foreign continued coverage of AWS re invent my name is Savannah Peterson and I am very excited to be joined by two brilliant blokes in the space of efficiency and performance whether you're on Prem or in the cloud today's discussion is going to be fascinating please welcome Brad and Simon to the show how are you Simon coming in from the UK how you feeling well thank you excellent and Brad we have you coming in from Seattle how are you this morning doing fine thank you excellent and feeling bookish given your background love that I know that you both really care about efficiency and performance it's a very hot topic both of the show and in the industry right now I'm curious I'm going to open it up with you Simon what challenges and I think you've actually continued to tackle these throughout the course of your career what challenges were you facing and wanting to solve when you started yellow dog um really we're just looking at cloud and coming from an on-premise environment really wanted to be able to make accessing Cloud particularly a volume to be simple and straightforward um if you look at today at the number of instance types available from the major Cloud providers there's more than seven thousand different instance types whereas on-prem you go along you select your processes you select your systems it's already be really easy when you hit the cloud you've just got this amazing amount of choice so really it was all about how can you make Intelligent Decisions for you know are you going to run your workload how to match it with what you've got on premise and that was really the inspiration for Rafael so staying there for just a second what does yellow dog provide customers is a SAS system so um you get to it by accessing through the yellow platform and what it allows people to do is to be able to make Intelligent Decisions about where to run their workload would that be on premise or in the cloud it has a wealth of information it understands the costs the performance the latency and the availability of every different instance type in all different clouds it really allows people to uh to be able to make use of that information provision exactly what they need and to be able to run their workloads yeah it also includes a provisioner and it also includes a scheduler as well which is a cloud native scheduler so it's designed to be able to cope with um with cloud in terms of things like spots and interruptions and be able to uh to reschedule and fail over between clouds if there's ever need to do so yeah that sounds incredible and I know this means a lot for partners like AMD Brad talk to me about the partnership and what this means for AMD for your customers yeah absolutely it you know we're excited to be aligned with the uh with a company like yellow dog it's it's um you know the the importance of compute is becoming more and more prevalent every day and it's it's always been top of mind but especially now when you think about what the uh what the economy and the rest of the world is kind of facing over the next you know probably a year or longer it's so important that um that you're able to maximize your dollars and your spend and doing away with uh with uh with absolute certainty that you've got the right type of people behind you uh ensuring that you're your dollars are being spent very wisely and the great thing about yell dogs that they have tremendous insight into uh into cost optimization computer optimization across the entire Globe their their indexes is quite remarkable and what it does is it allows uh customers to actually see just how performant and cost efficient AMD is so it allows us to really put our best foot forward and and gives customers a chance to understand something that they probably weren't uh more familiar with the fact that uh that AMD uh is a tremendous a tremendous value in the marketplace yeah and and uh Simon can you tell us a little bit more about the yellow dog index I'm glad you brought that up Brad yes the yellow index is uh is essentially it's live it's available for anyone to access you can just go to index.yam.tech and you'll be able to see pretty much every single instance type that's available from all the major Cloud providers and be able to make your selection are you looking for GPU type nodes are you looking for AMD processors are you looking just for performance essentially what you're able to do is create a live view of effectively what's available in different data centers around the world and the price at this moment in time also just uh as Brad mentioned in terms of you know cost efficiency and uh and being taking green values seriously as we should we should do the yellow index also has the ability to be able to see at that point in time where the best place to be at a runner job is based upon the lowest carbon impact of running at this moment in time and that for many organizations gives an amazing Insight in not just about being able to find the the understand fishing processes but being able to ensure the greenest energy possible is powering that process when you want to be able to run your workload it's so powerful what you just said and I think when we exactly it's not just about it's not just about power but it's about place when we are are looking at Global Computing at scale what I know that there's ESG advantages in and ESG being a very hot topic when we're talking about AMW on AWS and and and leveraging tools like yellow dog what other sorts of advantages Beyond being least carbon impactful can your Mutual customers benefit from so it's not like I say there's many other features you know a very important thing when you're running a high performance Computing workload is being able to match the instruction set that you're running on premise and then being able to use that in the cloud as well and also to be able to make Intelligent Decisions of where should something run should would something be more efficient um to build on premise should we always try and maximize our on-premise resources before going into the cloud there's a lot about being able to just be able to make decisions and yellow itself it makes thousands of decisions per second to be in a workout where the the best and most optimized places to to run your workload yeah so Brad you work with a lot of companies at scale what type of scale is possible when leveraging Technologies like AMD and yellow dog combined well you know I love the fact that you mentioned uh you know HPC and it's one of the areas that actually is most exciting for for me personally and for and for AMD with the combination of yellow dog and AWS and AWS launched the very first HPC uh instance type last year and you know we're we're we haven't even begun to answer a question we haven't gotten to see um the full-scale capability in the cloud when it comes to these uh these very coordinated and very refined workloads that are running at massive scale and and uh you know we've got some some products we'll be launched in the near future as well that are incredibly performant and you know to be honest I don't think I don't think we have even come close to seeing the scale relative to somebody's very optimized workloads in HPC uh that that we're capable of so um we're excited we're excited for the next few years to see how how we can wrap in um some of the tremendous success that AMD has had on-prem in these these these massive compute centers and replicating that same success inside AWS with companies like yellow dog it's uh it we're excited to see what uh what's what's going to come forward can you give us a preview of anything on the record that gets you really excited about the future I was going to ask you what what had you looking forward to 2023 and Beyond but nothing well not nothing official of course uh but um I will say this you know AMD has recently successful had the launch for Genoa uh it's our next next-gen release and it is um it is proving to be it absolutely is the dominant compute engine it at this point that exists and you know when you start to couple that with the the prowess of AWS you know you could see that over time becoming something potentially that um you know um can really start to change the compute landscape quite a bit so we're hopeful that you know in the future we'll have something along those lines uh with AWS and others and um we're very uh we're very bullish in that area love it uh Simon what about you you've been passionate about low carbon I.T for a long time is carbon neutral Tech in our future what I realize is a bold and lofty claim for you but feel free to give us any of your future predictions um yeah so well I started here trying to build solutions for you know many years ago so 2006 um I was part of a team that launched the the world's lowest powered Windows PC that was actually based on the AMD technology back then so uh you can tell that AMD have been working on a low power for us for a long time in terms of carbon neutral yes I think um certainly there's a there's a few data centers around the world now that are getting very close to uh to carbon neutral some of which may have already achieved it so that's really interesting but so you know the the second part of that is really the the manufacturer of everything that goes into those Services systems and being able to to get to uh you know a net zero on those over a period of time and when we do that which is yeah not without challenges but but certainly possible then we really will have carbon neutral I.T which will be uh a benefit to everyone you know mankind itself yeah casual statement and I have to say that I wholeheartedly agree I think that it's one of the greater challenges of Our Generation especially as what we're able to do in HPC in particular since we're talking about it is only going to grow and scale and magnitude and the amount of data that we have to organize certain process is is wild even today so I love that I'm curious is there anything that you can share with us that's in the pipeline for Yellow Dog anything coming up in the future that's very exciting um so we're coming up very soon um we're going to release something called um version 4 again log which contains um what we call a resource framework which is all about making sure you've got everything you need before you run a job either on-prem or in the cloud so that might be anything from making sure you've got the right licenses making sure that your data is all in the right location making sure you've got all aspects of your workflow ready before you start launching compute and start really but you know burning through dollars with computer could potentially sat there uh not not doing anything until other tasks keep catch up so we're really excited about this new V4 release which will uh which will come out very soon awesome we can't wait to learn more about that hopefully here again on the cube Brad what do Partnerships with companies like yellowdog meme for you and for the customers that you're able to serve yeah it's it's incredibly important I it's you know there's one of the difficulties in in compute that we have today especially in Cloud compute there's there's so much available at this point I mean there was a point in time it was very simple and straightforward it's not even close to being that anymore green so you know one of the things I love about yellow dog itself is actually it does a great they do a great job of making very complex situations and environments fairly simple to understand especially from a business perspective and so one of the things that we love about it is it actually helps our customers you know the AMD direct customers better understand how to properly use our technology and to get the most out of it and so it's difficult for us to articulate that message because you know we are a Semiconductor Company so sometimes it's a little tough to be able to articulate workloads and applications in the way that our customer base will be able to understand but you know it's it's so critical to have companies like yellow dog in the middle that can actually you know make that translation for us directly to the customer um you know and and especially too when you start thinking about ESG and environmental relationships and I'd like to make a comment and one of the things that is fantastic about AMD AWS and yellow we all share the same Mission and we're very public about those missions about just being better to the to the planet and um you know AMD has taken some very aggressive uh targets through 2025 much beyond anything that the industry has expected and you know because of that we are you know we are the most um we are the most power efficient xa6 product on the marketplace and it's not even close and you know I look forward to the day when uh you know you start looking at instance types inside these public Cloud providers in conjunction with the old dog and you can actually even start to see maybe potentially what that carbon footprint is based on those decisions you make on compute and um you know considering that more than half to spend for everybody is generally compute in these environments it's critical to really know what your true impact in the world is and um it's just one of the best parts about a partnership like this oh what a wonderful note to close on and I love both the Synergy between all the partners on a technology level but most importantly on a mission level because none of it matters if we don't have a planet that we can continue to innovate on so I'm I'm really grateful that you're both here fighting a good fight working together and also making a lot of information available for companies of all different sizes as they're navigating very complex decision trees in and operating their stack so thank you both Simon and Brad I really appreciate your time it's been incredibly insightful and thank you to our audience for tuning in to our continuing coverage of AWS re invent here on thecube my name is Savannah Peterson and I look forward to learning more with you soon foreign [Music]

welcome back to the cube's presentation of the aws executive summit at re invent 2021 made possible by accenture my name is dave vellante we're going to look at how digital infrastructure is helping to transform consumer experiences specifically how an insurance company is changing its industry by incentivizing and rewarding consumers who change their behavior to live healthier lives a real passion of of mine and getting to the really root cause of health with me now are simon guest who's the chief executive officer of generality vitality gmbh and niels mueller who's the managing director at the cloud first application engineering lead for the european market at accenture gentlemen welcome to the cube thanks for having us you're very welcome simon generally vitality it's a really interesting concept that you guys have envisioned and now put into practice tell us how does it all work sure no problem and thanks for for having us on dave it's a pleasure to be here so look uh generally vitality is in its uh it's core pretty simple concepts so it's uh it's a program that you have on your phone and the idea of this program is that it's a it's a wellness coach for you as an individual and it's going to help you to understand your health and where you are in terms of the state of your health at the moment and it's going to take you on a journey to improve your your lifestyle and your wellness and hopefully help you to lead a healthier and a more sort of mindful life i guess is is the best way of summarizing it from um from our point of view with insurance company of course you know our historical role has always been to uh be the company that's there if something goes wrong you know so if unfortunately you pass away or you have sickness in your in your life or in your family's life that's that's historically been our role but what we see with generality vitality is something a little bit different so it's a program that really is uh supposed to be with you every day of your life to help you to live a healthier life it's something that we already have in in four european markets in fact in five from this week i'm a little bit behind the time so we're live already in in germany in france in austria and italy and in spain and fundamentally what we what we do dave is too is to say to customers look if you want to understand your health if you want to improve it by moving a little bit more by visiting the doctor more by eating healthier by healthy choices on a daily basis we're going to help you to do that and we're going to incentivize you for going on this journey and making healthy choices and we're going to reward you for for doing the same so you know we partner up with with great companies like garmin like adidas like big brands that are let's say invested in this health and wellness space so that we can produce really an ecosystem for customers that's all about live well make good choices be healthy have an insurance company that partners you along that journey and if you do that we're going to reward you for for that so you know we're here not just in the difficult times which of course is one of our main roles but we're here as a partner as a lifetime partner to you too to help you feel better and live a better life i love it i mean it sounds so simple but but it's i'm sure it's very complicated to to make the technology simple for the user you've got mobile involved you've got the back end and we're going to get into some of the tech but first i want to understand the member engagement and some of the lifestyle changes simon that you've analyzed what's the feedback that you're getting from your customers what does the data tell you how do the incentives work as well what what is the incentive for the the member to actually do the right thing sure look i think actually the the covered uh situation that we've had in the last sort of two years has really crystallized the fact that this is something that we really ought to be doing and something that our customers really value so i mean look just to give you a bit of a sort of information about how it works for for customers so what we try to do with them is is to get customers to understand uh their current health situation you know using their phone so uh you know we ask our customers to go through a sort of health assessment around how they live what they eat how they sleep you know and to go through that sort of process uh and to give them what a vitality age which is a sort of uh you know sort of actuarial comparison with their real age so i'm i'm 45 but unfortunately my my vitality age is 49 and it means i have some work to do to bring that back together uh and what we see is that you know two-thirds of our customers take this test every year because they want to see how they are progressing on an annual basis in terms of living a healthier life and if what if what they are doing is having an impact on their life expectancy and their lifespan and their health span so how long are they going to live healthier for so you see them really engaging in this in this approach of understanding their current situation then what we know actually because the program is built around this model that uh really activity and moving and exercise is the biggest contributor to living a healthier life we know that the majority of deaths are caused by lifestyle illness is like you know poor nutrition and smoking and drinking alcohol and not exercising and so a lot of the program is really built around getting people to move more and it's not about being an athlete it's about you know getting off the the underground one station earlier walking home or making sure you do your 10 000 steps a day and what we see is that that sort of 40 of our customers are on a regularly basis linking either their phone or their their exercise device to our program and downloading that data so that they can see how how much they are exercising and at the same time what we do is we set we set our customers weekly challenges to say look if you can move a little bit more than last week we are going to to reward you for that and we see that you know almost half of our customers are achieving this weekly goal every week and it's really a fantastic level of engagement that normally is an insurer uh we don't see the way the rewards work is is pretty simple it's similar in a way to an airline program so every good choice you make every activity you do every piece of good food that you eat when you check your on your health situation we'll give you points and the more points you get you go through through a sort of status approach of starting off at the bottom status and ending up at a gold and then a platinum status and the the higher up you get in the status that the higher the value of the rewards that we give you so almost a quarter of our customers now and this is accelerated through provide they've reached that platinum status so they are the most engaged customers that we we have and those ones who are really engaging in the in the program and what we really try to create is this sort of virtuous circle that says if you live well you make good choices you improve your health you you progress through the program and we give you better and stronger and more uh valuable rewards for for doing that and some of those rewards are are around health and wellness so it might be that you get you get a discount on on gym gear from adidas it might be that you get a discount on a uh on a device from garmin or it might be actually on other things so we also give people amazon vouchers we also give people uh discounts on holidays and another thing that we we did actually in the last year which we found really powerful is that we've given the opportunity for our customers to convert those rewards into charitable donations because we we work in generality with a with a sort of um campaign called the human safety net which is helping out the poorest people in society and some what our customers do a lot of the time is instead of taking those financial rewards for themselves they convert it into a charitable donation so we're actually also thinking wellness and feeling good and insurance and some societal good so we're really trying to create a virtuous circle of uh of engagement with our customers i mean that's a powerful cocktail i love it you got the the data because if i see the data then i can change my behavior you got the gamification piece you actually have you know hard dollar rewards you could give those to charities and and you've got the the most important which is priceless can't put a value on good health i got one more question for simon and niels i'd love you to chime in as well on this question how did you guys decide simon to engage with accenture and aws and the cloud to build out this platform what's the story behind that collaboration was there unique value that you saw that that you wanted to tap that you feel like they bring to the table what was your experience yeah look i mean we worked at accenture as well because the the the sort of construct of this vitality proposition is a pretty a pretty complex one so you mentioned that the idea is simple but the the build is not so uh is not so simple and that that's the case so accenture's been part of that journey uh from the beginning they're one of the partners that we work with but specifically around the topic of rewards uh you know we're we're a primarily european focused organization but when you take those countries that i mentioned even though we're next to each other geographically we're quite diverse and what we wanted to create was really a sustainable and reusable and consistent customer experience that allowed us to go and get to market with an increasing amount of efficiency and and to do that we needed to work with somebody who understood our business has this historical let's say investment in in the vitality concept so so knows how to bring it to life but that what then could really support us in making uh what can be a complex piece of work as simple and as as replicable as possible across multiple markets because we don't want to go reinventing the wheel every time we do we move to a new market so we need to find a balance between having a consistent product a consistent technology offer a consistent customer experience with the fact that we we operate in quite diverse markets so this was let's say the the reason for more deeply engaging with accenture on this journey thank you very much niels why don't you comment on on that as well i'd love to to get your thoughts and and really really it's kind of your role here i mean accenture global si deep expertise in industry but also technology what are your thoughts on this topic yeah i'd love to love to comment so when we started the journey it was pretty clear from the outset that we would need to build this on cloud in order to get this scalability and this ability to roll out to different markets have a central solution that can act as a template for the different markets but then also have the opportunity to localize different languages different partners for the rewards there's different reward partners in the different markets so we needed to build in an asset basically that could work as a tempos centrally standardizing things but also leaving enough flexibility to to then localize in the individual markets and if we talk about some of the more specific requirements so one one thing that gave us headaches in the beginning was the authentication of the users because each of the markets has their own systems of record where the basically the authentication needs to happen and we somehow needed to still find a holistic solution that comes through the central platform and we were able to do that at the end through the aws cognito service sort of wrapping the individual markets uh local idp systems and by now we've even extended that solution to have a standalone cloud native kind of idp solution in place for markets that do not have a local idp solution in place or don't want to use it for for this purpose yeah so you had you had data you have you had the integration you've got local laws you mentioned the flexibility you're building ecosystems that are unique to the to the local uh both language and and cultures uh please you had another comment i interrupted you yeah i know i just wanted to expand basically on the on the requirements so that was the central one being able to roll this out in a standardized way across the markets but then there were further requirements for example like being able to operate that platform with very low operations overhead there is no large i.t team behind generally vitality that you know works to serve us or can can act as this itis backbone support so we needed to have basically a solution that runs itself that runs on autopilot and that was another big big driver for first of all going to cloud but second of all making specific choices within cloud so we specifically chose to build this as a cloud native solution using for example manage database services you know with automatic backup with automatic ability to restore data that scales automatically that you know has all this built in which usually maybe a database administrator would take care of and we applied that concept basically to every component to everything we looked at we we applied this requirement of how can this run on autopilot how can we make this as much managed by itself within the cloud as possible and then land it on these services and for example we also used the the api gateway from from aws for our api services that also came in handy when for example we had some response time issues with the third party we needed to call and then we could just with a flick of a button basically introduce caching on the level of the api gateway and really improve the user experience because the data you know wasn't updated so much so it was easier to cache so these are all experiences i think that that proved in the end that we made the right choices here and the requirements that that drove that to to have a good user experience niels would you say that the architecture is is a sort of a data architecture specifically is it a decentralized data architecture with sort of federated you know centralized governance or is it more of a centralized view what if you could talk about that yeah it's it's actually a centralized platform basically so the core product is the same for all the markets and we run them as different tenants basically on top of that infrastructure so the data is separated in a way obviously by the different tenants but it's in a central place and we can analyze it in a central fashion if if the need arises from from the business and the reason i ask that simon is because essentially i look at this as a as largely a data offering for your customers and so niels you were talking about the local language and simon as well i would imagine that that the local business lines have specific requirements and specific data requirements and so you've got to build an architecture that is flexible enough to meet those needs yet at the same time can ensure data quality and governance and security that's not a trivial challenge i wonder if you both could comment on that yeah maybe maybe i'll give a start and then simon can chime in so um what we're specifically doing is managing the rewards experience right so so our solution will take care of tracking what rewards have been earned for what customer what rewards have been redeemed what rewards can be unlocked on the next level and we we foreshadow a little bit to to motivate to incentivize the customer and as that data sits in an aws database in a tenant by tenant fashion and you can run analysis on top of that maybe what you're getting into is also the let's say the exercise data the fitness device tracking data that is not specifically part of what my team has built but i'm sure simon can comment a little bit on that angle as well yeah please yeah sure sure yeah sure so look i think them the topic of data and how we use it uh in our business is a very is very interesting one because it's um it's not historically being seen let's say as the remit of insurers to go beyond the you know the the data that you need to underwrite policies or process claims or whatever it might be but actually we see that this is a whole point around being able to create some shared value in in this kind of product and and what i mean by that is uh look if you are a customer and you're buying an insurance policy it might be a life insurance or health insurance policy from from generali and we are giving you access to this uh to this program and through that program you are living a healthier life and that might have a you know a positive impact on generali in terms of you know maybe we're going to increase our market share or maybe we're going to lower claims or we're going to generate value out of that then one of the points of this program is that we then share that value back with customers through the rewards on the platform that we that we've built here and of course being able to understand that data and to quantify it and to value that data is an important part of the of the the different stages of how you of how much value you are creating and it's also interesting to know that you know in a couple of our markets we we operate in the corporate space so not with retail customers but with with organizations and one of the reasons that those companies give vitality to their employees is that they want to see things like the improved health of a workforce they want to see higher presenteeism lower absenteeism of employees and of course being able to demonstrate that there's a sort of correlation between participation in the vitality program and things like that is also is also important and as we've said the markets are very different so we need to be able to to take the data uh that we have out of the vitality program uh and be able in in the company that that i'm managing to to interpret that data so that in our insurance businesses we are able to make good decisions about the kind of insurance products we i think what's interesting to uh to make clear is that actually that the kind of health data that we generate stays purely within the vitality business itself and what we do inside the vitality business is to analyze that data and say okay is this is this also helping our insurance businesses to to drive uh yeah you know better top line and bottom line in the in the relevant business lines and this is different per company and per mark so yeah being able to interrogate that data understand it apply it in different markets and different uh distribution systems and different kinds of approaches to insurance is an is an important one yes it's an excellent example of a digital business in in you know we talk about digital transformation what does that mean this is what it means i i'd love i mean it must be really interesting board discussions because you're transforming an industry you're lowering overall cost i mean if people are getting less sick that's more profit for your company and you can choose to invest that in new products you can give back some to your corporate clients you can play that balancing act you can gain market share and and you've got some knobs to turn some levers uh for your stakeholders which is which is awesome neil something that i'm interested in i mean it must have been really important for you to figure out how to determine and measure success i mean you're obviously removed it's up it's up to generality vitality to get adoption for for their customers but at the same time the efficacy of your solution is going to determine you know the ease of of of delivery and consumption so so how did you map to the specific goals what were some of the key kpis in terms of mapping to their you know aggressive goals besides the things we already touched on i think one thing i would mention is the timeline right so we we started the team ramping in january or february and then within six months basically we had the solution built and then we went through a extensive test phase and within the next six months we had the product rolled out to three markets so this speed to value speed to market that we were able to achieve i think is one of the key um key criteria that also simon and team gave to us right there was a timeline and that timeline was not going to move so we needed to make a plan adjust to that timeline and i think it's both a testament to to the team's work that they did that we made this timeline but it also is enabled by technologies like cloud i have to say if i go back five years ten years if if you had to build in a solution like this on a corporate data center across so many different markets and each managed locally there would have been no way to do this in 12 months right that's for sure yeah i mean simon you're a technology company i mean insurance has always been a tech heavy company but but as niels just mentioned if you had to do that with it departments in each region so my question is is now you've got this it's almost like non-recurring engineering costs you've got that it took one year to actually get the first one done how fast are you able to launch into new markets just from a technology perspective not withstanding any you know local regulations and figuring out to go to market is that compressed yeah so if you are specifically technology-wise i think we would be able to set up a new market including localizations that often involves translation of because in europe you have all the different languages and so on at i would say four to six weeks we probably could stand up a localized solution in reality it takes more like six to nine months to get it rolled out because there's many other things involved obviously but just our piece of the solution we can pretty quickly localize it to a new market but but simon that means that you can spend time on those other factors you don't have to really worry so much about the technology and so you've launched in multiple european markets what do you see for the future of this program come to america you know you can fight you can find that this program in america dave but with one of our competitors we're not we're not operating so much in uh but you can find it if you want to become a customer for sure but yes you're right so look i think from from our perspective uh you know to put this kind of business into a new market it's not it's not an easy thing because what we're doing is not offering it just as a as a service on a standalone basis to customers we want to link it with with insurance business in the end we are an insurance business and we want to to see the value that comes from that so there's you know there's a lot of effort that has to go into making sure that we land it in the right way also from a customer publishing point of view with our distribution and they are they are quite different so so yeah look coming to the question of what's next i mean it comes in three stages for me so as i mentioned we are uh in five markets already uh in next in the first half of 2022 we'll also come to to the czech republic and poland uh which we're excited to to do and that will that will basically mean that we we have this business in in the seven main uh general markets in europe related to life and health business which is the most natural uh let's say fit for something like vitality then you know the next the sort of second part of that is to say okay look we have a program that's very heavily focused around uh activity and rewards and that that's a good place to start but you know wellness these days is not just about you know can you move a bit more than you did historically it's also about mental well-being it's about sleeping good it's about mindfulness it's about being able to have a more holistic approach to well-being and and covert has taught us and customer feedback has taught us actually that this is something where we need to to go and here we need to have the technology to move there as well so to be able to work with partners that are not just based on on on physical activity but also also on mindfulness so this is how one other way we'll develop the proposition and i think the third one which is more strategic and and we are you know really looking into is there's clearly something in the whole uh perception of incentives and rewards which drives a level of engagement between an insurer like generali and its customers that it hasn't had historically so i think we need to learn you know forget you know forgetting about the specific one of vitality being a wellness program but if there's an insurer there's a role for us to play where we offer incentives to customers to do something in a specific way and reward them for doing that and it creates value for us as an insurer then then this is probably you know a place we want to investigate more and to be able to do that in in other areas means we need to have the technology available that is as i said before replicable faster market can adapt quickly to to other ideas that we have so we can go and test those in in different markets so yes we have to we have to complete our scope on vitality we have to get that to scale and be able to manage all of this data at scale all of those rewards at real scale and uh to have the technology that allows us to do that without without thinking about it too much and then to say okay how do we widen the proposition and how do we take the concept of vitality that sits behind vitality to see if we can apply it to other areas of our business and that's really what the future is is going to look like for us you know the the isolation era really taught us that if you're not a digital business you're out of business and pre-kov a lot of these stories were kind of buried uh but the companies that have invested in digital are now thriving and this is an awesome example jeff another point is that jeff amebacher one of the founders of cloudera early facebook employee famously said about 10 12 years ago the best and greatest engineering minds of our my generation are trying to figure out how to get people to click on ads and this is a wonderful example of how to use data to change people's lives so guys congratulations best of luck really awesome example of applying technology to create an important societal outcome really appreciate you your time on the cube thank you thanks bye-bye all right and thanks for watching this segment of thecube's presentation of the aws executive summit at reinvent 2021 made possible by accenture keep it right there for more deep dives [Music] you

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Executive Summit at re:Invent 2021 made possible by Accenture. My name is Dave Vellante. We're going to look at how digital infrastructure is helping to transform consumer experiences, specifically how an insurance company is changing its industry by incentivizing and rewarding consumers who changed their behavior to live healthier lives, a real passion of mine, and getting to the really root cause of health. With me now are Simon Guest, who's the Chief Executive Officer of Generali Vitality, GmbH, and Nils Muller-Sheffer, who's the Managing Director at the Cloud First Application Engineering Lead for the European market at Accenture. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us. >> You're very welcome Simon. Simon, Generali Vitality is a really interesting concept that you guys have envisioned and now put it into practice. Tell us how does it all work? >> Sure. No problem. And thanks for having us on David, pleasure to be here. So look, Generali Vitality is in its core a pretty simple concept. It's a program that you have on your phone. And the idea of this program is that it's a wellness coach for you as an individual, and it's going to help you to understand your health and where you are in terms of the state of your health at the moment, and it's going to take you on a journey to improve your lifestyle and your wellness, and hopefully help you to live a healthier and a more sort of mindful life, I guess, is the best way of summarizing it. From our point of view as an insurance company, of course, our historical role has always been to be the company that's there if something goes wrong. So if unfortunately you pass away or you have sickness in your life or your family's life, that's historically been our role. But what we see with Generali Vitality is something a little bit different. So it's a program that really is supposed to be with you every day of your life to help you to live a healthier life. It's something that we already have in for European markets and in fact, in five from this week, I'm a little bit behind the times. So we're live already in Germany, in France, in Austria, in Italy and in Spain. And fundamentally what we do Dave, is to say to customers, "Look, if you want to understand your health, if you want to improve it by moving a little bit more, or by visiting the doctor more, by eating healthier, by healthy choices on a daily basis, we're going to help you to do that. And we're going to incentivize you for going on this journey and making healthy choices. And we're going to reward you for doing the same." So, we partner up with great companies like Garmin, like Adidas, like big brands that are, let's say, invested in this health and wellness space so that we can produce really an ecosystem for customers that's all about live well, make good choices, be healthy, have an insurance company that partners you along that journey. And if you do that, we've going to reward you for that. So, we're here not just in a difficult times, which of course is one of our main roles, but we're here as a partner, as a lifetime partner to you to help you feel better and live a better life. >> I love it, I mean, it sounds so simple, but I'm sure it's very complicated to make the technology simple for the user. You've got mobile involved, you've got the back end and we're going to get into some of the tech, but first I want to understand the member engagement and some of the lifestyle changes Simon that you've analyzed. What's the feedback that you're getting from your customers? What does the data tell you? How do the incentives work as well? What is the incentive for the member to actually do the right thing? >> Sure, I think actually that the COVID situation that we've had in the last sort of two years is really crystallized the fact that this is something that we really ought to be doing and something that our customers really value. Just to give you a bit of a sort of information about how it works for our customers. So what we try to do with them, is to get customers to understand their current health situation, using their phone. So, we asked our customers to go through a sort of health assessments around how they live, what they eat, how they sleep, and to go through that sort of process and to give them all the Vitality age, which is a sort of actuarial comparison with their real age. So I'm 45, but unfortunately my Vitality age is 49 and it means I have some work to do to bring that back together. And what we see is that, two thirds of our customers take this test every year because they want to see how they are progressing on an annual basis in terms of living a healthier life. And if what they are doing is having an impact on their life expectancy and their lifespan and their health span. So how long are they going to live healthier for? So you see them really engaging in this approach of understanding that current situation. Then what we know actually, because the program is built around this model that's really activity and moving, and exercise is the biggest contributors to living a healthier life. We know that the majority of deaths are caused by lifestyle illnesses like poor nutrition and smoking and drinking alcohol and not exercising. And so a lot of the program is really built around getting people to move more. And it's not about being an athlete. It's about, getting off the underground one station earlier and walking home or making sure you do your 10,000 steps a day. And what we see is that that sort of 40% of our customers are on a regularly basis linking either their phone or their exercise device to our program and downloading that data so that they can see how much they are exercising. And at the same time, what we do is we set our customers weekly challenges to say, look, if you can move a little bit more than last week, we are go into to reward you for that. And we see that almost half of our customers are achieving this weekly goal every week. And it's really a level of engagement that normally as an insurer, we don't see. The way that rewards work is pretty simple. It's similar in a way to an airline program. So every good choice you make every activity to every piece of good food that you eat. When you check your on your health situation, we'll give you points. And the more points you get, you go through through a sort of status approach of starting off at the bottom status and ending up at a golden and a platinum status. And the higher up you get in the status, the higher the value of the rewards that we give you. So almost a quarter of our customers now, and this has accelerated through COVID have reached that platinum status. So they are the most engaged customers that we have and those ones who are really engaging in the program. And what we really tried to create is this sort of virtuous circle that says If you live well, you make good choices, you improve your health, you progress through the program and we give you better and stronger and more valuable rewards for doing that. And some of those rewards are around health and wellness. So it might be that you get a discounts on gym gear from Adidas, it might be that you get a discount on a device from Garmin, or it might be actually on other things. We also give people Amazon vouchers. We also give people discounts on holidays. And another thing that we did actually in the last year, which we found really powerful is that we've given the opportunity for our customers to convert those rewards into charitable donations. Because we work in generosity with a sort of campaign called The Human Safety Net, which is helping out the poorest people in society. And so what our customers do a lot of the time is instead of taking those financial rewards for themselves, they convert it into a charitable donation. So we're actually also linking wellness and feeling good and insurance and some societal goods. So we're really trying to create a virtuous circle of engagement with our customers. >> That's a powerful cocktail. I love it. You've got the data, because if I see the data, then I can change my behavior. You've got the gamification piece. You actually have hard dollar rewards. You could give those to charities and you've got the most important, which is priceless, you can't put a value on good health. I got one more question for Simon and Nils I'd love for you to chime in as well on this question. How did you guys decide, Simon, to engage with Accenture and AWS and the cloud to build out this platform? What's the story behind that collaboration? Was there unique value that you saw that you wanted to tap, that you feel like they bring to the table? What was your experience? >> Yeah, we work with Accenture as well because the sort of constructs of this Vitality proposition is a pretty complex one. So you mentioned that the idea is simple, but the build is not so simple and that's the case. So Accenture has been part of that journey from the beginning. They are one of the partners that we work with, but specifically around the topic of rewards, we're primarily European focused organization, but when you take those countries that I mentioned, even though we're next to each other geographically, we're quite diverse. And what we wanted to create was really a sustainable and reusable and consistent customer experience that allowed us to go get to market with an increasing amounts of efficiency. And to do that, we needed to work with somebody who understood our business, has this historical, let's say investment in the Vitality concepts and so knows how to bring it to life, but then could really support us in making what can be a complex piece of work, as simple, as replicable as possible across multiple markets, because we don't want to go reinventing the wheel every time we knew we moved to a new market. So we need to find a balance between having a consistent product, a consistent technology offer, a consistent customer experience with the fact that we operate in quite diverse markets. So this was, let's say the reason for more deeply engaging with Accenture on this journey. >> Thank you very much, Nils, why don't you comment on that as well? I'd love to get your thoughts and really is kind of your role here, an Accenture global SI, deep expertise in industry, but also technology, what are your thoughts on this topic? >> Yeah, I'd love to love to comment. So when we started the journey, it was pretty clear from the outset that we would need to build this on cloud in order to get this scalability and this ability to roll out to different markets, have a central solution that can act as a template for the different markets, but then also have the opportunity to localize different languages, different partners for the rewards, there's different reward partners in the different markets. So we needed to build an asset basically that could work as a template, centrally standardizing things, but also leaving enough flexibility to then localize in the individual markets. And if we talk about some of the most specific requirements, so one thing that gave us headaches in the beginning was the authentication of the users because each of the markets has their own systems of record where the, basically the authentication needs to happen. And if we somehow needed to still find a holistic solution that comes through the central platform, and we were able to do that at the end through the AWS cognitive service, sort of wrapping the individual markets, local IDP systems. And by now we've even extended that solution to have a standalone cloud native kind of IDP solution in place for markets that do not have a local IDP solution in place, or don't want to use it for this purpose. >> So you had data, you had the integration, you've got local laws, you mentioned the flexibility, you're building ecosystems that are unique to the local, both language and cultures. Please, you had another comment, I interrupted you. >> No, I just wanted to expand basically on the requirements. So that was the central one being able to roll this out in a standardized way across the markets, but then there were further requirements. For example, like being able to operate the platform with very low operations overhead. There is no large IT team behind Generali Vitality that, works disservice or can act as this backbone support. So we needed to have basically a solution that runs itself that runs on autopilot. And that was another big, big driver for first of all, going to cloud, but second of all, making specific choices within cloud. So we specifically chose to build this as a cloud native solution using for example, managed database services, with automatic backup, with automatic ability to restore data that scales automatically that has all this built in which usually maybe in a database administrator would take care of. And we applied that concept basically to every component, to everything we looked at, we applied this requirement of how can this run on autopilot? How can we make this as much managed by itself within the cloud as possible, and then lend it on these services. For example, we also use the API gateway from AWS for our API services that also came in handy when, for example, we had some response time issues with the third party we needed to call. And then we could just with a flick of a button basically, introduced caching on the level of the API gateway and really improve the user experience because the data wasn't updated so much, so it was easier to cache. So these are all experiences I think that that proved in the end that we made the right choices here and the requirements that drove that to have a good user experience. >> Would you say that the architecture is a sort of a, data architecture specifically, is it a decentralized data architecture with sort of federated, centralized governance? Or is it more of a centralized view, wonder if you could talk about that? >> Yeah, it's actually a centralized platform basically. So the core product is the same for all the markets and we run them as different tenants basically on top of the infrastructure. So the data is separated in a way, obviously by the different tenants, but it's in a central place and we can analyze it in a central fashion if the need arises from the business. >> And the reason I asked that Simon is because essentially I look at this as largely a data offering for your customers. And so Nils, you were talking about the local language and Simon as well. I would imagine that the local business lines have specific requirements and specific data requirements. And so you've got to build an architecture that is flexible enough to meet those needs yet at the same time can ensure data quality and governance and security. And that's not a trivial challenge. I wonder if you both could comment on that. >> Yeah, maybe I'll give a start and then Simon can chime in. So what we're specifically doing is managing the rewards experience, so our solution will take care of tracking what rewards have been earned for what customer, what rewards have been redeemed, what rewards can be unlocked on the next level, and we foreshadow a little bit to motivate incentivize the customer and asset that data sits in an AWS database by tenant fashion. And you can run analysis on top of that. Maybe what you're getting into is also the, let's say the exercise data, the fitness device tracking data that is not specifically part of what my team has built, but I'm sure Simon can comment a little bit on that angle as well. >> Yeah, please. >> Yeah, sure. I think the topic of data and how we use it in our business is a very interesting one because it's not historically been seen, let's say as the remit of insurance to go beyond the data that you need to underwrite policies or process claims or whatever it might be. But actually we see that this is a whole point around being able to create some shared value in this kind of products. And what I mean by that is, if you are a customer and you're buying an insurance policy, it might be a life insurance or health insurance policy from Generali, and we're not giving you access to this program. And through that program, you are living a healthier life and that might have a positive impact on generosity in terms of, maybe we're going to increase our market share, or maybe we are going through lower claims, or we're going to generate value of that then. One of the points of this program is we then share that value back with customers, through the rewards on the platform that we've built here. And of course, being able to understand that data and to quantify it and to value that data is an important part of the different stages of how much value you are creating. And it's also interesting to know that, in a couple of our markets, we operate in the corporate space. So not with retail customers, but with organizations. And one of the reasons that those companies give Vitality to their employees is that they want to see things like the improved health of a workforce. They want to see higher presenteeism, lower absenteeism of employees, and of course, being able to demonstrate that there's a sort of correlation between participation in the Vitality program and things like that is also important. And as we've said, the markets are very different. So we need to be able to take the data that we have out of the Vitality Program and be able in the company that I'm managing to interpret that data so that in our insurance businesses, we are able to make good decisions about kind of insurance product we have. I think what's interesting to make clear is that actually that the kind of health data that we generate states purely within the Vitality business itself and what we do inside the Vitality business is to analyze that data and say, is this also helping our insurance businesses to drive better top line and bottom line in the relevant business lines? And this is different per company. Being able to interrogate that data, understand it, apply it in different markets, in different distribution systems and different kinds of approaches to insurance is an important one, yes. >> It's an excellent example of a digital business and we talked about digital transformation. What does that mean? This is what it means. It must be really interesting board discussions because you're transforming an industry, you're lowering overall costs. I mean, if people are getting less sick, that's more profit for your company and you can choose to invest that in new products, you can give back some to your corporate clients, you can play that balancing act, you can gain market share. And you've got some knobs to turn, some levers, for your stakeholders, which is awesome. Nils, something that I'm interested in, it must've been really important for you to figure out how to determine and measure success. Obviously it's up to Generali Vitality to get adoption for their customers, but at the same time, the efficacy of your solution is going to determine, the ease of delivery and consumption. So, how did you map to the specific goals? What were some of the key KPIs in terms of mapping to their aggressive goals. >> Besides the things we already touched on, I think one thing I would mention is the timeline. So, we started the team ramping in January, February, and then within six months basically, we had the solution built and then we went through a extensive test phase. And within the next six months we had the product rolled out to three markets. So this speed to value, speed to market that we were able to achieve, I think is one of the key criteria that also Simon and team gave to us. There was a timeline and that time I was not going to move. So we needed to make a plan, adjust to that timeline. And I think it's both a testament to the team's work that we met this timeline, but it also is enabled by a technology stack cloud. I have to say, if I go back five years, 10 years, if you had to build in a solution like this on a corporate data center across so many different markets and each managed locally, there would've been no way to do this in 12 months, that's for sure. >> Yeah, Simon, you're a technology company. I mean, insurance has always been a tech heavy company, but as Nils just mentioned, if you had to do that with IT departments in each region. So my question is now you've got this, it's almost like nonrecurring engineering costs, it took one year to actually get the first one done, how fast are you able to launch into new markets just from a technology perspective, not withstanding local regulations and figuring out the go to market? Is that compressed? >> So you asked specifically technology-wise I think we would be able to set up a new market, including localizations that often involves translation of, because in Europe you have all the different languages and so on, I would say four to six weeks, we probably could stand up a localized solution. In reality, it takes more like six to nine months to get it rolled out because there's many other things involved, obviously, but just our piece of the solution, we can pretty quickly localize it to a new market. >> But Simon, that means that you can spend time on those other factors, you don't have to really worry so much about the technology. And so you've launched in multiple European markets, what do you see for the future of this program? Come to America. >> You can find that this program in America Dave, but with one of our competitors, we're not operating so much in the US, but you can find it if you want to become a customer for sure. But yes, you're right. I think from our perspective, to put this kind of business into a new market is not an easy thing because what we're doing is not offering it just as a service on a standalone basis to customers, we want to link it with insurance business. In the end, we are an insurance business, and we want to see the value that comes from that. So there's a lot of effort that has to go into making sure that we land it in the right way, also from a customer proposition points of view with our distribution, they are all quite different. Coming to the question of what's next? It comes in three stages for me. So as I mentioned, we are in five markets already. In the first half of 2022, we'll also come to the Czech Republic and Poland, which we're excited to do. And that will basically mean that we have this business in the seven main Generali markets in Europe related to life and health business, which is the most natural at let's say fit for something like Vitality. Then, the sort of second part of that is to say, we have a program that is very heavily focused around activity and rewards, and that's a good place to start, but, wellness these days is not just about, can you move a bit more than you did historically, it's also about mental wellbeing, it's about sleeping good, it's about mindfulness, it's about being able to have a more holistic approach to wellbeing and COVID has taught us, and customer feedback has taught is actually that this is something where we need to go. And here we need to have the technology to move there as well. So to be able to work with partners that are not just based on physical activity, but also on mindfulness. So this is how one other way we will develop the proposition. And I think the third one, which is more strategic and we are really looking into is, there's clearly something in the whole perception of incentives and rewards, which drives a level of engagement between an insurer like Generali and its customers that it hasn't had historically. So I think we need to learn, forgetting about the specific one or Vitality being a wellness program, but if there's an insurer, there's a role for us to play where we offer incentives to customers to do something in a specific way and reward them for doing that. And it creates value for us as an insurer, then this is probably a place that we'd want to investigate more. And to be able to do that in other areas means we need to have the technology available, that is, as I said before, replicable faster market can adapt quickly to other ideas that we have, so we can go and test those in different markets. So yes, we have to, we have to complete our scope on Vitality, We have to get that to scale and be able to manage all of this data at scale, all of those rewards that real scale, and to have the technology that allows us to do that without thinking about it too much. And then to say, okay, how do we widen the proposition? And how do we take the concept that sits behind Vitality to see if we can apply it to other areas of our business. And that's really what the future is going to look like for us. >> The isolation era really taught us that if you're not a digital business, you're out of business, and pre COVID, a lot of these stories were kind of buried, but the companies that have invested in digital are now thriving. And this is an awesome example, and another point is that Jeff Hammerbacher, one of the founders of Cloudera, early Facebook employee, famously said about 10, 12 years ago, "The best and greatest engineering minds of my generation are trying to figure out how to get people to click on ads." And this is a wonderful example of how to use data to change people's lives. So guys, congratulations, best of luck, really awesome example of applying technology to create an important societal outcome. Really appreciate your time on theCUBE. Thank you. >> Bye-bye. >> All right, and thanks for watching this segment of theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Executive Summit at re:Invent 2021 made possible by Accenture. Keep it right there for more deep dives. (upbeat music)

>>Hey, welcome to the cubes coverage of splunk.com 21. I'm licensed Lisa Martin here. I've got some in Demis with me, a VP in APAC at Splunk Simon. Welcome to the program. >>So here we are, unfortunately at another virtual conference, but there has been a tremendous amount of there's an understatement, right? That we've seen in the last 18 months. We've seen this massive distribution of the workforce. We've seen huge increases in the threat landscape. We've seen things like solar winds, ransomware, increasing significantly acceleration and digital transformation. As companies tried to do whatever they could to enable digital workspaces. I wanted to unpack with you, uh, this 20, 21 state of security report that Splunk has. What are some of the key findings? And then we'll dig into some of the things that you're seeing in the APAC region. >>Yeah, look, we're excited about the report. It really highlighted, I think what a lot of organizations are going through. Um, one of the statistics that stood out for me was, um, 75% of infrastructure users are multi-cloud, but expecting to get that these expecting to increase to 87% of customers will be using multicloud environments. So the reason why that's important is the complexity that creates, uh, for cyber professionals in terms of trying to protect and defend, um, becomes exponentially harder with every new iteration or generation of infrastructure that companies consume. Um, most interesting. Um, we actually saw about a third of users or already using three cloud providers, but that is going to grow to 50% of, of customers will grow to being using three cloud providers or more within the next two years. So again, just that, that trend is going to continue. Uh, the leveraging of cloud infrastructures is a core way of businesses digitizing and modernizing. Um, and as cyber professionals, we have to think about how we're going to address that. >>Definitely. One of the things that I've been seeing and hearing in the last 18 months from a security perspective is that organizations say, you know, it's, it's really not a matter of if we get hit with ransomware, it's when, and I was really surprised to see the, that the state of security report found that 70% of security and it leaders worry they're going to be hit by a solar winds style attack. So the security landscape changing dramatically in the last 18 months. >>Yeah, absolutely. I think the, the, the research is feeding back what we were already hearing from the customers, um, around how this is a critical, uh, motion. And I think the one thing that we've seen as well as the board level agenda now, the risk and cyber has, and, uh, an organization's ability to react or recover. Um, when you have an, an event, um, is now becoming a high priority for organizations, we're seeing a lot of increased spending in cybersecurity as this becomes more and more, um, pretty for organizations for breasts. So yeah, the, the, on the ground experiences certainly matching what we're seeing in the research there. Um, and all of that is a data problem, right? Security is a data problem when something happens, how do I, how do I know? Where, how do I know when, how do I know what, and then how do I know what actions to take based upon the data that we need to get? >>So security being a data problem talked about the complexity of the multi-cloud environments, that percentages of organizations that are adopting that now what that trend is moving towards. Also complexity, I can imagine with data volumes only increasing, what are some of the key challenges that APAC organizations specifically are seeing as they are accelerating digital transformation and doing what they can to enable this distributed workforce? >>Yeah. So, so the hybrid multicloud environment you use, I guess, an indicator of increased complexity, I think we often overlook the fact that I think the hybrid world is here to stay as well. So nobody is a hundred percent cloud and nobody's a hundred percent on prem anymore. It's very much an environment now where I need to, um, I need to protect and defend across that entire surface area and increasingly with edge computing. Um, and as we're looking at, uh, organizations pushing, processing out to the edge of their, um, their operations and whether that's a distributed workforce or sensor-based environments, um, that becomes critical as well. We've got organizations like Intel, uh, that use us to basically monitor not only the cyber infrastructure, but the entire customer infrastructure that they're providing the fabric by census of course, environments, where you can imagine that the security becomes even more important. >>So I think that complexity and the data sources that are now being generated and the explosion of that is, is kind of critical. Um, for apex specifically, we saw some interesting trends we saw about 37% of organizations are using data to now support the compliance environments. Um, about 36% are bringing in non-security data. Um, and about 36%, it really started to use AI or machine learning tools to help them in that, that large scale data volume processing, um, that they weren't able to do before. And then lastly, security analytics really is starting to become, uh, a critical tool in the arsenal of cyber professionals with 34% of organizations saying they're already using some form of security analytics to help them address the threat actors. >>Is there a silver lining in terms of the it folks and the security folks becoming better collaborating better? Anything that you've seen in this report? >>Uh, well in the report, but also in the way that we're seeing SOC organizations use tools. Um, so, uh, the orchestration remediation and automation is a big industry trend, particularly when you look at things like implementing zero trust and how you would use that for, um, putting that additional layer of protection around an organization. Um, and that's where the ability to identify using machine learning or AI, uh, trends or events, understand the actions that need to be taken, understand the data sources that help address and remediate those and be able to automate that frees up the time and cyber security professionals. Um, and that's a critical step we're seeing because there's a shortage of skills and that's been an ongoing challenge, not only in Asia Pacific, but I think worldwide, >>Right. It has been a challenge worldwide. I was actually doing some cyber security work in the last month or so. And I read that this is the fifth consecutive year of that cybersecurity skills gap. So definitely a challenge there, but also if you flip the coin and opportunity. So in terms of some of those challenges that you mentioned, what are some of the key things that organizations and APAC can do to confront and combat those security challenges that are no doubt just only going to grow? >>Yeah, so I think, I think it's about, um, visibility, uh, and getting control, uh, and that's where again, data becomes key to that. So making sure you're capturing the right data, making sure that data is available, um, to your professionals, or if you're using a service provider, making sure that data is captured and available to the service providers, because that is increasingly what we see as the critical step to be able to, when something happens, how do you recover what your meantime to remediation, um, as, as the kind of critical motion. And so that's, again, what we could coming back to is security is a data problem. >>Security is a data problem. Got it. I do want to, uh, unpack a little bit some of the visibility challenges. That is one of the things that was identified. You mentioned that with so much complexity, multi-cloud being, uh, as, as hybrid work, something that's going to stay, what are some of the things that organizations can do and how can Splunk help to remove and mitigate those visibility challenges? >>So we've we just another interesting piece of research, um, it's called the state of data innovation report. Um, that really looked at the way organizations that categorize that data and organizations that actually build a data strategy, um, are actually much more prepared to react, uh, to engage and then to leverage that data for competitive differentiation in their markets. Um, and interestingly 33% of APAC organizations particularly rated their usage of data as better, uh, than, um, the industry average. Um, and 54% of APAC organizations already said they're using technologies like observability, which really helps them innovate around the data. Thinking about that next generation of service they're trying to provide. >>Did you see those are great numbers? It's about a third, um, are, are working on implementing technologies 54% were focused on that observability. Did you see any industries in particular that really leading edge there? Of course, every industry being affected by the pandemic, but I'm just curious if there were any, any ones that stood out >>So many great customer examples that we've got, uh, where we see organizations thinking differently about the way they engage their customers as a result of the digital transformation. Um, for me, one of the ones that stands out is Lenovo, um, you know, 50 billion plus multinational company servicing 180 markets around the world, um, when they looked at their observability approach and tried to understand how they were going to approach troubleshooting, um, when they had issues, if you think about the e-commerce experience for their consumers, um, they were able to reduce the, uh, reduce the downtime, um, and improve, um, the remediation time when there were incidents, uh, even though they had a 300% increase in traffic. And so for the ability for an organization to handle that kind of surge in digital, uh, interactions with their customers and do that to have clear visibility, using metrics, traces, and logs, to understanding exactly what's going on across complex, siloed multi, uh, services, uh, environments was, was critical to the Novo success. And, um, you know, not only from a cybersecurity point of view, but also having real time visibility into their infrastructure became critical as they service their customers. >>Right? One of the things I think we learned Simon during the pandemic, one of the many things is that access to real-time data real-time visibility real time, rather than visibility is no longer a nice to have it's. It was something that in the beginning was sort of organizations needing it to survive. Now organizations needing it to thrive it's that, that real-time visibility is really table stakes for organizations in any industry. >>W we, we kind of saw organizations go through three phases. There was the react phase. Then there was the adapt phase. So, you know, reacting was, first of all, kind of keep my people safe. The adapt phase was how am I going to work? And now we're seeing that next generation, which is really the evolve phase, right? Given the pandemic is still well COVID is still with us. Um, whether it's your, most of the countries, which are treating it more as an endemic or whether you're on the number of the countries still on that journey. And you're in Asia Pacific, we see different levels of, of vaccination status, different levels of, uh, companies starting to open up or countries starting to open up their borders and, um, life getting back to the, what is the new normal, um, all of that is still gonna evolve with a different way of working, moving forward, a different way of engaging our customers and our, our, uh, constituents, if you're a public sector, organization and data is underlying all of that. And for that, where we're kind of excited to be helping some of the largest organizations with that across, across the region, >>Did it is absolutely critical. You know, one of the things that we've also, I think observed in the last year and a half is the, the patients or the fuses of people getting smaller and smaller. So for organizations to have that visibility into data so that they can service their customers, whether it be healthcare or financial services or the tech sector for, for example, the access to that data is critical for brand reputation, reducing churn. And of course, ensuring that the customers are getting what they need to from that data. >>Yeah. A hundred percent. Um, gosh, so many examples across the region. One of the ones that jumps to mind is Flinders university, right? When, when they had to go remote, they had to go virtual, um, 25,000 students overnight, um, suddenly needing to be interacting by digital channels. How do you keep them secure? How do you keep them safe? How do you get insights, uh, in terms of the services that they need to, to protect that student population? >>So if you, if you kind of distill this down into data opportunities for organizations, we'll start with APAC, what do you think the top three data opportunities are of security as a data problem? What are the opportunities to combat that for an organization to be really successful? >>So I think, I think visibility is the first one. So making sure we're capturing the data, making sure we're capturing the right data. Um, and so the ability, uh, not only to capture the data, but to time sequence the data so I can actually understand what's happened. And when, um, the second then is, is, uh, control. Um, so ensuring that the right people have access to the right data, but we, we control that in a way that is specific to our organization. Um, and then lastly compliance. Um, and I think we're seeing a lot of new legislation starts coming around critical infrastructure, um, recognizing the importance of the digital infrastructure to the broader economy, um, and making sure that you're compliant with that critical infrastructure kind of requirements and environments as well as then the traditional regulated industries such as healthcare and financial services, um, become critical in that approach. So thinking about those three elements, and then thinking about how do I then use tools like automation and security analytics to really accelerate, um, the capabilities that we have as an organization. >>So observability control compliance, give me the 32nd pitch of how Splunk can help organizations achieve all three of those. >>So observability really is about getting insights into all of your environments. So, uh, it's all about metrics, traces and logs, which is about understanding exactly what's going on with every experience of every digital interaction I have with every customer and the ability to Splunk through that with zero, uh, zero sampling or full fidelity of that data is something we see our customers, particularly Navy, um, security, uh, look for me to it's all about orchestration and analytics. So how do I, how do I get that understanding that, that user behavior understanding the analytics around that, and then how machine learning becomes a critical part of that to help me scale my cyber infrastructure and defend. And then lastly resilience is really the core for all it systems in a digital world. Um, and being able to not only harden deliver resilient services like going over, I was able to do the 300% increase in their web traffic. Um, but also when something does go wrong and be able to remediate quickly become critical as well. >>Right? That quick remediation is because, like I was saying earlier, it's no longer a, if we get hit it's when organizations need to have that resilience baked in. Well, Simon, thank you for joining me, breaking down. Some of those reports what's going on in APAC, some of the trends and also some of the opportunities, security being a data problem, um, and organizations, what they can do to remediate that we appreciate your time. Thanks for having my pleasure for Simon Davies and Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of splunk.com 21.

(fastpaced upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCubes coverage of the power of N and the collaborations between HPE Aruba and Pensando. Where the two companies are setting out to create a new category in network switching. Joining me now is Simon McCormack, who looks after product management at HPE Aruba. Welcome Simon. Good to see you. >> Good morning. Thanks for having me today. >> You're very welcome. So Simon, we've been talking all day about the Aruba switching fabric that you're bringing to market, embedding the Pensando technology. Can you tell us what's the primary value prop that AFC brings to its customers? >> Sure. Aruba Fabric Composer. This is orchestration and management for the Aruba wide switching platform. Primarily for data centers. It does a lot of things. I'll give you three key ones just to get a feel for it. So in data center networking, there's a lot of complex technologies. I'm afraid to say, lease spines, overlays, underlays, EDP and OSPF BGP. I can throw out loads of acronyms for you. Fabric Composer can really simplify through a bunch of intent based workflows, the deployment and management of these fabrics. We can do it either interactively through a UI or fully API driven, if you want to. So it really takes away a lot of the plexity there makes it dead easy to deploy these and that scale. Number two, in a data center, a lot of compute storage hypervisor technologies that you have to interact with the THEO network products. So in Fabric Composer, we built an integration layer into it that interacts with other orchestrators, vCenter, VMware vcenter is a good example of that. So an operator may make changes to vCenter that affect the network. You don't want to call the network team for it. Fabric Composer can automate that network side configuration on the Aruba switch, making your day to operations, insertion of new services, much more simpler. And then finally, number three, because we've got all these capabilities I've just told you about. We actually have a great typology model that we build from it. And we can use that to visualize this virtual to physical network layer that is really powerful for troubleshooting the environment. >> Great? So three things, actually four right. To simplify or integrate and automate. And it's kind of two and two way, I'm going to to call it. and then the visualization piece for troubleshooting. Awesome. What about security policy? How are you thinking about that in this release? >> Yeah, so that's where in this release, we're extending it with the Pensando PSM technologies embedded into the 10K. Now we can use Aruba Fabric Composer to actually orchestrate the policy in addition to the network. So you think about today, Fabric Composer does network primarily. You bring policy into it. You've got one single pane of glass now that does network and policy. It actually provides a really powerful capabilities for operators of different skill sets to be able to manage and orchestrate this environment. >> What about the sort of operational model as it pertains to the network and security, I'm interested in how flexible that is. For instance, if a customer wants to use their own tooling or operational frameworks. What if they want to leverage multi-vendor fabrics like a third-party spine? How do you deal with all of that? >> Yeah, and I think that's, we built that into essentially the DNA of this technology is that we're, we're expecting to often go into brownfield environments. Where they've already got best practices for security and networking. They've already got networking vendors there. The 10K is a very powerful lease switch on its own. We want those lease switches to go in all of these different environments, not just Greenfield. It's really great for Greenfield. And I'm going to explain this a little bit in a few ways. First of all, the technology we have with Aruba fabric Composer and Pensando PSM, you can do a pure operational split between them SecOps, NetOps. A lot of customers that's how they deal with it. They've got the security operations team, network operations team. If they're split, you can use the two tools and make a fantastic product using that. However, if they're not split, and you've got a single policy for it. You can use Aruba Fabric Composer to do both of them. So you've got the options there and we fully embrace that in the architecture of what we built. This extends to multiple layers for the technology build as well. Again, as I said, the 10K's is a lease switch, it can connect to third-party spines. So you could use Fabric Composer to manage this lease Spitch and the policy you could use Fabric Composer just to manage the least switch and connect and interoperate the lease to the spine, or you can do a full Aruba solution, the full Aruba spine and use that operating model. There's one final thing in this area is fabric Composers are a UI based orchestrator, API driven. Some customers love it. Some customers love their CLIs. We fully embrace the operational model where customers still use their own APIs and their own CLIs. So the customer may be using Ansible to automate through API. They can still use that directly to the switch and they can use it to AFC and mix the two. If you talk directly to a switch and change it, Fabric Composer detects it and basically sinks its configuration together. So we can insert all or any part of this solution into existing or new Netflix. >> Yeah, that's nice. Right? Because I mean, so there's the network hard guys, right they, they want that CLI access. So you you're accommodating that. And then as well, being able to bring those SecOps view and the netOps view together is important because let's say, let's face it. A lot of organizations, especially some of the smaller ones, they don't actually have a full blown SecOps team. That's really the netOps responsibility. And so that's nice flexibility, you can handle both worlds. How about segmentation? What a customer is telling you that they want regarding segmentation and how are you guys approaching that? >> Yeah, I mean, it's, it's actually a key feature of what we're doing in this area. Now the iland segmentation generates it's kind of a wide area with many layers to it and we could talk about it for hours. So let me talk briefly about some of the areas we're going into when it comes to the segmentation. But particularly of a compute and virtual type environment. So when you, when you're typically creating policies in today's world, current policies based on addresses, IP addresses, or Mac addresses. You have lots of rules and big lists of addresses. It's really annoying. Customers generally don't talk in addresses. They talk in machines and names of machines. So if you think about what I've already told you with the Fabric Composer, we've already got these hooks in the compute hypervisor layer. So we didn't know about the virtual machines? So it said obviously, a natural extension now for you to be able to create these policies based on the machines. So there's, there's a scale problem in policy distribution at two levels, at the top and the bottom. The top level is your chronic create the policy. You've got this massive distribution addresses. So Fabric Composer can really help you by allowing you to then create these groups, sensible groups, using the names then you can distribute. The 10K solution with the distributed architecture of the bottom layer, now allows us to distribute these policies and rules across your racks within your data center. So it scales really well, but that's one level I've described. You know, you're creating groups of machines with names, so it's easier to define it, but there's auto and automation angle to this as well. You might not want to even create it interactively. Now a lot of customers with VMware vCenter, For example, are tagging the virtual machines. So the tag tells you a group information. Again, Fabric Composer can already get the tag within its database model. So we can use the tag now either to fully automate or use as a hint to creating these groups. So now I've got a really simple way to basically just categorize my machines into the groups so that now I can push rules down onto them. And there's one, one final thing that I just want to tell you before, before we move on. There's, there's often a zero trust model you want to do in the data center for segmentation. Meaning I've got two virtual machines on the same network on the same host. Normally they can talk to each other, nothing's stopping them, but sometimes you want to isolate even those two. You can do it in products like vCenter with PV land technologies. A bit cumbersome to configure on the vSphere side, you got to match it with what you see on the switch side. It's one of those that's a real headache, unless you've got an orchestrator to do it. So Fabric Composer could basically orchestrate this isolated solution. You're now grouping your machines and you're saying they're isolated. We can do the smarts and both of the vCenter side and the switch side, get them in sync, get it all configured. And now the masses can start to do this kind of segmentation at scale. >> Got it. Thank you Simon. Can the Fabric Composer kind of be used as the primary prism for troubleshooting? How do you handle troubleshooting and this art combined architecture? Who, who do I call when there's a problem? How do you approach that? >> Well, definitely start by calling me or actually call my product first, so fabric Composer. If you're using it, use that as the front tool for what you're going to try and figure out what's going on. There is a global health dashboard. It encompasses networking security policy across the solution, across the fabric. So that's your, tells you what's going on immediately. Down to port stats on what's happening within the physical topology of the network. Down to the end-to-end view, we have in terms of policy connectivity between machines. So Fabric Composer is your first port of call, but we built a solution here that we don't want to hide the pieces underneath it. Any networking guy knows when they're deep troubleshooting networking stuff, they're going to end up with the switch. So you started the orchestrator, but sometimes in the deep troubleshooting, not day-to-day, hopefully. You'll go to the switch and you'll troubleshoot that way. We've got the same technology here with the policy, with the firewall rules, with Pensando PSM. We still fully embrace for deep troubleshooting, go to Pensando PSM. They have really advanced tools in their bag of tricks in the product to give you advanced troubleshooting down to the policy layer. They have a really powerful firewall log capability, where you can search and sort, and see exactly what role is allowing or stopping any traffic going through the environment. And the two orchestrated model, we really like it 'cause it scales really well. It allows Fabric Composer to remain lightweight, PSM focused on the policy orchestration bit. But again, if your that customer that wants to do single pane of glass use Fabric Composer for the standard day-to-day stuff. But you've got the tools there to do the advanced troubleshooting between the different elements that we have within the Pensando and the Aruba tools. >> Yeah, really well thought out. You got the simplification angle nailed, the integration automation we talked about that, the visualization and the topology map, zero trust. And then remediation with deep^ened inspection. Simon, thanks so much for taking us through the announcements. Really appreciate your insights and time today. >> Thank you very much. >> You're welcome. Okay. Keep it right there, this is Dave Vellante for theCube. More content from the HPE Aruba Pensando announcements coming right up. (soothing music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to the cubes coverage of the power of N and the collaborations between HPE Aruba and Pensando. Where the two companies are setting out to create a new category in network switching. Joining me now is Simon McCormack, who looks after product management at HPE Aruba. Welcome Simon. Good to see you. >> Good morning. Thanks for having me today. >> You're very welcome. So Simon, we've been talking all day about the Aruba switching fabric that you're bringing to market embedding the Pensando technology. Can you tell us what's the primary value prop that AFC brings to its customers? >> Sure. Aruba fabric composer. This is orchestration and management for the Aruba wide switching platform, primarily for data centers. It does a lot of things. I'll give you three key ones just to get a feel for it. So in data center, networking, there's a lot of complex technologies. I'm afraid to say, lease spines, overlays, underlays, EDPs, OSPs PGP. I can throw out loads of acronyms for you. Fabric composer can really simplify through a bunch of intent based workflows, the deployment and management of these fabrics. We can do it either interactively through a UI or fully API driven if you want to. So it really takes away a lot of the complexity there makes it dead easy to deploy these and that scale. Number two, in a data center, a lot of compute storage hypervisor technologies that you have to interact with with your network products. So in fabric composer, we built an integration layer into it, that interacts with other orchestrators. V-Center, VMware Vcenter is a good example of that. So an operator may make changes to V-Center that affect the network. You don't want to call the network team for it. Fabric composer can automate that network side configuration on the Aruba switch, making your day to operations, insertion of new services, much more simpler. And then finally, number three, because we've got all these capabilities I've just told you about. We actually have a great typology model that we build from it. And we can use that to visualize this virtual to physical network layer that is really powerful for troubleshooting the environment. >> Great, so three things actually for right simplify, you integrate and automate, and it's kind of two and two way I'm going to call it and then the visualization piece for troubleshooting. Awesome. What about security policy? How are you thinking about that in this release? >> Yeah, so that's where in this release, we're extending it with the Persando PSM technologies embedded into the 10 K. Now we can use Aruba fabric composer to actually orchestrate the policy in addition to the network. So you think about today, fabric poser does network primarily you bring policy into it, you've got one single pane of glass now that doesn't network in policy, it actually provides a really powerful capabilities for operators of different skill sets to be able to manage and orchestrate this environment. >> What about the sort of operational model as it pertains to the network and security, I'm interested in how flexible that is. Like for instance, if a customer wants to use their own tooling or operational frameworks or frameworks so what if they want to leverage multi-vendor fabrics like a third-party spine? How do you deal with all of that? >> Yeah, and I think that's, we built that into essentially the DNA of this technology is that where we're expecting to often go into brownfield environments where they've already got best practices for security and networking. They've already got networking vendors there. The 10 K the very powerful lease switch on its own. We want those lease switches to go in all of these different environments, not just Greenfield. It's really great for Greenfield. And I'm going to explain this a little bit in a few ways. First of all, the technology we have with Aruba fabric composer and Pensando PSM, you can do a pure operational split between them. SecOps, NetOps a lot of customers that's how they deal with it. They've got the security operations team network operations team. If they're split, you can use the two tools and make a fantastic product using that. However, they're not split and you've got a single policy for it. You can use Aruba fabric composer to do both of them. So you've got the options there and we fully embrace that in the architecture of what we built. This extends to multiple layers for the technology build as well. Again, as I said, the 10 K's at Leafs, which it can connect to third-party spines. So you could use fabric composer to manage this lead switch and the policy you could use fabric composer just to manage the lease switch and connect and inter-operate the Leaf's to a spine, or you can do a full Aruba solution, the full Rube Leaf spine and use that operating model. There's one final thing in this area is fabri Composers are a UI based orchestrator, API driven. Some customers love it. Some customers that love their CLIs, we fully embrace the operational model where customers still use their own API APIs and their own CLIs. So the customer may be using Ansible to automate through API. They can still use that directly to the switch and they can use it to AFC and mix the two. If you talk directly to a switch and change it, fabric composer detects it and basically sinks its configuration together. So we can insert all or any part of this solution into existing or new Networks. >> Yeah, that's nice. Right? Because I mean, so there's the network hard guys, they want that CLI access, so you you're accommodating that. And then as well, being able to bring those SecOps view and the NetOps view together is important because let's face it. A lot of organizations, especially some of the smaller ones, they don't actually have a full blown SecOps team, that's really the NetOps responsibility. And so that's nice flexibility. You can handle both worlds. How about segmentation? When a customer is telling you that they want regarding segmentation and how are you guys approaching that? >> Yeah, I mean, it's actually a key feature of what we're doing in this area. Now the land segmentation generates it's kind of a wide area with many layers to it and we could talk about it for hours. So let me talk briefly about some of the areas we're going into when it comes to the segmentation, particularly the compute-virtual type environment. So when you, you're typically creating policies in today's world, current policies based on addresses, IP addresses, or Mac addresses. You have lots of rules and big lists of addresses. It's really annoying. Customers generally don't talk in addresses. They talk in machines and names of machines. So if you think about what I've already told you with a fabric composer. We've already got these hooks in the compute hypervisor layer. So what do we know about the virtual machines? So it's undoubtedly a natural extension now for you to be able to create these policies based on the machines. So there's a scale problem in policy distribution, at two levels, at the top and the bottom. The top level is your chronic create the policy. You've got this massive distribution addresses. So fabric composer can really help you by allowing you to then create these groups, sensible groups, using the names. Then you can distribute the 10 K solution with the distributed architecture of the bottom layer, now allows us to distribute these policies and rules across your racks within your data center. So it scales really well, but that's one level I've described. You know, you're creating groups of machines with names, so it's easier to define it, but there's also an automation angle to this as well. You might not want to even create it interactively. A lot of customers with VMware Vcenter for example, are tagging the virtual machines. So the tag tells you a group information. Again, fabric composer can already get the tag within its database model. So we can use the tag now either to fully automate or use as a hint to creating these groups. So now I've got a really simple way to basically just categorize my machines into the groups so that now I can push rules down onto the, and there's one, final thing that I just want to tell you before we move on, There's often a zero trust model you want to do in the data center for segmentation, meaning I've got two virtual machines on the same network on the same host. Normally they can talk to each other, nothing's stopping them, but sometimes you want to isolate even those two. You can do it in products like V-Center with PV land technologies. A bit cumbersome to configure on the VSphere side, you've got to match it with what you see on the switch side. It's one of those, that's a real headache, unless you've got an orchestrator to do it. So fabric composer could basically orchestrate this isolated solution. You're now grouping the machines and you're saying they're isolated. We can do the smarts and both of the center side and the switch side, get them in sync, get it all configured. And now the masses can start to do this kind of segmentation at scale. >> Got it. Thank you Simon. Can the fabric composer kind of be used as the primary prism for troubleshooting? How do you handle troubleshooting and this art combined architecture? Who, who do I call when there's a problem? How do you approach that? >> Well, definitely start by calling me or actually call my product first, so fabric composer. If you're using it, use that as the front tool for what you're going to try and figure out what's going on. There is a global health dashboard. It encompasses networking security policy across the solution, across the fabric. So that's your tells you what's going on immediately, down to port stats on what's happening within the physical topology of the network down to the end to end view, we have in terms of policy connectivity between machines. So fabric composer is your first port of call, but we built a solution here that we don't want to hide the pieces underneath it. Any networking guy knows when they're deep troubleshooting networking stuff, they're going to end up at the switch. So you started the orchestrator, but sometimes in the deep troubleshooting, not day-to-day hopefully, you'll go to the switch and you'll troubleshoot that way. We've got the same technology here with the policy, with the firewall rules, with Pensando PSM, we still fully embrace. For deep troubleshooting, go to Pensando PSM. They have really advanced tools in their bag of tricks in the product to give you advanced troubleshooting down to the policy layer that they have a really powerful firewall log capability, where you can search and sort and see exactly what role is allowing or stopping any traffic going through the environment. And the two orchestrated model, we really like it because it scales really well. It allows fabric composer to remain lightweight, PSM focused on the policy orchestration bit. But again, if you're the customer that wants to do single pane of glass, use fabric composer for the standard day-to-day stuff. But you've got the tools there to do the advanced troubleshooting between the different elements that we have within the Pensando and the Aruber tools. >> Yeah, really well thought out, you get the simplification angle nailed, the integration automation we talked about that, the visualization and a topology map, zero trust, and then remediation with deepened spend inspection. Simon, thanks so much for taking us through the announcements, really appreciate your insights and time today. >> Thank you very much. >> You're welcome. Okay. Keep it right there. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. More content from the HPE Aruba Pensando announcements, coming right up. (soft music)

>>mhm Yes. >>Hello and welcome back to the cubes coverage of dr khan 2021 virtual. I'm john Kerry hosted the Q got a great cube segment here. Simon Maple Field C T Oh it's technique. Great company security shifting left great to have you on Simon. Thanks for thanks for stopping by >>absolute pleasure. Thank you very much for having me. >>So you guys were on last year the big partnership with DR Conn remember that interview vividly because it was really the beginning at the beginning but really come to me the mainstream of shifting left as devops. It's not been it's been around for a while. But as a matter of practice as containers have been going super mainstream. Super ballistic in the developer community then you're seeing what's happening. It's containers everywhere. Security Now dev sec apps is the standard. So devops great infrastructure as code. We all know that but now it's def sec ops is standard. This is the real deal. Give us the update on what's going on with sneak. >>Absolutely, yeah. And you know, we're still tireless in our approach of trying to get make sure developers don't just have the visibility of security but are very much empowered in terms of actually fixing issues and secure development is what we're really striving for. So yeah, the update, we're still very, very deep into a partnership with DACA. We have updates on DR desktop which allows developers to scan the containers on the command line, providing developers that really fast feedback as as early as possible. We also have uh, you know, new updates and support for running Docker scan on Lennox. Um, and yeah, you know, we're still there on the Docker hub and providing that security insights um, to, to users who are going to Docker hub to grab their images. >>Well, for the folks watching maybe for the first time, the sneak Docker partnership, we went in great detail last year was the big reveal why Docker and sneak partnership, what is the evolution of that partnership over the year? They speak highly of you guys as a developer partner. Why Doctor? What's the evolution looked like? >>It's a it's a really great question. And I think, you know, when you look at the combination of DACA and sneak well actually let's take let's take each as an individual. Both companies are very, very developer focused. First of all, right, so our goals and will be strife or what we what we tirelessly spend their time doing is creating features and creating, creating an environment in which a developer you can do what they need to do as easily as possible. And that, you know, everyone says they want to be developer friendly, They want to be developer focused. But very few companies can achieve. And you look at a company like doctor, you're a company like sneak it really, really provides that developer with the developer experience that they need to actually get things done. Um, and it's not just about being in a place that a developer exists. It's not enough to do that. You need to provide a developer with that experience. So what we wanted to do was when we saw doctor and extremely developer friendly environment and a developer friendly company, when we saw the opportunity there to partner with Yoko, we wanted to provide our security developer friendliness and developer experience into an already developed a friendly tool. So what the partnership provides is the ease of, you know, deploying code in a container combined with the ease of testing your code for security issues and fixing security issues in your code and your container and pulling it together in one place. Now, one of the things which we as a as a security company um pride ourselves on is actually not necessarily saying we provide security tools. One of what our favorite way of saying is we're a developer tooling company. So we provide tools that are four developers now in doing that. It's important you go to where the developers are and developers on DACA are obviously in places like the Docker hub or the Docker Cli. And so it's important for us to embed that behavior and that ease of use inside Dhaka for us to have that uh that that flow. So the developer doesn't need to leave the Docker Cli developer that doesn't need to leave Docker hub in order to see that data. If you want to go deeper, then there are probably easier ways to find that data perhaps with sneak or on the sneak site or something like that. But the core is to get that insight to get that visibility and to get that remediation, you can see that directly in in the in the Dhaka environment. And so that's what makes the relationship so so powerful. The fact that you combine everything together and you do it at source >>and doing it at the point of code. >>Writing >>code is one of the big things I've always liked about the value proposition is simple shift left. Um So let's just step back for a second. I got to ask you this question because this I wanted to make sure we get this on the table. What are the main challenges uh and needs to, developers have with container security? What are you seeing as the main top uh A few things that they need to have right now for the challenges uh with container security? >>Yeah, it's a it's a very good question. And I think to answer that, I think we need to um we need to think of it in a couple of ways. First of all, you've just got developers security uh in general, across containers. Um And the that in itself is there are different levels at which developers engage with containers. Um In some organizations, you have security teams that are very stringent in terms of what developers can and can't do in other organizations. It's very much the developer that that chooses their environment, chooses their parent image, et cetera. And so there when a developer has many, many choices in which they need to need to decide on, some of those choices will lead to more issues, more risk. And when we look at a cloud native environment, um uh Let's take let's take a node uh image as an example, the number of different uh images tags you can choose from as a developer. It's you know, there are hundreds, probably thousands. That you can actually you can actually choose. What is the developer gonna do? Well, are they going to just copy paste from another doctor file, for example, most likely. What if there are issues in that docker file? They're just gonna copy paste that across mis configurations that exist. Not because the developer is making the wrong decision, but because the developer very often doesn't necessarily know that they need to add a specific directive in. Uh So it's not necessarily what you add in a conflict file, but it's very often what you admit. So there are a couple of things I would say from a developer point of view that are important when we think about cloud security, the first one is just that knowledge that understanding what they need to do, why they need to do it. Secure development doesn't need to be, doesn't mean they need to be deep in security. It means they need to understand how they can develop securely and what what the best decisions that could come from guard rails, from the security team that they provide the development team to offer. But that's the that's an important error of secure development. The second thing and I think one of the most important things is understanding or not understanding necessarily, but having the information to get an act on those things early. So we know the length of time that developers are uh working on a branch or working on um some some code changes that is reducing more and more and more so that we can push to production very, very quickly. Um What we need to do is make sure that as a developer is making their changes, they can make the right decision at the right time and they have the right information at that time. And a lot of this could be getting information from tools, could be getting information from your team where it could be getting information from your production environments and having that information early is extremely important to make. That decision. May be in isolation with your team in an autonomous way or with advice from the security team. But I would say those are the two things having that information that will allow you to make that action, that positive change. Um uh and and yeah, understanding and having that knowledge about how you can develop security. >>All right. So I have a security thing. So I'm a development team and by the way, this whole team's thing is a huge deal. I think we'll get to that. I want to come back to that in a second but just throw this out there. Got containers, got some security, it's out there and you got kubernetes clusters where containers are coming and going. Sometimes containers could have malware in them. Um and and this is, I've heard this out and about how do how that happens off container or off process? How do you know about it? Is that infected by someone else? I mean is it gonna be protected? How does the development team once it's released into the wild, so to speak. Not to be like that, but you get the idea, it's like, okay, I'm concerned off process this containers flying around. What is it How do you track all >>and you know, there's a there's a few things here that are kind of like potential potential areas that, you know, we can trip up when we think about malware that's running um there are certain things that we need to that we need to consider and what we're really looking at here are kind of, what do we have in place in the runtime that can kind of detect these issues are happening? How do we block that? And how do you provide that information back to the developer? The area that I think is, and that is very, very important in order to in order to be able to identify monitor that those environments and then feed that back. So that that that's the kind of thing that can be that can be fixed. Another aspect is, is the static issues and the static issues whether that's in your os in your OS packages, for example, that could be key binaries that exist in your in your in your docker container out the box as well or of course in your application, these are again, areas that are extremely important to detect and they can be detected very very early. So some things, you know, if it's malware in a package that has been identified as malware then absolutely. That can be that can be tracked very very early. Sometimes these things need to be detected a little bit later as well. But yeah, different tools for different for different environments and wear sneak is really focused. Is this static analysis as early as possible. >>Great, great insight there. Thanks for sharing that certainly. Certainly important. And you know, some companies classes are locked down and all of sudden incomes, you know, some some malware from a container, people worried about that. So I want to bring that up. Uh The other thing I want to ask you is this idea of end to end security um and this is a team formation thing we're seeing where modern teams have essentially visibility of their workload and to end. So this is a huge topic. And then by the way it might integrate their their app might integrate with other processes to that's great for containers as well and observe ability and microservices. So this is the trend. What's in it for the developer? If I work with sneak and docker, what benefits do I get if I want to go down that road of having these teams began to end, but I want the security built in. >>Mhm. Yeah, really, really important. And I think what's what's most important there is if we don't look end to end, there are component views and there are applications. If we don't look into end, we could have our development team fixing things that realistically aren't in production anyway or aren't the key risks that are potentially hurting us in our production environment. So it's important to have that end to end of you so that we have the right insights and can prioritize what we need to identify and look at early. Um, so I think, I think that visibility into end is extremely important. If we think about who, who is re fixing uh certain issues, again, this is gonna depend from dog to walk, but what we're seeing more and more is this becoming a developer lead initiative to not just find or be given that information, but ultimately fixed. They're getting more and more responsible for DR files for for I see for for their application code as well. So one of the areas which we've looked into as well is identifying and actually running in cuba Netease workloads to identify where the most important areas that a developer needs to look at and this is all about prioritization. So, you know, if the developer has just a component view and they have 100 different images, 100 different kubernetes conflicts, you know, et cetera. Where do they prioritize, where do they spend their time? They shouldn't consider everything equal. So this identification of where the workloads are running and what um is causing you the most risk as a business and as an organization, that is the data. That can be directly fed back into your, your your vulnerability data and then you can prioritize based on the kubernetes workloads that are in your production and that can be fed directly into the results in the dashboards. That's neat. Can provide you as well. So that end to end story really provides the context you need in order to not just develop securely, but act and action issues in a proper way. >>That's a great point. Context matters here because making it easy to do the right thing as early as possible, the right time is totally an efficiency productivity gain, you see in that that's clearly what people want. It's a great formula, success, reduce the time it takes to do something, reduced the steps and make it easy. Right, come on, that's a that's a formula. Okay, so I gotta bring that to the next level. When I ask you specifically around automation, this is one the hot topic and def sec ops, automation is part of it. You got scale, you got speed, you've got a I machine learning, you go out of all these new things. Microservices, how do you guys fit into the automation story? >>It's a great question. And you know, one of the recent reports that we that we did based on a survey data this year called the state of a state of cloud, native applications security. We we asked the question how automated our people in their in their deployment pipelines and we found some really strong correlations between value from a security point of view um in terms of in terms of having that automation in it, if I can take you through a couple of them and then I'll address that question about how we can be automated in that. So what we found is a really strong correlation as you would expect with security testing in ci in your source code repositories and all the way through the deployment ci and source code were the two of the most most well tested areas across the pipeline. However the most automated teams were twice as likely to test in I. D. S. And testing your CLS in local development. And now those are areas that are really hard to automate if at all because it's developers running running their cli developers running and testing in their I. D. So the having a full automation and full uh proper testing throughout the sclc actually encourages and and makes developers test more in their development environment. I'm not saying there's causation there but there's definite correlation. A couple of other things that this pushes is um Much much more likely to test daily or continuously being automated as you would expect because it's part of the bills as part of your monitoring. But crucially uh 73% of our respondents were able to fix a critical issue in less than a week as opposed to just over 30% of people that were not automated, so almost double people are More likely to fix within a week. 36% of people who are automated can fix a critical security issue in less than a day as opposed to 8% of people who aren't automated. So really strong data that correlates being automated with being able to react now. If you look at something like Sneak what if our um goals of obviously being developer friendly developer first and being able to integrate where developers are and throughout the pipeline we want to test everywhere and often. Okay, so we start as far left as we can um integrating into, you know, CLS integrating into Docker hub, integrating into into doctors can so at the command line you type in doctors can you get sneak embedded in DHAKA desktop to provide you those results so as early as possible, you get that data then all the way through to to uh get reposed providing that testing and automatically testing and importing results from there as well as as well as other repositories, container repositories, being at a poor from there and test then going into ci being able to run container tests in C I to make sure we're not regressing and to choose what we want to do their whether we break, whether we continue with with raising an issue or something like that, and then continuing beyond that into production. So we can monitor tests and automatically send pull requests, etcetera. As and when new issues or new fixes occur. So it's about integrating at every single stage, but providing some kind of action. So, for example, in our ui we provide the ability to say this is the base level you should be or could be at, it will reduce your number of vulnerabilities by X and as a result you're going to be that much more secure that action ability across the pipeline. >>That's a great, great data dump, that's a masterclass right there on automation. Thanks for sharing that sign. I appreciate it. I gotta ask you the next question that comes to my mind because I think this is kind of the dots connect for the customer is okay. I love this kind of hyper focus on containers and security. You guys are all over it, shift left as far as possible, be there all the time, test, test, test all through the life cycle of the code. Well, the one thing that is popping up as a huge growth areas, obviously hybrid cloud devops across both environments and the edge, whether it's five G industrial or intelligent edge, you're gonna have kubernetes clusters at the edge now. So you've got containers. The relationship to kubernetes and then ultimately cloud native work clothes at, say, the edge, which has data has containers. So there's a lot of stuff going on all over the place. What's your, what's your comment there for customer says, Hey, you know, I got, this is my architecture that's happening to me now. I'm building it out. We're comfortable with kubernetes put in containers everywhere, even on the edge how to sneak fit into that story. >>Yeah, really, really great question. And I think, you know, a lot of what we're doing right now is looking at a developer platform. So we care about, we care about everything that a developer can check in. Okay, so we care about get, we care about the repositories, we care about the artifact. So um, if you look at the expansion of our platform today, we've gone from code that people uh, third party libraries that people test. We added containers. We've also added infrastructure as code. So Cuban eighties conflicts, Terror form scripts and things like that. We're we're able to look at everything that the developer touches from their code with sneak code all the way through to your to your container. And I see, so I think, you know, as we see more and more of this pushing out into the edge, cuba Nitties conflict that that, you know, controls a lot of that. So much of this is now going to be or not going to be, but so much of the environment that we need to look at is in the configurations or the MIS configurations in that in those deployment scripts, um, these are some of the areas which which we care a lot about in terms of trying to identify those vulnerabilities, those miS configurations that exist within within those scripts. So I can see yeah more and more of this and there's a potential shift like that across to the edge. I think it's actually really exciting to be able to see, to be able to see those uh, those pushing across. I don't necessarily see any other, any, you know, different security threats or the threat landscape changing as a result of that. Um there could be differences in terms of configurations, in terms of miS configurations that that that could increase as a result, but, you know, a lot of this and it just needs to be dealt with in the appropriate way through tooling through, through education of of of of how that's done. >>Well, obviously threat vectors are all gonna look devops like there's no perimeter. So they're everywhere right? Looking at I think like a hacker to be being there. Great stuff. Quick question on the future relationship with DR. Obviously you're betting a lot here on that container relationship, a good place to start. A lot of benefits there. They have dependencies, they're going to have implications. People love them, they love to use them, helps old run with the new and helps the new run better. Certainly with kubernetes, everything gets better together. What's the future with the DACA relationship? Take us through how you see it. >>So yeah, I mean it's been an absolute blast the doctor and you know, even from looking at some of the internal internal chats, it's been it's been truly wonderful to see the, the way in which both the doctor and sneak from everything from an engineering point of view from a marketing, from a product team. It's been a pleasure to, it's been a pleasure to see that relationship grow and flourish. And, and I think there's two things, first of all, I think it's great that as companies, we, we both worked very, very well together. I think as as as users um seeing, you know, doctor and and and sneak work so so seamlessly and integrated a couple of things. I would love to see. Um, I think what we're gonna see more and more and this is one of the areas that I think, um you know, looking at the way sneak is going to be viewing security in general. We see a lot of components scanning a lot, a lot of people looking at a components can and seeing vulnerabilities in your components. Can I think what we need to, to to look more upon is consolidating a lot of the a lot of the data which we have in and around different scans. What I would love to see is perhaps, you know, if you're running something through doctors can how can you how can you view that data through through sneak perhaps how can we get that closer integration through the data that we that we see. So I would love to see a lot more of that occur, you know, within that relationship and these are kind of like, you know, we're getting to that at that stage where we see integration, it just various levels. So we have the integration where we have we are embedded but how can we make that better for say a sneak user who also comes to the sneak pages and wants to see that data through sneak. So I would love to see at that level uh more there where as I mentioned, we have we have some some additional support as well. So you can run doctors can from from Lenox as well. So I can see more and more of that support rolling out but but yeah, in terms of the future, that's where I would love to see us uh to grow more >>and I'll see in the landscape side on the industry side, um, security is going beyond the multiple control planes out there. Kubernetes surveillance service matches, etcetera, continues to be the horizontally scalable cloud world. I mean, and you got you mentioned the edge. So a lot more complexity to rein in and make easier. >>Yeah, I mean there's a lot more complexity, you know, from a security point of view, the technology is the ability to move quickly and react fast in production actually help security a lot because you know, being able to spin a container and make changes and and bring a container down. These things just weren't possible, you know, 10 years ago, 20 years ago. Pre that it's like it was it's insanely hard compared trying to trying to do that compared to just re spinning a container up. However, the issue I see from a security point of view, the concerns I see is more around a culture and an education point of view of we've got all this great tech and it's it's awesome but we need to do it correctly. So making sure that as you mentioned with making the right decision, what we want to make sure is that right decision is also the easy decision and the clear decision. So we just need to make sure that as we as we go down this journey and we're going down it fast and it's not gonna, I don't see it slowing down, we're going fast down that journey. How do we make, how do we prepare ourselves for that? We're already seeing, you know, miss configurations left, right and center in the news, I am roles as three buckets, etcetera. These are they're they're simpler fixes than we than we believe, right? We just need to identify them and and make those changes as needed. So we just need to make sure that that is in place as we go forward. But it's exciting times for sure. >>It's really exciting. And you got the scanning and right at the point of coding automation to help take that basic mis configuration, take that off the table. Not a lot of manual work, but ultimately get to that cloud scale cool stuff. >>Simon, thank you >>for coming on the cube dr khan coverage. Really appreciate your time. Drop some nice commentary there. Really appreciate it. Thank you. >>My pleasure. Thank you very much. >>Simon Maple Field C T. O. A sneak hot startup. Big partner with Docker Security, actually built in deVOPS, is now dead. Say cops. This is dr khan cube 2021 virtual coverage. I'm sean for your host. Thanks for watching. Mm.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting Cuban cloud brought to you by silicon angle. Hi. I'm still Minuteman. And welcome back to the Cube on Cloud. Talking about really important topics is toe how developers we're changing how they build their applications where they live. Of course. Long discussion we've had for a number of years, you know? How do things change in hybrid environment? We've been talking for years. Public cloud and Private Cloud and really excited for this session. We're gonna talk about how edge environment and ai impact that. So happy to walk back. One of our cube alumni, Simon Crosby, is currently the chief technology officer with swim. Got plenty of viewpoints on AI the edge and knows the developer world. Well, Simon, welcome back. Thanks so much for joining us. >>Thank you, sir, for having me. >>All right. So let let let's start start for a second. Let's talk about developers, you know, used to be, you know, for for years we talked about, you know, what's the level of abstraction we get? Does it sit? You know, you know, do I put it on bare metal? Do I virtualized it? Do I contain Arise it. Do I make it serve? Ellis? Ah, lot of those things. You know that the app developer doesn't want to even think about. But location matters a whole lot when we're talking about things like a I where do I have all my data? That I could do my training? Where do I actually have to do the processing? And, of course, edge. Just changes by orders of magnitude, Some of the things like Leighton see, and where data lives and everything like that. So with that as a set up would love to get just your framework as to what you're hearing from developers and what will gettinto Some of the solutions that that you and your team are helping them toe do their jobs >>where you're up to lights to the data onslaught is very riel. Companies that I deal with are facing more and more real time data from products from their infrastructure from their partners, whatever it happens to be, and they need to make decisions rapidly. And the problem that they're facing is that traditional ways of processing that data or to so so perhaps the big data approach which by now is a bit old. It's been long in the tooth, Um, where you stored it and then you analyze it later is problematic. First of all, data streams of boundless so you don't really know winter analyze. But second, you can't store all. And so the story and analyze approach has to change and swim is trying to do something about this by adopting a process off. Analyze um, on the fly. So as dead is generate as you receive events, you don't bother Saw them. You you analyze them, and then if you have tow you still the data. But you you need to analyze as you receive data. Andre react immediately to be able to generate reasonable insights or predictions that can drive commerce and decisions in the real world. >>Yeah, absolutely. I remember back, you know, the early days of big data, you know, real time got thrown around a little, but it was usually I need to react fast enough toe. Make sure we don't, you know, lose the customer, we react toe something. But it was we gather all the data and let's move compute to the data. Uh, today is you talk about real time streams are so important. We've been talking about observe ability for last couple of years to just really understand the systems and the outputs More than, uh, looking back historically at where things were waiting for alerts. So could you give us some examples, if you would, Is toe You know that those streams, you know what is so important about being able to interact and leverage that data when you need it? And, boy, it's great if we can if we can use it then and not have to store it and think about it later. Obviously, there's some benefits there because >>every product nowadays has a CPU, right? And so there's more and more data and just let me give you an example. Um, swim processes real time data from more than 100 million mobile devices in real time, Um, in for a mobile operator. And what we're doing there is We're optimizing connection quality between devices and the network. Now that volume of data is more than four petabytes per day. Okay, now there is simply no way you could ever store that and analyze it later. The interesting thing about this is that if you adopt and analyze. And then if you really have to store architecture, you get to take advantage of Muslim. So you're running at CPU memory speeds instead of a disc speed, and so that gives you a million fold speed up. And it also means you don't have the Leighton see problem off reaching out to her boat storage, dead base or whatever. And so that reduces cost so we can do it all about 10% of the infrastructure that they previously had for her do style implementation. >>So maybe would help if we just explain when we say edge, people think of a lot of different things. Is it? You know, on I o. T device sitting out into the edge Are we talking about the telecom edge? We're watching a WS for years, you know, Spider out their services and into various environment. So what when you talk about the type of solutions you're doing and what your customers have is that the Telkom edges that the, you know, actual device edge, you know, where where does processing happen and where do these, you know, services that that work on it live? >>Uh, so I think the right way to think about edges. Where can you reasonably process the data? And it obviously makes sense to process data at the first opportunity you have. But much data is encrypted between the original device. Say Onda. The application and so edge as a place doesn't make as much sense as edge as an opportunity to decrypt and analyze data in the clear. So is computing is not so much a place in my view as the first opportunity you have to process state in the clear and to make sense of it. And then edge makes sense in terms of Leighton, see, by locating compute as close as possible to the sources of data, um, to reduce latency and maximize your ability to get insights. You know, Andre return to uses in, you know, quickly. So edge for me often is the cloud >>excellent. One of the other things I I think about back from, you know, the big data days or even earlier It was that how long it took to get from the raw data to processing that data, to be able to getting some insight and then being able to take action. Uh, it sure sounds like we're trying to collapse That completely. Is that you know, how do we do that? You know, Can we actually, you know, build the system so that we can, you know, in that real time continuous model that you talk about, You know? So what character movements? One >>of the wonderful things about cloud computing is that two major abstractions really served us on. Those are rest which expect this computing and databases and rest means in the old server can do the job for me. And then the database is just a napi I call away. The problem with that is that it's desperately slow. So when I say desperately slow, I mean, it's probably thrown away the last 10 years, Um, was law. Just think about this way. Your CPU runs at gigahertz and the network runs at milliseconds. So by definition, every time you reach out to a data store, you're going a million times slower than your Cebu. That's terrible. It's absolutely tragic. Okay, so a model which is much more effective is to have and in memory, computing architecture er in which you engage in state will computation. So instead of having to reach out to a database every time to update the database and whatever you know, store something and then fetch it again a few moments later when the next event arrives. You keep state in memory and you compute on the fly as data arrives and that way you get a million times speed up. You also end up with this tremendous cost direction because you don't end up with as many instances having to compute by comparison. So let me give you a quick example. If you go to a traffic dots from the AI, you can see, um, the real time state off the traffic infrastructure in Palo Alto. And, um, each one of those, um intersections is predicting its own future. Now, the volume of data from just a few 100 lights in Palo Alto is about four terabyte today. And sure, you can deal with this in AWS Lambda. There are lots and lots of servers up there. But the problem is that the end to end per event leighton see, is about 100 milliseconds. And you know, if I'm dealing with 30,000 events a second, that's just too much so solving that problem with a stateless architectures is extraordinarily expensive. You know, more than $5000 a month. Where is the staple architectural? Which you could think of as an evolution all for, uh, you know, something reactive or the actor model, Um, get you, You know, something like 1/10 of the cost. Okay, so cloud is fabulous for things that need to scale wide, but a state formal is required for dealing with things which update you rapidly or regularly about their changes in state. >>Yeah, absolutely. I You know, I think about if we were talking, I mentioned before AI training models often, if you look at something like autonomous vehicles, the massive amounts of data that it needs to process, you know, has to happen in the public cloud. Um, but then that gets pushed back down to the end device. In this case, it's a car because it needs to be able to react in real time and get fed at a regular update. The new training algorithms that that it has there. Um what are you saying? You know, we >>were reviews on on this training approach and the science in general, and that is that there aren't enough the scientists or no smart people to train these algorithms, deploy them to the edge and so on. And so there is an alternative worldview, which is a much simpler one, and that is that relatively simple algorithms deployed at scale to staple representatives. Their school, you know, digital twins off things, um, can deliver enormous improvements in behavior. Um, as things learn for themselves. So the way I think the at least this edge world gets smaller is that relatively simple models off things will learn for themselves for their own futures based on what they can see and and then react. And so this idea that we have lots and lots of very scientists dealing with vast amounts of information in the cloud, Um, it's suitable for certain algorithms, but it doesn't work for the vast majority of our applications. >>So where are we with the state of what the developers need to think about? You mentioned that there's compute in most devices. That's true, but you know they need some special in video chip set out there. Are there certain programming languages that that you're seeing more prevalent? Yeah, you know, interoperability. Give us a little bit of toe, you know, some tips and tricks for for those developing >>super so number one a staple architectures is fundamental and sure react is well known. Andi, there are, For example, on er lang swim is another. So I'm going to use some language. And I would encourage you to look at Cem O s or G to go from play there. A staple architecture, ER which allows actors small, concurrent objects to Stapley evolve their own state based on updates from the real world is fundamental. But the way in swim, we use data to build these models. So, um, these little agents for things we call them Web agents because the object I'd is a your I, um they staple evolved by processing their own real world data safely representing it. And then they do this wonderful thing, which is build a model on the fly, and they build a model by linking to things that they're related to. So a knit section would link to all of its sensors. But it would also licked all of its neighbors because the neighbors and linking is like a sub in pubs up and it allows that Web agent then to continually analyze, learn and predict on the fly. And so every one of these concurrent objects is doing this job off and analyzing its own raw data and then predicting from that and streaming the results so and swim you get stream board data in. And what streams out is predictions. Predictions about the future state off the infrastructure, and that's a very powerful staple approach, which can run all the memory. No stories required, by the way. It's still persistence. If you lose the no, you can just come back up and carry on. But there's no need to store huge amounts of raw data if you don't need it. And let me just be clear. The volumes of raw data from the real world are staggering, right? So for Porter by today from Palo Alto. But Las Vegas, about 60 terabytes today from the traffic lights, Um, no more than 100 million mobile devices is is tens of petabytes per day, which is just too much the store. >>Well, Simon, you'd mentioned that we we have a shortage when it comes to data scientists and the people that could be involved in those things. How about from the developer side? Do most enterprises that you're talking to? Do they have the skill set? Is the ecosystem mature enough for the company take involved? Or what do we need to do? Looking forward, toa help companies be able to take advantage of this opportunity. >>Yeah, So there is a huge change in terms of, I guess just cloud native skills. Um, and this is exacerbated. The more you get out into, I guess what you could think of as traditional kind of companies, all of whom have tons and tons of data sources. So we need to make it easy and swim tries to do this by effectively using skills of people already have Java or JavaScript and giving them easy ways to develop, deploy and then run applications without thinking about them. So instead of finding developers to notions of place and where databases are and all that sort of stuff, if they can write simple, object oriented programs about things like intersections and push buttons, a pedestrian lights, and in road loops and so on and simply relate basic objects in their world to each other, then we let data build the model by essentially creating these little concurrent objects for each thing, and they will then link to each other and solve the problem. We end up solving a huge problem for developers to which is that they don't need to acquire complicated cloud native skill sets to get to work. >>Well, absolutely. Simon, that's something we've been trying to do for a long time. Is to truly simplify things. I wanna let you have the final word. Uh, if you look out there, uh, the opportunity that challenge in the space, what final takeaways would would you get our audience? >>So very simple. If you adopt a staple competing Achter should like swim, you get to go a million times faster. The applications always have an answer. They analyze, learn and predict on the fly, and they go million times faster. They use 10% less. No. So 10% off the infrastructure of a store than analyze approach. And it's the way of the future. >>Simon Crosby. Thanks so much for sharing. Great having you on the program. >>Thank you too. >>And thank you for joining. I'm stew Minuteman. Thank you. As always for watching the cube. Yeah,

>> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome back to theCUBE on Cloud talking about really important topics as to how developers, were changing how they build their applications, where they live, of course, long discussion we've had for a number of years. You know, how do things change in hybrid environments? We've been talking for years, public cloud and private cloud, and really excited for this session. We're going to talk about how edge environment and AI impact that. So happy to welcome back one of our CUBE alumni, Simon Crosby, is currently the Chief Technology Officer with Swim. He's got plenty of viewpoints on AI, the edge and knows the developer world well. Simon, welcome back. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you, Stu, for having me. >> All right, so let's start for a second. Let's talk about developers. You know, it used to be, you know, for years we talked about, you know, what's the level of abstraction we get. Does it sit, you know, do I put it on bare metal? Do I virtualize it? Do I containerize it? Do I make it serverless? A lot of those things, you know that the app developer doesn't want to even think about but location matters a whole lot when we're talking about things like AI where do I have all my data that I could do my training? Where do I actually have to do the processing? And of course, edge just changes by orders of magnitude. Some of the things like latency and where data lives and everything like that. So with that as a setup, would love to get just your framework as to what you're hearing from developers and what we'll get into some of the solutions that you and your team are helping them to do their jobs. >> Well, you're absolutely right, Stu. The data onslaught is very real. Companies that I deal with are facing more and more real-time data from products from their infrastructure, from their partners whatever it happens to be and they need to make decisions rapidly. And the problem that they're facing is that traditional ways of processing that data are too slow. So perhaps the big data approach, which by now is a bit old, it's a bit long in the tooth, where you store data and then you analyze it later, is problematic. First of all, data streams are boundless. So you don't really know when to analyze, but second you can't store it all. And so the store then analyze approach has to change and Swim is trying to do something about this by adopting a process of analyze on the fly, so as data is generated, as you receive events you don't bother to store them. You analyze them, and then if you have to, you store the data, but you need to analyze as you receive data and react immediately to be able to generate reasonable insights or predictions that can drive commerce and decisions in the real world. >> Yeah absolutely. I remember back in the early days of big data, you know, real time got thrown around a little but it was usually I need to react fast enough to make sure we don't lose the customer, react to something, but it was, we gather all the data and let's move compute to the data. Today as you talk about, you know, real time streams are so important. We've been talking about observability for the last couple of years to just really understand the systems and the outputs more than looking back historically at where things were waiting for alerts. So could you give us some examples if you would, as to you know, those streams, you know, what is so important about being able to interact and leverage that data when you need it? And boy, it's great if we can use it then and not have to store it and think about it later, obviously there's some benefits there, because-- >> Well every product nowadays has a CPU, right? And so there's more and more data. And just let me give you an example, Swim processes real-time data from more than a hundred million mobile devices in real time, for a mobile operator. And what we're doing there is we're optimizing connection quality between devices and the network. Now that volume of data is more than four petabytes per day, okay. Now there is simply no way you can ever store that and analyze it later. The interesting thing about this is that if you adopt and analyze, and then if you really have to store architecture, you get to take advantage of Moore's Law. So you're running at CPU memory speeds instead of at disk speed. And so that gives you a million fold speed up, and it also means you don't have the latency problem of reaching out to, or about storage, database, or whatever. And so that reduces costs. So we can do it on about 10% of the infrastructure that they previously had for Hadoop style implementation. >> So, maybe it would help if we just explain. When we say edge people think of a lot of different things, is it, you know an IOT device sitting out at the edge? Are we talking about the Telecom edge? We've been watching AWS for years, you know, spider out their services and into various environments. So when you talk about the type of solutions you're doing and what your customers have, is it the Telecom edge? Is it the actual device edge, you know, where does processing happen and where do these you know, services that work on it live? >> So I think the right way to think about edge is where can you reasonably process the data? And it obviously makes sense to process data at the first opportunity you have, but much data is encrypted between the original device, say, and the application. And so edge as a place doesn't make as much sense as edge as an opportunity to decrypt and analyze data in the clear. So edge computing is not so much a place in my view as the first opportunity you have to process data in the clear and to make sense of it. And then edge makes sense, in terms of latency, by locating, compute, as close as possible to the sources of data, to reduce latency and maximize your ability to get insights and return them to users, you know, quickly. So edge for me often is the cloud. >> Excellent, one of the other things I think about back from, you know, the big data days or even earlier, it was that how long it took to get from the raw data to processing that data, to be able to getting some insight, and then being able to take action. It sure sounds like we're trying to collapse that completely, is that, you know, how do we do that? You know, can we actually, you know, build the system so that we can, you know, in that real time, continuous model that you talk about, you know. Take care of it and move on. >> So one of the wonderful things, one of the wonderful things about cloud computing is that two major abstractions have really served us. And those are rest, which is static disk computing, and databases. And rest means any old server can do the job for me and then the database is just an API call away. The problem with that is that it's desperately slow. So when I say desperately slow, I mean, it's probably thrown away the last 10 years of Moore's law. Just think about it this way. Your CPU runs at gigahertz and the network runs at milliseconds. So by definition, every time you reach out to a data store you're going a million times slower than your CPU. That's terrible. It's absolutely tragic, okay. So a model which is much more effective is to have an in-memory computer architecture in which you engage in staple computation. So instead of having to reach out to a database every time to update the database and whatever, you know, store something, and then fetch it again a few moments later when the next event arrives, you keep state in memory and you compute on the fly as data arrives. And that way you get a million times speed up. You also end up with this tremendous cost reduction because you don't end up with as many instances having to compute, by comparison. So let me give you a quick example. If you go to a traffic.swim.ai you can see the real time state of the traffic infrastructure in Palo Alto. And each one of those intersections is predicting its own future. Now, the volume of data from just a few hundred lights in Palo Alto is about four terabytes a day. And sure you can deal with this in AWS Lambda. There are lots and lots of servers up there. But the problem is that the end to end per event latency is about 100 milliseconds. And, you know, if I'm dealing with 30,000 events a second, that's just too much. So solving that problem with a stateless architecture is extraordinarily expensive, more than $5,000 a month. Whereas the staple architecture which you could think of as an evolution of, you know, something reactive or the actor model, gets you, you know something like a 10th of the cost, okay. So cloud is fabulous for things that need to scale wide but a staple model is required for dealing with things which update you rapidly or regularly about their changes in state. >> Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think about if, I mentioned before AI training models, often, if you look at something like autonomous vehicles, the massive amounts of data that it needs to process, you know, has to happen in the public cloud. But then that gets pushed back down to the end device, in this case it's a car, because it needs to be able to react in real time and gets fed at a regular update, the new training algorithms that it has there. What are you seeing-- >> I have strong reason on this training approach and data science in general, and that is that there aren't enough data scientists or, you know, smart people to train these algorithms, deploy them to the edge and so on. And so there is an alternative worldview which is a much simpler one and that is that relatively simple algorithms deployed at scale to staple representatives, let's call them digital twins of things, can deliver enormous improvements in behavior as things learn for themselves. So the way I think the, at least this edge world, gets smarter is that relatively simple models of things will learn for themselves, create their own futures, based on what they can see and then react. And so this idea that we have lots and lots of data scientists dealing with vast amounts of information in the cloud is suitable for certain algorithms but it doesn't work for the vast majority of applications. >> So where are we with the state of what, what do developers need to think about? You mentioned that there's compute in most devices. That's true, but, you know, do they need some special Nvidia chip set out there? Are there certain programming languages that you are seeing more prevalent, interoperability, give us a little bit of, you know, some tips and tricks for those developing. >> Super, so number one, a staple architecture is fundamental and sure React is well known and there are ACA for example, and Spurling. Swim is another so I'm going to use some language and I would encourage you to look at swimos.org to go from play there. A staple architecture, which allows actors, small concurrent objects to stapely evolve their own state based on updates from the real world is fundamental. By the way, in Swim we use data to build these models. So these little agents, for things, we call them web agents because the object ID is a URI, they stapley evolve by processing their own real-world data, stapley representing it, And then they do this wonderful thing which is build a model on the fly. And they build a model by linking to things that they're related to. So a need section would link to all of its sensors but it would also link to all of its neighbors because the neighbors and linking is like a sub in Pub/Sub, and it allows that web agent then to continually analyze, learn, and predict on the fly. And so every one of these concurrent objects is doing this job of analyzing its own raw data and then predicting from that and streaming the result. So in Swim, you get streamed raw data in and what streams out is predictions, predictions about the future state of the infrastructure. And that's a very powerful staple approach which can run all their memory, no storage required. By the way, it's still persistent, so if you lose a node, you can just come back up and carry on but there's no need to store huge amounts of raw data if you don't need it. And let me just be clear. The volumes of raw data from the real world are staggering, right? So four terabytes a day from Palo Alto, but Las Vegas about 60 terabytes a day from the traffic lights. More than 100 million mobile devices is tens of petabytes per day, which is just too much to store. >> Well, Simon, you've mentioned that we have a shortage when it comes to data scientists and the people that can be involved in those things. How about from the developers side, do most enterprises that you're talking to do they have the skillset? Is the ecosystem mature enough for the company to get involved? What do we need to do looking forward to help companies be able to take advantage of this opportunity? >> Yeah, so there is this huge challenge in terms of, I guess, just cloud native skills. And this is exacerbated the more you get added to. I guess what you could think of is traditional kind of companies, all of whom have tons and tons of data sources. So we need to make it easy and Swim tries to do this by effectively using skills that people already have, Java or JavaScript, and giving them easy ways to develop, deploy, and then run applications without thinking about them. So instead of binding developers to notions of place and where databases are and all that sort of stuff if they can write simple object-oriented programs about things like intersections and push buttons, and pedestrian lights, and inroad loops and so on, and simply relate basic objects in the world to each other then we let data build the model by essentially creating these little concurrent objects for each thing, and they will then link to each other and solve the problem. We end up solving a huge problem for developers too, which is that they don't need to acquire complicated cloud-native skillsets to get to work. >> Well absolutely, Simon, it's something we've been trying to do for a long time is to truly simplify things. Want to let you have the final word. If you look out there, the opportunity, the challenge in the space, what final takeaways would you give to our audience? >> So very simple. If you adopt a staple competing architecture, like Swim, you get to go a million times faster. The applications always have an answer. They analyze, learn and predict on the fly and they go a million times faster. They use 10% less, no, sorry, 10% of the infrastructure of a store than analyze approach. And it's the way of the future. >> Simon Crosby, thanks so much for sharing. Great having you on the program. >> Thank you, Stu. >> And thank you for joining I'm Stu Miniman, thank you, as always, for watching theCUBE.

>> Narrator: From around the globe. It's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re;Invent 2020 special coverage sponsored by AWS global partner network. >> Welcome to theCUBE. This is our coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 with special coverage of the APN partner experience. I'm Lisa Martin I've got a couple of gentlemen from BMC software joining me. Please welcome Greg Bukowski, the technology solutions director and Simon Blanks, area vice president Gentlemen it's great to have you on theCUBE virtual. >> Great to be here Lisa. >> Representing social distancing from across the country here. So guys, I'd like to just start Greg with you give our audience an understanding of your role technology solutions director your role and responsibilities at BMC. >> Sure I play the role of a field CTO. So I actually am aligned with our strategic CTO office and I bring their message to our customers all of our strategic customers within North America. >> And Simon, tell us a little bit about your role as area vice president. >> Well first of all, thanks for having us I have responsibility for our channels and our partners in the Americas. So I get to work both within our organization with our customers and with our partners to help them grow, to help us grow and deliver value to our customers. >> Speaking of your customers Simon the last year has been incredibly challenging and brought on a lot of challenges but opportunities. Talk to me about how that has impacted BMCs customers. >> That's a great question. You know, I think our customers are wanting to simplify that they're wanting to focus on what makes them win, right and get away from the things that, you know are not the competitive advantage. We see a lot of customers wanting to get out of the day-to-day operation of the data centers and migrate to the world of AWS but it's not as easy as we would all like it there's lots of challenges. AWS consulting partners are there to help them. One of the largest areas of challenges we see that they are having to address is manage these millions of IT assets that are constantly changing and some of them they don't even know exist and moving those to AWS, but moving them quickly, securely and of course, in a cost-effective manner. >> Talk to me a little bit about some of the speed like in the last nine months, have you seen an acceleration of those customers wanting to move workloads to AWS as we think of way back when the pandemic started and every business had to suddenly send workforces home no access to a data center or very limited. Is that something that you've seen speed up the last few months? >> Yeah we believe it's not only gained in velocity but will continue. We don't think that some of these changes to how a business is conducted are going to stop once the vaccine comes out. So yeah and you know the complexity of making this happen, you know it's difficult, especially in some of the very large organizations be it banks or telecoms or manufacturers or retailers you know it's not an easy chore and you know we've experienced some great wins in that area and helping some of our most strategic customers make that happen. >> So talk to me a little bit about Simon, what's your elevator pitch when you're going and i know you talk with customers, you talk with partners how do you describe BMC and what you guys deliver? >> Well BMC is a 40 year old company with 6,000 employees. we help 93% of the global 1000 manage their IT infrastructure right. In addition to that we help thousands of other customers with the same problems. So, you know what I tell organizations is we're there to help them be successful and to make things tick. >> Awesome thank you. So Greg, talk to me about more about the BMC solutions. You said in your role, you're also field CTO. What are some of the BMC solutions that you recommended AWS consulting partners consider to help customers, especially in this time as you're seeing more and more migrations AWS? >> Yeah I think that's a great point, Lisa. I mean, with the pandemic coming in, you know there was an initial pullback right that we saw from our customers and now as that trend, you know as the summer came on, not that it's gotten less, right. I mean obviously it's a big concern for customers but the realization of how they're going to operationalize themselves and still be a tech driven company and tech driven organization has really accelerated their digital transformation and it's driven more than anything the adoption of cloud technologies and to move into that cloud space it's brought about understanding customers how did they become more digital and to do that they have to connect their services. So underlying that challenge is really what we wanted to bring today to talk about is that BMC has an industry leading solution it's called a BMC discovery solution and it automatically goes within an organization's footprint and understands the dependencies between their infrastructure and their applications. That's really difficult, right? Typically we can just find assets, right? A lot of solutions out there can do that. What BMC does or what our solution does. That's unique in this space is that it understands relationships so that you understand from an application viewpoint which ultimately ties back to a business service into the software that runs on those assets into the applications that are supporting that as well as the platforms and infrastructure and that becomes more and more complex to date. What we see with our customers as they have cloud services they've got containers, they've got on-premise stuff. So we're working with customers today, right? We are the largest retailers in the US working with them to actually transform how they're doing business continuity. So it becomes not only an acceleration but a risk aversion program for them as well as a cost savings effort of trying to adopt that understanding those services from both within their data center, through the mainframe back into their cloud, right and understanding all those interdependencies so that they can run their business more efficiently. >> So Greg have you automated what used to be a traditionally manual lengthy process of that discovery. >> I think that is the key point Lisa. I mean when partners look to us for what value we can bring to them it's about accelerating that time all about reducing the time through automation what used to be a manual effort of understanding how these things connect and being able to having go talk to the application teams. We worked with a large bank as well. They were using other solutions in the marketplace and were taking six to nine months to map a single business service which is complex right it's got about a dozen applications that support it. We brought in our solution and they did it in three hours with one piece of information from an application team. It was unbelievable, right and these are the stories we hear all the time from our customers and this is a great solution that we have that runs in AWS. That's part of our AWS migration competency that we have and you know this is why we're here today on theCUBE. >> Well that speed improvement is massive as you just talked about Greg you know, when you think of organizations now that there is no time, there is no six to nine months to figure things out anymore right. Especially because we've all learned, I think a lot in the last nine months, professionally and personally but there's competition out there. That's ready to come and be nimble and faster and maybe with less legacy than any type of whether it's a retailer or a financial institution. So being able to get in there and discover and align this business and IT services folks to discover what they have, where they should move it that fast is really something that sounds to me like not just a survival mechanism, keeping the lights on during a strange time, but something that may even set apart the winners and the losers of tomorrow. >> Absolutely right. I mean you have to be able to tie into your existing infrastructure for print that traditional legacy or heritage as we call it for print that you have, that still runs your core business. Right, if you're a retailer it's probably some kind of supply chain rate If you're a bank it's all the financial transaction stuff that you do but then also adopt the technology and innovation that exists within the fintech space for a financial services customer and bringing that together and when you're doing that at the native integration point a lot of it comes into the cloud services, right and that's really where they're going to get the acceleration to attack new markets grow their margin in that space and that's where they need partners to help them. To adopt and learn those technologies and integrate those additionally, right we have other advanced capabilities that we offer from an AWS migration competency standpoint around cloud optimization. So when those services are running in there we also do a cost optimization that doesn't look at it from the infrastructure standpoint but actually it takes the same discovery data and lines it back to the lines of business. So the line of business now has visibility into if they're going to change what their operating model is how that's going to affect the cost in the backend services they can optimize their resources. >> So Simon looking at the capabilities that BMC is delivering. Talk to me about the BMC partner program. Why become a BMC partner? I think there's a couple of answers to that. First of all, what Greg was talking about in terms of this you know massive I'll call it reinvention of the amount of time it takes to perform some of these tasks. Some of these tasks that are done in every migration from you know months to days or hours that in and of itself can help the AWS consulting partners massively you know in their efforts. So that's one but I think more importantly than that is the culture of BMC and the importance of partners and the focus that it's getting whether or not it be from our board or CEO or down the management rank. So the channel has become massively important to our success and we're committed to helping our partners be successful right, we're committing to help them make money, right. We're actually, as a part of AWS re;Invent here were going to offer an incentive to partners to come and join our family. Traditionally there's enablement and costs associated with that and we're going to refund that cost. Plus we're going to invest our monies and refund any costs associated with the first co-marketing effort together that we can go out to the market and help them. So I think you know, it's sort of the three legs of the stool. The technology itself is you know, impressive the commitment of our leadership and we're also willing to make it you know, very economically attractive so that would be the reasons >> Everybody likes that, especially economically attractive. So in terms of what you're offering you said that around re;Invent with respect to interested perspective partners, how do they move forward with BMC to become an AWS consulting partner? What's that process like? >> Well, we have you know an onboarding team that Susan DuRoff she reports in to me and helps me with that process. But the best way to do it would be to contact me directly. My email address is simon_blanks@bmc.com and if you reach out to me directly, I'll make sure we get back to you promptly. We can have further discussions and you know, facilitate it and we really look forward to making that happen. >> That's pretty excellent personal service I like that. So Greg talk to me as we get towards the wrap here as field CTO, looking forward into 2021 which we all hope is going to be trim significantly better than 2020. What are some of the opportunities that you see that this time has uncovered for the IT folks and the business folks to get even stronger alignment? >> Yeah, I think this is a great opportunity for customers to realize that bringing together the IT organizations in alignment with their business organizations is a great opportunity from the Revolut to accelerate their adoption of technology accelerate their migrations into adoption of cloud services. But then also look for the opportunities to take advantage of, to grow revenue streams. Right I mean, challenges present opportunities and opportunities present growth, right? That's how customers grow when they recognize those opportunities and become agile enough to adopt them and go after them. >> That's a great mindset because it's absolutely true. It's not matter of how we look at it and look at what's being uncovered to then kind of exploit for good new products, new services, competitive differentiators all sorts of things going on. Well gentlemen, it's been a pleasure having you on theCUBE virtual today. Thank you for joining me. >> Thank you so much appreciate the time and thank you. >> All right. For my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube covering upgrade twenty twenty, The NTT Research Summit presented by NTT Research. >>Welcome back. I'm stupid a man. And this is the Cubes coverage of Upgrade twenty twenty. Of course, it's the NTT Research Summit and happy to welcome to the program someone that watch the Cube for a long time. But first time on the program. Simon Walsh. He is the new CEO of NTT America's Simon. Great to see you and thanks so much for joining us. >>Thanks very much. Too good to be here. All right. See, >>A Zai mentioned your your previous companies that you've worked for are ones that the Cube and Cube audience are well aware of. Matter of fact, when I worked for some of those companies, NTT is one of the large global companies that I had the pleasure to interact with over the years. But if you could maybe let's start with just a little bit of your background. And as I said, it's only been a few months that you've been the CEO, so you know, what's it like coming into a role like this? You know, during the situation that we're all faced with in twenty twenty. >>Yeah, Thank you. I mean, my background is really in, You know, the platforms that enable the customers Thio run their technologies. Andi, Uh, you know, I spent some of my time in Europe and the media on then latterly the last five plus years in the Americas. I have to say I really enjoy It's a much better environment. If I think about it from a GDP and an economy perspective, it's, ah really dynamic place to work. I worked with companies headquartered from Europe running America's, and I've worked with companies that were headquartered in the Americas, running some of the European businesses. So I've crossed the continent's if you like. I recently joined NTT. I have to say, you know, it was a pretty lengthy process to explore, but that was partly, you know, interviews and due diligence because you want to make sure that, you know, you're you're buying into a company that, you know, number one, you can have ah, cultural compatibility with, but also somebody who you see really investing in technology that consult for, you know, the business agenda of the markets. So that's really a bit about my background and then, you know, joining. I mean, I literally joined last week of June, so my whole time has bean through, locked down in terms of employment. It's been very unique. Taking on a new post, exclusively remote. Andi I was a bit worried, you know, at a human level, just, you know, how do you connect with people? What I would comment is I've actually had the ability to really meet ah, lot more people in person because you can physically get to people's schedules a lot easier. So that's certainly helped, you know. And I've done my, uh, activities of meeting clients. Eso they've been very amenable to connecting talking to our business partners and spending, you know, considerable amount of time with my colleagues, uh, in the Americas and around the world. Andi, it's actually been very rewarding. I think, funnily enough, you probably physically closer because you're on a screen and you probably like twenty four inches away from each other. Whereas in a meeting room you'd be the other side of the table. So it's been unique, but so far so good. >>Well, yeah, absolutely. The the new abnormal is we. We have sometimes say what? We're all usedto looking in the screens all day talking to various people there. Uh, the impact on business, though, has been, uh, you know, obviously ah, lot of different things, depending on the company. But that discussion of digital transformation a few years ago it was like, Oh, I don't know if it's really is it a buzzword? But that the spotlight that's been shown here in twenty twenty is what Israel and what is not leveraging cloud services, giving people agility, being able to react fast because, boy in twenty twenty if we needed to react fast, so help bring us inside a little bit. And your time there, the discussion you're having with customers, that adoption moving along that journey for digital transformation, the impact that you're seeing and house NTT helping its customers as they need to accelerate and respond toe the realities that we see today. >>Yeah, so you're right into I mean, digital disruption has been ongoing for multiple years. Way used to call it technology and change, and now we call it digital disruption or digital transformation. So it's not necessarily new. I think the thing that's really accelerated in twenty twenty, You know, as a consequence of the pandemic is really the word distributed, uh, in that customers are undertaking their digital transformations understanding. You know what it is to modernize processes, you know, modernize the customer experience on Then they're finding that actually, they don't need in a board room and discuss, you know, the performance of the business so they now need to have distributed access to data on. I think the topics that we see very prevalent is the distributed nature off the workforce. Andi. Obviously there's always been a filled workforce, and we've had systems, crm systems and other systems that were built for a distributed workforce. But now we have toe think about our supply chain management systems and our HR systems, the P and L. And you know all of the activities that business undertakes with an entirely distributed workforce, and it's quite abnormal. And I think what we've learned is where is the data on how doe I amalgamate data from distributed systems. And so I see. And we're doing a lot of work with our clients relating to digital transformation, but really about how doe I join data from system a two system F in a distributed manner, most importantly, securely timely on in A in an interface that is usable on it sounds really easy is like Oh, great, yeah, it's just two different data points. Connect them together, make it secure, make it visible, create transparency. But we all know that the world is full of technical debt, legacy systems and platforms Very expensive and significant historical investments on those things Don't modernize themselves overnight. Quite often. The dollars to modernize them don't justify themselves. So we then end up layering on, you know, new technology. So you know what I'm seeing on in digital transformation is really about. How do we handle distributed data Distributed decision making on how we do that in a secure manner on through an interface that is, uh, user friendly? >>Yeah, way. Obviously know that there's had to be some prioritization. You know, the joke. I've had everybody came into twenty twenty with Okay, here. Here's what I'm gonna do for the first half of the year. Here's the objectives that I have, and we kind of throw those in the shredder rather early on Number one priority. I still hear it was probably that the number one priority coming into the year and it stays there, and you've mentioned it multiple times. Its security, you know, is absolutely front and center Still. How overall, though, How are your customers? You know, the c X So sweet. How are they adjusting their priorities? Are there certain projects that just go on hold? Are there certain ones that get front and center? Obviously, you know, that distributed work from anywhere. Telemedicine, uh, you know, teach and learn from anywhere have been top of mind. But any other key learnings you're finding or prioritization changes, some of which are gonna probably stay with us. Uh, you know, for the long term, >>Absolutely. We've definitely seems Thio customers re prioritizing. And I think there is obviously an inevitability to this, a za consequence of the pandemic. I mean, if you were undertaking a campus upgrade, you might just put that on pause for the moment. And we've absolutely seen that. But what we've really seen is a prioritization has been How do we get our information to our users? Whether the user is a customer or whether the user is an employee, you know, there's examples where there's lots of companies who are saying they've got, like, online detail, right. But now they've got to do curbside pickup because they've actually got inventory in the stores. But the stores couldn't open. So what you've seen is a re prioritization to say, Well, when we look out inventory management and the supply chain systems, are we factoring in that the inventory we have in a store could also be seen as inventory across the stores? And in fact, what we've really got now is a distributed warehouse. We've got inventory in the warehouse like wholesale, ready for distribution on. Then we've got inventory in a store retail ready for consumer consumption. What? We don't want that to be separate Infantry. We want that to be holistic on. Then how do we enable any any consumer anywhere to be able to arrange for curbside pickup, which we didn't used to do because we would come into the store or arrange for mail order? But the inventory may come from, you know, I may send something from San Francisco to somebody in Boston because it was in a storied inventory in San Francisco. Now, sure, it's got it's got some freight cost, but I've also got some other efficiency savings, and I'm reducing my working capital in my inventory expense. So we've seen prioritization for really how to take advantage of this. I come back to it. This word distributed is very simple in principle, but everything is now working on a new dynamic. So that's some of the prioritization we've seen. >>Um, you mentioned one of the things that might get put on hold is wait. If I was doing a corporate network update, that might not be the first thing. You know, we we Absolutely. We've gotten some great data on just the changing traffic patterns of the Internet, but the network is so critically important, everybody from home is, you know, dealing with Children doing their zoom classrooms while we're trying to dio video meetings. Um, NTT obviously has a strong, uh, you know, network component to what? Its businesses help us understand the services that are important there. What? What? You're working with customers. And how has this kind of transformed, uh, some of those activities? >>Yeah, Yeah, sure. Thank you. You're so right. I mean, I have to say I just like thio, pay my respects to colleagues and fellow workers around the world who are not just working from home but also home schooling in parallel. Uh, kids are fled the nest, you know, they're working for themselves now, so we don't have the extra activity of home schooling. But I can really have a lot of respect her colleagues who are trying to do both. It's a real fine art on. We've seen a lot of actually just talking of re prioritization. We've seen a lot of companies, including ourselves. You know, say to our colleagues, Look after your Children home, school them do everything you can to support your families on, then get to your work So that re prioritization. Justin behavior has been a key change that we've seen a lot of people do that flexibility to. You know, work is something you do not somewhere you go on. Therefore, as long as the work is done, we can flex around. You know your needs is a family, so that's one prioritization we've seen at, actually. But to your point on the network, it is quite amusing to me that we've been for years now talking about cloud on demand subscription services on Actually, the one asset that you need to really enable cloud is the network and its historically been the least cloudlike that you could possibly imagine Because you still need to specify a physical connection. You still need to specify a band with value you still need to specify. You know, the number of devices you get too attached to it. I think this is really a monstrous change that we're going to experience and really are experiencing the network as a service. I mean, we talk about I as has SAS. But what happened toe now, as I mean really, did we just think that everything was about computing software? The network is the underpin er on DSO. Really? We see a big change and this is where we've been very busy in the network as a service enabling customers tohave dynamic reallocation of resources on the network so that they can prioritize traffic, prioritize content, prioritize events, you know, a lot of customers are now doing activities such as hosting their own event, their own digital conference on. Do you want to prioritize what the user experience is when you host one of those events over perhaps a back office process that, quite frankly, wait a few days so we see a significant opportunity. This is where we've been very busy the last few months in really building out much more dynamic network of the service solutions. You know, the Cloud Network. And I think the whole software defined network agenda has materially accelerated. That's one major area on then. The other area has just been the phenomenal ship to I p voice on soft bone, actually almost the deletion of the phone in its entirety. Everybody using you know, teams or Skype or Google hangouts to really use as their collaboration mechanism on. Then you know, we're providing all the underlying transportation layer. But as I p voice, you know, that creates a much more integrated collaboration. Experience on git creates a cost saving because you're taking away classic voice services. >>Yeah, Simon Boy, I'm excited for that. I I remember when I got my first BlackBerry and they were trying to sell me some things. I'm like, Wait, this is an Internet endpoint. I can do all of these things there and of course you know it's taking taking it. The last dozen years. If If Ghana certain far, but and we always joke, it's like smartphones. We don't use them for phones anymore. We use them for all the messaging and all those services. So, uh, the the data and the network are so critically important, something I want to turn Thio, you know, upgrade twenty twenty. You know what? I'm excited about this. You know, we've talked about, you know, the major impacts of what's happened in twenty twenty, and we're looking at the here and now. But it's great in technology when we get to be able to look forward and look at some of the opportunities out there. So we'd love to hear from your standpoint, some of the areas. What's exciting? You what's exciting? That we can look forward to some of the areas and pockets of research that we see at the event. >>Yeah. Thank you. Strewn E. I think what I like about Aravind is the investment that we make to work with, You know, scientific community, academia, really invest in, you know, forward looking future proofing, how physics and different technologies might play a role in the future. And, you know, some of these investments and some of this research yields commercial products, and some of it doesn't. But it's still a very valuable opportunity for us to really look at you know where technology is going. I think the areas that particularly appealing to me on a personal level, just the whole thing of quantum computing. This is, uh, you know, I know we're already exploring the capabilities of quantum computing in, you know, some labs and Cem academia centers on really to understand, how can we take advantage of that? But I think if you then say and you take another area that we're exploring through the event Biosciences, if you then take the two together and you think Okay, how do we take quantum computing on? We take Biosciences on you think about health care, and then you think about the pandemic. You know? Are there things that we can do with simulations and technologies in the future that really would give us a greater comprehension and ability to accelerate understanding, understand, accelerate testing, and then really contribute to, you know, the health and welfare of society. Andi, I think that's really quite an exciting area for us. So that's a specific topic that I'm particularly interested in. I'm glad to see us doing a lot in that space quantum computing as well as you know, Biosciences. And I'd say, you know, one other area where I still think we're all trying to ascertain how it serves the business is really the area of Blockchain. I think this is, um, intriguing. I'm still mentally trying to master the subject. No amount of white papers has managed Thio overcome the topic of my brain yet, So I'm still working on it on. Then I think cryptography, I come back to the same subject security. I mean, we are dependent as citizens, businesses and nations on technology. Now, on our data is available how we secure it, How we make sure that it's encrypted is absolutely going to be critical. You see an increasing push nationally on globally to ensure that there is, you know, security of data on. I think the subject of cryptography and how we go forward with, you know, beyond one hundred and twenty eight bit is gonna be a very difficult and critical subjects. So these are the areas I'm very impressed with. >>Wonderful. Simon, I wanna give you the final word from update. Great. Twenty twenty. >>Yeah, thanks to you. Just thanks very much, Thio. Anybody that's attending what you'll find through various workshops. There's lots of insight from our strategic partners from research scientists from academia from ourselves. So thank you very much for participating. You know, we always value your feedback. So please tell us what we could do to improve the content to help you with your businesses. Onda, We look forward and hope that everybody stays safe. Thank you for connecting with us virtually >>well. Simon Walsh, Thank you so much. Great. Having a conversation and glad to have you in our cube alumni now, >>thank you very much to have a good day. >>Alright, Stay tuned. More coverage from upgrade twenty twenty. I'm still minimum. And thanks. As always, for watching the cube. Yeah,

>> From around the globe, its theCUBE, covering the UPGRADE 2020, the NTT Research Summit presented by NTT research. >> Welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of UPGRADE 2020. Of course, it's the NTT Research Summit and happy to welcome to the program, someone that's watched theCUBE for a long time, but first time on the program, Simon Walsh, he is the new CEO of NTT Americas. Simon, great to see you, and thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks very much Stu, good to be here, nice to see you. >> As I mentioned, your previous companies that you've worked for are that theCUBE and theCUBE audience are well aware of. As a matter of fact, when I worked for some of those companies, NTT is one of the large global companies that I had the pleasure to interact with over the years. But if you could, maybe, let's start with just a bit of your background. And as I said, it's only been a few months that you've been the CEO. So, what's it like coming into a role like this, during the the situation that we're all faced with in 2020? >> Yeah. Thank you. My background is really in the platforms that enable the customers to run their technologies. And, I've spent some of my time in Europe and India and then lastly the last five plus years in the Americas, I have to say, I really enjoy it. It's a much better environment. And if I think about it from a GDP and an economy perspective, it's a really dynamic place to work. I've worked with companies, headquartered from Europe, running in Americas. And I've worked with companies that were headquartered in the Americas, running some of the European businesses. So, I've crossed the continents if you like. And I recently joined NTT and I have to say, it was a pretty lengthy process to explore, but that was partly, interviews and due diligence. Cause you want to make sure that, you're buying into a company that, number one, you can have a cultural compatibility with, but also somebody who you see really investing in technology that consult for the business agenda of the markets. So, that's really a bit about my background and then joining. I mean, I literally joined the last week of June, so, my whole time has been through lockdown in terms of employment. It's been very unique taking on a new post, exclusively remote, and I was a bit worried, at a human level, just, how do you connect with people? But what I would comment is I've actually had the ability to really meet a lot more people in person cause you can physically get to people's schedules a lot easier. So, that's certainly helped. And I've done my activities of meeting up clients. So, they've been very amenable to connecting, talking to our business partners and spending considerable amount of time with my colleagues in the Americas and around the world. And it's actually been very rewarding. I think, funnily enough, you probably physically closer because you're on a screen, and you're probably like 24 inches away from each other. Whereas in a meeting room you'd be the other side of a table. So, it's been unique, but so far so good. >> Oh yeah, absolutely. The new abnormal, as we've sometimes say we're all used to looking in the screens all day, talking to various people there. The impact on business though has been, obviously a lot of different things depending on the company, but that discussion of digital transformation a few years ago, it was like, "Oh, I don't know if it's real, is it a buzz word?" But that the spotlight that's been shown here in 2020 is what is real and what is not? Leveraging cloud services, giving people agility, being able to react fast because buoyant 2020th, we needed to react fast. So, help bring us inside a bit, and your time there, the discussions you're having with customers that adoption, moving along that journey for digital transformation, the impact that you're seeing and how's NTT helping its customers as they need to accelerate and respond to the realities that we see today. >> Yeah. So you're right Stu. I mean, digital disruption has been on varying for multiple years and we used to call it, technology and change and now we call it digital disruption or digital transformation. So, it's not necessarily new. I think the thing that's really accelerated in 2020, as a consequence of the pandemic is really the word distributed in that customers are undertaking their digital transformations, understanding what it is to modernize processes, modernize the customer experience. And then they're finding that actually they don't meet in a boardroom and discuss, the performance of the business. So, they now need to have distributed access to data. And I think that the topics that we see very prevalent is the distributed nature of the workforce. And obviously there's always been a field workforce and we've had systems. CRM systems and other systems that were built for a distributed workforce. But now we have to think about how supply chain management systems and our HR systems, the PNL, and, all of the activities that our business undertakes with an entirely distributed workforce. And it's quite abnormal. What I think what we've learned is where is the data and how do I amalgamate data from distributed systems? And so I see, we're doing a lot of work with our clients relating to digital transformation, but really about how do I join data from system A to System F in a distributed manner? And most importantly, securely, timely and in an interface that is usable. And it sounds really easy. It's like, Oh great. Yeah, it's just two different data points, connect them together, make it secure, make it visible, create transparency. But we all know that the world is full of technical debt, legacy systems and platforms, very expensive and significant historical investments. And those things don't modernize themselves overnight. And quite often the dollars to modernize them don't justify themselves. So, we then end up layering on new technology. So, what I'm seeing in digital transformation is really about how do we handle distributed data, distributed decision making, and how do we do that in a secure manner and through an interface that is user friendly. >> Yeah, we obviously know that there's had to be some prioritization. The joke I've had, everybody came into 2020 with, "Okay, here's what I'm going to do for the first half of the year. Here's the objectives that I have." And we kind of throw those in the shredder rather early on. Number one priority I still hear it was probably that the number one priority coming into the year and it stays there and you've mentioned it multiple times, it's security, it is absolutely front and center still. How overall though, how are your customers, the CXO suite, how are they adjusting their priorities? Are there certain projects that just go on hold? Are there certain ones that get front and center, obviously, you know, that distributed work from anywhere telemedicine, teach and learn from anywhere, have been top of mind. But any other key learnings you're finding or prioritization changes, some of which are going to probably stay with us, for the longterm. >> Absolutely. We've definitely seen customers reprioritizing. And I think there is obviously an inevitability to this as a consequence of the pandemic. I mean, if you were undertaking a campus upgrade, you might just put that on pause for the moment. And we've absolutely seen that. But what we've really seen as a prioritization has been, how do we get our information to our users, whether the user is a customer or whether the user is an employee? There's examples where there's lots of companies who say they've got like online e-tail, right? But now they've got to do curbside pickup because they've actually got inventory in the stores, but the stores couldn't open. So, what you've seen is a re-prioritization to say, well when we look at inventory management and the supply chain systems, are we factoring in the inventory we have in a store could also be seen as inventory across the stores? And in fact, what we've really got now is a distributed warehouse. We've got inventory in the warehouse like wholesale ready for distribution. And then we've got inventory in a store, retail ready for consumer consumption. What don't want that to be separate inventory. We want that to be holistic. And then how do we enable any consumer anywhere to be able to arrange for curbside pickup, which we didn't use to do because we would come into the store or arrange for mail order. But the inventory may come from you know, I may send something from San Francisco to somebody in Boston because it was in a store inventory in San Francisco. Now, sure, it's got some freight cost, but I've also got some other efficiency savings and I'm reducing my working capital or my inventory expense. So, we've seen prioritization for really how to take advantage of this. I come back to it, this word distributed is very simple in principal, but everything is now working on a new dynamic. So, that's some of the prioritization we've seen. >> You mentioned one of the things that might get put on hold is, wait if I was doing a corporate network update, that might not be the first thing, we absolutely, we've gotten some great data on just the changing traffic patterns of the internet, but the network is so critically important. Everybody from home is dealing with, you know, children doing their Zoom classrooms while we're trying to do video meetings. NTT obviously has a strong network component to what its business is. So, help us understand the services that are important there, what you're working with customers and how has this kind of transformed some of those activities? >> Yeah. Yeah, sure. Thank you. You're so right. I mean and I have to say, I just like to pay my respects to colleagues and fellow workers around the world who are not just working from home, but also homeschooling in parallel. Our kids fled the nest, either they're working for themselves now, so, we don't have the extra activity of homeschooling, but I can really have a lot of respect for colleagues who are trying to do both, it's a real fine art. And we've seen a lot of actually just talking of re-prioritization. We've seen a lot of companies including ourselves, say to our colleagues, look after your children, homeschool them, do everything you can to support your families and then get to your work. So, that re-prioritization just in behavior has been a key change that we've seen a lot of people do. That flexibility to, you know, work is something you do, not somewhere you go. And therefore, as long as the work is done, we can flex around, you know your needs as a family. So, that's one prioritization we've seen active actually. But to your point on the network, it's quite amusing to me that we've been for years now talking about cloud, on-demand subscription services. And actually the one asset that you need to really enable cloud is the network. And it's historically been the least cloud-like that you could possibly imagine because you still need to specify a physical connection. You still need to specify a bandwidth value. You still need to specify, the number of devices you've got to attach to it. I think this is really a monstrous change that we're going to experience and really are experiencing, the network as a service. I mean, we talk about IAS, PAS SAS, but what happened to NAS? I mean, really did we just think that everything was about computer and software? The networker is the underpinner. And so really we see a big change and this is where we've been very busy in the network as a service enabling customers to have, dynamic reallocation of resources on the network so that they can prioritize traffic, prioritize content, prioritize events. A lot of customers and are doing activities such as hosting their own event, their own digital conference. And you want to prioritize what the user experience is when you host one of those events over perhaps back office process that can quite frankly wait a few days. So, we see a significant opportunity. This is where we've been very busy the last few months in really building out much more dynamic network as a service solutions, the cloud network. And I think the whole software defined network agenda has materially accelerated. That's one major area. And then the other area has just been the phenomenal shift to IP voice and software and actually almost the deletion of the phone in its entirety. Everybody using, Teams or Skype or Google Hangouts to really use as their collaboration mechanism. And then, we're providing all the underlying transportation layer, but as IP voices, that creates a much more integrated collaboration experience, and it creates a cost saving cause you're taking away the classic voice services. >> Yeah. So Simon boy, I'm excited for that. I tell you, I remember when I got my first Blackberry and they were trying to sell me some things, I'm like, "Wait, this is an internet endpoint. I can do all of these things there." And of course, you know, it's taken me the last dozen years. If gone a certain far, but, and we always joke. It's like smartphones, we don't use them for phones anymore. We use them for all the messaging and all those services. So, the data and the network are so critically important. Simon, I want to turn to UPGRADE 2020, you know what I'm excited about this, we've talked about the major impacts of what's happened in 2020. And we're looking at the here and now, but it's great in technology when we get to be able to look forward and look at some of the opportunities out there. So, would love to hear from your standpoint, some of the areas, what's exciting you, what's exciting that we can look forward to some of the areas and pockets of research that we see at the event. >> Yeah, I think he's Stu. I think what I like about our event is the investment that we make to work with the scientific community, academia, and really invest in, forward-looking, future-proofing, how physics and different technologies might play a role in the future. And, some of these investments and some of this research yields, commercial products and some of it doesn't, but it's still a very valuable opportunity for us to really look at where technology is going. I think the areas that are particularly appealing to me on a personal level, just the whole thing of Quantum computing. This is, I know we're already exploring the capabilities of Quantum computing in some labs, and some academia centers and really to understanding how can we take advantage of that. But I think if you then say, and you take another area that we're exploring through the event, Biosciences. If you then take the two together and you think, okay, how do we take Quantum computing, and we take Biosciences and you think about healthcare, and then you think about the pandemic, are there things that we can do with simulations and technologies in the future that really would give us greater comprehension and ability to accelerate, understanding, accelerate testing, and then really contribute to the health and welfare of society. And I think that's really quite an exciting area for us. So, that's a specific topic that I'm particularly interested in. I'm glad to see us doing a lot in that space, Quantum computing, as well as the Biosciences. And I'd say one other area where I still think we're all trying to ascertain, how it serves the business is really the area of blockchain. I think this is intriguing. I'm still mentally trying to master the subject. No amount of white papers has managed to overcome the topic in my brain yet. So I'm still working on it. And then I think cryptography, I come back to the same subject security. I mean, we are dependent as citizens, businesses and nations on technology now, and our data is available how we secure it, how we make sure that it's encrypted is absolutely going to be critical. You see an increasing push nationally and globally to ensure that there is security of data. And I think the subject of cryptography, and how we go forward with, beyond 128 bit is going to be a very difficult and critical subject. So these are the areas I'm very impressed with. >> Wonderful. Simon, I want to give you the final word from UPGRADE 2020. >> Yeah. Thanks, Stu Just thanks very much to anybody that's attending. What you'll find through various workshops is lots of insight, from our strategic partners, from research scientists, from academia, from ourselves. So thank you very much for participating. We always value your feedback. So, please tell us what we could do to improve the content, to help you with your businesses. And we look forward and hope that everybody stays safe. Thank you for connecting with us virtually. >> Well, Simon Walsh. Thank you so much. Great having a conversation and glad to have you in our Cube alumni now. >> Thank you very much Stu. Have a good day. >> All right. And stay tuned more coverage from UPGRADE 2020 I'm Stu Miniman, and thanks as always for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of VeeamON 2020 brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of VeeamON 2020 online. Of course, instead of all gathering together in Las Vegas, we were getting to talk to participants of the community where they are around the globe. Happy to welcome to the program, first time guest on the program, he's part of the opening keynote I'm sure most of you saw, Simon Kofkin-Hansen, chief technology officer for VMware Solutions inside of IBM. Simon, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you Stu, it's a pleasure to be here. >> All right, so you know, obviously we know IBM quite well. We at theCUBE at you know, the virtual events, both RedHat Summit and IBM Think not too long in the past there. Talking a lot about you know, the open hybrid cloud many of the messages that I hear from Veeam remind me of what I heard at their environments you know, it, multicloud environment, we need flexibility in what we're doing, we, you know, need to of course you know, data is such an important piece of what's going on. Maybe before we get into it too much, give us a little bit about you know, your role there, where you fit into that whole discussion of what IBM is with Cloud. >> So Stu, yeah, I'm the chief technology officer of IBM, of Veeam solutions on the IBM cloud. Primarily involved and helped create the partnership that exists between IBM and VMware today. Basically, I'm providing automated solutions for our clients. Automated, secure solutions for our clients around the VMware and the IBM Cloud infrastructure space. >> Yeah, well, Simon, it's interesting stuff, you've got some good history there, maybe you might remind our audience you know, I remember at VMWorld, before there was a big partnership, that VMware made with a certain public cloud provider that gets talked about a lot, IBM was the first and if I saw you know, correctly, I'd love for you to be able to provide the data behind it. There are more VMware customers on the IBM Cloud than any other cloud is what I believe is the data I saw, I think. So bring us in little bit more, explain that relationship. >> So yes, we were, as IBM, beginning of all of this, I mean VMware and IBM have had a long relationship. And in fact, IBM manages over 850,000 predominantly VMware workloads on-prems, and have done for the last 10+ years. But in the latest iteration of this partnership, we brought together our automation and our codified experience from dealing with these, our client accounts around the world and brought that expertise along with VMware's product side to align this automated stdc stack on cloud platforms. And first to market with that automated stdc stack called VMware Cloud Foundation. First to market out and we've had a great ongoing relationship since then. It's really resonated with many of our clients and our enterprise clients out there. >> All right well Simon, one of the most important pieces of that, you know, VMware stdc message is that I have VMware, I know how, I manage that environment, and it's got a really robust ecosystem, so, of course Veeam started exclusively in the VMware environments, now lives across many environments, but you know the comment I've made on some of these interviews for VeeamON is, wherever the VMware solution and VMware Cloud goes, Veeam could just go along for the ride, really, if it were. There's obviously some integration work and testing, but help dig into a little bit, what that means for you know, solutions like Veeam tying into what VMware is doing, and what VMware is doing in the IBM Cloud. >> Well particularly at the beginning of this relationship, part of this partnership with VMware was its rich partner ecosystem. And I was given the remit and had the luxury to choose the best of the best products that's out there. Which wasn't necessarily IBM's products in this particular space. Obviously we chose Veeam for backup. I mean Veeam's reputation out there's the backup, it's known as the market leader for the backup of its actual workloads. So it was very important for us to embrace that ecosystem. And it's been a great partnership from the very, very beginning. Getting the backup products out into our platform and as we've done more recently, bringing in the new enhancements like Veeam Cloud Connect to deal with data replication and more use cases around migration and the movement of data in a hybrid cloud sense. And Veeam has been right there with us every step of the way. >> Yeah, so Simon, you're a CTO, so bring us in a little bit architecturally because when I think about hybrid cloud or even you know having to move my data between you know different data centers, you know there are, you know, the physics challenges, and you know sometimes I can, you know, get closer, I can (microphone cuts out) through there, and then there's the financial considerations. So give us to how we have to think about that, what is data movement in 2020, you know, what considerations do we have to have here, and how does IBM maybe differentiate a little bit from some others? >> So I'll answer your first question, I'll answer some of the last questions first. What does data movement in 2020 look like? Well, to be perfectly honest, Stu, we never imagined what would happen this year, but data mobility and the movement of data in a hybrid scenario has never been more acute or prevalent because of the stage that the world is currently in and the conditions that we're living in today. Being able to use familiar based tooling that represents what is used in an on-premises state, over in the cloud, enabling Veeam, or people who have existing investments in Veeam, to use that tooling for multiple different use cases. Not just backup, but that actual data replication functionality has become ever more prevalent in these cases. I was saying similar messages back in 2019 and 2018 and as long as back in 2010. I feel as though, I look at that, it's been almost a decade now, talking about the need or the capabilities of hybrid cloud and this movement of data. But I've absolutely seen an absolute increase in it over the last few years and particularly in 2020 in this current situation. The major difference from an IMB perspective is I would say, is our openness, and our, how we're dealing with the openness in the community, and our commitment to open source. Our flexibility, our security, and the way we actually deal with the enterprise. And one of the major differentiations is the security to the core. Actually building up the security, looking at the secure elements, making sure their data is safe from tampering, it's encrypted both in transit and at rest. And these are many of the factors that our enterprise clients actually demand of us and particularly when we look at the regulated industries with their heavy focus on the financial services sector. And Veeam, with its capabilities and its ability to both do the backup and migration functionality, sort of clients are expecting a two-for-one deal, in these days when they're trying to cut costs, and get out of their own data centers in an effort to cut their costs. >> Excellent. Well, Simon, you know you laid out really the imperative for enterprises, you know today and how they're dealing with that, bring us in as to what differentiates the IBM-Veeam relationship versus just IBM is open and flexible, so there are a lot of options. You know what particularly is there about Veeam that makes that relationship special? >> Well, I think it all down to the partnership and the deep willingness to work together. The research that we're doing in the products, yeah? Looking at ways that we can take Veeam beyond the VMware space and into bare metals and containers. But maintaining that level of security and flexibility that clients demand. I mean, many clients, if they've invested in a particular technology to do their backups, back up and DR, because of the heavy data requirements are still one of the most important if not the most important use case that many cloud users or many of our clients actually go for. So having that partnership with Veeam, in not only dealing with the traditional base, which is the VMware backups, but really pushing the boundaries and looking how we can extend that into migrations, into containers, and bare metal, by still keeping that level of security and flexibility. It's a difficult balance. Sometimes to make it more secure, you have to make things less flexible. And vise-versa, having things more flexible, they become less secure. So being willing to work us and actually define that difficult balance, and still provide the level of the user experience and the level of functionality that our clients demand, and keeping both client sets happy, both IBM and Veeam. It's challenging at times, but I guess it's what makes the job interesting and exciting. >> Yeah Simon, I'm actually glad you mentioned containers as one of the you know, modernization efforts going on there. Of course from Veeam's standpoint, when vSphere 7 rolls out, that they are being supported in you know one of the first work in that. I'd love to hear your viewpoint, what you're hearing from customers, how you expect, as a VMware partner for cloud, that movement of VMs and containers and how they're going together. What should we be looking for as that kind of matures and progresses? >> So I would absolutely watch this space. Particularly as we move into this. Containers and VMs living very much side-by-side. With VMware's announcements around Project Pacific and tanzu, it's very interesting. It's certainly a furor around the market. And we as IBM are very closely working with them with our acquisition last year of RedHat and its containerization platform. All while maintaining our ability in the OpenShift community around Kubernetes. So Stu, obviously I'm privy to a lot more information which I really can't really say and dig into too much detail around this particular angle but just to say that, watch this space. There's a lot going to happen. You're going to see a lot of announcements in the back half of 2020 and in the first few halves of 2021, particularly around the carburetions between containers and VMs and seeing how the different offerings from the different companies shape-- (mic cuts out) interesting times ahead. >> Yeah, absolutely. Simon, maybe you're right, don't want to get you in trouble as looking too much into the future, but maybe bring us into, I'm sure you're having lots of conversations with customers, what's their mindset, you talked about, you know, there's bare metals, virtualization, containers, you know application modernization, I've always said the long haul of the dent in any transformation and modernization (mic stutters) doing, so you know, 'cause some of the challenges and opportunities that you're hearing from customers that you and your partner are helping to solve? >> So some of the challenges around this containerization is containerization (mic stutters) is taking a lot longer and its taking a lot more time than we originally anticipated or expected. So the realization is actually hitting that VMware is going to be around for a while. I mean, the idea that people are thinking that they're just going to transform their applications, or all their VMs over a six or 12-month period, is just not reality. So we're living in this hybrid platform way, where you have VMware, you have virtual machines, and containers coexisting. Certain parts of the application, namely the, if I take the three-tier web app as an example, consisting of a http server, an application server, and a database. When you containerize that, or modernize that, it's very easy to modernize the http server, which turns into the ingress/egress servers on the container. It's very easy to modernize the application server, which is fairly static and you can just put a container. But as we know, Stu, data is sticky. So what many enterprises the data migration, or the way that the database is transformed, is the thing that takes the longest. So we're seeing out there in the enterprises people who are running their apps both with the ingress/egress service, the application server container containerized, but the database still living on a virtual machine, for a extended period of time. And until that made the final jump or chone their data service, they make that move. I do see this being, I personally, I honestly don't believe in my lifetime VMs will actually disappear. Because we're seeing that in some cases it's actually too costly for organizations to actually transform their applications or there's no real business case. It works perfectly well with the existing process. There's no need to modernize. But they're looking at ways and what parts of the architecture can be modernized, and containers are definitely the future for all the attributes that we know and love. But there is going to be this hybrid world. So having tools and partners like Veeam, who are willing to cross the ecosphere of the different platforms, is critical for our clients today and critical for partnerships that we have. Like the one we have with Veeam. >> All right well Simon, it goes back to one of those IT maxims, you know, is IT always additive. We almost never really get rid of anything, we just keep adding to it and changing it and as you said, data is that critical component and I think you highlighted nicely how you know, Veeam fits in you know, very much for that story. So Simon, thank you so much for joining us, pleasure having you on the program, glad to have you in theCUBE alumni ranks at this point. >> Thank you Stu, and thank you, it was a pleasure. Take care. >> All right stay tuned for lots more coverage from VeeamON 2020 online, I'm Stu Miniman, and thanks for watching theCUBE. (calm music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios (upbeat music) in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hi, and welcome to a special CUBE Conversation. I'm Stu Miniman, coming to you from our Boston Area studio, and today, March 31st, 2020, is World Backup Day. Joining me is one of our CUBE alumni, Simon Taylor, who's the CEO of HYCU. Simon, we had you a couple weeks ago in our studio, of course. Today we have you joining us remotely. Thank you so much for joining us, and great to see you. >> Great to see you, as well Stu, as always. >> So, there's certain dates that everybody circles on the calendar and gets ready. In your industry, I have to imagine, normally World Backup Day would be a huge party, cake, and everything like that. Just, in all jest, it's my understanding, HYCU did not create World Backup Day, but it is gratuitous to talk about that, and it's something that's been around for a few years. Let's start there, thank you for joining. >> Yeah, absolutely Stu, and again, thanks for having me back on. You're going to get sick of having me on your wonderful program if we keep visiting too much, but I do appreciate it. I'm actually calling in today, as you can imagine, from Vermont, as we sort of escape the city here and get out in the countryside away from all the hectic and the crisis. You know, it's speaking of the crisis, I think that World Backup Day really could not have come at a better time, in some senses. It's so important, and I think it was created to help the world remember that their data loss is such a major issue, and that if we don't watch out for our data, if we don't backup our data, if we don't put proper data protection practices into place, we really can have a problem. And I think when we are moving to work-from-home environments, when we are moving out of the office, when the world is in such a state of flux, as it is today with Coronavirus, these are the moments when you want to really know that your data is protected, that you're safe. You know, we're seeing a rise in ransomware attacks. We're seeing all sorts of things that are tangential to the crisis with COVID-19, and I think, you know, us all taking a moment to kind of realize what an issue data loss is in the world, there just couldn't be a more important time to do that than during a crisis like this one. >> Yeah, Simon, unfortunately, it's scary times also for the IT department because bad actors are definitely making even more attacks right now, in the midst of the global pandemic, something that people are concerned about. When I've been looking out at the community, there's been conversations about, you know, "What does this mean for digital transformation, "and cloud adoption?" And some of the things I'm hearing, especially over in Europe, is there were certain companies, and if you look at certain countries, take Germany for one example, where they might have been a little bit slow to say, "Uh, I'm not sure "if I want to do the cloud." Well, if everybody's working from home for a little bit, and IT needs to keep the business running, there's been a push even faster to the cloud, and one of the main things we're going to talk about today is your partnership with Microsoft Azure. So love to hear what you're hearing from your customers out there, especially ones that normally it's, "Oh, I'm going to make my plan," and we know how fast, or slow, the enterprise normally moves, and now there's a little bit of an acceleration to say, "Hey, we need to get involved in the cloud, and my backup, my data protection is absolutely even more critical when I go to the public cloud." >> Oh my gosh, Stu, absolutely. You're right on all counts. I mean, one of the most horrific issues that we're seeing over, and over, and over again with our customers, and it's such a shame, is that there are bad actors out there. There are bad individuals out there who are trying to take advantage of this crisis, and what they're doing is they're understanding that they can now exploit the fact there's so much work from home. We're seeing more man-in-the-middle attacks. We're seeing more customers who are calling us up and saying, "I've just been hit with a ransomware, "all my data's locked down. "Somebody didn't follow protocol when they were working "from home, and boom, all of the sudden we're being asked "to pay a million dollars in bitcoin, "and what do I do?" I'm really, really proud of my team for stepping up during the crisis. We've actually seen more than 10 different customers, just in the last month, who've called us up and have said, "You know, I'm supposed to pay this bitcoin ransom. "Can you get my data back?" In all 10 out of 10 cases, because of how natively integrated HYCU is into the platforms we support, we were actually able to recover that data within the next few hours to days, get it back for them before they had to pay out those ransoms. So again, not just a plug for HYCU, a plug for backup and recovery in general. A plug for everybody who's thinking about, "How do I keep myself safe when I'm moving to the cloud?" Absolutely, this is the time to keep yourself safe with proper data protection strategies. You know, I think the second thing that you bring up, very rightly so, is that there were a lot of countries, Germany's one of them but there's many, who had sort of been on the back foot during this crisis, and had always expected that on-prem was going to be a majority of their infrastructure for the foreseeable future. They were all dipping their toe in the cloud water, the cloud pond, as it were, but you didn't see a lot of folks in Europe who were 100% committing to cloud. Well, wow, has that changed. You know, as we moved to work from home, you need a lot of that dynamic scaling that only true cloud environments, public cloud, can provide. But I think the second thing, and maybe more importantly, is we don't want to see our IT departments having to go into the office. We don't want to see them having to put themselves, and potentially their families at risk, simply to go in and manage data. So being able to work off of infrastructure-as-a-service, hugely critical during the crisis, and to the fact that HYCU is a natively integrated service into those different enterprise and public clouds means that you can do all of it remotely. And I think this is where the whole HYCU simplicity is a pillar, and a guiding principle for the company has become so important. I can't tell you how many customers have called us up and said, "I wanted to be at home with my family. "The other backup companies, the legacy deployments we had, "just simply wouldn't have allowed me to stay at home. "I would have needed to go back to the office. "Do you have something that's as-a-service?" That certainly brings me to, I think, your third point, which is we are absolutely thrilled here today, on World Backup Day, in the midst of this crisis, to be announcing the launch of HYCU for Azure. And again, this is a natively integrated service that customers can literally just VPN to their set data center, go directly to their cloud, go directly to Azure, in the marketplace turn on HYCU for Azure, and boom, you're going to have all of that wonderful, natively integrated, purpose filled backup recovery as a service. You're going to have all of that application support. You're going to have all of the things you've become, sort of used to, Stu, when we talk about HYCU, natively integrated into Azure as well. And again, I think because of this crisis, because we want people to stay at home, we want to flatten that curve, the fact that we've got this new service for Azure, which is so important for everybody, I think is just critical at this particular time. >> Yeah, definitely hugely important. We've been talking to you and HYCU for a number of years, Simon. Of course, started out very focused on, really, a Nutanix environment, broadened out to really the virtualization environment, and you're really going with your customers heavily into a cloud environment. So, Azure, really important. When I was at Microsoft Ignite last year, CEO Satya Nadella, I could sum up his main them in one word, and that was trust. So, number one, it was a knock against a certain company in the cloud that mainly drive their revenue from ads, but when he talked about customers and partners, he wanted Microsoft to really be the company that people trust in that environment. We've seen Microsoft, one of the biggest movers from an application standpoint, the real push to Office 365, got people to really embrace and trust SaaS. Would love to hear your early customers who you've been working through for this announcement, why this is so important that HYCU, not only supporting and integrating with Azure, but in the Azure marketplace, and what your customers are telling you. >> Gosh, that's such a great question, Stu. You know, first, just talking about Satya Nadella, I really think the world of him. I think he does truly believe it, when he, you know, if you've read his book, "Hit Refresh", you do start to see a man who truly cares, not just about the bottom line, or even the top line, for that matter, but really strives to drive real customer value. And I think one of the things he really did at Microsoft is he talks a lot about how the solutions that they're selling have real world effects across so many different industries. It's the net result of the technology that I think he cares about, as opposed to just the sum of its parts. So it's really, really interesting, I think, when we think about him and his leadership style, to think about how HYCU kind of fits into that. And you know, one of the things I'm really proud to announce is that here, on World Backup Day, in the midst of this horrible pandemic, what we're doing, as we launch HYCU for Azure is we're actually going to give it entirely free, no cost, no strings attached, to the entire world for the next three months. And the reason we're choosing to do that is we believe that data protection is so important, that in a situation like this, it's incredibly important that people don't take life threatening risks, things that could threaten not only them, but their families, going in to the office to do this. You know, and I think one of the great things about HYCU and also HYCU with Protege, our multi-cloud data management platform, is that you can now migrate your data from on-prem to the cloud with the touch of a button from home. You can literally go sign up, it's free of charge for all the HYCU backup you want for the next three months. You know, get on there and protect your data, that's number one. You know, that adds real value to customers in the midst of this crisis. Number two is you can use HYCU Protege to then migrate entire workloads, keep them safe, whether it's applications, whether it's databases. You know, we want customers to know that they can trust a third party, like HYCU, to be able to automate the process of migration to the cloud, and then you know, in the midst of a crisis like this everybody's thinking about disaster recovery. Well, guess what? We can even more data back on-prem, using a runbook, and we can actually drive true disaster recovery preparedness, as well, all for Azure customers. You know, Stu, you and I were talking about this offline a few minutes ago, but the reality is, we've interviewed our customers, and 72% of them, and that's in 71 countries now around the world, funny enough, but 72% of those customers are Azure customers, as well. So when we talk about our on-prem business, 72% of our on-prem business is also using Azure. So the ability to dynamically move these workloads to the cloud, move it back again for DR, as well as protect that data wherever it's sitting, and do all of that from home, with simplicity, and for the next three months no cost, I think that's how we're trying to drive value and trust into the Azure marketplace. >> Yeah, first of all, Simon, that's really a lot of good pieces here. It almost becomes a little bit trite when we talk about, "Oh, well, I want to build optionality "into my product, I want to be ready to change "and adjust things." But the environment and landscape that we're living with today is we understand, companies need to be able to react really fast, and they need to be able to adjust with this changing landscape. So what they're doing last month, versus what they're doing today, versus what they might doing in a couple of months, you know, I don't want to get locked in. I don't want to make any big decision. So therefore, it's great to see you're giving customers flexibility there. They've got both the free usage of the software, but also that migration built in to HYCU Protege. You know, how do I move my data around? How do I make sure it's still protected? So important that, you know, we've been talking for years about the ability to make changes fast and to move with speed, but you know, I think today's landscape really just put the point on (laughs), you know, we've been planning for this, in some ways, and this might have been the exact thing we're planning for, but this is the reason that this technology's so important. >> It's so well said, Stu. I mean, honestly, just like you said, we started out with the purpose-built back up recovery for Nutanix, and then we added GCP, we added VMware, now of course, we're launching Azure, but in each case, we said it's got to be natively integrated, it's got to be super simple, we've got to automate every process we can. We want to make sure that customers can wake up in the morning, log in to their cloud infrastructure, whether it's GCP, now Azure, you know, turn this on as a service. We always say, "There's nothing to download "when it's a true service," right? And I think that's so important now. It used to be kind of a talking point, but I think now people are really seeing the true value, which is when you don't need to go in to your data center, when you don't need to VPN in, when you don't need to figure out all the rest of this architecture. Well, when people are moving enormous amounts of data, and buying so much VDI, and deploying all these work-from-home modules to, sort of, protect their infrastructure, and create and environment that works for the current conditions, the last thing they have to do is put themselves at risk for the backup. I think because this is purpose-built, because it's a true service, because it's a natural extension, really, of the cloud provider they've chosen, or multiple, I think we make that really, really easy for customers, and we're very proud of the work we've done on that front. >> All right, Simon, just want to give you the opportunity. You know, what kind of feedback have you had from customers over the last couple of weeks, specifically? You talked about how important Azure was for them, of course, prior to this announcement, but just anecdotally, we'd love to hear just viewpoints as to customers you're talking and working with in these challenging times. >> Sure, sure, so first of all, everybody's hard pressed. I mean, there's a crunch everywhere. You know, people are feeling this sort of potential for a really, really systemic downturn into the economy, but at the same time, there were really urgent needs in terms of acquiring mission-critical infrastructure to support the move to work from home. And I think that's caused massive shifts in the way people are thinking about purchasing technology, and specifically infrastructure technology in the marketplace. People truly want services now. You know, before it was something that maybe drove the valuation of a company, et cetera, et cetera, but now people are saying, "Hey, it's nothing to do with that at all. "I just want a service that I can scale up, "and I can scale down. "I want it now, I want it fast, and I want it simple." So I think anything that's natively integrated, and is acting as a SaaS, true SaaS offering, has a real advantage in today's marketplace. I think the second thing is, that as customers are moving in droves to VDI, you know, I think there's a lot of talk right now about whether it's ever going to move 100% back. I think as people are discovering how effective and powerful we can be as we work from home, I mean, Stu, look at us right now having this very conversation, I think it's amazing what we're able to achieve with the technology that's out there, and I think that's really reduced the panic, and I think it's something that people aren't talking about. That there's such, imagine what the panic would have been if we didn't have Zoom, if we weren't able to do a GoToMeeting, if we weren't able to log in with a VPN and access our infrastructure. I mean, the entire world would have shut down like this. Now there's arguments being made that it may still shut down, et cetera, but you know we have at least delayed that process. I think we've created a lot of support for the economy and the environment through all of the technology that the marketplace is presenting to customers. And I think the next step in that is making sure that we recognize a couple of things. You know, we're seeing, again, a huge rise in ransomware attacks. There are many, many bad actors out there looking to exploit and take advantage of this situation, which is why I say you don't need to buy our product, but please, if you've got Azure, go and turn on the backup. Well, why wouldn't you? Protect your data, make sure it's recoverable. God forbid anything bad happens, or you do get attacked, make sure you can get that data back from a third party. Make sure it's really easy to recover. Make sure all your mission-critical applications and databases are supported. And I think if we do those things, and we work together to protect our customers, and for just a very short period of time, really don't worry so much about how much money we're going to make off of them, but think about how to protect them, truly, I think that's where the value is, and I think that's how we as human beings, can sort of do a better job of protecting each other. >> All right, well, Simon, thank you so much for all the updates. Happy World Backup Day. You know, I definitely look forward to chatting with you soon, and thanks for joining, and please be safe. >> Stu, always a pleasure. Please stay healthy, as well, take care. >> All right, I'm Stu Miniman, and you've been watching theCUBE here with some of our remote interviews. Check out thecube.net for everything online, and thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat digital music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston massachusetts, it's theCUBE. (techno music) Now, here's your host Stu Miniman. >> Hi, and welcome to a special CUBE conversation here in our Boston area studio. One of the biggest topics we've been digging into as we head through 2020, has really been multi-cloud and as the customers as they're really going through their own transformations understanding what they're doing in their data center to modernize what's happening between all of the public clouds they use, and all the services that fit amongst them. Happy to bring back one of our CUBE alumni to dig into a specific topic. Simon Taylor, who's the CEO of HYCU. Of course data protection, a big piece. A big buzz in the industry for a number of years, in one of those areas, in multi-cloud, that's definitely of big importance. Simon, great to see you, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you so much for having me back on, it's exciting to be here. >> All right, so, Simon, first, give us the update. >> Sure. >> It's 2020. We've seen you at many of the conferences we go to. You're based in Boston, so not to far for you to come out to our Boston area studio here. You know a 40 minute drive without traffic so, >> Not bad at all. >> give us the latest on HYCU. >> Certainly well and Stu, thanks again for having me into your studio, it's gorgeous, everything looks great. It's a lot easier than traveling over to Europe to see you. So this is very very convenient actually. But since we last spoke, which I think was about six months ago now, HYCU has been growing fast and furiously, you know we started out with the world's first purpose built backup and recovery product for Nutanix Of course, we added VMware we added Google Cloud, we wrapped all the data together into multi-cloud data protection as a service, and we called that HYCU Protege. Well I am so thrilled to announce that in just the three months since we've launched Protege, we have seen hundreds of customers flocking to it. And what we're finding is that customers are calling us and they're saying things like, "let me get this straight, "I'm already backing up my data on-prem with you, "I can now migrate to the cloud, "bring it back again for disaster recovery as a service, "and it's all part of HYCU?" and we say yes, you know, and they say, "and this is all offered as a service?" Yes, "and it's natively integrated "into all the platforms that I'm using?" Yes. And I think so customers today, are more and more in need of the kind of expertise that HYCUs providing because they're looking now much more strategically than ever before, at what workloads to leave on-prem and which workloads to migrate to the cloud, and they want to make sure that, that entire data pathway is protected from beginning to end. >> Yeah, it's really interesting stuff, I think back to early in my career that you know that data protection layer was like, "well, this is what I'm running "and don't change it." Think about like when you've rolled out like virtual tape as a technology it was, you know, "I don't want to have to change my backup "because that is just something that runs "and I don't do it." For last five years or so it feels like customers. There's so much change in their environment that they are looking for things that are more flexible, you talked about some of the flexible adoption models for payment and the like that they're looking for. So, you know, what do you think customers are just more embracing of that change, is it just that changes their daily business and therefore data protection needs to come along with that. Well it's funny you asked because just a few years ago I was on theCUBE with you and you said to me, "you guys have a perpetual license model, "what are you doing about that?" and I said, "don't worry, it is shifting to as a service it's going subscription," which was super important for the market is, I've had conversations with folks who are selling cooking gear and they're trying to sell that as a service, I saw yesterday, somebody, I think Panera Bread, is offering a coffee as a service. You know, I think what we've started to realize is that the convenience of the as a service model, the flexibility, which I would argue was probably driven by cloud technology and cloud technology adoption, is something the market has truly embraced and I think anybody who's not moved in that direction at this point is probably very much being left behind. >> Okay, another technology that often goes hand in hand in discussion with data protection is security. Of course ransomware is a hot topic conversation the last few years, how does that fit into your conversations with customers, what are you saying? >> That's a great question. So you know one of our advisory board members, his name is Kevin Powers, and he runs the Boston College cyber security program. I had the privilege and the honor of attending the FBI Boston College cyber program recently at a large scale event at Boston College, and FBI Director Ray was actually on hand to talk about this problem, and it was incredible you know he said, "cyber crime as a service "is becoming a major issue," you're talking about the commoditization of hard to build malware, that's now just skyrocketing off the charts, the amount of cyber exploitation that's going on across the world. This is creating massive massive issues for the FBI because they've got so many thousands of cases, they've got to deal with. And while they're doing a fantastic job. We believe prevention is certainly the key. So one of the things that has been really really wonderful as a CEO to watch has been the way that some of our customers have actually been able to crack the code in terms of not having to give in to these bad actors. We've had actual customers who have had ransomware attacks had millions of dollars in data, literally stolen from them, and they've been told, "you've got to deposit, "$5 million on this Bitcoin account by midnight, "or we're deleting the data." Right? Because HYCU is Linux based because HYCU is not Windows Server based because HYCU is natively integrated into all the platforms that we support. We were able to help those customers get their data back without paying a penny. So I think that that's one of those moments where you really sort of say to yourself, "God I'm glad I'm in this business here," we've built a product that doesn't just do what we say it's going to do, it does a heck of a lot more. And I think it's it's absolutely a massive problem and data protection is really a key part of the answer, >> You know it's great to hear their success stories there, you know I think back to earlier days where it'd be like well you know what if I set up for disasters and data protection and things like that, well maybe I haven't thought about it or maybe I kind of implemented it but I've never really tested it, but there's more and more reasons why I might actually need to leverage these technologies that I've deployed, and it's nice to know that they're there. You know it's not just an insurance thing that I've never used. >> Oh absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. >> All right. So I started off our discussion time in talking about multi-cloud So you talked about earlier we first first met it was at the Nutanix shows in their environments, and some of that you've gone along with Nutanix as they've gone through hybrid and multi-cloud what they call enterprise Cloud Messaging. >> Sure. >> And play with those environments so bring us up to speed. What have your big customers doing with cloud where does HYCU fit in and what are the updates on your product. >> Yeah, sure. And I'll start off by saying that at this point about a third of all AHV customers are using a HYCU for backup AND recovery. >> And just for our audience that doesn't know, AHV of course is Nutanix's >> Yes. >> Acropolis Hypervisor >> Absolutely. >> That comes baked into their solution as an alternative to people like VMware. >> Perfectly said as always sir, yes very much, and you know we've been thrilled as the rise of AHV and Nutanix has sort of taken the market by storm. And when we started out, you know we use to came on the show with zero customers and a new product and said, "we believe in AHV and we think it's going to be great "and we're going to back it up." And that's really paid off in spades for us, which was wonderful, but we also recognize that customers needed that VMware backups. We built a VADP integration and then we started going after the public cloud. So we started with Google Cloud, and we said we're going to build the world's first purpose built backup and recovery as a service for GCP. We launched that last year and it was tremendous you know some of the world's largest companies and organizations and governments are actually now running HYCU specifically for Google Cloud. So we've been thrilled about that. I think the management team at GCP has done a terrific job of making sure that Google can be really competitive in the cloud wars, and we're thrilled to support them. >> Yeah, and I'm glad you've got some customer stories on Google because you know the industry watchers out there it's like, "well you know Google they're number three," and you know we know that Google has some really strong data products Where they're very well known but I'm curious when you're talking to your customers. Is there anything that's kind of commonalities to why customers are using Google and you know what feedback you're hearing from your customers out there. >> Sure I mean I'll start off by saying this, we've polled our customers and we've now got over 1,300 customers in 56 countries. So we polled all of them and we just said, "how many data silos do you have, "how many platforms, how many clouds?" The average was five. Right, so the first thing to say is that I think almost all of these large enterprise customers in public sector and private sector are really using all of them, the extent to which they may be using AWS versus Azure versus GCP, versus Nutanix versus VMware on-prem. we can argue and debate but I think all customers at this point of any size and scale are trying them all out. I think what Google's done really well is they've started to build a really strong partner program. I think where they were a little bit sort of late to the party in terms of AWS and Azure being there sort of first. But I think what Thomas Kurian did when he came in is he sort of tripled down on sort of building out that ecosystem and saying, "what's really important "to make cloud customers comfortable "that their data is going to be as safe on Google Cloud, "as it was on-prem," and I'm thrilled that they've elected to make data protection sort of one of the key pillars of that strategy, not just because we're a data protection company, but because I do think that that was one of the encumbrances in terms of that evolution to cloud. >> Yeah, absolutely, seen a huge growth in the ecosystem around Google. The other big cloud provider that has a very strong partner ecosystem is the one when I went to the show last year, their CEO Satya Nadella talked about trust, so of course talking about Microsoft and Azure, very large ecosystem there, trying to emphasize, maybe against others and by the way you saw this as much of a shot against Google >> Sure. >> you know, how do I trust Google with my data and information from the consumer side as AWS is I might be concerned that they might be competing against them. So, how about the Microsoft relationship? >> It's a great question. So again, so when we started on-prem, with our initial purpose built backup recovery products. We added Google Cloud. You know I'm now thrilled to announce that we're also going to be launching Azure backup and recovery. It's also native, it is purpose built into the Azure Marketplace. All the things you've come to expect from HYCU backup. The simplicity, the fact that it's SLO based. The fact that you can actually go in and decide how many times a day you want a different recovery point et cetera. All of those levels of configuration are now baked in to HYCUs own purpose built backup and recovery as a service for Azure. But I think the important thing to remember about this wonderful wonderful new addition to our portfolio. Is that, it is a critical component of HYCU Protege. So getting back to your question from before about multi-cloud data protection and what we're seeing, we call this the year of migration, because for all of these cloud platforms, what are they really trying to do they need to move massive amounts of data in a safe and resilient manner, to the cloud. So remember after we built out these purpose built backup recovery services, Azure is now one of those. We then pulled all that data together under a single pane of glass we called it HYCU Protege. We then said to customers, we're going to enable you to automatically migrate with the touch of a button an entire workload to the cloud, and then bring it back again for disaster recovery, and we will protect the data on-prem in the cloud and back again. >> Yeah, it's interesting 'cause when we kind of look at what's happening in the marketplace, for many years it was a discussion of what's moving from the data center to the public cloud, some things are moving back from the environment edge, of course, pulls things even further. Often it's, I say it's not even migration anymore it's just mobility, because we are going to be moving things and spinning things up and building things in many more places, and it's going to change. As we started out that conversation, there's so much change going on that so you're giving customers some optionality there, so that this isn't just a one way, you know, let's stick it on a truck put it on this thing and get it to that environment but I need to be able to enable some of that optionality and know what I'm doing today but also knowing that you know six months a year from now, we know things are going to be different >> Yes, yes! >> And in each of these some of those environments. >> Absolutely. We call it the three Ds data assurance, data mobility, and disaster recovery. So I think the ability to not only protect your data, whether it's on-prem as it journeys to the cloud or whether it's in the cloud, the ability to actually assist the customer in the migration. And what I hear time and time again is, "oh but Azure has a tool," or "Google has a tool for migration." Of course they have tools for migration, but I think the challenge for customers is, how do I affect that data resiliency, how do I ensure that I can move the data as a complete workload. Moving an entire SAP HANA instance, for example, to the cloud. And it protected the entire time as it journeys up there, and then bring it back for the disaster recovery without professional services. Because again, you know HYCU it's about simplicity, we want to make sure that these customers can get the same level of readiness, the same ease of deployment that they get from their cloud vendor, when they're thinking about the data protection and the migration. >> All right, I want to click down one layer >> Please. >> in here. We're talking about multi-cloud, you talk about simplicity. >> Sure. >> Well, Kubernetes might not be the simplest thing out there but it absolutely is a fundamental piece of the infrastructure in a multi-cloud environment so you know your partners, Google with GKE, Azure with AKS and >> And Carbon. >> Carbon with a K from Nutanix everyone now, I say it's not about distributions it's really every platform that you're going to use is going to have Kubernetes built into it so what does that mean from a data protection standpoint? Do you just plug into all of these environments you've tested it got customers using it? >> It's a great question it comes up, as you can imagine, all the time. I think it's something that is becoming more and more ready for prime time. A lot of the major vendors are moving to it, making heavy investments in Kubernetes, we ourselves have over 100 customers that are actively using Kubernetes in one form or another and backing the data up using HYCU so there's no question in my mind that HYCU is Kubernetes ready. I think what's really exciting for us is some of the native integrations we're working on with Google and with Nutanix so whether it's Carbon whether it's GKE, we want to make sure that when we work with these platforms that we mimic, how the platform is supporting Kubernetes, so that our customers can get the same experience from HYCU that they're getting from the platform provider itself. >> All right, Simon want to give you the final word. Bring us inside your customers what they're doing with multi-cloud and where HYCU fits there, here in 2020. Sure, we talked about prime time. Cloud for many years has been something that I think large enterprises have talked a big game about, but have been really dipping their toe in the water with. What we've seen the last two years, is a massive massive at scale migration to the largest three public clouds, whether that's GCP, whether that's Azure or the other one. (laughing) We're thrilled to support GCP and Azure because GCP and Azure, we believe do provide the most value to our customers. But I think the name of the game here is not just supporting a customer in the cloud, it's understanding that every customer today is to is on a journey, whether they're on-prem, whether their journeying to cloud or they're in cloud those three Ds, data assurance, which is our backup, data mobility, which is the automated migration, or disaster recovery readiness. That's the name of the game and that's how HYCU wants to help. >> All right, Simon Taylor. Always a pleasure to catch up with you thank you so much for the HYCU updates, >> Stu thanks so much for having us on. >> All right, be sure to check out www.thecube.net for all of our inventory of the shows that we've been at the videos we've done, you can even search on keywords in companies, I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (Techno Music)