more and more expensive. Eventually, they're going to move on to a softer target and we want to harden up all of our clients so they're not that soft target. >> I always say, you're in the denominator business You get the bigger denominator, less value so they'll move on to somewhere else. What is your secret sauce? Is it your data? Is it your humans? >> You know, it's actually really three pillars. Part of what we talked about, which is observability. How much we're able to see because of the vast view through our partner network. And that's the other piece is this partner network. So we have what we'll call collective protection because we have so many different data inputs and understanding or what we'll call signal that we're able to interpret. And that is really one of our large differentiators. The last piece is disruption. So we'll use both the signal, our network, and truly go after these fraudsters and actually penalize 'em. And we are responsible for partly one of the largest ad fraud take downs, and someone is sitting in jail today because of it. >> Can you explain the anatomy of an ad hack? Like, what's that look like? I mean, I'm sure there's a lot of different profiles, but what's a common thing? >> And there's a few different profiles, right? One could simply be bots hitting your site, your homepage, right? That could skew data that will be used by a marketing team to make strategic decisions for a business. Form fills, account takeovers, there's all these different types of attack vectors. And then what we also specialize in across the programmatic industry is really reading what we'll call a bid stream. All these pieces of data that are going to come in, and that's how we can actually take a look at the device, the IP, and some of these signals when you put them all together, they give us a true picture of is this a human being or an automated bot swarm trying to permeate a business? >> Okay, and the automated bot swarm. So take it from the hacker's point of view. What's their objective of, you know, hitting you with those bots? What happens after they flood the zone? >> It really depends what they want. In certain cases it could be to actually take over someone's account and buy things. It can be, again, hitting the marketing component and actually driving differentiation on someone's site with form fills and surveys. So there's lots of different ways that they come to us. Inside the bid streams we're able to stop quickly because we're really high up in the actual food chain of that technology. So before some of these ad servers make a single decision, they'll make a call to Human and we'll quickly tell them serve this ad or do not. >> And the profile is largely criminals, not so much nation-state attack, or is it? >> Well, it really could be a little bit of everybody. That's the toughest part to tell. I would say we deal mostly with criminals more than I think nation-states. And people that are simply going after money, and when they see soft targets and people that don't have either they're site hardened or a true understanding of what they're fighting against, they get taken advantage of very quickly. >> What are some of the positive business outcomes that your customers are achieving? Maybe you have a favorite customer story example that you think really shines light on the value that Human is delivering. >> Sure. There's a huge customer inside the media ecosystem, and they truly serve as the gatekeepers or barriers to a lot of fraud. They look at Human as a strategic partner to make sure that when we bring on customers, they're all above board and we are not actually allowing anyone to permeate this advertising and media ecosystem with fraud. So we work hand in glove with lots of the largest platforms across media to really make sure this ecosystem is protected as it can be. >> So- >> You have the sets... Oh, go ahead please. I'm sorry. >> I was going to say, but you do more than media, is that right? >> Absolutely. We have a tremendous enterprise side of our business as well. And that is looking at financials, hospitality companies, travel companies. We really work across a full ecosystem. Bots aren't siloed. They don't care what industry you're in. So we set up industry expertise and domain expertise both across the media spectrum, as well as other components so that we can go as deep as we need to to really mitigate this. >> So you've got this huge observation space, this kind of sensor network if you will. what's the proportionality between the number of channels that we've seen evolve, and the way that that attackers are approaching the hacks? >> Sure. I think, you know, when we look at channels or platforms, the moment a new platform opens up, it gets attacked and we're continually seeing this. So the minute there is money moving towards any sort of industry, you'll see fraud right behind it. So we very carefully track industries, and we make sure we understand the changes and evolutions that are happening so we can get out in front. And a great example is in-game advertising and audio in-game advertising. They're brand new and we're starting to see money shift there for the first time. So those are the companies that have come to us immediately and said, hey, we know what's coming next. The money's here, fraud's on the way, how can Human help us? >> We haven't talked about 5G. It's rare that we don't talk about 5G, but how is that going to affect your customers? >> 5G is really going to give everybody ubiquity in terms of access, right? The more access we have, it allows your device `to become an attack vector. >> It's going to open up more channels. >> Rick: That's right. That's right. >> And so how are you planning as that becomes more mainstream to help customers combat that? As things just keep changing, there's so much flux going on. >> And that's it. You know, cyber is polymorphic. It will continue to change on us. So we are constantly evolving, and one of the things I always like to talk about with Human is the depth of the talent inside the company. And we source cyber talent globally, truly globally. All over the world, we have humans working with extreme expertise. So we've got this global perspective of what's happening everywhere in the world right now. And we're really leveraging that tremendously to fight the economics of cyber crime. >> How are you helping with your expertise at Human, companies address the massive skills gap in cybersecurity? >> Well, that's exactly it. I think there's a lot of education going on. When we meet customers or prospects, we make sure they understand the gravity of the situation and make sure we can help them see and provide insights so they understand who's attacking them, what they're being attacked with, and how to fight back. >> So what's the next step for your technology approach? How should we think about your roadmap? What are your customers asking you 'cause it's hard, right? Like you said, it's polymorphic. Sometimes it's hard to predict, but at the same time, you know, it's like you defend against yourself. You know, you say, okay let's flip the equation. You know, where are weaknesses? What are you guys thinking about in the future? >> Sure, it's a great question. We've continued to build out the Human defense platform. We merged with another company about six months ago, and we just acquired a company as well. The reason we continue on this growth path is to continue to put products and services in place so that we can continue to grow and really actually mitigate against all the different potential attacks out there. So we'll continue to add products, we'll continue to add services because as we see more and more attacks coming, we've got a greater understanding of the how and the why. So we're actually building out products that specifically hit these new pockets in industry so we can get there first and really create a beachhead. >> And how do you work with AWS? >> Sure, AWS is strategic partner and they've done a great job of helping lean in with us. We're not only working with AWS, but working across their ecosystem and working with some of their partners as well and some of their clients as well. So we're really standing up this Human Defense Platform for our partners and direct clients as well. >> Can you give us any examples of that? >> I'm not really allowed to name names when it comes to that. I apologize, but it's truly across their entire partner network. >> Got it. What are some of the things that you've heard? We're only at day one, obviously of re:Invent '22. Anything that you've heard today, maybe during the keynote or some of the things on the show floor that really excite you about the direction that AWS is moving, and the opportunities that it's going to deliver to Human? >> Sure. Absolutely. I think one of the things that was mentioned today was their clean room initiative, and I think that is an excellent place where Human has a great fit. And I think that our filtering technology and our layer there will really make sure that a clean room stays clean, and that the data that is actually joined and used is pure data and not rife with any bots. >> Got it. Humansecurity.com. Last question, Rick. If you had a bumper sticker to put on a fancy shiny new car and it was about Human, what would it say? >> It would say, know who's real. Keep it human. >> Love it. Know who's real, keep it human. Rick, thank you so much for joining us on the program. >> Thanks so much for having me. >> Introducing Human Security to our audience. We appreciate that. Really exciting stuff and so needed, especially in today's dynamic cyber landscape. We appreciate your insights. >> Rick: My pleasure. Thank you guys. >> All right. For our guest and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE. The leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (soft bright music)

>>Hey everyone, and welcome back to The Cube's live coverage of AWS Reinvented 2022 Live from the Venetian Expo in Las Vegas. We're happy to be back. This is first full day of coverage over here last night. We've got three full days of coverage in addition to last night, and there's about 50,000 people here. This event is ready, people are ready to be back, which is so exciting. Lisa Martin here with Paul Gill and Paul, it's great to be back in person. Great to be hosting with you >>And likewise with you, Lisa. I think the first time we hosted again, >>It is our first time exactly. >>And we come here to the biggest event that the cube ever does during the year. >>It's the Super Bowl of the >>Cube. It's it's elbow to elbow out there. It's, it's, it's full tackle football, totally on the, on the floor of reinvent. And very exciting. This, you know, I've been to a lot of conferences going back 40 years, long as I can remember. Been going to tech conferences. This one, the, the intensity, the excitement around this is really unusual. People are jazzed, they're excited to be here, and that's great to see, particularly coming back from two years of isolation. >>Absolutely. The energy is so palpable. Even yesterday, evening, afternoon when I was walking in, you just feel it with all the people here. You know, we talk to so many different companies on the Q Paul. Every company these days has to be a data company. The most important thing about data is making sure that it's backed up and it's protected, that it's secure, that it can be recovered if anything happens. So we're gonna be having a great conversation next about data resiliency with one of our alumni. >>And that would be Rick Scott, Rick, excuse me, Rick Scott, >>Rick Clark. Rick Clark, say Rick Scott, cloud sales Veritas. Rick, welcome back >>To the program. Thank you. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure being here, you know, thank you so much. You're definitely very excited to myself and 40,000 of my closest cousins and friends all in one place. Yep. Or I could possibly go wrong, right? So >>Yeah, absolutely nothing. So, Rick, so Veritas has made some exciting announcements. Talk to us about some of the new things that you've >>Unveiled. Yeah, we've been, we've been incredibly busy and, you know, the journey that we've been on, one of the big announcement that we made about three or four weeks ago is the introduction, really, of a brand new cloud native data management platform that we call Veritas Alta. And this is a journey that we've been on for the better part of seven years. We actually started it with our, our flex appliances. We continued, that was a containerization of our traditional net backup business in, into a highly secured appliance that was loved by our customers. And we continued that theme and that investment into what we call a scale out and scale up form factor appliance as well, what we called flex scale. And then we continued on that investment theme, basically spending over a billion dollars over that seven year journey in our cloud native. And we call that basically the Veritas altar platform with our cloud native platform. And I think if you really look at what that is, it truly is a data management platform. And I emphasize the term cloud native. And so our traditional technologies around data protection, obviously application resiliency and digital compliance or data compliance and governance. We are the only, the first and only company in the world to provide really a cloud optimized, cloud native platform, really, that addresses that. So it's been fun, it's been a fun journey. >>Talk a little bit about the customer experience. I see over 85% of the Fortune 100 trust Veritas with their data management. That's >>A big number. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it is incredible actually. And it really comes back to the Veritas older platform. We sort of built that with, with four tenants in mind, all driving back to this very similar to AWS's customer obsession. Everything we do each and every day of our waiting moments is a Veritas employee is really surrounds the customer. So it starts with the customer experience on how do they find us to, how do they procure our solutions through things like AWS marketplace and how do they deploy it? And the second thing is around really cost optimization, as we know, you know, to, to say that companies are going through a digital transformation and moving workloads to the cloud. I mean, I've got customers that literally were 20% in cloud a year ago and 80% a year later, we've never seen that kind of velocity. >>And so we've doubled down on this notion of cost optimization. You can only do that with these huge investments that I talked about. And so we're a very profitable company. We've been around, got a great heritage of over 30 years, and we've really taken those investments in r and d to provide that sort of cloud native technology to ultimately make it elastic. And so everything from will spin up and spin down services to optimize the cloud bill for our customers, but we'll also provide the greatest workload support. You know, obviously on-prem workloads are very different from cloud workloads and it's almost like turning the clock back 20 years to see all of those new systems. There's no standard API like s and MP on the network. And so we have to talk to every single PAs service, every single DB PAs, and we capture that information and protect it. So it's really has been a phenomenal journey. It's been great. >>You said this, that that al represents a shift from clouds from flex scale to cloud native. What is the difference there? >>The, the main difference really is we took, you know, obviously our traditional product that you've known for many media years, net backup. It's got, you know, tens of millions of lines of code in that. And we knew if we lifted and shifted it up into the cloud, into an I AEs infrastructure, it's just not, it obviously would perform extremely well, but it wasn't cost optimized for our customer. It was too expensive to to run. And so what we did is we rewrote with microservices and containerization, Kubernetes huge parts of that particular product to really optimize it for the cloud. And not only have we done it for that technology, what we now call alter data protection, but we've done it across our entire port portfolio. That was really the main change that we made as part of this particular transition. And >>What have you done to prepare customers for that shift? Is this gonna be a, a drop in simple upgrade for them? >>Absolutely. Yeah. In fact, one of the things that we introduced is we, we invest still very heavily with regards to our OnPrem solutions. We're certainly not abandoning, we're still innovating. There's a lot of data still OnPrem that needs to move to the cloud. And so we have a unique advantage of all of the different workload supports that we provide OnPrem. We continue that expansion into the cloud. So we, we create it as part of the Veritas AL Vision, a technology, we call it AL view. So it's a single painter glass across both OnPrem and cloud for our customers. And so now they can actually see all of their data protection, all our application availability, single collect, all through that single unified interface, which is really game changing in the industry for us. >>It's game changing for customers too, because customers have what generally six to seven different backup technologies in their environment that they're having to individually manage and provision. So the, the workforce productivity improvements I can imagine are, are huge with Veritas. >>Yeah. You you nailed it, right? You must have seen my script, but Absolutely. I mean, I look at the analogy of, you think about the airlines, what's one of the first things airlines do with efficiency? South Southwest Airlines was the best example, a standardized on the 7 37, right? And so all of their pilots, all of their mechanics, all know how to operate the 7 37. So we are doing the same thing with enterprise data protection. So whether you're OnPrem at the edge or in the cloud or even multi-cloud, we can provide that single painter glass. We've done it for our customers for 30 plus years. We'll continue to do it for another 30 something years. And so it's really the first time with Veritas altar that, that we're, we're coming out with something that we've invested for so long and put, put such a huge investment on that can create those changes and that compelling solution for our customers. So as you can see, we're pretty pumped and excited about it. >>Yes, I can >>Use the term data management to describe Alta, and I want to ask about that term because I hear it a lot these days. Data management used to be database, now data management is being applied to all kinds of different functions across the spectrum. How do you define data management in Veritas >>Perspective? Yeah, there's a, we, we see it as really three main pillars across the environment. So one is protection, and we'll talk a little bit about this notion of ransomware is probably the number one use case. So the ability to take the most complex and the biggest, most vast applications. SAP is an example with hundreds of different moving parts to it and being able to protect that. The second is application resiliency. If, if you look at the cloud, there's this notion of, of responsibility, shared responsibility in the cloud. You've heard it, right? Yep. Every single one of the cloud service providers, certainly AWS has up on their website, this is what we protect, here's the demarcation line, the line in the sand, and you, the customer are responsible for that other level. And so we've had a technology, you previously knew it as InfoScale, we now call it alter application resiliency. >>And it can provide availability zone to availability zone, real time replication, high availability of your mission critical applications, right? So not only do we do the traditional backups, but we can also provide application resiliency for mission critical. And then the third thing really from a data management standpoint is all around governance and compliance. You know, ac a lot of our customers need to keep data for five, 10 years or forever. They're audited. There's regulations and different geographies around the world. And, and those regulations require them to be able to really take control of their cloud, take control of their data. And so we have a whole portfolio of solutions under that data compliance, data government. So back to your, your question Paul, it's really the integration and the intersection of those three main pillars. We're not a one trick pony. We've been at this for a long time, and they're not just new products that we invented a couple of months ago and brought to market. They're tried and tested with eight 80,000 customers and the most complex early solutions on the planet that we've been supporting. >>I gotta ask you, you know, we talked about those three pillars and you talked about the shared responsibility model. And think of that where you mentioned aws, Salesforce, Microsoft 365, Google workspace, whatnot. Are you finding that most customers aren't aware of that and haven't been protecting those workloads and then come to you and saying, Hey guys, guess what, this is what this is what they're responsible for. The data is >>You Yeah, I, it's, it's our probably biggest challenge is, is one of awareness, you know, with the cloud, I mean, how many times have you spoken to someone? You just put it in the cloud. Your applications, like the cloud providers like aws, they'll protect everything. Nothing will ever go down. And it's kind like if you, unless your house was ever broken into, you're probably not gonna install that burglar alarm or that fire alarm, right? Hopefully that won't be an event that you guys have to suffer through. So yeah, it's definitely, it wasn't till the last year or so the cloud service providers really published jointly as to where is their responsibility, right? So a great example is an attack vector for a lot of corporations is their SAS applications. So, you know, whether it it's your traditional SA applications that is available that's available on the web to their customers as a sas. >>And so it's certainly available to the bad actors. They're gonna, where there's, there's gonna be a point they're gonna try to get in. And so no matter what your resiliency plan is, at the end of the day, you really need to protect it. And protection isn't just, for example, with M 365 having a snapshot or a recycle bin, that's just not good enough. And so we actually have some pretty compelling technology, what we call ALTA SAS protection, which covers the, pretty much the, the gamut of the major SAS technologies to protect those and make it available for our customers. So yeah, certainly it's a big part of it is awareness. Yeah. >>Well, I understand that the shared responsibility model, I, I realize there's a lot of confusion about that still, but in the SaaS world that's somewhat different. The responsibility of the SaaS provider for protecting data is somewhat different. How, how should, what should customers know about that? >>I think, you know, the, the related to that, if, if you look at OnPrem, you know, approximately 35 to 40% of OnPrem enterprise data is protected. It's kind of in a long traditional problem. Everyone's aware of it. You know, I remember going to a presentation from IBM 20 something years ago, and someone held their push hand up in the room about the dis drives and says, you need to back it up. And the IBM sales guy said, no, IBM dis drives never crash. Right? And so fast forward to here we are today, things have changed. So we're going through almost a similar sort of changes and culture in the cloud. 8% of the data in the cloud is protected today, 8%. That's incredible. Meaning >>That there is independent backup devoted >>To that data in some cases, not at all. And something many cases, the customer just assumes that it's in the cloud, therefore it's always available. I never have to worry about protecting it, right? And so that's a big problem that we're obviously trying to, trying to solve. And we do that all under the umbrella of ransomware. That's a huge theme, huge investment that, that Veritas does with regards to providing that resiliency for our >>Customers. Ransomware is scary. It is becoming so prolific. The bad actors have access to technologies. Obviously companies are fighting them, but now ransomware has evolved into, no longer are we gonna get hit, it's when, yeah, it's how often it's what's the damage going to be. So the ability to help customers recover from ransomware, that resiliency is table stakes for businesses in any industry these days. Does that, that one of the primary pain points that your customers are coming to you with? >>It's the number one pain point. Yeah, it's, it's incredible. I mean, there's not a single briefing that our teams are doing customer meetings where that term ransomware doesn't come up as, as their number one use case. Just to give you something, a couple of statistics. There's a ransomware attack attack that happens 11 times a second right around the globe. And this isn't just, you know, minor stuff, right? I've got friends that are, you know, executives of large company that have been hit that have that some, you know, multimillion dollar ransom attack. So our, our play on this is, when you think about it, is data protection is the last line of defense. Yes. And so if they break through, it's not a case, Lisa, as you mentioned, if it's a case of when Yeah. And so it's gonna happen. So one of the most important things is knowing how do you know you have a gold copy, a clean copy, and you can recover at speed in some cases. >>We're talking about tens of thousands of systems to do that at speed. That's in our dna. We've been doing it for many, many years. And we spoke through a lot of the cyber insurance companies on this particular topic as well. And what really came back from that is that they're actually now demanding things like immutable storage, malware detection, air gaping, right? Anomaly detection is sort of core technologies tick the box that they literally won't ensure you unless you have those core components. And so what we've done is we've doubled down on that investment. We use AI in ML technologies, particularly around the anomaly detection. One of the, the, the unique and ne differentiators that Verto provides is a ransomware resiliency scorecard. Imagine the ability to save uran a corporation. We can come in and run our analytics on your environment and kind of give you a grade, right? Wouldn't you prefer that than waiting for the event to take place to see where your vulnerability really is? And so these are some of the advantages that we can actually provide for our customers, really, really >>To help. Just a final quick question. There is a, a common perception, I believe that ransomware is an on premise problem. In fact, it is also a cloud problem. Is that not right? >>Oh, absolutely. I I think that probably the biggest attack vector is in the cloud. If it's, if it's OnPrem, you've certainly got a certain line of defense that's trying to break through. But, you know, you're in the open world there. Obviously with SAS applications in the cloud, it's not a case of if, but when, and it's, and it's gonna continue to get, you know, more and more prevalent within corporations. There's always gonna be those attack factors that they find the, the flash wounds that they can attack to break through. What we are concentrating on is that resiliency, that ability for customers to recover at speed. We've done that with our traditional appliances from our heritage OnPrem. We continue to do that with regard to resiliency at speed with our customers in the cloud, with partners like aws >>For sure. Almost done. Give me your 30 seconds on AWS and Veritas. >>We've had a partnership for the better part of 10 years. It's incredible when you think about aws, where they released the elastic compute back in 2006, right? We've been delivering data protection, a data management solutions for, for the better part of 30 years, right? So, so we're, we're Junos in our space. We're the leader in, in data protection and enterprise data protection. We were on-prem. We, we continue to be in the cloud as AWS was with the cloud service provided. So the synergies are incredible. About 80 to 85% of our, our joint customers are the same. We take core unique superpowers of aws, like AWS outposts and AWS Glacier Instant retrieval, for example, those core technologies and incorporate them into our products as we go to Mark. And so we released a core technology a few months ago, we call it ultra recovery vault. And it's an air gap, a mutable storage, worm storage, right Once, right? You can't change it even when the bad actors try to get in. They're independent from the customer's tenant and aws. So we manage it as a managed backup service for our customers. Got it. And so our customers are using that to really help them with their ransomware. So it's been a tremendous partnership with AWS >>Standing 10 years of accounting. Last question for you, Rick. You got a billboard on the 1 0 1 in Santa Clara, right? By the fancy Verto >>1 0 1? >>Yeah. Right. Well, there's no traffic. What does that billboard say? What's that bumper sticker about? Vertus, >>I think, I think the billboard would say, welcome to the new Veritas. This is not your grandfather's old mobile. We've done a phenomenal job in, in the last, particularly the last three or four years, to really reinvent ourselves in the cloud and the investments that we made are really paying off for our customers today. So I'm excited to be part of this journey and excited to talk to you guys today. >>Love it. Not your grandfather's Veritas. Rick, thank you so much for joining Paula, me on the forgot talking about what you guys are doing, how you're helping customers, really established that cyber of resiliency, which is absolutely critical these days. We appreciate your >>Time. My pleasure. Thank you so much. >>All right, for our guest and Paul Gilland, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching the Queue, which as you know is the leader in live enterprise and emerging check coverage.

>>Well, hi everybody. I'm John Walls here and welcome back to the cubes, continuing coverage and splunk.com 21. And we've talked a lot about data, obviously, um, and a number of partnerships and the point of resources that it's going on in this space. And certainly a very valuable partnership that Splunk has right now is one with Intel. And with me to talk a little bit more about that is Rick Echavarria, who is the vice president of sales and the marketing group at Intel. Rick. Good to see it today. Thanks for joining us on the queue. It's >>Good to see you, John, and thanks for having us. >>You bet. No glad to have you as part of the.com coverage as well. Um, well, first off, let's just for folks at home, uh, who would like to learn more about this relationship, the Splunk Intel partnership, if you would give us that the 30,000 foot picture of it right now, in terms of, of how it began and how it's evolved to the point where it resides today. >>Yeah. Uh, sure. Glad to do that. You know, Splunk is had for many years, uh, position as, as one of the world's best, uh, security information and event management platform. So just like many customers in the cybersecurity space, they're probably trying to retire their technical debt. And, and what are the areas of important focuses to SIM space, right? The SIM segment within cybersecurity. And so the initial engagement between Intel and Splunk started with the information security group at Intel, looking to, again, retire the technical debt, bring next generation SIM technology. And that started, uh, the engagement with Splunk again, to go solve the cybersecurity challenges. One of the things that we quickly learned is that, uh, those flung offers a great platform, you know, from a SIM point of view, as you know, the cyber security segment, the surface area of attack, the number of attacks kids were increased. >>And we quickly realized that this needed to be a collaboration in order for us to be able to work together, to optimize our infrastructure. So it could scale, it could be performance, it could be reliable, uh, to protect Intel's business. And as we started to work with Splunk, we realized, Hey, this is a great opportunity. Intel is benefiting from it. Why don't we start working together and create a reference architecture so that our joint customers also benefit from the collaboration that we have in the cybersecurity space, as we were building the Intel cybersecurity infrastructure platform. So that re that was really the beginning of, uh, of the collaboration around described here and a little bit more, >>Right? So, so you had this, this good working relationship and said, Hey, why don't we get together? Let's get the band together and see what we can do for our car joint clients down the road. Right. So, so what about those benefits that, because you've now you've got this almost as force multiplier right. Of, of Intel's experience. And then what Splunk has been able to do in the data analytics world. Um, what kind of values are being derived, do you think with that partnership? >>Well, obviously we feel much better about our cyber security posture. Um, and, uh, and what's sort of interesting, John, is that we realized that we were what started out as a conversation on SIM. Uh, it really turned out to be an opportunity for us to look at Splunk as a data platform. And, you know, in the technology world, you sometimes hear people talk about the horizontal capabilities. Then the vertical usage is really the security. Uh, the SIM technology. It really became one of several, sorry about the noise in the background. One, uh, became a vertical application. And then we realized that we can apply this platform to some other usages. And in addition to that, you know, when you think about cybersecurity and what we use for SIM that tends to be part of your core systems in it, we started to explore what can we do with what could we do with other data types for other different types of applications. >>And so what we, what we decided to do is we would go explore usages of this data at the edge, uh, of, of the network, and really started to move into much more of that operational technology space. When we realized that Splunk could really, uh, that we could integrate that we can ingest other types of data. And that started a second collaboration around our open Vino technology and our AI capabilities at the edge with the ingestion and the machine learning capabilities of Splunk, so that we can take things like visual data and start creating dashboards for, for example, uh, managing the flow of people, you know, especially in COVID environment. So, uh, and understanding utilization of spaces. So it really started with SIM is moved to the edge. And now we realized that there's a continuum in this data platform that we can build other usages around. >>What was that learning curve like when you went out to the edge, because a lot of people are talking about it, right. And there was a lot of banter about this is where we have to be, but you guys put your money where your mouth was, right? Yeah. You went out, you, you explored that frontier. And, and so what was that like? And, and, and what I guess maybe kind of being early in, uh, what advantage do you think that has given you as that process has matured a little bit? >>Well, it's really interesting John, because what really accelerated our engagement with Splunk in that space was the pandemic. And we had, uh, in 2020 Intel announced the pandemic response technology initiative, where we decided we were going to invest $50 million in accelerating technologies and solutions and partnerships to go solve some of the biggest challenges that depend on them. It was presenting to the world at large. And one of those areas was around companies trying to figure out how to, how to manage spaces, how to manage, you know, the number of people that are in a particular space and social distancing and things of that nature. And, you know, we ended up engaging with Splunk and this collaboration, again, to start looking at visual data, right, integrating that with our open Vino platform and again, their machine learning and algorithms, and start then creating what you would call more operational technology types of application based on visual data. Now these will have other applications that could be used for security usages. It could be used for, again, social distancing, uh, the utilization of acids, but their pandemic and that program that ends the launch is really what became the catalyst for our collaboration with Splunk that allowed us to expand into space. >>Right. And you've done a tremendous amount of work in the healthcare space. I mean, especially in the last year and a half with Penn and the pandemic, um, can you give just a couple of examples of that maybe the variety of uses and the variety of, uh, processes that you've had an influence in, because I think it's pretty impressive. >>Yeah. We, um, there's quite a bit of breadth in the types of solutions we've deployed as part of the pandemic response. John, you can think of some of the, I wouldn't call these things basic things, but you think about telehealth and that improving the telehealth experience all the way to creating privacy aware or sorry, solutions for privacy sensitive usage is where you're doing things like getting multiple institutions to share their data with the right privacy, uh, which, you know, going back to secure and privacy with the right, uh, protections for that data, but being allowed, allowing organization a and organization B partner together use data, create algorithms that both organizations benefit from it. An example of that is, is work we've done around x-ray, uh, and using x-rays to detect COVID on certain populations. So we've gone from those, you know, data protection, algorithm, development, development type of solutions to, to work that we've done in tele-health. So, uh, and, and a lot of other solutions in between, obviously in the high-performance, uh, space we've invested in high-performance computing for, to help the researchers, uh, find cures, uh, for the current pandemic and then looking at future pandemic. So it's been quite a breadth of, uh, uh, of solutions and it's really a Testament also to the breadth of Intel's portfolio and partnerships to be able to, uh, enable so much in such a short amount of time. >>I totally agree, man. Just reading it a little bit about it, about that work, and you talk about the, the breadth of that, the breadth and the depth of that is certainly impressive. So just in general, we'll just put healthcare in this big lump of customers. So what, what do you think the value proposition of your partnership with Splunk is in terms of providing, you know, ultimate value to your customers, because you're dealing with so many different sectors. Um, but if you could just give a summary from your perspective, this is what we do. This is why this power. >>Yeah. Well, customers, uh, talk about transformation. You know, there's a lot of conversation around transformation, right before the pandemic and through and center, but there's a lot of talk about companies wanting to transform and, you know, in order to be able to transform what are the key elements of that is, uh, to be able to capture the right data and then take, turn that data into the right outcomes. And that is something that requires obviously the capabilities and the ability to capture, to ingest, to analyze the data and to do that on an infrastructure that is going to scale with your business, that is going to be reliable. And that is going to be, to give you the flexibility for the types of solutions that you're wanting to apply. And that's really what this blog, uh, collaboration with Intel is going to do. It's, it's just a great example, John, uh, of the strategy that our CEO, pat Gelsinger recently talked about the importance of software to our business. >>This plump collaboration is right in the center of that. They have capabilities in SIM in it observability, uh, in many other areas that his whole world is turning data into, you know, into outcomes into results. But that has to be done on an infrastructure that again, will scale with your business, just like what's the case with Intel and our cybersecurity platform, right? We need to collaborate to make sure that this was going to scale with the demand demands of our business, and that requires close integration of, of hardware and software. The other point that I will make is that the, what started out as a collaboration with between Intel and Splunk, it's also expanding to other partners in the ecosystem. So I like to talk to you a little bit on a work stream that we have ongoing between Intel Splunk, HPE and the Lloyd. >>And why is that important is because, uh, as customers are deploying solutions, they're going to be deploying applications and they're going to have data in multiple environments on premise across multiple clouds. And we have to give, uh, these customers the ability to go gather the data from multiple sources. And that's part of the effort that we're developing with HPE and the Lloyd's will allow people to gather data, perform their analytics, regardless, regardless of their where their data is and be able to deploy the Splunk platform across these multiple environments, whether it's going to be on prem or it's going to be in a pure cloud environment, or it's going to be in a hybrid with multiple clouds, and you're willing to give our customers the most flexibility that we can. And that's where that collaboration with Deloitte and HP is going to come into play. >>Right. And you understand Splunk, right? You will get the workload. I mean, it's, it's totally, there's great familiarity there, which is a great value for that customer base, because you could apply that. So, so, um, obviously you're giving us like multiple thumbs up about the partnership. What excites you the most about going forward? Because as you know, it's all about, you know, where are we going from here? Yes. Now where we've been. So in terms of where you're going together in that partnership, well, what excites you about that? >>Well, first of all, we're excited because it's just a great example of the value that we can deliver to customers when you really understand their pain points and then have the capability to integrate solutions that encompass software and hardware together. So I think that the fact that we've been able to do the work on, on that core SIM space, where we now have a reference architecture that shows how you could really scale and deliver that a Splunk solution for your cybersecurity needs in a, in a scale of one reliable and with high levels of security, of course. And the fact that we then also been able to co-develop fairly quickly solutions for the edge, allows customers now to have that data platform that can scale and can access a lot of different data types from the edge to the cloud. That is really unique. I think it provides a lot of flexibility and it is applicable to a lot of vertical industry segments and a lot of customers >>And be attractive to a lot of customers. That's for sure rec edge of area. We appreciate the time, always a good to see you. And we certainly appreciate your joining us here on the cube to talk about.com for 21. And your relationship with the folks at Splunk. >>Yeah. Thank you, John. >>You bet. Uh, talking about Intel spot, good partnership. Long time, uh, partnership that has great plans going forward, but we continue our coverage here of.com 21. You're watching the cube.

(gentle music) >> Welcome to today's session of the AWS Startup Showcase The Next Big Thing in AI, Security, & Life Sciences. Today we're featuring Protegrity for the life sciences track. I'm your host for theCUBE, Natalie Erlich, and now we're joined by our guest, Rick Farnell, the CEO of Protegrity. Thank you so much for being with us. >> Great to be here. Thanks so much Natalie, great to be on theCUBE. >> Yeah, great, and so we're going to talk today about the ransomware game, and how it has changed with kinetic data protection. So, the title of today's video segment makes a bold claim, how are kinetic data and ransomware connected? >> So first off kinetic data, data is in use, it's moving, it's not static, it's no longer sitting still, and your data protection has to adhere to those same standards. And I think if you kind of look at what's happening in the ransomware kind of attacks, there's a couple of different things going on, which is number one, bad actors are getting access to data in the clear, and they're holding that data ransom, and threatening to release that data. So kind of from a Protegrity standpoint, with our protection capabilities, that data would be rendered useless to them in that scenario. So there's lots of ways in which kind of backup data protection, really wonderful opportunities to do both data protection and kind of that backup mixed together really is a wonderful solution to the threat of ransomware. And it's a serious issue and it's not just targeting the most highly regulated industries and customers, we're seeing kind of attacks on pipeline and ferry companies, and really there is no end to where some of these bad actors are really focusing on and the damages can be in the hundreds of millions of dollars and last for years after from a brand reputation. So I think if you look at how data is used today, there's that kind of opposing forces where the business wants to use data at the speed of light to produce more machine learning, and more artificial intelligence, and predict where customers are going to be, and have wonderful services at their fingertips. But at the same time, they really want to protect their data, and sometimes those architectures can be at odds, and at Protegrity, we're really focusing on solving that problem. So free up your data to be used in artificial intelligence and machine learning, while making sure that it is absolutely bulletproof from some of these ransomware attacks. >> Yeah, I mean, you bring a really fascinating point that's really central to your business. Could you tell us more about how you're actually making that data worthless? I mean, that sounds really revolutionary. >> So, it sounds novel, right? To kind of make your data worthless in the wrong hands. And I think from a Protegrity perspective, our kind of policy and protection capability follows the individual piece of data no matter where it lives in the architecture. And we do a ton of work as the world does with Amazon Web Services, so kind of helping customers really blend their hybrid cloud strategies with their on-premise and their use of AWS, is something that we thrive at. So protecting that data, not just at rest or while it's in motion, but it's a continuous protection policy that we can basically preserve the privacy of the data but still keep it unique for use in downstream analytics and machine learning. >> Right, well, traditional security is rather stifling, so how can we fix this, and what are you doing to amend that? >> Well, I think if you look at cybersecurity, and we certainly play a big role in the cybersecurity world but like any industry, there are many layers. And traditional cybersecurity investment has been at the perimeter level, at the network level keeping bad actors out, and once people do get through some of those fences, if your data is not protected at a fine grain level, they have access to it. And I think from our standpoint, yes, we're last line of defense but at the same time, we partner with folks in the cybersecurity industry and with AWS and with others in the backup and recovery to give customers that level of protection, but still allow their kinetic data to be utilized in downstream analytics. >> Right, well, I'd love to hear more about the types of industries that you're helping, and specifically healthcare obviously, a really big subject for the year and probably now for years to come, how is this industry using kinetic protection at the moment? >> So certainly, as you mentioned, some of the most highly regulated industries are our sweet spot. So financial services, insurance, online retail, and healthcare, or any industry that has sensitive data and sensitive customer data, so think first name last name, credit card information, national ID number, social security number blood type, cancer type. That's all sensitive information that you as an organization want to protect. So in the healthcare space, specifically, some of the largest healthcare organizations in the world rely on Protegrity to provide that level of protection, but at the same time, give them the business flexibility to utilize that data. So one of our customers, one of the leaders in online prescriptions, and that is an AWS customer, to allow a wonderful service to be delivered to all of their customers while maintaining protection. If you think about sharing data on your watch with your insurance provider, we have lots of customers that bridge that gap and have that personal data coming in to the insurance companies. All the way to, if in a use case in the future, looking at the pandemic, if you have to prove that you've been vaccinated, we're talking about some sensitive information, so you want to be able to show that information but still have the confidence that it's not going to be used for nefarious purposes. >> Right, and what is next for Protegrity? >> Well, I think continuing on our journey, we've been around for 17 years now, and I think the last couple, there's been an absolute renaissance in fine-grained data protection or that connected data protection, and organizations are recognizing that continuing to protect your perimeter, continuing to protect your firewalls, that's not going to go away anytime soon. Your access points, your points of vulnerability to keep bad actors out, but at the same time, recognizing that the data itself needs to be protected but with that balance of utilizing it downstream for analytic purposes, for machine learning, for artificial intelligence. Keeping the data of hundreds of millions if not billions of people saved, that's what we do. If you were to add up the customers of all of our customers, the largest banks, the largest insurance companies, largest healthcare companies in the world, globally, we're protecting the private data of billions of human beings. And it doesn't just stop there, I think you asked a great question about kind of the industry and yes, insurance, healthcare, retail, where there's a lot of sensitive data that certainly can be a focus point. But in the IOT space, kind of if you think about GPS location or geolocation, if you think about a device, and what it does, and the intelligence that it has, and the decisions that it makes on the fly, protecting data and keeping that safe is not just a personal thing, we're stepping into intellectual property and some of the most valuable assets that companies have, which is their decision-making on how they use data and how they deliver an experience, and I think that's why there's been such a renaissance, if you will, in kind of that fine grain data protection that we provide. >> Yeah, well, what is Protegrity's role now in future proofing businesses against cyber attacks? I mean, you mentioned really the ramifications of that and the impact it can have on businesses, but also on governments. I mean, obviously this is really critical. >> So there's kind of a three-step approach, and this is something that we have certainly kind of felt for a long, long time, and we work on with our customers. One is having that fine-grain data protection. So tokenizing your data so that if someone were to get your data, it's worthless, unless they have the ability to unlock every single individual piece of data. So that's number one, and then that's kind of what Protegrity provides. Number two, having a wonderful backup capability to roll kind of an active-active, AWS being one of the major clouds in the world where we deploy our software regularly and work with our customers, having multi-regions, multi-capabilities for an active-active scenario where if there's something that goes down or happens you can bring that down and bring in a new environment up. And then third is kind of malware detection in the rest of the cyber world to make sure that you rinse kind of your architecture from some of those agents. And I think when you kind of look at it, ransomware, they take data, they encrypt your data, so they force you to give them Bitcoin, or whatnot, or they'll release some of your data. And if that data is rendered useless, that's one huge step in kind of your discussions with these nefarious actors and be like you could release it, but there's nothing there, you're not going to see anything. And then second, if you have a wonderful backup capability where you wind down that environment that has been infiltrated, prove that this new environment is safe, have your production data have rolling and then wind that back up, you're back in business. You don't have to notify your customers, you don't have to deal with the ransomware players. So it's really a three-step process but ultimately it starts with protecting your data and tokenizing your data, and that's something that Protegrity does really, really well. >> So you're basically able to eliminate the financial impact of a breach? >> Honestly, we dramatically reduce the risk of customers being at risk for ransomware attacks 100%. Now, tokenizing data and moving that direction is something that it's not trivial, we are literally replacing production data with a token and then making sure that all downstream applications have the ability to utilize that, and make sure that the analytic systems and machine learning systems, and artificial intelligence applications that are built downstream on that data have the ability to execute, but that is something that from our patent portfolio and what we provide to our customers, again, some of the largest organizations in retail, in financial services, in banking, and in healthcare, we've been doing that for a long time. We're not just saying that we can do this and we're in version one of our product, we've been doing this for years, supporting the largest organizations with a 24 by seven capability. >> Right, and tell us a bit about the competitive landscape, where do you see your offering compared to your competitors? >> So, kind of historically back, let's call it an era ago maybe even before cloud even became a thing, and hybrid cloud, there were a handful of players that could acquire into much larger organizations, those organizations have been dusting off those acquired assets, and we're seeing them come back in. There's some new entrants into our space that have some protection mechanisms, whether it be encryption, or whether it be anonymization, but unless you're doing fine grain tokenization, you're not going to be able to allow that data to participate in the artificial intelligence world. So, we see kind of a range of competition there. And then I'd say probably the biggest competitor, Natalie, is customers not doing tokenization. They're saying, "No, we're okay, we'll continue protecting our firewall, we'll continue protecting our access points, we'll invest a little bit more in maybe some governance, but that fine grain data protection, maybe it's not for us." And that is the big shift that's happening. You look at kind of the beginning of this year with the solar winds attack, and the vulnerability that caused the very large and important organizations found themselves the last few weeks with all the ransomware attacks that are happening on meat processing plants and facilities, shutting down meat production, pipeline, stopping oil and gas and kind of that. So we're seeing a complete shift in the types of organizations and the industries that need to protect their data. It's not just the healthcare organizations, or the banks, or the credit card companies, it is every single industry, every single size company. >> Right, and I got to ask you this questioning, what is your defining contribution to the future of cloud scale? >> Well, ultimately we kind of have a charge here at Protegrity where we feel like we protect the world's most sensitive data. And when we come into work every day, that's what every single employee thinks at Protegrity. We are standing behind billions of individuals who are customers of our customers, and that's a cultural thing for us, and we take that very serious. We have maniacal customer support supporting our biggest customers with a fall of the sun 24 by seven global capability. So that's number one. So, I think our part in this is really helping to educate the world that there is a solution for this ransomware and for some of these things that don't have to happen. Now, naturally with any solution, there's going to be some investment, there's going to be some architecture changes, but with partnerships like AWS, and our partnership with pretty much every data provider, data storage provider, data solution provider in the world, we want to provide fine-grain data protection, any data in any system on any platform. And that's our mission. >> Well, Rick Farnell, this has been really fascinating conversation with you, thank you so much. The CEO of Protegrity, really great to have you on this program for the AWS Startup Showcase, talking about how ransomware game has changed with the kinetic data protection. Really appreciate it. Again, I'm your host Natalie Erlich, thank you again very much for watching. (light music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe. >> (upbeat music) It's the cube with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >> Hi, welcome back everyone to the Cubes coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier, host of the cube. Got a great guest, Rick Smith, CTO of IBM Anthem client team. Rick. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on the cube. >> Yeah. Thank you, John. Nice to see you as well, virtually. >> First introduce yourself, what you do there, what's going on on your plate these days, honestly, COVID, we're coming out of it soon. Take a minute to introduce yourself. >> Yeah, so I've got about 15 years in the seat with Anthem. Previous to that I worked at Pretty university as the CTO in Indiana. So haven't really left, but started working with Anthem as a technical architect, eventually moved into the CTO role and have been part of, you know, a long journey with them that started at a managed services agreement in 2005. And here we are in 2021. So I've been through a lot of changes they've made to improve themselves and move into digitalization. And certainly the changes we've made too to accommodate that as we went through the years. >> Awesome. Well, thanks for that setup. I really want to dig into this expansion of project Cirrus. You guys have had a multi decade partnership with IBM and then last year you launched this expansion, project Cirrus. Can you describe this project? And what does it mean? And this new term I've heard, enterprise hybrid cloud as a service. Sounds very interesting. >> Yeah. So that's my term. I'm hoping you made it patent or something like that. But the reality is you hear our CEO talk and say that 75% of corporate workloads are not in the cloud yet. Right? And Anthem is no different, right? So they starting to go into cloud and those kinds of things. But they said to us, you know, "Hey, we've got a long series of excellence with you from a delivery perspective, reliability perspective is kind of the bedrock of what we do, but we don't want to be in the data center business, right? And we want to transform and move to cloud. We want to become a more of an AI company and these kinds of things. And we said, well, we think we can actually put together a program... Excuse me, program for you to allow you to do that, right? And so we formed something called project Cirrus which is really an expansion of our partnership. So if I look back, John, we did about 80% of the end-to-end delivery for Anthem from a managed services perspective. In other words, they did a few pieces and we said, we think we could improve that if we had the entire 100%. And so project Cirrus was about, you know, extending from 80% to 100%. It was also about taking a series of applications that were important to them and actually say, we'll actually take them on and transform them 100% all the way to cloud and take advantage of new things. It was about a commitment to closing those data centers, right? So they have five strategic data centers. And about 24,000 hosts that we said we will actually commit to getting those, you know, getting you out of the data centers and moving those to either IBM cloud or close to IBM cloud if you will, I'll come back to that in a minute. And we'll also build something called ATEC, Anthem Technology Excellent Center, if you will. And that's near and dear to my heart because that's sort of my baby, right? So it's a transformation engine and we can talk a little bit more about that in a second. But he said the key to this for us is that, if we look at our trend line, John, over the number of years with Anthem, when we started about 2007 looking at this data, we've grown the number of hosts. We've had to manage, over 600% during that time period. But we've driven down high priority incidents by over 90%. So think about that. You know, this is really important for them to have resiliency and stability in their organization. You know, huge acceleration number of hosts, but drive down the a P zero incidents, if you will. And they said, we need to maintain that and continue to improve upon that. Right? >> Yeah. >> So Cirrus was a commitment to take that further, right? Start driving AAN, AI into the operations, if you will in everything that we do. So Anthem is transforming to do AI and machine learning for their members. We're committed to transforming and doing the same kind of thing on our operational side if you will. >> Yeah, that's awesome. And I think one of the things that's interesting that jumps out at me just as you're talking, first of all super exciting that project you got out there, a lot going on to unpack, but let's do that. I mean, what I hear you saying which is getting me kind of all triggered in a good way is you got transformation going on and innovation same time. You're innovating with this new enterprise hybrid clouds of service concept. You take in more efficiency, you're doing the classic transformational things, making things more efficient, all that good stuff for agility, but it's actually innovative. So this idea of an enterprise hybrid cloud as a service is pretty innovative because now you're talking about things with AI and scale that come into play, right? So you got the setup, you got it moving into being innovative but scales right there. What is this enterprise hybrid cloud as a service? Because is it just agility, is it the AI piece? Where do you see that going? >> Yeah, that's a great question. Right? And you're a great stuff, man, Johnson. (Smith laughs) So again, Anthem's not ready to move all of their workload to cloud, right? And we recognize (indistinct)is going to be out of the data center business. So how can we take non traditional workloads, right? Get them close to cloud, right? Get them very close to cloud, get us out of the managing the data center and actually allow us to move seamlessly from non traditional workloads into cloud. And so what we did was something we think is very innovative. This is the enterprise hybrid cloud piece for me, right? 'Cause normally hybrid cloud says, you have a client data center location and you have cloud. We marry the two together. We said, you're not going to have a data center location anymore. We're going to have our data centers, you know, IBM cloud. And we're actually going to put some dedicated space right next to cloud. And when I say next to cloud, I literally mean within a few feet. And we're going to bring these non traditional workloads there, we're going to take the network operation brain and bring it there. And we're going to allow you then to basically be able to move seamlessly from that to directly into cloud and improve operations at the same time. There's other a side benefit to this too. The other unintended sort of benefit is that what any organization, right? That you find stuff in the data center that hasn't been looked at for a long period of time, right? Application teams haven't looked at it, et cetera, et cetera. We're literally touching every single host. Right? So this gives us an opportunity to also work with our teams and find things that really can just be thrown away. Right? And this is great because we're actually making them more efficient, optimizing the cost structures as we go about it. >> Yeah. I mean the operational model changes me. You mentioned that just that whole point about you're kind of doing some discovery on apps, this becomes kind of sets the table for AI ops which is just code word for day two operations or full cloud native environments, which now you're seeing cloud native include legacy. Yes. Because you can put containers into the mix and you can then create these integration points that you don't have to kind of get rid of the old to bring in the new. So the dimension of what's going on here is pretty interesting, right? When you start thinking about that, "Okay. I can modernize the same time as connect two existing systems." >> That's exactly right. And we put the things very close to one another. And if there's any concerns over data security compliance or healthcare regulated industry, of course, we can have the workloads located in the best location to ensure that security is in place. Right? So that's what's beautiful about it, right? We can kind of hit every layer that's possible from having it just as secure as completely privatized to going directly over to public cloud or connecting the two together as we go along. >> Well, you're definitely a pioneer. I love that enterprise hybrid cloud as a service. I think that's something that's relevant. We're living in a hybrid world. I mean, the cube, we used to go to events now it's virtual events, but when now the events come back, they're hybrid events. Every company is experiencing this phenomenon on hybrid something, not just technology. The ops got to adapt, so super cool. You mentioned something that was your baby. I want to get back to you. And you said you want to talk about, I want to just bring that up. This Anthem technology excellence center is your baby. ATech I think you said for short. >> Yeah. We call it Atech for short. And really, John, we said that it's got to be more than just taking that other 20% that we don't run today. And we're doing some very innovative things moving non-traditional workloads. Like I said, all that kind of stuff was very cool, right? But we need a transformation engine, right? And we need the ability to transform skills. Like upscale the people at Anthem as well as IBM, right there on the account team, it's a big account. We want to think of new ways to work together. Right? Traditional managed services is like, what? Someone cuts a ticket and says, "Give me X by her seat." Right? That's the traditional model. And we said, that's not good enough. We need to collaborate better together. And we are willing to redefining how we form our teams to work with Anthem. Right? So if we want to form, for example, a product ownership team that builds it, runs it, maintains it. And that team has Anthem plus IBM together. we're going to use ATEC as a vehicle to design that and drive it and make sure they have all the skills they need within that group to do that. Right? That's new ways of working together. And it's also to drive things like site reliability engineering, right? Cloud service management operations, make sure that Anthem has the right training, make sure we work together on these kinds of things. So it's really kind of an exciting thing. And it's intended to be a co-created model, right? So we actually work with the Anthem, we co-create using IBM garage methodologies and then the idea is to coast staff it, but it's tended to be a thin layer of world-class engineering. That's really the whole point of it. And yeah, I'm super excited about that. As you move forward, yeah. >> While you're speaking our language, the cube we'd love the co-creation we do with media. It's always fun to create content together. And sometimes in real time put it together like we're doing now. And it creates a bond. I mean, I got to bring this up because this is becoming more and more obvious. And now mainstream, the notion of co-creation, the notion of ecosystems and ecosystems really meaning network effect and integrating with other parties, right? Companies and our systems. If you look at the underlying business model as a systems management software bottle. Okay. So with that, these ecosystems, the network effect. If you build together, you stay together. I mean, this is a different mindset. It's different dynamic. It's a different relationship that companies are now looking for in what used to be called suppliers. Are you supplying something? Are you building together? Right. So this seems to be the theme. Can you expand on this new trend? >> Right. And get away from the strict racing, this person does, this person does that. Instead, we build a team together that has all the skills necessary and that team owns a product life cycle. They build it, run it and maintain it. And that's changing the way we deliver services from IBM perspective significantly, right? Because that's not our traditional model but that's what we're doing. So we're really out in the front end, on the front edge if you will. Changing that model completely. And it's one of the most exciting things for me, you know, as far as going forward. >> You know, this whole idea of partnerships has always kind of been there but now it gets modernized and uplifted if you will, to a new level. And it really is about watching each other's backs too when you have that kind of... 'Cause we're talking about like pushing the envelope on probably the biggest confluence of tech trends I've ever seen in my career. And I've seen many big waves, you know, from the different revolutions and inflection points. Now it's sort of all coming together, right? At scale too, it's happening very fast. I mean, the change over is happening in years that once you took decades before. So it's really is a team approach. >> Yeah. There's no doubt about it. And I see it every day in the work we're doing. And it's like, for example, at Atech where we're working with the data scientists at the Anthem, we're thinking of new ways to build things they've never done before. We're hoping to enable their science, enable the things they want to do for digitization standpoint, the same token I'm taking, you know, a data scientist and putting them on the operation side too. Right? So we're doing both these kinds of things together. And really I didn't say this before, but this whole thing is about driving automation, right? Driving down, no human touch, soft service, automation. That is kind of been the linchpin of this. And I also want to say John, that doing this all during a pandemic, you know, we signed our new agreement together with them at a quarter, at the end of March in 2020. And we went live in August 1st with all the changes, the extra 20% capacity to over 300 plus applications completely, started Atech from co-creation in a pandemic. And we both agreed as a company, I give great credit to our client and to the numbers involved that everyone set up front and during March. The pandemic's not an excuse to get anything done. So, we're going to go forward and make it happen. That's probably the thing I'm most proud about. That was just... It's crazy when you think of how big the project was and do pull it off during a pandemic. >> Yeah. There's going to be two sides of the street and this one, this pandemics over the ones who made it through and refactored and or innovated. Cause it's not just about being and having a tale, it's about taking advantage of the situation and the ones who didn't do anything. Whether they were in the cloud or not, that's not to me. That's not the issue of you're in the cloud you had an advantage. >> It's not. Right. >> But there's going to be two sides of the streets. And I think the one thing that the pandemic has shown us and I'd love to get your reaction as a final comment here is that when you pull back when the pandemic, it showed all the scabs, it shows everything. And you can see what's obvious and it becomes a forcing function. Necessity's the mother of all invention as expression goes so you can see what's worth doubling down on and you can see the productivity gains and that becomes clear. >> Yeah. Yeah. And I think there's good and bad with everything, right? Pros and cons, like you said, and you know, one of the cons I think is the having to schedule all interactions is definitely a con, right? Because when you spend time not only with the client virtually but in person, you do get the advantage of having, you know, chalk talks and things like that. They're not scheduled. Right? So that's definitely one of the cons side, but one of the pro side is it did provide some focus, right? Kind of extreme focus and on what's important and allowed us to, you know, I think dove some bonds with the Anthem leadership team and the application teams doing it virtually over cameras like this that maybe happen at a larger scale than they might have normally been because the pandemic kind of allowed us to do that and made that happen. >> Great stuff, Rick, great insight. Great to have you on the cube as always. Great to talk tech, talk business, talk about the transformation and innovation and the cloud scale. Thanks for coming on Rick Smith, CTO of the IBM Anthem client team. Thanks for coming on the cube. >> You're welcome. Thanks John. >> Okay. Cube coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm John. For your host of the cube. Thanks for watching. (soft music) (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >> Hi, welcome back everyone to the Cubes coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier, host of the cube. Got a great guest, Rick Smith, CTO of IBM Anthem client team. Rick. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on the cube. >> Yeah. Thank you, John. Nice to see you as well, virtually. >> First introduce yourself, what you do there, what's going on on your plate these days, honestly, COVID, we're coming out of it soon. Take a minute to introduce yourself. >> Yeah, so I've got about 15 years in the seat with Anthem. Previous to that I worked at Pretty university as the CTO in Indiana. So haven't really left, but started working with Anthem as a technical architect, eventually moved into the CTO role and have been part of, you know, a long journey with them that started at a managed services agreement in 2005. And here we are in 2021. So I've been through a lot of changes they've made to improve themselves and move into digitalization. And certainly the changes we've made too to accommodate that as we went through the years. >> Awesome. Well, thanks for that setup. I really want to dig into this expansion of project Sirius. You guys have had a multi decade partnership with IBM and then last year you launched this expansion, project Sirus. Can you describe this project? And what does it mean? And this new term I've heard, enterprise hybrid cloud as a service. Sounds very interesting. >> Yeah. So that's my term. I'm hoping you made it patent or something like that. But the reality is you hear our CEO talk and say that 75% of corporate workloads are not in the cloud yet. Right? And Anthem is no different, right? So they starting to go into cloud and those kinds of things. But they said to us, you know, "Hey, we've got a long series of excellence with you from a delivery perspective, reliability perspective is kind of the bedrock of what we do, but we don't want to be in the data center business, right? And we want to transform and move to cloud. We want to become a more of an AI company and these kinds of things. And we said, well, we think we can actually put together a program... Excuse me, program for you to allow you to do that, right? And so we formed something called project Sirius which is really an expansion of our partnership. So if I look back, John, we did about 80% of the end-to-end delivery for Anthem from a managed services perspective. In other words, they did a few pieces and we said, we think we could improve that if we had the entire 100%. And so project Sirius was about, you know, extending from 80% to 100%. It was also about taking a series of applications that were important to them and actually say, we'll actually take them on and transform them 100% all the way to cloud and take advantage of new things. It was about a commitment to closing those data centers, right? So they have five strategic data centers. And about 24,000 hosts that we said we will actually commit to getting those, you know, getting you out of the data centers and moving those to either IBM cloud or close to IBM cloud if you will, I'll come back to that in a minute. And we'll also build something called ATEC, Anthem Technology Excellent Center, if you will. And that's near and dear to my heart because that's sort of my baby, right? So it's a transformation engine and we can talk a little bit more about that in a second. But he said the key to this for us is that, if we look at our trend line, John, over the number of years with Anthem, when we started about 2007 looking at this data, we've grown the number of hosts. We've had to manage, over 600% during that time period. But we've driven down high priority incidents by over 90%. So think about that. You know, this is really important for them to have resiliency and stability in their organization. You know, huge acceleration number of hosts, but drive down the a P zero incidents, if you will. And they said, we need to maintain that and continue to improve upon that. Right? >> Yeah. >> So Sirius was a commitment to take that further, right? Start driving AAN, AI into the operations, if you will in everything that we do. So Anthem is transforming to do AI and machine learning for their members. We're committed to transforming and doing the same kind of thing on our operational side if you will. >> Yeah, that's awesome. And I think one of the things that's interesting that jumps out at me just as you're talking, first of all super exciting that project you got out there, a lot going on to unpack, but let's do that. I mean, what I hear you saying which is getting me kind of all triggered in a good way is you got transformation going on and innovation same time. You're innovating with this new enterprise hybrid clouds of service concept. You take in more efficiency, you're doing the classic transformational things, making things more efficient, all that good stuff for agility, but it's actually innovative. So this idea of an enterprise hybrid cloud as a service is pretty innovative because now you're talking about things with AI and scale that come into play, right? So you got the setup, you got it moving into being innovative but scales right there. What is this enterprise hybrid cloud as a service? Because is it just agility, is it the AI piece? Where do you see that going? >> Yeah, that's a great question. Right? And you're a great stuff, man, Johnson. (Smith laughs) So again, Anthem's not ready to move all of their workload to cloud, right? And we recognize (indistinct)is going to be out of the data center business. So how can we take non traditional workloads, right? Get them close to cloud, right? Get them very close to cloud, get us out of the managing the data center and actually allow us to move seamlessly from non traditional workloads into cloud. And so what we did was something we think is very innovative. This is the enterprise hybrid cloud piece for me, right? 'Cause normally hybrid cloud says, you have a client data center location and you have cloud. We marry the two together. We said, you're not going to have a data center location anymore. We're going to have our data centers, you know, IBM cloud. And we're actually going to put some dedicated space right next to cloud. And when I say next to cloud, I literally mean within a few feet. And we're going to bring these non traditional workloads there, we're going to take the network operation brain and bring it there. And we're going to allow you then to basically be able to move seamlessly from that to directly into cloud and improve operations at the same time. There's other a side benefit to this too. The other unintended sort of benefit is that what any organization, right? That you find stuff in the data center that hasn't been looked at for a long period of time, right? Application teams haven't looked at it, et cetera, et cetera. We're literally touching every single host. Right? So this gives us an opportunity to also work with our teams and find things that really can just be thrown away. Right? And this is great because we're actually making them more efficient, optimizing the cost structures as we go about it. >> Yeah. I mean the operational model changes me. You mentioned that just that whole point about you're kind of doing some discovery on apps, this becomes kind of sets the table for AI ops which is just code word for day two operations or full cloud native environments, which now you're seeing cloud native include legacy. Yes. Because you can put containers into the mix and you can then create these integration points that you don't have to kind of get rid of the old to bring in the new. So the dimension of what's going on here is pretty interesting, right? When you start thinking about that, "Okay. I can modernize the same time as connect two existing systems." >> That's exactly right. And we put the things very close to one another. And if there's any concerns over data security compliance or healthcare regulated industry, of course, we can have the workloads located in the best location to ensure that security is in place. Right? So that's what's beautiful about it, right? We can kind of hit every layer that's possible from having it just as secure as completely privatized to going directly over to public cloud or connecting the two together as we go along. >> Well, you're definitely a pioneer. I love that enterprise hybrid cloud as a service. I think that's something that's relevant. We're living in a hybrid world. I mean, the cube, we used to go to events now it's virtual events, but when now the events come back, they're hybrid events. Every company is experiencing this phenomenon on hybrid something, not just technology. The ops got to adapt, so super cool. You mentioned something that was your baby. I want to get back to you. And you said you want to talk about, I want to just bring that up. This Anthem technology excellence center is your baby. ATech I think you said for short. >> Yeah. We call it Atech for short. And really, John, we said that it's got to be more than just taking that other 20% that we don't run today. And we're doing some very innovative things moving non-traditional workloads. Like I said, all that kind of stuff was very cool, right? But we need a transformation engine, right? And we need the ability to transform skills. Like upscale the people at Anthem as well as IBM, right there on the account team, it's a big account. We want to think of new ways to work together. Right? Traditional managed services is like, what? Someone cuts a ticket and says, "Give me X by her seat." Right? That's the traditional model. And we said, that's not good enough. We need to collaborate better together. And we are willing to redefining how we form our teams to work with Anthem. Right? So if we want to form, for example, a product ownership team that builds it, runs it, maintains it. And that team has Anthem plus IBM together. we're going to use ATEC as a vehicle to design that and drive it and make sure they have all the skills they need within that group to do that. Right? That's new ways of working together. And it's also to drive things like site reliability engineering, right? Cloud service management operations, make sure that Anthem has the right training, make sure we work together on these kinds of things. So it's really kind of an exciting thing. And it's intended to be a co-created model, right? So we actually work with the Anthem, we co-create using IBM garage methodologies and then the idea is to coast staff it, but it's tended to be a thin layer of world-class engineering. That's really the whole point of it. And yeah, I'm super excited about that. As you move forward, yeah. >> While you're speaking our language, the cube we'd love the co-creation we do with media. It's always fun to create content together. And sometimes in real time put it together like we're doing now. And it creates a bond. I mean, I got to bring this up because this is becoming more and more obvious. And now mainstream, the notion of co-creation, the notion of ecosystems and ecosystems really meaning network effect and integrating with other parties, right? Companies and our systems. If you look at the underlying business model as a systems management software bottle. Okay. So with that, these ecosystems, the network effect. If you build together, you stay together. I mean, this is a different mindset. It's different dynamic. It's a different relationship that companies are now looking for in what used to be called suppliers. Are you supplying something? Are you building together? Right. So this seems to be the theme. Can you expand on this new trend? >> Right. And get away from the strict racing, this person does, this person does that. Instead, we build a team together that has all the skills necessary and that team owns a product life cycle. They build it, run it and maintain it. And that's changing the way we deliver services from IBM perspective significantly, right? Because that's not our traditional model but that's what we're doing. So we're really out in the front end, on the front edge if you will. Changing that model completely. And it's one of the most exciting things for me, you know, as far as going forward. >> You know, this whole idea of partnerships has always kind of been there but now it gets modernized and uplifted if you will, to a new level. And it really is about watching each other's backs too when you have that kind of... 'Cause we're talking about like pushing the envelope on probably the biggest confluence of tech trends I've ever seen in my career. And I've seen many big waves, you know, from the different revolutions and inflection points. Now it's sort of all coming together, right? At scale too, it's happening very fast. I mean, the change over is happening in years that once you took decades before. So it's really is a team approach. >> Yeah. There's no doubt about it. And I see it every day in the work we're doing. And it's like, for example, at Atech where we're working with the data scientists at the Anthem, we're thinking of new ways to build things they've never done before. We're hoping to enable their science, enable the things they want to do for digitization standpoint, the same token I'm taking, you know, a data scientist and putting them on the operation side too. Right? So we're doing both these kinds of things together. And really I didn't say this before, but this whole thing is about driving automation, right? Driving down, no human touch, soft service, automation. That is kind of been the linchpin of this. And I also want to say John, that doing this all during a pandemic, you know, we signed our new agreement together with them at a quarter, at the end of March in 2020. And we went live in August 1st with all the changes, the extra 20% capacity to over 300 plus applications completely, started Atech from co-creation in a pandemic. And we both agreed as a company, I give great credit to our client and to the numbers involved that everyone set up front and during March. The pandemic's not an excuse to get anything done. So, we're going to go forward and make it happen. That's probably the thing I'm most proud about. That was just... It's crazy when you think of how big the project was and do pull it off during a pandemic. >> Yeah. There's going to be two sides of the street and this one, this pandemics over the ones who made it through and refactored and or innovated. Cause it's not just about being and having a tale, it's about taking advantage of the situation and the ones who didn't do anything. Whether they were in the cloud or not, that's not to me. That's not the issue of you're in the cloud you had an advantage. >> It's not. Right. >> But there's going to be two sides of the streets. And I think the one thing that the pandemic has shown us and I'd love to get your reaction as a final comment here is that when you pull back when the pandemic, it showed all the scabs, it shows everything. And you can see what's obvious and it becomes a forcing function. Necessity's the mother of all invention as expression goes so you can see what's worth doubling down on and you can see the productivity gains and that becomes clear. >> Yeah. Yeah. And I think there's good and bad with everything, right? Pros and cons, like you said, and you know, one of the cons I think is the having to schedule all interactions is definitely a con, right? Because when you spend time not only with the client virtually but in person, you do get the advantage of having, you know, chalk talks and things like that. They're not scheduled. Right? So that's definitely one of the cons side, but one of the pro side is it did provide some focus, right? Kind of extreme focus and on what's important and allowed us to, you know, I think dove some bonds with the Anthem leadership team and the application teams doing it virtually over cameras like this that maybe happen at a larger scale than they might have normally been because the pandemic kind of allowed us to do that and made that happen. >> Great stuff, Rick, great insight. Great to have you on the cube as always. Great to talk tech, talk business, talk about the transformation and innovation and the cloud scale. Thanks for coming on Rick Smith, CTO of the IBM Anthem client team. Thanks for coming on the cube. >> You're welcome. Thanks John. >> Okay. Cube coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm John. For your host of the cube. Thanks for watching. (soft music) (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's "theCUBE" with digital coverage of AWS "re:Invent" 2020. Sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. >> Hi, everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's virtual coverage of AWS "re:Invent" virtual 2020. It's not an in-person event this year. It's remote, it's virtual, "theCUBE" is virtual and our guests and our interviewers will be remote as well. And so we're here covering the event for the next three weeks, throughout the next three cause we're weaving in commentary from "theCUBE", check out the cube.net and all of our coverage. And here at AWS we have special feature programming, we got a great segment here talking about big data in the cloud, governance, data lakes, all that good stuff. Rik Tamm-Daniels, vice-president strategic ecosystems and technology for Informatica, and Rick Turnock, head of enterprise data services, Invesco, customer of Informatica. Welcome to the cube. >> Hey John, thanks for having us. >> So Rik, with a K from Informatica, I want to ask you first, we've been covering the company journey for many, many years. Always been impressed with the focus on data and specifically cloud and all the things that you guys have been announcing over the years, have been spot on the mark. You know, AI with CLAIRE, you know, making things, cloud native, all that's kind of playing out now with the pandemic, "re:Invent", that's the story here. Building blocks with high level services, cloud native, but data is the critical piece again. More machine learning, more AI, more data management. What's your take on this year's "re:Invent". >> Absolutely John and again, we're always excited to be here at "re:Invent", we've been here since the very first one. You know, it's a deep talk to a couple of key trends there, especially the era of the global pandemic here. There's so many challenges that so many enterprises are experiencing. I think the big surprise has been, that has actually translated into a tremendous amount of demand for digital transformation, and cloud modernization in particular. So we've seen a huge uptake in our cloud relationships with AWS when it comes to transformational architecture solutions around data and analytics, and using data as a fundamental asset for digital transformation. And so some of those solution areas are things like data warehouse, modernization of the cloud, or end-to-end data governance. That's a huge topic as well for many enterprises today. >> Before coming into "re:Invent", I had a chance to sit down an exclusive interview with Andy Jassy. I just spoke with Matt Garman who's now heading up sales and marketing, who ran EC too. Rick, you're a customer of Informatica. Their big talking point to me and validation to the trends is, there's no excuse to go slow anymore because there's a reason to go fast cause there's consequences and the pandemic has highlighted that you got to move faster otherwise, you know, you're going to be on the wrong side of history and necessity is the mother of all invention. Okay, great. I buy that by the way. So I have no complaints on talking point there from Amazon Web Services. The problem is, you got to manage the data. (John chuckles) To go fast. The gas in the tank is data, and if it's screwed up, it's not going to go well, all right? So it's like putting gas in a car. So, this is where I see the data lake coming into the cloud and all the benefits and look at the successes of companies. The cloud is a real enabler. What's your take on this? The importance of data governance, because cloud scale is here, people want to go faster, data is like the key thing. >> Yeah. The data governance was a critical component when we started our enterprise data platform and looking at, you know, how can we build a modern-day architecture with scale, bringing our enterprise data, but doing it in a governed fashion. So, when we did it, we kind of looked at, you know, what are critical partners? How can we apply data governance and the full catalog capabilities of knowing what data's coming in, identifying it, and then really controlling the quality of it to meet the needs of the organization. It was a critical component for us because typically it's been difficult to get access to that right data. And as we look in the future and even current needs, we really need to understand our data and bring the right data in and make it easily accessible and governance, and quality of that is a critical component of it. >> I want to just follow up with that if you don't mind cause you know, I've done so many of these interviews, I've been on the block now 30 years in the industry, I've seen the waves come and go, and you see a lot of these mandates, you know, "Data governance, we're adding data governance." From the Ivory tower, or you hear, "Everything got to be a service." But when you peel back and look under the hood to make that happen, it's complicated. You've got to have put things in place and it's got to be set up properly, you got to do your work. How important it is to have... And well what's under the covers to this? Cause governance, yeah, it's a talking point, I get that. But to make it actually happen well, it's hard. >> We started really with the operating models from the start. So I kind of took over data governance seven years ago and had a governing global architecture that's been around for 40 years, and it was hard. So this was really our shot and time to get it right. So we did an operating model, a governance model, and it really ingrained it through the whole build and execution process. And so it was part with technology and it was foundational to the process to really deliver it. So it wasn't governance from a governance saying, it was really part of our operating model and process to build this out and really succeed at it. >> Rik, on the Informatica side, I got to get your take on the new solution you guys announced, "The Governed Data Lake", I think it was solution. Does this tie into that? Take a minute to explain the announcement, and how does this tie in? >> Yeah, absolutely John. So I think you take a step back, look at... We talked about some of the drivers of why companies are investing in cloud data lakes. And I think what comes down to is, when you think about that core foundation of data analytics, you know, they're really looking at, you know, how do we go ahead and create a tremendous leap forward in terms of their ability to leverage data as an asset. And again, as we talked about, one of the biggest challenges is trust around the data. And what the solution does though, is it really looks to say, "Okay, first and foremost, "let's create that foundation of trust "not just for the cloud data lake, "but for the entire enterprise. "To ensure that when we start to build this "new architecture, one, we understand the data assets "that are coming in at the very get-go." Right? It's much harder to add data governance after the fact, but you put it in upfront, you understand your existing data landscape. And once that data is there, you make sure you understand the quality of the information, you cleanse the data, you also make sure you put it under the right data management policies. So many policies that enterprises are subject to now like CCPA and GDPR. They have to be concerned about consumer privacy and being able as part of your governance foundational layer, to make sure that you're in compliance as data moves through your new architectures. It's fundamental having that end trust and confidence to be able to use that data downstream. So our solution looks to do that end-to-end across a cloud environment, and again, not just the cloud environment, but the full enterprise as well. One thing I do want to touch on if you don't mind is on the AI side of things and the tooling side of things. Because I think data governance has been around a while, as you said, it's not that it's a new concept. But how do you do it efficiently in today's world? >> John: Yeah. >> And this is where Informatica is focused on a concept of data 4.0. Which is the use of metadata and AI and machine learning and intelligence, to make this process much, much more efficient. >> Yeah that's a good point, Rik, from these two Rickes, I got to go, one's with a K, one with a C, and CK. So Rick, CK and from Invesco customer, I want to just check that with you because I was your customer of Informatica, by they brought up a good point about governance. And I saw this movie before, we've all seen this before, people just slap on solutions or tooling to a pre-existing architecture. You see that with security, you know, now it's, you can't have a conversation without saying, "Oh security's got to be baked in from the beginning." Okay cool, I get that. There's no debate there. Governance, same kind of thing, you know, you're hearing this over and over again, if you don't bake governance into the beginning of everything, you're going to be screwed. Okay? So how important is that foundation of trust for this peace. (Rick mumbling) >> It's critical and to do it at beginning, right? So you're profiling the data, you're defining entitlements and who has access to it, you're defining data quality rules that you can validate that, you define the policies, is there a PII data, all of that, as you do that from the start, then you have a well-governed and documented data catalog and taxonomy that has the policies and the controls in place to allow that to use. If you do it after the fact, then you're always going to be catching up. So a part of our process and policies and where the really Informatica tools delivered for us is to make it part of that process. And to use that as we continue to build out our data platform with the quality controls and all the governance processes built in. >> I got to ask on your journey, that's seven years ago, you took over the practice. You were probably right in the middle of the sea change when everyone kind of woke up and said, "Hey, you know, Amazon, you go back seven years, "look at Amazon where they were to where they are today." Okay? Significantly strong then, total bellwether now in terms of value opportunity. So, how did you look at the cloud migration? How do you think about the cloud architecture? Because I'm sure, and I'd love to get your story here about how you thought about cloud, in the midst of architecting the data foundational platform there. >> Yeah, we're a global company that had architecture, we grew it by acquisition. So a lot of our data architecture was on-prem, difficult really to pull that enterprise data together to meet the business needs. So when we started this, we really wanted to leverage cloud technology. We wanted a modern stack. We wanted scale, flexibility, agility, security, all the things that the cloud brought us too. So we did a search, and looking at that, and looked at competitors, but really landed on to Amazon just bought by core capabilities and scale they have innovation and just the services to bring a lot what we're looking at and really deliver on what we wanted from a platform. >> Why Informatica and AWS, why the combination? Can you share some of the reasons why you went with Informatica with AWS? >> Yeah, again, when we started this off, we looked at the competitors, right? And we were using IVQ. So we had an Informatica product on-prem, but we looked at a lot of the different governance competitors, and really the integrated platform that Informatica brings to us, what was the key deliverer, right? So we can really have the technical metadata with EDC and enterprise data client, catalog, scan our sources, our file, understanding the data and lineage of what it is. And we can tie that into axon and the governance tools to really define business costs returns. We were very critical of defining all our key data elements business glossary, and then we can see where that is by linking that to the technical metadata. So we know where our PII data, where are all our data and how it flows, both tactically and from a business process. And then the IDQ. So when we've defined and understand the data, we want to bring in the delight and how we want to conform it, to make it easily accessible, we can define data quality rules within the governance tool, and then execute that with IDQ, and really have a well-defined data quality process that really takes it from governance in theory to governance in really execution. >> That's awesome. Hey, you are using the data, you're using the cloud, you're getting everything you need out of it. That's the whole idea, isn't it? >> Yeah. >> That's good stuff, Rik at Informatica, tell us about what's going on, you mentioned data 4.0, I think people should pay attention to some of the interviews I've done with your team. They're online also, it's part of that next-gen, next level thinking. Here at "re:Invent", what should customers pay attention to, that you guys are doing? Great customer example here of cloud scale. What's the story for "re:Invent" this year for Informatica. >> But what John, it comes down to when customers think about their cloud journey, right? And the difference, especially with their data centric workloads and priorities and initiatives, all the different hurdles that they need to overcome. I think Informatica we're uniquely positioned to help customers address all those different challenges and you heard Rick speak about a whole bunch of those along the way. And I think particularly at "re:Invent", first of all, I just welcome folks to... They want to learn more about our data governance solution. Please come by our virtual booth. We also have a great interactive experience that encouraged folks to check out. One of the key components of our solution is our enterprise data catalog. And attendees at "re:Invent" can actually get hands on with our data catalog through the demo jam, the AWS demo jam as part of "re:invent". So I'd encourage folks to check that out as well, just to see what we're talking about yet actually. >> Awesome. Final question for you guys, as "re:Invent" is going on, a lot app stores are popping up, you seeing obviously the same trends, machine learning and you know, outpost is booming, so a cloud operations is clearly here, Rick from Invesco, what do you think the most important story is for your peers as they're here? It's a learning conference and you guys have seven years in the cloud working together with Informatica, in your opinion, what should people be paying attention to as they looked at this pandemic and what they got to get through? And then coming out of it with the growth strategy, it's all got to be more about the data, there's more data coming in, more sources, IoT data, certainly the work at home is causing these workloads, workplace, workflows, everything's changed, the future of work. What's your advice to peers out there on what to pay attention to and what to think about? >> We really started with a top-down strategy, right? To really the vision and the future. What do we want to get out of our data? Data is just data, right? But it's the information, it's the analytics, it's really delivering value for our clients, shareholders, and employees to really do their job, simplify our architecture. So really defining that vision of what you want and approach, and then executing on it, right? So how do you build it in a way to make it flexible and scalable, and how do you build an operating and governance model really to deliver on it because, you know, garbage in is garbage out, and you really got to have those processes, I think to really get the full value of what you're building. >> Get the data out there at the right place, at the right time and the right quality data. That's a lot more involved now and you need to be agile. And I think agile data is a way to go. Rick Turnock... >> And then with channels and capabilities that makes it easier, right? It makes it doable. And I think that's what cloud and the Informatica tools, right? Where in the past, you know, it was people hard coding and doing it right? The capability of that cloud and these tools give us makes it really achievable. >> You know, we have an old saying here in our CUBE team, you know, "If there's a problem, "you got to see if it's important, "and then look at the consequences "of not solving that problem, quantify the value of "solving or not solving that problem, "and then look and deploy solutions to do it." I think now with the data, you can actually do that and say, "This ain't quite the consequences of not doing this "or doing this, have a quantifiable value." I just loved that because it brings the whole ROI back to the table. And, you know, it's a dark art, it used to be, you mentioned the old days, you know, you got to do all this custom work, it was like a dark art. Oh yeah, the ROI calculation, payback. I mean, it was a moving train. That's the way it used to be. Not anymore. >> You got to do it to survive, really, if you're not doing it, you know, I don't know. >> Necessity is the mother of all inventions I think, now more than ever, data's going to be the key. Rik final word from Informatica. What should people pay attention to? >> Yeah, I mean, I think as you mentioned there, data is obviously a critical asset, right? And, and to your point with cloud, you can not only realize ROI quickly, but, you can actually iterate so much more quickly, where you can get that ROI immediately or you can validate that ROI, you can adjust your approach. But again, from an Informatica standpoint, we are seeing such a huge uptake in demand for customers who want to go to the cloud, who are modernizing. Every day we're investing heavily and how do we make sure that customers can get there quickly? They can maximize the ROI from their data assets, and we're doing it with all things, data management, from traditional data integration, all the way to the data governance, all the capabilities we talked about today. >> Yeah. Congratulations. That's the benefit of investing in a platform and having a set of out of the box tooling with SaaS, platform as a service, really it can enable success. And I think the pandemic is pretty obvious who's taking advantage of it, so congratulations and continued success. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. Rick Turnock, head of data service, enterprise data services at Invesco, customer of Informatica sharing his insight. Great insight there. Necessity is the mother of all inventions, baking it in from the beginning data governance foundational, it's not a bolt on, that's the message. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (soft music)

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of Veem on 2020 brought to you by beam. >>Hi buddy. Welcome back to the cubes. Ongoing coverage of Veem on 2020s Veem online 2020 I'm Dave Volante and Rick van overs here as a senior director of product strategy at Veem. Rick, it's always a great pleasure to see you. I wish we could see each other face to face. >>Yeah. You know, it's different this year, but, uh, yeah, it is always great to be on the cube. I think, uh, uh, in 2018 had an eight year gap and it's a N a couple of times we've been back since and yeah, happy to be back on the cube. >>So how's it going with you guys with the online format? I mean, breakouts are big for you cause you're, you're profiling some new products that we're going to get into, how's it all working for you? >>Well, it's been different. It's a good way to explain it in one word different, but the reality is I have a, uh, pardon, the language, a side hustle here, where at Veeam, I've worked with the event team to kind of bring the best content. And for the breakouts, that's an area that I've been working a lot with our speakers and our, some of our partners, external experts, users, and people who have, you know, beaten ransomware and stuff like that. But I've worked really hard to aggregate the content and get the best blend of content. And we kind of have taken an interesting approach where the breakouts are that library of content that we think organizations and the people who attend the event really take away the most. So we've got this full spectrum from R and D deep level stuff to just getting started type of stuff, and really all types of levels in between. And yeah, we want the breakouts to focus on generally available products, right? So I've worked pretty diligently to bring a good spread across the, uh, different products. And then a little secret trick we're doing is that into the summer, we're going to open up new content. So there's this broadcast agenda that we've got publicized, but then beyond that, we're going to sneak in some new content into the summer. >>Well, I'm glad you're thinking that way, because you know, a lot of what a lot of people are doing. There's a church trying to take their physical events and mirror it to the, to the digital or the virtual. And I think so often with physical events, people forget about the afterglow. And so I'm glad you guys are thinking about it upfront. >>Yeah. It has to be a mechanism that we've used it a couple of different ways, one to match how things are going to be released. Right? Cause being, we're always releasing products across the different set. I mean, we have one flagship product, but then the other products have their own cycles. So if something works well for that, we'll put it into the summer library. And then it's also a great opportunity for us to reach deep and get some content from people that we might not have been able to get before. In fact, we had one of our engineers who's based in Australia and great resource, great region, strong market for us, but I can't w if we were to have the in person event, I can't bring somebody from Australia for one session, but this was a great way to bring her expertise to the event without, you know, having the travel burden and different variety of speakers and different varieties of content. So there's ways that we've been able to build on it. But again, the top level word is definitely different, but I feel like it's working for sure. >>So Rick, give us the helicopter view of some of the product areas that we should be really be aware of as it relates to what you guys are doing at Veem on 2020. And then we'll, we'll drill in give us the high level though. >>Yeah. So for people attending the event and online, my advice really is that we're spread across about 75 to 80% of the content is for technical people. 20% of the content in the breakouts is going to be for decision makers or executives, that type. And then within that, the context of the technical content, we want to have probably 10 to 15% being like presenters from our R and D group. So very technical, uh, low level type discussions, highest level architect type stuff, kind of after that generic use cases, a nice and in the middle area, because we have a lot of people that are getting started with our products, like maybe they're new to the office three 65 backup, or they're new to backing up natively in the cloud. We have a lot of contexts around the virtual machine backup and storage integration, all those other great things, but the platform is kind of spread out at Veeam. There's a lot to take in. So the thought is wherever anyone is on their journey with any of the products and not some, that's a hard task to do with a certain number of slots. We want to provide something for everyone at every level. So that's the, that's the helicopter view. >>So let me ask you a couple of follow ups on that. So let's start with office three 65. Now you guys have shared data at this event, uh, talking about that most customers just say, Oh yeah, well, I trust Microsoft to do my backup. Well, of course, as we, well, well know it, backup is one thing, but recovery is everything. And so explain why, uh, what will explain the value that you guys bring? Why can't I just rely on the SAS vendor, uh, to, to do my backup and recovery? >>Well, there's a lot to that question, Dave, the number one thing I'll say is that at Veeam, we have partnerships with Microsoft. You have where HPE, all the household brands of it. And in many of these situations, we've always come into the market with the platform itself, providing a basic backup. I'll give windows, for example, anti backup, right? Yeah. Those, you know, it's there, but there's always a market for more capabilities, more functionality, more portability. So we've taken office three 65 is a different angle for backup. And we lead with the shared responsibility model, Microsoft as well as the other clouds, make it very clear that data classification and that responsibility of data that actually sits 100% with the customer. And so, yes, you can add things to the platform, but if we have organizations where we have things like I need to retain my content forever, or I need a discovery use case. >>And then if you think about broader use cases like one drive for business data, especially with the rapid shift of work from home organizations may not be not so much using the file server, but using things like one drive for business, for file exchanges, right? So having a control plane over that data is, is very important. So we really base it on the shared responsibility and Microsoft is one of our strongest partners. So they are very keen for us to provide solutions that are going to consume and move data around to, to meet customer needs in the cloud and in the SAS environment. For sure. So, you know, it's been a very easy conversation for our customers and it's our fastest growing product as well. So, uh, this, this product is doing great. Uh, I don't have the quarterly numbers, but we just released the mid part of Q4. We just released the newest release, which implemented object storage support. So that's been the big ask for our customers, right? So it's a, it's that product's doing great. >>Yeah. So, you know, that notion of shared responsibility, you hear that a lot in cloud security, you're applying it to cloud data protection, which, you know, security and data protection are now, you know, there's a lot of gray area between them now. Uh, and I think it's, you know, security is a, or data protection is a fundamental part of your security strategy, but that notion of shared responsibility is very important. And one that's oftentimes misunderstood because people hear, Oh, it's in the cloud. Okay. My cloud vendor has got to cover it, but what does, what does that shared responsibility mean? Ultimately, isn't it up to the customer to own the end end result. >>It is. And I look at, especially Microsoft, they classify their software for different ways on prem software, uh, software as a service, the infrastructure as a service. Uh, I forget what the third one is, but they have so many different ways that you can package their software, but in all of them, they put the data classification for the customer and it same for other clouds as well. And when, if I'm an organization today, if I'm running data in a SAS platform, if I am running systems in iOS platforms, in the hyperscale public clouds, that is an opportunity for me to really think about that control plane of the data and the backup and restore responsibility, because it has to be easy to use. It has to be very consumable so that customers can avoid that data loss or be in a situation where the complexity to do a restore is so miserable that they may not even want to go do it. I've actually had conversations with organizations as they come to Veeam. That was their alternative. Oh, it's just too painful to do. Like, why would you even do that? You know, so that, that shared responsibility model across the different data types in the cloud and on-premise well, and SAS models, that's really where we find the conversations go pretty nicely. >>Right. And if it's too complicated, you won't even bother testing it. So I want to ask you something about cloud native. You mentioned cloud native, your cloud native capabilities, um, and I'm, I'm inferring from that, that you basically are not just taking your on prem stack and shoving it into the cloud. You're actually taking advantage of the native cloud services. Can you, can you explain what's going on there and maybe some product specifics? >>Sure. So, you know, Veeam has this reputation of number one, VM backup, you know, here in my office, I have posters from all over the years and somewhere down here is number one, VM backup. And that's where we cut our teeth and got our name out there. But now if you're an Azure, if you're an Amazon, we have cloud native backup products available. In fact, the last time you and I spoke was that an Amazon reinvent where we launched the Amazon product. And then last month we launched the Azure product, which provides cloud native backup for Azure. And so now we have this cloud feature parody and those products are going to move very quickly as well. We've had the software as a service product for office three 65, where we keep adding services. And we saw in the general session, we're going to add protection for a new service in office three 65. >>So we're going to continue to innovate around these different areas. And there's also another cloud that we announced a capability for as well. So, you know, the platform at Veem it's growing, and it's amazing to see this happen cause you know, customers are making cloud investments and there's no cloud for all right. So some organizations like this cloud that cloud are a little bit of these two clouds combined. So we have to really go into the cloud with customer needs in mind because there's no one size fits all approach to the cloud, but their data, everybody knows how important that is. >>So to that end though, each, each cloud is going to have a set of native services and you've got to develop specific to that cloud, right? So that you can have the most, the lowest, highest performance, the most efficient, the lowest cost data protection solution backup and recovery possible is that, I mean, taking advantage of those native cloud services is going to be unique for each cloud, right? Because AWS has cloud and Azure cloud. Those are, those are different, you know, technically underneath, is that, is that right? >>You're absolutely right. And the cost models, they have different behaviors across the clouds. In fact, the breakout that I did here at the event with Melissa Palmer, those who are interested in the economics of the cloud should check that out because the cloud is all about consuming those resources. When I look at backup, I don't want backup to be a cost prohibitive insurance policy. Basically I want backup to be a cost effective yet resilient technology that when we're using the cloud, we can kind of balance all these needs. And one of the ways that beam's done that is we've put in cost estimators, which it's not that big of a like flashy part of the user interface, but it's so powerful to customers. The thought is if I want to consume infrastructure as a service in the cloud, and I want to back up via API calls, snapshots to ECE, two instances only nice and high performance, nice and fast. >>But the cost profile of that if I kept them for a year is completely different than if I used object storage. And what we're doing with the Veeam backup for Azure and Amazon products is we're putting those numbers right there in the wizard. So you could say, Hey, I want to keep two years of data. And I have snapshots and I have object storage, totally different cost profiles. And I'll put those costs testaments in there. And you can make egregious examples where it'll be like 10 and 20 X the price, but it really allows customers to get it fast, to get it cost efficient. And more importantly, at the end of the day, have that protection that they need. And that's, you know, that's something that I've been trying to evangelize at this cost. Estimator is a really big deal. >>Yeah. Provides transparency so that you can let the business, you know, drive sort of what the, what the data protection level is as opposed to sort of either, whether it's a one size fit all or you're under protected or overprotected and spending too much, I asked Anton is going to kind of, how do you prioritize it? Because basically his answer was we look at the economics and then ultimately you're giving tools to allow the customer to decide, >>Yeah, you don't want to have that surprise cloud bill at the end of the month. You don't want to have, um, you know, waste in the cloud and Anton's right. The economics are very important. The modeling process that we use is interesting. I had a chat with one of the product managers who is basically in charge of our cloud economic modeling and to the organizations out there. This is a really practical bit is, think about modeling, think about cloud economics, because here's the very important part. If you've already implemented something it's too late and what I mean by that, the economics, if they're not right when you implement it, so you're not modeling ahead of time. Once you implement, you can monitor it all you want, but you're just going to monitor it off the model. So the thought is, this is all a backwards process. You have to go backwards with the economics, with the modeling, and that will lead you to no surprises down the road. For sure. >>I want to ask you about the COVID impact generally, but specifically as it relates to ransomware, I mean, we've had a lot more inquiries regarding ransomware. There's certainly a lot more talk about it in the press. What have you seen, uh, specifically with respect to ransomware since the pandemic and since the lockdown. >>So that's something that's near and dear to my heart on the technology team here at product strategy, everyone has like a little specialization industry specialization. Ransomware's mine. So good ask. So the one thing that sticks out to me a lot is identifying where ransomware comes in and around. I have one data point that indicated around 58 or so percent of ransomware comes in through remote desktop. And the thought here is if we have shifted to remote access and new working models, what really worries me, Dave is when people hustle, when people hurry and the thought here is you can have it right. Or you can have it right now in mid March, we needed to make a move right now. So I worry about UN UN incomplete security models, right? People hurrying to, um, implement and maybe not taking their security, right. Especially when you think about most ransomware can come in through remote desktop. >>I thought fish attacks were the main attack vector, but I had some data points that told me this. So I have been, and I just completed a great white paper that those watching this can go to dot com and download. But the thought here is I just completed a great white paper on tips to beat ransomware and yes, Veeam has capabilities, but here's the logic. Dave. I like to explain it this way, beating ransomware. And we had a breakout that I recorded here at the event, encourage everyone to watch that I had two users share their story of how they beat ransomware with Veem. Two very different ways too. Any product is, or is not necessarily ransomware resilient. It's like going through an audit. And what I mean by that is people ask me all the time is being compliant to this standard or that standard it's 100% dictated how the product's implemented, how the product's audited, same with ransomware. >>It's 100% dictated on how Veem is implemented. And then what's the nature of the exploit. And so I break it down to three simple things. We have to educate. We have to know what threats are out there. We have to know who is accessing, what data. And then the big part of it is the implementation. How have we implemented Veeam? Are we keeping data in immutable buckets in the cloud? Are we keeping data with an air gap? And then three, the remediation when something does happen, how do we go about solving that problem? I talked to our tech support team who deals with it every day and they have very good insights, very good feedback on this phenomena. And that they've helped me shape some of the recommendations I put in the paper. But, uh, yeah, it's a 30 page paper. I don't know if I can summarize it here. That's a long one for me, but, uh, the threats real, and this is something we'll never be done with. Right. I have, I've done two other papers on it and I'm going to have another one soon after that, but we're building stuff into the product. We're educating the market. And, um, you know, we're winning, we're seeing like I had the two customers, um, beat ransomware, great stories. I think I learned so much hearing from someone who's gone through it and that you can find that in the, in the Vermont broadcast for those attending here. >>Well, you've touched on a couple of having them take advantage of the cloud guys who have these immutable mutable buckets that you can, you can leverage. Um, a lot of people don't even don't even know about that. Um, and then, like you say, create an air gap and presumably there's best practice around how often you write to that bucket and how often you create, you know, that air gap you may be, you may be change up the patterns. I don't know other, other thoughts on that. >>Well, I collectively put, I've created a term and uh, nobody's questioning me on it yet, so that's good, but I'm calling it ultra resilient storage. And what I'm referring to is that immutable backup in the cloud. And if we, it becomes a math calculation, you know, if you have one data point in there, that's good. But if you had a week's worth of data points, that's better. If you had a month's worth of data points, that's even better. But of course those cost profiles are going to change. Same thing with tape tapes, a an air gap, removable media, and I go back and forth on this, but some of the more resilient storage snapshot engines can do ultra resilient techniques as well, such as like, uh, pure storage, safe mode and NetApp snap fall. And then the last thing is actually a Veeam technology. It's been out for three, four years now, insider protection. >>It's a completely out of band copy of backup data that that Veeam cloud connect offers. So my thought here is that these ultra resilient types, those are best defense in these situations. And, you know, it's, it's a, it becomes a calculated risk of how much of it do I want to keep, because I want to have the most restore options available. I want to have no data loss, but I also don't want it old. Right. You know, there's a huge decline in value taking your business back a year ago, because that's the last tape you had, for example, I want today's or yesterday's backup if I'm in that type of situation. So I go through a lot of those points in my paper, but I hope that, um, those out there fighting the war on ransomware have the tools. I know they have the tools to win with them. >>Well, it's like we were talking about before and ransomware is a really good example of the, the blurring lines between security and backup and recovery. Of course. Uh, what role do analytics play in terms of providing transparency and identifying anomalous behavior in the whole ransomware equation? >>Well, the analytics are very important and I have to be really kind of be transparent, you know, VMs, backup company, right? We're not a security tool, but this is it's getting awfully close. And the, I don't want to say the long form historical definition of it. Security was something around this thing called a CIA triad, maintaining confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data. So security tools are really big on the confidentiality and integrity side of it. But on the availability side, that's ravine can come in. So the analytics come in to our play pretty naturally, right? We have, the Veem has had for years now, uh, an alarm that detects abnormal behavior in regards to CPU rights or CPU usage and disk, right IO. Like if there's both of those or abnormally high, that this is what we call possible ransomware activity. Or if we have a incremental backup, that is like 100% change rate, that's a bad sign, right. >>Things like that. And then the other angle is even on PCs desktops like this computer, I'm talking to you now on w we have just simple logic of, once you take a backup eject the drive. So it's offline, right? So analyzing where the threats come from, what kind of behavior they're going to have when we apply it to backup. Veem can have these built in analytic engines that are just transparently there for our customers. There's no deep reeducation necessary to use these, but the thought is we want a very flexible model. That's going to just provide simple ease of use, and then allow that protection with the threatscape to help it help the customers where we can, because no two ransomware threats are the same. That's the other thing. They are so varied in what they do everything from application specific to files. And now there's these new ones that upload data. The ransom is actually a data leak. They're not encrypting the data. They're just the ransom is to take down potentially huge amounts of data leakage, right? So, um, all kinds of threat actors out there for sure. >>You know, it's a last kind of line of questioning here. Rick is, as I've said, a number of times, it's just, it's ironic that we're entering this new decade in this pandemic hits. And everybody talks about the acceleration of certain trends. But if you think about the trends, you know, last decade, it's always performance and costs. We talked a lot about granularity. We talked about, you know, simplicity, you guys expanded your number of use cases. Uh, the, the support, the compatibility matrix, if you will, all those things are sort of things that you've executed on. As you look forward to this coming decade, we talked about cloud. I mean, we were talking about cloud, you know, back in the, in 2008, 2009 time frame, but it was a relatively small portion of the business. Now everybody's talking cloud. So cloud cloud, native DePaul discussion on ransomware and maybe even broader business resiliency, digital transformation, we've been, we've been given lip service in a lot of cases to digital transformation. All of a sudden that's changed. So as you put on, you pull out the telescope and look forward to the trends that are going to drive your thinking in themes, decision making. What do you look toward? >>Well, I think that laser focused on four things, backup solutions for cloud workloads, and there's incredible opportunity there, right? So yes, we have a great Azure story, great Amazon story. And in the keynote, we indicated the next cloud capability, but there's still more, there's more services in the cloud that we need to go after. There's also the sass pocket. We have a great office, three 65 story, but there's other SAS products that we could provide a story for. And then the physical and virtual platforms. I mean, I feel really confident there we've got really good capabilities, but there's always the 1%. And you know, what's in the corner. What's the 1% of the 1%, right? And those are workloads we can continue to go after. But my thought is, as long as we attack those four areas, we're going to be on a good trajectory to deliver on that promise of being that most trusted provider of cloud data management for backup solutions. >>So my thought here is that we're going to just keep adding products. And it's very important to make it sometimes a new product. We don't want to just bolt it on to backup and replication via 11 or be 10 for that, for that matter, because it'll slow it down, right? The cloud native products are going to have to have their own cadence, their own independent, um, development cycles. And they're going to move faster, right? Because they'll need to, so you'll, you'll see us continuing to add new products, new capabilities, and sometimes it'll, it'll intermix, you know, and that's, that's, that's the whole definition of a platform when one product is talking to another, from a management side, a control plane, given customer portability, all that stuff. So we're going to just go after a cloud, virtual, physical SAS, and new products and new capabilities to do it. >>Well, Rick, it's always a pleasure talking to you. Your home studio looks great. You look good. And, but, but nonetheless, hopefully we'll be able to see each other face to face here shortly. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you, Dave. >>All right. And thank you for watching. Everybody's Dave Vellante and our continuous coverage of the Mon 2020, the online version of right back, right after this short break.

>> From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of VeeamON 2020, brought to you by Veeam. >> Hi, everybody, welcome back to theCUBE's ongoing coverage of VeeamON 2020, it's Veeam online 2020. I'm Dave Vellante. And Rick Vanover's here, he's the senior director of product strategy at Veeam. Rick, it's always a great pleasure to see you. I wish we could see each other face-to-face. >> Yeah, you know it's different this year, but yeah, it is always great to be on theCUBE. I think in 2018, it had a eight-year gap and a couple of times we've been back since, and yeah, happy to be back on theCUBE. >> So how's it going with you guys with the online format? Breakouts are big for you 'cause you're profiling some new products that we're going to get into. How's it all working for you? Well, it's been different. It's a good way to explain it in one word, different. But the reality is, I have a, pardon the language, a side hustle here where at Veeam, I've worked with the event team to bring the best content, and for the breakouts, it's an area that I've been working a lot with our speakers and some of our partners and external experts, users, and people who have beaten ransomware and stuff like that. But I've worked really hard to aggregate the content and get the best blend of content. And we kind of have taken an interesting approach where the breakouts are that library of content that we think organizations and the people who attend the event really take away the most. So, we've got this full spectrum from R&D deep level stuff to just getting started type of stuff, and really all types of levels in between. We want the breakouts to focus on generally available products, right? So I've worked pretty diligently to bring a good spread across the different products. And then a little secret trick we're doing is that into the summer, we're going to open up new content. So there's this broadcast agenda that we've got publicized, but then beyond that we're going to sneak in some new content into the summer. >> Well, I'm glad you're thinking that way, because what a lot of people are doing, they're just trying to take their physical events and mirror it to the digital or the virtual, and I think so often with physical events, people forget about the afterglow, so I'm glad you guys are thinking about it upfront. >> Yeah, it has to be a mechanism, that we've used it a couple of different ways. One to match how things are going to be released, right? 'Cause Veeam, we're always releasing products across the different set. We have one flagship product, but then the other products have their own cycles. So if something works well for that, we'll put it into the summer library. And then it's also a great opportunity for us to reach deep and get some content from people that we might not have been able to get before. In fact, we had one of our engineers who's based in Australia, and great resource, great region, strong market for us, but if we were to have the in-person at that, I can't bring somebody from Australia for one session. But this was a great way to bring her expertise to the event without having the travel burden and different variety of speakers and different varieties of content. So there's ways that we've been able to build on it, but again, the top level word is definitely different. But I feel like it's working for sure. >> So, Rick, give us the helicopter view of some of the product areas that we should really be aware of as it relates to what you guys are doing at VeeamON 2020, and then we'll drill in. Give us the high level though. >> So for people attending the event online, my advice really is that we're spread across about 75 to 80% of the content is for technical people. 20% of the content in the breakouts is going to be for decision-makers or executives, that type. And then within the context of the technical content, we want to have probably 10 to 15% be presenters from our R&D group, so very technical low-level type discussions, highest level architect type stuff after that. Generic use case is a nice in-the-middle area, because we have a lot of people that are getting started with our products, so like maybe they're new to the Office 365 backup or they're new to backing up natively in the cloud. We have a lot of context around the virtual machine backup and storage integration and all those other great things, but when the platform is kind of spread out at Veeam, there's a lot to take in. So the thought is wherever anyone is on their journey with any of the products, and that's a hard task to do with a certain number of slots, we want to provide something for everyone at every level. So that's the helicopter view. >> So let me ask you a couple of followups on that. So let's start with Office 365. Now, you guys have shared data at this event, talking about most customers just say, "Oh, yeah, well, I trust Microsoft to do my backup." Well, of course, as we well know, backup is one thing (chuckles) but recovery is everything. Explain the value that you guys bring. Why can't I just rely on the SaaS vendor to do my backup and recovery? >> Well, there's a lot to that question, Dave. The number one thing I'll say is that at Veeam, we have partnerships with Microsoft, VMware, HPE, all the household brands of IT, and in many of these situations, we've always come into the market with the platform itself providing a basic backup. I'll give Windows, for example, anti-backup. It's there, but there's always a market for more capabilities, more functionality, more portability. So we've taken Office 365 as a different angle for backup, and we lead with the shared responsibility model. Microsoft as well as the other clouds make it very clear that data classification and that responsibility of data, that actually sits 100% with the customer. And so, yes, you can add things to the platform, but if we have organizations where we have things like, I need to retain my content forever, or I need a discovery use case, and then if you think about broader use cases, like OneDrive for business data, especially with the rapid shift of work from home, organizations may now be not so much using the file server, but using things like OneDrive for Business for file exchanges. So, having the control plane open that data is very important, so we really base it on the shared responsibility. And Microsoft is one of our strongest partners, so they are very keen for us to provide solutions that are going to consume and move data around to meet customer needs in the cloud and in the SaaS environment for sure. So, it's been a very easy conversation for our customers and it's our fastest growing product as well. So this product is doing great. I don't have the quarterly numbers but we just released in the mid part or the Q4, we just released the newest release, which implemented object storage support, so that's been the big ask for customers, right? So that product's doing great. >> Yeah, so that notion of shared responsibility, you hear that a lot in cloud security. You're applying it to cloud data protection, which you know security and data protection are now, there's a lot of gray area between them now. And I think security or data protection is a fundamental part of your security strategy. But that notion of shared responsibility is very important and one that's oftentimes misunderstood because people hear, oh, it's in the cloud, okay, my cloud vendor's got it covered. But what does that shared responsibility mean? Ultimately, isn't it up to the customer to own the end result? >> It is, and I look at especially Microsoft. They classify their software four different ways, on-prem software, software as a service, infrastructure as a service, and I forget whatever the third one is, but they have so many different ways that you can package their software, but in all of them, they put the data classification for the customer. And it's the same for other clouds as well. And if I'm an organization today, if I'm running data in a SaaS platform, if I am running systems in IAS platforms, in the hyperscale public clouds, that is an opportunity for me to really think about that control plane of the data, and the backup and restore responsibility, because it has to be easy to use. It has to be very consumable so that customers can avoid that data loss or be in a situation where the complexity to do a restore is so miserable that they may not even want to go do it. I've actually had conversations with organizations as they come to Veeam, that was their alternative. Oh, it's just too painful to do, like, why would you even do that? So that shared responsibility model across the different data types in the cloud and on-prem as well and SaaS models, that's really where we find the conversations go pretty nicely. >> Right, and if it's too complicated, you won't even bother testing it. So, I want to ask you something about cloud data. You mentioned cloud native capabilities, and I'm inferring from that, that you basically are not just taking your on-prem stack and shoving it into the cloud. You're actually taking advantage of the native cloud services. Can you explain what's going on there, and maybe some product specifics? >> Sure, so Veeam has this reputation of number one VM backup. I'm here in my office, I have posters from all over the years, and somewhere down here is number one VM backup. And that's where we cut our teeth and got our name out there. But now if you're in Azure, if you're in Amazon, we have cloud native backup products available. In fact, the last time you and I spoke was at Amazon re:Invent where we launched the Amazon product. And then last month, we launched the Azure product, which provides cloud native backup for Azure, and so now we have this cloud feature parody, and those products are going to move very quickly. As well, we've had this software as a service product for Office 365 where we keep adding services. And we saw in the general session, we're going to add protection for a new service in Office 365. So we're going to continue to innovate around these different areas, and there's also another cloud that we announced a capability for as well. So the platform at Veeam, it's growing, and it's amazing to see this happen, 'cause customers are making cloud investments and there's no cloud for all. So some organizations like this cloud, that cloud, or a little bit of these two clouds combined. So we have to really go into the cloud with customer needs in mind, because there's no one size fits all approach to the cloud, but the data, everybody knows how important that is. >> To that end though, each cloud is going to have a set of native services, and you've got to develop specific to that cloud, right, so that you can have the highest performance, the most efficient, the lowest cost data protection solution backup and recovery possible. Taking advantage of those native cloud services is going to be unique for each cloud, right? 'Cause AWS' cloud and Azure cloud, those are different technically underneath. Is that right? >> You're absolutely right, and the cost models have different behaviors across the clouds. In fact, the breakout that I did here at the event with Melissa Palmer, those who are interested in the economics of the cloud should check that out, because the cloud is all about consuming those resources. When I look at backup, I don't want backup to be a cost-prohibitive insurance policy, basically. I want backup to be a cost-effective, yet resilient technology that when we're using the cloud, we can kind of balance all these needs. And one of the ways that Veeam's done that is we've put in cost estimators, which it's not that big of a flashy part of the user interface, but it's so powerful to customers. The thought is if I want to consume infrastructure as a service in the cloud, and I want to back up via API call snapshots to EC2 instances only, nice and high performance, nice and fast, but the cost profile of that if I kept them for a year is completely different than if I used object storage. And what we're doing with the Veeam backup for Azure and Amazon products is we're putting those numbers right there in the wizard. So you could say, "Hey, I want to keep two years of data, "and I have snapshots and I have object storage," totally different cost profiles, and I'll put those cost estimates in there. You could make egregious examples where it'll be like 10 and 20 x the price, but it really allows customers to get it fast, to get it cost-efficient, and more importantly at the end of the day, have that protection that they need. And that's something I've been trying to evangelize that this cost estimator is a really big deal. >> It provides transparency so that you're going to let the business drive sort of what the data protection level is, as opposed to sort of whether it's a one-size-fit-all or you're under-protected or over-protected and spending too much. I ask Anton, "How do you prioritize?" Basically his answer was we look at the economics. And then ultimately you're giving tools to allow the customer to decide. >> Yeah, you don't want to have that surprise cloud bill at the end of the month. You don't want to have waste in the cloud, and Anton's right, the economics are very important. The modeling process that we use is interesting. I had a chat with one of the product managers who is basically in charge of our cloud economic modeling, and to the organizations out there, this is a really practical bit, is think about modeling, think about cloud economics, because here's the very important part. If you've already implemented something, it's too late. And what I mean by that, the economics, if they're not right when you implement it so you're not modeling it ahead of time, once you implement, you can monitor it all you want, but you're just going to monitor it off the model. So the thought is this is all a backwards process. You have to go backwards with the economics, with the model, and then that will lead you to no surprises down the road. >> I want to ask you about the COVID impact generally, but specifically as it relates to ransomware, we've had a lot more inquiries regarding ransomware. There's certainly a lot more talk about it in the press. What have you seen specifically with respect to ransomware since the pandemic and since the lockdown? >> So that's something that's near and dear to my heart. On the technology team here at product strategy, everyone has a little specialization, industry specialization. ransomware is mine, so good ask. Whew, so the one thing that sticks out to me a lot is identifying where ransomware comes in, and I have one data point that indicated around 58 or so percent of ransomware comes in through remote desktop. And the thought here is if we have shifted to remote access and new working models, what really worries me, Dave, is when people hustle, when people hurry. And the thought here is you can have it right or you can have it right now. In mid-March, we needed to make a move right now. So, I worry about incomplete security models, people hurrying to implement and maybe not taking their security right, especially when you think about most ransomware can come in through remote desktop. I though phish attacks were the main attack vector, but I had some data points that told me this. So I have been, and I just completed a great white paper that those watching this can go to veeam.com and download, but the thought here is I just completed a great white paper on tips to beat ransomware, and yes, Veeam has capabilities, but here's the logic, Dave. I like to explain it this way. Beating ransomware, and we had a breakout that I recorded here at the event and encourage everyone to watch that, I had two users share their story of how they beat ransomware with Veeam, two very different ways, too. Any product is or is not necessarily ransomware-resilient. It's like going through an audit. What I mean by that is people ask me all the time, is Veeam compliant to this standard or that standard? It's 100% dictated how the product's implemented, how the product's audited. Same with ransomware. It's 100% dictated on how Veeam is implemented and then what's the nature of the exploit. And so I break it down into three simple things. We have to educate. We have to know what threats are out there, we have to know who is accessing what data, and then the big part of it is the implementation. How have we implemented Veeam? Are we keeping data in immutable buckets in the cloud? Are we keeping data with an air gap? And then three, the remediation. When something does happen, how do we go about solving that problem? I talked to our tech support team who deals with it every day, and they have very good insights, very good feedback on this phenomena, and that they've helped me shape some of the recommendations I put in the paper. But yeah, it's a 30-page paper. I don't know if I can summarize it here. It's a long one for me, but the threat's real, and this is something we'll never be done with, right? I've done two other papers on it, and I'm going to have another one soon after that. But we're building stuff into the product, we're educating the market, and we're winning. We're seeing like I had the two customers beat ransomware, great stories. I think I learn so much hearing from someone who's gone through it, and that you can find that in the VeeamON broadcast for those attending here. >> Well, you touched on a couple. Take advantage of the cloud guys who have these immutable buckets that you can leverage. A lot of people don't even know about that. And then, like you say, create an air gap, and presumably there's best practice around how often you write to that bucket and how often you create that air gap. You maybe change up the patterns, I don't know, other thoughts on that. >> Well, I collectively put, I've created a term, and nobody's questioning me on it yet, so that's good, but I'm calling it ultra-resilient storage. And what I'm referring to is that immutable backup in the cloud. It becomes a math calculation. If you have one data point in there, that's good, but if you had a week's worth of data points, that's better. If you had a month's worth of data points, that's even better. But of course, those cost profiles are going to change. Same thing with tape, tape's an air gap, removable media, and I go back and forth on this, but some of the more resilient storage snapshot engines can do ultra-resilient techniques as well, such as like Pure Storage SafeMode and NetApp SnapVault. And then the last thing is actually a Veeam technology that's been out for, I don't know, three or four years now, insider protection, it's a completely out-of-band copy of backup data that Veeam Cloud Connect offers. So my thought here is that these ultra-resilient types, those are the best defense in these situations. It becomes a calculated risk of how much of it do I want to keep, because I want to have the most restore options available, I want to have no data loss. But I also don't want it old. There's a huge decline in value of taking your business back a year ago, because that's the last tape you had, for example. I want today's or yesterday's backup if I'm in that type of situation. So, I go through a lot of those points in my paper, but I hope that those out there fighting the war on ransomware have the tools. I know they have the tools to win with Veeam. >> Well, it's like we were talking about before, and ransomware is a really good example of the blurring lines between security and backup and recovery, of course. What role do analytics play in terms of providing transparency and identifying anomalous behavior in the whole ransomware equation? >> Well, the analytics are very important, and I have to be really kind of, be completely transparent. Veeam is a backup company. We're not a security tool. But it's getting awfully close. I don't want to say, the long form historical definition of IT security was something around this thing called a CIA triad, maintaining confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data. So, security tools are really big on the confidentiality and integrity side of it, but on the availability side, that's where Veeam can come in. So the analytics come in to our play pretty naturally. Veeam has had for years now an alarm that detects abnormal behavior in regards to CPU usage and disk write IO. If there's both of those are abnormally high, that is what we call possible ransomware activity. Or if we have a incremental backup that is like 100% change rate, that's a bad sign, things like that. And then the other angle is, even on PC's desktops, like this computer I'm talking to you now on, we have just simple logic of once you take a backup, eject the drive so it's offline, right? So analyzing where the threats come from, what kind of behavior they're going to have, when we apply it to backup, Veeam can have these builtin analytic engines that are just transparently there for our customers. There's no deep re-education necessary to use these, but the thought is we want a very flexible model that's just going to provide simple ease of use and then allow that protection with the threatscape to help the customers where we can, because no two ransomware threats are the same. That's the other thing. They are so varied in what they do, everything from application specific to files, and now there's these new ones that upload data. The ransom is actually a data leak. They're not encrypting the data, the ransom is take down potentially huge amounts of data leakage. So all kinds of threat actors out there, for sure. >> You know, the last line of questioning here, Rick, is I've said a number of times, it's ironic that we're entering this new decade and this pandemic hits. Everybody talks about the acceleration of certain trends, but if you think about the trends, last decade, it's always performance and cost, we talked a lot of granularity, we talked about simplicity, you guys expanded your number of use cases, the support, the compatibility matrix if you will. All those things are sort of things that you've executed on. As you look forward to this coming decade, we talked about cloud. I mean, we were talking about cloud back in 2008, 2009 timeframe, but it was a relatively small portion of the business. Now everybody's talking cloud, so cloud, cloud native, the whole discussion on ransomware, and being broad, our business resiliency. Digital transformation, we've been given lip service in a lot of cases to digital transformation. All of a sudden, that's changed. So as you pull out the telescope and look forward to the trends that are going to drive your thinking and Veeam's decision making, what do you look toward? >> Well, I think that Veeam is laser-focused on four things. Backup solutions for cloud, workloads, and there's incredible opportunity there, right? So yes, we have a great Azure story, great Amazon story, and in the keynote we indicated the next cloud capability, but there's still more, there's more services in the cloud that we need to go after. There's also the SaaS market. We have a great Office 365 story, but there's other SaaS products that we could provide a story for. And then the physical and virtual platforms, I mean, I feel really confident there. We've got really good capabilities, but there's always the 1% and what's in the corner, and what's the 1% of the 1%? And those are workloads we can continue to go after. But my thought is, as long as we attack those four areas, we're going to be on a good trajectory to deliver on that promise of being that most trusted provider of cloud data management for backup solutions. So, my thought here is that we're going to just keep adding projects, and it's very important to make it sometimes a new product. We don't want to just bolt it on to Backup and Replication V11 or V10 for that matter, because it'll slow it down. The cloud native products are going to have to have their own cadence, their own independent development cycles, and they're going to move faster, 'cause they'll need to. So you'll see us continue to add new products, new capabilities, and sometimes it'll intermix, and that's the whole definition of a platform, when one product is talking to another, from a management side, a control plane, giving customer portability, all that stuff. So we're just going to go after cloud virtual/physical SaaS and new products and new capabilities to do it. >> Well, Rick, it's always a pleasure talking to you. Your home studio looks great, you look good, but nonetheless, hopefully we'll be able to see each other face-to-face here shortly. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, Dave. >> All right, and thank you for watching, everybody. It's Dave Vellante and our continuous coverage of VeeamON 2020, the online version. We'll be right back right after this short break. (upbeat music)

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation hi I'm Stu min a man and welcome to this special cube conversation over helping cover the second generation of the VMware cloud on Dell EMC happy to welcome to the program brick Villiers who's the vice president of data center and cloud with IDC not too far from me physically even the worse in today's day and age we're all practicing social distance Oh Rick great to see you thanks so much for joining no thanks - pleasure to be here looking forward to a great conversation all right so Rick you know usually this time of year you and I see other more than we their families because we're traveling a both circuit going to the analyst events like and one of the topics we spent a lot of time talking about over the years is of course cloud you know VMware's partnership with Amazon is of course one that the entire industry but notice of and the relationship of Amazon VMware and Dell is an interesting one what we're talking about today though is the VMware cloud or in the shorthand VM see on L EMC and it's the second generation of this product help us understand kind of where this fits in the categorization and the research that you in an IDC like that yes - it's an interesting question it's one that we've actually been thinking about for several years now and it had to do with some early conversations we were having back then with companies about their private cloud environment they've been deploying those for the last four or five years we were seeing them up on a sort of refresh cycle and when he started asking about how satisfied they'd been with those and where they wanted to use them and we got back some very consistent feedback saying that they had had some problems with their first generation of their private cloud environment and that they needed to address those and one of them was a consistency problem is that you know every private cloud they built whether they build it themselves or whether they looked at a host of private cloud provider even in their own company we're different different technologies different and figure different sets of tools and that was a big problem for them the second big problem they'd run into was basically every time there's a new technology or an upgrade or a fix we basically can't adopt it quickly we can't use it till the next refresh cycle so we're always behind we're playing catch-up and and neither one of those things really aligned with what they felt cloud should be and what they've been seeing in their public cloud environment and so when we looked at that and we started looking at the feedback a boat was coming on or we realized that we were about to see a new generation of private cloud environment but we said but this will be different not just because of new technology but it'll be actually different use cases and a different approach and the first thing is we said its first of all these are it's not so much a private cloud is that they dedicated cloud it's it's I have resources that are dedicated to a business or a service an application I want to get done and and I want to basically operate that just like all those other cloud and then the second thing is is they said and by the way this is less and less about a general-purpose new data center and we just run my data center same way it's I want this to be a platform for creating new services that I want to deliver in a location a factory a hospital you know a city block whatever that is and and so we brought those together and we started looking at those and we said well this is really going to lead to the emergence of a whole new product class which we started calling local cloud as a SERP because it reflected both of those things it says like it is no longer assembling piece parts but it was consuming these resources and as a service method with all the benefits of agility and responsiveness and continual enhancement that come with that but it was also about I need to be able to put these in new location not just in my corporate data center but out where I'm trying to do new businesses and services in and that's what led us to start talking about this in this new product category of local cloud as a service and then we started seeing solutions that came out on the market that fit very much with this idea okay yeah Rick really interesting because you're right you know private cloud is a conversation we've been having in the industry for about a dozen years and one of the biggest challenges is you talk to 100 customers and you get a hundred and fifty definitions of what a private cloud is so if I hear you right local cloud is in some ways it's an extension of what we see in the public cloud so you know I think back it used to be hey can I get this same stack in both place we saw companies like you know IBM and Oracle and even VMware thing you know how can I match what you have in your data center there as opposed to you know as your stack AWS outposts we're saying hey we're actually going to give you the you know the same you know same hardware you know same software and as a service as you said yeah you talked about also some of those new locations so you know without getting into too much depth so it sounds like and I've looked a little bit of research there there is the data center piece and then really emerging there's the potential for edge use cases do I see that right is just just like you know we've got kind of the hyper scalars we've the data center edge is pulling on everything so yeah your city you're saying edge doesn't kill the cloud and everything before it it's gonna just be another op in oh absolutely I mean for us this is it's more of an extension of the cloud environment and by that we also said one of the other critical things in this is it's it changes if you think about new applications that you're trying to create whether it's in the public cloud or whether one of these local cloud environments they're being built on a cloud native architecture and that's one of the other key elements of this solution is these become the platforms that allow enterprises to bring things like containers and service designs and this sort of you know DevOps driven application development model into both the corporate data centers which absolutely this these solutions like but also again to extend it out to places where in the past you didn't have a lot of IT you didn't have a lot of compute and storage but now if you're trying to do things like real-time monitoring for you know in the world we're living in today oh and air you know can I use machine vision to track the health of the people going through the airport I need to deliver a cloud service essentially at that Airport I have latency issues I have availability issues I can't do it from a data center you know sitting out halfway across the country it has to be at the airport but I need to be able to basically have a reliable consistent cloud environment but now I can put in 10 airports or 100 or so it's that combination of location but consistency everywhere I put it that's part of what this this new stories about and and I think that's the other big part of the message here excellent Rick so one of the things I we get into the numbers and talk specifically about the VMware solution how do customers get from where they are who these type of solutions you know one of the discussions around private cloud is could I upgrade what I have moved to these environment and I think about many of the solutions that are extending public clouds it it it doesn't necessarily mesh into what I have today so it did how do we get from you know the environments that I have today you know and how do these local cloud as a services fit in yeah so this is this is actually one of the interesting use cases for this is one way you can use this is to deploy this in your corporate data set where you but yet it's creating that public cloud environment you can do a lift and shift and leverage this as a way to MA I guess you would say now it's shift and lift because now you can bring it into this local cloud as a service platform and still run it locally get those kind of things tested and I wait and as you decide which functions you may want to move offload to a public cloud or add dr you can use this platform to do that but i think there's there's more to it than that the the other part of of what we talk about here is is and I think it's something that that needs to be addressed as something that helps people do this faster is these new systems while very modern very consistent there is a great value they like many of the more modern merged systems that are coming on the market have very different power profiles very different network requirements then what's in a lot of corporate data centers and that's one thing we've seen again and again when we've talked to people about deploying these is the technology's great the solutions great but you know I have to make sure I've got the right power and I've opened up the firewalls and all those things there one thing that I found interesting is we're starting to see companies say one way to remove that friction is you know there if there's a colocation facility near the customer site that has great power has great network connectivity you know I can use that place to now deliver this service in days instead of weeks because it's concentrated there you know it's a pure environment and I think that's one thing that's also helping with this shift is people can leverage those facilities in that activity to basically make this migration a lot easier for companies when they want to when they want to transform their environment yeah really important points there Rick absolutely we you know we've been telling companies for years you need to understand what you're good at and what you're not and you know we're in concrete and managing power and bullying there's a handful of companies that are excellent at that most of the rest of you companies you suck at it so therefore if you can leverage other people that you can do that so when you say local it does not need to mean a piece of real estate that I own it could be you know that that spectrum of boosting or to the environment yeah all right let's get to the numbers Rick so we're gonna pull up a light here with some of your research you know for years we've been talking about you know the private cloud category is huge compared to public cloud because while public cloud is growing huge numbers compared to traditional IT it is small so let's take a look at the slides and talk us through what we're looking at here yeah so this is the thing part of it when we were talking about this forecast and we again we're looking at product like you know the VMware cloud on Dell you see and the alternative solutions out there is is for part of the you space which we've talked about whereas this is a the next-generation of the corporation private cloud with better connectivity and better consistency in some ways that's the easy activity but what you're doing is as we've said is I'm translate I'm transferring from a upfront capital expenditure to a 3-4 year subscription and so when we look at this and we started thinking about the forecast and what we're saying is what I've done is I've moved from you know an upfront spend in one year to spreading it out over three years and from a forecast standpoint that means in the early years while you may be deploying and lot of companies are gonna be leveraging these and they're in their private cloud and their data centers the revenue stream to the provider in this case VMware and WMC or the group were talking about today streams over three years so the forecasts can look really big or grows very fast but that's because that subscription revenue keeps growing and growing so today when we've looked at you know comments some of the solutions that have been out there you brought up earlier you know the Rackspace and others as early versions of this but you know it's still relatively new these types of solutions have only really the market now for six months seven months so 2020 even without Co vid wasn't going to be some huge year one thing we see actually is that these types of solutions are even more attractive in the world we're living in because they give you that promise of rapid deployment and scale but absolutely by 2022 you know that accumulated revenue stream that subscription scream both for enterprise and for a growing number of edge use cases we're talking you know revenues up and around the five seven billion dollar range and that only accelerates one thing that's not really showing in here yet but it's also part of this local conversation is is the 5g build-out in the extension and use of these local clouds in connection with the 5g environment and that's part of this edge use case too so so absolutely if you want to see you know total revenue streams here over you know in 2022 as we talked about here just under five billion dollars going from you know a half a billion dollars this year but even the biggest growth in the business expansion is after that and why we think this is is the value why why people are willing to pay for this is because of that value of consistency continuous enhancements and a platform for innovation that's what makes this all come together and why we think this is gonna be such a big and important market in the coming years yeah absolutely and you know has an impact on your job rake instead of counting all that is in the growth there you're you're now talking to Wall Street about you know oh well Dell might have shipped X number of boxes but they can't recognize it over this period of time so let's talk about the customers though how does a solution like this you know what do you see it affecting their adoption of what they're doing with their overall you know I mean this is the case specifically for VMware cloud on Delhi see is you know without a doubt as we all know that VMware and and is is a critical part of most corporations IT environments today many of their applications are there they've invested great amounts of resources and expertise and understanding how to operate and drive those environments and and one thing this does is again it gives them that ability to leverage those investments and the things they've done there for application design and that's to recovery and and and sort of the AB neo management of their IT environment but now again use it in this as a service way so it's definitely one of the big benefits we see is it helps people make that transition removing the friction of that modernization for a lot of companies if they want to move to a cloud environment that's step one I think that's value one I would say and point out you know VMware also now is being very you know focused on making sure that it's also a strong platform for these next-generation cloud native development environment and that's been added to these platforms and will absolutely expect to see this and all the VMware cloud solution so that's another great part of this is there again preserving that ability for their customers who both do better with their existing environment and also have a platform for going forward with these new systems you know for us the big thing is is a continual focus by VMware and Dell as partners to make sure that it can scale its ability to operate these environments one of the things they're making a commitment to to their customers we are going to make these ingenuously available available on very good short notice and that they continually improve and that's gonna take a lot of back-end investment because really VMware has to now centrally manage not a hundred or a thousand potentially tens of thousands of system for many customers around the world that's the real next big step here we see is when you can add that fleet management ability so the company has the ability to say I can now deploy some great new service in one place a hundred places a thousand places while still being secure while still offering my end users you know the availability and the latency that they want that's a very powerful thing that companies are gonna be able to offer in the coming years alright well Rick fillers really important items they're really glad you brought up you know about a modern application about their data of course you know the inverse partner Dell has a strong legacy in data you know some pcs track you know the explosive growth of that or you know more than a decade now so thanks a lot and I think you captured that perfectly the data control part of this is is critical all right lots more from the VMware cloud on Dell EMC I'm sue minimun and thank you for watch the cube [Music]

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation hi I'm Stu man a man and welcome to this special cube conversation over helping cover the second generation of the VMware cloud on Dell EMC happy to welcome to the program Rick fillers who's the vice president of data center and cloud with IDC not too far from me physically even though of course in today's day and age we're all practicing social distance so Rick great to see you thanks so much we've done it well thanks Stu pleasure to be here looking forward to a great conversation all right so Rick you know usually this time of year you and I see other more than we their families because we are traveling a circuit going to the analyst invent like and one of the topics we spent a lot of time talking about over the years is of course cloud you know VMware's partnership with Amazon is of course one that the entire industry but notice of and the relationship of Amazon VMware and Dell is an interesting one what we're talking about today though is the VMware cloud or in the shorthand VM see on LEM see and it's the second generation of this product help us understand kind of where this fits in the categorization and the research that you and an IDC look at yes - it's an interesting question it's one that we've actually been thinking about for several years now and it had to do with some early conversations we were having back then with companies about their private cloud environment they'd been deploying those for the last four or five years we were seeing them up on a sort of refresh cycle and when he started asking about how satisfied they'd been with those and where they wanted to use them and we got back some very consistent feedback saying that they'd had some problems with their first generation of their private cloud environment and nothing needed to address those and one of them was a consistency problem is that you know every private cloud they built whether they build it themselves or they looked at a hosted private cloud provider even in their own company we're different different technologies different and figure different sets of tools and that was a big problem for them the second big problem they'd run into was basically every time there's a new technology or an upgrade or fix we basically can't adopt it quickly we can't use it till the next refresh cycle so we're always behind we're playing catch-up and and neither one of those things really aligned with what they felt cloud should be and what they've been seeing in their public cloud environment and so when we looked at that and we started looking at the feedback about was combiner we realized that we were about to see a new generation of private cloud environment but we said but this will be different not just because of new technology but it'll be actually different use cases and a different approach and the first thing is we said it's first of all these are it's not so much a private cloud is that they dedicated cloud it's it's I have resources that are dedicated to a business or a service an application I want to get done and and I want to basically operate that just like all those other cloud and then the second thing is is they said and by the way this is less and less about a general-purpose new data center and we just run my data center same way it's I want this to be a platform for creating new services that I want to deliver in a location a factory a hospital you know a city block whatever that is and and so we brought those together and we started looking at those and saying well this is really going to lead to the emergence of a whole new product class which we've started calling local cloud as a service because it reflected both of those things is like it is no longer assembling piece parts but it was consuming these resources and as a service method with all the benefits of agility and responsiveness and and continued enhancement that come with that but it was also about I need to be able to put these in new location not just in my corporate data center but out where I'm trying to do new businesses and services in and that's what led us to start talking about this in this new product category called local cloud as a service and then we started seeing solutions that came out on the market that fit very much with this idea okay yeah Rick really interesting because you're right you know private cloud is a conversation we've been having in the industry for about a dozen years and one of the biggest challenges is you talk to 100 customers and you get a hundred and fifty definitions of what a private cloud is so if I hear you right local cloud is in some ways it's an extension of what we see in the public cloud so you know I think back it used to be hey can I get this same stack in both place we saw companies like you know IBM and Oracle and even VMware dang you know how can I match what you have in your data center there as opposed to you know as your stack AWS outposts we're saying hey we're actually gonna give you the you know the same you know same hardware you know same software and as a service as you said yeah you talked about also some of those new locations so you know without getting into too much depth so it sounds like and I looked a little bit of research there there is the data center piece and then really emerging there's the potential for edge use cases do I see that right is just just like you know we've got kind of the hyper scalars we've the data center edge is pulling on everything so you're saying edge doesn't kill the cloud and everything before it it's gonna just be another op in oh absolutely I mean trust this is it's more of an extension of the cloud environment and by that we also said one of the other critical things in this is it's it changes you if you think about new applications that you're trying to create whether it's in the public cloud or whether one of these local cloud environments they're being built on a cloud native architecture and that's one of the other key elements of this solution is these become the platforms that allow enterprises to bring things like containers and service designs and this sort of you know DevOps driven application development model into both the corporate data centers which absolutely this these solutions like but also again to extend it out to places where in the past you didn't have a lot of IT didn't have a lot of compute and storage but now if you're trying to do things like real-time monitoring for you know in the world we're living in today Oh an airport you know can I use machine vision to track the health of the going through the airport I need to deliver a cloud service essentially at that Airport I have latency issues I have availability issues I can't do it from a data center you know sitting out halfway across the country it has to be at the airport but I need to be able to basically have a reliable consistent cloud environment but now I can put in ten airports or a hundred so it's that combination of location but consistency everywhere I put it that's part of what this this new stories about and and I think that's the other big part of the messenger excellent Rick so one of the things I for we get into the numbers and talk specifically about the VMware solution how do customers get from where they are who these type of solutions you know one of the discussions around private cloud is could I upgrade what I have moved to these environment I think about many of the solutions that are extending public clouds it it doesn't necessarily mesh into what I have today so it did how do we get from you know the environments that I have today you know and how do these local cloud as a services fit in yeah so this is this is actually one of the interesting use cases for this is one way you can use this is to deploy this in your corporate data set where you but yet it's creating that public cloud environment you can do a lift and shift and leverage this as a way to MA I guess you would say now it's shift and lift because now you can bring it into this local fly as a service platform and still run it locally get those kind of things tested and by weight and as you decide which functions you may want to move offload to a public cloud or add dr you can use this platform to do that but I think there's there's more to it than that the the other part of of what we talk about here is is and I think it's something that that needs to be addressed as something that helps people do this faster is these new systems while very modern very consistent there is a great value they like many of the more modern merged systems that are coming on the market have very different power profiles very different network requirements then what's in a lot of corporate data centers and that's one thing we've seen again and again when we've talked to people about deploying these is the technology's great the solutions great but you know I have to make sure I've got the right power and I've opened up the firewalls and all those things one thing that I found interesting is we're starting to see companies say one way to remove that friction is you know there if there's a colocation facility near the customer site that has great power has great network connectivity you know I can use that place to now deliver this service in days instead of weeks because it's concentrated there you know it's a pure environment yeah and I think that's one thing that's also helping with this shift is people can leverage those facilities in that activity to basically make this migration a lot easier for companies when they want to when they want to transform their environment yeah really important points there Rick absolutely we you know we've been telling companies for years you need to understand what you're good at and what you're not and you know pouring concrete and managing power and bullying there's a handful of companies that are excellent at that most of the rest of you companies you suck at it so therefore if you can leverage other people that you can do that so when you say local it does not need to mean a piece of real estate that I own it could be you know that that spectrum of boosting or the environment yeah all right let's get to the numbers Rick so we're gonna pull up a light here with some of your research you know for years we've been talking about you know the private cloud category is huge compared to a public cloud because well public cloud is growing huge numbers compared to traditional IT it is small so let's take a look at the slides and talk us through what we're looking at here yeah so this is the thing part of it when we were talking about this forecast and we again we're looking at product like you know the VMware cloud on Dell you see and the alternative solutions out there is is for part of the use case which we've talked about whereas this is a the next-generation of the corporation private cloud with better connectivity and better consistency in some ways that's the easy activity but what you're doing is as we've said is I'm translate I'm transferring from a upfront capital expenditure to a 3-4 year subscription and so when we look at this and we started thinking about the forecast and what we're saying is what I've done is I've moved from you know an upfront spend in one year to spreading it out over three years and from a forecast standpoint that means in the early years while you may be deploying and lot of companies are gonna be leveraging these in their in their private cloud and their data centers the revenue stream to the provider in this case VMware and WMC or the group we're talking about today streams over three years so the forecasts can look really big or grows very fast but that's because that subscription revenue keeps growing and growing so today when we looked at you know comment some of the solutions that have been out there you brought up earlier you know the Rackspace and others as early versions of this but you know it's still relatively new these types of solutions of only on the market after six months seven month so 2020 even without Cove it wasn't going to be some huge year one thing we see actually is that these types of solutions are even more attractive in the world we're living in because they give you that promise of rapid deployment in scale but absolutely by 2022 you know that accumulated revenue stream that subscription scream both for enterprise and for a growing number of edge use cases we're talking you know revenues up and around the five seven billion dollar range and that only accelerates one thing that's not really showing in here yet but it's also part of this local conversation is is the 5g build-out and the extension and use of these local clouds in connection with the 5g environment and that's part of this edge use case too so so absolutely if you want to see you know total revenue streams here over you know in 2022 as we talked about here just under five billion dollars going from you know a half a billion dollars this year but even the biggest growth and the biggest expansion is after that and why we think this is is the value why why people are willing to pay for this is because of that value of consistency continuous enhancements and a platform for innovation that's what makes this all come together and why we think this is gonna be such a big and important market in the coming years yeah absolutely and you know has an impact on your job rake instead of counting on is in the growth there you're now talking to Wall Street about you know oh well Dell might have shipped X number of boxes but they can't recognize it over this period of time so let's talk about the customers though how it is a solution like this you know what do you see it affecting their adoption of what they're doing with their overall you know I mean this is the case specifically for VMware cloud on Delhi see is you know without a doubt as we all know that VMware and and is is a critical part of most corporations IT environments today many of their applications are there they've invested great amounts of resources and expertise and understanding how to operate and drive those environments and and one thing this does is again it gives them that ability to leverage those investments and the things they've done there for application design and that's the recovery and and and sort of the app mule management of their IT environment but now again use it in this as a service way so it's definitely one of the big benefits we see is it helps people make that transition removing the friction of that modernization for a lot of companies if they want to move to a cloud environment that's step one I think that's value one I would say and point out you know VMware also now is being very you know focused on making sure that it's also a strong platform for these next-generation cloud native development environment and that's been added to these platforms and we'll absolutely expect to see this and all the VMware cloud solution so that's another great part of this is there again preserving that ability for their customers who both do better with their existing environment and also have a platform for going forward with these new systems you know for us the big thing is is a continual focus by VMware and Dell as partners to make sure that it can scale its ability to operate these environment one of the things they're making a commitment to to their customers we are going to make these continuously available available on very good short notice and that they continually improve and that's gonna take a lot of back-end investment because really VMware has to now centrally manage not one hundred or a thousand potentially tens of thousands of system for many customers around the world that's the real next big step here we see is when you can add that fleet management ability so the company has the ability to say I can now deploy some great new service in one place a hundred places a thousand places while still being secure while still offering my end users you know the availability and the latency that they want that's a very powerful thing that companies are gonna be able to offer in the coming years all right well Rick fillers really important items they're really glad you brought up you know about the modern application about their data of course you know the immersed partner Dell has a strong legacy in data you know something shiny sees track you know the explosive growth of that or you know more than a decade now so thanks a lot and I think you capture that perfectly the data control part of this is is critical all right lots more from the VMware cloud on Dell EMC I'm Stu minimun and thank you for watch the queue [Music]

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube, covering AWS re:Invent 2019 brought to you by Amazon Web Services and Intel along with its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody. You're watching The Cube. We go out to the events and we extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Velante and I'm excited to have Veeam on the program. Good friend Rick Vanover is here. Rick, it's great to see you again. >> Thanks, Dave. >> He's the Senior Director of Product Strategy at Veeam, and Jim Kruger is the newly minted CMO. Jim, good to see you, thank for coming on. >> Great, thank you Dave. Thanks for having us. >> All right, so, let's talk about re:Invent. You guys are well known in the VMware community of course. Now the cloud comes in, you guys rose like a rocket ship with virtualization. Now cloud's here. How's the show going for you? What are the conversations like? >> Yeah, it's great. I mean, this is a continuation of the relationship that we have with AWS. We were a global sponsor and one of five companies represented in the global summit so that was a lead up to this. >> Which was today, this morning the partner summit, or the earlier partner summit. >> No, throughout the whole year. There's 30 different locations throughout the world that we sponsored and so that was a really good entry into this new audience for us in terms of new buyers and so forth. And re:Invent is huge. I mean, you can't even walk in the hallways out there. Our booth has been packed and just some really good conversations. We had a great announcement as a part of the show, so it's going great. >> Let's talk about that for sure. So, give us the update on 2019. You guys hit the billion dollar milestone. We covered you at VeeamON. We've been there for the last couple years, so congratulations on that. >> Jim: Thank you. Which of course is challenging because you're doing a lot more annual recurring revenue. You're still able to break through that billion dollar mark but give us an update on 2019. >> Yeah, so far so good, it's going well. We're going through a transition here. We call it act one to act two. And act one was really the foundation of the company focusing on virtual environments. Act two is really moving into the cloud and also moving from perpetual to subscription. And so we're going through that transition as we speak and we're finding really good success. We're really letting the market dictate that transition. We're not really forcing things on customers, but we had a really good Q3. We grew our annual recurring revenue by 24%. Our enterprise business is actually the fastest growing business within Veeam. It's growing at, it grew 20% year over year. And our alliances are really on fire. Year over year for our alliances, for our resellers, we have four of them, grew 92%. So, we're outgrowing the market significantly, continuing to gain market share. We're still number one in Europe and number four globally but catching up quick. >> So, Rick, when I first was introduced to Veeam I think it was at some VeeamUG somewhere, like "It's an interesting name, who are these guys?" And then saw you guys take off and it coincided with a big simplification theme and better resource allocation. We got all this wasted server capacity. But the problem was when we consolidated all those servers we now had less utilization or less capacity to drive things like backup which was a compute-hungry workload. You guys figured that out from a product standpoint. You simplified things and you took off. So, check, great job. Now there's cloud, so what's different about cloud? You guys have some announcements. What are you doing to take advantage of the cloud? >> Well so, our cloud journey, Dave, is starting but it's actually evolving from some technologies that have been out for a while. So, actually earlier this year, this isn't new, but we implemented a technology that puts data into the cloud which is a very important first step. Back up data into the cloud, very transparent, very easy to do with Veeam, but everything is different in the cloud. I think the plumbing is different. The use cases are different. The expectations of customers are different. So, when we look at how we're going to go into a market from a product standpoint, my team works with Jim's team as well as the product management team on this very purposefully, but the thought is we need to put in the right platform and the right capabilities for the cloud. So, that's the big news today here at AWS re:Invent and yesterday. We had a great session today where we showed off the new product being back up for AWS. And we have been through a lot of iterations on how we're going to get to this milestone. And I'm really stoked that it was available for this event, live in the marketplace. And I think about why we're going to go with this new product now this way. Ratmir, our co-founder, likes to say he wants to capture the hearts and minds of IT pros, and this product will do it. File level recovery, free edition, easy, it just works. Whatever you want to save, we've got it in this product. So, I'm really hoping that this will be the year of an additional disruption as we kick off act two that Jim mentioned. >> You guys have always been feature-rich. I was sharing with your audience the spending data that I have access to and when you look at it, when you look at spending momentum it shows some of the new guys, obviously you wouldn't be surprised. You're seeing some people experimenting, and okay, that's cool. And then some of the legacy guys you see, they're hanging on to the install base. Veeam interestingly is right there with the leaders but really consistent spending momentum for years. And so my question is, how is that, why are you able to sustain that momentum over time? What is your unique approach? >> Yeah, I mean I think there's a couple of key factors there that we've done as a business. One of the key strategies of the company is to remain agnostic and to build partnerships. And so one of the key strategies that we've had over the past few years is to work with partners. And so we've done go to markets, some engineering work, and as I mentioned in Q3 alone we saw 92% year over year growth and so that's helping us to drive growth. We've added some new products and so we have backup for Microsoft Office 365, which is a whole new market for us. And we're seeing tremendous growth there year over year, so that's helping us to keep steady. And then just the innovation engine. The development team that we have is one of the reasons why I joined Veeam, is because of the innovation and the development team and how they approach the market in terms of really focusing on the user and building products that aren't just a check box but they're products that add a tremendous amount of value. And so, we have a new, we made announcements here with specifically with AWS, but to continue our innovation track we have a new release that's coming out in the January timeframe called Version 10 which adds another 150 plus capabilities. And so, I think that's one of the biggest reasons we continue to add value to the system and to our customers. We're adding between three to four thousand new customers a month and our customer count is continuing to, we're at 365 thousand customers today and growing fast. >> So, Rick, I wonder if you can talk from a product standpoint. I said virtualization, I'm generalizing in cloud. There's specific things for VMware obviously that you do and I presume the same thing for cloud. What's unique about, well, first of all your relationship with AWS and what's unique about making your software work in the AWS ecosystem? >> Well, the unique part is really our go to market of partnering first. I like to say that partnership is in Veeam's DNA. We sell through the channel and we have the alliance relationships. We have the platform relationships like AWS as well as other clouds. And the thought here is that by going in software only I am actually completely convinced we're very well positioned in the market to come in with a solution that will work for literally everybody no matter what their preference, what brands of technology they use, what clouds they use. And so I think about what becomes interesting, what becomes unique with that. And I'll give you an Amazon example and this is something that's coming in the Version 10 that Jim alluded to. Amazon has a capability called object lock which can be used for immutable backups or immutable data. We're using it for backups and that's something that we're going to leverage in our upcoming release that is actually going to be a huge thing, a huge amount of capabilities where organizations can have their backup data resilient against ransomware, resilient against malicious admins, insider threats or accidental deletion. And that is only possible in the cloud. So, we're walking into a situation where Veeam, if we're going to leverage S3 and some of these capabilities provided by Amazon, along with our laser-focused approach for backups, we're going to give the market some things that honestly it'd be really hard to say no to. >> So, can you talk more about that immutability capability? Timestamp that and then go across the old stuff? >> It's smarter than a timestamp. Actually the thought here is that there's this governance and compliance mode that comes with AWS S3 storage which is a property of a bucket that's set at the top level. And from a API standpoint when an ISV like Veeam wants to put data into S3, that along with a lot of other elements of the consumption of the storage can be set. And what we're doing is we're actually working backwards into the user interface, and if I want to put my backup data into S3, I'm actually going to say make this data immutable, meaning unable to be deleted or changed. Or actually you can't change in S3, it's only a delete. But anyways, you can't delete it. So, the thought is I'm going to put, I'm just going to make up an example, Dave, seven days into S3, mark it as immutable. No matter what, that data can not be removed. >> You got a policy on it. >> Yeah, and it's there, it will not be deleted. No ransomware, no malicious admin, no insider threat. And then we're doing it with a lot of API intelligence so it's very efficient on how it goes in there and shared metadata. We just did a session on part of that today and we're going to have a huge splash event in January where we take it to the market. So, if anybody listening is going to be concerned about ransomware, Veeam has a technology that's evolving for you. >> So, I can set my RPO to whatever I want based on my objectives for the business, the cost equation. >> Yeah, and it's actually transparent to that. To me, it's a restore point but I have this ability to sleep at night because I know that it's in Amazon and it's object locked and I can't do anything to it. >> Yeah, but that was seven days ago, so I now want to update it. So, you've set a policy to say, okay. >> So, yeah, so that the eighth day the backup will go and day one will drop and then we'll be at two through eight. And then the next day three through nine. It will just, it will be a window of sorts. And the best part is, Dave, it's going to be transparent. It's in the user interface. It's a restore point and the ease of use. I look at the product team and we really have this mantra. Simple, reliable, flexible, and who doesn't want those types of capabilities in a product today? And actually it works backwards. So, one of our co-founders, Andre, like's to say, his expectation is somebody can download the product and do their first backup within ten minutes without using the manual. The ease of use has to be like that and with the newest product from Monday we're doing it again. >> So, Jim, I wonder if I could ask you about messaging. It's interesting, it was interesting to see at VeeamON. You guys got back to basics. There's a lot of money flowing into the data protection industry. You're still seeing new startups. Storage overall is a little soft right now because the cloud's eating away at the big guys, but data protection is still pretty hot as evidenced by some of the spending data that I talked about. A lot of guys talking about data management. You talk about data management, too, but you got back to the basics at VeeamON. You talked about it starts with backup. I wonder if you can talk about that messaging and then how that does relate to some of the new use cases. And you mentioned some, but what's your point of view there? >> Yeah, absolutely, so, yeah so, that is a key initiative for us in 2020 is to shift the pure speeds and feeds and features and talk more about use cases. As you'll see that come out and across our portfolio, that's one of our key marketing initiatives, but yeah. The messaging we did back in 2018, I think we over-rotated a little bit and focused a little bit too much on the enterprise and as you know our business is very spread across multiple segments. From SMB to commercial to enterprise. And enterprises is of course the key market that we want to go after but we have this great business at the lower end of the market which I think is unique and a differentiator for Veeam in terms of the number of customers that we have and the customer base that we have. So, what we've done is gone back to using words like backup because there's budget for backup. And that's a word that people automatically know what it means. You don't want to get too cute about it. So, we've come out with a new campaign around cloud data management, "Backup for what's next", and we're pushing that really hard because I think a lot of people know Veeam as the virtual leader and now we're moving into the cloud area so it's important for us to position the company to not only virtual but virtual, physical and cloud. And so you're going to see a lot more push into the cloud with the new solutions we're launching and pushing that hard in 2020. >> Now, Veeam's always had strong no BS engineering. You know the tagline, "It just works." It's true, you talk to your customers. And it's interesting, when you go to VeeamON, I've been to several, you're right. I mean, you've got guys there that are loyal to Veeam. They may not be huge buyers just in terms of ASPs, but there's a zillion of them and they're very loyal. And I think it's very smart strategy. You just keep moving up markets. You guys are like Steady Eddie. Give us, last question is 2020, what should we expect from you guys? You got VeeamON, The Cube is going to be there. We're excited, it's always a fun show. You get a passionate crowd. >> Yeah, so we have some exciting announcements that we're going to be making in the first of the year and in the mid part of the year which we think are going to be game changers and continue us on the trajectory of growth. So, we're very excited about that and yeah, continuing to focus on satisfying our customers. We're super proud of our net promoter score of 75, which is three times, three and a half times the industry and so keeping that momentum going with our customers is critically important. >> Well, guys, congratulations on all your success. Great, you mentioned your NPS. Great customer loyalty, the billion dollar milestone. Ratmir is on, he's on the record last year at VeeamON saying, "Hey, no, we're open to IPO." So, we'll be watching that and we'll ask him. We won't hit you with that. But guys, thanks so much for coming on. >> All right, thank you, Dave. >> Dave: Jim, Rick, good to see you. >> Thank you. >> And thank you, everybody, for watching. This is The Cube, live from AWS re:Invent 2019 from Las Vegas. We'll be right back right after this short break.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering Splunk .conf19. Brought to you by Splunk. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. It's theCUBE's live coverage here in Las Vegas for Splunk's .conf 2019. It's the 10th year of .conf and we have two great guests, Rick Fitz, senior vice president, general manager of groups at Splunk, and Karthik Rau, vice president, area GM of SignalFx. The big story is SignalFx acquired by Splunk. Rick, you sponsored that. Guys, welcome to theCUBE, great to see you guys again. >> Yeah, great to be here, Jeff. >> Great to be here. >> They just broke a world record for the bike on intro there. >> Rick: They did. >> Pretty exciting what's going on here, a lot of records being broken. Splunk just continues to move the needle on capabilities, product, platform, brand messaging. SignalFx coming, we've been reporting on it since their founding, really in your wheelhouse, you guys bought them for a good number, a big number? >> Rick: Yup. >> Why? What's going on? Why the interest in SignalFx? >> You know, for a long time, we've been watching, I would say, perhaps, patiently, watching the market and the trends, and we were really waiting for a time where the new application architecture was really going to kind of start to take hold, where this cloud native trend that we've been seeing where people are building applications, where people are actually delivering applications to market in quite a different way, would finally get some escape velocity, and we've been watching patiently for that to occur. And as we saw that last year start to accelerate, really, we went out and surveyed the entire market and, of course, at the end of that survey, resulted in the acquisition of SignalFX, and also of Omnition. And so we bought those two companies, and have combined them to deliver on our vision of what we've trying to do for DevOps. >> Rick, you and I had a conversation in 2015 here in theCUBE at the .Conf at that time, you were on the IoT, you saw this wave, again, you've been patient. What about IT operations that's happening now that makes this so critical for Splunk? 'Cause IT operations, we know what automation's doing, machine learning toolkit, getting a lot of rave reviews. People love to automate things, but more apps are coming. What's the motivation now? What was the critical linchpin for you to make this happen? >> Yeah, exactly. What we're seeing is, in traditional IT operations is this world where developers build these monolithic applications, hand 'em off to operations, and they operate it. And then in the same conversation, you'll get handed over to somebody running, if you will, developer engineering or cloud engineering or they have various different levels for it but you're really dealing with an engineering organization and they're being tasked with digitization of their enterprise and very strategic investments are being made there, but they're also being asked to build things at high availability, high scalability, and highly reliable with lots of change. So it's kind of the competitive advantage of the enterprise. And as I was seeing that occur more and more I just saw the distance between IT operations and development, kind of, separate, and I said, wow, that's interesting 'cause it's being driven by this new application architecture, or cloud native architecture. And I didn't want to be left behind. I wanted to actually be able to build a bridge for IT operations into this future. And I think this future trend is something that's going to be lasting for the next 10, 15 to 20 years. So I think this is very strategic to Splunk and very important for us to get right for the long-term, but I also see my role as part of Splunk, is to make sure that we take IT operations into this new world, because these new worlds, and if you will, the existing worlds, those operating models are quite different. >> John: Yeah. >> They operate differently. They think differently. They, in one they own their code, they're on call. In another one they're waiting for something to fix so then they try to, you know, we're waiting for something to break and then they fix it. So we're trying to actually help enterprises across that entire gambit with some pattern. >> And certainly with security the theme here, at this event, this is a security event too, on top of everything right? So, this is what it's turned into. >> Rick: That's right. >> Data is driving a lot of security polemetry and data's important for security, so. >> Yeah. >> I mean, that's operations. >> That's right. And your apps have to be secured, in both worlds. >> Yeah. >> So, I think Splunk has a role to play in helping in this transformation for all of IT as it becomes much more developer centric. And, of course, as I said, that is really one of the strategic reasons why we led the acquisition Citadel FX in Omni. >> Well, we're looking forward to seeing how you handle the acquisition, of course, we were fans of the deal. Karthik, I got to ask you, every single company in observability space is going public. So, why, you could have gone public, why Splunk? Why sell to these guys? What made it a fit for you? >> Well, ultimately, we look at a number of things, or we looked at a number of things in making the decision and we wouldn't have done this with anyone other than Splunk. Just a strategic fit was just so great on so many levels. You know, when we started the company our goal was to solve the modern dream observability challenges for anyone building a cloud native application, and we knew that was going to be a long road. They're going to be a lot of things we needed to invest in and develop. And so we started on the metric side. We layered on distributive tracing and we took a philosophy that we wanted to build an enterprise great, scalable, robust, feature-rich set of technologies. We weren't in the market to build, you know, SMB, kind of very simple, limited type of a product. We're really focused on the larger, more sophisticated customers. And so, as we looked at continuing to extend our portfolio, one of the things that we needed to invest in was in the logging space because, when you think about the trifecta of monitoring data types that you need, you know, logging is a big part of it. And we knew that we wouldn't be able to go and build a logging system from the ground up that would be robust enough to support enterprise use cases, and so we started a partnership conversation with Rick and team, and it just became very clear through that process that there was a tremendous amount of product fit, vision fit, culture fit, values fit. Just everything was so aligned that we realized that we could do so much more together as one company. So, we rounded out the solution portfolio, or the technology portfolio quite substantially over night by becoming a part of Splunk and then the other part of it too is, you know, we saw as we were dealing with customers, we were dealing mostly with native cloud native, cloud first customers. But a lot of the customers that we were, that were prospects, that we were talking too were more traditional enterprises who were not 100% of the way there yet. Some of them weren't even 10% of the way there yet. And it was difficult for us to really engage in conversations early with them, to help them understand what does it mean to shift from traditional IT ops to DevOps because we didn't have a relationship with them on the IT ops side of things, and so, the other thing that we were really excited about being a part of Splunk is we can be a part of that conversation from the very beginning when the customer, you know, maybe they're just beginning to think about it and they don't have the urgency of doing it today but we can be there with them from the very beginning and help them get there on their timelines. >> This is an interesting discussion point because what you're highlighting and we've had conversations about your company about being a platform, not just a tool. So, you're getting at is that as you guys started getting more market share, you're platform needs, you needed logging. And meet the market leader, right here right? >> Yeah. >> That's right. >> So, you guys need them, so, partnering's hard when you're trying to build a platform. Now, you can have a platform that enables partners to build on top of it, but components of a full baked platform, it's hard to partner. Rick, what's your thoughts and reaction to that, because that's my statement, but do you agree with it? It's hard to partner in the platform, it's core competency. Look it, he struggled with logging 'cause he'd have to build out a boat load of new investment and you guys are already, just to catch up. >> Yeah, that's right. And I think the thing that needs to be stated here is in your large scale enterprises, they are truly looking for the best to breed, highly scalable environments, right, that we're talking about here. And, they want, they encouraged us to take a step in this direction. It was an obvious choice and I think that has been the reaction that we've kind of heard universally. Like, this is a great idea. This is a really strategic thing that you've Splunk folks have actually done. And so that's really encouraging and so I would agree with you. Partnering, and we were talking through it, but as we were talking, it's like, this is better not to partner in this case. >> John: Better together. >> One of the things that's really important is that logs, you know, that's what were all about. We've actually spent a lot of time in trying to invest into this streaming world of dealing with things in stream. And these guys have perfected it for Metrix, which is, that's the strategic aspect of this. And then combining what they had already done with Tracing, with Omnition, it just doubles down on this future of this application architecture that I mentioned. >> Some MMAs have a couple flavors to them. You buy a company, you throw them under a general manager, an executive, they kind of live there. Founders lead, you get the core tech, some team. The other scenario is full team comes in, hits the ground running. They're building out. They're going to own the build-out. It's seems to me based upon the Omnition acquisition, you're giving Karthik and team, kind of some reign here. >> Rick: Yeah. >> To go build this out. Is that how you guys see it? >> Yeah, that's exactly right. And so, both Speros and Karthik report to me. I'm their onboarding czar, as it were. But were really what we're going to focus on is customer success and achieving our business case. And really capitalizing on the opportunity. These guys were running a hundred miles an hour and we got to get them to got a thousand miles and we're only going to make adjustments to the business case in order to achieve that. And that's what we're here to do is to shepherd this organization in its entirety to the greatness that I think we all see out there. We're going to do that in a very careful, cautious way. >> Karthik, Omnition is a acquisition stealth company. Kind of a commitment saying hey, here's some more horsepower. Talk about how that happened and what's the purpose behind that acquisition. >> Well, I can let Rick talk to how it happened. And I'll talk about the other plans, so. >> When we surveyed the market we actually found that people have certain strengths. These guys that actually started their journey into tracing. I guess their first release was last December and so they've made some strides. And we kind of found Omnition through this discussion and we went like, oh my gosh. And we were in the process of doing the acquisition, doing due diligence. And we set everything on their roadmap is what these guys have done and vice versa. This is another combination that we can't pass up. This is, and what I told him the day we closed, I said, if you had the capital you would have done this, and he's like, yeah I would've. (chuckles) >> One of the things that Rick had asked me during our process was, what are the top three things that you would invest in if you had Slunk resources behind you. And I said Microservices APM, Microservices APM, Microservices APM, and so. >> And I got a big grin 'cause I obviously couldn't disclose what we doing but.. >> You know, the Omnition team, they're still in stealth so there's not a whole lot out there on the web about them. It's a phenomenal team. They've got people who are committers on some major open source projects, deeply technical, very, very shared philosophy to what we had a SignalFx in terms of open instrumentation, not having any proprietary lock in how you collect an instrument data. Very similar philosophies around leveraging the power of analytics and monitoring. And we just actually focused on different parts of the problem because we're both relatively early in this effort. So, we effectively doubled up the teams capacity over night and accelerated our roadmap by several quarters, so, I'm really excited about what we can do together with them. >> Well, are they the Bay area or they from.. >> They are Bay area base, yes. >> Okay cool. Well, I want to get your guys' thoughts on the keynote today. Feedback was authentic, kind of very cool keynote. As you guys bring this together, Rick, Karthik team, the optics, the messaging, what's the core positioning? What's, as you guys look at wholistic view now that you've invested in and are building out for customers, what's the posture? Take us through the keynote positioning. What's the marketplace, customer message around the future here? >> Yeah, I think it's really clear that what we're trying to do for IT organizations and application development organizations is build solutions that are modern and helpful to their core mission. And, by the way as I mentioned, in the world of new development, it's different, it's a different solution set. It's a different approach, a different operating model than it is in current IT operations. And so, one of the key messages we wanted to resonate is that we have the right solutions in both these worlds for you and that we're trying to develop an operating model of reactive response, a quick response, or engaging the right person in the problem, through our use of VictorOps for example, and using that as a way to be very intelligent about how we educate the people that are engaging in resolution process. So, we are trying to create a bridge to both worlds so that they can both be successful. And then under pit that, of course, with automation that can be leveraged in both worlds as well. So, that's what we're trying to convey. We know it's early days, by the way, these guys have been with the company for three weeks, so, it's kind of like, wow. >> Culture shock. >> Culture shock. >> Throw into deep water. Yeah, let's throw you out on stage in front of 11,000 people and see if you can swim and they did phenomenal, by the way. But that was kind of the key message and we're so excited because we just, we feel like were just in the first inning of perhaps a 19 or 20 inning game, 'cause I think it's going to be a lot of fun. >> Karthik: Yeah it is. >> And it's going to be close out here but we're really excited to be able to bring this to market. >> I mean, it's amazing coming in now three weeks in to see the breath of technology that's available and that's going platform. And, you know, what struck me today watching the keynote was just, you know it's such a feature rich and such a broad platform from everything in the, with the core, indexing capabilities that everyone's known about a long time. All of the ML, the additional capabilities we're going to bring in on the metric side. >> Yeah. >> And then the use cases just across every persona, there's just so much that we can do. >> What do you think of the culture? Are they run hard? They a playful company? They like to work hard, play hard? >> Yup. >> But they also are focused on real customer value. They got great engaged communities. What's your take of the culture so far? >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean culture fit was a really important part for us if we're going to be acquired by a company and be a part of a larger organization. Their kindred spirits I feel to the way we ran SignalFx. It's a very customer focused organization, great technology and engineering culture. And it's hard to find both, right? It feels like every organization is very important and very well respected. It's not like heavily skewed to it's just all about engineers, it's all about sales, it's very balanced culture and it's very customer focused. >> Guys, congratulations. Big deal. They don't see these kind of mega deals, they come along once in a while. It's a big bet. Good luck with everything, Rick. Thanks for coming on. Final question for both of you, what's the big take-a-way to take back to the office as you leave .Conf this week? What's going to resinate the most with you guys that you're going to take back as feedback? >> For me its, you know, I get my energies from customer conversations. We all do here at Splunk. If you're having a bad day, go talk to a customer and then they walk you and stop you in the hall and say, you know we really thank you again doing what you do. And so it just, I take back from this always that what we do matters and is important and just keep chugging along at it because we're doing some really good work out there that's really helping lives. And that's really important. >> John: That's good therapy. >> Yeah. >> When a bad day, talk to a customer. >> Go talk to a customer. >> I love you guys. (laughs) What's your take-a-way? >> I'm just, I'm thrilled at the number of customers who are coming up to me and saying how excited they are about the acquisition and working with us. You know, that's really re-affirming for me and it's just super exciting to see what we have ahead of us. >> You guys have a great tech following. A lot of tech leaders who knew you guys, knew you had good stuff so congratulations. Great Validation. >> Yup. Thank you. >> John: Good job >> Thank you John. >> Thanks you guys for coming on theCUBE. Great insight. Thanks for sharing all that data. (laughs) Data to everywhere here on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, more coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE covering Boomi World 19. Brought to you by Boomi. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Lisa Martin, John Furrier is my co-host, and we are at Boomi World 2019 in Washington, D.C. Very pleased to be joined by the founder of Boomi and the co-founder and CEO of Guru, Rick Nucci. Hey, Rick. >> Hello. >> Lisa: Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me, this is very cool setup. >> Lisa: Yeah, isn't it?! >> Rick: Yeah. >> So this is a founder of Boomi. It's pretty cool to have a celebrity on our stage. >> Rick: I'm not a celebrity. (laughs) >> (laughs) Talk to us about all that back in the day back in Philadelphia when you had this idea for what now has become a company that has 9,000+ customers in 80+ countries. >> Yeah, I'm beyond proud of this team and just how well they have done and made this business into what it is today. Yeah, way back in 2007, we were really looking at the integration market, and back then, cloud was really an unknown future. It was creeping up the Hype Cycle of the Gartner. Hype Cycle's my favorite thing they do. A lot of people were dismissing it as a fad, and we were early adopters of cloud internally at Boomi. We were early users of Salesforce and NetSuite and just thought and made a bet and a lot of this stuff is luck as any founder will tell you, any honest founder will tell you. And recognize that, hey, if the world were to move to cloud, how would you actually think about the integration problem? Because it would be very different than how you would think about it in the on-prem days when you have everything in your own data center behind your own four walls. In this world, everything's different. Security's a huge deal, the way data moves and has to mediate between firewalls is a big deal. And none of these products are built like this and so, really wanted as a team, and I remember these early conversations and had the willingness to take a big bet and swing for the fences and what I mean by that is really build a product from the ground up in this new paradigm, new cloud, and take a bet and say, hey, if cloud does take off, this will be awesome for Boomi. If not, well, we'll be in the line of all the other startups that have come and gone. And I think we ended up in a good spot. >> Yeah, that's a great point, Rick, about the founders being honest. And a lot of it is hard work, but having a vision and making multiple bets and big bets. I remember, when EC2 came out, it was a startup dream, too, by the way. You could just purchase a data center. But it wasn't fully complete, it was actually growing very fast. More services were coming on, they were web services, so that was API-based concepts back then. When was the crossover point for you guys going, "okay, we got this, the bets are coming in. "We're going to double down, we're going to double down on this." What were some of those moments where you started to get visibility that was a good bet? And what did you do? >> Yeah, what it really was was the rise of SaaS, very specifically, and the rise of business applications that were being re-architected in the cloud. And everybody knew about Salesforce, but there weren't a lot of other things back then. And there was NetSuite and a handful of others, but then, you started to see additional business units start to build cloud, and you had, in the HR space, with success factors in Taleo and marketing automation space with Eloqua and Marketo. CRM space, we all know that story, e-commerce space procurement, and you start to see these best-of-breed products rise up which is amazing, but as that was happening, it was proliferating the integration problem. And so what became really clear to us, I think, as we were going through this and finding product market fit for Boomi, again, back in 2007, 2008, that was the pattern that emerged, like hey, every time someone buys one of these products, they are going to have to integrate 'cause you're talking about employee data, customer data. You have to integrate this with your other systems and that was going to create an opportunity for us and that was where we were like, okay, I think we're onto something. >> You know, to date, we've been doing theCUBE for 10 years. We made a big bet that people, authentic conversation would be a good bet, turns out it worked. We love it, things going great, but now, we're living in a world now that's getting more complex and I want to get your thoughts that Dave Vellante, myself, Stu who have been talking about how clouds changed and we were goofing on the Web 2.0 metaphor by saying, Cloud 1.0, Cloud 2.0. But I want to get your thoughts on how you might see this because, if you say Cloud 1.0 was Amazon, compute storage, AtScale, cloud NATO, all started there. Pretty straightforward if you're going to be born in the cloud, then you could work with some things there, but to bring multicloud and for enterprises to adopt with this integration challenge, Cloud 2.0 unveils some new things like, for instance, network management now is observability. Configuration management is now automation (chuckles). So you start to see things emerge differently in this Cloud 2.0 operating model. How do you see Cloud 2.0? Do you believe that, one, there's a Cloud 2.0 the way I said it, and if so, what is your version of what Cloud 2.0 would look like? >> Yeah, I think, yes, definitely think things are changing and the way that I think about it is that we're continuing to unbundle, and what I mean by unbundle is we're continuing to proliferate... Buyers are willing to buy and, therefore, we're continuing to proliferate relatively narrower and narrower and deeper and deeper capabilities and functionalities. And one big driver of that is AI, specifically, machine learning, and not the hypey stuff, but the real stuff. It's funny, man, when you compare, right now, AI, and what I was just talking about, it's the same thing all over again. It's Hype Cycle crawling up the thing, okay. But now, I think the recipe for good AI products that really do solve problems is that they're very intentionally narrow and they're very deep because they're gathering good training data and they're built to solve a very specific problem. So I think-- >> Like domain expertise, domain-specific-- >> Exactly, industry expertise, domain expertise, use case. If you're gathering training data about a knowledge worker, the data you'll gather is very different if you're a salesperson or an HR professional or an engineer. And I think the AI companies that are getting it right, are really dialed in and focused on that, so as a result, you see this proliferation of things that might be layered on top of big platforms like CRM's and technologies like Slack, which is creating a place for all this to come together, but you're seeing this unbundling where you're getting more and more kind of almost microservices, not quite, but very fine-tuned, specific things coming together. >> So machine learning, I totally agree with you, it's definitely hype, but the hardcore machine learning has a math side to it and a cognition side, cognitive learning thing. But, also, data is a common thread here. I mentioned domain-specific. >> Rick: All about the data. >> So, if data's super important, you want domain expertise which I agree with, but also there's now a horizontal scalability with observation data. The more data you have, the better at machine learning. It may or may not, depending on what the context is, so you have contextual data, this is a (chuckles) hard thing. What's your view on this because this is where people maybe get caught around the axis of machine learning hype and not nearly narrowing on what their data thinking is. >> Rick: 100%. >> What's your--? >> 100%, I think people will tend to fall in the trap of focusing on the algorithms that they're building and not recognizing that, without the data, the algorithms are useless. Right? >> Lisa: Right. >> And that it's really about how, as a ML problem that you're trying to tackle. Are you gathering data that's good, high-quality, scalable, accurate, protected, and safe? Because now, for different reasons, but again, just like when we were moving to cloud, security and privacy are utmost important because, for any AI to do its job well, it has to gather a lot of data out of the enterprise and store it and train off of that. >> It's interesting a lot of the cloud play. I mean sales was just a unicorn right out of the gate and they were a pioneer, that's what it is. They were cloud before cloud was cloud as we know it today. But you see a lot of things like the marketing automation cloud platform. It's a marketing cloud, I got a sales cloud. Almost seem too monolithic and you see people trying to unbundle that. I think you're right. Or break it apart 'cause the data is stuck in this full-stack model because, if you agree with your sets, horizontal scalability and vertical integration is the architecture. Technically, that's half-stack. (chuckles) >> Yes, yes. >> John: So half-stack developers are evaluable now. >> Totally, and yes, I like that term. The other problem that I think you're getting at is tendency isolation of that data. A lot of things were built with that in mind, meaning that the best AI you're going to build is only going to be what you can derive from one customer's set of data. Whereas, now, people are designing things intentionally such that the more customers that are using the thing, the better and smarter it gets. And so, to your point about monolithic, I think the opportunity that the next wave of startups have is that they can design in that world and that just means that their technology will get better faster 'cause it'll be able to learn from more data and-- >> This hasn't been changing a lot in cloud. I want to get your thoughts because you guys at Boomi here are on a single-tenant instance model because the collective intelligence of the data benefits everybody as more people come in. That's a beautiful fly, we'll feel a lot like Amazon model to me. But the old days, multi-tenancy was the holy grail. Maybe that came from the telcos or whatever, hosting world. What's your view on single-tenant instance on a SaaS business versus, say, multiten... There's trade-offs and pros and cons. What's your opinion, where do you lean on this one? >> Yeah, I mean we, both Boomi and Guru, so two eras worth or whatever. You have to have some level of tenancy isolation for some level of what you do. And, at Boomi, what we did is we separated the sensitive, private data. Boomi has customers processing payroll through its product, so very, very sensitive stuff absolutely has to be protected and isolated per tenant, and Boomi and Guru is signing up for that, and the clauses that we sign to are security agreements. But what you can decouple from that is more of the metadata or the attributes about that data and that customer, so Boomi, you're referring to, launched way back when Boomi Suggest which basically learned. As all the people were building data maps, connecting different things together, Boomi could learn from all that and go, oh, you're trying to do this. Well, these however many other customers, let me suggest how these maps are drawn, and Guru, we're following a very similar pattern, so Guru, we store knowledge which also tends to be IP for a company and so, yes, we absolutely adhere to the fact that only a handful of our employees can ever see that stuff, and that's 'cause they're in devops, and they needed to keep things running, but all the tenants are protected from one another. No one could ever leak to another one. But there are things about organization and structure and tagging and learnings you can get that are not that sensitive stuff that does make the product better from an AI perspective the more people that use it. And so, I don't know that I'm giving you one or another, but I think it does come down to how you intentionally design your data to it. >> John: Decoupling is the critical piece. >> Absolutely. >> This is the cloud architecture. Decouple, use API's to connect highly cohesive elements, and the platform can be cohesive if shared. >> Absolutely, and you can still get all the benefits of scalability and elastic growth and, yeah, 100%. >> Along that uncoupling line, tell us a little bit briefly about what Guru is and then I want to talk about some of the use cases. I know I'm a big Slack user; you probably are too, John. Talk to us about what you're doing there, but just give our folks a sense of what Guru is and all that good stuff. >> Sure, I mean Guru's, in some ways, like Boomi, rethinking a very old problem, in this case, it's knowledge management. That's a concept we've talked about for a long time and I think, these days, it has really become something that does impact a company's ability to scale and grow reliably, so very specifically, what we do is we bring the knowledge that employees need to do their job to them when they need it. So imagine if you're a customer support agent and you're supporting Spotify, you're an employee of Spotify. And I write in and I want to know about the new Hulu partnership. As an agent, you use Guru to look up and give me that answer and you don't have to go to a portal, you don't have to go to some other place to do that. Guru's sitting there right next to your ticket or your chat as you're having it in real time, saying, hey, there's asking about Hulu. This is the important things you want to know and talk about. And then the other half of that is, we make sure that that doesn't go still. The classic problem with knowledge products is the information, when you're talking about something like product knowledge, changes all the time. And the world we live in is moving faster and faster and faster, so we used to ship product once a year, once every two years. Now we ship product every month, sometimes couple times a month. >> Can you get a Guru bot for our journalism and our Cube hosts? We can be real time. >> Hey! >> I would be happy to do that. >> That'd be great! >> (laughs) Guru journalist. >> Actually, you're able to set it right in there where your ears are-- >> Lisa: I'll take it. >> Just prompting you, exactly. So, and then you asked about Slack, that's a really great partner for us. They were an early investor in the company. They're a customer, but together, if you think about where a lot of knowledge exchange happens in Slack, it's, hey, I need to know something. I think I can go slack John 'cause I think he'll know the answer. He knows about this. And you're like the 87th person who's asked me that same thing over again. Well, with Guru being integrated into Slack, you can just say, "Guru, give them the answer." And you don't have to repeat yourself. And that expert fatigue problem is a real thing. >> John: That's a huge issue. >> Absolutely. >> And, as your company grows and more and more people are, oh, poor John's getting buried for being the expert, one of the reasons he got you there. Now he's getting burned out and buried from it. And so we seek to solve that problem and then, post-Guru, a company will scale faster, they'll onboard their employees faster, they'll launch products better, 'cause everyone will know what to talk about-- >> It's like a frequently asked questions operating system. >> Rick: Exactly. >> At a moment's notice. >> Technology, right? And making it living 'cause all those FAQ's change all the time. >> And that's the important part too is keeping it relevant, 24 by 7. >> Rick: Absolutely. >> Which is difficult. >> Contextual data analysis is really hard. What's the secret sauce? >> The secret sauce is that we live where you work. The secret sauce is that we focus very specifically on specific workflows like that customer support agent and so, by knowing what you're doing and what ticket you're working on and what chat you're having with a customer, Guru can be anticipatory over time and start to say, "hey, you probably "want to talk to him about this," and bring that answer to you. It's because we live where you work. And that was frankly accidental in a lot of ways. We were trying to solve the problem of knowledge living where you work, and then what we realized is, wow, there's a lot of interesting stuff that we can learn and give back to the customer about what problems they're solving and when they're using Guru and why, and that only makes the product better. So that's really, I think, the thing that, if you ask our typical customers, really gets them excited. They'll say, hey, because of Guru, I feel more confident when I'm on the phone, that I'm always going to give the right answer. >> That's awesome. >> I love hearing customers talk about or even have business leaders talk about some of the accidental discoveries or capabilities, but just how, over time, more and more and more value gets unlocked if you can actually, really extract value from that data. Last question, Rick, I need to know what's in a name? The name Boomi, the name Guru? >> Yes, well, I'll start with the less exciting answer which I always get asked about, which is Boomi, which is a Hindi word that means "earth" or "from the earth". And, sometimes, if you're ordering at the Indian restaurant, you'll see B-H-O-M-I and that might be the vegetables on the menu. That name came from an early employee of the company. I wish I could say that it had a connection to business (laughs). It really doesn't, it just was like, it looks cool, and people tend to remember the name. And honestly, there have been so many moments in the early, early days where we were like, should we change the name, it doesn't really. And we're like you know what? People tend to, it sticks with them, it's kind of exciting, and we kept it. Guru, on the flip side, one of our early employees came up with that name too, and I think she was listening to me talk about what we were doing and she's like, oh, that thing is like a guru to you. And so the brand promise is that you feel like a guru in your area of expertise within a company and that our product plays a relatively small role in you having that, feeling confident about that expertise. >> I love that, awesome. Rick, thank you so much for joining John and me on theCUBE today, we appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> John: Thanks. >> For John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from Boomi World 2019. Thanks for watching. (upbeat electronic music)

>> from the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada. It's the Cube covering Cooper inspired 2019. Brought to You by Cooper. >> Welcome to the Cube. Lisa Martin on the ground at Koopa Inspired 19 from Las Vegas. Very excited to welcome one of Cooper's spend centers from the USO acquaintance, senior director of procurement and contract management. Hey, welcome. >> Thank you. I'm glad to be here. >> Yeah, so this is one of the things that I really appreciate it with. All of the tech conference is that we go to on the Q, which is many, Many a year is when vendors like Cooper really share their success is through the voices and the stories of their successful customers. You got called out yesterday during general session today. There's a big cardboard cutout of you behind us there. But one of the things also that I find intriguing is looking at older organizations, and USO is 77 years young. We think of older organizations challenging Thio maneuver that in this digital era and really be able to transform the business so that you could d'oh, what the mission of the U. S. It was, which is to help men and women in our U. S. Armed forces from the time that they enter to the time that they transition back to civilian life. Talked a little bit about us. So what your role is in for cumin and then we'll talk about how you're achieving these great things. >> Well, I've been with us for four years, almost four years. When I first interviewed for this position with my boss, the VP controller, I asked her if they had a secure to pay solution. She said No again when I was hired for this position, My, you know, my goal was to get the organization automated. They were processing everything by paper. All the requisitioning was being processed by paper. It would take for seven seven 10 days. It's for a requisition to be approved because it would literally be something printed out and move from desk to desk, desk on approvals and on the back end for invoicing would occur the same filling out a cover sheet. Everything was printed out, processed manually, so that was kind of my first project when I started and my position was new, procurement had been under the director of canning operation. So, um came. It was just a small piece of it. So they made a decision After he left to create my position on DSO I. Again. That was my goal initially when I started. So So it was going through an R P process, looking, looking our requirements and then selecting vendor gets the best value to the USO, which was Coop up. And Cooper is what I think we all love about. It is it's so customizable, and the USO has a lot of, ah, a lot of different requirements in our barbecue elements. From, you know, we've entertainment tours to our programs, care packages we send out to the military. Our operations are USO Center's construction projects, our development campaigns for on line and direct mail. So there are a lot of different requirements. I really work with each department and kind of setting up those requirements, and Cooper was able to do that for us. We were able to customize a lot of it, But for us, the innovation part is really thinking outside the box because >> tough to do 77 year old organization, right, especially one that has paper everywhere. You guys air now 90.4% paper. Yes, with Cooper, that's a massive Yes, it's cultural change. It's a >> huge and it took again. Another thing. When I interviewed Waas, I interviewed with the CFO as well and I said If you don't support me, I will not be successful. So they have been very supportive. My supervisor, the CFO, the entire organization CEO. It's been extreme. He loves Cooper, so loves the app in improving a breathing invoices requisitions. So it was really that that communication, the socialization training because it was a huge cultural shift and some were embraced it. It was a little tougher for others moving. But eventually you move in line because that is, you know, that's the new process for us as an organization. So it's it's become very successful. We're moving towards new modules contracts, Clm expends sourcing. So we're really expanding the group A picture at us. Oh, >> so what would you say before you came on board when there was so much paper floating around everywhere? You can imagine the security risk of all these, you know, personal information or what have you lying around on someone's desk? What waas The percent, if you could guess visibility into where the U. S. I was spending money prior to bringing on Cooper versus what is it today? >> Uh, extremely small percentage would have been a very small. I mean, we just had a you know, we operate on our European system. Is Great Plains pretty clunky? Not, You know, it's It's hard to see the visibility. Now. It's 100% visibility. We see all of all of the requisitioning occurring overseas. You know, we have centers all over the world, and they all have access to Cooper now because they have to submit requisitions through Cooper. And so we now have 100% visibility. And for our reporting, you know, able to pull all that information and we've got controls in place gave us the ability to put some controls in place and our approval work flows and making sure that contracts were reviewed before budgets air approved, etcetera. A lot of those things were able to set those controls in place in >> that control. Word that you bring up is spot on. We've been talking about that for the last couple of days, and it's the same when we were talking with Suzie Orman earlier, who was one of the key nodes. And when she talks about personal finance, it's sort of the same thing. We all as individuals, whether we're consumers, you know, in our personal lives, buying whenever we want from anything dot com to being buyers or managers of even lines of business. Within whatever company we work for. We need to have that picture that control and control is really that kind of accountability and that awareness. Are we managing everything appropriately? Are there other parts of the business that are doing the same thing that there may be getting the same service is at a better price, and we're we should know that right, but without having that visibility will be able to control of this process is it's an inhibitor to any business being able to transform digitally and be competitive and right to really get back to your core >> mission. Exactly. And that's what's helping you know us with the control way are a 501 c three. So we need tohave that visibility on dhe. Make sure that our donor dollars are being spent wisely, and this enabled enables us to do that enables toe have that that total visibility and making sure those controls are in place. >> Actually, speaking of donor dollars, has this actually been a facilitator of actually being able to increase donations? Because the donors now have this much easier transaction process that can imagine that would be a positive impact there. >> Well, I mean that this is more for our procurements. Mean, Coop is kind of more for our actual procurement. What it does do is it does create process savings and avoidance savings, which we can reinvest in, you know, in our program. Right. So that's where we're seeing it. That's where Steve always seeing it. We've communicated that to him, and then we're also able to provide arse CFO with reporting tools. So we create. We pull all this information from Cooper through reports, and there were able to create a spreadsheet, and he can see how we spend is an organization. You know how we spend in commodities, How where are unbudgeted, you know, kind of get a total of much I budgeted we have for for a specific period of time. So we're able to see all this kind of information. He conceal this in kind of information on one spreadsheet that we created through all the reports that way >> in Crete. >> So I want to get your perspectives on the changing role of the chief procurement officer and the chief financial officer. You know, now they have the opportunity to leverage technology, emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning to be able to get that visibility and that control, but also be former strategic and really drive top line bought online for their business. Your perspective on this the last few years alone and how were you able to help a 77 year old organization like us so embraced the opportunities that these emerging technologies can deliver? >> Well, I think one key is as because our our organization is all over the world. And then there are centers that could be, you know, roll. And they, you know, they it's the whole vendor presence and the amount of vendors that we as an organization, do bring on. And some of them it's totally understandable where some of them they do need to bring on based on, you know, their availability. But what I'm trying to do, what Cooper has helped me try to do with Cooper advantages to try to leverage our volume organizational volume that was not occurring previously. I think people were just, you know, when the new defender they brought it on because we have a lot of events, you know, supplies for the centers, et cetera. So really trying to, strategically, as an organization to be able to work with the region's on where can we find synergies to kind of consolidating leverage our values for Henderson with Cooper work, we've been able to do that. We can see the span where it's occurring, kind of all the duplications that are occurring. So that's where I'm seeing a bit opportunity and trying to work. >> One of the coolest things about what you guys are doing in procurement with Cooper is this is affecting human lives. Give us a little bit of an overview of what you guys were able to facilitate with Hurricane hearty. Wish struck Houston just about two years ago. I loved that story that >> those kind of those spur of the moment emergency type requisitions that we get and were able to those get processed a lot quicker when when we have group as opposed to previously the way they had processed. It was very labor intensive manually, verbally instead of being able to see it in. You know what's great about the requisitioning piece of it is the comments kind of audit that people can see in all the conversations. So those types of requests that are considered emergencies, they can go a lot sooner on so we can get those service's or the goods out to to that particular project. So that's what we're able to do with that. That particular one is well, being able to support the National Guard and during the Hurricane Harvey >> and accelerate things that really based on the data that you can see, I really need to have acceleration on all the action. >> I mean distant just to our programs team. They support the care packages that we send to the military. Now that we have coop in place, we use 1/3 party fulfillment center. When they receive the product, the receipts are automatically fed into Cooper and applied against the purchase orders, and then they're approved a lot quicker, So then they can receive kicked, tip the product and ship it out overseas because we get. These are based on requests. The military bases have requested to have this particular product being sent over. So this turns the process is cut in half to get the care packages out to the millet. >> That's awesome. Getting care packages to the troops 50% Bastard is outstanding. Last question for you, Rick. Some of the things that Cooper has announced in the last day and 1/2 what excites you about the direction that this company is going in >> for me? The constant changing, I mean, and I was not in the military, so I'm way moved around a lot. I was when I was growing up. I adopt to change a very quickly, but understands some people don't write quickly, but it's bettering themselves, finding the operative, listening to the customer and really making those enhancements based on customer feedback. And I think it helps with the community intelligence that we talk with, you know, with the communities and find out. What are you doing? How how are you doing this? Because a lot of companies will say, Well, I have specific requirements and a lot of them are pretty similar. If people talk, you know, community talks. So that's kind of that's I like getting together and again meeting other, you know, people, customers. And so it's Yeah, it's pretty exciting. >> I like what? How tender this morning, you know, showed the word community and said, Really, it's communication and unity, and you just articulated that beautifully. Listen to the customers. Get the synergies from them. That's why we should. Any software business should be developing right soccer. So thank you so much for joining me on the Cube today, sharing the big impact that you guys are making at the USO charity. Near and dear to my heart. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you very much >> for your acquaintance. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube from Cooper inspired 19. Thanks for watching.

>> From Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE. Covering WTG Transform 2019 brought to you by Winslow Technology Group. >> Welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman, and we're at WTG Transform 2019 here in Boston, Massachusets. Happen to welcome back to the program the CTO of Winslow Technology Group. Rick Gouin spoke to the customers this morning, threw in a bunch of data points, got us all thinking about where we are today and where we're going tomorrow in the cloud. Rick, thanks so much for joining us >> Hey, thanks for having me. >> All right, so rick, you and I, we've known each other for a few years now, we have these great debates as to kind of where we are and where we're going. I attended a Nutanix event a couple years ago, and Nassim Taleb, who is the author of a number of books including Black Swan and Antifragile, he worked on Wall Street and he said look, we all try to make these predictions, but we think it's going to be a line, or maybe they'll be slow adoption, but the black swan that he said is something, just the quick thing is you've never seen a black swan, you'd think that all swans are white, and once you've seen a black swan, you're like, oh my god, everything that I thought I knew I have to think any questions. Predicting the future, especially in a never changing world where we don't have all the facts and when we can't predict, is really challenging. So understanding whether cloud will take 80% of the market or 30% in the next five years is a little bit of a complex thing. It's like trying to predict the weather here in New England where we're watching the clouds and the rain roll in and roll out. Start with us as to Winslow Technology, your customers, where they are with cloud, and how that conversation goes with them today. >> Yeah, so I think you make a great point about these statistics, these assertions, these predictions. We're getting bombarded with them without context, and I think that it leaves a lot of our customers feeling like they're behind the curve a little bit because have bandy about the, you'll hear 80% of cloud, of companies have a cloud strategy, and there's never the follow up to see did it change two weeks later, was it actually implemented. And so, I think what we can all agree on is that one, all of these technologies are going to continue to grow. Their adoption is going to continue to grow. We're going to continue to figure out different ways to extract value from those services, but the other part of this, and I think it's really where Winslow fits in, is that we want to help our customers position themselves to take advantage of that. So I want to help our customers transform what they're doing today. If we look out at that three, at that five year mark, we know that we're going to have a lot of workloads out there. I don't know what the percentage is going to be, I'm not going to throw a fake number out there, but we know that it's going to be bigger than the one today. And we also, I would assert, that there are things we can help you do in your on-prem environment today that will help you make you better prepared for that transition and allow you to attack that, hopefully, in a more strategic and well considered way. >> Yeah, absolutely. Well rick, I am very sure 87% of all statistics lie, and beyond that, I would poke and prod at any numbers that I see there because look, numbers are numbers, and as you said, things do change all the time. >> Context. >> When I look at some of the tailwinds that have been driving your business the last few years, hyper convergent infrastructure, some of the services wrapping around, help customers with their security journey, with their cloud journey. You've got a number of partners that are there. The bombardment that your customers get, it doesn't stop. If they open up, they open up the news today, it's like oh, AWS just unleased their latest on outpost, and VMware is partnering with all the clouds, and therefore you better be ready for it. The thing I'll poke a little bit at, I don't mind that customers think they're a little bit far behind because what they need to be doing is being that change mindset because the worse thing they can do is just say, well, I've got it the way I want it and I'm not going to change. And I think that that's something you would agree with and that Winslow's helping them to try to keep up because nobody can keep up by themselves, so they've got to be able to turn to partners like yourself to keep up. >> Yeah. I think one of the think one of the things that was telling that I touched on earlier today a little bit was the number three reason that we heard from our customers for why they weren't leveraging the public cloud was because they didn't know how. And I think that that's telling, I think that sort of response to the whole notion that they're feeling behind the curve, but I also feel like you mentioned hyper converged, you mentioned some of these other partners we work with. These guys all have some great stories that will allow our customers to take a first step. What we're not talking about is saying hey, customers, you've got to re-platform everything. You've got to re-write everything to leverage all these different cloud services and cloud platform. That's a big lift for a lot of our customers, but what might not be such a huge lift is leveraging some of those cloud services, cloud connectivity capabilities that are built into those platforms from those partners like Nutanix, like VMware, like Dell EMC. >> So rick, I really liked your line that most customers, many customers end up hybrid by accident. And unfortunately, I think that's where we are when you go talk to them, they might not understand hybrid cloud, multi cloud, they're just like oh, that's vendor terminology, but do you have SAS? Oh, absolutely, they've all got O365 and Salesforce, and a whole host of other ones. Three which probably IPO today. And are they using a public cloud? They definitely are. Most of them at least understand they're using it as opposed to five years ago it was like oh, wait, we actually checked all the IPs and we had three groups that we didn't realize that were doing the old stealth IT. So what is the advice, how do we make sure we get everybody talking in, what are some steps to move forward on that strategy to actually have a coherent cloud offering, not just the pieces that I put together because that's what different groups did. >> Sure, yeah. I think the hybrid by accident scenario is one that we're seeing more and more often from our customers and also just from other folks in the industry. And I guess just to kind of expand on that a little bit, what we're talking about there is when somebody that we're working with perhaps goes into a project, goes into a cycle with the notion that they're going to be all of one or all of the other. I'm going to put everything in the cloud or I'm going to put nothing in the cloud. And what happens is you find a workload that doesn't fit where your whatever your direction is. And so all of a sudden, if you're one of those people who say oh the cloud is just somebody else's computer. Next thing you know, you're on O365, next thing you know you're consuming Dropbox or who knows what. You've got all of these different public services and you have no integration between your on-prem environment and all these public services you're leveraging. And so, you find yourself in a scenario where you're in a hybrid by accident, and which means that you didn't build in the sort of management that would be able to consider these different silos of information. And so, what we kind of advocate is that when you're approaching these strategic decisions, recognize upfront that you may very well end up in hybrid scenario, at least in the next few years this is probably what it's going to look like, at least that's what I think. Recognize that upfront and build that into your plan. If you plan to end up in a hybrid end state, you're whole environment is going to be such much more cohesive, you're going to have that app mobility, you're going to have so much more flexibility than if you end up there by accident by moving half your workloads out, lift and shifting some things over here, some stuff gets left behind, different groups are managing different things 'cause they're different skillsets. If you plan to be in that state at the end, you're going to be in much better shape, but you're also going to be well positioned to continue to move things out as those services become more robust and as you can extract more value from those for your business. >> I think if you've looked at the history of IT, it's very rare that we get one thing to rule them all. >> Right. >> And it's like, well, Ethernet's done a good job at networking, and the mainframe had it's time there, but at the end of the day, five years from now, it might just be all my solutions are cloud, but it's just, as you said, that location matters a little bit less because by the way, it's not just public and private, that edge computing thing is a huge draw that most companies I talk to have some kind of IOT and censure strategy that they're picking out. How can users be data driven to get to the right things in the right place and really make smart decisions? >> Yeah. So I think that there's two facets here to being able to make data driven decisions. The first is that you have to collect the data. We have to put in the diligence, so certainly, that's one of the places that we're able to help our customers in collecting and in quantifying it, attaching dollars and cents. Here's what the services will cost, here's what the professional services, the re-platforming will cost. Let's wrap some numbers around this. If you're trying to make those decisions, if you're creating a strategy, and you haven't taken a look at what your costs are going to be, what your level of effort is going to be, that's a super incomplete strategy, and it's one of the frustrating things for me as a customer facing resource to walk into one of those situations where a customer is dead set on their strategy, but really doesn't understand it themselves. We really welcome the opportunity to help those kind of do their diligence to be able to create more informed and data drive strategies. Leveraging information from their own environments. >> All right. Rick, last thing is we know things are changing all the time. What's the last thing you want people to know about Winslow Technology 2019 that they might not have understood if they looked at the company a year or three years ago? >> Yeah, so I think that some of the big changes that have really come to us in the last couple years is we're adding technical firepower at alarming rate. Our growth is really focused on the services delivery, and the engineering talent we've brought in high end security resources, high end VMware resources. We're able to deliver those cloud connectivity capabilities from all those different products that you mentioned. We're able to deliver a fairly robust security portfolio today, not to mention, the highest level of VMware expertise that there is out there. So we put a lot of focus into the services, into professional services, into helping our customers sort of understand and make that journey, straddle that public, private, hybrid, multi sort of thing. And we think that services is going to drive a lot of this for us going forward. And so our capabilities are growing leaps and bounds, year over year in the services and engineering talent perspective. >> All right, well, Rick Gouin, CTO of Winslow Technology. Always a pleasure to catch up. My prediction, next year I think we'll be another five to 10% in our agreement as to what the future looks like. >> I like it. >> Just because it will be today as opposed to tomorrow >> Yes. >> in the viewpoint. Be back with much more here from WTG 2019. I'm Stu Miniman. And thanks for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)