(upbeat music) >> Welcome everyone to theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Startup Showcase AI/ML Top Startups Building Foundation Model Infrastructure. This is season three, episode one of our ongoing series covering exciting startups from the AWS ecosystem to talk about data and analytics. I'm your host, Lisa Martin and today we're excited to be joined by two guests from Astronomer. Steven Hillion joins us, it's Chief Data Officer and Jeff Fletcher, it's director of ML. They're here to talk about machine learning and data orchestration. Guys, thank you so much for joining us today. >> Thank you. >> It's great to be here. >> Before we get into machine learning let's give the audience an overview of Astronomer. Talk about what that is, Steven. Talk about what you mean by data orchestration. >> Yeah, let's start with Astronomer. We're the Airflow company basically. The commercial developer behind the open-source project, Apache Airflow. I don't know if you've heard of Airflow. It's sort of de-facto standard these days for orchestrating data pipelines, data engineering pipelines, and as we'll talk about later, machine learning pipelines. It's really is the de-facto standard. I think we're up to about 12 million downloads a month. That's actually as a open-source project. I think at this point it's more popular by some measures than Slack. Airflow was created by Airbnb some years ago to manage all of their data pipelines and manage all of their workflows and now it powers the data ecosystem for organizations as diverse as Electronic Arts, Conde Nast is one of our big customers, a big user of Airflow. And also not to mention the biggest banks on Wall Street use Airflow and Astronomer to power the flow of data throughout their organizations. >> Talk about that a little bit more, Steven, in terms of the business impact. You mentioned some great customer names there. What is the business impact or outcomes that a data orchestration strategy enables businesses to achieve? >> Yeah, I mean, at the heart of it is quite simply, scheduling and managing data pipelines. And so if you have some enormous retailer who's managing the flow of information throughout their organization they may literally have thousands or even tens of thousands of data pipelines that need to execute every day to do things as simple as delivering metrics for the executives to consume at the end of the day, to producing on a weekly basis new machine learning models that can be used to drive product recommendations. One of our customers, for example, is a British food delivery service. And you get those recommendations in your application that says, "Well, maybe you want to have samosas with your curry." That sort of thing is powered by machine learning models that they train on a regular basis to reflect changing conditions in the market. And those are produced through Airflow and through the Astronomer platform, which is essentially a managed platform for running airflow. So at its simplest it really is just scheduling and managing those workflows. But that's easier said than done of course. I mean if you have 10 thousands of those things then you need to make sure that they all run that they all have sufficient compute resources. If things fail, how do you track those down across those 10,000 workflows? How easy is it for an average data scientist or data engineer to contribute their code, their Python notebooks or their SQL code into a production environment? And then you've got reproducibility, governance, auditing, like managing data flows across an organization which we think of as orchestrating them is much more than just scheduling. It becomes really complicated pretty quickly. >> I imagine there's a fair amount of complexity there. Jeff, let's bring you into the conversation. Talk a little bit about Astronomer through your lens, data orchestration and how it applies to MLOps. >> So I come from a machine learning background and for me the interesting part is that machine learning requires the expansion into orchestration. A lot of the same things that you're using to go and develop and build pipelines in a standard data orchestration space applies equally well in a machine learning orchestration space. What you're doing is you're moving data between different locations, between different tools, and then tasking different types of tools to act on that data. So extending it made logical sense from a implementation perspective. And a lot of my focus at Astronomer is really to explain how Airflow can be used well in a machine learning context. It is being used well, it is being used a lot by the customers that we have and also by users of the open source version. But it's really being able to explain to people why it's a natural extension for it and how well it fits into that. And a lot of it is also extending some of the infrastructure capabilities that Astronomer provides to those customers for them to be able to run some of the more platform specific requirements that come with doing machine learning pipelines. >> Let's get into some of the things that make Astronomer unique. Jeff, sticking with you, when you're in customer conversations, what are some of the key differentiators that you articulate to customers? >> So a lot of it is that we are not specific to one cloud provider. So we have the ability to operate across all of the big cloud providers. I know, I'm certain we have the best developers that understand how best practices implementations for data orchestration works. So we spend a lot of time talking to not just the business outcomes and the business users of the product, but also also for the technical people, how to help them better implement things that they may have come across on a Stack Overflow article or not necessarily just grown with how the product has migrated. So it's the ability to run it wherever you need to run it and also our ability to help you, the customer, better implement and understand those workflows that I think are two of the primary differentiators that we have. >> Lisa: Got it. >> I'll add another one if you don't mind. >> You can go ahead, Steven. >> Is lineage and dependencies between workflows. One thing we've done is to augment core Airflow with Lineage services. So using the Open Lineage framework, another open source framework for tracking datasets as they move from one workflow to another one, team to another, one data source to another is a really key component of what we do and we bundle that within the service so that as a developer or as a production engineer, you really don't have to worry about lineage, it just happens. Jeff, may show us some of this later that you can actually see as data flows from source through to a data warehouse out through a Python notebook to produce a predictive model or a dashboard. Can you see how those data products relate to each other? And when something goes wrong, figure out what upstream maybe caused the problem, or if you're about to change something, figure out what the impact is going to be on the rest of the organization. So Lineage is a big deal for us. >> Got it. >> And just to add on to that, the other thing to think about is that traditional Airflow is actually a complicated implementation. It required quite a lot of time spent understanding or was almost a bespoke language that you needed to be able to develop in two write these DAGs, which is like fundamental pipelines. So part of what we are focusing on is tooling that makes it more accessible to say a data analyst or a data scientist who doesn't have or really needs to gain the necessary background in how the semantics of Airflow DAGs works to still be able to get the benefit of what Airflow can do. So there is new features and capabilities built into the astronomer cloud platform that effectively obfuscates and removes the need to understand some of the deep work that goes on. But you can still do it, you still have that capability, but we are expanding it to be able to have orchestrated and repeatable processes accessible to more teams within the business. >> In terms of accessibility to more teams in the business. You talked about data scientists, data analysts, developers. Steven, I want to talk to you, as the chief data officer, are you having more and more conversations with that role and how is it emerging and evolving within your customer base? >> Hmm. That's a good question, and it is evolving because I think if you look historically at the way that Airflow has been used it's often from the ground up. You have individual data engineers or maybe single data engineering teams who adopt Airflow 'cause it's very popular. Lots of people know how to use it and they bring it into an organization and say, "Hey, let's use this to run our data pipelines." But then increasingly as you turn from pure workflow management and job scheduling to the larger topic of orchestration you realize it gets pretty complicated, you want to have coordination across teams, and you want to have standardization for the way that you manage your data pipelines. And so having a managed service for Airflow that exists in the cloud is easy to spin up as you expand usage across the organization. And thinking long term about that in the context of orchestration that's where I think the chief data officer or the head of analytics tends to get involved because they really want to think of this as a strategic investment that they're making. Not just per team individual Airflow deployments, but a network of data orchestrators. >> That network is key. Every company these days has to be a data company. We talk about companies being data driven. It's a common word, but it's true. It's whether it is a grocer or a bank or a hospital, they've got to be data companies. So talk to me a little bit about Astronomer's business model. How is this available? How do customers get their hands on it? >> Jeff, go ahead. >> Yeah, yeah. So we have a managed cloud service and we have two modes of operation. One, you can bring your own cloud infrastructure. So you can say here is an account in say, AWS or Azure and we can go and deploy the necessary infrastructure into that, or alternatively we can host everything for you. So it becomes a full SaaS offering. But we then provide a platform that connects at the backend to your internal IDP process. So however you are authenticating users to make sure that the correct people are accessing the services that they need with role-based access control. From there we are deploying through Kubernetes, the different services and capabilities into either your cloud account or into an account that we host. And from there Airflow does what Airflow does, which is its ability to then reach to different data systems and data platforms and to then run the orchestration. We make sure we do it securely, we have all the necessary compliance certifications required for GDPR in Europe and HIPAA based out of the US, and a whole bunch host of others. So it is a secure platform that can run in a place that you need it to run, but it is a managed Airflow that includes a lot of the extra capabilities like the cloud developer environment and the open lineage services to enhance the overall airflow experience. >> Enhance the overall experience. So Steven, going back to you, if I'm a Conde Nast or another organization, what are some of the key business outcomes that I can expect? As one of the things I think we've learned during the pandemic is access to realtime data is no longer a nice to have for organizations. It's really an imperative. It's that demanding consumer that wants to have that personalized, customized, instant access to a product or a service. So if I'm a Conde Nast or I'm one of your customers, what can I expect my business to be able to achieve as a result of data orchestration? >> Yeah, I think in a nutshell it's about providing a reliable, scalable, and easy to use service for developing and running data workflows. And talking of demanding customers, I mean, I'm actually a customer myself, as you mentioned, I'm the head of data for Astronomer. You won't be surprised to hear that we actually use Astronomer and Airflow to run all of our data pipelines. And so I can actually talk about my experience. When I started I was of course familiar with Airflow, but it always seemed a little bit unapproachable to me if I was introducing that to a new team of data scientists. They don't necessarily want to have to think about learning something new. But I think because of the layers that Astronomer has provided with our Astro service around Airflow it was pretty easy for me to get up and running. Of course I've got an incentive for doing that. I work for the Airflow company, but we went from about, at the beginning of last year, about 500 data tasks that we were running on a daily basis to about 15,000 every day. We run something like a million data operations every month within my team. And so as one outcome, just the ability to spin up new production workflows essentially in a single day you go from an idea in the morning to a new dashboard or a new model in the afternoon, that's really the business outcome is just removing that friction to operationalizing your machine learning and data workflows. >> And I imagine too, oh, go ahead, Jeff. >> Yeah, I think to add to that, one of the things that becomes part of the business cycle is a repeatable capabilities for things like reporting, for things like new machine learning models. And the impediment that has existed is that it's difficult to take that from a team that's an analyst team who then provide that or a data science team that then provide that to the data engineering team who have to work the workflow all the way through. What we're trying to unlock is the ability for those teams to directly get access to scheduling and orchestrating capabilities so that a business analyst can have a new report for C-suite execs that needs to be done once a week, but the time to repeatability for that report is much shorter. So it is then immediately in the hands of the person that needs to see it. It doesn't have to go into a long list of to-dos for a data engineering team that's already overworked that they eventually get it to it in a month's time. So that is also a part of it is that the realizing, orchestration I think is fairly well and a lot of people get the benefit of being able to orchestrate things within a business, but it's having more people be able to do it and shorten the time that that repeatability is there is one of the main benefits from good managed orchestration. >> So a lot of workforce productivity improvements in what you're doing to simplify things, giving more people access to data to be able to make those faster decisions, which ultimately helps the end user on the other end to get that product or the service that they're expecting like that. Jeff, I understand you have a demo that you can share so we can kind of dig into this. >> Yeah, let me take you through a quick look of how the whole thing works. So our starting point is our cloud infrastructure. This is the login. You go to the portal. You can see there's a a bunch of workspaces that are available. Workspaces are like individual places for people to operate in. I'm not going to delve into all the deep technical details here, but starting point for a lot of our data science customers is we have what we call our Cloud IDE, which is a web-based development environment for writing and building out DAGs without actually having to know how the underpinnings of Airflow work. This is an internal one, something that we use. You have a notebook-like interface that lets you write python code and SQL code and a bunch of specific bespoke type of blocks if you want. They all get pulled together and create a workflow. So this is a workflow, which gets compiled to something that looks like a complicated set of Python code, which is the DAG. I then have a CICD process pipeline where I commit this through to my GitHub repo. So this comes to a repo here, which is where these DAGs that I created in the previous step exist. I can then go and say, all right, I want to see how those particular DAGs have been running. We then get to the actual Airflow part. So this is the managed Airflow component. So we add the ability for teams to fairly easily bring up an Airflow instance and write code inside our notebook-like environment to get it into that instance. So you can see it's been running. That same process that we built here that graph ends up here inside this, but you don't need to know how the fundamentals of Airflow work in order to get this going. Then we can run one of these, it runs in the background and we can manage how it goes. And from there, every time this runs, it's emitting to a process underneath, which is the open lineage service, which is the lineage integration that allows me to come in here and have a look and see this was that actual, that same graph that we built, but now it's the historic version. So I know where things started, where things are going, and how it ran. And then I can also do a comparison. So if I want to see how this particular run worked compared to one historically, I can grab one from a previous date and it will show me the comparison between the two. So that combination of managed Airflow, getting Airflow up and running very quickly, but the Cloud IDE that lets you write code and know how to get something into a repeatable format get that into Airflow and have that attached to the lineage process adds what is a complete end-to-end orchestration process for any business looking to get the benefit from orchestration. >> Outstanding. Thank you so much Jeff for digging into that. So one of my last questions, Steven is for you. This is exciting. There's a lot that you guys are enabling organizations to achieve here to really become data-driven companies. So where can folks go to get their hands on this? >> Yeah, just go to astronomer.io and we have plenty of resources. If you're new to Airflow, you can read our documentation, our guides to getting started. We have a CLI that you can download that is really I think the easiest way to get started with Airflow. But you can actually sign up for a trial. You can sign up for a guided trial where our teams, we have a team of experts, really the world experts on getting Airflow up and running. And they'll take you through that trial and allow you to actually kick the tires and see how this works with your data. And I think you'll see pretty quickly that it's very easy to get started with Airflow, whether you're doing that from the command line or doing that in our cloud service. And all of that is available on our website >> astronomer.io. Jeff, last question for you. What are you excited about? There's so much going on here. What are some of the things, maybe you can give us a sneak peek coming down the road here that prospects and existing customers should be excited about? >> I think a lot of the development around the data awareness components, so one of the things that's traditionally been complicated with orchestration is you leave your data in the place that you're operating on and we're starting to have more data processing capability being built into Airflow. And from a Astronomer perspective, we are adding more capabilities around working with larger datasets, doing bigger data manipulation with inside the Airflow process itself. And that lends itself to better machine learning implementation. So as we start to grow and as we start to get better in the machine learning context, well, in the data awareness context, it unlocks a lot more capability to do and implement proper machine learning pipelines. >> Awesome guys. Exciting stuff. Thank you so much for talking to me about Astronomer, machine learning, data orchestration, and really the value in it for your customers. Steve and Jeff, we appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> My pleasure, thanks. >> And we thank you for watching. This is season three, episode one of our ongoing series covering exciting startups from the AWS ecosystem. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. (upbeat music)

(electronic music) (graphics whooshing) (graphics tinkling) >> Telecommunications is well north of a trillion-dollar business globally, that provides critical services on which virtually everyone on the planet relies. Dramatic changes are occurring in the sector, and one of the most important dimensions of this change is the underlying infrastructure that powers global telecommunications networks. Telcos have been thawing out, if you will, they're frozen infrastructure, modernizing. They're opening up, they're disaggregating their infrastructure, separating, for example, the control plane from the data plane, and adopting open standards. Telco infrastructure is becoming software-defined. And leading telcos are adopting cloud native microservices to help make developers more productive, so they can respond more quickly to market changes. They're embracing technology consumption models, and selectively leveraging the cloud where it makes sense. And these changes are being driven by market forces, the root of which stem from customer demand. So from a customer's perspective, they want services, and they want them fast. Meaning, not only at high speeds, but also they want them now. Customers want the latest, the greatest, and they want these services to be reliable and stable with high quality of service levels. And they want them to be highly cost-effective. Hello and welcome to this preview of Mobile World Congress 2023. My name is Dave Vellante, and at this year's event, theCUBE has a major presence at the show made possible by Dell Technologies, and with me to unpack the trends in telco, and look ahead to MWC23 are Dennis Hoffman, he's the Senior Vice President and General Manager of Dell's telecom business, and Aaron Chaisson, who is the Vice President of Telecom and Edge Solutions Marketing at Dell Technologies, gentlemen, welcome, thanks so much for spending some time with me. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Thanks, glad to be here. >> So, Dennis, let's start with you. Telcos in recent history have been slow to deliver and to monetize new services, and a large part because their purpose-built infrastructure could been somewhat of a barrier to responding to all these market forces. In many ways, this is what makes telecoms, really this market so exciting. So from your perspective, where is the action in this space? >> Yeah, the action Dave is kind of all over the place, partly because it's an ecosystem play. I think it's been, as you point out, the disaggregation trend has been going on for a while. The opportunity's been clear, but it has taken a few years to get all of the vendors, and all of the components that make up a solution, as well as the operators themselves, to a point where we can start putting this stuff together, and actually achieving some of the promise. >> So Aaron, for those who might not be as familiar with Dell's a activities in this area, here we are just ahead of Mobile World Congress, it's the largest event for telecoms, what should people know about Dell? And what's the key message to this industry? >> Sure, yeah, I think everybody knows that there's a lot of innovation that's been happening in the industry of late. One of the major trends that we're seeing is that shift from more of a vertically-integrated technology stack, to more of a disaggregated set of solutions, and that trend has actually created a ton of innovation that's happening across the industry, or along technology vendors and providers, the telecoms themselves. And so, one of the things that Dell's really looking to do is, as Dennis talked about, is build out a really strong ecosystem of partners and vendors that we're working closely together to be able to collaborate on new technologies, new capabilities that are solving challenges that the networks are seeing today. Be able to create new solutions built on those in order to be able to bring new value to the industry. And then finally, we want to help both partners, as well as our CSP providers activate those changes, so that they can bring new solutions to market, to be able to serve their customers. And so, the key areas that we're really focusing on with our customers is, technologies to help modernize the network, to be able to capitalize on the value of open architectures, and bring price performance to what they're expecting, and availability that they're expecting today. And then also, partner with the lines of business to be able to take these new capabilities, produce new solutions, and then deliver new value to their customers. >> Great, thank you, Aaron. So Dennis, you and I, known you for a number of years. I've watched you, you're are a trend spotter. You're a strategic thinker. I love now the fact that you're running a business that you had to go out and analyze, and now you got to make it happen. So, how would you describe Dell's strategy in this market? >> Well, it's really two things. And I appreciate the comment, I'm not sure how much of a trend spotter I am, but I certainly enjoy, and I think I'm fascinated by what's going on in this industry right now. Our two main thrusts, Dave, are first round, trying to catalyze that ecosystem, be a force for pulling together a group of folks, vendors that have been flying in fairly loose formation for a couple of years, to deliver the kinds of solutions that move the needle forward, and produce the outcomes that our network operator customers can actually buy and consume, and deploy, and have them be supported. The other thing is, there's a couple of very key technology areas that need to be advanced here. This ends up being a much anticipated year in telecom. Because of the delivery of some open infrastructure solutions that have being developed for years. With the Intel Sapphire Rapids program coming to market, we've of course got some purpose-built solutions on top of that for telecommunications networks. Some expanded partnerships in the area of multi-cloud infrastructure. And so, I would say the second main thrust is, we've got to bring some intellectual property to the party. It's not just about pulling the ecosystem together. But those two things together really form the twin thrusts of our strategy. >> Okay, so as you point out, you obviously not going to go alone in this market, it's way too broad, there's so many routes to market, partnerships, obviously very, very important. So, can you share a little bit more about the ecosystem and partners, maybe give some examples of some of the key partners that you'd be highlighting or working with, maybe at Mobile World Congress, or other activities this year? >> Yeah, absolutely. As Aaron touched on, I'm a visual thinker. The way I think about this thing is a very, very vertical architecture is tipping sideways. It's becoming horizontal. And all of the layers of that horizontal architecture are really where the partnerships are at. So, let's start at the bottom, silicon. The silicon ecosystem is very much focused on this market. And producing very specific products to enable open, high performance telecom networks. That's both in the form of host processors, as well as accelerators. One layer up, of course, is the stuff that we're known for, subsystems, compute storage, the hardware infrastructure that forms the foundation for telco clouds. A layer above that, all of the cloud software layer, the virtualization and containerization software, and all of the usual suspects there, all of whom are very good partners of ours, and we're looking to expand that pretty broadly this year. And then at the top of the layer cake, all of the network functions, all of the VNF's and CNF's that were once kind of the top of proprietary stacks, that are now opening up and being delivered, as well-formed containers that can run on these clouds. So, we're focusing on all of those, if you will, product partnerships, and there is a services wrapper around all of it. The systems integration necessary to make these systems part of a carrier's network, which of course, has been running for a long time, and needs to be integrated with in a very specific way. And so, all of that, together kind of forms the ecosystem, all of those are partners, and we're really excited about being at the heart of it. >> Interesting, it's not like we've never seen this movie before, which is, it's sort of repeating itself in telco. Aaron, you heard my little intro up front about the need to modernize infrastructure, I wonder if I could touch on another major trend, which we're seeing is the cloud, and I'm talkin' about not only public, but private and hybrid cloud. The public cloud is an opportunity, but it's also a threat for telcos. Telcom providers are lookin' to the public cloud for specific use cases, you think about like bursting for an iPhone launch or whatever. But at the same time, these cloud vendors, they're sort of competing with telcos. They're providing local zones, for example, sometimes trying to do an end run on the telco connectivity services, so telecom companies, they have to find the right balance between what they own and what they rent. And I wonder if you could add some color as to what you see in the market and what Dell specifically is doing to support these trends. >> Yeah, and I think the most important thing is what we're seeing, as you said, is these aren't things that we haven't seen before. And I think that telecom is really going through their own set of cloud transformations, and so, one of the hot topics in the industry now is, what is telco cloud? And what does that look like going forward? And it's going to be, as you said, a combination of services that they offer, services that they leverage. But at the end of the day, it's going to help them modernize how they deliver telecommunication services to their customers, and then provide value added services on top of that. From a Dell perspective, we're really providing the technologies to provide the underpinnings to lay a foundation on which that network can be built, whether that's best of breed servers that are built in design for the telecom environments. Recently, we announced our Infer block program, in partnering with virtualization providers, to be able to provide engineered systems that dramatically simplify how our customers can deploy, manage, and lifecycle manage throughout day two operations, an entire cloud environment. And whether they're using Red Hat, whether they're using Wind River, or VMware, or other virtualization layers, they can deploy the right virtualization layer at the right part of their network to support the applications they're looking to drive. And Dell is looking to solve how they simplify and manage all of that, both from a hardware, as well as on management software perspective. So, this is really what Dell's doing to, again, partner with the broader technology community, to help make that telco cloud a reality. >> Aaron, let's stay here for a second, I'm interested in some of the use cases that you're going after with customers. You've got Edge infrastructure, remote work, 5G, where's security fit, what are the focus areas for Dell, and can we double click on that a little bit? >> Yeah, I mean, I think there's two main areas of telecommunication industry that we're talking to. One, we've really been talking about the sort of the network buyer, how do they modernize the core, the network Edge, the RAN capabilities to deliver traditional telecommunication services, and modernize that as they move into 5G and beyond. I think the other side of the business is, telecoms are really looking from a line of business perspective to figure out how do they monetize that network, and be able to deliver value added services to their enterprise customers on top of these new networks. So, you were just touching on a couple of things that are really critical. In the enterprise space, AI and IoT is driving a tremendous amount of innovation out there, and there's a need for being able to support and manage Edge compute at scale, be able to provide connectivity, like private mobility, and 4G and 5G, being able to support things like mobile workforces and client capabilities, to be able to access these devices that are around all of these Edge environments of the enterprises. And telecoms are seeing as that, as an opportunity for them to not only provide connectivity, but how do they extend their cloud out into these enterprise environments with compute, with connectivity, with client and connectivity resources, and even also provide protection for those environments as well. So, these are areas that Dell is historically very strong at. Being able to provide compute, be able to provide connectivity, and being able to provide data protection and client services, we are looking to work closely with lines of businesses to be able to develop solutions that they can bring to market in combination with us, to be able to serve their end user customers and their enterprises. So, those are really the two key areas, not only network buyer, but being able to enable the lines of business to go and capitalize on the services they're developing for their customers. >> I think that line of business aspect is key, I mean, the telcos have had to sit back and provide the plumbing, cost per bit goes down, data consumption going through the roof, all the over at the top guys have had the field day with the data, and the customer relationships, and now it's almost like the revenge (chuckles) of the telcos. Dennis, I wonder if we could talk about the future. What can we expect in the years ahead from Dell, if you break out the binoculars a little bit. >> Yeah, I think you hit it earlier. We've seen the movie before. This has happened in the IT data center. We went from proprietary vertical solutions to horizontal open systems. We went from client server to software-defined open hardware cloud native. And the trend is likely to be exactly that, in the telecom industry because that's what the operators want. They're not naive to what's happened in the IT data center, they all run very large data centers. And they're trying to get some of the scale economies. Some of the agility, the cost of ownership benefits for the reasons Aaron just discussed. It's clear as you point out, this industry's been really defined by the inability to stop investing, and the difficulty to monetize that investment. And I think now, everybody's looking at this 5G, and frankly, 5G plus 6G, and beyond, as the opportunity to really go get a chunk of that revenue, and Enterprise Edge is the target. >> And 5G is touching so many industries, and that kind of brings me, Aaron into Mobile World Congress. I mean, you look at the floor layout, it's amazing. You got Industry 4.0, you've got our traditional industry and telco colliding. There's public policy. So, give us a teaser to Mobile World Congress 23, what's on deck at the show from Dell? >> Yeah, we're really excited about Mobile World Congress. This, as you know, is a massive event for the industry every year. And it's really the event that the whole industry uses to kick off this coming year. So, we're going to be using this obviously to talk to our customers and our partners about what Dell's looking to do, and what we're innovating on right now, and what we're looking to partner with them around. In the front of the house, we're going to be doin', we're going to be highlighting 13 different solutions and demonstrations to be able to show our customers what we're doing today, and show them the use cases, and put into action, so they get to actually look and feel, and touch, and experience what it is that we're working around. Obviously, meetings are important, everybody knows Mobile World Congress is the place to get those meetings and kickoff for the year. So, we're going to have, we're lookin' at several hundred meetings, hundreds of meetings that we're going to be lookin' to have across the industry with our customers and partners in the broader community. And of course, we've also got technology that's going to be in a variety of different partner spaces as well. So, you can come and see us in hall three, but we're also going to have technologies, kind of spread all over the floor. And of course, there's always theCUBE. You're going to be able to see us live all four days, all day, every day. You're going to be hearing our executives, our partners, our customers, talk about what Dell is doing to innovate in the industry, and how we're looking to leverage the broader, open ecosystem to be able to transform the network, and what we're lookin' to do. So, in that space, we're going to be focusing on what we're doing from an ecosystem perspective, our infrastructure focus. We'll be talking about what we're doing to support telco cloud transformation. And then finally, as we talked about earlier, how are we helping the lines of business within our telecoms monetize the opportunity? So, these are all different things we're really excited to be focusing on, and look forward to the event next month. >> Yeah, it's going to be awesome in Barcelona at the FITA, as you say, Dell's big presence in hall three, Orange is in there, Deutsche Telecom, Intel's in hall three. VMware's there, Nokia, Vodafone, you got some great things to see there. Check that out, and of course, theCUBE, we are super excited to be collaborating with you, we got a great setup. We're in the walkway right between halls four and five, right across from the government of Catalonia, who are the host partners for the event, so there's going to be a ton of action there. Guys, can't wait to see you there, really appreciate your time today. >> Great, thanks. >> Alright, Mobile World Congress, theCUBE's coverage starts on February 27th right after the keynotes. So, first thing in the morning, east coast time, we'll be broadcasting is, Aaron said all week, Monday through Thursday in the show floor, check that out at thecube.net. siliconangle.com has all the written coverage, and go to dell.com, see what's happenin' there, have all the action from the event. Don't miss us, this is Dave Vellante, we'll see you there. (electronic music)

>>Oh, welcome back to the Cube here at aws Reinvent 22. As we continue our coverage here, the AWS Global Showcase, the Startup Showcase, John Wall is here hosting for the Cube as we've been here all week. Hope you're enjoying our coverage here. This is day three, by the way. We're wrapping it up shortly with us to talk about what's going on in the, kind of the hotel world in it and what's going on in the cloud, especially at I hg is Eric Norman, head of infrastructure, architecture, and innovation at I H G Hotels and Resorts. Eric, good to see you, >>Sir. Oh, thank you. And thank you for inviting me. Yeah, >>You bet. Glad to have you board here on the queue. First time, I think too, by the way, right? >>It is. And can I just tell you who IHG is >>Real quick? Yeah, wait a second. First I want another rest. I got Introduc to Rod Stuller, who is the Vice president and of Solutions marketing at Aviatrix and Rod. Good to see you, sir. Thanks a lot. Now let's talk about I ih. >>Great. Well, IHGs a a hospitality company, it's been around for 200 years, that has 17 brands globally in over a hundred countries. We sleek, you know, up could up to 888,000 people a night. So it's a pretty large company that we compete with, you know, all the hotel companies globally. >>So let's talk about your, your footprint right now in, in terms of what your needs are, because you've mentioned obviously a lot of, you have a lot of customers needs, you have a lot of internal stakeholder needs. Yeah. So just from that perspective, how are you balancing out, you know, the products you wanna launch as opposed to the, on the development side and the maintenance side? >>Yeah, I mean we, we have focused our, our attention to our, our guests and our hotels globally and, and taking technology and from a foundation, getting it at, at the edge so that way the consumer and the hotel owner can deliver a quality product to a guest experience. You know, we've have moved larger, a large deployment of our mission critical applications over the last five years really, of moving into more SaaS and infrastructure like AWS and GCP and, and leveraging their global scale to be able to deliver at the edge or get closer to the edge. And so we've, you know, I'm pretty sure you've seen, you know, kind of people building, you know, mission critical apps. You know, probably in the last three years it's probably escalating and more of like a hockey stick of moving stuff. I'd love to hear what AVIA is seeing. Oh >>Yeah. Now we're, we're seeing that quite a bit, right? As people move into the cloud, it's now business critical applications that are going there. So good enough isn't good enough anymore, right? It has to be, you know, a powerful capability that's business critical, can support that, give people the ability to troubleshoot it when something goes wrong. And then multi-cloud, you mentioned a couple different cloud companies, a lot of enterprises are moving to multiple clouds and you don't want to have to do it differently in every cloud. You want a infrastructure management layer that allows you to do that across >>Clouds. So how do you go about that, you know, deciding what goes where. I mean, it sounds like a simple question, but, but if you are dealing in a lot of different kinds of environments, different needs and different requirements, whatever, you know, how are you sorting out, delegating, you know, you know, you're, you're you're gonna be working here, you're gonna be >>Working there. Yeah. So we built some standards base that says, you know, certain types of apps, you know, transactional base, you know, go to this cloud provider and data analytics that's gonna go to another, another cloud provider based on our decision of key capability, native capability, and, and also coverage. You know, cuz we are in China, right? You know, you know, I, I've gotta be able to get into China and, and build not only a network that can support that, but also business apps locally to meet, compete with compliance, regulatory type activities. I mean, even in, in the US market, I got, you know, California privacy laws, you know, you have globally, you've gotta deal with getting data applications into compliance for those globally, right? >>Yeah. So, so you got that compliance slash governance Yeah. Issue. Huge issue. Yeah. I would think for you, you gotta decide who's gonna get to what when, and also we have to meet certain regulatory standards as you pointed out. And not just there, but you got European footprint, right? I mean, you're global. Yeah. So, so you know, handling that kind of scope or scale, what kind of nightmares or challenges does that provide you and how's Aviatrix helping you solve >>That? Yeah, in the early days, you know, we were using cloud native, you know, constructs for networking and a little bit of a security type angle to it. What we found was, you know, you can't get the automation you need. You can't get the, the scalability, you know, cuz we're, we're trying to shift left our, you know, our DevOps and our ability to deploy infrastructure. Aviatrix had come in and, and provided a, a solution that gets us there quicker than anybody else. It's allow us to, you know, build a mesh network across all our regions globally. I'm able to deploy, you know, new landing zones or, you know, public cloud fairly quickly with my, you know, networking construct. We also, we found that because we are a multi hybrid cloud, we, we introduced on the edge a a new network. We had to introduce a performance hub architecture that's using Equinix that sits in every region in every public cloud and partner. Cuz all our partners, you know, we, we've moved a lot of stuff to sas. You know, Amadeus is our centralized reservation system. That's our key, you know? Sure. You know, reservation tool, it's so sourced out. I need to bring them in and I need to get data that's closer to where, in a region to where it needs the land so I can process it. Right. >>And it's a big world out there too. I mean, you're, you're not in your head Rod. So talk about if you would share some of the, the aviatrix experience in that regard. When you have a client like this that has these, you know, multinational locations and, and yet you're looking for some consistency and some uniformity. You don't, you know, you can't be reinventing the wheel every time something pops up, right? >>Right. No. And then, and it's about agility and speed and, you know, being able to do it with less people than you used to have to do things, right? You, you want to be able to give the developers what they need when they need it. There was a time when people were going around it, swiping their credit card and, and saying, it doesn't give me what I need. And so cloud is supposed to change that. So we're trying to deliver the ability to do that for the developers a lot faster than had been done in the past. But at the same time, giving the enterprise the controls, the security, the compliance that they need. And sometimes those things got in the way, but now we're building systems that allow that to happen at, at the piece that developers needed to happen. >>But what Rod said about, you know, one of the big things you sparked my thinking is it also, you know, building a overlay of the cloud native construct allows for visibility that, you know, you didn't have, you know, from a developer or even a operations day two operations, now you get that visibility into the network space and controls and management of that space a lot easier now, you know? >>Yeah. I mean, business critical applications, right? People, the people, the business does not care about networking, right? They see it as electricity and if it's down somebody else's problem to fix it. But the people who do need to keep it up, they need the telemetry. They need the ability to understand, are we trending in the wrong direction? Should we be doing something so that we don't get to the point where it goes down? And that's the kind of information that we're providing in this multi-cloud environment. You mentioned Equinix, we, we just have a partnership with Equinix where we're extending the cloud operational model that Aviatrix delivers all the way out to Equinix and that global fabric that you're talking about. So this is allowing the, the comp companies to have that visibility, that operational ability all the way globally. >>Yeah. Because you know, when you start building all these clouds now and multi regions, multiple AZs or different cloud providers or SaaS providers, you're moving data all over the place. And if you, if you don't have a single pane of glass to see that entire network and be able to route stuff accordingly, it's gonna be a zoo. It's not gonna >>Work. We were, I was talking earlier with, with another guest and we were just talking about companies in your case, I, I IHG kind of knowing what you have and it's not like such a basic thing he said, but yeah, you'd be surprised how many people don't know what they have. Oh, yeah. And so they're trying to provide that visibility and, and, and awareness. So, so I'm kind of curious because you were just the next interview up, so sorry Ken, but, but do you know what you have, I mean, are you learning what you have or is how do you identify, prioritize? How valuable is this asset as opposed to this can wait? I mean, is that still an ongoing process for >>You? It, it's definitely an ongoing process. I mean, we've done over the last three years of constantly assessing all our inventory of what we have, making sure we have the right mo roadmaps for each of the apps and products that we have. Cause we've turned to more of a product driven organization and a DevOps and we're, we're moving more and more product teams onto that DevOps process. Yep. So we can shift left a lot of the activities that developer in the past had to go over a fence to ask for help and, and, you know, kind of the automation of the network and the security built in allows us to be able to shift that left. >>Did that, I, you were saying too three years, right? You've been on, on this path Yep. Going back then to 2019 right. Pandemic hits, right. The world changes. How has that affected this three year period for you? And where are you in terms of where you expected to be and, and Yep. And then what's your, what are your headlights seeing down the road as to what your, your eventual journey, how you want that to end? >>I probably, the biggest story that we have a success story is when the pandemic did happen, you know, all our call centers, all agents had to go home. We were able within 30 days be able to bring up remote desktops, you know, workspaces an a uws and give access to globally in China and in Singapore and in the Americas. There's >>No small task there, >>That's for sure. So we built a desktop, certified it, and, and agents were able to answer calls for guests, you know, you know, so it was a huge success to us. Sure. It did slow down. I mean, during the pandemic it did slow us down from what gets migrated. You know, our focus is, you know, again, back to what I was saying earlier is around our guests and our loyalty and, you know, how do we give value back to our hotel owners and our guests? >>And how do you measure that? I mean, how do you know that what you're doing is working with, with that key audience? >>We'd measured by, you know, one occupa >>There so many, how many people do we have in the rooms? Right? But in terms of the interface, in terms of the effectiveness, the applications, in terms of what you're offering. Yeah. >>It gets back to uptime of our systems and you know, being able to deploy an application in multiple regions elevates the availability of the product to our guest. You know, the longer I'm up, the more revenue I can produce. Right. So, you know, so we, we try to, you know, we measure also guest satisfaction at the properties, you know, them using our tech and that kind of stuff to >>Be so you surveying just to find out what, how they feel about, so some, >>Cause we have a lot of tech inside of our hotels that allow for, we have ISG connect, which allows for people to go from one hotel another and not ask for passwords and, you know, that kind of stuff. >>That would not be made by the way. I'd be begging for help. Let's talk about skills, because I hear that a lot. Talk a lot about that this week. Hearing that, that, you know, the advancement of knowledge is obviously a very powerful thing, but it's also a bit of a shortcoming right now in terms of, of having a need for skills and not having that kind of firepower horsepower on your bench. What, what do you see in that regard? And, and first off, what did you see about it? And then I'll follow >>Up with Yeah, I mean, over our journey, it started off where you didn't have the skills, you know, you didn't have the skill from an operations engineering architecture. So we went on a, you know, you know, how do we build training programs? How do we get, you know, tools to, to either virtual training, bringing teachers, we built, you know, daily, our weekly calls where we bring our experts from our vendors in there to be able to ask questions to help engineering people or architecture people or operations to ask questions and get answers. You know, we, we've been on a role of, you know, upscaling over the last three years and we continue to drive that, you know, we have lunch and learns that we bring people to. Yep. You know, and, and we, and we, we ta tailor the, the content for that training based on what we are consuming and what we're using as opposed to just a, you know, a broad stroke of, of public cloud or, it's >>Almost like you don't have to be holistic about it. You just need to, what do you need to know to >>Make >>Them successful, to be better at what you're doing here? Right. Sure. >>And that's been huge. And, >>And yeah, we, and we have a program called ace, which is AVIATRIX certified engineer. And there's a bunch of different types of classes. So if you're a networking person in the past it's like A C C I E, but we have about 18,000 people over the last three years who have gone through that training. One of them. One of them, right? Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. And, and this is not necessarily about aviatrix. What we're doing is trying to give multi-cloud, you know, networking expertise because a lot of the people that we're talking about are coming from the data center world. And networking is so different in the cloud. We're helping them understand it's not as scary as they might think. Right. If your whole career has been networking in the data center and all of a sudden there's this cloud thing that you don't really understand, you need somebody to help you sort of get there. And we're doing that in a multi-cloud way. And we have all kinds of different levels to teach people how to do, do infrastructure as code. That's another thing, you know, data center guys, they never did infrastructure as code. It was, you had to bolt it in and plug stuff in. Right. But now things are being done much faster with infrastructure as code. And we're teaching people how >>To do that. Yeah. I mean, yesterday, one of the keynotes is about the partner in the, the marketplace. And they use the image imagery of, of marathon runner, you know, a marathon runner. Yeah. You could do a marathon by yourself, but if you want to improve and become a, a great marathon runner, you need a coach, you need nutritionist, you need people running with you to, to make that engine go faster a little bit. Yeah, exactly. And you know, having a partner like Aviatrix helps you know the team to be successful. >>Well, it is, it is a marathon, not a sprint. That's for sure. And you've been on this kind of three year jog. You might feel like you've been running a marathon a little bit, but it sounds like you're really off to a great start and, and have a pretty good partnership here. So thank you. Congratulations on that, Eric. Thank you for being with us. And Rod, same to you. Thank you. Appreciate the time here on the AWS Global Showcase. I'm John Wal, you're watching The Cube. We're out in Las Vegas and of course the cube, as you well know, is the leader in high tech coverage.

>>Hey everyone, welcome back. It's the Cube live in Las Vegas. We've been here since Monday covering the event wall to coverage on the cube at AWS Reinvent 22, Lisa Martin here with Dave Ante. Dave, we're hearing consistently north of 50,000 people here. I'm hearing close to 300,000 online. People are back. They are ready to hear from AWS and its ecosystem. Yeah, >>I think 55 is the number I'm hearing. I've been using 50 for 2019, but somebody the other day told me, no, no, it was way more than that. Right, right. Well this feels bigger in >>2019. It does feel bigger. It does feel bigger. And we've had such great conversations as you know, because you've been watching the Cube since Monday night. We're pleased to welcome from Sumo Logic. Lynn Doherty, the president of Worldwide Field Operations. Lynn, welcome to the program. >>Thank you for having me. I'm glad to be here. Talk >>To us about what's going on at Sumo Logic. We cover them. We've been following them for a long time, but what's what's new? >>We have a lot going on at Sumo Logic. What we do is provide solutions for both observability and security. And if you think about the challenges that our customers are facing today, everybody as they're doing this digital transformation is in a situation where the data and the digital exhausts that they have is growing faster than their budgets and especially in what looks like potentially uncertain economic times. And so what we do is enable them to bring that together on a platform so that they can solve both of those problems in a really cost effective way. >>What are some of the things that you're hearing from customers in the field where it relates to Sumo logic and aws? What are they asking for? >>They continue to ask for security and, and I think as everybody goes on that journey of digital transformation and, and I think what's going on now is that there are people who are kind of in wave two of that digital transformation, but security continues to be top of mind. And again, as as our customers are moving into potentially uncertain economic times and they're saying, Hey, I've gotta shore up and, and maybe do smarter things with my budget, cybersecurity is one piece of that that is not falling off the table. That their requirements around security, around audits, around compliance don't go away regardless of what else happens. >>How do you fit in the cloud ecosystem generally? AWS specifically? I think AWS is generally perceived as a more friendly environment for the ecosystem partners. We saw CrowdStrike yesterday, you know, stock got crushed. They had a great quarter, but not as great as they thought it could be. Yeah. And one, some of the analysts were saying, well, it could be Microsoft competition at the low end of the market. Okay. AWS is like the ecosystem partners are really strong in security, lot of places to add value. Where does Sumo Logic >>Fit? Yeah, we are all in with aws. So AWS is our platform of choice. It's the platform that we're built on. It's the only platform that we use. And so we work incredibly closely with aws. In fact, last year we were the first ever AWS ISV partner of the year for as Sumo Logic, which we're not as big as some of the other players, but it just is a testament to the partnership that we have with aws. >>When you're out in the field talking with customers, we talked about some of the challenges there, but where are your customer conversations? You talked about security and cyber as is not falling off the table. In fact, it's, it's rising up the stock, it's a board level conversation. So where are the customer conversations that you're having? Are they, are they at the developer level? Are they higher? Are they at the C-suite? What does that look like? >>Yeah, it's, it's actually at both the developer and the C-suite. And so there's really two motions. The first is around developers and practitioners and people that run security operation centers. And they need tools that are easy to use that integrate in their environment. And so we absolutely work with them as a starting point because if, if they aren't happy with the tools that they have, you know, the customer can't go on that digital transformation, can't have effective application usage. But we also need to talk to C-Suite and that to CIO or a CISO who's really thinking often more broadly about how do we do things as a platform and how do we consolidate some of our tools to rationalize what we're using and really make the most of the budget that we have. And so we come at it from both angles. We call it selling above the line and below the line because both of those are really important people for us to work with. >>Above the line being sort of the business executives, >>Business executives and C-suite executives. And then, but below the line are the actual people who are using the product and using a day to day interacting with the tools. >>So how are those above the line and below the line conversations, you know, different? What, what are the, what are the above the line conversations? What are the sort of keywords that, you know, that resonate? Let's start there. >>Yeah, above the line, there's a lot that's around how do we make the most of the investments that we're making. And so there are no shortage of tools, right? You can look around this AWS floor and see that there are no shortage of tools and software products out there. And so above the line it's how do we make use of the budget that we have and get the most out of the investments we've made and do that in a really smart way. Often thinking about platforms and consolidating tools and, and using the tools and getting full value of what they have below the line. I think it's really how do they have really strong ease of use? How do they get the fastest time to value? Because time to value is really important when you're a practitioner, when you're developing an application, when you're migrating and modernizing an application, having tools that are easy to use and not just give you data but give you insights. And so that's what a conversation with a practitioner for us is, is taking data and turning it into insights that they can use. >>You know, and it seems like we never get rid of stuff in it, but there's a big conversation now when you talk to practitioners, okay, well you got some budget pressures, your sales cycles are elongating. What are you doing about, a lot of 'em are saying, well, we're consolidating and nowhere is that more needed probably than insecurity. So how, how are you seeing that play out in the market? Are you able to take advantage of that as Sumo? >>I think there's the old joke that says there is no ciso. Whoever says, if I just had one more tool, I'd be secure. >>And >>Nobody ever says that it's not one more tool. It's having effective tools and having tools that integrate. And so when I think of Sumo Logic in that space, it's number one, we really integrate with so many different tools out there that give, again, not just security information, but security insights. And so that becomes a really important part of the conversation. What, when you talk about tool consolidation, that's absolutely, I think something that has been a journey that a lot of our customers have been on and probably will be on for the foreseeable future. And so that's a place that we can really help because we have a platform that you can leverage our tool on the DevOps side and on the security side. And that's a conversation that we have a lot with our customers. Are >>You helping bridge those two, the security folks, the dev folks? Cause we talk about Shift left and CISO being involved now. Is Sumo Logic helping from a cultural perspective to bridge those two? >>Yeah, well I think it's a really good point that you make. It's, there's part of it that's a technology challenge and then there's part of it that's a cultural challenge and an organization silo challenge that happens. And so it is something that we try to bring our customers together and often start in one area of the business and help move into other areas and bring them together. It, it also comes down to that data growing faster than budgets and customers can no longer afford to keep multiple copies of the same data, the same metrics, and all of that digital exhaust that comes as they move to the cloud and modernize their applications. And so we bring that together and help them get the most use out of it. >>There are a lot of, we've been talking all week in the cube about sort of adjacencies to security. We've talking about data protections now becoming an adjacency. You know, you talk about resilience within an organization, everybody was sort of caught off guard, obviously with the pandemic, not as resilient as they could have been. So it seems like the scope of security is really expanding. You know, they always say it's, it's a team sport, okay, it's a pro mine, but it's true. Right? Whereas it used to be that guy's problem. Yeah. What are you seeing in terms of that evolution? >>Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. I think the pandemics force some of that faster than was happening, but it's absolutely something that is going on that cybersecurity is now built in from the ground up and I've been in cyber security for years and it's moved from an afterthought or something that comes after the fact, Hey, let's build the application and then we'll worry about security to, it needs to be a secure application from the ground up. And so that is bringing together that dev and SEC ops a lot because it needs to be built in, the security piece needs to be built in from the ground up on the development side. >>Absolutely. The, the threat landscape has changed so much in the last couple of years. Has the fraudsters, bad actors, whatever you wanna call 'em, are getting far more sophisticated. Yeah. So security can't be an afterthought. Can't be a built on. Yeah, it's gotta be integrated, built in from the ground up for organizations to be able to be, as they've said, resilient. We're hearing a lot about resiliency and the importance of it. For any business. >>For any business, it's important for every business. And if you think about how we interact with companies now, our view of a bank isn't the branch, it's the app, our view of office, it's this, right? It's, it's on the phone, it's on digital devices, it's on a website. And so that is your interaction, that is your experience. And so that plays into, is it up, is it running, is it responsive? That application performance piece, but also the security piece of is it secure? Is my data protected? You know, do I have any vulnerability? >>Yeah, you must have, being in field operations, a favorite customer story that you really think defines the value proposition beautifully of Sumo Logic. What story is that? >>Wow, that's a good question. I have a lot of favorite stories. You know, we have customers, for example, gaming customers that maybe aren't able to predict what their usage looks like. And that's something that we really help our customers with is the peaks and valleys. And so we have gaming customers or retail customers that we're able to take their data sources and they may be at one level and go to 10 x in a day without any notice. And we're able to handle that for them. And I think that's something that I'm really proud of is that we don't make that the customer's problem. They're, they're peaks and valleys, they're spikes that may happen seasonally in retail. It's Black Friday sales that are coming up. It's a new game that gets released. It's a new music piece that gets released and they are going to see that, but they don't have to worry about that because of us. And so that really makes me proud that we handle that and take that problem off of their shoulders. I >>See Pokemon on the website, that's a hugely popular >>Game, Pokemon now. Yes. >>Last question for you, we've got about 30 seconds left. If you had a billboard to put up in Denver where you live about Sumo Logic and its impact like an elevator pitch or a phrase that you think really summarizes the impact, what would it >>Say? Yeah, well it's a really good question. I've got it on my shirt. I dunno, it's not for the G-rated, but we fix things faster. Fix shit faster. And so for us that's really, ultimately, it's not just about having information, it's not just about having the data, it's about being able to resolve your problems quickly. And whether that's an application or a security issue, we've gotta be able to fix it faster for our customers and that's what we enable them to do. >>Fix bleep faster. Lynn, it's been a pleasure having you on the program. Thank you so much. Thank you for joining us. Awesome step at Sumo Logic. For our guest and for Dave Ante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube Live from Las Vegas, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

>>Hey everyone, it's Vegas. Welcome back. We know you've been watching all day. We appreciate that. We always love being able to bring you some great content on the Cube Live from AWS Reinvented 22. Lisa Martin here with Paul Gill. And Paul, we've had such a great event. We've, I think we've done nearly 70 interviews since we started on the Cube on >>Monday night. I believe we just hit 70. Yeah, we just hit 70. You must feel like you've done half of >>Them. I really do. But we've been having great conversations. There's so much innovation going on at aws. Nothing slowed them down during the pandemic. We love also talking about the innovation, the flywheel that is their partner ecosystem. We're gonna have a great conversation about that >>Next. And as we've said, going back to day one, the energy of the show is remarkable. And here we are, we're getting late in the afternoon on day two, and there's just as much activity, just as much energy out there as, as the beginning of the first day. I have no doubt day three will be the >>Same. I agree. There's been no slowdown. We've got two guests here. We're gonna have a great conversation. Chuck Kubota joins us, senior Director of Cloud Services, GTM at Red Hat. Great to have you on the program. And Ted Stanton, global head of Sales, red Hat at IBM at aws. Welcome. >>Thanks for having us. >>How's the show going so far for you guys? >>It's a blur. Is it? Oh my gosh. >>Don't they all >>Blur? Well, yes, yes. I actually like last year a bit better. It was half the size. Yeah. And a lot easier to get around, but this is back to normal, so >>It is back to normal. Yeah. And and Ted, we're hearing north of 50,000 in-person attendees. I heard a, something I think was published. I heard the second hand over like 300,000 online attendees. This is maybe the biggest one we ever had. >>Yeah, yeah, I would agree. And frankly, it's my first time here, so I am massively impressed with the overall show, the meeting with partners, the meeting with customers, the announcements that were made, just fantastic. And >>If you remember back to two years ago, there were a lot of questions about whether in-person conferences would ever return and the volume that we used to see them. And that appears to be >>The case. I think we, I think we've answered, I think AWS has answered that for us, which I'm very pleased to see. Talk about some of those announcements. Ted. There's been so much that that's always one of the things we know and love about re men is there's slew of announcements. You were saying this morning, Paul, and then keynote, you lost, you stopped counting after I >>Lost 15, I lost count for 15. I think it was over 30 announcements this morning alone >>Where IBM and Red Hat are concern. What are some of the things that you are excited about in terms of some of the news, the innovation, and where the partnership is going? >>Well, definitely where the partnership is going, and I think even as we're speaking right now, is a keynote going on with Aruba, talking about some of the partners and the way in which we support partners and the new technologies and the new abilities for partners to take advantage of these technologies to frankly delight our customers is really what most excites me. >>Chuck, what about you? What's going on with Red Hat? You've been there a long time. Sales, everything, picking up customers, massively transforming. What are some of the things that you're seeing and that you're excited >>About? Yeah, I mean, first of all, you know, as customers have, you know, years ago discovered it's not competitively advantageous to manage their own data centers in most cases. So they would like to, you know, give that responsibility to Amazon. We're seeing them move further up the stack, right? So that would be more beyond the operating system, the application platforms like OpenShift. And now we have a managed application platform built on OpenShift called Red Out OpenShift service on AWS or Rosa. And then we're even further going up the stack with that with, we just announced this week that red out OpenShift data science is available in the AWS marketplace, runs on Rosa, helps break the land speed record to getting those data models out there that are so important to make, you know, help organizations become more, much more data driven to remain competitive themselves. >>So talk about Rosa and how it differs from previous iterations of, of OpenShift. I mean, you had, you had an online version of OpenShift several years ago. What's different about Rosa? >>Yeah, so the old OpenShift online that was several years old, right? For one thing, wasn't a joint partnership between Amazon and Red Hat. So we work together, right? Very closely on this, which is great. Also, the awesome thing about Rosa, you know, if you think about like OpenShift for, for, as a matter of fact, Amazon is the number one cloud that OpenShift runs on, right? So a lot of those customers want to take advantage of their committed spins, their EDPs, they want one bill. And so Rosa comes through the one bill comes through the marketplace, right? Which is, which is totally awesome. Not only that or financially backing OpenShift with a 99.95% financially backed sla, right? We didn't have that before either, right? >>When you say financially backed sla, >>What do you mean? That means that if we drop below 99.95% of availability, we're gonna give you some money back, right? So we're really, you know, for lack of better words, putting our money where our mouth is. Absolutely right. >>And, and some of the key reasons that we even work together to build Rosa was frankly we've had a mirror of customers and virtually every single region, every single industry been using OpenShift on AWS for years, right? And we listened to them, they wanted a more managed version of it and we worked very closely together. And what's really great about Rosa too is we built some really fantastic integrations with some of the AWS native services like API gateway, Amazon rds, private link, right? To make it very simple and easy for customers to get started. We talked a little bit about the marketplace, but it's also available just on the AWS console, right? So customers can get started in a pay as you go fashion start to use it. And if they wanna move into a more commitment, more of a set schedule of payments, they can move into a marketplace private offer. >>Chuck, talk about, how about Rosen? How is unlocking the power of technology like containers Kubernetes for customers while dialing down some of the complexity that's >>There? Yeah, I mean if you think about, you know, kind of what we did, you know, earlier on, right? If you think about like virtualization, how it dialed down the complexity of having to get something rack, get a blade rack, stack cable and cooled every time you wanted to deploy new application, right? So what we do is we, our message is this, we want developers to focus on what matters most. And that's build, deploy, and running applications. Most of our customers are not in the business of building app platforms. They're not in the business of building platforms like banks, I, you know, financials, right? Government, et cetera. Right? So what we do is we allow those developers that are, enable those developers that know Java and Node and springing and what have you, just to keep writing what they know. And then, you know, I don't wanna get too technical here, but get pushed through way and, and OpenShift takes care of the rest, builds it for them, runs it through a pipeline, a CICD pipeline, goes through all the testing and quality gates and things like that, deploys it, auto wires it up, you know, to monitoring which is what you need. >>And we have all kinds of other, you know, higher order services and an ecosystem around that. And oh, by the way, also plugging into and taking advantage of the services like rds, right? If you're gonna write an application, a tradition, a cloud native application on Amazon, you're probably going to wanna run it in Rosa and consuming one of those databases, right? Like RDS or Aurora, what have you. >>And I, and I would say it's not even just the customers. We have a variety of ecosystem partners, both of our partners leveraging it as well. We have solos built their executive management system that they go ahead and turn and sell to their customers, streamlines data and collects data from a variety of different sources. They decided, you know, it's better to run that on top of Rosa than manage OpenShift themselves. We've seen IBM restack a lot of their software, you know, to run on top of Rose, take advantage of that capabilities. So lots of partners as well as customers are taking advantage of fully managed stack of that OpenShift that that turnkey capabilities that it provides >>For, for OpenShift customers who wanna move to Rose, is that gonna be a one button migration? Is that gonna be, can they run both environments simultaneously and migrate over time? What kind of tools are you giving them? >>We have quite, we have quite a few migration tools such as conveyor, right? That's one of our projects, part of our migration application toolkit, right? And you know, with those, there's also partners like Trilio, right? Who can help move, you know, applications back 'em up. In fact, we're working on a pretty cool joint go to market with that right now. But generally speaking, the OpenShift experience that the customers that we have know and love and those who have never used OpenShift either are coming to it as well via Rosa, right? The experience is primarily the same. You don't have to really retrain your people, right? If anything, there's a reduction in operational cost. We increase developer productivity cuz we manage so much of the stack for you. We have SRE site reliability engineers that are backing the platform that proactively get ahead of anything that may go wrong. So maybe you don't even notice if something went wrong, wrong. And then also reactively fixing it if it comes to that, right? So, you know, all those kind of things that your customers are having to do on their own or hire a contractor, a consultant, what have to do Now we benefit from a managed offering in the cloud, right? In Amazon, right? And your developers still have that great experience too, like to say, you know, again, break the land speed record to prod. >>I >>Like that. And, and I would actually say migrations from OpenShift are on premise. OpenShift to Rosa maybe only represents about a third of the customers we have. About another third of the customers is frankly existing AWS customers. Maybe they're doing Kubernetes, do it, the, you know, do it themselves. We're struggling with some of the management of that. And so actually started to lean on top of using Rosa as a better platform to actually build upon their applications. And another third, we have quite a few customers that were frankly new OpenShift customers, new Red Hat customers and new AWS customers that were looking to build that next cloud native application. Lots of in the startup space that I've actually chosen to go with Rosa. >>It's funny you mention that because the largest Rosa consumer is new to OpenShift. Oh wow. Right. That's pretty, that's pretty powerful, right? It's not just for existing OpenShift customers, existing OpenShift. If you're running OpenShift, you know, on EC two, right. Self-managed, there's really no better way to run it than Rosa. You know, I think about whether this is the 10th year, 10 year anniversary of re right? Right. Yep. This is also the 10 year anniversary of OpenShift. Yeah, right. I think it one oh came out about sometime around a week, 10 years ago, right? When I came over to Red Hat in 2015. You know, if you, if you know your Kubernetes history was at July 25th, I think was when Kubernetes ga, July 25th, 2015 is when it g you have >>A good >>Memory. Well I remember those days back then, right? Those were fun, right? The, we had a, a large customer roll out on OpenShift three, which is our OpenShift RE based on Kubernetes. And where do you think they ran Amazon, right? Naturally. So, you know, as you move forward and, and, and OpenShift V four came out, the, reduces the operational complexity and becomes even more powerful through our operator framework and things like that. Now they revolved up to Rosa, right? And again, to help those customers focus on what matters most. And that's the applications, not the containers, not those underlying implementation and technical details while critically important, are not necessarily core to the business to most of our customers. >>Tremendous amount of innovation in OpenShift in a decade, >>Pardon me? >>Tremendous amount of innovation in OpenShift in the >>Last decade. Oh absolutely. And, and and tons more to come like every day. Right. I think what you're gonna see more of is, you know, as Kubernetes becomes more, more and more of the plumbing, you know, I call 'em productive abstractions on top of it, as you mentioned earlier, unlocking the power of these technologies while minimizing, even hiding the complexity of them so that you can just move fast Yeah. And safely move fast. >>I wanna be sure we get to, to marketplaces because you have been, red Hat has made, has really stepped up as commitment to the AWS marketplace. Why are you doing that now and how are, how are the marketplaces evolving as a channel for you? >>Well, cuz our customers want us to be there, right? I mean we, we, we are customer centric, customer first approach. Our customers want to buy through the marketplace. If you're an Amazon, if you're an Amazon customer, it's really easy for you to go procure software through the marketplace and have, instead of having to call up Red Hat and get on paper and write a second check, right? One stop shop one bill. Right? That is very, very attractive to our customers. Not only that, it opens up other ways to buy, you know, Ted mentioned earlier, you know, pay as you go buy the drink pricing using exactly what you need right now. Right? You know, AWS pioneered that, right? That provides that elasticity, you know, one of the core tenants at aws, AWS cloud, right? And we weren't able to get that with the traditional self-managed on Red Hat paper subscriptions. >>Talk a little bit about the go to market, what's, you talked about Ted, the kind of the three tenants of, of customer types. But talk a little bit about the gtm, the joint go to market, the joint engineering, so we get an understanding of how customers engage multiple options. >>Yeah, I mean, so if you think about go to market, you know, and the way I think of it is it's the intersection of a few areas, right? So the product and the product experience that we work together has to be so good that a customer or user, actually many start talk, talking about users now cuz it's self-service has a more than likely chance of getting their application to prod without ever talking to a person. Which is historically not what a lot of enterprise software companies are able to do, right? So that's one of those biggest things we do. We want customers to just be successful, turn it on, get going, be productive, right? At the same time we wanna to position the product in such a way that's differentiating that you can't get that experience anywhere else. And then part of that is ensuring that the education and enablement of our customers and our partners as such that they use the platform the right way to get as much value out of as possible. >>All backed by, you know, a very smart field that ensures that the customer get is making the right decision. A customer success org, this is attached to my org now that we can go on site and team with our customers to make sure that they get their first workloads up as quickly as possible, by the way, on our date, our, our dime. And then SRE and CEA backing that up with support and operational integrity to ensure that the service is always up and available so you can sleep, sleep, sleep well at night. Right? Right. One of our PMs of, of of Rosa, he says, what does he say? He says, Rosa allows organizations, enables organizations to go from 24 7 operations to nine to five innovation. Right? And that's powerful. That's how our customers remain more competitive running on Rosa with aws, >>When you're in customer conversations and you have 30 seconds, what are the key differentiators of the solution that you go boom, boom, boom, and they just go, I get it. >>Well, I mean, my 32nd elevator pitch, I think I've already said, I'll say it again. And that is OpenShift allows you to focus on your applications, build, deploy, and run applications while unlocking the power of the technologies like containers and Kubernetes and hiding or minimizing those complexities. So you can do as fast as possible. >>Mic drop Ted, question for you? Sure. Here we are at the, this is the, I leave the 11th reinvent, 10th anniversary, 11th event. You've been in the industry a long time. What is your biggest takeaway from what's been announced and discussed so far at Reinvent 22, where the AWS and and its partner ecosystem is concerned? If you had 30 seconds or if you had a bumper sticker to put on your DeLorean, what would you say? >>I would say we're continuing to innovate on behalf of our customers, but making sure we bring all of our partners and ecosystems along in that innovation. >>Yeah. I love the customer obsession on both sides there. Great work guides. Congrats on the 10th anniversary of OpenShift and so much evolution, the customer obsession is really clear for both of you guys. We appreciate your time. You're gonna have to come back now. Absolutely. Absolutely. Thank you. All right. Thank you so much for joining us. For our guests and for Paul Gillin. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

>>Welcome back, everyone live here at Supercomputing 22 in Dallas, Texas. I'm John for host of the Queue here at Paul Gillin, editor of Silicon Angle, getting all the stories, bringing it to you live. Supercomputer TV is the queue right now. And bringing all the action Bresniker, chief architect of Hewlett Packard Labs with HP Cube alumnis here to talk about Supercomputing Road to Quantum. Kirk, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Thanks for having me guys. Great to be >>Here. So Paul and I were talking and we've been covering, you know, computing as we get into the large scale cloud now on premises compute has been one of those things that just never stops. No one ever, I never heard someone say, I wanna run my application or workload on slower, slower hardware or processor or horsepower. Computing continues to go, but this, we're at a step function. It feels like we're at a level where we're gonna unleash new, new creativity, new use cases. You've been kind of working on this for many, many years at hp, Hewlett Packard Labs, I remember the machine and all the predecessor r and d. Where are we right now from your standpoint, HPE standpoint? Where are you in the computing? It's as a service, everything's changing. What's your view? >>So I think, you know, you capture so well. You think of the capabilities that you create. You create these systems and you engineer these amazing products and then you think, whew, it doesn't get any better than that. And then you remind yourself as an engineer. But wait, actually it has to, right? It has to because we need to continuously provide that next generation of scientists and engineer and artists and leader with the, with the tools that can do more and do more frankly with less. Because while we want want to run the program slower, we sure do wanna run them for less energy. And figuring out how we accomplish all of those things, I think is, is really where it's gonna be fascinating. And, and it's also, we think about that, we think about that now, scale data center billion, billion operations per second, the new science, arts and engineering that we'll create. And yet it's also what's beyond what's beyond that data center. How do we hook it up to those fantastic scientific instruments that are capable to generate so much information? We need to understand how we couple all of those things together. So I agree, we are at, at an amazing opportunity to raise the aspirations of the next generation. At the same time we have to think about what's coming next in terms of the technology. Is the silicon the only answer for us to continue to advance? >>You know, one of the big conversations is like refactoring, replatforming, we have a booth behind us that's doing energy. You can build it in data centers for compute. There's all kinds of new things. Is there anything in the paradigm of computing and now on the road to quantum, which I know you're involved, I saw you have on LinkedIn, you have an open rec for that. What paradigm elements are changing that weren't in play a few years ago that you're looking at right now as you look at the 20 mile stair into quantum? >>So I think for us it's fascinating because we've had a tailwind at our backs my whole career, 33 years at hp. And what I could count on was transistors got at first they got cheaper, faster and they use less energy. And then, you know, that slowed down a little bit. Now they're still cheaper and faster. As we look in that and that Moore's law continues to flatten out of it, there has to be something better to do than, you know, yet another copy of the prior design opening up that diversity of approach. And whether that is the amazing wafer scale accelerators, we see these application specific silicon and then broadening out even farther next to the next to the silicon. Here's the analog computational accelerator here is now the, the emergence of a potential quantum accelerator. So seeing that diversity of approaches, but what we have to happen is we need to harness all of those efficiencies and yet we still have to realize that there are human beings that need to create the application. So how do we bridge, how do we accommodate the physical of, of new kinds of accelerator? How do we imagine the cyber physical connection to the, to the rest of the supercomputer? And then finally, how do we bridge that productivity gap? Especially not for people who like me who have been around for a long time, we wanna think about that next generation cuz they're the ones that need to solve the problems and write the code that will do it. >>You mentioned what exists beyond silicon. In fact, are you looking at different kinds of materials that computers in the future will be built upon? >>Oh absolutely. You think of when, when we, we look at the quantum, the quantum modalities then, you know, whether it is a trapped ion or a superconducting, a piece of silicon or it is a neutral ion. There's just no, there's about half a dozen of these novel systems because really what we're doing when we're using a a quantum mechanical computer, we're creating a tiny universe. We're putting a little bit of material in there and we're manipulating at, at the subatomic level, harnessing the power of of, of quantum physics. That's an incredible challenge. And it will take novel materials, novel capabilities that we aren't just used to seeing. Not many people have a helium supplier in their data center today, but some of them might tomorrow. And understanding again, how do we incorporate industrialize and then scale all of these technologies. >>I wanna talk Turkey about quantum because we've been talking for, for five years. We've heard a lot of hyperbole about quantum. We've seen some of your competitors announcing quantum computers in the cloud. I don't know who's using these, these computers, what kind of work they're being used, how much of the, how real is quantum today? How close are we to having workable true quantum computers and what can you point to any examples of how it's being, how that technology is being used in the >>Field? So it, it remains nascent. We'll put it that way. I think part of the challenge is we see this low level technology and of course it was, you know, professor Richard Fineman who first pointed us in this direction, you know, more than 30 years ago. And you know, I I I trust his judgment. Yes. You know that there's probably some there there especially for what he was doing, which is how do we understand and engineer systems at the quantum mechanical level. Well he said a quantum mechanical system's probably the way to go. So understanding that, but still part of the challenge we see is that people have been working on the low level technology and they're reaching up to wondering will I eventually have a problem that that I can solve? And the challenge is you can improve something every single day and if you don't know where the bar is, then you don't ever know if you'll be good enough. >>I think part of the approach that we like to understand, can we start with the problem, the thing that we actually want to solve and then figure out what is the bespoke combination of classical supercomputing, advanced AI accelerators, novel quantum quantum capabilities. Can we simulate and design that? And we think there's probably nothing better to do that than than an next to scale supercomputer. Yeah. Can we simulate and design that bespoke environment, create that digital twin of this environment and if we, we've simulated it, we've designed it, we can analyze it, see is it actually advantageous? Cuz if it's not, then we probably should go back to the drawing board. And then finally that then becomes the way in which we actually run the quantum mechanical system in this hybrid environment. >>So it's na and you guys are feeling your way through, you get some moonshot, you work backwards from use cases as a, as a more of a discovery navigational kind of mission piece. I get that. And Exoscale has been a great role for you guys. Congratulations. Has there been strides though in quantum this year? Can you point to what's been the, has the needle moved a little bit a lot or, I mean it's moving I guess to some, there's been some talk but we haven't really been able to put our finger on what's moving, like what need, where's the needle moved I >>Guess in quantum. And I think, I think that's part of the conversation that we need to have is how do we measure ourselves. I know at the World Economic Forum, quantum Development Network, we had one of our global future councils on the future of quantum computing. And I brought in a scene I EEE fellow Par Gini who, you know, created the international technology roadmap for semiconductors. And I said, Paulo, could you come in and and give us examples, how was the semiconductor community so effective not only at developing the technology but predicting the development of technology so that whether it's an individual deciding if they should change careers or it's a nation state deciding if they should spend a couple billion dollars, we have that tool to predict the rate of change and improvement. And so I think that's part of what we're hoping by participating will bring some of that road mapping skill and technology and understanding so we can make those better reasoned investments. >>Well it's also fun to see super computing this year. Look at the bigger picture, obviously software cloud natives running modern applications, infrastructure as code that's happening. You're starting to see the integration of, of environments almost like a global distributed operating system. That's the way I call it. Silicon and advancements have been a big part of what we see now. Merchant silicon, but also dpu are on the scene. So the role role of silicon is there. And also we have supply chain problems. So how, how do you look at that as a a, a chief architect of h Hewlett Packard Labs? Because not only you have to invent the future and dream it up, but you gotta deal with the realities and you get the realities are silicon's great, we need more of that quantums around the corner, but supply chain, how do you solve that? What's your thoughts and how do you, how, how is HPE looking at silicon innovation and, and supply chain? >>And so for us it, it is really understanding that partnership model and understanding and contributing. And so I will do things like I happen to be the, the systems and architectures chapter editor for the I eee International Roadmap for devices and systems, that community that wants to come together and provide that guidance. You know, so I'm all about telling the semiconductor and the post semiconductor community, okay, this is where we need to compute. I have a partner in the applications and benchmark that says, this is what we need to compute. And when you can predict in the future about where you need to compute, what you need to compute, you can have a much richer set of conversations because you described it so well. And I think our, our senior fellow Nick Dubey would, he's coined the term internet of workflows where, you know, you need to harness everything from the edge device all the way through the extra scale computer and beyond. And it's not just one sort of static thing. It is a very interesting fluid topology. I'll use this compute at the edge, I'll do this information in the cloud, I want to have this in my exoscale data center and I still need to provide the tool so that an individual who's making that decision can craft that work flow across all of those different resources. >>And those workflows, by the way, are complicated. Now you got services being turned on and off. Observability is a hot area. You got a lot more data in in cycle inflow. I mean a lot more action. >>And I think you just hit on another key point for us and part of our research at labs, I have, as part of my other assignments, I help draft our AI ethics global policies and principles and not only tell getting advice about, about how we should live our lives, it also became the basis for our AI research lab at Shewl Packard Labs because they saw, here's a challenge and here's something where I can't actually believe, maintain my ethical compliance. I need to have engineer new ways of, of achieving artificial intelligence. And so much of that comes back to governance over that data and how can we actually create those governance systems and and do that out in the open >>That's a can of worms. We're gonna do a whole segment on that one, >>On that >>Technology, on that one >>Piece I wanna ask you, I mean, where rubber meets the road is where you're putting your dollars. So you've talked a lot, a lot of, a lot of areas of, of progress right now, where are you putting your dollars right now at Hewlett Packard Labs? >>Yeah, so I think when I draw, when I draw my 2030 vision slide, you know, I, for me the first column is about heterogeneous, right? How do we bring all of these novel computational approaches to be able to demonstrate their effectiveness, their sustainability, and also the productivity that we can drive from, from, from them. So that's my first column. My section column is that edge to exoscale workflow that I need to be able to harness all of those computational and data resources. I need to be aware of the energy consequence of moving data, of doing computation and find all of that while still maintaining and solving for security and privacy. But the last thing, and, and that's one was a, one was a how one was aware. The last thing is a who, right? And is is how do we take that subject matter expert? I think of a, a young engineer starting their career at hpe. It'll be very different than my 33 years. And part of it, you know, they will be undaunted by any, any scale. They will be cloud natives, maybe they metaverse natives, they will demand to design an open cooperative environment. So for me it's thinking about that individual and how do I take those capabilities, heterogeneous edge to exito scale workflows and then make them productive. And for me, that's, that's where we were putting our emphasis on those three. When, where and >>Who. Yeah. And making it compatible for the next generation. We see the student cluster competition going on over there. This is the only show that we cover that we've been to that is from the dorm room to the boardroom and this cuz Supercomputing now is elevating up into that workflow, into integration, multiple environments, cloud, premise, edge, metaverse. This is like a whole nother world. >>And, and, but I think it's, it's the way that regardless of which human pursuit you're in, you know, everyone is going to be demand simulation and modeling ai, ML and massive data m l and massive data analytics that's gonna be at heart of, of everything. And that's what you see. That's what I love about coming here. This isn't just the way we're gonna do science. This is the way we're gonna do everything. >>We're gonna come by your booth, check it out. We've talked to some of the folks, hpe obviously HPE Discover this year, GreenLake with center stage, it's now consumption is a service for technology. Whole nother ballgame. Congratulations on, on all this. I would say the massive, I won't say pivot, but you know, a change >>It >>Is and how you guys >>Operate. And you know, it's funny sometimes you think about the, the pivot to as a services benefiting the customer, but as someone who has supported designs over decades, you know, that ability to to to operate and at peak efficiency, to always keep in perfect operating order and to continuously change while still meeting the customer expectations that actually allows us to deliver innovation to our customers faster than when we are delivering warranted individual packaged products. >>Kirk, thanks for coming on Paul. Great conversation here. You know, the road to Quantum's gonna be paved through computing supercomputing software integrated workflows from the dorm room to the boardroom to Cube, bringing all the action here at Supercomputing 22. I'm Jacque Forer with Paul Gillin. Thanks for watching. We'll be right back.

>>How do y'all and welcome back to the cube where we're live from Dallas at a Supercomputing 2022. My name is Savannah Peterson. Joined with L AED today, as well as some very exciting guests talking about one of my favorite and most complex topics out there, talking about quantum a bit today. Please welcome Ken and Matthew. Thank you so much for reading here. Matthew. Everyone's gonna be able to see your shirt. What's going on with hybrid quantum? I have >>To ask. Wait, what is hybrid quantum? Yeah, let's not pretend that. >>Let's not >>Pretend that everybody knows, Everyone already knows what quantum computing is if we goes straight to highway. Yeah. Okay. So with the brief tour detour took qu regular quantum computing. Yeah, >>No, no. Yeah. Let's start with quantum start before. >>So you know, like regular computers made of transistors gives us ones and zeros, right? Binary, like you were talking about just like half of the Cheerios, right? The joke, it turns out there's some problems that even if we could build a computer as big as the whole universe, which would be pretty expensive, >>That might not be a bad thing, but >>Yeah. Yeah. Good for Dell Got mill. >>Yeah. >>Yeah. We wouldn't be able to solve them cuz they scale exponentially. And it turns out some of those problems have efficient solutions in quantum computing where we take any two state quantum system, which I'll explain in a sec and turn it into what we call a quantum bit or qubit. And those qubits can actually solve some problems that are just infeasible on even these world's largest computers by offering exponential advantage. And it turns out that today's quantum computers are a little too small and a little too noisy to do that alone. So by pairing a quantum computer with a classical computer, hence the partnership between IQ and Dell, you allow each kind of compute to do what it's best at and thereby get answers you can't get with either one alone. >>Okay. So the concept of introducing hybridity, I love that word bridge. I dunno if I made it up, but it's it for it. Let's about it. Abri, ding ding. So does this include simulating the quantum world within the, what was the opposite? The classical quantum world? Classical. Classical, classical computer. Yeah. So does it include the concept of simulating quantum in classical compute? >>Absolutely. >>Okay. How, how, how do, how do you do that? >>So there's simulators and emulators that effectively are programmed in exactly the same way that a physical quantum machine is through circuits translated into chasm or quantum assembly language. And those are the exact same ways that you would program either a physical q p or a simulated >>Q p. So, so access to quantum computing today is scarce, right? I mean it's, it's, it's, it's limited. So having the ability to have the world at large or a greater segment of society be able to access this through simulation is probably a good idea. >>Fair. It's absolutely a wonderful one. And so I often talk to customers and I tell them about the journey, which is hands on keyboard, learning, experimentation, building proof of concepts, and then finally productization. And you could do much of that first two steps anyway very robustly with simulation. >>It's much like classical computing where if you imagine back in the fifties, if, if the cube was at some conference in 1955, you know, we wouldn't have possibly been able to predict what we'd be doing with computing 70 years later, right? Yeah. That teenagers be making apps on their phones that changed the world, right? And so by democratizing access this way, suddenly we can open up all sorts of new use cases. We sort of like to joke, there's only a couple hundred people in the world who really know how to program quantum computers today. And so how are we gonna make thousands, tens of thousands, millions of quantum programmers? The answer is access and simulators are an amazingly accessible way for everyone to start playing around with the >>Fields. Very powerful tool. >>Wow. Yeah. I'm just thinking about how many, there's, are there really only hundreds of people who can program quantum computing? >>I kind of generally throw it out there and I say, you know, if you looked at a matrix of a thousand operations with hundreds of qubits, there's probably, I don't know, 2000 people worldwide that could program that type of a circuit. I mean it's a fairly complex circuit at that point and >>I, I mean it's pretty phenomenal When you think about how early we are in adoption and, and the rollout of this technology as a whole, can you see quite a bit as, as you look across your customer portfolio, what are some of the other trends you're seeing? >>Well, non quantum related trends or just any type you give us >>Both. >>Yeah. So >>We're a thought leader. This is >>Your moment. Yeah, so we do quite a bit. We see quite a bit actually. There's a lot of work happening at the edge as you're probably well aware of. And we see a lot of autonomous mobile robots. I actually lead the, the research office. So I get to see all the cool stuff that's really kind of emerging before it really regrets >>What's coming next. >>Let's see, Oh, I can't tell you what's coming next, but we see edge applications. Yes, we see a lot of, of AI applications and artificial intelligence is morphing dramatically through the number of frameworks and through the, the types and places you would place ai, even places I, I personally never thought we would go like manufacturing environments. Some places that were traditionally not very early adopters. We're seeing AI move very quickly in some of those areas. One of the areas that I'm really excited about is digital twins and the ability to eventually do, let's come up on acceleration with quantum technologies on, on things like computational fluid dynamics. And I think it's gonna be a wonderful, wonderful area for us moving forward. >>So, So I can hear the people screaming at the screen right now. Wait a minute, You said it was hybrid, you're only talking the front half. That's, that's cat. What about the back half? That's dog. What about the quantum part of it? So I, on Q and, and I apologize. Ion Q >>Ion >>Q, Yeah Ion Q cuz you never know. You never never know. Yeah. Where does the actual quantum come in? >>That's a great >>Question. So you guys have one of these things. >>Yeah, we've built, we currently have the world's best quantum computer by, by sub measures I drop there. Yeah, no big deal. Give me some snaps for that. Yeah, Ken knows how to pick em. Yeah, so right. Our, our approach, which is actually based on technology that's 50 years old, so it's quite, quite has a long history. The way we build atomic clocks is the basis for trapped eye quantum computing. And in fact the first quantum logic gate ever made in 1995 was at NIST where they modified their atomic clock experiment to do quantum gates. And that launched really the hardware experimentalist quantum Peter Revolution. And that was by Chris Monroe, our co-founder. So you know that history has flown directly into us. So to simplify, we start with an ion trap. Imagine a gold block with a bunch of electrodes that allow you to make precisely shaped electromagnetic fields, sort of like a rotating saddle. >>Then take a source of atoms. Now obviously we're all sources of atoms. We have a highly purified source of metal atium. We heat it up, we get a nice hot plume of atoms, we ionize those atoms with an ionizing later laser. Now they're hot and heavy and charged. So we can trap them in one of these fields. And now our electromagnetic field that's spitting rapidly holds the, the ions like balls in a bowl if you can imagine them. And they line up in a nice straight line and we hold them in place with these fields and with cooling laser beams. And up to now, that's how an atomic clock works. Trap an item and shine it with a laser beam. Count the oscillations, that's your clock. Now if you got 32 of those and you can manipulate their energy states, in our case we use the hyper fine energy states of the atom. >>But you can basically think of your high school chemistry where you have like an unexcited electron, an excited electron. Take your unexcited state as a zero, your excited state as a one. And it turns out with commercially available lasers, you can drive anywhere between a zero, a one or a super position of zero and one. And so that is our quantum bit, the hyper fine energy state of the atrium atom. And we just line up a bunch of them and through there access the magical powers of supervision entanglement, as we were talking about before, they don't really make sense to us here in the regular world, but >>They do exist. But what you just described is one cubit. That's right. And the way that you do it isn't exactly the same way that others who are doing quantum computing do it. That's right. Is that okay? >>And there's a lot of advantages to the trapped iron approach. So for example, you can also build a super conducting qubit where you, where you basically cool a chip to 47 mil kelvin and coerce millions of atoms to work together as a single system. The problem is that's not naturally quantum. So it's inherently noisy and it wants to deco here does not want to be a quantum bit. Whereas an atom is very happy to be by itself a qubit because we don't have to do anything to it. It's naturally quantum, if that makes sense. And so atomic qubits, like we use feature a few things. One the longest coherence times in the industry, meaning you can run very deep circuits, the most accurate operations, very low noise operations. And we don't have any wires. Our atoms are connected by laser light. That means you can connect any pair. So with some other technologies, the qubits are connected by wires. That means you can only run operations between physically connected qubits. It's like programming. If you could only use, for example, bits that are adjacent with an i untrapped approach, you can connect any pair so that all to all connectivity means your compilation is much more efficient and you can do much wider and deeper circuits. >>So what's the, what is the closest thing to a practical application that we've been able to achieve at this point? Question. And when I say practical, it doesn't have to be super practical. I mean, what is the, what is the sort of demonstration, the least esoteric demonstration of this at this point? >>To tie into what Ken was saying earlier, I think there's at least two areas that are very exciting. One is chemistry. Chemistry. So for example, you know, we have water in our cup and we understand water pretty well, but there's lots of molecules that in order to study them, we actually have to make them in a lab and do lots of experiments. And to give you a sense of the order of magnitude, if you wanted to understand the ground state of the caffeine molecule, which we all know and has 200 electrons, you would need to build a computer bigger than the moon. So, which is, you know, again, would be good profit for Dell, but probably not gonna happen time soon. That's >>Kind of fun to think about though. Yeah, that's a great analogy. That >>Was, yeah. And in fact it'd be like 10 moons of compute. Okay. So build 10 moons of >>Computer. I >>Love the sci-fi issue. Exactly. And now you can calculate caffeine, it's crazy or it just fits in a quantum computer the size of this table. And so we're using hybrid quantum computing now to start proving out these algorithms not for molecules as complex as caffeine or what we want in the future. Like biologics, you know, new cancer medications, new materials and so forth. But we are able to show, for example, the ground state of smaller molecules and prove a path to where, you know, decision maker could see in a few years from now, Oh, we'll be able to actually simulate not molecules we already understand, but molecules we've never been able to study a prayer, if that makes sense. And then, >>Yeah, I think there's a key point underneath that, and I think goes back to the question that you asked earlier about the why hybrid applications inherently run on the classical infrastructure and algorithms are accelerated through qs, the quantum processing units. >>And so are you sort of time sharing in the sense that this environment that you set up starts with classical, with simulation and then you get to a point where you say, okay, we're ready, you pick up the bat phone and you say I wanna, >>I would say it's more like a partnership, really. Yeah, >>Yeah. And I think, I think it's kind of the, the way I normally describe it is, you know, we've taken a look at it it from a really kind of a software development life cycle type of perspective where again, if you follow that learn experiment, pro proof of concept, and then finally productize, we, we can cover and allow for a developer to start prototyping and proofing on simulators and when they're ready all they do is flip a switch and a manifest and they can automatically engage a qu a real quantum physical quantum system. And so we've made it super simple and very accessible in a democratizing access for developers. >>Yeah. Makes such big difference. Go ahead. >>A good analogy is to like GPUs, right? Where it's not really like, you know, you send it away, but rather the GPU accelerates certain operations. The q p. Yeah, because quantum mechanics, it turns out the universe runs on linear algebra. So one way to think about the q p is the most efficient way of doing linear algebra that exists. So lots of problems that can be expressed in that form. Combinatorial optimization problems in general, certain kinds of machine learning, et cetera, get an exponential speed up by running a section of the algorithm on the quantum computer. But of course you wouldn't like port Microsoft Word. Yeah, exactly. You know, you're not gonna do that in your product. It would be a waste of your quantum computer. >>Not just that you wanna know exactly how much money is in your bank account, not probabilistically how much might be ballpark. Yeah. Realm 10, moon ballpark, right? >>10 moon ballpark. Be using that for the rest of the show. Yeah. Oh, I love that. Ken, tell me a little bit about how you identify companies and like I n Q and and end up working with Matthew. What, what's that like, >>What's it like or how do you >>Find it's the process? Like, so, you know, let's say I've got the the >>We're not going there though. Yeah. We're not >>Personal relationship. >>Well, >>You can answer these questions however you want, you know. No, but, but what does that look like for Dell? How do you, how do you curate and figure out who you're gonna bring into this partnership nest? >>Yeah, you know, I, I think it was a, it's, it was a, a very long drawn out learning opportunity. We started actually our working quantum back in 2016. So we've been at it for a long time. And only >>In quantum would we say six years is a long time. I love >>That. Exactly. >>By the way, that was like, we've been doing this for age for a >>Long time. Yeah. Very long time before >>You were born. Yes. >>Feels like it actually, believe it or not. But, so we've been at it for a long time and you know, we went down some very specific learning paths. We took a lot of different time to, to learn about different types of qubits available, different companies, what their approaches were, et cetera. Yeah. And, and we ended up meeting up with, with I N Q and, and we also have other partners as well, like ibm, but I N q you know, we, there is a nice symbiotic relationship. We're actually doing some really cool technologies that are even much, much further ahead than the, you know, strict classical does this, quantum does that where there's significant amount of interplay between the simulation systems and between the real physical QS. And so it's, it's turning out to be a great relationship. They're, they're very easy to work with and, and a lot of fun too, as you could probably tell. Yeah. >>Clearly. So before we wrap, I've got it. Okay. Okay. So get it. Let's get, let's get, yeah, let's get deep. Let's get deep for a second or a little deeper than we've been. So our current, our current understanding of all this, of the universe, it's pretty limited. It's down to the point where we effectively have it assigned to witchcraft. It's all dark energy and dark matter. Right. What does that mean exactly? Nobody knows. But if you're in the quantum computing space and you're living this every day, do you believe that it represents the key to us understanding things that currently we just can't understand classical models, including classical computing, our brains as they're constructed aren't capable of understanding the real real that's out there. Yeah. If you're in the quantum computing space, do you possess that level of hubris? Do you think that you are gonna deliver the answers? >>I'm just like, I think the more you're in the space, the more mysterious and amazing it all seems. There's a, but there is a great quote by Richard Feinman that sort of kicked off the quantum exploration. So he gave a lecture in 1981, so, you know, long before any of this began, truly ages ago, right? Yeah. And in this lecture he said, you know, kind of wild at that time, right? We had to build these giant supercomputers to simulate just a couple atoms interacting, right? And it's kind of crazy that you need all this compute to simulate what nature does with just a handful >>Particles. Yeah. >>Really small. So, and, and famously he said, you know, nature just isn't classical. Damn it. And so you need to build a computer that works with nature to understand nature. I think, you know, the, the quantum revolution has only just begun. There's so many new things to learn, and I'm sure the quantum computers of 40 years from now are not gonna look like the, you know, the computers of today, just as the classical computers of 40 years ago look quite different to us now, >>And we're a bunch of apes. But you think we'll get there? >>I, yeah, I, I mean, I, I have, I think we have, I feel incredibly optimistic that this tool, quantum computing as a tool represents a sea change in what's possible for humans to compute. >>Yeah. I think it's that possibility. You know, I, when I tell people right now in the quantum era, we're in the inac stage of the quantum era, and so we have a long way to go, but the potential is absolutely enormous. In fact, incomprehensibly enormous, I >>Was just gonna say, I don't even think we could grasp >>In the, from the inac is they had no idea of computers inside of your hand, right? Yeah. >>They're calculating, you know, trajectories, right? Yeah. If you told them, like, we'd all be video chatting, you >>Know, >>Like, and kids would be doing synchronized dances, you know, you'd be like, What? >>I love that. Well, well, on that note, Ken Matthew, really great to have you both, everyone now will be pondering the scale and scope of the universe with their 10 moon computer, 10 moons. That's right. And, and you've given me my, my new favorite bumper sticker since we've been on a, on a roll here, David and I, which is just naturally quantum. Yeah, that's, that's, that's, that's one of my new favorite phrases from the show. Thank you both for being here. David, thank you for hanging out and thank all of you for tuning in to our cube footage live here in Dallas. We are at Supercomputing. This is our last show for the day, but we look forward to seeing you tomorrow morning. My name's Savannah Peterson. Y'all have a lovely night.

(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Startup Showcase. This is season two, episode four of the ongoing series covering the exciting hot startups from the AWS ecosystem. Here we're talking about cybersecurity in this episode. I'm your host, John Furrier here we're excited to have CUBE alumni who's back Snehal Antani who's the CEO and co-founder of Horizon3.ai talking about exploitable weaknesses and vulnerabilities with autonomous pen testing. Snehal, it's great to see you. Thanks for coming back. >> Likewise, John. I think it's been about five years since you and I were on the stage together. And I've missed it, but I'm glad to see you again. >> Well, before we get into the showcase about your new startup, that's extremely successful, amazing margins, great product. You have a unique journey. We talked about this prior to you doing the journey, but you have a great story. You left the startup world to go into the startup, like world of self defense, public defense, NSA. What group did you go to in the public sector became a private partner. >> My background, I'm a software engineer by education and trade. I started my career at IBM. I was a CIO at GE Capital, and I think we met once when I was there and I became the CTO of Splunk. And we spent a lot of time together when I was at Splunk. And at the end of 2017, I decided to take a break from industry and really kind of solve problems that I cared deeply about and solve problems that mattered. So I left industry and joined the US Special Operations Community and spent about four years in US Special Operations, where I grew more personally and professionally than in anything I'd ever done in my career. And exited that time, met my co-founder in special ops. And then as he retired from the air force, we started Horizon3. >> So there's really, I want to bring that up one, 'cause it's fascinating that not a lot of people in Silicon Valley and tech would do that. So thanks for the service. And I know everyone who's out there in the public sector knows that this is a really important time for the tactical edge in our military, a lot of things going on around the world. So thanks for the service and a great journey. But there's a storyline with the company you're running now that you started. I know you get the jacket on there. I noticed get a little military vibe to it. Cybersecurity, I mean, every company's on their own now. They have to build their own militia. There is no government supporting companies anymore. There's no militia. No one's on the shores of our country defending the citizens and the companies, they got to offend for themselves. So every company has to have their own military. >> In many ways, you don't see anti-aircraft rocket launchers on top of the JP Morgan building in New York City because they rely on the government for air defense. But in cyber it's very different. Every company is on their own to defend for themselves. And what's interesting is this blend. If you look at the Ukraine, Russia war, as an example, a thousand companies have decided to withdraw from the Russian economy and those thousand companies we should expect to be in the ire of the Russian government and their proxies at some point. And so it's not just those companies, but their suppliers, their distributors. And it's no longer about cyber attack for extortion through ransomware, but rather cyber attack for punishment and retaliation for leaving. Those companies are on their own to defend themselves. There's no government that is dedicated to supporting them. So yeah, the reality is that cybersecurity, it's the burden of the organization. And also your attack surface has expanded to not just be your footprint, but if an adversary wants to punish you for leaving their economy, they can get, if you're in agriculture, they could disrupt your ability to farm or they could get all your fruit to spoil at the border 'cause they disrupted your distributors and so on. So I think the entire world is going to change over the next 18 to 24 months. And I think this idea of cybersecurity is going to become truly a national problem and a problem that breaks down any corporate barriers that we see in previously. >> What are some of the things that inspired you to start this company? And I loved your approach of thinking about the customer, your customer, as defending themselves in context to threats, really leaning into it, being ready and able to defend. Horizon3 has a lot of that kind of military thinking for the good of the company. What's the motivation? Why this company? Why now? What's the value proposition? >> So there's two parts to why the company and why now. The first part was what my observation, when I left industry realm or my military background is watching "Jack Ryan" and "Tropic Thunder" and I didn't come from the military world. And so when I entered the special operations community, step one was to keep my mouth shut, learn, listen, and really observe and understand what made that community so impressive. And obviously the people and it's not about them being fast runners or great shooters or awesome swimmers, but rather there are learn-it-alls that can solve any problem as a team under pressure, which is the exact culture you want to have in any startup, early stage companies are learn-it-alls that can solve any problem under pressure as a team. So I had this immediate advantage when we started Horizon3, where a third of Horizon3 employees came from that special operations community. So one is this awesome talent. But the second part that, I remember this quote from a special operations commander that said we use live rounds in training because if we used fake rounds or rubber bullets, everyone would act like metal of honor winners. And the whole idea there is you train like you fight, you build that muscle memory for crisis and response and so on upfront. So when you're in the thick of it, you already know how to react. And this aligns to a pain I had in industry. I had no idea I was secure until the bad guy showed up. I had no idea if I was fixing the right vulnerabilities, logging the right data in Splunk, or if my CrowdStrike EDR platform was configured correctly, I had to wait for the bad guys to show up. I didn't know if my people knew how to respond to an incident. So what I wanted to do was proactively verify my security posture, proactively harden my systems. I needed to do that by continuously pen testing myself or continuously testing my security posture. And there just wasn't any way to do that where an IT admin or a network engineer could in three clicks have the power of a 20 year pen testing expert. And that was really what we set out to do, not build a autonomous pen testing platform for security people, build it so that anybody can quickly test their security posture and then use the output to fix problems that truly matter. >> So the value preposition, if I get this right is, there's a lot of companies out there doing pen tests. And I know I hate pen tests. They're like, cause you do DevOps, it changes you got to do another pen test. So it makes sense to do autonomous pen testing. So congratulations on seeing that that's obvious to that, but a lot of other have consulting tied to it. Which seems like you need to train someone and you guys taking a different approach. >> Yeah, we actually, as a company have zero consulting, zero professional services. And the whole idea is that build a true software as a service offering where an intern, in fact, we've got a video of a nine year old that in three clicks can run pen tests against themselves. And because of that, you can wire pen tests into your DevOps tool chain. You can run multiple pen tests today. In fact, I've got customers running 40, 50 pen tests a month against their organization. And that what that does is completely lowers the barrier of entry for being able to verify your posture. If you have consulting on average, when I was a CIO, it was at least a three month lead time to schedule consultants to show up and then they'd show up, they'd embarrass the security team, they'd make everyone look bad, 'cause they're going to get in, leave behind a report. And that report was almost identical to what they found last year because the older that report, the one the date itself gets stale, the context changes and so on. And then eventually you just don't even bother fixing it. Or if you fix a problem, you don't have the skills to verify that has been fixed. So I think that consulting led model was acceptable when you viewed security as a compliance checkbox, where once a year was sufficient to meet your like PCI requirements. But if you're really operating with a wartime mindset and you actually need to harden and secure your environment, you've got to be running pen test regularly against your organization from different perspectives, inside, outside, from the cloud, from work, from home environments and everything in between. >> So for the CISOs out there, for the CSOs and the CXOs, what's the pitch to them because I see your jacket that says Horizon3 AI, trust but verify. But this trust is, but is canceled out, just as verify. What's the product that you guys are offering the service. Describe what it is and why they should look at it. >> Yeah, sure. So one, when I back when I was the CIO, don't tell me we're secure in PowerPoint. Show me we're secure right now. Show me we're secure again tomorrow. And then show me we're secure again next week because my environment is constantly changing and the adversary always has a vote and they're always evolving. And this whole idea of show me we're secure. Don't trust that your security tools are working, verify that they can detect and respond and stifle an attack and then verify tomorrow, verify next week. That's the big mind shift. Now what we do is-- >> John: How do they respond to that by the way? Like they don't believe you at first or what's the story. >> I think, there's actually a very bifurcated response. There are still a decent chunk of CIOs and CSOs that have a security is a compliance checkbox mindset. So my attitude with them is I'm not going to convince you. You believe it's a checkbox. I'll just wait for you to get breached and sell to your replacement, 'cause you'll get fired. And in the meantime, I spend all my energy with those that actually care about proactively securing and hardening their environments. >> That's true. People do get fired. Can you give an example of what you're saying about this environment being ready, proving that you're secure today, tomorrow and a few weeks out. Give me an example. >> Of, yeah, I'll give you actually a customer example. There was a healthcare organization and they had about 5,000 hosts in their environment and they did everything right. They had Fortinet as their EDR platform. They had user behavior analytics in place that they had purchased and tuned. And when they ran a pen test self-service, our product node zero immediately started to discover every host on the network. It then fingerprinted all those hosts and found it was able to get code execution on three machines. So it got code execution, dumped credentials, laterally maneuvered, and became a domain administrator, which in IT, if an attacker becomes a domain admin, they've got keys to the kingdom. So at first the question was, how did the node zero pen test become domain admin? How'd they get code execution, Fortinet should have detected and stopped it. Well, it turned out Fortinet was misconfigured on three boxes out of 5,000. And these guys had no idea and it's just automation that went wrong and so on. And now they would've only known they had misconfigured their EDR platform on three hosts if the attacker had showed up. The second question though was, why didn't they catch the lateral movement? Which all their marketing brochures say they're supposed to catch. And it turned out that that customer purchased the wrong Fortinet modules. One again, they had no idea. They thought they were doing the right thing. So don't trust just installing your tools is good enough. You've got to exercise and verify them. We've got tons of stories from patches that didn't actually apply to being able to find the AWS admin credentials on a local file system. And then using that to log in and take over the cloud. In fact, I gave this talk at Black Hat on war stories from running 10,000 pen tests. And that's just the reality is, you don't know that these tools and processes are working for you until the bad guys have shown. >> The velocities there. You can accelerate through logs, you know from the days you've been there. This is now the threat. Being, I won't say lazy, but just not careful or just not thinking. >> Well, I'll do an example. We have a lot of customers that are Horizon3 customers and Splunk customers. And what you'll see their behavior is, is they'll have Horizon3 up on one screen. And every single attacker command executed with its timestamp is up on that screen. And then look at Splunk and say, hey, we were able to dump vCenter credentials from VMware products at this time on this host, what did Splunk see or what didn't they see? Why were no logs generated? And it turns out that they had some logging blind spots. So what they'll actually do is run us to almost like stimulate the defensive tools and then see what did the tools catch? What did they miss? What are those blind spots and how do they fix it. >> So your price called node zero. You mentioned that. Is that specifically a suite, a tool, a platform. How do people consume and engage with you guys? >> So the way that we work, the whole product is designed to be self-service. So once again, while we have a sales team, the whole intent is you don't need to have to talk to a sales rep to start using the product, you can log in right now, go to Horizon3.ai, you can run a trial log in with your Google ID, your LinkedIn ID, start running pen test against your home or against your network against this organization right now, without talking to anybody. The whole idea is self-service, run a pen test in three clicks and give you the power of that 20 year pen testing expert. And then what'll happen is node zero will execute and then it'll provide to you a full report of here are all of the different paths or attack paths or sequences where we are able to become an admin in your environment. And then for every attack path, here is the path or the kill chain, the proof of exploitation for every step along the way. Here's exactly what you've got to do to fix it. And then once you've fixed it, here's how you verify that you've truly fixed the problem. And this whole aha moment is run us to find problems. You fix them, rerun us to verify that the problem has been fixed. >> Talk about the company, how many people do you have and get some stats? >> Yeah, so we started writing code in January of 2020, right before the pandemic hit. And then about 10 months later at the end of 2020, we launched the first version of the product. We've been in the market for now about two and a half years total from start of the company till present. We've got 130 employees. We've got more customers than we do employees, which is really cool. And instead our customers shift from running one pen test a year to 40, 50 pen test. >> John: And it's full SaaS. >> The whole product is full SaaS. So no consulting, no pro serve. You run as often as you-- >> Who's downloading, who's buying the product. >> What's amazing is, we have customers in almost every section or sector now. So we're not overly rotated towards like healthcare or financial services. We've got state and local education or K through 12 education, state and local government, a number of healthcare companies, financial services, manufacturing. We've got organizations that large enterprises. >> John: Security's diverse. >> It's very diverse. >> I mean, ransomware must be a big driver. I mean, is that something that you're seeing a lot. >> It is. And the thing about ransomware is, if you peel back the outcome of ransomware, which is extortion, at the end of the day, what ransomware organizations or criminals or APTs will do is they'll find out who all your employees are online. They will then figure out if you've got 7,000 employees, all it takes is one of them to have a bad password. And then attackers are going to credential spray to find that one person with a bad password or whose Netflix password that's on the dark web is also their same password to log in here, 'cause most people reuse. And then from there they're going to most likely in your organization, the domain user, when you log in, like you probably have local admin on your laptop. If you're a windows machine and I've got local admin on your laptop, I'm going to be able to dump credentials, get the admin credentials and then start to laterally maneuver. Attackers don't have to hack in using zero days like you see in the movies, often they're logging in with valid user IDs and passwords that they've found and collected from somewhere else. And then they make that, they maneuver by making a low plus a low equal a high. And the other thing in financial services, we spend all of our time fixing critical vulnerabilities, attackers know that. So they've adapted to finding ways to chain together, low priority vulnerabilities and misconfigurations and dangerous defaults to become admin. So while we've over rotated towards just fixing the highs and the criticals attackers have adapted. And once again they have a vote, they're always evolving their tactics. >> And how do you prevent that from happening? >> So we actually apply those same tactics. Rarely do we actually need a CVE to compromise your environment. We will harvest credentials, just like an attacker. We will find misconfigurations and dangerous defaults, just like an attacker. We will combine those together. We'll make use of exploitable vulnerabilities as appropriate and use that to compromise your environment. So the tactics that, in many ways we've built a digital weapon and the tactics we apply are the exact same tactics that are applied by the adversary. >> So you guys basically simulate hacking. >> We actually do the hacking. Simulate means there's a fakeness to it. >> So you guys do hack. >> We actually compromise. >> Like sneakers the movie, those sneakers movie for the old folks like me. >> And in fact that was my inspiration. I've had this idea for over a decade now, which is I want to be able to look at anything that laptop, this Wi-Fi network, gear in hospital or a truck driving by and know, I can figure out how to gain initial access, rip that environment apart and be able to opponent. >> Okay, Chuck, he's not allowed in the studio anymore. (laughs) No, seriously. Some people are exposed. I mean, some companies don't have anything. But there's always passwords or so most people have that argument. Well, there's nothing to protect here. Not a lot of sensitive data. How do you respond to that? Do you see that being kind of putting the head in the sand or? >> Yeah, it's actually, it's less, there's not sensitive data, but more we've installed or applied multifactor authentication, attackers can't get in now. Well MFA only applies or does not apply to lower level protocols. So I can find a user ID password, log in through SMB, which isn't protected by multifactor authentication and still upon your environment. So unfortunately I think as a security industry, we've become very good at giving a false sense of security to organizations. >> John: Compliance drives that behavior. >> Compliance drives that. And what we need. Back to don't tell me we're secure, show me, we've got to, I think, change that to a trust but verify, but get rid of the trust piece of it, just to verify. >> Okay, we got a lot of CISOs and CSOs watching this showcase, looking at the hot startups, what's the message to the executives there. Do they want to become more leaning in more hawkish if you will, to use the military term on security? I mean, I heard one CISO say, security first then compliance 'cause compliance can make you complacent and then you're unsecure at that point. >> I actually say that. I agree. One definitely security is different and more important than being compliant. I think there's another emerging concept, which is I'd rather be defensible than secure. What I mean by that is security is a point in time state. I am secure right now. I may not be secure tomorrow 'cause something's changed. But if I'm defensible, then what I have is that muscle memory to detect, respondent and stifle an attack. And that's what's more important. Can I detect you? How long did it take me to detect you? Can I stifle you from achieving your objective? How long did it take me to stifle you? What did you use to get in to gain access? How long did that sit in my environment? How long did it take me to fix it? So on and so forth. But I think it's being defensible and being able to rapidly adapt to changing tactics by the adversary is more important. >> This is the evolution of how the red line never moved. You got the adversaries in our networks and our banks. Now they hang out and they wait. So everyone thinks they're secure. But when they start getting hacked, they're not really in a position to defend, the alarms go off. Where's the playbook. Team springs into action. I mean, you kind of get the visual there, but this is really the issue being defensible means having your own essentially military for your company. >> Being defensible, I think has two pieces. One is you've got to have this culture and process in place of training like you fight because you want to build that incident response muscle memory ahead of time. You don't want to have to learn how to respond to an incident in the middle of the incident. So that is that proactively verifying your posture and continuous pen testing is critical there. The second part is the actual fundamentals in place so you can detect and stifle as appropriate. And also being able to do that. When you are continuously verifying your posture, you need to verify your entire posture, not just your test systems, which is what most people do. But you have to be able to safely pen test your production systems, your cloud environments, your perimeter. You've got to assume that the bad guys are going to get in, once they're in, what can they do? So don't just say that my perimeter's secure and I'm good to go. It's the soft squishy center that attackers are going to get into. And from there, can you detect them and can you stop them? >> Snehal, take me through the use. You got to be sold on this, I love this topic. Alright, pen test. Is it, what am I buying? Just pen test as a service. You mentioned dark web. Are you actually buying credentials online on behalf of the customer? What is the product? What am I buying if I'm the CISO from Horizon3? What's the service? What's the product, be specific. >> So very specifically and one just principles. The first principle is when I was a buyer, I hated being nickled and dimed buyer vendors, which was, I had to buy 15 different modules in order to achieve an objective. Just give me one line item, make it super easy to buy and don't nickel and dime me. Because I've spent time as a buyer that very much has permeated throughout the company. So there is a single skew from Horizon3. It is an annual subscription based on how big your environment is. And it is inclusive of on-prem internal pen tests, external pen tests, cloud attacks, work from home attacks, our ability to harvest credentials from the dark web and from open source sources. Being able to crack those credentials, compromise. All of that is included as a singles skew. All you get as a CISO is a singles skew, annual subscription, and you can run as many pen tests as you want. Some customers still stick to, maybe one pen test a quarter, but most customers shift when they realize there's no limit, we don't nickel and dime. They can run 10, 20, 30, 40 a month. >> Well, it's not nickel and dime in the sense that, it's more like dollars and hundreds because they know what to expect if it's classic cloud consumption. They kind of know what their environment, can people try it. Let's just say I have a huge environment, I have a cloud, I have an on-premise private cloud. Can I dabble and set parameters around pricing? >> Yes you can. So one is you can dabble and set perimeter around scope, which is like manufacturing does this, do not touch the production line that's on at the moment. We've got a hospital that says every time they run a pen test, any machine that's actually connected to a patient must be excluded. So you can actually set the parameters for what's in scope and what's out of scope up front, most again we're designed to be safe to run against production so you can set the parameters for scope. You can set the parameters for cost if you want. But our recommendation is I'd rather figure out what you can afford and let you test everything in your environment than try to squeeze every penny from you by only making you buy what can afford as a smaller-- >> So the variable ratio, if you will is, how much they spend is the size of their environment and usage. >> Just size of the environment. >> So it could be a big ticket item for a CISO then. >> It could, if you're really large, but for the most part-- >> What's large? >> I mean, if you were Walmart, well, let me back up. What I heard is global 10 companies spend anywhere from 50 to a hundred million dollars a year on security testing. So they're already spending a ton of money, but they're spending it on consultants that show up maybe a couple of times a year. They don't have, humans can't scale to test a million hosts in your environment. And so you're already spending that money, spend a fraction of that and use us and run as much as you want. And that's really what it comes down to. >> John: All right. So what's the response from customers? >> What's really interesting is there are three use cases. The first is that SOC manager that is using us to verify that their security tools are actually working. So their Splunk environment is logging the right data. It's integrating properly with CrowdStrike, it's integrating properly with their active directory services and their password policies. So the SOC manager is using us to verify the effectiveness of their security controls. The second use case is the IT director that is using us to proactively harden their systems. Did they install VMware correctly? Did they install their Cisco gear correctly? Are they patching right? And then the third are for the companies that are lucky to have their own internal pen test and red teams where they use us like a force multiplier. So if you've got 10 people on your red team and you still have a million IPs or hosts in your environment, you still don't have enough people for that coverage. So they'll use us to do recon at scale and attack at scale and let the humans focus on the really juicy hard stuff that humans are successful at. >> Love the product. Again, I'm trying to think about how I engage on the test. Is there pilots? Is there a demo version? >> There's a free trials. So we do 30 day free trials. The output can actually be used to meet your SOC 2 requirements. So in many ways you can just use us to get a free SOC 2 pen test report right now, if you want. Go to the website, log in for a free trial, you can log into your Google ID or your LinkedIn ID, run a pen test against your organization and use that to answer your PCI segmentation test requirements, your SOC 2 requirements, but you will be hooked. You will want to run us more often. And you'll get a Horizon3 tattoo. >> The first hits free as they say in the drug business. >> Yeah. >> I mean, so you're seeing that kind of response then, trial converts. >> It's exactly. In fact, we have a very well defined aha moment, which is you run us to find, you fix, you run us to verify, we have 100% technical win rate when our customers hit a find, fix, verify cycle, then it's about budget and urgency. But 100% technical win rate because of that aha moment, 'cause people realize, holy crap, I don't have to wait six months to verify that my problems have actually been fixed. I can just come in, click, verify, rerun the entire pen test or rerun a very specific part of it on what I just patched my environment. >> Congratulations, great stuff. You're here part of the AWS Startup Showcase. So I have to ask, what's the relationship with AWS, you're on their cloud. What kind of actions going on there? Is there secret sauce on there? What's going on? >> So one is we are AWS customers ourselves, our brains command and control infrastructure. All of our analytics are all running on AWS. It's amazing, when we run a pen test, we are able to use AWS and we'll spin up a virtual private cloud just for that pen test. It's completely ephemeral, it's all Lambda functions and graph analytics and other techniques. When the pen test ends, you can delete, there's a single use Docker container that gets deleted from your environment so you have nothing on-prem to deal with and the entire virtual private cloud tears itself down. So at any given moment, if we're running 50 pen tests or a hundred pen tests, self-service, there's a hundred virtual private clouds being managed in AWS that are spinning up, running and tearing down. It's an absolutely amazing underlying platform for us to make use of. Two is that many customers that have hybrid environments. So they've got a cloud infrastructure, an Office 365 infrastructure and an on-prem infrastructure. We are a single attack platform that can test all of that together. No one else can do it. And so the AWS customers that are especially AWS hybrid customers are the ones that we do really well targeting. >> Got it. And that's awesome. And that's the benefit of cloud? >> Absolutely. And the AWS marketplace. What's absolutely amazing is the competitive advantage being part of the marketplace has for us, because the simple thing is my customers, if they already have dedicated cloud spend, they can use their approved cloud spend to pay for Horizon3 through the marketplace. So you don't have to, if you already have that budget dedicated, you can use that through the marketplace. The other is you've already got the vendor processes in place, you can purchase through your existing AWS account. So what I love about the AWS company is one, the infrastructure we use for our own pen test, two, the marketplace, and then three, the customers that span that hybrid cloud environment. That's right in our strike zone. >> Awesome. Well, congratulations. And thanks for being part of the showcase and I'm sure your product is going to do very, very well. It's very built for what people want. Self-service get in, get the value quickly. >> No agents to install, no consultants to hire. safe to run against production. It's what I wanted. >> Great to see you and congratulations and what a great story. And we're going to keep following you. Thanks for coming on. >> Snehal: Phenomenal. Thank you, John. >> This is the AWS Startup Showcase. I'm John John Furrier, your host. This is season two, episode four on cybersecurity. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(modern music) >> Welcome back, everyone to theCUBE's live coverage here in San Francisco for VMware Explore, formerly VMworld. theCUBE's been here 12 years today, we've been watching the evolution of the user conference. It's been quite a journey to see and, you know, virtualization just explode. We got two great guests here, we're going to break it all down. Ash McCarty, director of Multicloud Product Management Dell Technologies, no stranger to the VMworld, now VMware Explore, and Josh Prewitt, Chief Product Officer at Rackspace Technology. Great to see you guys, thanks for coming on. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah, thanks so much, thanks for having us. >> So, you know, the theme this year is multicloud, but it's really all about vSphere 8's out, you got VxRail, you got containers, you got the magic going on around cloud native, which it really points to the future state of where this is going, which is agile enterprises, infrastructure as code, high performance under the hood, I mean, all the things that you guys have been doing for many, many years and decades and business, but now with VMware putting it all together, it feels like, this year, it's like you got visibility into the value proposition, people have clear line of sight into where the performances are from the hardware software and now Cloud, it's kind of coming together, feels like it's coming together. Let's talk about that and the relationship between you guys, Rackspace and Dell and VMware. >> Perfect. That sounds great. Well, thanks so much for having us. You know, I'll sort of kick that off. We've got a huge lifelong partnership and relationship with Dell and VMware and the technologies that these guys create that we're able to put in front of our customers are really what allows us to go drive those business outcomes. So, yeah, happy to dive into it. >> Yeah, and I think to add to that, we understand that customers have a tremendously complex challenge ahead of them on managing their infrastructure. That's why with VxRail, we have intelligent infrastructure. We want it to simplify the outcomes for customers no matter if they're managing VMware or if they're managing the actual hardware infrastructure underneath it. >> Yeah, one of the things that we always talk about, you know, you read about it on the blogs and the news and the startup world, is "Oh, product-market fit," and, well, it kind of applies here, if you think about what's going on on the product side with the Edge emerging, hybrid cloud on pace with private cloud, and obviously, cloud native is great too if you have native applications in there, but now, putting it all together, you're hearing things like the telco cloud, I hear buzzwords like that, I hear supercloud, which we promoting, which you see in companies becoming cloud themselves, with the CapEx being handled by either public cloud or optimized on premise or hosted hardware. I mean, this is now, this is not all about everything's going to the cloud, this is now cloud operations on premise and in hosting hardware, so I'd love to get your perspective on that because you guys are huge hosting, you've got huge experience there, modernizing all the time. What does the modern era look like for the customer? >> Yeah, yeah, so, I mean, I think it's very clear to everybody that it's a multicloud world, right? I think the main question is, are you multicloud as a strategy, or are you multicloud as a situation? Because everybody's multicloud. That ship has sailed, right? >> Yeah, exactly. >> And so, when I look at the capabilities that we have with the partnership with Dell and the VxRail technologies, you know, life-cycle management that you have to go and perform across your fleet can be extremely difficult, and whenever you take something like the VxRail and you add, you know, you have the hardware and you have the software all fully integrated there, it makes it much easier to do life-cycle management, so for a company like Rackspace, where we have tens of thousands of nodes that we're managing for customers across 29 global data centers, and we're all over the place, the ability to have that strength with Dell's hardware, the VMware platform improve life-cycle management makes it so much easier for us to manage our fleet and be able to deliver those outcomes even faster for customers. >> So assuming that VxRail isn't a virtual railroad that delivers data to Rackspace data centers, if it's not that, what is it, Ash? Give us a little premier on what VxRail is. >> Well, VxRail is the first and only jointly engineered HCI system with VMware, so everything we do with VMware is better. >> So hyperconverged infrastructure. >> Hyperconverged infrastructure. >> What we used to call a server because all the bits are in the box, right? >> All the storage is computed in there. >> Everything's in there. Right. >> Simplifies management. And we built in with the VxRail HCI system software, which is really our secret sauce, we built in to actually add those automation capabilities with VMware, so it allows you to scale out very quickly, scale up very quickly. And one of our big capabilities is our life-cycle management, which is full stack, meaning it life-cycles the entire vSphere stack as well as the hardware infrastructure underneath as one continuously validated state, meaning that customers can focus more on their business outcomes and driving their business forward versus spending time managing their infrastructure. >> And when you talk about customers, it's also the value proposition that's flowing through Rackspace because Rackspace, when you install these systems, how long does it take to spin up to have a VM available for use when you install one of these systems? >> Oh, so you can have the system up and running very quickly. So we automate all the day one deployment, so you can have the system up and running in your labs, in your data centers in 45 minutes, and you can have VMs up in provision very shortly after that. >> So what do you do with that kind of agility? >> Oh my gosh, so we've actually taken that, and we've taken the VxRail platform and we've created what we call Rackspace Services for VMware Cloud, and this is our platform that is based on VxRail, it's based on vCloud Director from VMware, and by having the VxRail is already RackStacked, ready to go for our customers, we're able to sign a customer up today, and then, within a matter of minutes, give them access to a vCloud Director portal where they can go in and spin up a new VM anytime they want, but then, it also integrates into all of those cloud management platforms and tools, right? It integrates into your Terraform, so you've got, you know, your full CI/CD pipeline, and so you have that full end-to-end capability. If you want to go click around on a portal, you can using vCloud Director and using vSphere and all that great stuff. If you want to automate it, you can do that too. And we do it all in the backs of that VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure. >> Talk about the DPU dynamic. We're hearing a lot about DPUs. VxRail, you guys have some HCI-like vibe there with DPUs. How is that impacting performance, can you guys see? 'Cause we're hearing a lot of buzz around the VxRail and the VMware DPUs really making things much faster. >> I mean, it's the thing we talk about most with customers now is their challenges with scaling their infrastructure, and VxRail is going to be the first and only jointly engineered system that will have vSphere 8 with DPUs functionality and will have the full life-cycle management, and what this really empowers customers to do is, as they're growing their environments that they're scaling out their workloads in the data center, they need a way to scale to that next generation of networking and network security, and that's what DPUs allow you to do. They give you that offload and that high performance capability. >> Talk about the... I'd love to get your guys' perspective, while we're just riffing on this real quick sidebar for a second, if VxRail has these capabilities which you guys are promoting it does and some of the things go on in the modern era, the next gen apps are going to look a lot different. We're kind of calling it supercloud, if you will, for lack of a better description. Yeah, multicloud is a state, I agree. It's a situation and a state, but supercloud is really the functionality of what cloud does. So what do you guys see as, maybe it's tea leaves reading now or dots connecting, what are some of those next gen apps? I mean the Edge is there with, "Oh, the Edge is going to explode," and I can see the Edge having new kinds of apps that we've never seen before, whether it's on premise building lights and however they work or IoT changing. What do you guys see as the next gen app/apps coming out that's not looking the same as now, or how are apps today changing for next gen? 'Cause you get more performance at the Edge, you get more action, you get more co-locations in GEOS, so it's clear multicloud multi-presence is happening too, right? So what are you guys seeing? What's this... >> Yeah, I would say two areas that resonate most with customers is customers transitioning to their cloud native journey, so beginning it and using things like Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations, which we fully support and have a white paper out there list for customers, another area is really in the AIML space, so we've been partnering with both VMware and Nvidia to simplify how customers deploy new AIML infrastructure. I mean, it's challenging, complex, a lot of customers are wanting to dive in because it really enables them to better operate and operate on insights and analytics they get from running their business. >> Josh? >> And, you know, I think it really comes down to, whether you want to call it Edge or IoT or, you know, smart things, whatever, right? It all comes down to how we are expected, now, to capture all of the data to create a better user experience, and that's what we're seeing the modern applications being built around, right, is how do you leverage all of the data that's now at your fingertips, whether it's from wearables, machine vision, whatever it may be, and drive that improved user experience. And so that's the apps that we're seeing now, right? You know, of course, you still have all your business apps, all your ERP capabilities that need to exist and all of that great stuff, but at the same time, I also expect that, whenever, you know, now, whenever I'm walking into a store and their machine vision picks me up and they're pinging my phone and pushing me push notifications, I expect to have a better user experience. >> And do a database search on you too, by the way. >> Yeah, exactly, right? >> No search warrants out for 'em, you know, you're good. >> That's exactly it, so, you know, you kind of expect that better user experience and that's where I'm seeing a lot of the new app development. >> Yeah, it's fun, as these cases are intoxicating to think about all the weird coolness around it. The thing that I want to get your thoughts on is, we were just talking on the analyst session earlier in theCUBE, if DevOps is here and won, which we believe it has and infrastructure as code is happening, the cloud native discussion, shifting left CI/CD pipeline, that's DevOps in my mind, that's like cloud native developers, that's like traditional IT in my mind, so that's all part of the coding. DataOps and Security Ops seem to be the most robust areas of conversations where that's the new Ops, right? So, I mean, I made the term up, but new Ops, in terms of the focus, what are you making more efficient? What are you optimizing for? What's your guys reaction to that? Because all the conversations that we talk about is data, security, and then the rest seems to be cool, all good on the developer's side. Yeah, shift left events happening up there, Kubernetes containers, but all the action on the Ops side seems to be data and security. >> Yeah. >> What's your reaction to that? Is that right? >> So personally, I do think that it's right. I think that, you know with great power comes great responsibility, right? And so the clouds have brought that to us, all of your infrastructure as code has brought that to us. We have that great power now, right? But then you start to see, kind of, the pipeline attacks that are starting to become more and more popular. And so how you secure something that is as complex as, you know, a cloud native development pipeline is really hard, it's really challenging, so I do think that it warrants the attention. Then on the data side, I think that that matters because when I talked about those examples of a better user experience, I don't want my better user experience tomorrow, I don't want it 20 minutes from now. I want that real time capability, and so with that comes massive requirements from a compute and hardware perspective, massive requirements from a software perspective, and from, you know, what folks are now calling DataOps perspective >> Data addressability, having the data available to be delivered in real time. >> You know, there there's been a lot of talk, here at the conference, about the disaggregation of, you know, the brainularism, if we're going to make up words, you know, the horsepower that's involved, CPU, DPU, GPU. I'll make up another word. We're familiar with the thermometers used during COVID to measure temperature. Pretend that I've invented a device called a Care-o-meter and I'm pointing at various people's foreheads, who needs to care about DPUs and GPUs and CPUs? You know, John was referencing the idea of security at the Edge, data. Well, wow, we've got GPUs that can do things. Who needs to care about that? Obviously, we care about it. You care about it. You care about it. You're building this stuff, you're deploying this stuff, but at what level in the customer stack do they need to care about it? Are you going in, is RackSpace engaging customers and saying, "Look, here's the value proposition: we understand your mission to be this. We believe we can achieve your mission." How far down in the organization do you go before you get to someone where you have to have the DPU conversation? 'Cause we didn't even define DPU yet here, which is always offensive to me. >> I think I defined it actually. >> Did you define DPU? Good. Thank you John. >> Yeah, yeah. >> But so who should care? Who should really care about that? >> Oh, that's such a complex question, right? Because everybody, Rackspace included >> But a good one. But a good question. >> Oh, it's a great question. >> Thank you. >> Great question. (laughing) >> Everybody, Rackspace included, is talking about selling business outcomes, right? And ultimately, that is what matters. It is what matters, is selling those business outcomes to the customer. And so of course we're dealing with our business buyers who are just looking for, "Hey, improve my KPIs, make this run faster, better, stronger, all of that great stuff," but ultimately you get down to an IT staff, and to the IT staff, these things matter because the IT staff, they all have budgets that they have to hit. The realities start to hit them and they can't just go and spend whatever they want, you know, trying to hit the KPIs of the marketing department or the finance department, right? And so you have your business buyers that do care significantly about buying their outcomes, and so we're having, you know, the business outcomes conversations with them and then, oftentimes, they will come back to us and say, "Okay, but now we need you to talk to this person over in our IT organization. We need you to talk with our CIO, with our VP of infrastructure," whatever that may be, where we really get down to the nuts and bolts and we talk about how, you know, we can stretch the hardware coming from Dell, we can stretch the software coming from VMware, and we can deliver a higher caliber experience, a lower TCO, by taking advantage of some of the new technologies coming out. >> Yeah, so there's a reason why I ask that awesome question, and it's because I can imagine a scenario where, and this speaks to RackSpace's position in the market today and moving forward and what your history has been, people want to know, "Well, why should I work with Rackspace instead of some mega-hyper-monster-cloud?" If part of the answer is: well, it's because, for very specific application environments, like healthcare we talked about earlier, that might be a conversation where you're actually bringing in Dell to have a conversation about how you are specifically optimizing hardware and software to achieve things that otherwise can't be achieved with t-shirt sizes of servers in a hyperscale cloud. I mean, is that part of the Rackspace value proposition moving forward, that you can do things like that with partners like Dell that the other folks aren't going to focus on? >> Absolutely, it is, right? And a lot of the power of Rackspace is that, you know, we're the best-in-class pure play cloud solutions provider, and we can talk to you about your AWS, your Azure, your GCP, all of that great stuff, but we can also talk to you about private cloud solutions that are built on the backs of Dell Technologies, and in this multicloud world, you don't have that one size fits all for every single application. There are some things that run great in a hyperscale provider, and we can help you get there, but just exactly like you said, there are these verticals where you have applications that don't necessarily run all that well or they're not modernized, they haven't been refactored to be able to take advantage of cloud native services. And if all you're going to do is run that on bare metal in VMs, a hosted private cloud is, by far, the best way to do that, right? And Rackspace provides that hosted private cloud on the backs of Dell technology, on the backs of VMware technology, and we can go deliver those custom bespoke solutions to customers. >> So the infrastructure and the hardware still matters, Ash, yes? >> Absolutely, and I think he just highlighted, while what he does with his customers and what's important to his internal organization is being to deliver faster outcomes, better outcomes, give those customers, to meet those KPIs of those customers consuming their infrastructure at Rackspace, so I think, really, what the DPU and the underlying infrastructure enables is all that full stack integration to allow them to quickly scale to the demands of those customers and what they need in their infrastructure. >> Guys, while we got you here, what do you think about this year's VMware Explore, a lot of anticipation around how many people are going to show up and, you know, all kinds of things around the new name and Broadcom. Big attendance here, I mean, I was very surprised about the size of the attendance and the show floor, the ecosystem, this train is not stopping. I mean, this is VMware's third act, no matter what the contextual situation is. What's your observation of the show? Do you agree, or is there anything that you could want to share about for folks who didn't make it, what they missed? >> Yeah, I mean it really highlights, I mean, you've seen the breadth of the show, I know people that aren't here that aren't able to see it are really missing the excitement. So there's a lot of great announcements around multicloud, around all the announcements, around the vSphere 8 with the DPUs, the vSAN Express Storage architecture, ton of new exciting technologies that are really empowering how customers, you know, the future of how customers are going to consume their workloads in their data centers. >> Josh, they're not short on products and stuff. A lot of moving parts. vSphere 8, a bunch of new stuff. And the cloud native stuff's looking pretty good too, off the tee. >> You know, it does feel like a focus on the core, though, in a way. So I don't think there's been a lot of peripheral noise at the show. Sometimes it's, you know, "And we got this, and this, and this, and this." It's vSphere 8, vSAN 8, cloud software, you know, really hammering it home and refining it. >> But you don't think of it as a little bit of a circus act. I mean the general keynote was theatrical, I thought, I mean, I thought they did a good job on that. I think vSphere 8 was buried a little bit, I thought they could have... They checked the box at the beginning. >> That's true, that's true. >> I mean, they mentioned it, but we didn't see the demos. You know? Demos are usually great. But that's my only criticism. >> Well, that's why we supplemented it with the VxRail announcements, right? With our big announcements around vSphere 8 and with the DPUs as well as the vSAN Express Storage architecture being integrated into VxRail, so I think, you know, it's always that ongoing partnership and, you know, doing what's best for our customers, showing them the next generation and how they consume that technology. >> Yeah, you guys got good props on VxRail. We had a great chat about it yesterday. Rackspace, you guys doing good? Quick update on what's happening with you guys. Give a quick plug. What's going on at Rackspace? What's hot? What's going on? Give a quick plug for what the services are and the products you got going on there. >> Yeah, absolutely. So we are that end-to-end cloud provider, right? And so we've got really exciting offers in market, helping customers take advantage of all the hyperscale providers, and then giving them that private cloud experience. We've got everything from single-tenant running in our data centers on the backs of vSphere, vCloud Director, and VxRails, all the way through to, like, multi-tenant burstable capability that runs within our own data centers as well. It's a really exciting time for technology, a really exciting time for Rackspace. >> Congratulations, we've been following your journey for a long time. Dell, you guys do continue to do a great job and end-to-end phenomenal work. The telco thing's a huge opportunity, we didn't even go there. But Ash, thanks. Josh, thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >> Yeah, thanks so much. Thanks for having us. >> Thank you very much. >> Okay, thanks for watching theCUBE. We're live, day two of three days of wall-to-wall coverage. Two sets here in Moscone West on the ground level, in the lobby, checking out all the action. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break. (modern music)

>> "theCube" presents Dell Technologies World, brought to you by Dell. >> Hey everyone, Welcome back to "theCube's" continuing coverage of Dell Technologies World 2022. Live from the show floor in Las Vegas. We have been here since Monday evening. About seven to 8,000 folks here. It's been a fantastically well-attended event that Dell has done. Lots of talk about announcements, including APEX. Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante are going to unpack more of APEX with our next two Cube alumni who are returning, Akanksha Mehrotra, VP of APEX product marketing joins us, and Chad Dunn, VP of product management APEX. Guys, welcome back. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> It is really great to be back. >> So just in case there's anybody out there that's been under a rock since Monday, APEX has now been what GA for a year, celebrating a momentous year and some big news. Akanksha, walk us through that and then talk about some of the feedback that you've gotten on what you guys announced just two days ago. >> Yeah. So it's been an exciting week like you said. APEX just for sort of background is our portfolio of as-a-service solutions, we introduced it a year ago. We have now 10 plus services in our portfolio. We added our very first full stack managed service for cyber recovery this week. The feedback from customers over the past year and then the conversations we've had, you know, over the course of this week has been phenomenal. If I had to really summarize it, I would say the pain point that we're looking to solve, helping organizations manage data across disparate and fragmented environments across a variety of clouds, you know, on-premises, in a co-lo, on the far edge, at a hyperscale or in the telco edge is resonating. This is a pain point... This is very real pain point for them. And our goal in our vision to create a consistent and a secure experience across all of these different, you know, silos of data, if you will. It's something that they really want more of from us. >> Chad, talk a little bit about the influence of the customer in the last couple of years. Well, in the last year, in terms of releasing the cyber recovery solution on APEX, we have seen the threat landscape massively change. >> It increases every day. >> It increases every day, ransomware is no longer a... Is it going to happen too? It's a matter of when? >> Yes. >> Talk to us about the influence of the customer of this being the first full stack solution on APEX. >> Sure, like I don't think there's a boardroom in the world where this isn't being discussed as just such a high risk environment for cyber techs. It's damaging to lose your data. It's damaging to your reputation, it's financially damaging. So it's incredibly important into our customers. And we're finding that, you know, many of them don't necessarily have all the expertise to be able to defend against it themselves. And so that's where an as-a-service solution, like the one that we're offering really makes sense to them, right? They're much more apt to consume as-a-service when the competency doesn't necessarily already exist in their IT organizations. So we've been doing this for a few years as a solution with managed services. And in fact, we've deployed over 2000 of these, and making that a standardized offering with T-shirt sizing, subscription basis, really seems to be a winner. And every customer I've talked to has been absolutely over the moon with it. >> All right, so we have Chad in product management, Akanksha, you're in product marketing. So you knew going into this, that it was going to be different. So I'm interested in kind of what your learnings were, that internal transformation, which is ongoing now, I understand that, but how did it change how you manage, you know, deploy the life cycle of the product and communicate that. >> I'll get us started and I'm sure Chad will add on. So, you know, to your point, when we started this journey internally before we started it externally, we knew this was going to be a multi-year transformation for us. And a multi-year transformation that affects every part of the company, how we build products, how we market products, how we bring them to market, how we sell them, et cetera. And so we made a very conscious effort to kind of secure that buy-in early on. And it starts Michael on down. This is a strategic priority for him as I'm sure both of you know. And each function has kind of established, you know, areas where they know they need to transform and a north star goal for where they want to get to. So I'll speak for marketing as a place that's, you know, close to my heart. One, we know as we get into this space, we're going to be talking to different types of folks and having conversations with different types of personas within an account than we have had before. Using cyber recovery solution as an example, yes, we want to talk to, you know, IT administrators and CIO who we've been talking to. But as Chad said, this is something that CISOs care about. This is something that security teams care about. That those are a different set of personas for us to market to, to communicate with, whose pain points we need to understand better. So that's an example of a change. Another one is moving from a... I mean, events like this are great, and we certainly love to be back in person, but in as-a-service model, you want to have much more frequent communication with your intended audiences. So we've moved to more of an always on-marketing motion leveraging our blog, leveraging other vehicles. And that's that has also been a transformation for us. >> On the marketing side, I'm curious, sorry, Dave. Chad, you brought up one of the big things that is a huge challenge for any organization and any industry with respect to the cybersecurity in that threat landscape is brand reputation. >> Yeah. >> Are you having more conversations at the CMO level? I'm just curious if they're involved in this. We got to make sure that we don't have... We're not the next one on the news because customers will churn like crazy. Is that at all part of the conversation than persona change? >> It is certainly part of it. But, you know, we don't want to be motivated by fear, right? We want to be motivated by preparation and securing the business and growing the business. So, you know, it is a sea level discussion to, you know, understand how we need to protect our critical data. But it's really from a lens of, you know, how do we grow and we grow more quickly? And you know, if you look at APEX overall, yes, we've made a lot of internal changes to get where we are and we're going to continue to make those. And I'll talk through some examples. But this is also a journey for our customers, right? The change to, you know, consuming by the drip, consuming APEX, consuming as-a-service, you could take two companies with identical size and an identical vertical, and they're going to have different priorities about how they want to consume this infrastructure and these services. So we're on that journey with them just as we have to transform ourselves internally, from the way that we do accounting, from the way that we do sales compensation, from the way that we actually build product. And in fact, we just changed up the model by which we're, you know, developing product in APEX today. So I'm about 90 days into my role in APEX. I came from the HCI business. And I'm here with my engineering leader who was also in the HCI business. So we were able to be fortunate enough to work in an organization that went from zero to 4 billion in pretty quickly. So, Hey, let's see if we can apply some of that learning to this. But it's an incredible partnership inside of Dell with people like Dell Digital and our transformation office. Because we've done things roughly the same way for about 30 years. And this is all very new to us. So it's pretty amazing journey. >> I'm interested in what's different. You weren't first to market. The public cloud guys might say, "Eh, it's not cloud." >> No. >> Okay, so how are you different than public cloud and how are you different from your traditional on-prem competitors? >> Again, I'll get us started and chime in. I would say... I'll take your first example. I want to go back to kind of what our customers... Where they want help from us and what are they're asking us for. As I said, the debate is over. They have told us pretty definitively, and our data and your data shows it, that they will and the data will continue to grow in all these different fragmented silos. What they want is an experience that orchestrated across all of these different environments, by a vendor that they trust, right? And that's what we are committed to delivering to them. That's our north star, that's where we're going. I would argue that any one of the hyperscalers don't have incentives to kind of make that same experience happen across all those different environments. A vendor like Dell, who has been trusted by many years... You know, for many years from our customer, who doesn't have a single dog in the race, but is looking to partner with folks across the entire ecosystem, is looking to innovate with our software, our services, and our infrastructure is best positioned to help them orchestrate across. >> Yeah. Well, you know, if you're wondering what's different, you really have to look at what the value proposition is for public clouds versus keeping data on-prem or keeping it in a place where it's accessible to multiple clouds. You know, I think if you haven't been under a rock here at the show, you know it is all about multi-cloud, and you know that we're, you know, absolutely embracing it from, you know, Project Alpine where we're putting storage endpoints in public cloud, to what we're doing with APEX and our data storage services and the move of our customers into co-locations where the data can be accessible to multiple clouds. I think that getting the commerce capabilities in place that we've done over the course of the last year is a great first step. But look for us to double down on the day two management and operations, using that platform that we've created for APEX. And that's going to allow us to create more velocity and bring more solutions into the fold more quickly, and then provide more day two management optimization operation of the solutions by our customers. >> Okay. Sorry. So definitely agree with the public cloud. And I got to trust them to do my multi-cloud or what I call super-cloud. What about your traditional competitors? Is it the normal sort of what we'd expect for the Dell differentiators portfolio, supply chain, et cetera, or are there APEX specific differentiators? >> Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so there are absolutely the Dell differentiators of the breadth of our sales force through both our direct sales teams as well as our partners, our secure supply chain, our services team, and the expertise that they've built, which we're obviously bringing to bear with this market and this offer. Those are kind of the Dell wide advantages that we bring to bear with this. But specifically for APEX against the traditional on-prem competitors, I would say the simplicity with which we are bringing our offers to market is a differentiator for us. And it's one that our customers in the past year have retreated back to us. So the commerce experience that Chad was just talking about, we have made very conscious efforts to simplify and abstract the way that complexity from our customers, so that they are picking very easy to understand outcomes that they care about. And then not really worry about the peace parts, whether it's the hardware, the software, or the services that help make that service level outcome happen. I would argue, you know, some of the other competitors, traditional competitors that we have haven't done that. And it's more of a... You know, that complexity is still there. And what we hear from our customers is, I want the simplicity and agility that public cloud provides. That's something that hyperscalers did get right. And we're bringing that experience to our infrastructure. >> Yeah. Like I think the other way that we'll differentiate ourselves is going to be by the breadth of the solutions, right? So we've got a tremendous amount of IP in solutions like cyber recovery, right? This wasn't a new thing for us. This is something we've been doing for a few years as there's tremendous consulting capabilities, services capabilities, the underlying products of course. Well, there's a pipeline of solutions lined up behind that. So as we move into high performance computer as-a-service, MLOps as-a-service, we can draw on those solutions that we've offered, but in a very custom way in the past now at a high velocity manner in the console. >> Well, the high velocity these days is critical. As we've seen the last two years, things have changed so dramatically for customers in every industry that needed to pivot with speed and accelerate their transformation. >> And the transparency. Right? So going back to his example, having that price transparency. You can go to our website and look at the pricing, pick in the two or three very simple options and see it right there and order it through the console. In a matter of minutes versus, you know, wait for two weeks to get the code and then wait for a month to get the hardware, and then wait for the services team to show up. So what we are hearing... I mean, we have truly been able to take deployments that used to take several months to a matter of days. And so that's how the simplicity kind of, you know, pays off not only in that initial deployment, but over the course of the subscription, the day two operations that Chad was just talking about and the innovation and the work that we're doing to simplify their lives in that process, allow them to focus in other areas. >> Oh, absolutely. That time to value, time to market has never been more critical. And the ability, to your point, Akanksha, to allow folks to be able to focus more on the strategic initiatives that will actually help move the business for... Add value, move the business forward and allow it to be competitive and differentiate itself is critical for everybody in every industry. Chad, I wanted to kind of pivot on multi-cloud for a second. You talked about that. And we had Chuck Whit on yesterday. He was talking about, you know, multi-cloud. A lot of organizations, many, many, many in multi-cloud by default. But what Dell wants to do is change that, multi-cloud by design. Is APEX going to be a facilitator of multi-cloud by design? Talk to us about that for customers. >> We absolutely will be. So if you look at what made customers multi-cloud by default, it's them going for the services that exist in the cloud and looking for best of breed services. Whether it's machine learning, speech recognition, database, they're going to those best of breed players. And so the value proposition for us is since you're in those clouds, you want access to your data and you want it centrally, so you can see it, leverage it, use it from any of those clouds, but you may have other reasons for keeping your data or even your compute on-prem or in a co-location. It could be data sovereignty, it could be policy compliance, it could be data gravity. So we want to make the concept of having your workloads or your data anywhere, very seamless for our customers, right? So it's really embracing the concept of multi-cloud and making it easier. >> The cyber recovery solution is really interesting to me. I was talking to one of the partners here and they said, "Dave, this was a really good show for us." And they probably had a quasi competitive solution. I don't really know. But like a lot of customers and, you know, got a lot of leads out of it. So it's the hot topic and that's what they said. This is cyber, everybody wants cyber. So how did that solution come together? Because I know you... You really... You've always been security conscious. But I never really full cracked the security solution. And now here it is in APEX, it's like, boom, out of the box or out of the service. How'd that come about? >> It really started back in 2014, specifically. It's funny when you can point to an event where, you know, something started like this. So there was a fairly high profile ransomware attack in 2014. And that caused us to look at the assets that we had from our data protection portfolio, from a software and storage perspective and say, "Hey, we can put something together that can really address this, right? Through novel use of existing technology." So we built out reference architectures. We built out the consulting service on how you protect your data. We partnered and built software to be able to secure the data in an air gaped imutable vault and offer the services to be able to manage that, monitor that, restore the data when needed. So we did that in a very custom way for years. In fact, as I said, over 2,000 systems deployed this way. So having a vehicle like APEX that has the as-a-service capability built in, the subscription capability built in, the ease and velocity of purchasing and operating was really a natural fit. So you know, we expect this is going to be a very high volume solution for us. >> Great. Awesome. >> Akanksha, can you talk a little bit about the partner ecosystem involved here in APEX? You know, when I think about ransomware in data protection, I think organizations need to be able to protect apps, users, data platforms. But we think of how data is so spread out, customers want that single pane of glass to be able to manage all that and know that that data is protected. Talk to us about how you're working with partners. I know the partner ecosystem at Dell's huge. How are you working with partners and how can they build upon APEX? >> Yeah So our partners are a very important part of our ecosystem. They help expand our reach. They also help complement our capabilities. You know, for example, in specific verticals. They may have services or expertise in a particular area. For the APEX portfolio, we actually offer a wide variety of ways for partners to engage with us. Starting out, they could refer our solutions and refer, you know, some of our services, if they want to take more of an advisory role in some capacity. They could resell our services with additional services included. In this scenario, for example, they would leverage our console, include some of their services in there and then offer it to their end customers. They could host APEX offers in their own data center or in a co-lo data center and build their practice on top of it. A lot of our partners and customers, we've got kind of joint customer partners that for example, have built a healthcare practice on top of an APEX solution, where they've added their services or built their business on top of it. And then finally, there's of course, technology and ISV partners, right? And that is where we might leverage, you know, some of their technology, built it to be part of a service or a solution that we're doing and join the go-to market. So I think the answer is lots of ways for partners to engage with APEX. And we absolutely are engaging with them in a wide variety of ways. And I think cyber recovery is no different. >> Well, there must be not a dull moment with what you guys have going on with APEX. Thank you for taking some time to talk to us about that. Sounds like the momentous year that you've had is going to continue. And it sounds like you've gotten great feedback from the customers and the partner so far. Thank you for joining "theCube" and telling us what's going on. And we can't wait to hear more next year. I'm sure there will be lots more next year. >> Yes indeed. >> Absolutely. Thank you very much. >> For our guests and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching "theCube's" coverage of Dell Technologies World 2022, live from Las Vegas. Stick around, we'll be right back with our next guest. (upbeat music)

(contemplative upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to this CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE, here in Palo Alto, California. Got a great topic on expanding capabilities for urgent computing. Dan Stanzione, he's Executive Director of TACC, the Texas Advanced Computing Center, and Rajesh Pohani, VP of PowerEdge, HPC Core Compute at Dell Technologies. Gentlemen, welcome to this CUBE Conversation. >> Thanks, John. >> Thanks, John, good to be here. >> Rajesh, you got a lot of computing in PowerEdge, HPC, Core Computing. I mean, I get a sense that you love compute, so we'll jump right into it. And of course, I got to love TACC, Texas Advanced Computing Center. I can imagine a lot of stuff going on there. Let's start with TACC. What is the Texas Advanced Computing Center? Tell us a little bit about that. >> Yeah, we're part of the University of Texas at Austin here, and we build large-scale supercomputers, data systems, AI systems, to support open science research. And we're mainly funded by the National Science Foundation, so we support research projects in all fields of science, all around the country and around the world. Actually, several thousand projects at the moment. >> But tied to the university, got a lot of gear, got a lot of compute, got a lot of cool stuff going on. What's the coolest thing you got going on right now? >> Well, for me, it's always the next machine, but I think science-wise, it's the machines we have. We just finished deploying Lonestar6, which is our latest supercomputer, in conjunction with Dell. A little over 600 nodes of those PowerEdge servers that Rajesh builds for us. Which makes more than 20,000 that we've had here over the years, of those boxes. But that one just went into production. We're designing new systems for a few years from now, where we'll be even larger. Our Frontera system was top five in the world two years ago, just fell out of the top 10. So we've got to fix that and build the new top-10 system sometime soon. We always have a ton going on in large-scale computing. >> Well, I want to get to the Lonestar6 in a minute, on the next talk track, but... What are some of the areas that you guys are working on that are making an impact? Take us through, and we talked before we came on camera about, obviously, the academic affiliation, but also there's a real societal impact of the work you're doing. What are some of the key areas that the TACC is making an impact? >> So there's really a huge range from new microprocessors, new materials design, photovoltaics, climate modeling, basic science and astrophysics, and quantum mechanics, and things like that. But I think the nearest-term impacts that people see are what we call urgent computing, which is one of the drivers around Lonestar and some other recent expansions that we've done. And that's things like, there's a hurricane coming, exactly where is it going to land? Can we refine the area where there's going to be either high winds or storm surge? Can we assess the damage from digital imagery afterwards? Can we direct first responders in the optimal routes? Similarly for earthquakes, and a lot recently, as you might imagine, around COVID. In 2020, we moved almost a third of our resources to doing COVID work, full-time. >> Rajesh, I want to get your thoughts on this, because Dave Vellante and I have been talking about this on theCUBE recently, a lot. Obviously, people see what cloud's, going on with the cloud technology, but compute and on-premises, private cloud's been growing. If you look at the hyperscale on-premises and the edge, if you include that in, you're seeing a lot more user consumption on-premises, and now, with 5G, you got edge, you mentioned first responders, Dan. This is now pointing to a new architectural shift. As the VP of PowerEdge and HPC and Core Compute, you got to look at this and go, "Hmm." If Compute's going to be everywhere, and in locations, you got to have that compute. How does that all work together? And how do you do advanced computing, when you have these urgent needs, as well as real-time in a new architecture? >> Yeah, John, I mean, it's a pretty interesting time when you think about some of the changing dynamics and how customers are utilizing Compute in the compute needs in the industry. Seeing a couple of big trends. One, the distribution of Compute outside of the data center, 5G is really accelerating that, and then you're generating so much data, whether what you do with it, the insights that come out of it, that we're seeing more and more push to AI, ML, inside the data center. Dan mentioned what he's doing at TACC with computational analysis and some of the work that they're doing. So what you're seeing is, now, this push that data in the data center and what you do with it, while data is being created out at the edge. And it's actually this interesting dichotomy that we're beginning to see. Dan mentioned some of the work that they're doing in medical and on COVID research. Even at Dell, we're making cycles available for COVID research using our Zenith cluster, that's located in our HPC and AI Innovation Lab. And we continue to partner with organizations like TACC and others on research activities to continue to learn about the virus, how it mutates, and then how you treat it. So if you think about all the things, and data that's getting created, you're seeing that distribution and it's really leading to some really cool innovations going forward. >> Yeah, I want to get to that COVID research, but first, you mentioned a few words I want to get out there. You mentioned Lonestar6. Okay, so first, what is Lonestar6, then we'll get into the system aspect of it. Take us through what that definition is, what is Lonestar6? >> Well, as Dan mentioned, Lonestar6 is a Dell technology system that we developed with TACC, it's located at the University of Texas at Austin. It consists of more than 800 Dell PowerEdge 6525 servers that are powered with 3rd Generation AMD EPYC processors. And just to give you an example of the scale of this cluster, it could perform roughly three quadrillion operations per second. That's three petaFLOPS, and to match what Lonestar6 can compute in one second, a person would have to do one calculation every second for a hundred million years. So it's quite a good-size system, and quite a powerful one as well. >> Dan, what's the role that the system plays, you've got petaFLOPS, what, three petaFLOPS, you mentioned? That's a lot of FLOPS! So obviously urgent computing, what's cranking through the system there? Take us through, what's it like? >> Sure, well, there there's a mix of workloads on it, and on all our systems. So there's the urgent computing work, right? Fast turnaround, near real-time, whether it's COVID research, or doing... Project now where we bring in MRI data and are doing sort of patient-specific dosing for radiation treatments and chemotherapy, tailored to your tumor, instead of just the sort of general for people your size. That all requires sort of real-time turnaround. There's a lot AI research going on now, we're incorporating AI in traditional science and engineering research. And that uses an awful lot of data, but also consumes a huge amount of cycles in training those models. And then there's all of our traditional, simulation-based workloads and materials and digital twins for aircraft and aircraft design, and more efficient combustion in more efficient photovoltaic materials, or photovoltaic materials without using as much lead, and things like that. And I'm sure I'm missing dozens of other topics, 'cause, like I said, that one really runs every field of science. We've really focused the Lonestar line of systems, and this is obviously the sixth one we built, around our sort of Texas-centric users. It's the UT Austin users, and then with contributions from Texas A&M , and Texas Tech and the University of Texas system, MD Anderson Healthcare Center, the University of North Texas. So users all around the state, and every research problem that you might imagine, those are into. We're just ramping up a project in disaster information systems, that's looking at the probabilities of flooding in coastal Texas and doing... Can we make building code changes to mitigate impact? Do we have to change the standard foundation heights for new construction, to mitigate the increasing storm surges from these sort of slow storms that sit there and rain, like hurricanes didn't used to, but seem to be doing more and more. All those problems will run on Lonestar, and on all the systems to come, yeah. >> It's interesting, you mentioned urgent computing, I love that term because it could be an event, it could be some slow kind of brewing event like that rain example you mentioned. It could also be, obviously, with the healthcare, and you mentioned COVID earlier. These are urgent, societal challenges, and having that available, the processing capability, the compute, the data. You mentioned digital twins. I can imagine all this new goodness coming from that. Compare that, where we were 10 years ago. I mean, just from a mind-blowing standpoint, you have, have come so far, take us through, try to give a context to the level of where we are now, to do this kind of work, and where we were years ago. Can you give us a feel for that? >> Sure, there's a lot of ways to look at that, and how the technology's changed, how we operate around those things, and then sort of what our capabilities are. I think one of the big, first, urgent computing things for us, where we sort of realized we had to adapt to this model of computing was about 15 years ago with the big BP Gulf Oil spill. And suddenly, we were dumping thousands of processors of load to figure out where that oil spill was going to go, and how to do mitigation, and what the potential impacts were, and where you need to put your containment, and things like that. And it was, well, at that point we thought of it as sort of a rare event. There was another one, that I think was the first real urgent computing one, where the space shuttle was in orbit, and they knew something had hit it during takeoff. And we were modeling, along with NASA and a bunch of supercomputers around the world, the heat shield and could they make reentry safely? You have until they come back to get that problem done, you don't have months or years to really investigate that. And so, what we've sort of learned through some of those, the Japanese tsunami was another one, there have been so many over the years, is that one, these sort of disasters are all the time, right? One thing or another, right? If we're not doing hurricanes, we're doing wildfires and drought threat, if it's not COVID. We got good and ready for COVID through SARS and through the swine flu and through HIV work, and things like that. So it's that we can do the computing very fast, but you need to know how to do the work, right? So we've spent a lot of time, not only being able to deliver the computing quickly, but having the data in place, and having the code in place, and having people who know the methods who know how to use big computers, right? That's been a lot of what the COVID Consortium, the White House COVID Consortium, has been about over the last few years. And we're actually trying to modify that nationally into a strategic computing reserve, where we're ready to go after these problems, where we've run drills, right? And if there's a, there's a train that derails, and there's a chemical spill, and it's near a major city, we have the tools and the data in place to do wind modeling, and we have the terrain ready to go. And all those sorts of things that you need to have to be ready. So we've really sort of changed our sort of preparedness and operational model around urgent computing in the last 10 years. Also, just the way we scheduled the system, the ability to sort of segregate between these long-running workflows for things that are really important, like we displaced a lot of cancer research to do COVID research. And cancer's still important, but it's less likely that we're going to make an impact in the next two months, right? So we have to shuffle how we operate things and then just, having all that additional capacity. And I think one of the things that's really changed in the models is our ability to use AI, to sort of adroitly steer our simulations, or prune the space when we're searching parameters for simulations. So we have the operational changes, the system changes, and then things like adding AI on the scientific side, since we have the capacity to do that kind of things now, all feed into our sort of preparedness for this kind of stuff. >> Dan, you got me sold, I want to come work with you. Come on, can I join the team over there? It sounds exciting. >> Come on down! We always need good folks around here, so. (laughs) >> Rajesh, when I- >> Almost 200 now, and we're always growing. >> Rajesh, when I hear the stories about kind of the evolution, kind of where the state of the art is, you almost see the innovation trajectory, right? The growth and the learning, adding machine learning only extends out more capabilities. But also, Dan's kind of pointing out this kind of response, rapid compute engine, that they could actually deploy with learnings, and then software, so is this a model where anyone can call up and get some cycles to, say, power an autonomous vehicle, or, hey, I want to point the machinery and the cycles at something? Is the service, do you guys see this going that direction, or... Because this sounds really, really good. >> Yeah, I mean, one thing that Dan talked about was, it's not just the compute, it's also having the right algorithms, the software, the code, right? The ability to learn. So I think when those are set up, yeah. I mean, the ability to digitally simulate in any number of industries and areas, advances the pace of innovation, reduces the time to market of whatever a customer is trying to do or research, or even vaccines or other healthcare things. If you can reduce that time through the leverage of compute on doing digital simulations, it just makes things better for society or for whatever it is that we're trying to do, in a particular industry. >> I think the idea of instrumenting stuff is here forever, and also simulations, whether it's digital twins, and doing these kinds of real-time models. Isn't really much of a guess, so I think this is a huge, historic moment. But you guys are pushing the envelope here, at University of Texas and at TACC. It's not just research, you guys got real examples. So where do you guys see this going next? I see space, big compute areas that might need some data to be cranked out. You got cybersecurity, you got healthcare, you mentioned oil spill, you got oil and gas, I mean, you got industry, you got climate change. I mean, there's so much to tackle. What's next? >> Absolutely, and I think, the appetite for computing cycles isn't going anywhere, right? And it's only going to, it's going to grow without bound, essentially. And AI, while in some ways it reduces the amount of computing we do, it's also brought this whole new domain of modeling to a bunch of fields that weren't traditionally computational, right? We used to just do engineering, physics, chemistry, were all super computational, but then we got into genome sequencers and imaging and a whole bunch of data, and that made biology computational. And with AI, now we're making things like the behavior of human society and things, computational problems, right? So there's this sort of growing amount of workload that is, in one way or another, computational, and getting bigger and bigger. So that's going to keep on growing. I think the trick is not only going to be growing the computation, but growing the software and the people along with it, because we have amazing capabilities that we can bring to bear. We don't have enough people to hit all of them at once. And so, that's probably going to be the next frontier in growing out both our AI and simulation capability, is the human element of it. >> It's interesting, when you think about society, right? If the things become too predictable, what does a democracy even look like? If you know the election's going to be over two years from now in the United States, or you look at these major, major waves >> Human companies don't know. >> of innovation, you say, "Hmm." So it's democracy, AI, maybe there's an algorithm for checking up on the AI 'cause biases... So, again, there's so many use cases that just come out of this. It's incredible. >> Yeah, and bias in AI is something that we worry about and we work on, and on task forces where we're working on that particular problem, because the AI is going to take... Is based on... Especially when you look at a deep learning model, it's 100% a product of the data you show it, right? So if you show it a biased data set, it's going to have biased results. And it's not anything intrinsic about the computer or the personality, the AI, it's just data mining, right? In essence, right, it's learning from data. And if you show it all images of one particular outcome, it's going to assume that's always the outcome, right? It just has no choice, but to see that. So how we deal with bias, how do we deal with confirmation, right? I mean, in addition, you have to recognize, if you haven't, if it gets data it's never seen before, how do you know it's not wrong, right? So there's about data quality and quality assurance and quality checking around AI. And that's where, especially in scientific research, we use what's starting to be called things like physics-informed or physics-constrained AI, where the neural net that you're using to design an aircraft still has to follow basic physical laws in its output, right? Or if you're doing some materials or astrophysics, you still have to obey conservation of mass, right? So I can't say, well, if you just apply negative mass on this other side and positive mass on this side, everything works out right for stable flight. 'Cause we can't do negative mass, right? So you have to constrain it in the real world. So this notion of how we bring in the laws of physics and constrain your AI to what's possible is also a big part of the sort of AI research going forward. >> You know, Dan, you just, to me just encapsulate the science that's still out there, that's needed. Computer science, social science, material science, kind of all converging right now. >> Yeah, engineering, yeah, >> Engineering, science, >> slipstreams, >> it's all there, >> physics, yeah, mmhmm. >> it's not just code. And, Rajesh, data. You mentioned data, the more data you have, the better the AI. We have a world what's going from silos to open control planes. We have to get to a world. This is a cultural shift we're seeing, what's your thoughts? >> Well, it is, in that, the ability to drive predictive analysis based on the data is going to drive different behaviors, right? Different social behaviors for cultural impacts. But I think the point that Dan made about bias, right, it's only as good as the code that's written and the way that the data is actually brought into the system. So making sure that that is done in a way that generates the right kind of outcome, that allows you to use that in a predictive manner, becomes critically important. If it is biased, you're going to lose credibility in a lot of that analysis that comes out of it. So I think that becomes critically important, but overall, I mean, if you think about the way compute is, it's becoming pervasive. It's not just in selected industries as damage, and it's now applying to everything that you do, right? Whether it is getting you more tailored recommendations for your purchasing, right? You have better options that way. You don't have to sift through a lot of different ideas that, as you scroll online. It's tailoring now to some of your habits and what you're looking for. So that becomes an incredible time-saver for people to be able to get what they want in a way that they want it. And then you look at the way it impacts other industries and development innovation, and it just continues to scale and scale and scale. >> Well, I think the work that you guys are doing together is scratching the surface of the future, which is digital business. It's about data, it's about out all these new things. It's about advanced computing meets the right algorithms for the right purpose. And it's a really amazing operation you guys got over there. Dan, great to hear the stories. It's very provocative, very enticing to just want to jump in and hang out. But I got to do theCUBE day job here, but congratulations on success. Rajesh, great to see you and thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us, John. >> Okay. >> Thanks very much. >> Great conversation around urgent computing, as computing becomes so much more important, bigger problems and opportunities are around the corner. And this is theCUBE, we're documenting it all here. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (contemplative music)

(upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. We're here live in Las Vegas for an in-person event. Of course, it's a hybrid event, virtual online. Many people online. A lot of people here on the event, a lot of action. cloud going next generation, mainframe transformation, more analytics, more chips, everything's faster and cheaper and getting better and better in the cloud. We've got the great coverage. We've got two great guests. We got Justin Hooper vice president of Global Operations Infrastructure Ingram Micro and JP Perot, EVP of Telecom Media and Technology and AWS executive sponsor for Atos. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, glad to be here. >> So what is it about the conference so far? Pretty good, like a lot of people here? >> Super exciting. >> 27,000 people showing up. >> It's amazing. >> Real people not workers. >> Yeah, it feels almost normal. >> Yeah I can't believe the turnout. >> Got a great topic, you guys working together you got mainframe, you got analytics, transformation. Let's get into it. Let's start by introducing what you guys do, your company, and why you are here. JP, we'll start with you. >> Yeah, I can start. Okay, so yeah, so I'm leading, you know, in Atos all the cloud business and telecom media technology, Atos is a big company is a service and technology company, 11 billion Euro business, and we are leading all the transformation to cloud and also, all what is related to hybrid cloud transformation. Also with security. We are number two in the world in terms of security and cybersecurity. We have developed for so long lasting relationship with AWS. We have been an advanced technology partner of AWS for now many years, since 2013. And we have developed a specific program, you know, regarding manufacturing transformation and mega trends. So this is why we are super excited to be here with you Justin today, thank you, by the way having Ingram Micro with us, Justin. >> I appreciate it, it's good talking to you. Good to be here. >> And I'm Justin Hooper, I work for a Ingram Micro. I run their Global Infrastructure and IT operations. Ingram Micro is one of the world's largest technology suppliers, technology solutions, and cloud platform and services. >> Well, great for the intro. Thanks for that set up, a lot of action going on. You guys have recently purchased, you guys got the transformation in the cloud. What is the movement to the cloud? Take us through the current situation. >> Yeah, we see, a big acceleration and especially due to COVID situation. We have seen acceleration of transformation to cloud. There is a lot to do, a lot to do because many business critical application, which have not been transformed. And also, especially all the applications which are sitting on top of mainframe that is why executive discussion we are with Ingram at the moment is how we can help Ingram with some of the applications that are on mainframe to transform and design the future. >> Justin, take us through the transformation that they're helping you with, what's the key challenge? What problem are they solving? Take us through the specifics. >> Yeah, it's interesting because I'm actually a lover of the mainframe, I think most of the people at AWS would think, the mainframes, didn`t they put the rockets on the moon. That's old technology, but mainframes are still fantastic platforms. We, have great success, great resiliency with Atos . We are on the most modern chips, but there are a lot of restrictions. You know, you really have to size your mainframe for your peak workloads. You don't have the ability to separate segments, scale horizontally, and then there are really nuanced. Like it's hard to get resources that know mainframes, to be honest with you, it is just, there's a people issue there industry-wide, and we're not different than any other company and compete for resources, both on the system side and on the programming side. And we really want to look at how we can make a massive leave, if we're going to leave the mainframe, how do we start a journey where we can end up really being able to take advantage of horizontal scalability, the ability to have a utility compute model where we're really paying as we go, because that is the opposite how the mainframe model works today. >> Talk about the refactor 'cause I know I've covered a lot of mainframe stuff with IBM in the past and how banks are still using it. Everyone is they're real applications. They're mission critical. How are they integrating into the digital transformation. Containers, kubernetes are hot right now. You're starting to see a lot more integration. How do your customers and how do you guys see refactoring happening? I can see the integration, but that as the refactoring come in. >> There's really what we've learned with our partnership is there are really a couple of ways to do the refactoring. You can convert your old Cobalt code to something else like Java. And there are tools and companies out there that do that. Or you can really build a plan where you can effectively emulate your mainframe on commodity computing and through a relatively deep analysis with Atos, the recommendation that we're looking at is that ability to first get off of the hardware, get off of that reliance on the platform, but not jump all the way to modify your code to Java. There's not a lot of value in going from Cobalt to Java, for example, if you're not making improvements in your programs, adding business capabilities. So the journey starts with get off the hardware, but then it allows you to go and say, we are going to break up those complex programs. We are going to separate the data differently. And once you do that, you can start to take advantage of containers and start to separate yourself even more and really get into the cloud. But, there are ways to piece your way through that. >> You know that's really good insight, JP, I'd love to get your reaction on this too, because what Justin's getting at is what we hear a lot from experienced CIOs of large companies that have a lot of existing stuff. And the theme is and the word they use is you don't want to touch the white hot core. Meaning it's so mission critical that if you mangle it too hard, touch it too hard a lot of bad things happen. So this idea of push things out to the cloud that around the edges, and then work your way slowly in is a risk management and practical approach. >> Not exactly, you said it right, its exactly a risk management So, and Justin explain it different factors, which come to the end point in terms of decision there is one issue regarding competencies, because their lack of competency in the markets. There is what kind of business critical apps you have. There is a transformation as such, you know, as Justin explain you can record, or you can move, you know, to a different platform. So, each time it's a program, it's a program and analysis that we do with our customer advising the customer about, hey, based on your critical application, what is the right journey, what is the right transformation to do the right risk management? >> Justin you're taking the hot core I saw you nodding your head. You're like, yeah, what's your take on that? >> Well, yeah, I agree with you. And that fear, uncertainty and doubt it's kept people on the mainframe for a really long time. The technology has caught up and the expertise where just as JP said, you've got to be really careful in the way you plan it, and you've got to make sure that you can always get back. And so the approach that we're looking at taking is, you're able to accommodate more risk if there's an easy roll back plan, and some of the new new technologies and processes are going to allow that, so, you know, if I screw this up, I get to go find a job someplace else. So I'm aware of the white hot core, but I am confident it can be done. >> Yeah, and then technology, if you don't have to kill the old to bring in the new, you can do both, and I like your approach. I think that's a success path that people are talking about it's well documented. But at the end of the day, we're back in distributed computing, I mean, I want to get this at the end, but I want to give you guys some time to think about it. As cloud becomes everywhere as Adam Selipsky talks about, it's not just about mainframes, this it's a distributed computing paradigm. So we're going to come back to that, but let's get into the SAP Redshift `cause I think that's something that you guys are working on I think that's worth calling out here. Analytics is huge, tell us what's going on there, how you guys are working together on that. >> Yeah, so we have designed a high level of competency around SAP, and especially the migration and the SAP Redshift. So we have designed this program also with AWS and is something we are discussing at the moment also with Ingram. So we see an acceleration of this trajectory. It has been also highly pushed by SAP as well. And also we are one of the strongest partner of SAP and we see many many customers engage into this transformation at the moment. >> The cloud really gives you a lot of advantages when you're doing migration, especially around a pre-existing software, like SAP was pretty big, complex mission critical So you can throw compute at it, a lot of cool capabilities. >> Yeah, that's true, but you need, you still need to configure a lot of things as well, because it's, you need to customize and you have to really fine tune, you know, what is it, what is going to be available to the customer needs and to what you need in your company as well. >> Okay, lets get back to what Justin was saying about emulation, I mean, I can run SAP (laughs) on Amazon. I mean, we've talked about it, I wrote a story about this prior to the event called Superclouds. You can build these super applications that combine things that you never would have thought was possible. SAP running on Amazon or Ford can come to Redshift when you need it, so you have a lot more flexibility. This is now the new normal. >> Correct. >> Correct. Or Justin maybe you want also to comment on that, you know? >> You know, the great thing about being on Redshift is we pick that as a platform for our data warehouse a number of years ago, and there were basically analytics capabilities, but what we're seeing a lot here at re:Invent is as Amazon is catching up with their out of the box ML and AI capabilities in Redshift. So it feels good that we pick the platform that they're growing the capabilities in right, as we're advancing out of more of the traditional analytics and trying to go to that machine learning. And one of the things that we work at the Atos on is migrating off of SAPBW and saying, maybe we don't need that as a data and reporting platform, if we're solid with Redshift and we certainly don't need both. So we're working with them to look at the case to move all the way to Redshift, and then we can run our analytics and build the ML in that. >> And you know, that was a big theme in the keynote. This purpose-built capabilities, it's almost like having, you know, if you're building a building, you got iron steel girders made for you. You got this now better value in the platform to build on. This brings up the notion of distributed computing. >> JP: Yeah. >> In a way there's the same game, different generation. I mean, isn't it? You've got to integrate this still transformations inflection points, this is current. I feel like this now more than ever is a time where you can actually roll it all together with a little help from your friends or if Amazon's got somebody, you know, who want to reinvent the wheel. What's your reaction to that? 'Cause we've seen the movie before, when it's hard. Now, it seems easier, maybe its not. >> Yeah, we see three layers co-existing in more more. We see that, see application on data will be spread over three dimensions there will be edge computing there will be private cloud and there will be public cloud. And we see more more pressure in the direction that many customers are saying, hey, where should I put my data? This spot will go on and be processed at the edge, this spot will be process in the public cloud. There is also one of the capability where we in Atos we are able to advise customers about what is the best way to process your data if you have a lot of latency, you can process at the edge. You know, there's less equipment, you can process the public cloud. So, we see this coexistence of model. >> Justin what's your take on this distributed computing throwback concept, because look at the rise of companies like Snowflake. Where'd they come from? They're on Amazon, they pick the cloud. Now they're on going to other clouds. You can build a supercloud. You can actually build this out now faster. What's your take? >> Yeah, I, my take is that it's a pendulum and it swings back and forth, and like you said, there was client server and then everything was web-based. And a lot of things look a lot like the mainframe, put everything in the cloud and then attached to it. And then all of a sudden, you know what? We need edge computing, pull some stuff back out of the cloud and put it where we need it. So, it's going to continue to evolve. What I have noticed that I like more is, the major home one swings and statements like I want to get out of the data center business and go to the cloud, I hear those less. And people are realizing there's there's hybrid. There's purpose build computing like you said, and we need to make sure that we're putting our data where it needs to be, putting our compute where it needs to be. And that's going to change on our customer base and evolving technologies 5G is changing the whole world around edge computing. So I'm enjoying the ride, I'm glad I'm in technology because I get to move with the ebbs and flows, but I don't think we're ever going to land. I think it's going to keep moving. >> Yeah that's a totally fair point where it's fun as a technologist, but you're right. If you're operating with cloud, it doesn't matter if you're on premises or edge or public cloud, it's the same thing (laughs). >> Justin: Yeah. >> It's just pick your, pick, your use case. >> Justin: Right, your use case- >> I want a low latency at the edge. I'm not going to move my data, send it to cloud. Of course, we're going to leave it there. >> Yeah. >> If you're on premise before- >> We've already move workloads back and forth. And a lot of companies are doing that too, you know? >> I think that's what they're getting at when they talk about cloud everywhere. I think that's their way of saying, okay, hybrid is real. They won't ever say multicloud though. (all laughing) Not yet. (all laughing) >> Won't hear that here. >> All right, quick summary. What do you guys do? And what's the future hold for the relationship. You guys got a good thing going on? Take us through what's the future look like. >> Yeah, for me it's a big thank you for the partnership with Ingram. So we are extremely excited by what we can do for you. And in terms of advising your transformation and, you know, I hope that you get the right service and the right advice, you know, from Atos. >> Yeah, it's been great. We, we've appreciated. We've been, we started as a mainframe customer and now they're helping to advise on how we could get off the mainframe. I mean really cannibalizing one of the other areas there in the spirit of evolving and partnership, and you guys are bringing a ton of expertise and the way you guys attack the account and we centralized through our account team is very helpful. You're very aware of what's going on on all sides of the business. >> Well, congratulations. >> That's a big part of the theme, the keynote today on, on ad about mainframe transmission. But at the end of the day, it's about modern infrastructure, modern application development. >> Justin: Absolutely. >> Getting out, having set the table for the next generation. >> JP: Yeah. >> Thanks for coming on theCUBE and you guys want to get a quick plug in real quick for the company talk about Atos and Ingram. Give a quick plug for what you guys are working on. >> Sorry- >> Give a quick plug about what you`re working on. Give a quick commercial one minute about the company. >> One minute. >> Yeah. >> At Atos we're really transforming or leading the industry in terms of secured transformation to cloud security will be more and more important as data is everything about where is the value. So we are really making sure that our customers, they get to maximize, they can maximize the value around data transformation to cloud in a secured way. >> Justin, JP, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate the insights. Don't touch the hot core and make, take your time. Have a good time, you're watching theCUBE, the official broadcasting of AWS re:Invent leader in tech coverage, theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>Welcome to this cube conversation with 40 net. I'm your host. Lisa Martin, Derek Minky is back. He's the chief security insights and global threat alliances at 40 minutes, 40 guard labs, Derek. Welcome back to the program. >>Likewise, we've talked a lot this year. And of course, when I saw that there are, uh, you guys have predictions from 40 guard labs, global threat intelligence and research team about the cyber threat landscape for 2022. I thought it was going to be a lot to talk about with Derek here. So let's go ahead and dig. Right in. First of all, one of the things that caught my attention was the title of the press release about the predictions that was just revealed. The press release says 40 guard labs, predict cyber attacks aimed at everything from crypto wallets to satellite internet, nothing. There is no surface that is safe anymore. Talk to me about some of the key challenges that organizations in every industry are facing. >>Yeah, absolutely. So this is a, as you said, you, you had the keyword there surface, right? That, and that attack surface is, is open for attack. That's the attack surface that we talk about it is literally be pushed out from the edge to space, like a lot of these places that had no connection before, particularly in OT environments off grid, we're talking about, uh, you know, um, uh, critical infrastructure, oil and gas, as an example, there's a lot of these remote units that were living out there that relied on field engineers to go in and, uh, you know, plug into them. They were air gapped, those such low. Those are the things that are going to be accessible by Elio's low earth orbit satellites. And there are 4,000 of those out there right now. There's going to be over 30,000. We're talking Starlink, we're talking at least four or five other competitors entering this space, no pun intended. And, um, and that's a big deal because that it's a gateway. It opens the door for cyber criminals to be able to have accessibility to these networks. And so security has to come, you know, from, uh, friends of mine there, right. >>It absolutely does. We've got this fragmented perimeter tools that are siloed, the expand and very expanded attack surface, as you just mentioned, but some of the other targets, the 5g enabled edge, the core network, of course, the home environment where many of us still are. >>Yeah, yeah, definitely. So that home environment like the edge, it is a, uh, it's, it's the smart edge, right? So we have things called edge access Trojans. These are Trojans that will actually impact and infect edge devices. And if you think about these edge devices, we're talking things that have machine learning and, and auto automation built into them a lot of privilege because they're actually processing commands and acting on those commands in a lot of cases, right? Everything from smart office, smart home option, even until the OT environment that we're talking about. And that is a juicy target for attackers, right? Because these devices naturally have more privileged. They have APIs and connectivity to a lot of these things where they could definitely do some serious damage and be used as these pivot within the network from the edge. Right. And that's, that's a key point there. >>Let's talk about the digital wallet that we all walk around with. You know, we think out so easy, we can do quick, simple transactions with apple wallet, Google smart tab, Venmo, what have you, but that's another growing source of that, where we need to be concerned, right? >>Yeah. So I, I I've, I've worn my cyber security hat for over 20 years and 10 years ago, even we were talking all about online banking Trojans. That was a big threat, right? Because a lot of financial institutions, they hadn't late ruled out things like multifactor authentication. It was fairly easy to get someone's bank credentials go in siphoned fans out of an account. That's a lot harder nowadays. And so cyber criminals are shifting tactics to go after the low hanging fruit, which are these digital wallets and often cryptocurrency, right? We've actually seen this already in 40 guard labs. Some of this is already starting to happen right now. I expect this to happen a lot more in 20, 22 and beyond. And it's because, you know, these wallets are, um, hold a lot of whole lot of value right now, right. With the crypto. And they can be transferred easily without having to do a, like a, you know, EFT is a Meijer transfers and all those sorts of things that includes actually a lot of paperwork from the financial institutions. And, you know, we saw something where they were actually hijacking these wallets, right. Just intercepting a copy and paste command because it takes, you know, it's a 54 character address people aren't typing that in all the time. So when they're sending or receiving funds, they're asking what we've actually seen in malware today is they're taking that, intercepting it and replacing it with the attackers. Well, it's simple as that bypassing all the, you know, authentication measures and so forth. >>And is that happening for the rest of us that don't have a crypto wallet. So is that happening for folks with apple wallets? And is that a growing threat concern that people need to be? It is >>Absolutely. Yeah. So crypto wallets is, is the majority of overseeing, but yeah, no, no digital wallet is it's unpatched here. Absolutely. These are all valid targets and we are starting to see activity in. I am, >>I'm sure going after those stored credentials, that's probably low-hanging fruit for the attackers. Another thing that was interesting that the 2022 predictions threat landscape, uh, highlighted was the e-sports industry and the vulnerabilities there. Talk to me about that. That was something that I found surprising. I didn't realize it was a billion dollar revenue, a year industry, a lot of money, >>A lot of money, a lot of money. And these are our full-blown platforms that have been developed. This is a business, this isn't, you know, again, going back to what we've seen and we still do see the online gaming itself. We've seen Trojans written for that. And oftentimes it's just trying to get into, and user's gaming account so that they can steal virtual equipment and current, you know, there there's virtual currencies as well. So there was some monetization happening, but not on a grand scale. This is about a shift attackers going after a business, just like any organization, big business, right. To be able to hold that hostage effectively in terms of DDoSs threats, in terms of vulnerabilities, in terms of also, you know, crippling these systems with ransomware, like we've already seen starting to hit OT, this is just another big target. Right. Um, and if you think about it, these are live platforms that rely on low latency. So very quick connections, anything that interrupts that think about the Olympics, right on sports environment, it's a big deal to them. And there's a lot of revenue that could be lost in cybercriminals fully realizes. And this is why, you know, we're predicting that e-sports is going to be a, um, a big target for them moving forward. >>Got it. And tell, let's talk about what's going on with brands. So when you and I spoke a few months ago, I think it was ransomware was up nearly 11 X in the first half of a calendar year, 2021. What are you seeing from an evolution perspective, uh, in the actual ransomware, um, actions themselves as well as what the, what the cyber criminals are evolving to. >>Yeah. So to where it's aggressive, destructive, not good words, right. But, but this is what we're seeing with ransomware. Now, again, they're not just going after data as the currency, we're seeing, um, destructive capabilities put into ransomware, including wiper malware. So this used to be just in the realm of, uh, APTT nation state attacks. We saw that with should moon. We saw that with dark soil back in 2013, so destructive threats, but in the world of apt and nation state, now we're seeing this in cyber crime. We're seeing it with ransomware and this, I expect to be a full-blown tactic for cyber criminals simply because they have the, the threat, right. They've already leveraged a lot of extortion and double extortion schemes. We've talked about that. Now they're going to be onboarding this as a new threat, basically planting these time bombs. He's ticking time bombs, holding systems for, for, for ransom saying, and probably crippling a couple of, to show that they mean business and saying, unless you pay us within a day or two, we're going to take all of these systems offline. We're not just going to take them offline. We're going to destroy them, right. That's a big incentive for people to, to, to pay up. So they're really playing on that fear element. That's what I mean about aggressive, right? They're going to be really shifting tactics, >>Aggressive and destructive, or two things you don't want in a cybersecurity environment or to be called by your employer. Just wanted to point that out. Talk to me about wiper malware. Is this new emerging, or is this something that's seeing a resurgence because this came up at the Olympics in the summer, right? >>Absolutely. So a resurgence in, in a sort of different way. Right. So, as I said, we have seen it before, but it's been not too prevalent. It's been very, uh, it's, it's been a niche area for them, right. It's specifically for these very highly targeted attack. So yes, the Olympics, in fact, two times at the Olympics in Tokyo, but also in the last summer Olympics as well. We also saw it with, as I mentioned in South Korea at dark school in 2013, we saw it an OT environment with the moon as an example, but we're talking handfuls here. Uh, unfortunately we have blogged about three of these in the last month to month and a half. Right. And that, and you know, this is starting to be married with ransomware, which is particularly a very dangerous cause it's not just my wiper malware, but couple that with the ransom tactics. >>And that's what we're starting to see is this new, this resurgent. Yes. But a completely new form that's taking place. Uh, even to the point I think in the future that it could, it could severely a great, now what we're seeing is it's not too critical in a sense that it's not completely destroying the system. You can recover the system still we're talking to master boot records, those sorts of things, but in the future, I think they're going to be going after the formal firmware themselves, essentially turning some of these devices into paperweights and that's going to be a very big problem. >>Wow. That's a very scary thought that getting to the firmware and turning those devices into paperweights. One of the things also that the report talked about that that was really interesting. Was that more attacks against the supply chain and Linux, particularly talk to us about that. What did you find there? What does it mean? What's the threat for organizations? >>Yeah. So we're seeing a diversification in terms of the platforms that cyber criminals are going after. Again, it's that attack surface, um, lower hanging fruit in a sense, uh, because they've, you know, for a fully patched versions of windows, 10 windows 11, it's harder, right. For cyber criminals than it was five or 10 years ago to get into those systems. If we look at the, uh, just the prevalence, the amount of devices that are out there in IOT and OT environments, these are running on Linux, a lot of different flavors and forms of Linux, therefore this different security holes that come up with that. And that's, that's a big patch management issue as an example too. And so this is what we, you know, we've already seen it with them or I bought net and this was in our threat landscape report, or I was the number one threat that we saw. And that's a Linux-based bot net. Now, uh, Microsoft has rolled out something called WSL, which is a windows subsystem for Linux and windows 10 and windows 11, meaning that windows supports Linux now. So that all the code that's being written for botnets, for malware, all that stuff is able to run on, on new windows platforms effectively. So this is how they're trying to expand their, uh, attack surface. And, um, that ultimately gets into the supply chain because again, a lot of these devices in manufacturing and operational technology environments rely quite heavily actually on Linux. >>Well, and with all the supply chain issues that we've been facing during the pandemic, how can organizations protect themselves against this? >>Yeah. So this, this is a big thing, right? And we talked about also the weaponization of artificial intelligence, automation and all of these, there's a lot going on as you know, right from the threats a lot to get visibility on a lot, to be able to act quickly on that's a big key metric. There is how quick you can detect these and respond to them for that. You need good threat intelligence, of course, but you also truly need to enable, uh, uh, automation, things like SD wan, a mesh architecture as well, or having a security fabric that can actually integrate devices that talk to each other and can detect these threats and respond to them quickly. That's a very important piece because if you don't stop these attacks well, they're in that movement through the attack chain. So the kill chain concept we talk about, um, the risk is very high nowadays where, you know, everything we just talked about from a ransomware and destructive capabilities. So having those approaches is very important. Also having, um, you know, education and a workforce trained up is, is equally as important to, to be, you know, um, uh, to, to be aware of these threats. >>I'm glad you brought up that education piece and the training, and that's something that 49 is very dedicated to doing, but also brings up the cybersecurity skills gap. I know when I talked with Kenzie, uh, just a couple months ago at the, um, PGA tournament, it was talking about, you know, big investments in what 40 guard, 40, 40 net is doing to help reduce that gap. But the gap is still there. How do I teach teams not get overloaded with the expanding service? It seems like the surface, the surface has just, there is no limit anymore. So how does, how does it teams that are lean and small help themselves in the fact that the threat is landscape is, is expanding. The criminals are getting smarter or using AI intelligent automation, what our it teams do >>Like fire with fire. You got to use two of the same tools that they're using on their side, and you need to be able to use in your toolkit. We're talking about a security operation center perspective to have tools like, again, this comes to the threat intelligence to get visibility on these things. We're talking Simmons, sor uh, we have, you know, 40 AI out now, uh, deception products, all these sorts of things. These are all tools that need that, that, uh, can help, um, those people. So you don't have to have a, you know, uh, hire 40 or 50 people in your sock, right? It's more about how you can work together with the tools and technology to get, have escalation paths to do more people, process procedure, as we talk about to be able to educate and train on those, to be able to have incident response planning. >>So what do you do like, because inevitably you're going to be targeted, probably interacts where attack, what do you do? Um, playing out those scenarios, doing breach and attack simulation, all of those things that comes down to the skills gaps. So it's a lot about that education and awareness, not having to do that. The stuff that can be handled by automation and AI and, and training is you're absolutely right. We've dedicated a lot with our NSC program at 49. We also have our 40 net security academy. Uh, you know, we're integrating with those secondary so we can have the skillsets ready, uh, for, for new graduates. As an example, there's a lot of progress being made towards that. We've even created a new powered by 40 guard labs. There is a 40 guard labs play in our NSC seven as an example, it's, uh, you know, for, um, uh, threat hunting and offensive security as an example, understanding really how attackers are launching their, their campaigns and, um, all those things come together. But that's the good news actually, is that we've come a long way. We actually did our first machine learning and AI models over 10 years ago, Lisa, this isn't something new to us. So the technology has gone a long way. It's just a matter of how we can collaborate and obviously integrate with that for the, on the skills gap. >>And one more question on the actual threat landscape, were there any industries that came up in particular, as we talked about e-sports we talked about OT and any industries that came up in particular as, as really big hotspots that companies and organizations really need to be aware of. >>Yeah. So also, uh, this is part of OT about ICS critical infrastructure. That's a big one. Uh, absolutely there we're seeing, uh, also cyber-criminals offering more crime services now on dark web. So CAS, which is crime as a service, because it used to be a, again, a very specialized area that maybe only a handful of organized criminal organizations could actually, um, you know, launch attacks and, and impact to those targets where they're going after those targets. Now they're offering services right on to other coming cyber criminals, to be able to try to monetize that as well. Again, we're seeing this, we actually call it advanced persistent cybercrime APC instead of an apt, because they're trying to take cyber crime to these targets like ICS, critical infrastructure, um, healthcare as well is another one, again, usually in the realm of APMT, but now being targeted more by cybercriminals in ransomware, >>I've heard of ransomware as a service, is that a subcategory of crime as a service? >>Absolutely. Yeah. It is phishing as a service ransomware as, and service DDoSs as a service, but not as, as many of these subcategories, but a ransomware as a service. That's a, another big problem as well, because this is an affiliate model, right. Where they hire partners and pay them commission, uh, if they actually get payments of ransom, right? So they have literally a middle layer in this network that they're pushing out to scale their attacks, >>You know, and I think that's the last time we talked about ransomware, we talked about it's a matter of, and I talk to customers all the time who say, yes, it's a matter of when, not, if, is, is this the same sentiment? And you think for crime as a service in general, the attacks on e-sports on home networks, on, uh, internet satellites in space, is this just a matter of when, not if across the board? >>Well, yeah, absolutely. Um, you know, but the good news is it doesn't have to be a, you know, when it happens, it doesn't have to be a catastrophic situation. Again, that's the whole point about preparedness and planning and all the things I talked about, the filling the skills gap in education and having the proper, proper tools in place that will mitigate that risk. Right. And that's, and that's perfectly acceptable. And that's the way we should handle this from the industry, because we process we've talked about this, people are over a hundred billion threats a day in 40 guard labs. The volume is just going to continue to grow. It's very noisy out there. And there's a lot of automated threats, a lot of attempts knocking on organizations, doors, and networks, and, you know, um, phishing emails being sent out and all that. So it's something that we just need to be prepared for just like you do for a natural disaster planning and all these sorts of other things in the physical world. >>That's a good point. It doesn't have to be aggressive and destructive, but last question for you, how can, how is 4d guard helping companies in every industry get aggressive and disruptive against the threats? >>Yeah. Great, great, great question. So this is something I'm very passionate about, uh, as you know, uh, where, you know, we, we don't stop just with customer protection. Of course, that is as a security vendor, that's our, our primary and foremost objective is to protect and mitigate risk to the customers. That's how we're doing. You know, this is why we have 24 7, 365 operations at 40 guy labs. Then we're helping to find the latest and greatest on threat intelligence and hunting, but we don't stop there. We're actually working in the industry. Um, so I mentioned this before the cyber threat Alliance to, to collaborate and share intelligence on threats all the way down to disrupt cybercrime. This is what big target of ours is, how we can work together to disrupt cyber crime. Because unfortunately they've made a lot of money, a lot of profits, and we need to reduce that. We need to send a message back and fight that aggressiveness and we're we're on it, right? So we're working with Interpol or project gateway with the world economic forum, the partnership against cyber crime. It's a lot of initiatives with other, uh, you know, uh, the, uh, the who's who of cyber security in the industry to work together and tackle this collaboratively. Um, the good news is there's been some steps of success to that. There's a lot more, we're doing the scale of the efforts. >>Excellent. Well, Derek as always great and very informative conversation with you. I always look forward to these seeing what's going on with the threat landscape, the challenges, the increasing challenges, but also the good news, the opportunities in it, and what 40 guard is doing 40 left 40 net, excuse me, I can't speak today to help customers address that. And we always appreciate your insights and your time we look forward to talking to you and unveiling the next predictions in 2022. >>All right. Sounds good. Thanks, Lisa. >>My pleasure for Derek manky. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this cube conversation with 40 net. Thanks for watching.

from the cube studios in palo alto in boston bringing you data driven insights from the cube and etr this is breaking analysis with dave vellante semiconductors are the heart of technology innovation for decades technology improvements have marched the cadence of silicon advancements in performance cost power and packaging in the past 10 years the dynamics of the semiconductor industry have changed dramatically soaring factory costs device volume explosions fabulous chip companies greater programmability compressed time to tape out a lot more software content the looming presence of china these and other factors have changed the power structure of the semiconductor business chips today power every aspect of our lives and have led to a global semiconductor shortage that's been well covered but we've never seen anything like it before we believe silicon's success in the next 20 years will be determined by volume manufacturing capabilities design innovation public policy geopolitical dynamics visionary leadership and innovative business models that can survive the intense competition in one of the most challenging businesses in the world hello and welcome to this week's wikibon cube insights powered by etr in this breaking analysis it's our pleasure to welcome daniel newman in one of the leading analysts in the technology business and founder of futurum research daniel welcome to the program thanks so much dave great to see you thanks for having me big topic yeah i'll say i'm really looking forward to this and so here's some of the topics that we want to cover today if we have time changes in the semiconductor industry i've said they've been dramatic the shift to nofap companies we're going to talk about volume manufacturing those shifts that have occurred largely due to the arm model we want to cover intel and dig into that and what it has to do to to survive and thrive these changes and then we want to take a look at how alternative processors are impacting the world people talk about is moore's law dead is it alive and well daniel you have strong perspectives on all of this including nvidia love to get your thoughts on on that plus talk about the looming china threat as i mentioned in in the intro but daniel before we get into it do these topics they sound okay how do you see the state of the semiconductor industry today where have we come from where are we and where are we going at the macro level there are a lot of different narratives that are streaming alongside and they're not running in parallel so much as they're running and converging towards one another but it gradually different uh you know degrees so the last two years has welcomed a semiconductor conversation that we really hadn't had and that was supply chain driven the covid19 pandemic brought pretty much unprecedented desire demand thirst or products that are powered by semiconductors and it wasn't until we started running out of laptops of vehicles of servers that the whole world kind of put the semiconductor in focus again like it was just one of those things dave that we as a society it's sort of taken for granted like if you need a laptop you go buy a laptop if you needed a vehicle there'd always be one on the lot um but as we've seen kind of this exponentialism that's taken place throughout the pandemic what we ended up realizing is that semiconductors are eating the world and in fact the next industrial the entire industrial itself the complex is powered by semiconductor technology so everything we we do and we want to do right you went from a vehicle that might have had 50 or 100 worth of semiconductors on a few different parts to one that might have 700 800 different chips in it thousands of dollars worth of semi of semiconductors so you know across the board though yes you're dealing with the dynamics of the shortage you're dealing with the dynamics of innovation you're dealing with moore's law and sort of coming to the end which is leading to new process we're dealing with the foundry versus fab versus invention and product development uh situation so there's so many different concurrent semiconductor narratives that are going on dave and we can talk about any of them and all of them and i'm sure as we do we'll overlap all these different themes you know maybe you can solve this mystery for me there's this this this chip shortage and you can't invent vehicle inventory is so tight but yet when you listen to uh the the ads if the the auto manufacturers are pounding the advertising maybe they're afraid of tesla they don't want to lose their brand awareness but anyway so listen it's by the way a background i want to get a little bit academic here but but bear with me i want to introduce actually reintroduce the concept of wright's law to our audience we know we all know about moore's law but the earlier instantiation actually comes from theodore wright t.p wright he was this engineer in the airplane industry and the math is a little bit abstract to apply but roughly translated says as the cumulative number of units produced doubles your cost per unit declines by a fixed percentage now in airplanes that was around 15 percent in semiconductors we think that numbers more like 20 25 when you add the performance improvements you get from silicon advancements it translates into something like 33 percent cost cost declines when you can double your cumulative volume so that's very important because it confers strategic advantage to the company with the largest volume so it's a learning curve dynamic and it's like andy jassy says daniel there's no compression algorithm for experience and it definitely applies here so if you apply wright's law to what's happening in the industry today we think we can get a better understanding of for instance why tsmc is dominating and why intel is struggling any quick thoughts on that well you have to take every formula like that in any sort of standard mathematics and kind of throw it out the window when you're dealing with the economic situation we are right now i'm not i'm not actually throwing it out the window but what i'm saying is that when supply and demand get out of whack some of those laws become a little bit um more difficult to sustain over the long term what i will say about that is we have certainly seen this found um this fabulous model explode over the last few years you're seeing companies that can focus on software frameworks and innovation that aren't necessarily getting caught up in dealing with the large capital expenditures and overhead the ability to as you suggested in the topics here partner with a company like arm that's developing innovation and then and then um you know offering it uh to everybody right and for a licensee and then they can quickly build we're seeing what that's doing with companies like aws that are saying we're going to just build it alibaba we're just going to build it these aren't chip makers these aren't companies that were even considered chip makers they are now today competing as chip makers so there's a lot of different dynamics going back to your comment about wright's law like i said as we normalize and we figure out this situation on a global scale um i do believe that the who can manufacture the most will certainly continue to have significant competitive advantages yeah no so that's a really interesting point that you're bringing up because one of the things that it leads me to think is that the chip shortage could actually benefit intel i think will benefit intel so i want to introduce this some other data and then get your thoughts on this very simply the chart on the left shows pc shipments which peaked in in 2011 and then began at steady decline until covid and they've the pcs as we know have popped up in terms of volume in the past year and looks like they'll be up again this year the chart on the right is cumulative arm shipments and so as we've reported we think arm wafer volumes are 10x those of x86 volumes and and as such the arm ecosystem has far better cost structure than intel and that's why pat gelsinger was called in to sort of save the day so so daniel i just kind of again opened up this this can of worms but i think you're saying long term volume is going to be critical that's going to confer low cost advantages but in the in in the near to mid-term intel could actually benefit from uh from this chip shortage well intel is the opportunity to position itself as a leader in solving the repatriation crisis uh this will kind of carry over when we talk more about china and taiwan and that relationship and what's going on there we've really identified a massive gap in our uh in america supply chain in the global supply chain because we went from i don't have the stat off hand but i have a rough number dave and we can validate this later but i think it was in like the 30-ish high 30ish percentile of manufacturing of chips were done here in the united states around 1990 and now we're sub 10 as of 2020. so we we offshored almost all of our production and so when we hit this crisis and we needed more manufacturing volume we didn't have it ready part of the problem is you get people like elon musk that come out and make comments to the media like oh it'll be fixed later this year well you can't build a fab in a year you can't build a fab and start producing volume and the other problem is not all chips are the same so not every fab can produce every chip and when you do have fabs that are capable of producing multiple chips it costs millions of dollars to change the hardware and to actually change the process so it's not like oh we're going to build 28 today because that's what ford needs to get all those f-150s out of the lot and tomorrow we're going to pump out more sevens for you know a bunch of hp pcs it's a major overhaul every time you want to retool so there's a lot of complexity here but intel is the one domestic company us-based that has basically raised its hand and said we're going to put major dollars into this and by the way dave the arm chart you showed me could have a very big implication as to why intel wants to do that yeah so right because that's that's a big part of of foundry right is is get those volumes up so i want to hold that thought because i just want to introduce one more data point because one of the things we often talk about is the way in which alternative processors have exploded onto the scene and this chart here if you could bring that up patrick thank you shows the way in which i think you're pointing out intel is responding uh by leveraging alternative fat but once again you know kind of getting getting serious about manufacturing chips what the chart shows is the performance curve it's on a log scale for in the blue line is x86 and the orange line is apple's a series and we're using that as a proxy for sort of the curve that arm is on and it's in its performance over time culminating in the a15 and it measures trillions of operations per second so if you take the traditional x86 curve of doubling every 18 to 24 months that comes out roughly to about 40 percent improvement per year in performance and that's diminishing as we all know to around 30 percent a year because the moore's law is waning the orange line is powered by arm and it's growing at over a hundred percent really 110 per year when you do the math and that's when you combine the cpu the the the neural processing unit the the the xpu the dsps the accelerators et cetera so we're seeing apple use arm aws to you to your point is building chips on on graviton and and and tesla's using our list is long and this is one reason why so daniel this curve is it feels like it's the new performance curve in the industry yeah we are certainly in an era where companies are able to take control of the innovation curve using the development using the open ecosystem of arm having more direct control and price control and of course part of that massive arm number has to do with you know mobile devices and iot and devices that have huge scale but at the same time a lot of companies have made the decision either to move some portion of their product development on arm or to move entirely on arm part of why it was so attractive to nvidia part of the reason that it's under so much scrutiny that that deal um whether that deal will end up getting completed dave but we are seeing an era where we want we i said lust for power i talked about lust for semiconductors our lust for our technology to do more uh whether that's software-defined vehicles whether that's the smartphones we keep in our pocket or the desktop computer we use we want these machines to be as powerful and fast and responsive and scalable as possible if you can get 100 where you can get 30 improvement with each year and generation what is the consumer going to want so i think companies are as normal following the demand of consumers and what's available and at the same time there's some economic benefits they're they're able to realize as well i i don't want to i don't want to go too deep into nvidia arm but what do you handicap that that the chances that that acquisition actually happens oh boy um right now there's a lot of reasons it should happen but there are some reasons that it shouldn't i still kind of consider it a coin toss at this point because fundamentally speaking um you know it should create more competition but there are some people out there that believe it could cause less and so i think this is going to be hung up with regulators a little bit longer than we thought we've already sort of had some previews into that dave with the extensions and some of the timelines that have already been given um i know that was a safe answer and i will take credit for being safe this one's going to be a hard one to call but it certainly makes nvidia an amazing uh it gives amazing prospects to nvidia if they're able to get this deal done yeah i i agree with you i think it's 50 50. okay my i want to pose the question is intel too strategic to fail in march of this year we published this article where we posed that question uh you and i both know pat pretty well we talked about at the time the multi-front war intel is waging in a war with amd the arm ecosystem tsmc the design firms china and we looked at the company's moves which seemed to be right from a strategy standpoint the looking at the potential impact of the u.s government intel's partnership with ibm and what that might portend the us government has a huge incentive to make sure intel wins with onshore manufacturing and that looming threat from china but daniel is intel too strategic to fail and is pat gelsinger making the right moves well first of all i do believe at this current juncture where the semiconductor and supply chain shortage and crisis still looms that intel is too strategic to fail i also believe that intel's demise is somewhat overstated not to say intel doesn't have a slate of challenges that it's going to need to address long term just with the technology adoption curve that you showed being one of them dave but you have to remember the company still has nearly 90 of the server cpu market it still has a significant market share in client and pc it is seeing market share erosion but it's not happened nearly as fast as some people had suggested it would happen with right now with the demand in place and as high as it is intel is selling chips just about as quickly as it can make them and so we right now are sort of seeing the tam as a whole the demand as a whole continue to expand and so intel is fulfilling that need but where are they really too strategic to fail i mean we've seen in certain markets in certain uh process in um you know client for instance where amd has gained of course that's still x86 we've seen uh where the m1 was kind of initially thought to be potentially a pro product that would take some time it didn't take nearly as long for them to get that product in good shape um but the foundry and fab side is where i think intel really has a chance to flourish right now one it can play in the arm space it can build these facilities to be able to produce and help support the production of volumes of chips using arm designs so that actually gives intel and inroads two is it's the company that has made the most outspoken commitment to invest in the manufacturing needs of the united states both here in the united states and in other places across the world where we have friendly ally relationships and need more production capabilities if not in intel b and there is no other logical company that's us-based that's going to meet the regulator and policymakers requirements right now that is also raising their hand and saying we have the know-how we've been doing this we can do more of this and so i think pat is leaning into the right area and i think what will happen is very likely intel will support manufacturing of chips by companies like qualcomm companies like nvidia and if they're able to do that some of the market share losses that they're potentially facing with innovation challenges um and engineering challenges could be offset with growth in their fab and foundry businesses and i think i think pat identified it i think he's going to market with it and you know convincing the street that's going to be a whole nother thing that this is exciting um but i think as the street sees the opportunity here this is an area that intel can really lean into so i think i i think people generally would recognize at least the folks i talk to and it'll be interested in your thoughts who really know this business that intel you know had the best manufacturing process in in the world obviously that's coming to question but but but but for instance people say well intel's 10 nanometer you know is comparable to tsm seven nanometer and that's sort of overstated their their nanometer you know loss but but so so they they were able to point as they were able to sort of hide some of the issues maybe in design with great process and and i i believe that comes down to volume so the question i have then is and i think so i think patrick's pat is doing the right thing because he's going after volume and that's what foundry brings but can he get enough volume or does he need for inst for instance i mean one of the theories i've put out there is that apple could could save the day for intel if the if the us government gets apple in a headlock and says hey we'll back off on break up big tech but you got to give pat some of your foundry volume that puts him on a steeper learning curve do you do you worry sometimes though daniel that intel just even with like qualcomm and broadcom who by the way are competitors of theirs and don't necessarily love them but even even so if they could get that those wins that they still won't have the volume to compete on a cost basis or do you feel like even if they're numbered a number three even behind samsung it's good enough what are your thoughts on that well i don't believe a company like intel goes into a business full steam and they're not new to this business but the obvious volume and expansion that they're looking at with the intention of being number two or three these great companies and you know that's same thing i always say with google cloud google's not out to be the third cloud they're out to be one well that's intel will want to to be stronger if the us government and these investments that it's looking at making this 50 plus billion dollars is looking to pour into this particular space which i don't think is actually enough but if if the government makes these commitments and intel being likely one of the recipients of at least some of these dollars to help expedite this process move forward with building these facilities to make increased manufacturing very likely there's going to be some precedent of law a policy that is going to be put in place to make sure that a certain amount of the volume is done here stateside with companies this is a strategic imperative this is a government strategic imperative this is a putting the country at risk of losing its technology leadership if we cannot manufacture and control this process of innovation so i think intel is going to have that as a benefit that the government is going to most likely require some of this manufacturing to take place here um especially if this investment is made the last thing they're going to want to do is build a bunch of foundries and build a bunch of fabs and end up having them not at capacity especially when the world has seen how much of the manufacturing is now being done in taiwan so i think we're concluding and i i i correctly if i'm wrong but intel is too strategic to fail and and i i sometimes worry they can go bankrupt you know trying to compete with the likes of tsmc and that's why the the the public policy and the in the in the partnership with the u.s government and the eu is i think so important yeah i don't think bankruptcy is an immediate issue i think um but while i follow your train of thought dave i think what you're really looking at more is can the company grow and continue to get support where i worry about is shareholders getting exhausted with intel's the merry-go-round of not growing fast enough not gaining market share not being clearly identified as a leader in any particular process or technology and sort of just playing the role of the incumbent and they the company needs to whether it's in ai whether it's at the edge whether it's in the communications and service provider space intel is doing well you look at their quarterly numbers they're making money but if you had to say where are they leading right now what what which thing is intel really winning uh consistently at you know you look at like ai and ml and people will point to nvidia you look at you know innovation for um client you know and even amd has been super disruptive and difficult for intel uh of course you we've already talked about in like mobile um how impactful arm has been and arm is also playing a pretty big role in servers so like i said the market share and the technology leadership are a little out of skew right now and i think that's where pat's really working hard is identifying the opportunities for for intel to play market leader and technology leader again and for the market to clearly say yes um fab and foundry you know could this be an area where intel becomes the clear leader domestically and i think that the answer is definitely yes because none of the big chipmakers in the us are are doing fabrication you know they're they're all outsourcing it to overseas so if intel can really lead that here grow that large here then it takes some of the pressure off of the process and the innovation side and that's not to say that intel won't have to keep moving there but it does augment the revenue creates a new profit center and makes the company even more strategic here domestically yeah and global foundry tapped out of of sub 10 nanometer and that's why ibm's pseudonym hey wait a minute you had a commitment there the concern i have and this is where again your point is i think really important with the chip shortage you know to go from you know initial design to tape out took tesla and apple you know sub sub 24 months you know probably 18 months with intel we're on a three-year design to tape out cycle maybe even four years so they've got to compress that but that as you well know that's a really hard thing to do but the chip shortage is buying them time and i think that's a really important point that you brought out early in this segment so but the other big question daniel i want to test with you is well you mentioned this about seeing arm in the enterprise not a lot of people talk about that or have visibility on that but i think you're right on so will arm and nvidia be able to seriously penetrate the enterprise the server business in particular clearly jensen wants to be there now this data from etr lays out many of the enterprise players and we've superimposed the semiconductor giants in logos the data is an xy chart it shows net score that's etr's measure of spending momentum on the vertical axis and market share on the horizontal axis market share is not like idc market share its presence in the data set and as we reported before aws is leading the charge in enterprise architecture as daniel mentioned they're they're designing their own chips nitro and graviton microsoft is following suit as is google vmware has project monterey cisco is on the chart dell hp ibm with red hat are also shown and we've superimposed intel nvidia china and arm and now we can debate the position of the logos but we know that one intel has a dominant position in the data center it's got to protect that business it cannot lose ground as it has in pcs because the margin pressure it would face two we know aws with its annapurna acquisition is trying to control its own destiny three we know vmware has project monterey and is following aws's lead to support these new workloads beyond x86 general purpose they got partnerships with pansando and arm and others and four we know cisco they've got chip design chops as does hpe maybe to a lesser extent and of course we know ibm has excellent semiconductor design expertise especially when it comes to things like memory disaggregation as i said jensen's going hard after the data center you know him well daniel we know china wants to control its own destiny and then there's arm it dominates mobile as you pointed out in iot can it make a play for the data center daniel how do you see this picture and what are your thoughts on the future of enterprise in the context of semiconductor competition it's going to take some time i believe but some of the investments and products that have been brought to market and you mentioned that shorter tape out period that shorter period for innovation whether it's you know the graviton uh you know on aws or the aiml chips that uh with trainium and inferentia how quickly aws was able to you know develop build deploy to market an arm-based solution that is being well received and becoming an increasing component of the services and and uh products that are being offered from aws at this point it's still pretty small and i would i would suggest that nvidia and arm in the spirit of trying to get this deal done probably don't necess don't want the enterprise opportunity to be overly inflated as to how quickly the company's going to be able to play in that space because that would somewhat maybe slow or bring up some caution flags that of the regulators that are that are monitoring this at the same time you could argue that arm offering additional options in competition much like it's doing in client will offer new form factors new designs um new uh you know new skus the oems will be able to create more customized uh hardware offerings that might be able to be unique for certain enterprises industries can put more focus you know we're seeing the disaggregation with dpus and how that technology using arm with what aws is doing with nitro but what what these different companies are doing to use you know semiconductor technology to split out security networking and storage and so you start to see design innovation could become very interesting on the foundation of arm so in time i certainly see momentum right now the thing is is most companies in the enterprise are looking for something that's fairly well baked off the shelf that can meet their needs whether it's sap or whether it's you know running different custom applications that the business is built on top of commerce solutions and so intel meets most of those needs and so arm has made a lot of sense for instance with these cloud scale providers but not necessarily as much sense for enterprises especially those that don't want to necessarily look at refactoring all the workloads but as software becomes simpler as refactoring becomes easier to do between different uh different technologies and processes you start to say well arm could be compelling and you know because the the bottom line is we know this from mobile devices is most of us don't care what the processor is the average person the average data you know they look at many of these companies the same in enterprise it's always mattered um kind of like in the pc world it used to really matter that's where intel inside was born but as we continue to grow up and you see these different processes these different companies nvidia amd intel all seen as very worthy companies with very capable technologies in the data center if they can offer economics if they can offer performance if they can offer faster time to value people will look at them so i'd say in time dave the answer is arm will certainly become more and more competitive in the data center like it was able to do at the edge in immobile yeah one of the things that we've talked about is that you know the software-defined data center is awesome but it also created a lot of wasted overhead in terms of offloading storage and and networking security and that much of that is being done with general purpose x86 processors which are more expensive than than for instance using um if you look at what as you mentioned great summary of what aws is doing with graviton and trainium and other other tooling what ampere is doing um in in in oracle and you're seeing both of those companies for example particularly aws get isvs to write so they can run general purpose applications on um on arm-based processors as well it sets up well for ai inferencing at the edge which we know arms dominating the edge we see all these new types of workloads coming into the data center if you look at what companies like nebulon and pensando and and others are doing uh you're seeing a lot of their offloads are going to arm they're putting arm in even though they're still using x86 in a lot of cases but but but they're offloading to arm so it seems like they're coming into the back door i understand your point actually about they don't want to overplay their hand there especially during these negotiations but we think that that long term you know it bears watching but intel they have such a strong presence they got a super strong ecosystem and they really have great relationships with a lot of the the enterprise players and they have influence over them so they're going to use that the the the chip shortage benefits them the uh the relationship with the us government pat is spending a lot of time you know working that so it's really going to be interesting to see how this plays out daniel i want to give you the last word your final thoughts on what we talked about today and where you see this all headed i think the world benefits as a whole with more competition and more innovation pressure i like to see more players coming into the fray i think we've seen intel react over the last year under pat gelsinger's leadership we've seen the technology innovation the angstrom era the 20a we're starting to see what that roadmap is going to look like we've certainly seen how companies like nvidia can disrupt come into market and not just using hardware but using software to play a major role but as a whole as innovation continues to take form at scale we all benefit it means more intelligent software-defined vehicles it puts phones in our hands that are more powerful it gives power to you know cities governments and enterprises that can build applications and tools that give us social networks and give us data-driven experiences so i'm very bullish and optimistic on as a whole i said this before i say it again i believe semiconductors will eat the world and then you know you look at the we didn't even really talk about the companies um you know whether it's in ai uh like you know grok or grav core there are some very cool companies building things you've got qualcomm bought nuvia another company that could you know come out of the blue and offer us new innovations in mobile and personal computing i mean there's so many cool companies dave with the scale of data the uh the the growth and demand and desire for connectivity in the world um it's never been a more interesting time to be a fan of technology the only thing i will say as a whole as a society as i hope we can fix this problem because it does create risks the supply chain inflation the economics all that stuff ties together and a lot of people don't see that but if we can't get this manufacturing issue under control we didn't really talk about china dave and i'll just say taiwan and china are very physically close together and the way that china sees taiwan and the way we see taiwan is completely different we have very little control over what can happen we've all seen what's happened with hong kong so there's just so many as i said when i started this conversation we've got all these trains on the track they're all moving but they're not in parallel these tracks are all converging but the convergence isn't perpendicular so sometimes we don't see how all these things interrelate but as a whole it's a very exciting time love being in technology and uh love having the chance to come out here and talk with you i love the optimism and you're right uh that competition in china that's going to come from china as well xi has made it a part of his legacy i think to you know re-incorporate taiwan that's going to be interesting to see i mean taiwan ebbs and flows with regard to you know its leadership sometimes they're more pro i guess i should say less anti-china maybe that's the better way to say it uh and and and you know china's putting in big fab capacity for nand you know maybe maybe people look at that you know some of that is the low end of the market but you know clay christensen would say well to go take a look at the steel industry and see what happened there so so we didn't talk much about china and that was my oversight but but they're after self-sufficiency it's not like they haven't tried before kind of like intel has tried foundry before but i think they're really going for it this time but but now what are your do you believe that china will be able to get self-sufficiency let's say within the next 10 to 15 years with semiconductors yes i would never count china out of anything if they put their mind to it if it's something that they want to put absolute focus on i think um right now china vacillates between wanting to be a good player and a good steward to the world and wanting to completely run its own show the the politicization of what's going on over there we all saw what happened in the real estate market this past week we saw what happened with tech ed over the last few months we've seen what's happened with uh innovation and entrepreneurship it is not entirely clear if china wants to give the more capitalistic and innovation ecosystem a full try but it is certainly shown that it wants to be seen as a world leader over the last few decades it's accomplished that in almost any area that it wants to compete dave i would say if this is one of gigi ping's primary focuses wanting to do this it would be very irresponsible to rule it out as a possibility daniel i gotta tell you i i love collaborating with you um we met face to face just recently and i hope we could do this again i'd love to have you you back on on the program thanks so much for your your time and insights today thanks for having me dave so daniel's website futuram research that's three use in futurum uh check that out for termresearch.com uh the the this individual is really plugged in he's forward thinking and and a great resource at daniel newman uv is his twitter so go follow him for some great stuff and remember these episodes are all available as podcasts wherever you listen all you do is search for breaking analysis podcast we publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com and by the way daniel thank you for contributing your your quotes to siliconangle the writers there love you uh you can always connect on twitter i'm at divalanto you can email me at david.velante at siliconangle.com appreciate the comments on linkedin and don't forget to check out etr.plus for all the survey data this is dave vellante for the cube insights powered by etr be well and we'll see you next time you

(cheerful music) >> Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE's coverage of AnsibleFest 2021, with Red Hat. Topic of this power panel is the future of automation, we've got a great lineup of CUBE alumni, Joe Fitzgerald, vice president, general manager of the Red Hat business unit, thanks for coming on, Tom Anderson, vice president, product manager of Red Hat, and Alessandro Perilli, the senior director of product market at Red, all good CUBE alumni. Distinct power panel, Joe we'll start out with you, what have you seen in automation game right now, 'cause it continues to evolve. I mean you can't go to an event, a virtual event, or read anything online without hearing AI automation, automation hybrid, automation hybrid hybrid hybrid hybrid, I mean automation is the top conversation in almost all verticals. What do you see happening right now? >> Yeah, it's sort of amazing, you know? Automation is quite fashionable these days, as you pointed out. Automation's always been on the radar of a lot of enterprises, and I think it was always perceived as sort of like that, an efficiency, a task model thing, that people did. Now automation is, if you believe some of the analysts, it's up to a board room imperative in some cases. So we are seeing with our customers that the level of complexity they're dealing with, particularly exaggerated by what's gone past year and a half in the world, is putting a tremendous amount of pressure, attention and importance on automation. So automation's definitely one of the busiest places to be right now. >> What's the big change this year, though? I mean we love the automation conversation, we had it last year a lot too, as well. What's the change, what's the trend right now that's driving this next level automation conversation with customers? >> Well, I'll ask my colleagues to comment on that in a second, but, the challenges here with automation, is people are constrained now, they can't access facilities as easy as they used to be able to. They still need to go fast, some businesses have had to expand dramatically, and introduce new services to handle all sorts of new scenarios, they've had to deploy things faster. Security, not a week goes by you don't read about something going on regarding security and breaches and hacking and things like that, so they're trying to secure things as fast as possible, right, and deploy critical fixes and patches and things like that. So there's just tremendous amount of activity, that's really been exaggerated by what's gone on over the past year. >> And all of this is being compounded with a nature of increasing complexity, that we're seeing in the architecture, explosion microservices, the adoption en masse of containers, and the adoption of multiple clouds for most customers around the world. So really, the extension of the IT environment, especially for large enterprises, enormous for any team, no matter how big it is, so how scale it is, to really go after and look for all the systems, and then the complexity of the architectures, is enormous within that IT environment. It is impossible to scale the applications and to scale the infrastructure, and not scale the IT operations. And so automation becomes really a way to scale IT operations, rather than just keep repeating the same steps over and over, in an attempt to simplify, or to reduce costs. It's well beyond that at this point. >> That's a great point. Tom, what's your reaction to this, because Alessandro brings up a good point, developers are going faster than ever before. The changes of speed and complexity have gone up, so the demand for the IT and/or security groups, or anyone, to be faster, not weeks, minutes. We're talking about a complete time shift here. >> Yeah, so I talk to a lot of customers, and what I keep hearing again and again from them is kind of two things, which is, a need for skills, and reskilling existing staff. When Alessandro talks about the complexity and the scale, think about all the different new tools, new environments, new platforms that these employees and these associates are being exposed to and expected to be able to handle. So, a real, not a skill shortage, but a stress on the skills of the organization. And then secondly, really, our customers are talking to us about the culture in the environment itself, the culture of collaboration, the culture of automation, and the kind of impact that has in our organization, the way teams are now expected to work together, to share information, to share automation, to push, you know, we talk about shifting left in a lot of things now in IT, automation is now shifting left, pushing automation and access to subsystems, IT subsystems and resources, into the hands of people who traditionally haven't had direct access to those resources. So really kind of shift in skills, and a shift in culture I see. >> Ah, the culture. (indistinct), I want to come back to that culture thing, but I want to ask you specifically on that point, do you think automation users still view automation as just repeating and simplifying processes that they already are doing? You've heard the term, "Done it three times, automate it." Is that definition changing and evolving, what's your thoughts? >> Yeah, IT is really changing, going from the traditional, "I'm a network engineer and I use a command line to update my devices I'm responsible for, the config devices, and then I decide to write a playbook using a really cool product like Ansible to drive automation into my daily tasks." And then it comes up to exposing, again, exposing that subsystem I'm responsible for, whatever it is, storage, network, compute, whatever it is, exposing that op so other people can consume it without me being involved, right? So that's a real change in a mindset, and tooling, and approach, that I'm going to expose that op to a set of workflows, business workflows, that drive automation throughout an organization. So that's a real kind of evolution of automation, (indistinct) first, and that's usually focused mostly on day zero, provisioning of a new service. Now we see a lot more focus, or a lot of additional focus on day two operations. How do I automate my day two operations to make them a lot more efficient, as my scale and complexity grows? How do I take the human element out of operating this on a day to day basis? >> So you're saying basically, if I understand you correctly, the system's architecture view, or mindset, around automation, it moves from "Hey, I'm going to use," and Ansible by the way is great for "Hey, I want to automate something, I'm doing a lot," that's cool. But you're looking at it differently. If I understand you correctly, you're saying the automation has to be a system view, meaning you create the rules of the road so that automation can happen at the front lines of the CICD pipeline. You mentioned shift left, is that the difference, is that kind of what's happening here, that's beyond just doing automation, because you can automate it, so you've done that, this is like the next level, is that what you're getting at? >> It is, and we joke about it a little bit, crushing silos, right? Breaking down silos, and again, I keep talking about culture, it really is important, tools are important and technology's important, but the culture's super important, and trying to think of that thing from a systems mindset, of sort of workflows and orchestration of a business process that touches IT components, and how do I automate that and expose that to that workflow, without a human having to touch it, right? Yet still enforce my security protocols, my performance expectations, my compliance stuff, all of that stuff still needs to be enforced, and that's where repeatable automation comes in, of being able to expose this stuff up into these system-level workflows. >> And then there is another element to this (indistinct), I think it's really important to attach to this, the element of speed. We talk about complexity, we talk about scale, but then there is this emerging third dimension, as I call it, that is the speed. And the speed has a number of different articulation, it's the speed when you're thinking about how quickly you need to deliver the application. If you're in a very competitive environment, think about web scale startups for example, or companies in an emerging market, and then you have the speed in terms of reacting to a cybersecurity attack, which Tom just mentioned. And then you have the third kind of speed I'm thinking about right now, which is the increasing amount of artificial intelligence, so an algorithmic kind of operation that is taking place in the organization. For now it's still very limited, but it's not unthinkable that going forward, the operations will be driven, or at least assisted by artificial intelligence. This speed, just like the scale and the complexity we mentioned before, are impossible to be addressed by a single team, and so automation becomes indispensable. >> Yeah, that's a great point, I want to just double click on that, I mean both Tom and Joe were just talking about system, they used the word system. In a subsystem, if one is going faster than the other, to your point, there's a bottleneck there. So if the IT group or security groups are going to take time to approve things, they're not putting rules to the road together to automate and help developers be faster, because look, it's clear, we've been reporting on this in theCUBE, cloud developers are fast. They're moving really fast with code. And so what happens is, if they're going to shift left, that means they're going to be at the point of coding to set policies on security. So, that's going to put pressure on the other subsystems to go faster, so they have to then expose rules of the road, or I'm just making that up, but policy base, or have some systems thinking. They can't just be the old way of saying "No, slow it down." So this is a cultural thing, I think Joe, you brought up culture, Alessandro, you brought up culture. Is that still there? That speed, fast team here and a slow team here? Is that still around, or people getting faster on both sides? And I'm kind of talking about IT, generally speaking, they tend to be slower than the developers. >> Well, just a couple comments, first of all, you heard silos, you heard complexity, you heard speed, talked about shift left. Let me sort of maybe tie those together, right? What's happened to date is every silo has their own set of tooling, right? And so one silo might move very fast, with a very private set of tools, or network management, or security, or whatever, right? And if you think about it, one of the number one skills gaps right now is for automation people. But if an automation person has to learn 17 different tools, 'cause I'm running on three public clouds, I'm on-premise, edge, and I'm doing things to move network storage, compute, security, all sorts of different systems, the tooling is so complicated, right, that I end up with a bunch of specialists. Which can only do one or two things, because they don't know the other domains and they don't know the skills. One of the things we've seen from our customers, I think this is a fundamental shift in automation, is that what we've done with Ansible in particular is, we actually adopted Ansible because of its simplicity. It's actually human-readable, you don't have to be a hardcore programmer to write automation. So that allows the emergence of citizen creators of automation. There's not like a group in some ivory tower that now can make automation and they do it for the masses. Individuals can now use Ansible to create automation. Going cross-domain, Ansible automation touches networks, security, storage, compute, cloud, edge, Linux, Windows, containers, traditional, ITSM, it touches so many systems, that basically what you have is you have a set of power tooling, in Ansible, that allows you now to share automation across teams, 'cause they speak the same language, right? And that's how you go faster. If every silo is fast, but when you have to go inter-silo you slow down, or have to open a ticket, or have some (indistinct) mismatch, it causes delays, errors, and exposures. >> I think that is a very key point, I mean that delay of opening up tickets, not being responsive, Alessandro, you put up machine learning and AI, I mean if you think about what that could do from an automation standpoint, if you can publish the HIPAA rules for your healthcare, you can just traverse that with a bot, right? I mean this is the new... This just saves so much time, why even open up a ticket? So if you can shift left and do the security, and there's kind of rules there, this is a trend, how do you make that happen, how do you bust the silos, and I guess that's the question I'd love to get everyone to react to, because that implies some sort of horizontally scalable control plane. How does someone do that in an architectural way, that doesn't really kind of, maybe break everything, or make the (indistinct) go into a cultural sideways situation? >> Maybe I can jump in, and grab this one, and then maybe ask Alessandro to weigh in afterwards, but, what we've seen and what you'll see some of the speakers at AnsibleFest this year talk about, from a cultural perspective is bringing teams together across automation guilds, JPMC calls it a community of practice, where they're bringing hundreds and thousands of individuals in the organization together virtually, into these teams that share best practices, and processes and automation that they've created. Secondly, and this is a little bit of a shameless plug for Ansible, which is having a common language, a common automation language across these teams, so that sharing becomes obviously a lot easier when you're using the same language. And then thirdly, what we see a lot now is people treating automation as code. Storing that, and get version managing and version controlling and checking in, checking out, really thinking of automation differently from an individual writing a script, to this being infrastructure or whatever my subsystem is, managed it and automated it as code, and thinking of themselves as people responsible for code. >> These are all great points. I think that on top of all these things, there is an additional element which is change management. You cannot count on technology alone to change something that is purely cultural, as we kept saying during this video right now. So, I believe that a key element to win, to succeed in an automation project, is to couple the technology, great technology, easy to understand, able to become the common language as Tom just said, with an effort in change management that starts from the top. It's something you don't see very often because a technology vendor rarely works with a more consulting firm, but it's definitely an area that I think would be very interesting to explore for our customers. >> That's a great point on the change management, but let me ask you, what do you think it needs to make automation more frictionless for users, what do you see that needs to happen, Alessandro? >> I think there are at least a couple of elements that need to change. The first one is that, the effort that we're seeing right now in the industry, to further democratize the capability to automate has to go one notch further. And by that I mean, implementing cell service provisioning portals and ways for automatically execute an automation workflow that already exists, so that an end user, somebody that works in the line of business, and doesn't understand necessarily what the automation workflow, the script is doing, still able to use it, to consume it when it, she or he needs to use it. This is the first element, and then the second element that is definitely more ambitious, is about the language, about how do I actually write the automation workflow? This is a key problem. It's true that some automation engines and some workflows have done, historically speaking, a better job than others, in simplifying the way we write automation workflows, and definitely this is much simpler than writing code with a programming language, and it's simpler than writing automation compared to a tool that we use 10, 15 years ago. But still, there is a certain amount of complexity, because you need to understand how to write in a way that the automation framework understands, and you need even before that, you need to express what you want to achieve, and in a way that the automation engine understands. So, I'm thinking that going forward we'll start to see artificial intelligence being applied to this problem, in a way that's very similar to what OpenAI Microsoft are doing with Codex, the capability that is a model that allows a person to write in plain English through a comment in code, to translate that comment into actual code, taken from GitHub or through the machine learning process that's been done. I'm really thinking that going forward, we will start to see some effort in the same direction, but applied to automation. What if the AI could assist us, not replace us, in writing the automation workflow so that more people are capable to translating what they want to achieve, in a way that is automatable? >> So you're saying the language, making it easy to program, or write, or create. Being a creator of automation. And then having that be available as code, with other code, so there's kind of this new paradigm of automating the automation. >> In a sense, this is absolutely true, yes. >> In addition to that, John, I think there's another dimension here which is often overlooked, which we do spend a lot of time on. It's one thing to have things like Alessandro mentioned, that are front edge in terms of helping you write code, but you want to know something? In big organizations, a lot of times what we find is, someone's already written the code that you need. You know what the problem is? You don't know about it, you can't find it, you can't share it and you can't collaborate on it, so the best code is something that somebody's already invested the time to write, test, burn in, certify, what if they could share it, and what if people could find it, and then reuse it? Right, everybody's talking about low code, no code, well, reuse is the best, right? Because you've already invested expertise into doing it. So we've spent a lot of time working with our customers based on their feedback, on building the tools necessary for them to share automation, to collaborate on it, certify it, and also to create that supply chain from partners who create integrations and interfaces to their systems, and to be able to share that content through the supply chain out to our customers and have them be able to share automation across very large globally distributed organizations. Very powerful. >> That's a powerful point, I mean reuse, leverage there, is phenomenal. Discovery engine's got to be built. You got to know, I mean someone's got to build a search engine for the code. "Hey code, who's written some code?" But just a whole 'nother mindset, so this brings up my next question for you guys, 'cause this is really, we're teasing out the biggest things coming next in automation. These are all great points, they're all about the future, where will the puck be, let's skate to where the puck will be, but it's computer science and automation that's being democratized and opened up more, so it's, what do you guys think is the biggest thing coming next for automation? >> Joe, you want to go next? >> Sure. Sure. Yeah, I'll take it. So we're getting a glimpse of that with a number of customers right now that we're working with that are doing things around concepts like self-healing infrastructures. Well what the heck is that? Basically, it's tying event systems, and AI, which is looking at what's going on in an environment, and deciding that something is broken, sub-optimal, spending too much, there's some issue that needs to be dealt with. In the old days, it was, that system would stop with opening a ticket, dispatch some people who were either manually or semi-automated go fix their whatever. Now people are connecting these systems and saying "Wait a minute. I've got all this rich data coming through my eventing systems. I can make some sense out of it with AI or machine learning. Then I can drive automation, I just eliminated a whole bunch of people, time, exposure, cost, everything else." So I think that, sort of a ventureman automation is going to be huge. I'm going to argue that every single system in the world that uses AI, the result of that's going to be, I want to go do something, I want to change, optimize my move, secure, stop, start, relocate, how's that going to get done? It's going to get done with automation. >> And what Joe just said is really highly successful in the consumer space. If you think about solutions like If This Then That, or Zapier for example, those are examples of event-driven automation. They've been in the consumer space for a long time, and they are wildly popular to the point that there are dozens of clones and competitors. The enterprise space, it didn't adopt the same approach so far, but we start to see event bridges, and event hubs that can really help with this. And this really connects to the previous point, at this point I'm a broken record, which is about the speed and the complexity. If the environment is so spread out, so complex, and it goes all the way to the edge, and all these events take place at a neck-breaking pace, the only way for you is to tie the automation workflows that you have written, to a trigger, an event that takes place at some point, according to your logic. >> Tom, what are your thoughts? >> Yeah, last but not least on that kind of thread, which is sort of the architectures as we get out to the edge, what does it take to automate things at the edge? We thought there was a big jump from data center to cloud, and now when you start extending that out to the edge, am I going to need a new automation platform to handle those edge devices? Will I need a new language, will I need a new team, or can I connect these things together using a common platform to develop the automate at the edge? And I think that's where we see some of our customers moving now, which is automating those edge environments which have become critical to their business. >> Awesome, I want to ask one final question while I've got you guys here in this power panel, great insights here. Operational complexity was mentioned, skills gap was mentioned earlier, I want to ask you guys about the organizational behavior and dynamic going on with this change. Automation, hybrid, multi-cloud, all happening. When you start getting into speed of application development for the modern app, opensource where things are opening up and things are going to be democratized with automation and code and writing automation, and scaling that, you're going to have a cultural battle that's happening, and we're kind of seeing it play out in real time. DevOps has kind of gone and been successful, and we're seeing cloud-native bring new innovation, people are refactoring their business models with cloud technologies, now the edge is here, so this idea of speed, shifting left, from a developer standpoint, is putting pressure on the old, incumbent systems, like the security group, or the IT group that's still holding onto their ticketing system, and they're slower, they're getting requests, and the developer's like "Okay, go faster, I want this done faster." So we're seeing departments reorganizing. What do you guys see, 'cause Red Hat, you guys have been in there, all these big accounts for the generation of this modern era. What's the cultural dynamics happening, and what can companies do to be successful, to get to the next level? >> So I think for us, John, we certainly see it and we experience it, across thousands of customers, and what we've done as an organization is put together adoption journeys, a consulting engagement for our customers around an automation adoption journey, and that isn't just about the technology, it's all throughout that technology, it's about those cultural things, thinking differently about the way I automate and the way I share, and the way I do these tasks. So it's as much about cultural and process as it is about technology. And our customers are asking us for that help. Red Hat, you have thousands of customers that are using this product, surely you can come and tell us how we can achieve more with automation, how can we break down these silos, how can we move faster, and so we've put together these offerings, both directly as well as with our partners, to try and help these customers kind of get over that cultural hump. >> Awesome. Anyone else want to react to the cultural shift and dynamics and how it can play out in a positive way? >> Yeah, I think that it's a huge issue. We always talk about people, processes, and technology. Well the people issue's a really big deal here. We're seeing customers, huge organizations, with really capable teams building apps and services and infrastructures, saying "Help me think about automation in a new way." The old days, it was "Hey, I'm thinking about it as a cost savings thing." Yeah, there's still cost savings in there. To your point, John, now they're talking about speed, and security, and things like that. How fast, zero day exploits, now it's like zero hour exploits. How fast can I think about securing something? You know, time to heal, time to secure, time to optimize, so people are asking us, "What are the best practices? What is the best way to look at what I've got, my automation deficits," used to have tech deficits, now you got automation deficits, right? "What do I need to do culturally?" It's very similar to what happened with DevOps, right? Getting teams to get together and think about it differently and holistically, that same sort of transition is happening, and we're helping customers do that, 'cause we're talking to a lot of them where you've got the scholars have been through it. >> Awesome. Alessandro, your thoughts on this issue. >> I think that what Tom and Joe just said is going to further aggravate, it's going to happen more and more going forward, and there is a reason for that. And this connects back with the skill problem, that we discussed before. In the last 10 years, I've seen growing demand for developers to become experts in a lot of areas that have nothing to do with development, code development. They had to become experts in cloud infrastructures, they had to become experts in security because, you've probably heard this many times, security's everybody's responsibility. Now they've been asked to become experts in artificial intelligence, transforming their title into something like ML engineer. The amount of skills and disciplines that they need to master, alone, by themself, would require a lifetime of work. And we're asking human beings to get better and better at all of these things, and all of the best practice. It's absolutely impossible. And so the only way for them, yeah, five jobs in one, six jobs in one, right? Probably for the same seller, and the only way that these people can execute the best practice, enforce the best practice, if the best practices are encoded in automation workflow, not necessarily written by them, but by somebody else, and execute them at the right time, the right context, and for the right reason. >> It's like the five tool player in baseball, you got to do five different things, I mean this is, you got to do AI, you got to do machine learning, you got to have access to all the data, you got to do all these different things. This is the future of automation, and automation's critical. I've never heard that term, automation deficit or automation debt, we used to talk about tech debt, but I think automation is so important because the only way to go fast is to have automation, kind of at the center of it. This is a huge, huge topic. Thank you very much for coming on, power panel on the future of automation, Joe, Tom, Alessandro from Red Hat, thanks for coming on, everyone, really appreciate the insight, great conversation. >> Thanks, John. >> 'Kay, this is theCUBE's coverage of AnsibleFest 2021 virtual. This is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, your host, thanks for watching. (calm music)