>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from the cube and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Organizations have considerable room to improve their performance without making expensive changes to their talent, their structure, or their fundamental business model. You don't need a slew of consultants to tell you what to do. You already know. What you need is to immediately ratchet up expectations, energy, urgency, and intensity. You have to fight mediocrity every step of the way. Amp it up and the results will follow. This is the fundamental premise of a hard-hitting new book written by Frank Slootman, CEO of Snowflake, and published earlier this year. It's called "Amp It Up, Leading for Hypergrowth "by Raising Expectations, Increasing Urgency, "and Elevating Intensity." Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights, powered by ETR. At Snowflake Summit last month, I was asked to interview Frank on stage about his new book. I've read it several times. And if you haven't read it, you should. Even if you have read it, in this Breaking Analysis, we'll dig deeper into the book and share some clarifying insights and nuances directly from Slootman himself from my one-on-one conversation with him. My first question to Slootman was why do you write this book? Okay, it's kind of a common throwaway question. And how the heck did you find time to do it? It's fairly well-known that a few years ago, Slootman put up a post on LinkedIn with the title Amp It Up. It generated so much buzz and so many requests for Frank's time that he decided that the best way to efficiently scale and share his thoughts on how to create high-performing companies and organizations was to publish a book. Now, he wrote the book during the pandemic. And I joked that they must not have Netflix in Montana where he resides. In a pretty funny moment, he said that writing the book was easier than promoting it. Take a listen. >> Denise, our CMO, you know, she just made sure that this process wasn't going to. It was more work for me to promote this book with all these damn podcasts and other crap, than actually writing the book, you know. And after a while, I was like I'm not doing another podcast. >> Now, the book gives a lot of interesting background information on Slootman's career and what he learned at various companies that he led and participated in. Now, I'm not going to go into most of that today, which is why you should read the book yourself. But Slootman, he's become somewhat of a business hero to many people, myself included. Leaders like Frank, Scott McNealy, Jayshree Ullal, and my old boss, Pat McGovern at IDG, have inspired me over the years. And each has applied his or her own approach to building cultures and companies. Now, when Slootman first took over the reins at Snowflake, I published a Breaking Analysis talking about Snowflake and what we could expect from the company now that Slootman and CFO Mike Scarpelli were back together. In that post, buried toward the end, I referenced the playbook that Frank used at Data Domain and ServiceNow, two companies that I followed quite closely as an analyst, and how it would be applied at Snowflake, that playbook if you will. Frank reached out to me afterwards and said something to the effect of, "I don't use playbooks. "I am a situational leader. "Playbooks, you know, they work in football games. "But in the military, they teach you "situational leadership." Pretty interesting learning moment for me. So I asked Frank on the stage about this. Here's what he said. >> The older you get, the more experience that you have, the more you become a prisoner of your own background because you sort of think in terms of what you know as opposed to, you know, getting outside of what you know and trying to sort of look at things like a five-year-old that has never seen this before. And then how would you, you know, deal with it? And I really try to force myself into I've never seen this before and how do I think about it? Because at least they're very different, you know, interpretations. And be open-minded, just really avoid that rinse and repeat mentality. And you know, I've brought people in from who have worked with me before. Some of them come with me from company to company. And they were falling prey to, you know, rinse and repeat. I would just literally go like that's not what we want. >> So think about that for a moment. I mean, imagine coming in to lead a new company and forcing yourself and your people to forget what they know that works and has worked in the past, put that aside and assess the current situation with an open mind, essentially start over. Now, that doesn't mean you don't apply what has worked in the past. Slootman talked to me about bringing back Scarpelli and the synergistic relationship that they have and how they build cultures and the no BS and hard truth mentality they bring to companies. But he bristles when people ask him, "What type of CEO are you?" He says, "Do we have to put a label on it? "It really depends on the situation." Now, one of the other really hard-hitting parts of the book was the way Frank deals with who to keep and who to let go. He uses the Volkswagen tagline of drivers wanted. He says in his book, in companies there are passengers and there are drivers, and we want drivers. He said, "You have to figure out really quickly "who the drivers are and basically throw the wrong people "off the bus, keep the right people, bring in new people "that fit the culture and put them "in the right seats on the bus." Now, these are not easy decisions to make. But as it pertains to getting rid of people, I'm reminded of the movie "Moneyball." Art Howe, the manager of the Oakland As, he refused to play Scott Hatteberg at first base. So the GM, Billy Bean played by Brad Pitt says to Peter Brand who was played by Jonah Hill, "You have to fire Carlos Pena." Don't learn how to fire people. Billy Bean says, "Just keep it quick. "Tell him he's been traded and that's it." So I asked Frank, "Okay, I get it. "Like the movie, when you have the wrong person "on the bus, you just have to make the decision, "be straightforward, and do it." But I asked him, "What if you're on the fence? "What if you're not completely sure if this person "is a driver or a passenger, if he or she "should be on the bus or not on the bus? "How do you handle that?" Listen to what he said. >> I have a very simple way to break ties. And when there's doubt, there's no doubt, okay? >> When there's doubt, there's no doubt. Slootman's philosophy is you have to be emphatic and have high conviction. You know, back to the baseball analogy, if you're thinking about taking the pitcher out of the game, take 'em out. Confrontation is the single hardest thing in business according to Slootman but you have to be intellectually honest and do what's best for the organization, period. Okay, so wow, that may sound harsh but that's how Slootman approaches it, very Belichickian if you will. But how can you amp it up on a daily basis? What's the approach that Slootman takes? We got into this conversation with a discussion about MBOs, management by objective. Slootman in his book says he's killed MBOs at every company he's led. And I asked him to explain why. His rationale was that individual MBOs invariably end up in a discussion about relief of the MBO if the person is not hitting his or her targets. And that detracts from the organizational alignment. He said at Snowflake everyone gets paid the same way, from the execs on down. It's a key way he creates focus and energy in an organization, by creating alignment, urgency, and putting more resources into the most important things. This is especially hard, Slootman says, as the organization gets bigger. But if you do approach it this way, everything gets easier. The cadence changes, the tempo accelerates, and it works. Now, and to emphasize that point, he said the following. Play the clip. >> Every meeting that you have, every email, every encounter in the hallway, whatever it is, is an opportunity to amp things up. That's why I use that title. But do you take that opportunity? >> And according to Slootman, if you don't take that opportunity, if you're not in the moment, amping it up, then you're thinking about your golf game or the tennis match that's going on this weekend or being out on your boat. And to the point, this approach is not for everyone. You're either built for it or you're not. But if you can bring people into the organization that can handle this type of dynamic, it creates energy. It becomes fun. Everything moves faster. The conversations are exciting. They're inspiring. And it becomes addictive. Now let's talk about priorities. I said to Frank that for me anyway, his book was an uncomfortable read. And he was somewhat surprised by that. "Really," he said. I said, "Yeah. "I mean, it was an easy read but uncomfortable "because over my career, I've managed thousands of people, "not tens of thousands but thousands, "enough to have to take this stuff very seriously." And I found myself throughout the book, oh, you know, on the one hand saying to myself, "Oh, I got that right, good job, Dave." And then other times, I was thinking to myself, "Oh wow, I probably need to rethink that. "I need to amp it up on that front." And the point is to Frank's leadership philosophy, there's no one correct way to approach all situations. You have to figure it out for yourself. But the one thing in the book that I found the hardest was Slootman challenged the reader. If you had to drop everything and focus on one thing, just one thing, for the rest of the year, what would that one thing be? Think about that for a moment. Were you able to come up with that one thing? What would happen to all the other things on your priority list? Are they all necessary? If so, how would you delegate those? Do you have someone in your organization who can take those off your plate? What would happen if you only focused on that one thing? These are hard questions. But Slootman really forces you to think about them and do that mental exercise. Look at Frank's body language in this screenshot. Imagine going into a management meeting with Frank and being prepared to share all the things you're working on that you're so proud of and all the priorities you have for the coming year. Listen to Frank in this clip and tell me it doesn't really make you think. >> I've been in, you know, on other boards and stuff. And I got a PowerPoint back from the CEO and there's like 15 things. They're our priorities for the year. I'm like you got 15, you got none, right? It's like you just can't decide, you know, what's important. So I'll tell you everything because I just can't figure out. And the thing is it's very hard to just say one thing. But it's really the mental exercise that matters. >> Going through that mental exercise is really important according to Slootman. Let's have a conversation about what really matters at this point in time. Why does it need to happen? And does it take priority over other things? Slootman says you have to pull apart the hairball and drive extraordinary clarity. You could be wrong, he says. And he admits he's been wrong on many things before. He, like everyone, is fearful of being wrong. But if you don't have the conversation according to Slootman, you're already defeated. And one of the most important things Slootman emphasizes in the book is execution. He said that's one of the reasons he wrote "Amp It Up." In our discussion, he referenced Pat Gelsinger, his former boss, who bought Data Domain when he was working for Joe Tucci at EMC. Listen to Frank describe the interaction with Gelsinger. >> Well, one of my prior bosses, you know, Pat Gelsinger, when they acquired Data Domain through EMC, Pat was CEO of Intel. And he quoted Andy Grove as saying, 'cause he was Intel for a long time when he was younger man. And he said no strategy is better than its execution, which if I find one of the most brilliant things. >> Now, before you go changing your strategy, says Slootman, you have to eliminate execution as a potential point of failure. All too often, he says, Silicon Valley wants to change strategy without really understanding whether the execution is right. All too often companies don't consider that maybe the product isn't that great. They will frequently, for example, make a change to sales leadership without questioning whether or not there's a product fit. According to Slootman, you have to drive hardcore intellectual honesty. And as uncomfortable as that may be, it's incredibly important and powerful. Okay, one of the other contrarian points in the book was whether or not to have a customer success department. Slootman says this became really fashionable in Silicon Valley with the SaaS craze. Everyone was following and pattern matching the lead of salesforce.com. He says he's eliminated the customer service department at every company he's led which had a customer success department. Listen to Frank Slootman in his own words talk about the customer success department. >> I view the whole company as a customer success function. Okay, I'm customer success, you know. I said it in my presentation yesterday. We're a customer-first organization. I don't need a department. >> Now, he went on to say that sales owns the commercial relationship with the customer. Engineering owns the technical relationship. And oh, by the way, he always puts support inside of the engineering department because engineering has to back up support. And rather than having a separate department for customer success, he focuses on making sure that the existing departments are functioning properly. Slootman also has always been big on net promoter score, NPS. And Snowflake's is very high at 72. And according to Slootman, it's not just the product. It's the people that drive that type of loyalty. Now, Slootman stresses amping up the big things and even the little things too. He told a story about someone who came into his office to ask his opinion about a tee shirt. And he turned it around on her and said, "Well, what do you think?" And she said, "Well, it's okay." So Frank made the point by flipping the situation. Why are you coming to me with something that's just okay? If we're going to do something, let's do it. Let's do it all out. Let's do it right and get excited about it, not just check the box and get something off your desk. Amp it up, all aspects of our business. Listen to Slootman talk about Steve Jobs and the relevance of demanding excellence and shunning mediocrity. >> He was incredibly intolerant of anything that he didn't think of as great. You know, he was immediately done with it and with the person. You know, I'm not that aggressive, you know, in that way. I'm a little bit nicer, you know, about it. But I still, you know, I don't want to give into expediency and mediocrity. I just don't, I'm just going to fight it, you know, every step of the way. >> Now, that story was about a little thing like some swag. But Slootman talked about some big things too. And one of the major ways Snowflake was making big, sweeping changes to amp up its business was reorganizing its go-to-market around industries like financial services, media, and healthcare. Here's some ETR data that shows Snowflake's net score or spending momentum for key industry segments over time. The red dotted line at 40% is an indicator of highly elevated spending momentum. And you can see for the key areas shown, Snowflake is well above that level. And we cut this data where responses were greater, the response numbers were greater than 15. So not huge ends but large enough to have meaning. Most were in the 20s. Now, it's relatively uncommon to see a company that's having the success of Snowflake make this kind of non-trivial change in the middle of steep S-curve growth. Why did they make this move? Well, I think it's because Snowflake realizes that its data cloud is going to increasingly have industry diversity and unique value by industry, that ecosystems and data marketplaces are forming around industries. So the more industry affinity Snowflake can create, the stronger its moat will be. It also aligns with how the largest and most prominent global system integrators, global SIs, go to market. This is important because as companies are transforming, they are radically changing their data architecture, how they think about data, how they approach data as a competitive advantage, and they're looking at data as specifically a monetization opportunity. So having industry expertise and knowledge and aligning with those customer objectives is going to serve Snowflake and its ecosystems well in my view. Slootman even said he joined the board of Instacart not because he needed another board seat but because he wanted to get out of his comfort zone and expose himself to other industries as a way to learn. So look, we're just barely scratching the surface of Slootman's book and I've pulled some highlights from our conversation. There's so much more that I can share just even from our conversation. And I will as the opportunity arises. But for now, I'll just give you the kind of bumper sticker of "Amp It Up." Raise your standards by taking every opportunity, every interaction, to increase your intensity. Get your people aligned and moving in the same direction. If it's the wrong direction, figure it out and course correct quickly. Prioritize and sharpen your focus on things that will really make a difference. If you do these things and increase the urgency in your organization, you'll naturally pick up the pace and accelerate your company. Do these things and you'll be able to transform, better identify adjacent opportunities and go attack them, and create a lasting and meaningful experience for your employees, customers, and partners. Okay, that's it for today. Thanks for watching. And thank you to Alex Myerson who's on production and he manages the podcast for Breaking Analysis. Kristin Martin and Cheryl Knight help get the word out on social and in our newsletters. And Rob Hove is our EIC over at Silicon Angle who does some wonderful and tremendous editing. Thank you all. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts. Wherever you listen, just search Breaking Analysis podcast. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. And you can email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com or DM me @dvellante or comment on my LinkedIn posts. And please do check out etr.ai for the best survey data in enterprise tech. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. Be well. And we'll see you next time on Breaking Analysis. (upbeat music)

>>Really excited about this year's data, citizens with so many of you together. Uh, I'm going to talk today about accessible data, because what good is the data. If you can get it into your hands and shop for it, but you can't understand it. Uh, and I'm here today with, uh, bald, really thrilled to be here with Paul. Paul is an award-winning author on all topics data. I think 20 books with 21st on the way over 300 articles, he's been a frequent speaker. He's an expert in future trends. Uh, he's a VP at cognitive systems, uh, over at IBM teachers' data also, um, at the business school and as a champion of diversity initiatives. Paul, thank you for being here, really the conformance, uh, to the session with you. >>Oh, thanks for having me. It's a privilege. >>So let's get started with, uh, our origins and data poll. Um, and I'll start with a little story of my own. So, uh, I trained as an engineer way back when, uh, and, um, in one of the courses we got as an engineer, it was about databases. So we got the stick thick book of CQL and me being in it for the programming. I was like, well, who needs this stuff? And, uh, I wanted to do my part in terms of making data accessible. So essentially I, I was the only book that I sold on. Uh, obviously I learned some hard lessons, uh, later on, as I did a master's in AI after that, and then joined the database research lab at the university that Libra spun off from. Uh, but Hey, we all learned along the way. And, uh, Paula, I'm really curious. Um, when did you awaken first to data? If you will? >>You know, it's really interesting Stan, because I come from the opposite side, an undergrad in economics, uh, with some, uh, information systems research at the higher level. And so I think I was always attuned to what data could do, but I didn't understand how to get at it and the kinds of nuances around it. So then I started this job, a database company, like 27 years ago, and it started there, but I would say the awakening has never stopped because the data game is always changing. Like I look at these epochs that I've been through data. I was a real relational databases thinking third normal form, and then no SQL databases. And then I watch no SQL be about no don't use SQL, then wait a minute. Not only sequel. And today it's really for the data citizens about wait, no, I need SQL. So, um, I think I'm always waking up in data, so I'll call it a continuum if you will. But that was it. It was trying to figure out the technology behind driving analytics in which I took in school. >>Excellent. And I fully agree with you there. Uh, every couple of years they seem to reinvent new stuff and they want to be able to know SQL models. Let me see. I saw those come and go. Uh, obviously, and I think that's, that's a challenge for most people because in a way, data is a very abstract concepts, um, until you get down in the weeds and then it starts to become really, really messy, uh, until you, you know, from that end button extract a certain insights. Um, and as the next thing I want to talk about with you is that challenging organizations, we're hearing a lot about data, being valuable data, being the new oil data, being the new soil, the new gold, uh, data as an asset is being used as a slogan all over. Uh, people are investing a lot in data over multiple decades. Now there's a lot of new data technologies, always, but still, it seems that organizations fundamentally struggle with getting people access to data. What do you think are some of the key challenges that are underlying the struggles that mud, that organizations seem to face when it comes to data? >>Yeah. Listen, Stan, I'll tell you a lot of people I think are stuck on what I call their data, acumen curves, and you know, data is like a gym membership. If you don't use it, you're not going to get any value on it. And that's what I mean by accurate. And so I like to think that you use the analogy of some mud. There's like three layers that are holding a lot of organizations back at first is just the amount of data. Now, I'm not going to give you some stat about how many times I can go to the moon and back with the data regenerate, but I will give you one. I found interesting stat. The average human being in their lifetime will generate a petabyte of data. How much data is that? If that was my apple music playlist, it would be about 2000 years of nonstop music. >>So that's some kind of playlist. And I think what's happening for the first layer of mud is when I first started writing about data warehousing and analytics, I would be like, go find a needle in the haystack. But now it's really finding a needle in a stack of needles. So much data. So little time that's level one of mine. I think the second thing is people are looking for some kind of magic solution, like Cinderella's glass slipper, and you put it on her. She turns into a princess that's for Disney movies, right? And there's nothing magical about it. It is about skill and acumen and up-skilling. And I think if you're familiar with the duper, you recall the Hadoop craze, that's exactly what happened, right? Like people brought all their data together and everyone was going to be able to access it and give insights. >>And it teams said it was pretty successful, but every line of business I ever talked to said it was a complete failure. And the third layer is governance. That's actually where you're going to find some magic. And the problem in governance is every client I talked to is all about least effort to comply. They don't want to violate GDPR or California consumer protection act or whatever governance overlooks, where they do business and governance. When you don't lead me separate to comply and try not to get fine, but as an accelerant to your analytics, and that gets you out of that third layer of mud. So you start to invoke what I call the wisdom of the crowd. Now imagine taking all these different people with intelligence about the business and giving them access and acumen to hypothesize on thousands of ideas that turn into hundreds, we test and maybe dozens that go to production. So those are three layers that I think every organization is facing. >>Well. Um, I definitely follow on all the days, especially the one where people see governance as a, oh, I have to comply to this, which always hurts me a little bit, honestly, because all good governance is about making things easier while also making sure that they're less riskier. Um, but I do want to touch on that Hadoop thing a little bit, uh, because for me in my a decade or more over at Libra, we saw it come as well as go, let's say around 2015 to 2020 issue. So, and it's still around. Obviously once you put your data in something, it's very hard to make it go away, but I've always felt that had do, you know, it seemed like, oh, now we have a bunch of clusters and a bunch of network engineers. So what, >>Yeah. You know, Stan, I fell for, I wrote the book to do for dummies and it had such great promise. I think the problem is there wasn't enough education on how to extract value out of it. And that's why I say it thinks it's great. They liked clusters and engineers that you just said, but it didn't drive lineup >>Business. Got it. So do you think that the whole paradigm with the clouds that we're now on is going to fundamentally change that or is just an architectural change? >>Yeah. You know, it's, it's a great comment. What you're seeing today now is the movement for the data lake. Maybe a way from repositories, like Hadoop into cloud object stores, right? And then you look at CQL or other interfaces over that not allows me to really scale compute and storage separately, but that's all the technical stuff at the end of the day, whether you're on premise hybrid cloud, into cloud software, as a service, if you don't have the acumen for your entire organization to know how to work with data, get value from data, this whole data citizen thing. Um, you're not going to get the kind of value that goes into your investment, right? And I think that's the key thing that business leaders need to understand is it's not about analytics for kind of science project sakes. It's about analytics to drive. >>Absolutely. We fully agree with that. And I want to touch on that point. You mentioned about the wisdom of the crowds, the concept that I love about, right, and your organization is a big grout full of what we call data citizens. Now, if I remember correctly from the book of the wisdom of the crowds, there's, there's two points that really, you have to take Canada. What is, uh, for the wisdom of the grounds to work, you have to have all the individuals enabled, uh, for them to have access to the right information and to be able to share that information safely kept from the bias from others. Otherwise you're just biasing the outcome. And second, you need to be able to somehow aggregate that wisdom up to a certain decision. Uh, so as Felix mentioned earlier, we all are United by data and it's a data citizen topic. >>I want to touch on with you a little bit, because at Collibra we look at it as anyone who uses data to do their job, right. And 2020 has sort of accelerated digitization. Uh, but apart from that, I've always believed that, uh, you don't have to have data in your title, like a data analyst or a data scientist to be a data citizen. If I take a look at the example inside of Libra, we have product managers and they're trying to figure out which features are most important and how are they used and what patterns of behavior is there. You have a gal managers, and they're always trying to know the most they can about their specific accounts, uh, to be able to serve as them best. So for me, the data citizen is really in its broadest sense. Uh, anyone who uses data to do their job, does that, does that resonate with you? >>Yeah, absolutely. It reminds me of myself. And to be honest in my eyes where I got started from, and I agree, you don't need the word data in your title. What you need to have is curiosity, and that is in your culture and in your being. And, and I think as we look at organizations to transform and take full advantage of their, their data investments, they're going to need great governance. I guarantee you that, but then you're going to have to invest in this data citizen concept. And the first thing I'll tell you is, you know, that kind of acumen, if you will, as a team sport, it's not a departmental sport. So you need to think about what are the upskilling programs of where we can reach across to the technical and the non-technical, you know, lots and lots of businesses rely on Microsoft Excel. >>You have data citizens right there, but then there's other folks who are just flat out curious about stuff. And so now you have to open this up and invest in those people. Like, why are you paying people to think about your business without giving the data? It would be like hiring Tom Brady as a quarterback and telling him not to throw a pass. Right. And I see it all the time. So we kind of limit what we define as data citizen. And that's why I love what you said. You don't need the word data in your title and more so if you don't build the acumen, you don't know how to bring the data together, maybe how to wrangle it, but where did it come from? And where can you fixings? One company I worked with had 17 definitions for a sales individual, 17 definitions, and the talent team and HR couldn't drive to a single definition because they didn't have the data accurate. So when you start thinking of the data citizen, concept it about enabling everybody to shop for data much. Like I would look for a USB cable on Amazon, but also to attach to a business glossary for definition. So we have a common version of what a word means, the lineage of the data who owns it, who did it come from? What did it do? So bring that all together. And, uh, I will tell you companies that invest in the data, citizen concept, outperform companies that don't >>For all of that, I definitely fully agree that there's enough research out there that shows that the ones who are data-driven are capturing the most markets, but also capturing the most growth. So they're capturing the market even faster. And I love what you said, Paul, about, um, uh, the brains, right? You've already paid for the brains you've already invested in. So you may as well leverage them. Um, you may as well recognize and, and enable the data citizens, uh, to get access to the assets that they need to really do their job properly. That's what I want to touch on just a little bit, if, if you're capable, because for me, okay. Getting access to data is one thing, right? And I think you already touched on a few items there, but I'm shopping for data. Now I have it. I have a cul results set in my hands. Let's say, but I'm unable to read and write data. Right? I don't know how to analyze it. I don't know maybe about bias. Uh, maybe I, I, I don't know how to best visualize it. And maybe if I do, maybe I don't know how to craft a compelling persuasion narrative around it to change my bosses decisions. So from your viewpoint, do you think that it's wise for companies to continuously invest in data literacy to continuously upgrade that data citizens? If you will. >>Yeah, absolutely. Forest. I'm going to tell you right now, data literacy years are like dog years stage. So fast, new data types, new sources of data, new ways to get data like API APIs and microservices. But let me take it away from the technical concept for a bit. I want to talk to you about the movie. A star is born. I'm sure most of you have seen it or heard it Bradley Cooper, lady Gaga. So everyone knows the movie. What most people probably don't know is when lady Gaga teamed up with Bradley Cooper to do this movie, she demanded that he sing everything like nothing could be auto-tuned everything line. This is one of the leading actors of Hollywood. They filmed this remake in 42 days and Bradley Cooper spent 18 months on singing lessons. 18 months on a guitar lessons had a voice coach and it's so much and so forth. >>And so I think here's the point. If one of the best actors in the world has to invest three and a half years for 42 days to hit a movie out of the park. Why do we think we don't need a continuous investment in data literacy? Even once you've done your initial training, if you will, over the data, citizen, things are going to change. I don't, you don't. If I, you Stan, if you go to the gym and workout every day for three months, you'll never have to work out for the rest of your life. You would tell me I was ridiculous. So your data literacy is no different. And I will tell you, I have managed thousands of individuals, some of the most technical people around distinguished engineers, fellows, and data literacy comes from curiosity and a culture of never ending learning. That is the number one thing to success. >>And that curiosity, I hire people who are curious, I'll give you one more story. It's about Mozart. And this 21 year old comes to Mozart and he says, Mozart, can you teach me how to compose a symphony? And Mozart looks at this person that says, no, no, you're too young, too young. You compose your fourth symphony when you were 12 and Mozart looks at him and says, yeah, but I didn't go around asking people how to compose a symphony. Right? And so the notion of that story is curiosity. And those people who show up in always want to learn, they're your home run individuals. And they will bring data literacy across the organization. >>I love it. And I'm not going to try and be Mozart, but you know, three and a half years, I think you said two times, 18 months, uh, maybe there's hope for me yet in a singing, you'll be a good singer. Um, Duchy on the, on the, some of the sports references you've made, uh, Paul McGuire, we first connected, uh, I'm not gonna like disclose where you're from, but, uh, I saw he did come up and I know it all sorts of sports that drive to measure everything they can right on the field of the field. So let's imagine that you've done the best analysis, right? You're the most advanced data scientists schooled in the classics, as well as the modernist methods, the best tools you've made a beautiful analysis, beautiful dashboards. And now your coach just wants to put their favorite player on the game, despite what you're building to them. How do you deal with that kind of coaches? >>Yeah. Listen, this is a great question. I think for your data analytics strategy, but also for anyone listening and watching, who wants to just figure out how to drive a career forward? I would give the same advice. So the story you're talking about, indeed hockey, you can figure out where I'm from, but it's around the Ottawa senators, general manager. And he made a quote in an interview and he said, sometimes I want to punch my analytics, people in the head. Now I'm going to tell you, that's not a good culture for analytics. And he goes on to say, they tell me not to play this one player. This one player is very tough. You know, throws four or five hits a game. And he goes, I'd love my analytics people to get hit by bore a wacky and tell me how it feels. That's the player. >>Sure. I'm sure he hits hard, but here's the deal. When he's on the ice, the opposing team gets more shots on goal than the senators do on the opposing team. They score more goals, they lose. And so I think whenever you're trying to convince a movement forward, be it management, be it a project you're trying to fund. I always try to teach something that someone didn't previously know before and make them think, well, I never thought of it that way before. And I think the great opportunity right now, if you're trying to get moving in a data analytics strategy is around this post COVID era. You know, we've seen post COVID now really accelerate, or at least post COVID in certain parts of the world, but accelerate the appetite for digital transformation by about half a decade. Okay. And getting the data within your systems, as you digitize will give you all kinds of types of projects to make people think differently than the way they thought before. >>About data. I call this data exhaust. I'll give you a great example, Uber. I think we're all familiar with Uber. If we all remember back in the days when Uber would offer you search pricing. Okay? So basically you put Uber on your phone, they know everything about you, right? Who are your friends, where you going, uh, even how much batteries on your phone? Well, in a data science paper, I read a long time ago. They recognize that there was a 70% chance that you would accept a surge price. If you had less than 10% of your battery. So 10% of battery on your phone is an example of data exhaust all the lawns that you generate on your digital front end properties. Those are logs. You can take those together and maybe show executive management with data. We can understand why people abandoned their cart at the shipping phase, or what is the amount of shipping, which they abandoned it. When is the signal when our systems are about to go to go down. So, uh, I think that's a tremendous way. And if you look back to the sports, I mean the Atlanta Falcons NFL team, and they monitor their athletes, sleep performance, the Toronto Raptors basketball, they're running AI analytics on people's personalities and everything they tweet and every interview to see if the personality fits. So in sports, I think athletes are the most important commodity, if you will, or asset a yet all these teams are investing in analytics. So I think that's pretty telling, >>Okay, Paul, it looks like we're almost out of time. So in 30 seconds or less, what would you recommend to the data citizens out there? >>Okay. I'm going to give you a four tips in 30 seconds. Number one, remember learning never ends be curious forever. You'll drive your career. Number two, remember companies that invest in analytics and data, citizens outperform those that don't McKinsey says it's about 1.4 times across many KPIs. Number three, stop just collecting the dots and start connecting them with that. You need a strong governance strategy and that's going to help you for the future because the biggest thing in the future is not going to be about analytics, accuracy. It's going to be about analytics, explainability. So accuracy is no longer going to be enough. You're going to have to explain your decisions and finally stay positive and forever test negative. >>Love it. Thank you very much fall. Um, and for all the data seasons is out there. Um, when it comes down to access to data, it's more than just getting your hands on the data. It's also knowing what you can do with it, how you can do that and what you definitely shouldn't be doing with it. Uh, thank you everyone out there and enjoy your learning and interaction with the community. Stay healthy. Bye-bye.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think virtual 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We've got three great guests here to talk about IBM Cloud Satellite and AI operations. Laura Guio, GM of Global Cisco Alliance. Matthew Angelstad, IBM Partner, Lead Client Partner for Canada, Financial Services. And Kuberan Kandasamy, VP of Personal Insurance at Economical Insurance. Folks, thanks for coming on theCUBE, this great panel on Cloud Satellite and AI ops. Thanks for joining me. >> Thank you, John. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, John, good to see you. >> Well, first, let's start with you. There's the General Manager for the IBM-Cisco strategic partnership. Tell us more about the relationship as cloud has become hybrid and it's pretty much determined that's the standard and multicloud is right around the corner. The programmability of the infrastructure is critical. And so, obviously you can see the modern applications are doing that. Take us through the IBM-Cisco strategic partnership. >> Absolutely, so John, as you know, and we've talked in the past, it's a 25-year relationship between IBM and Cisco, long-standing. Now, if you look at Cisco in the past, they've really been known as a networking and hardware company. But with the evolution of Cisco and how they're changing, they're really switching to be more around a supporting technology and in the services and software areas. With that change coupled with Kyndryl, our spin-off of what we were previously calling NewCo, we have an opportunity now to refocus all of the work that we're doing as IBM and Cisco going forward. You couple that with the Red Hat acquisition that we did almost two years ago, we've got a three-way partnership here that's really bringing a lot of value to the marketplace. Now, when you look at that from a hybrid cloud perspective, we announced our Satellite product, which is built on top of Cisco technology with IBM in that as well. And then really taking the security elements of what Cisco does and bringing all of this into the fold around that hybrid cloud solution. So, we're super excited about this. >> Real quick while I have you, you brought up a couple of key points. I just want to get to, I know we're going to get to it later, but the operating model has shifted. You mentioned with the NewCo and these relationships, ecosystem relationships and network effect, not just like packets, but like businesses and APIs are critical. This new cloud operating model is really the center of that equation. How does that relate into all that? >> So, you know, these operating models and how we're going to market here is changing dramatically. And you take what Cisco's doing, and you know, we've got a client here with us today, Kuberan who's going to talk about what they're doing with some of this technology. But really taking that at the core of how do you bring value at the client. What are they doing to get that hybrid cloud solution put into place? And then what are all those surrounding elements around software, managing the ops and things that we need? This is where IBM and Cisco couple together, really great value. >> Kuberan, you got teed up beautifully there. So, I want to go to you and then I'll go to Matthew after. But, okay, tell us more about this IBM-Cisco dynamic. You guys are a hot growth company doing very well and continuing to grow. And sure, post-pandemic is looking good too. So, take us through why you decided to engage IBM and Cisco. >> Sure. Sure, John, thank you. You know, to appreciate how we got here and why we asked IBM and Cisco to help us, let me first start by providing some background. Our journey started back in 2016 when we launched Sonnet, an MVP. Sonnet is our fully automated, direct-to-customer digital channel, where customers can quote and buy home and auto policies online without the need to engage anyone at Economical. Then in 2018, we launched Vyne, another MVP. Vyne is our simplified self-serve and digitized broker channel, where our broker partners can quote and buy home and auto insurance policies for their customers, again, without the need to engage anyone at Economical. Both Sonnet and Vyne have won awards for innovation and both have been industry disruptors. You know, after launch, we heightened our focus on enhancing business functionality and user experiences. Given that we had started with MVPs, it made sense for us to put a lot of emphasis on enhancements initially. And, you know, we maintain the platform level monitoring capabilities at a macro level. And the way we did the enhancements where we stood up agile pods, you know, focused on very specific business mandate. This approach delivered desired results for our business, but as our excitement grew for our upcoming IPO and our business started ramping up their growth plans, we needed to increase our focus on fine-tuning key components, which included enhancing our focus on stability and predictability for our Sonnet and Vyne platforms. And we needed the ability to look deeper and get into the micro level, so that we can monitor the pulse of, you know, every component of our user's journey across both Sonnet and Vyne, and we needed help with this. And this is where we engaged IBM and Cisco to help us through this journey. >> On that vision real quick. How does the AI fit in? More on the automation side or on the app side? I mean, I can imagine with that growth in the IPO, you think in automation, I'm assuming, can you elaborate quickly? >> Absolutely. So, I mean, if you think about it, it's a lot of data that we get, like it's all digitized, so we have a lot of data in there. And this is where, you know, the ability to be able to actually mine that data and actually be taking proactive steps in terms of predicting, having predictability and all that, that's where the AI ops comes in. But that's part of our journey through this. >> Yeah, it's good. I mean, the theme here is transformation is the innovation at scale. Matthew, you lead the Financial Services division in Canada. What are you seeing as the hot topics with your clients and how are you responding? How is IBM participating? >> Yeah, absolutely. And Kuberan was touching on this from Economical's perspective. They already have two leading digital solutions in market with Sonnet on the retail customer side in Vyne with their broker network. But what we're seeing even more so in the past year so of the pandemic is a dramatic acceleration of that end-to-end digital experience. So, our clients and their customers are expecting digital native solutions that are contextually personalized, highly secure and always available or extremely resilient, right? That obviously plays into IBM's capabilities and our joint capabilities with our partner ecosystem such as Cisco AppDynamics around hybrid, multicloud and AI. >> So, if you don't mind, if you don't mind following up on that AppDynamics point. Can you tell me a little bit more about how that solution played out and how that evolved? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, first off, this was based, again, on our long-standing relationship with Cisco AppDynamics that Laura was speaking about. And then the unique to what Kuberan in Economical was seeking of stitching together the data footprint across the infrastructure architecture but leveraging data in a business context. And I think that is the unique value that AppDynamics brings to this scenario here, is a market-leading solution that does bring together those multiple data sets but contextualizes them in a business context. So, you can understand from a user perspective that end-to-end journey right from initiation in the application, all the way through the technical infrastructure. And it becomes very preventative in terms of identifying and resolving potential issues before they even occur. >> So, AppD and these IBM services work well together right there. That's your key point, right? That's. >> Absolutely, and that's, the point is bringing together the best combination of solutions and services on behalf of our customer set. And this where AppDynamics and IBM and our other partners work incredibly well together. >> Well, we'll talk about the dynamics again. This is, again, this highlights the point of the better together combination here with the Cisco relationship and the IBM evolution you mentioned. What can other clients expect? I mean, this is going to be the playbook. (laughs) I mean, you got the Cloud Satellite. Take us through what this means. What does all this mean? >> Yeah, absolutely. I'll start, and maybe even Laura can add as needed. But from an IBM perspective, absolutely. We're going to work with our partner ecosystem in the hybrid multicloud world. So, we've really evolved whether it's IBM Cloud, AWS, as some of our clients, including Economical and others. Microsoft Azure, Google. It is about bringing those together regardless of strategic decisions made on cloud platform, but understanding how the applications play together. And again, stitching together the data across those application sets to drive value out of it. This is where we're really seeing the evolution of IBM and our partner ecosystem, and the evolution of IBM services as well. >> Awesome. >> Yeah. And if you really look at what Cisco's trying to do, they've declared they're going to be in this hybrid cloud space. They bring the elements to the solution when you look at networking. We look at some of the security. And then when we start looking at how this combines with edge technology, we really start getting combinations between the IBM technology, the Cisco technology and how that completes a picture in a solution for the client. >> I love the end-to-end story. I see hybrid as distributed computer in my mind and now you've got multicloud as subsystems and all is going to have to be operated together. And the software that makes that happen. And I can see tons of head room opportunity there. Kuberan, talk about what you guys are seeing as results now. Because this is where you start to see the conversation shift to. It's not just go to the cloud anymore, it's make the cloud operational on all environments. That's really what people want to see. Can you share what you're seeing as a result and where do you go from there? >> Yeah, absolutely. You know, what's awesome about all of this is first of all, in a very short time the team which really was composed of a cross-functional and a highly collaborative group of people, they've already delivered some key pieces that are giving us line of sight into what's going on for a business solution. And, you know, the implemented scope is already detecting symptoms and allowing us to be very proactive and it is also helping us to complete root cause analysis faster. It's helping us to reduce defect linkage through our quality assurance practices. So, you know, for us, as I mentioned earlier, this is a journey like, you know, unlike traditional approaches where implementations are driven by predetermined scope. We are changing the mindset, specifically because we're using a lot of telemetry and continuous discovery in helping transform how our platform is important. You know, it has become part of our philosophy where business and technology are now working closer together. And our vision is to navigate continuously towards having a highly automated monitoring solution that leverages cognitive insights and intelligence. So, you know, to be able to have a robust self-healing capability. And this is where it kind of ties with the whole cloud capability, because now you can actually enable the self-healing capabilities and with AppDynamics bringing in the dynamic capture of issues happening and things like that. And if you kind of step back a bit and if you think of this approach, this is no different than how we envisioned and how we implemented both Sonnet and Vyne, where it was a fully digitized end-to-end solution that provides services and value for, excuse me, for our customers. Right? So, hopefully that kind of stitches the picture for you. >> That's awesome, great insight. Laura, Matthew, Kuberan, thanks for coming on theCUBE. In the last minute that we have, let's go down the line. Laura, Matthew and Kuberan, we'll start with you guys. What's the bottom line for IBM and Cisco's relationship with the Cloud Satellite and AI. What should people walk away with? What's the bumper sticker? What's the summary? >> So, as IBM invest more and more in these strategic hybrid cloud solutions industry-focused, it's really bringing an industry-focused solution to clients without us having to reinvent that every time. And as you've heard from Kuberan here, I mean, we're bringing that value to our customers. >> All right. Matthew? >> Yeah, I'd just like to add, and this is a great example here of being able to co-innovate and collaborate with our partners and with our clients, Economical in this case, to evolve these solutions. And as Kuberan has stated, this is the first step in a journey here and there's lots of exciting things to come. >> Kuberan, take us home, final word. >> Thank you. What I would say is, what we've learned from this is really standing this stuff in more like a garage style kind of a situation where you can actually get something going rapid and you get business results and you start seeing ROI very quickly. So, that's the benefit I've seen. >> Awesome, great points. IBM and Cisco better together. This ecosystem, the co-creation, the new network effects is the new dynamic in the marketplace. This is the table stakes. Thanks for coming on, thanks for sharing the insights. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thanks a lot, John. >> Okay, IBM Think 2021. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thank you for watching. (cheerful music)

>>from around the globe. It's the >>cube >>With digital coverage of IBM think 2021 >>brought to you by IBM. Welcome back to the cubes coverage of IBM Think Virtual 2021. I'm john for your host of the cube. Got three great guests here talking about IBM cloud satellite and AI operations, Lori G O G M of Global SisQo Alliance, Matthew, Engelstad, IBM partner. Lead client partner for Canada financial services and cooper on Kent Asami VP of personal insurance. That economical insurance folks. Thanks for coming on the cube. This great panel on cloud satellite and Ai Ops. Thanks for joining me. >>Thank you. Thank you. Thank you john. Good to see you. >>Well, first let's start with you. There's a general manager for the IBM Cisco Strategic Partnership. Tell us more about the relationship as cloud has become hybrid. It's pretty much determined that's the standard and multi clouds right around the corner. The program ability of the infrastructure is critical and so obviously you can see the modern applications are doing that take us through the IBM Cisco strategic partnership. >>Mhm. Absolutely. So john as you know, and we've talked in the past, it's a 25 year relationship between IBM and Cisco longstanding. Now if you look at Cisco in the past, they've really been known as a networking and hardware company, but with the evolution of Cisco and how they're changing, they're really switching to be more around supporting technology and in the services and software areas. With that change coupled with Kendrell, our spin off of what we were previously calling Newco, we have an opportunity now to refocus all of the work that we're doing as IBM and Cisco going forward. You couple that with the red hat acquisition that we did almost two years ago, we've got a three way partnership here that's really bringing a lot of value to the marketplace. Now, when you look at that from a hybrid cloud perspective, we announced our satellite product which is built on top of Cisco technology with IBM in that as well. And then really taking the security elements of what Cisco does and bringing all this into the fold around that hybrid cloud solution. So we're super excited about this >>real quick. Why have you brought up a couple key points? I just want to get too. I know we're gonna get to it later, but the operating model has shifted, you mentioned with the new co and these relationships, ecosystem relationships and network effect, not just like packets, but like businesses and mps are critical. This new cloud operating model is really a center of of that. That that equation, how does that relate into all that? >>So, the, you know, these operating models and how we're going to market here is changing dramatically and you take what Cisco is doing and you know, we've got a client here with us Today programme who's going to talk about what they're doing with some of this technology. But really taking that at the core of how do you bring value at the client, what are they doing to get that hybrid cloud solution put into place And then what are all those surrounding elements around software managing the apps and things that we need? This is where IBM and Cisco coupled together. Really bring value >>cooper. You got teed up beautifully there so I want to go to you then go to Matthew after but okay, tell us more about this IBM. Cisco dynamic. You guys are hot growth company um doing very well and continuing to grow and sure, post pandemic. It's looking good too. So take us through why you decided to engage IBM and Cisco? >>Sure, sure john thank you. Um you know, to appreciate how we got here and why? We asked IBM and Cisco to help us. Let me first start by providing some background. Our journey started back in 2016 when we launched Sonnet and M. V. P. Uh Sonnet is a fully automated director customer digital channel where customers can quote and buy home and all of his online without the need to engage anyone at economical. Then in 2018, we launched by another m. v. p. Wine is our simplified self serve and digitized broker channel where broker partners can quote and buy home and auto insurance policies for their customers again, without the need to engage anyone at economical. Both uh some wine have won awards for innovation and both have been industry disruptors. You know, after launch we heightened our focus on enhancing business functionality and user experiences, given that we had started with MVPs, it made sense for us to put a lot of emphasis on enhancements initially. And you know, we maintained platform level monitoring capabilities at a macro macro level. We we and and the way we did the enhancement where we stood up agile pods, you know, focused on very specific business mandate. This approach delivered design results for our business. But as our excitement grew for our upcoming I. P. O. And our business started ramping up their growth plans. We needed to increase our focus on fine tuning key components which included enhancing our focus on stability and predictability for our sonnet and wine platforms. And we needed the ability to look deeper and get into the micro level so that we can monitor the pulse of uh you know, every component of our users journey uh across both solid and wine. And we need to help with this. And this is where we engage idea Francisco to help us through this journey >>on that vision real quick. How does the A. I. Fit in more on the automation side or on the upside? I mean I can imagine what that growth in the I. P. O. You're thinking automation I'm assuming. Can you elaborate quickly? >>Absolutely. So I mean if you think about it, it's a lot of data that we get like it's all digitized so we have a lot of data in there and this is where you know the ability to be able to actually mined that data and actually be taking proactive steps in terms of predicting having predictability and all that. That's where the Ai Ops comes in but that's part of our journey through this. >>Yeah that's good. I mean the theme here is transformation is the innovation at scale. Matthew, you lead the financial services division in Canada. What are you seeing as the hot topics uh with your clients and how are you responding? House IBM participating? >>Yeah, absolutely. And cooper and was touching on on this from economical perspective, they already have two leading digital solutions in market with Sonnet on the retail customer side in vine with their broker network. But what we're seeing even more so in the past year or so of the pandemic is a dramatic acceleration of that and then digital experience. So our clients and their customers are expecting digital native solutions that are contextually personalized, highly secure and always available or extremely resilient. Right? That obviously plays into IBM's capabilities and our joint capabilities with our partner ecosystem such as Cisco appdynamics around high hybrid, multi cloud and AI. >>So, if you don't mind if I don't mind following up on that app dynamics point, um can you tell me a little bit more about how that solution played out and how that involved? >>Yeah, absolutely. So first off this was based again on our longstanding relationship with Cisco appdynamics that laura was speaking about and then unique to what cooper and and economical was seeking. Of stitching together the data footprint across the infrastructure architecture. But leveraging data in a business context. And I think that is the unique value that app dynamics brings to this scenario here is a market leading solution that does bring together those multiple datasets, but contextual ISeS them in a business context. So you can understand from a user perspective that end to end journey right from initiation in the application all the way through the technical infrastructure and it becomes very preventative uh in terms of identifying and resolving potential issues before they even occur. >>So empty and this IBM services worked well together right there. That's your key point, right? That's >>absolutely. And that's the point is bringing to bear the best combination of, of solutions and services on behalf of our customers set. And this is where appdynamics and IBM uh, and our other partners work incredibly well together. >>We'll talk about the dynamics. Again, this is again, this highlights the point of the better together combination here with the Cisco relationship and the IBM evolution you mentioned, um what can other clients expect? I mean, this is gonna be the playbook. I mean you got the cloud satellite take us through what this means. What does all this mean? >>Yeah, absolutely. I'll start and maybe even laura can can add as as needed, but from an IBM perspective, absolutely. We're gonna work with our partner ecosystem um in the hybrid, multi cloud world. So uh we've really evolved whether it's IBM cloud aws as some of our clients, including economical and others Microsoft, Azure, um google. Uh It is about bringing those together regardless of strategic decisions made on cloud platform, but understanding how the applications play together and again, stitching together the data across those applications sets to drive value out of it. Uh This is where we're really seeing the evolution of IBM in our partner ecosystem and the evolution of IBM services as well. Awesome. >>Yeah. And if you really look at what Cisco is trying to do, um they've declared they're going to be in this hybrid cloud space. They bring elements to the solution. When you look at networking we look at some of the security and then when we start looking at how this combines with edge technology, we really start getting combinations between the IBM technology, the Cisco technology and how that completes a picture in a solution for a client. >>I love the end to end story, actually hybrids, distributed computer in my mind and now you've got multi club, it's just subsystems and all gonna have to be operated together and the software all makes that happen. I could see tons of headroom opportunity there cooper and talk about what you guys are seeing as results now because this is where you start to see uh the conversation shift too. It's not just go to the cloud anymore, it's make the cloud operational on all environments. That's really people want to see, can you share what you're seeing as a result? And where do you go from there? >>Yeah, absolutely. Um you know what's awesome about all of this is first of all, in a very short time, the team which really was composed of a cross functional and the highly collaborative group of people, uh they've already delivered some key pieces that are giving us line aside into what's going on for our business solution and you know, the implemented uh scope is already detecting symptoms and allowing us to be very proactive and it is also helping us to complete root cause analysis faster, helping us reduce defect linkage through a quality assurance practices. So, you know, for us, as I mentioned earlier, this is a journey like, you know, unlike traditional approaches where um implementations are driven by predetermined scope, we are changing the mindset specifically because we're using a lot of telemetry and continuous discovery in helping transform how our platform is important. You know, it has become part of our philosophy where business and technology are now working closer together and our vision is to navigate yeah continuously towards having a highly automated monitoring solution that leverages cognitive insights and intelligence. So you know to be able to have a robust self healing capability and this is where it kind of ties with the whole cloud capability because now you can actually enable the self self healing capabilities and with afghan um is bringing in the uh uh dynamic capture of issues happening and things like that. And if you kind of step back a bit and if you think of this approach, this is no different than how we envisioned and how we implemented both Summit and Wine where it was a fully digitized end to end solution that provides services and value for excuse me for our customers. Right? So hopefully that changes the picture. >>That's awesome. Great insight, Laura Matthew Gordon? Thanks for coming on the cube in the last minute that we have, let's go down the line laura Matthew cooper on. We'll start with you guys. What's the bottom line for IBM and Cisco relationship with the cloud satellite and a I guess what should people walk away with? What's the bumper sticker? What's the summary? >>So as IBM invest more and more in these strategic cloud hybrid cloud solutions industry focused, it's really bringing an industry focused solution to clients without us having to reinvent that every time. And as you heard from from Kobrin here, I mean we're bringing that value to our customers. >>All right Matthew, >>yeah, I just like to add and this is a great example here of being able to co innovate and collaborate with our partners and with our clients, economical in this case to evolve these solutions And as cooper and had stated, uh, this is the first step in a journey here and there's lots of exciting things to come, >>come on, take us home. Final word. >>Thank you. What I would say is what we've learned from. This is really uh, standing this up more like a garage style kind of situation where you can actually get something going rapid and you get business results and you start seeing RY very quickly. So that's the benefit. I've >>seen some great points. IBM and Cisco better together this ecosystem. The co creation, the new network effects is the new dynamic in the marketplace. This is the table stakes. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for sharing the insight. Thanks for coming. Thank you. Appreciate it. >>Thank you. Thanks a lot john >>Okay. IBM think 2021. I'm John for with the Cube. Thank you for watching. >>Mm

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hello and welcome to this special CUBE Conversation here in the Palo Alto studios, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, for this Leading with Observability series with Under the Hood with Splunk Observability, I'm John Furrier with Arijit Mukherji with Splunk, he's a distinguished engineer, great to have you on. These are my favorite talks. Under the Hood means we're going to get all the details, what's powering observability, thanks for coming on. >> It's my pleasure, John, it's always nice to talk to you. >> Leading with Observability is the series, want to take a deep dive look across the spectrum of the product, the problems that it's solving, but Under the Hood is a challenge, because, people are really looking at coming out of COVID with a growth strategy, looking at cloud-native, Kubernetes, you're starting to see microservices really be a big part of that, in real deployments, in real scale. This has been a theme that's been growing, we've been covering it. But now, architectural decisions start to emerge. Could you share your thoughts on this, because this becomes a big conversation. Do you buy a tool here, how do you think it through, what's the approach? >> Exactly, John. So it's very exciting times in some sense, with observability right now. So as you mentioned and discussed a few times, there's a bunch of trends that are happening in the industry which is causing a renewed interest in observability, and also an appreciation of the importance of it, and observability now as a topic, it's like a huge umbrella topic, it covers many many different things like APM, your infrastructure monitoring, your logging, your real user monitoring, your digital experience management, and so on. So it's quite a set of things that all fall under observability, and so the challenge right now, as you mentioned, is how do we look at this holistically? Because, I think at this point, it is so many different parts to this edifice, to this building, that I think having a non-integrated strategy where you just maybe go buy or build individual pieces, I don't think that's going to get you very far, given the complexity of what we're dealing with. And frankly, that's one of the big challenges that we, as architects within Splunk, we are scratching our heads with, is how do we sort of build all of this in a more coherent fashion? >> You know, one of the things, Arijit, I want to get your thoughts on is because, I've been seeing this trend and, we've been talking about it on theCUBE a lot around systems thinking, and if you look at the distributed computing wave, from just go back 20 years and look at the history of how we got here, a lot of those similar concepts are happening again, with the cloud, but not as simple. You're seeing a lot more network, I won't say network management, but observability is essentially instrumentation of the traffic and looking at all the data, to make sure things like breaches and cybersecurity, and also making systems run effectively, but it's distributed computing at the end of it, so there's a lot of science that's been there, and now new science emerging around, how do you do this all? What's your thoughts on this, because this becomes a key part of the architectural choices that some companies have to make, if they want to be in position to take advantage of cloud-native growth, which is multifold benefits, and your product people talk about faster time to market and all that good stuff, but these technical decisions matter, can you explain? >> Yes, it absolutely does. I think the main thing that I would recommend that everybody do, is understand why observability, what do you want to get out of it? So it is not just a set of parts, as I mentioned earlier, but it brings direct product benefits, as we mentioned, like faster mean time to resolution, understanding what's going on in your environment, having maybe fewer outages at the same time, understanding your causes, so many different benefits. So the point is not that one has the ability to do maybe (indistinct) or ability to do infrastructure (indistinct), the main question is aspirationally, what are my goals that are aligned to what my business wants? So what do I want to achieve, do I want to innovate faster? In that case, how is observability going to help me? And this is sort of how you need to define your strategy in terms of what kind of tools you get and how they work together. And so, if you look at what we're doing at Splunk, you'll notice it's extremely exciting right now, there's a lot of acquisitions happening, a lot of products that we're building, and the question we're asking as architects is, suppose we want to use, that will help us achieve all of this, and at the same time be somewhat future-proofed. And I think any organization that's either investing in it, or building it, or buying it, they all would probably want to think along those lines. Like what are my foundational principles, what are the basic qualities I want to have out of this system? Because technologies and infrastructures will keep on changing, that's sort of the rule of nature right now. The question is how do we best address it in a more future-proofed system? At Splunk, we have come up with a few guiding principles, and I'm sure others will have done the same. >> You know, one of the dynamics I want to get your reaction to is kind of two perspectives, one is, the growth of more teams that are involved in the work, so whether it's from cyber to monitoring, there's more teams with tools out there that are working on the network. And then you have just the impact of the diversity of use cases, not so much data volume, 'cause that's been talked about, lot of, we're having a tsunami of data, that's clear. But different kinds of dynamics, whether it's real-time, bursting, and so when you have this kind of environment, you can have gaps. And solar winds have taught us anything, it's that you have to identify problems and resolve them, this comes up a lot in observability conversations, MTTI, mean time to identify, and then to resolve. These are concepts. If you don't see the data, you can't understand what's going on if you can't measure it. This is like huge. >> Yes, absolutely right, absolutely right. So what we really need now is, as you mentioned, we need an integrated tool set, right? What we mean by that, is the tools must be able to work together, the data must be able to be used across the board. So like by use case it should not be siloed or fragmented, that they should work as one system that users are able to learn, and then sort of be able to use effectively without context switching. Another concept that's quite important is, how flexible are you? Are you digging yourself into a fixed solution, or are you depending on open standards that will then let you change out implementations, or vendors, or what have you, (static crackles) down the line, relatively easily. So understanding how you're collecting the data, how good can open standards and open source you're using is important. But to your point about missing and gaps, I think full fidelity, like understanding every single transaction, if you can pull it off, is a fascinating superpower, because that's where you don't get the gaps, and if you are able to go back and track any bad transaction, any time, that is hugely liberating, right? Because without that, if you're going to do a lot of sampling, you're going to miss a huge percentage of the user interactions, that's probably a recipe for some kind of trouble down the line, as you mentioned. And actually, these are some of those principles that we are using to build the Splunk Observability Suite, is no sample or full fidelity is a core foundational principle, and for us, it's not just isolated to, let's say application performance management, where user gets your API and you're able to track what happened, we are actually taking this upstream, up to the user, so the user is taking actions on the browser, how do we capture and correlate what's happening on the browser, because (indistinct) as you know, there's a huge move towards single-page applications, where half of my logic that my users are using is actually running on the browser, right? And so understanding the whole thing end to end, without any gaps, without any sampling, is extremely powerful. And so yes, so those are some of the things that we're investing in, and I think, again, one should keep in mind, when they're considering observability. >> You know, we were talking the other day, and having a debate around technical debt, and how that applies to observability, and one of the things that you brought up earlier about tools, and tool sprawl, that causes problems, you have operational friction, and we've heard people say "Yeah, I've got too many tools," and just too much, to replatform or refactor, it's just too much pain in the butt for me to do that, so at some point they break, I take on too much technical debt. When is that point of no return, where someone feels the pain on tool sprawl? What are some of the signaling where it's like, "You better move now (indistinct) too late," 'cause this integrated platform, that's what seems to be the way people go, as you mentioned. But this tool sprawl is a big problem. >> It is, and I think it starts hitting you relatively early on, nowadays, if you ask my opinion. So, tool sprawl is I think, if you find yourself, I think using three or four different tools, which are all part of some critical workload together, that's a stink that there's something could be optimized. For example, let's say I'm observing whether my website works fine, and if my alerting tool is different from my data gathering, or whatever, the infrastructure monitoring metrics tool, which is different from my incident management tool, which is different from my logs tool, then if you put the hat on of an engineer, a poor engineer who's dealing with a crisis, the number of times they have to context switch and the amount of friction that adds to the process, the delay that it adds to the process is very very painful. So my thinking is that at some point, especially if we find that core critical workloads are being fragmented, and that's when sort of I'm adding a bunch of friction, it's probably not good for us to sort of make that sort of keep on going for a while, and it would be time to address that problem. And frankly, having these tools integrated, it actually brings a lot of benefit, which is far bigger than the sum of the parts, because think about it, if I'm looking at, say, an incident, and if I'm able to get a cross-tool data, all presented in one screen, one UI, that is hugely powerful because it gives me all the information that I need without having to, again, dig into five different tools, and allows me to make quicker, faster decisions. So I think this is almost an inevitable wave that everybody must and will adopt, and the question is, I think it's important to get on the good program early, because unless you sort of build a lot of practices within an organization, that becomes very very hard to change later, it is just going to be more costly down the line. >> So from an (indistinct) standpoint, under the hood, integrated platform, takes that tool sprawl problem away, helps there. You had open source technology so there's no lock-in, you mentioned full fidelity, not just sampling, full end to end tracing, which is critical, wants to avoid those gaps. And then the other are I want to get your thoughts on, that you didn't bring up yet, that people are talking about is, real time streaming of analytics. What role does that play, is that part of the architecture, what function does that do? >> Right, so to me, it's a question of, how quickly do I find a problem? If you think about it, we are moving to more and more software services, right? So everybody's a software service now, and we all talk to each other in different services. Now, any time you use a dependency, you want to know how available it is, what are my SLAs and SLOs and so on, and three nines is almost a given, that you must provide three nines or better. Ideally four nines of availability, because your overall system stability is going to be less than the one of any single part, and if you go to look at four nines, you have about four or five minutes of total downtime in one whole month. That's a hard thing to be able to control. And if your alerting is going to be in order of five or 10 minutes, there's no chance you're going to be able to promise the kind of high availability that you need to be able to do, and so the fundamental question is you need to understand problems quick, like fast, within seconds, ideally. Now streaming is one way to do it, but that really is the problem definition, how do I find the problems early enough so that I can give my automation or my engineers time to figure out what happened and take corrective action? Because if I can't even know that there's something amiss, then there's no chance I'm going to be able to sort of provide that availability that my solution needs. So in that context, real time is very important, it is much more important now, because we have all these software and service dependencies, than it maybe used to be in the past. And so that's kind of why, again, at Splunk, we invested in real time streaming analytics, with the idea again being, let the problem, how can we address this, how can we provide customers with quick, high level important alerts in seconds, and that sort of real time streaming is probably the best way to achieve that. And then, if I were to, sorry, go ahead. >> No, go on, finish. >> Yeah, I was going to say that it's one thing to get an alert, but the question then is, now what do I do with it? And there's obviously a lot of alert noise that's going out, and people are fatigued, and I have all these alerts, I have this complex environment, understanding what to do, which is sort of reducing the MTTR part of it, is also important, I think environments are so complex now, that without a little bit of help from the tool, you are not going to be able to be very effective, it's going to take you longer, and this is also another reason why integrated tools are better, because they can provide you hints, looking at all the data, not just one type, not just necessarily logs, or not just necessarily traces, but they have access to the whole data set, and they can give you far better hints, and that's again one of the foundational principles, because this is in the emergent field of AIOps, where the idea is that we want to bring the power of data science, the power of machine learning, and to aid the operator in figuring out where a problem might be, so that they can at least take corrective action faster, not necessarily fix it, but at least bypass the problem, or take some kind of corrective action, and that's a theme that sort of goes across our suite of tools is, the question we ask ourselves is, "In every situation, what information could I have provided them, what kind of hints could we have provided them, to short circuit their resolution process?" >> It's funny you mention suite of tools, you have an Observability Suite, which Splunk leads with, as part of the series, it's funny, suite of tools, it's kind of like, you kind of don't want to say it, but it is kind of what's being discussed, it's kind of a platform and tool working together, and I think the trend seems to be, it used to be in the old days, you were a platform player or a tool player, really kind of couldn't do both, but now with cloud-native, as it's distributed computing, with all this importance around observability, you got to start thinking, suite has platform features, could you react to that, and how would you talk about that, because what does it mean to be a platform? Platforms have benefits, tools have benefits, working together implies it's a combination, could you share your thoughts on that reaction to that? >> That's a very interesting question you asked, John, so this is actually, if you asked me how I look at the solution set that we have, I will explain it thus. We are a platform, we are a set of products and tools, and we are an enterprise solution. And let me explain what I mean by that, because I think all of these matter, to somebody or the other. As a platform, you're like "How good am I in dealing with data?" Like ingesting data, analyzing data, alerting you, so those are the core foundational features that everybody has, these are the database-centric aspects of it, right? And if you look at a lot of organizations who have mature practices, they are looking for a platform, maybe it scales better than what they have, or whatnot, and they're looking for a platform, they know what to do, build out on top of that, right? But at the same time, a platform is not a product, 99% of our users, they're not going to make database calls to fetch and query data, they want an end to end, like a thing that they can use to say, "Monitor my Kubernetes," "Monitor my Elasticsearch," "Monitor my," you know, whatever other solution I may have. So then we build a bunch of products that are built on top of the platform, which provide sort of the usability, so where, it's very easy to get on, send the data, have built-in content, dashboard (indistinct), what have you, so that my day to day work is fast, because I'm not a observability engineer, I'm a software engineer working on something, and I want to use observability, make it easy for me, right? So that's sort of the product aspect of it. But then if you look at organizations that a little bit scale up, just a product is also not good enough. Now we're looking at a observability solution that's deployed in an enterprise, and there are many many products, many many teams, many many users, and then how can one be effective there? And if you look at what's important at that level, it's not the database aspect or the platform aspect, it's about how well can I manage it, do I have visibility into what I am sending, what my bill is, can I control against incorrect usage, do I have permissions to sort of control who can mess with my (indistinct) and so on, and so there's a bunch of layer of what we call enterprise capabilities that are important in an organizational setting. So I think in order to build something that's successful in this space, we have to think at all these three levels, right? And all of these are important, because in the end, it's how much value am I getting out of it, it's not just what's theoretically possible, what's really happening, and all of these are important in that context. >> And I think, Arijit, that's amazing masterclass right there, soundbite right there, and I think it's because the data also is important, if you're going to be busting down data silos, you need to have a horizontally scalable data observability space. You have to have access to the data, so I think the trend will be more integrated, clearly, and more versatile from a platform perspective, it has to be. >> Absolutely, absolutely. >> Well, we're certainly going to bring you back on our conversations when we have our events and/or our groups around digital transformation Under the Hood series that we're going to do, but great voice, great commentary, Arijit, thank you for sharing that knowledge with us, appreciate it. >> My pleasure, thank you very much. >> Okay, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, here, Leading with Observability content series with Splunk, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, thanks for watching. (calm music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with that leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hello and welcome to this special CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier, your host. We're here for a special series, Leading with Observability, and this segment is: End-to-end observability drives great digital experiences. We've got a great guest here, Craig Hyde, senior director of product management for Splunk. Craig, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> And thanks for having me. This is great. >> So this series, Leading with Observability is a super hot topic obviously with cloud native. In the pandemic, COVID-19 has really kind of shown cloud native trend has been a tailwind for people who invested in it, who have been architecting for cloud on premises where data is a key part of that value proposition and then there's people who haven't been doing it. So, and out of this trend, the word observability has become a hot segment. And for us insiders in the industry, we know observability is just kind of network management on steroids in the cloud, so it's about data and all this. But at the end of the day, there's value that's enabled from observability. So I want to talk to you about that value that's enabled in the experience of the end user whether it's in a modern application or user inside the enterprise. Tell us what you think about this end user perspective. >> Sure, yeah thanks a lot for that intro. And I would actually argue that observability wouldn't even just be machine data or network data, it's more of a broader context where you can see everything that's going on inside the application and the digital user experience. From a user experience or a digital experience management perspective, I believe the metrics that you pull from such a thing are the most useful and ubiquitous metrics that you have and visibility in all of technology. And when done right, it can tell you what the actual end result of all this technology that you're piecing together, the end result of what's getting delivered to the user, both quantitatively and qualitatively. So, my background, I actually started a company in this domain. It was called Rigor and we focused purely on looking at user experience and digital experience. And the idea was that, you know, this was 10 years ago, we were just thinking, look, 10 years from now, more and more people are going to do business digitally, they're going to work more digitally and at the same time we saw the legacy data centers being shut down and things were moving to the cloud. So we said, look, the future is in the users, and where it all comes together is on the user's desktop or on their phone, and so we set out to focus specifically on that space. Fast forward 10 years, we're now a part of Splunk and we're really excited to bolt this onto an overall observability strategy. You know, I believe that it's becoming more and more popular, like you said, with the pandemic and COVID-19, it was already on a tear from a digital perspective, the adoption was going through the roof and people were doing more and more remote, they were buying more and more offline, but the pandemic has just pushed it through the roof. And I mean, wow, like the digital business genie's out of the bottle and there's no putting it back now. But, you know, there's also other things that are driving the need for this and the importance of it and part of it comes with the way technology is growing. It's becoming much more complex in terms of moving parts. Where an app used to be run off three different tiers in a data center, now it could be across hundreds of machines and opaque networks, opaque data centers all over the world, and the only time you often see things, how they come together, is on the user's desktop. And so that's where we really think you got to start from the user experience and work back. And, you know, all the drive in computing is all about making things better, faster and cheaper, but without this context of the user, often the customer and the experience gets left out from reaping the rewards from all these gains. So that's sort of like encapsulates my overall view of the space and why we got into it and why I'm so excited about it. >> Well Craig, I got to ask on a personal level. I mean, you look at what happened with the pandemic, I mean, you're a pioneer, you had a vision. Folks that are on the entrepreneurial side say, hey digital businesses is coming and they get it and it's slowly gets known in the real world, becomes more certain, but with the pandemic, it just happened all of a sudden so fast for everybody because everyone's impacted. Teachers, students, families, work, everyone's at home. So the entire user experience was impacted in the entire world. What was going through your mind when you saw all this happening and you see the winners obviously were people had invested in cloud native and data-driven technologies, what was your take on all this when you saw this coming? >> Well, the overall trend has been going on for decades, right? And so the direction of it isn't that surprising, but the magnitude and the acceleration, there's some stats out there from Forbes where the e-commerce adoption doubled within the first six months of the pandemic. So we're talking, you know, 10, 12 years of things ticking up and then within six months, a doubling of the adoption of e-commerce. And so like anybody else, you first freeze and say, what does this mean? But when people start working remote and people start ordering things from Amazon and all the other websites, it's quick to see like, aha! It no longer matters what chairs somebody is sitting in when they're doing work or that they're close to a store and you have a physical storefront when you're trying to buy something, it's all about that digital experience and it needs to be ubiquitous. So it's been interesting to see the change over the past few months for sure. But again, it doesn't change the trend, it just magnified it and I don't see it going back anytime soon. >> Yeah I mean, digital transformation has always been a buzz word that everyone kind of uses as a way to kind of talk about the big picture. >> Right. >> It's actually transforming and there's also share shifts that happen in every transformation, in any market shift. Obviously that's happening with cloud. Cloud native edge is becoming super important. In all of these, and by the way, in all the applications that sit on that infrastructure which is now infrastructure as code, has a data requirement that observability piece becomes super critical, not just from identifying and resolving, but also for training machine learning and AI, right? So, again, you have this new flywheel observability that's really at the heart of digital transformation. What should companies think about when they associate observability to digital transformation as they're sitting around whether they're CXOs or CSOs or solution architects going, okay, how does observability plug into my plans? >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, my recommendation and the approach that I would take is that you want to start with the end in mind and it's all about how you set your goals when you're setting out in getting into digital transformation. And, you know, the late Steve Jobs, to borrow one of his quotes, he said that you have to start with the customer experience in mind and work backwards to the technology. And so I think that applies when you get into an observability strategy. So without understanding what the actual user experience is, you don't have a good enough yardstick to go out there and start working towards. So availability on a server or CPU time or transaction time in a database, like, those are all great, but without the context of what is the goal you're actually going after, it's kind of useless. So, like I said, it's not uptime, it's not server time, it's not any of that stuff, and it's user experience and these things are different. So they're like visual metrics, right? So what a user sees, because all kinds of things are going on in the background, but if it can see that the person can see and their experience is that they're getting some kind of response from the machine, then that's how you measure where the end point is and what the overall goal is. And so like to keep kind of going on with that, it's like you start with the end in mind, you use that end to set your goals, you use that domain and that visibility to troubleshoot faster. So when the calls start rolling in then they say, hey, I'm stuck at home and I'm on a slow internet connection, I can't get on the app and core IT is taking a phone call, You can quickly look and instrument that user and see exactly what they're seeing. So when you're troubleshooting, you're looking at the data from their perspective and then working backwards to the technology. >> That's super exciting. I want to get your thoughts on that. So just to double down on that because I think this highlights the trend that we were just talking about. But I'll break it down into three areas that I see happening in the marketplace. Number one, availability and performance. That's on everyone's mind. You just hit that, right? Number two, integrations. There's more integrations going on within platforms or tools or systems, whether it's an API over here, people are working together digitally, right? And you're seeing e-commerce. And third is the user patterns and the expectations are changing. So when you unpack those kinds of like trends, there's features of observability underneath each. Could you talk about that because I think that seems to be the common pattern that I'm seeing? Okay, high availability, okay, check. Everyone has to have that. Almost table stakes. But it's hard when you're scaling, right? And then integrations, all kinds of API is being slinged around. You've got microservices, you've got Kubernetes, people are integrating data flows, control planes, whatever, and then finally users. They want new things. New patterns emerge, which is new data. >> Yeah, absolutely. And to just kind of talk about that, it reminds me of like a Maslow's hierarchy of needs of visibility, right? Like, okay, the machine is on, check. Like you said, it's table stakes, make sure it's up and running. That's great. Then you want to see sort of the applications that are running on the machine, how they're talking to each other, are other components that you're making API calls to, are they timing out or are they breaking things? And so you get that visibility of like, okay, they're on, what's going on top of those machines are inside of them or in the containers or the virtual machines or whatever segment of computing that you're looking at, And then that cherry on top, the highest point is like, how is that stack of technology serving your customer? How's it serving the user and what's the experience? So those are sort of the three levels that we kind of look at when we're thinking of user experience. And so, it's a different way to look at it, but it's sort of the way that kind of we see the world is that three tier, that three layer cake. >> It's interesting. >> And you need all the layers. >> It's super relevant. And again, it's better together, but you can mix and match and have product in there. So I want to get into the Splunk solution. You guys have the digital experience monitoring solution. Can you explain what that is and how that fits into all this and what's in it for the customers, what's the benefit? >> Right, sure. So with the digital experience monitoring and the platform that we have, we're giving people the ability to basically do what I was talking about, where it enables you to take a look at what the user's experience are and pull metrics and then correlate them from the user all the way through the technical journey to the back end, through the different tiers of the application and so on. So that technology is called real user monitoring where we instrument the users. And then we also layer in synthetic monitoring which is the sort of robot users that are always on for when you're in lower level environments and you want to see, you know, what experience is going to look like when you push out new software, or when nobody's on the application, did something break? So a couple of those two together and then we feed that into our overall observability platform that's fed with machine data, we have all the metrics from all the components that you're looking at in that single pane of glass. And the idea is that we're also bringing you not only just the metrics and the events from logs and all the happenings, but we're also trying to help tease out some of these problems for you. So many problems that happen in technology have happened before, and we've got a catalog with our optimization platform of 300 plus things that go wrong when webpages or web applications or API calls start acting funky. And so we can provide, based on our intelligence that's built into the platform, basically run books for people to fix things faster and build those playbooks into the release process so you don't break the applications to begin with and you can set flags to where people understand what performance is before when it's being delivered to the customer, and if there are problems, let's fix them before we break the experience and lose the trust of the user. So again, it's the metrics from the stats that are coming across the wire of everything all the way to the users, it's the events from the logs that are coming in so you can see context, and then it's that user experience, it's a trace level data from where you can double click into each of the tiers and say, like, what's going on in here? What's going on in the browser? What's going on in the application? What's going on in the backend? And so you can sort of pool all that together in a single pane of glass and find problems faster, fix them faster and prevent users from having problems to begin with. And to do this properly, you really need it all under one roof and so that's why we're so excited to bring this all together. >> Yeah, I've been sitting on theCUBE for 10 years now. We've been 11 years, on our 11th year doing theCUBE. Digital you can measure everything. So why not? There should be no debate if done properly. So that brings up this whole concept that you guys are talking about full fidelity. Can you just take a minute to explain what that is? What is full fidelity mean? >> Sure, you know, full fidelity really comes down to a lot about these traces. So when we talk about metrics, logs and traces, it's all about getting all the activity that goes on in an application and looking at it. So when you or I interact with our company's app online and there's problems, that the person who's going to fix this problem, they can actually see specifically me. They can look at my experience and look at what it would look like in my browser, you know, what were all the services that I was interacting with and what was going on in the application, what code was being called, what services were being called, and look at specifically me as opposed to an aggregate of all the domains all put together. And it really is important from a troubleshooting standpoint. It's really important from an understanding of the actuals because without full fidelity and capturing all of the data, you're kind of going, you know, you're taking guesses and it eliminates a lot of the guesswork. And so that's something that's special with our platform is that ability to have the full fidelity. >> When does a client, a customer not have full fidelity? I might think I have it, someone sold me a product, What's the tell sign that I don't have full fidelity? >> Oh yeah, well with observability, there's a lot of tricks in the game. And so you see a lot of summary data that looks like, hey, this is that one call, but usually it's knitted together from a bunch of different calls. So that summary data just from, because this stuff takes up a lot of storage and there's a lot of problems with scale, and so when you might see something that looks like it's this call, it's actually like, in general, when a call like this happens, this is what it looks like. And so you've got to say like, is this the exact call? And, you know, it makes a big difference from a troubleshooting perspective and it's really hard to implement and that's something that Splunk's very good at, right? It's data at scale. It's the 800 pound gorilla in collecting and slicing apart machine data. So like, you have to have something of that scale in order to ingest all this information. It's a hard problem for sure. >> Yeah, totally. And I appreciate that. While I got you here, you're an expert, I got to ask you about Open Telemetry. We've heard that term kicked around. What does that mean? Is it an open source thing, is it an open framework? What is Open Telemetry and what does it mean for your customers or the marketplace? >> Yeah, I think of Open Telemetry as finally creating a standard for how we're collecting data from applications across AP- In the past, it's been onesie-twosie, here and there each company coming up with it themselves and there are never any standards of how to look at transactions across data, across applications and across tiers. And so Open Telemetry is the attempt and it's a consortium, so there's many people involved in pushing this together, but think of like a W3C, which creates the standards for how websites operate, and without it, the web wouldn't be what it is today. And now Open Telemetry is coming behind and doing that same thing from an observability standpoint. So you're not just totally locked into one vendor in the way that they do it and you're held hostage to only looking at that visibility. We're trying to set the standards to lower the barrier of entry into getting to application performance monitoring, network performance monitoring and just getting that telemetry where there are standards across the board. And so it's an open source project. We commit to it, and it's a really important project for observability in general. >> So does that speak to like, the whole more data you have, the less blind spots you might have? Is that the same concept? Is that some of the thinking behind this? >> It enables you to get more data faster. Now, if you think about, if there are no standards and there are no rules on the road and everybody can get on the road and they can decide if they want to drive in the left lane or the right lane today, it makes getting places a lot harder. And the same is true with Open Telemetry. without the standards of what, you know, the naming conventions, where you instrument, how you instrument, it becomes very hard to put some things in a single pane of glass because they just look differently everywhere. And so that's the idea behind it. >> Well Craig, great to have you on. You're super smart on this, and Leading with Observability, it's a hot topic. It's super cool and relevant right now with digital transformation as companies are looking to rearchitect and change how they're going to flip the script on software development, modern applications, modern infrastructure, edge, all of this is on top of mind of everyone's thing on their plans. And we certainly want to have you back in some of our conversations that we have around this on our editorial side as well with when we have these clubhouses we are going to start doing a lot of those. We definitely want to bring you in. I'll give you a final word here. Tell us what you're most excited about. Put the commercial for Splunk. Why Splunk? Why you guys are excited. Take a minute to get the plug in. >> It's so easy. Splunk has the base to make this possible. Splunk is, like I said, it's an 800 pound gorilla in machine data and taking in data at scale. And when you start going off into the observability abyss, the really, really hard part about it is having the scale to not only go broad in the levels of technology that you can collect, but also go deep. And that depth, when we talked about that full fidelity, it's really important when you get down to brass tacks and you start implementing changes and troubleshooting things and turning that data that you have in to doing, so understanding what you can do with it. And Splunk is fully committed to going, not only broad to get everything under one roof, but also deep so that you can make all of the information that you collect actionable and useful. And it's something that I haven't seen anybody even attempt and I'm really excited to be a part of building towards that vision. >> Well, I've been covering Splunk for, man, many, many years. 10 years plus, I think, since it's been founded, and really the growth and the vision and the mission still is the same. Leveraging data, making use of it, unlocking the power of data as it evolves and there's more of it. And it gets more complicated when data is involved in the user experience end-to-end from cybersecurity to user flows and new expectations. So congratulations. Great product. Thanks for coming on and sharing. >> Thanks again for having us. >> Okay, this is John Furrier in theCUBE. Leading with Observability is the theme of this series and this topic was End-to-end observability to enable great digital experiences. Thanks for watching. (lighthearted music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From the keeps studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with that leaders all around the world. This is theCube conversation. >> Welcome to theCube conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of theCube. With a special content series called, Leading with observability, and this topic is, Keeping watch over microservices and containers. With great guests, Patrick Lin, VP of Product Management for the observability product at Splunk. Patrick, great to see you. Thanks for coming on remotely. We're still in the pandemic, but thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, John, great to see you as well. Thanks for having me. >> So, leading with observability is a big theme of our content series. Managing end to end and user experience is a great topic around how data can be used for user experience. But now underneath that layer, you have this whole craziness of the rise of the container generation, where containers are actually going mainstream. And Gardner will forecast anywhere from 30 to 40 percent of enterprises still yet, haven't really adopted at full scale and you've got to keep watch over these. So, what is the topic about keeping watch over microservice and containers, because, yeah, we know they're being deployed. Is it just watching them for watching sake or is there a specific reason? What's the theme here? Why this topic? >> Yeah, well, I think containers are part of the entire kind of stack of technology that's being deployed in order to develop and ship software more quickly. And, the fundamental reasons for that haven't changed but they've been greatly accelerated by the impact of the pandemic. And so I think for the past few years we've been talking about how software's eating the world, how it's become more and more important that company go through the transformation to be more digital. And I think now that is so patently obvious to everybody. When your only way of accessing your customer and for the customer to access your services is through a digital media. The ability for your IT and DevOps teams to be able to deliver against those requirements, to deliver that flawless customer experience, to sort of keep pace with it the digital transformation and the cloud initiatives. All of that is kind of coming as one big wave. And so, we see a lot of organizations migrating workloads to the cloud, refactoring applications, building new applications natively. And so, when they do that oftentimes the infrastructure of choice is containers. Because it's the thing that keeps up with the pace of the development. It's a much more efficient use of underlying resources. So it's all kind of part of the overall movement that we see. >> What is the main driver for this use case microservices and where's the progress bar in your mind of the adoption and deployment of microservices, and what is the critical things that are there you guys are looking at that are important to monitor and observe and keep track of? Is it the status of the microservices? Is it the fact that they're being turned on and off, the state, non-state, I mean take us through some of the main drivers for why you guys are keeping an eye on the microservices component? >> Sure, well, I think that if we take a step back the reason that people have moved towards microservices and containers fundamentally has to do with the desire to be able to, number one, develop and ship more quickly. And so if you can parallelize the development have API is the interface between these services rather than having sort of one monolithic code base, you can evolve more quickly. And on top of that, the goal is to be able to deliver software that is able to scale as needed. And so, that is a part of the equation as well. So when you sort of look at at this the desire to be able to iterate on your software and services more quickly, to be able to scale infinitely, staying up and so on. That's all like a great reason to do it, but what happens along those lines, what comes with it is a few kind of additional layers of complexity because now rather than have, let's say an end to your app that you're watching over on some hosts that you could reboot when there's a problem. Now you have 10's, maybe 100's of services running on top of maybe 100,000's, maybe 10,000's of containers. And so the complexity of that environment has grown quite quickly. And the fact that those containers may go away as you are scale the service up and down to meet demand also adds to that complexity. And so from an observability perspective, what you need to be able to do is a few things. One is you need to actually be tracking this in enough detail and at a high enough resolution in realtime. So that you know when things are coming in and out. And that's been one of the more critical things that we've built towards a Splunk, is that ability to watch over it in realtime. But more important, or just as important in that is, understanding the dependencies and the relationships between these different services. And so, that's one of the main things that we worked on here is to make sure that you can understand the dependency so that when there's an issue you have a shot at actually figuring out where the problem is coming from. Because of the fact that there's so many different services and so many things that could be affecting the overall user experience when something goes wrong. >> I think that's one of the most exciting areas right now, on observability is this whole microservices container equation, because a lot of actions being done there, there's a lot of complexity but the upside, if you do it right, it's significant. I think people generally are bought into that concept, Patrick, but I want to get your thoughts. I get this question a lot from executives and leaders whether it's a cloud architect or a CXO. And the question is, what should I consider? What do I need to consider when deploying an observability solution? >> Yeah, that's a great question. Cause I think they're obviously a lot of considerations here. So, I think one of the main ones, and this is something that I think is a pattern that we are pretty familiar with in the this sort of monitoring and management tool world. Is that, over time most enterprises have gotten themselves a very large number of tools. One for each part of their infrastructure or their application stack and so on. And so, what you end up with is sprawl in the monitoring toolset that you have. Which creates not just sort of a certain amount of overhead in terms of the cost, but also complexity that gets in the way of actually figuring out where the problem is. I've been looking at some of the toolsets that some of our customers have pulled together and they have the ability to get information about everything but it's not kind of woven together in a useful way. And it sort of gets in the way actually, having so many tools when you are actually in the heat of the moment trying to figure something out. It sort of hearkens back to the time when you have an outage, you have a con call with like a cast of 1000's on it trying to figure out what's going on. And each person comes to that with their own tool, with their own view, without anything that ties that to what the others are seeing. And so, that need to be able to provide sort of an integrated toolset, with a consistent interface across infrastructure, across the application, across what the user experience is and across the different data types. The metrics, the traces, the logs. Fundamentally I think that ability to kind of easily correlate the data across it and get to the right insight. We think that's a super important thing. >> Yeah, and I think what that points out, I mean, I always say, don't be a fool with a tool. And if you have too many tools, you have a tool shed, and there are too many tools everywhere. And that's kind of a trend, and tools are great when you need tools. To do things. But when you have too many, when you have a data model where essentially what you're saying is, a platform is the trend, because weaving stuff together you need to have a data control plane, you need to have data visualization. You need to have these things for understanding the success there. So, really it's a platform, but platforms also have tools as well. So tools or features of a platform if I get what you're saying, right? Is that correct? Yeah, so I think that there's one part of this which is, you need to be able to, if I start from the user point of view, what you want is a consistent and coherent set of workflows for the people who are trying to actually do the work. You don't want them to have to deal with the impedance mismatches across different tools that exist based on, whatever, even the language that they use but how they bring the data in and how it's being processed. You go down one layer from that. You sort of want to make sure that what they're working with is actually consistent as well. And that's the sort of capabilities that you're looking at whether you're whatever, trying to chart something to be able to look at the details, or go from a view of logs to the related traces. You sort of want to make sure that the information that's being served up there is consistent. And that in turn relies on data coming in, in a way that is sort of processed to be correlated well. So that if you say, Hey, I'm I'm looking at a particular service. I want to understand what infrastructure is sitting on or I'm looking at a log and I see that it relates to a particular service. And I want to look at traces for that service. Those things need to be kind of related from the data on in and that needs to be exposed to the user so that they can navigate it properly and make use of it. Whether that's during kind of, or time during an incident or peace time. >> Yeah, I love that wartime conciliary versus peace time. I saw blog posts from a VC, I think said, don't be a Tom Hagen, which is the guy in The Godfather when the famous lines said, you're not a wartime conciliary. Which means things are uncertain in these times and you've got to get them to be certain. This is a mindset, this is part of the pandemic we're living in. Great point, I love that. Maybe we could follow up on that at the end, but I want to get some of these topics. I want to get your reactions to. So, I want you to react to the following, Patrick. it's an issue in a topic, and there it is, missing data results in limited analytics and misguided troubleshooting. What's your reaction to that? What's your take on that? What's the Splunk's take on that? >> Yeah, I mean, I think Splunk has sort of been a proponent of that view for a very long time. I think that whether that's from the log data or from, let's say, the metric data that we capture at high resolution or from tracing. The goal here is to have the data that you need in order to actually properly diagnose what's going on. And I think that older approaches, especially on the application side, tend to sample data right at the source and provide hopefully useful samples of it for when you have that problem. That doesn't work very well in the microservice world because you need to actually be able to see the entirety of a transaction, to a full trace across many services before you could possibly make a decision as to what's useful to keep. And so, the approach that I think we believe is the right one, is to be able to capture at full fidelity all of those bits of information, partly because of what I just said, you want to be able to find the right sample, but also because it's important to be able to tie it to something that may be being pulled in by different system. So, an example of that might be, in a case where you are trying to do real user monitoring alongside of APM, and you want to see the end to end trace from what the user sees all the way through to all the backend services. And so, what's typical in this world today is that, that information is being captured by two different systems independent sampling decisions. And therefore the ability to draw a straight line from what the end user sees all the way to what is effecting it on the backend is pretty hard. Where it gets really expensive. And I think the approach that we've taken is to make it so that that's easy and cost-effective. And it's tremendously helpful then to tie it back to kind of what we were talking about at the outset here where you were trying to provide services that make sense and are easy access and so on to your end user. to be able to have that end to end view because you're not missing data. It's tremendously valuable. >> You know what I love about Splunk is, cause I'm a data geek going back when it wasn't fashionable back in the 80's. And Splunk has always been about ingesting all the data. So they bring all the data, we'll take it all. Now from at the beginning it was pretty straightforward, complex but still it had a great utility. But even now, today, it's the same thing you just mentioned, ingest all the data because there's now benefits. And I want to just ask you a quick question on this, distributed computing trend, because I mean everyone's pretty much in agreement that's in computer science or in the industry and in technology says, okay, cloud is a distributed computing with the edge. It's essentially distributed computing in a new way, new architecture with new great benefits, new things, but science is still kicking apply some science there. You mentioned distributed tracing because at the end of the day that's also a new major thing that you guys are focused on and it's not so much about, it's also good get me all the data but distributed tracing is a lot harder than understanding that because of the environment and it's changing so fast. What's your take on it? >> Yeah, well fundamentally I think this goes back to, ironically one of the principles in observability. Which is that oftentimes you need participation from the developers in sort of making sure that you have the right visibility. And it has to do with the fact that there are many services that are being kind of strong together as it were to be able to deliver on some end user transaction or some experience. And so, the fact that you have many services that are part of this, means that you need to make sure that each of those components is actually kind of providing some view into what it's doing. And distribute tracing is about taking that and kind of weaving it together so that you get that coherent view of the business workflow within the overall kind of web of services that make up your application. >> So the next topic, I want to get into, we've got limited time, but I'm going to squeeze through, but I'm going to read it to you real quick. Slow alerts and insights are difficult to scale. If they're difficult to scale it holds back the meantime between resolving. And so, it's difficult to detect in cloud. It was easier maybe on premise, but with cloud this is another complexity thing. How are you seeing the inability to scale quickly across the environments for to manage the performance issues and delays that are coming out of not having that kind of in slow insights or managing that? What's your reaction to that? >> Yeah, well, I think there are a lot of tools out there that we'll take in events or where issues from cloud environments. But they're not designed from the very beginning to be able to handle the sort of scale of what you're looking at. So, I mentioned, it's not uncommon for a company to have 10's or maybe even 100's of services and 1000's of containers or hosts. And so, the sort of sheer amount of data you have to be looking at on an ongoing basis. And the fact that things can change very quickly. Containers can pop in and go away within seconds. And so, the ability to track that in realtime implies that you need to have an architectural approach that is built for that from the very beginning. It's hard to retrofit a system to be able to handle orders to magnitude more complexity and change in pace of change. You need to start from the very beginning. And the belief we have is that you need some form of a realtime streaming architecture. Something that's capable of providing that realtime detection and alerting across a very wide range of things in order to handle the scale and the ephemeral nature of cloud environments. >> Let me ask a question then, because I heard some people say, well, it doesn't matter. 10, 15 minutes to log in to an event is good enough. What would you react to that? (chuckles) What a great example of where it's not good enough? I mean, is it minutes is it's seconds, what are we talking about here? What's the good enough bar right now? >> Yeah, I mean, I think any anybody who has tried to deliver an experience digitally to an end user, if you think you can wait minutes to solve a problem you clearly haven't been paying enough attention. And I think that, I think it almost goes without saying, that the faster you know that you have a problem, the better off you are. And so, when you think about what are the objectives that you have for your service levels or your performance or availability. I think you run out of minutes pretty quickly, if you get to anything like say, three nines So, waiting 15 minutes, maybe would have been acceptable before people were really trying to use your service at scale. But definitely not any more. >> And the latest app requires it. It's super important. I brought that up and tongue in cheek kind of tee that up for you because these streaming analytics, streaming engines are super valuable, and knowing when to use realtime and not also matters. This is where the platforms come in. >> Yes, absolutely. The platform is the thing that enables that. And I think you have to sort of build it from the very beginning with that streaming approach with the ability to do analytics against the streams coming in, in order for you to deliver on this sort of promise of alerts and insights at scale and in realtime. >> All right, final point. I'll give you the last word here. Give a plug for the Splunk observability suite. What is it? Why is it important? Why should people buy it? Why should people adopt it? Why should they upgrade to it? Give the perspective, give the plug. >> Yeah, sure. I appreciate the opportunity. So, I think as we've been out there speaking to customers right over the last year as part of Splunk and before that, I think they've spoken to us a lot about the need for better visibility into their environments. Which are increasingly complex and where they're trying to deliver on the best possible user experience. And to sort of add to that, where they're trying to actually consolidate the tools. We spoke about the sprawl at the beginning. And so, with what we're putting together here with the Splunk observability suite. I'd say we have the industry's most comprehensive and powerful combination of solutions that will help both sort of IT and DevOps teams tackle these new challenges for monitoring and observability that other tools simply can't address. So you're able to eliminate the management complexity by having a single consistent user experience across the metrics and logs and traces, so that you can have seamless monitoring and troubleshooting and investigation. You can create a better user experiences by having that true end to end visibility, all the way from the front end to the backend services, so that you can actually see what kind of impact you're having on users and figure it out within seconds. I think we're also able to help increase developer productivity. As these high performance tools that help the DevOps teams get to a better quality code faster, because they can get immediate feedback on how their coachings are doing with each we would see each release and they're able to operate more efficiently. So, I think there's a very large number of benefits from this approach of providing a single unified toolset that relies on a source of data that's consistent across it but then has the sort of particular tools that different users need for what they care about. Whether you're the front end developer, needing to understand the user experience, whether you're backend service owner wanting to see how your service relates to others, whether you're owning the infrastructure, and needs to see, is it actually providing what the services are running on it need. >> Well, Patrick, great to see you. And I just want to say, congratulations has been following your work, going back in the industry specifically with SignalFx, you guys were really early and seeing the value of observability before it was a category. And so how has more often so relevant as you guys had saw it. So, congratulations and keep up the great work. We'll keep a competition's open. Thanks for coming on. >> Great, thanks so much, John. Great talking to you. >> All right, this is theCube, Leading with observability, it's a series, check it out. We have a multiple talk tracks. Check out the Splunk's a series, Leading with observability. I'm John Furrier with theCube. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent executive summit 2020, sponsored by Accenture and AWS. >>Okay. Welcome back to the cubes coverage of 80 us. Re-invent 2020 virtual ecentric executive summit. The two great guests here to break down the analysis of the relationship with cloud and essential. Brian bowhead director ahead of Accenture. 80 was a business group at Amazon web services. And Andy T a B G the M is essentially Amazon business group lead managing director at Accenture. Uh, I'm sure you're super busy and dealing with all the action, Brian. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. So thank you. You guys essentially has been in the spotlight this week and all through the conference around this whole digital transformation, essentially as business group is celebrating its 50th anniversary. What's new, obviously the emphasis of next gen post COVID generation, highly accelerated digital transformation, a lot happening. You got your five-year anniversary, what's new. >>Yeah, it, you know, so if you look back it's exciting. Um, you know, so it was five years ago. Uh, it was actually October where we, where we launched the Accenture AWS business group. And if we think back five years, I think we're still at the point where a lot of customers were making that transition from, you know, should I move to cloud to how do I move to cloud? Right? And so that was one of the reasons why we launched the business group. And since, since then, certainly we've seen that transition, right? Our conversations today are very much around how do I move to cloud, help me move, help me figure out the business case and then pull together all the different pieces so I can move more quickly, uh, you know, with less risk and really achieve my business outcomes. And I would say, you know, one of the things too, that's, that's really changed over the five years. >>And what we're seeing now is when we started, right, we were focused on migration data and IOT as the big three pillars that we launched with. And those are still incredibly important to us, but just the breadth of capability and frankly, the, the, the breadth of need that we're seeing from customers. And obviously as AWS has matured over the years and launched our new capabilities, we're Eva with Accenture. Um, and in the business group, we've broadened our capabilities and deepened our capabilities over the, over the last five years as well. For instance, this year with, with COVID, especially, it's really forced our customers to think differently about their own customers or their citizens, and how do they serve as those citizens. So we've seen a huge acceleration around customer engagement, right? And we powered that with Accenture customer engagement platform powered by ADA, Amazon connect. And so that's been a really big trend this year. And then, you know, that broadens our capability from just a technical discussion to one where we're now really reaching out and, and, um, and helping transform and modernize that customer and citizen experience as well, which has been exciting to say, Andy want to get your thoughts here. We've >>Been reporting and covering essential for years. It's not like it's new to you guys. I mean, five years is a great anniversary. You know, check is good relationship, but you guys have been doing the work you've been on the trend line. And then this hits and Andy said on his keynote, and I thought he said it beautifully. And he even said it to me, my one-on-one interview with them was it's on full display right now, the whole digital transformation, everything about it is on full display and you're either were prepared for it or you kind of word, and you can see who's there. You guys have been prepared. This is not new. So give us the update from your perspective, how you're taking advantage of this, of this massive shift, highly accelerated digital transformation. >>Well, I think, I think you can be prepared, but you've also got to be prepared to always sort of, I think what we're seeing in, in, um, in, in, in, in recent times and particularly in two 20, what, what is it I think today there are, um, 4% of the enterprise workloads sits at the cloud. Um, you know, that leaves 96% out there on prem. Um, and I think over the next four to five years, um, we're going to see that sort of, uh, acceleration to the, to the cloud pick up, um, this year as Andy touched on, I think, uh, uh, on Tuesday in his, I think the pandemic is a forcing function, uh, for companies to, to, to really pause and think about everything from, from, you know, how they, um, manage that technology, their infrastructure, to, to clarity to where that data sets to what insights and intelligence that getting from that data. >>And then eventually even to, to the talent, the talent they have in the organization and how they can be competitive, um, that culture, that culture of innovation, of invention and reinvention. And so I think, I think, you know, when you, when you think of companies out there faced with these challenges, it forces us, it forces AWS's forces, AEG to come together and think through how can we help create value for them? How can we help help them move from sort of just causing and rethinking to having real plans in action and that taking them, uh, into, into implementation. And so that's, that's what we're working on. Um, I think over the next five years, we're looking to just continue to come together and, and help these companies get to the cloud and get the value from the cloud. Cause it's, it's beyond just getting to the cloud attached to me and living in the cloud and getting the value from it. >>It's interesting. Andy was saying, don't just put your toe in the water. You've got to go beyond the toe in the water kind of approach. Um, I want to get to that large scale cause that's the big pickup this week that I kind of walked away with was it's large scale. Acceleration's not just toe in the water experimentation. Can you guys share, what's causing this large scale end to end enterprise transformation and what are some of the success criteria have you seen for the folks who have done that? Yeah. And I'll, I'll start in the end. >>You can buy a lawn. So you, it's interesting if I look >>Back a year ago at reinvent and when I did the cube interview, then we were talking about how ABG we're >>Starting to see that shift of customers. You know, we've been working with customers for years on a single of what I call a single-threaded programs, right? We can do a migration, we can do SAP, we can do a data program. And then even last year we were really starting to see customers ask. The question is like, what kind of synergies and what kind of economies of scale do I get when I start bringing these different threads together and also realizing that it's, you know, to innovate for the business and build new applications, new capabilities, well, that, that is going to inform what data you need to, to hydrate those applications, right? Which then informs your data strategy while a lot of that data is then also embedded in your underlying applications that sit on premises. So you should be thinking through how do you get those applications into the cloud? >>So you need to draw that line through all of those layers. And that was already starting last year. And so last year we launched the joint transformation program with AEG. And then, so we were ready when this year happened and then it was just an acceleration. So things have been happening faster than we anticipated, but we knew this was going to be happening. And luckily we've been in a really good position to help some of our customers really think through all those different layers of kind of the pyramid as we've been calling it along with the talent and change pieces, which are also so important as you make this transformation to cloud >>Andy, what's the success factors. Andy Jassy came on stage during the partner day, a surprise fireside chat with Doug Hume and talking about this is really an opportunity for partners to, to change the business landscape with enablement from Amazon. You guys are in a pole position to do that in the marketplace. What's the success factors that you see, >>Um, really from three, three fronts, I'd say, um, w you know, one is the, the people. Um, and, and I, I, again, I think Andy touched on sort of a, uh, success factors, uh, early in the week. And for me, it's these three areas that it sort of boils down to, to these three areas. Um, one is the, the, the, the people, uh, from the leaders that it's really important to set those big, bold visions point the way. And then, and then, you know, set top down goals. How are we going to measure you almost do get what you measure, um, to be, you know, beyond the leaders, to, to the right people in the right position across the company. We're finding a key success factor for these end to end transformations is not just the leaders, but you haven't poached across the company, working in a, in a collaborative, shared, shared success model, um, and people who are not afraid to, to invent and fail. >>And so that takes me to perhaps the second point, which is the culture. Um, it's important, uh, with finding food for the right conditions to be set in the company, not enable people to move at pace, move at speed, be able to fail fast, um, keep things very, very simple, and just keep iterating and that sort of culture of iteration, um, and improvement versus seeking perfection is, is super important for, for success. And then the third part of maybe touch on is, is partners. Um, I think, you know, as we move forward over the next five years, we're going to see an increasing number of players in the ecosystem in the enterprises state. Um, you're going to see more and more SAS providers. And so it's important for companies and our joint clients out there to pick partners like, um, like AWS or, or Accenture or others, but to pick partners who have all worked together and built solutions together. And that allows them to get speed to value quicker. It allows them to bring in pre-assembled solutions, um, and really just drive that transformation in a quicker, it sorts of manner. >>Yeah, that's a great point worth calling out, having that partnership model that's additive and has synergy in the cloud, because one of the things that came out of this this week, this year is reinvented, is there's new things going on in the public cloud, even though hybrid is an operating model, outpost and super relevant. There, there are benefits for being in the cloud and you've got partners, APIs, for instance, and have microservices working together. This is all new, but I got, I got to ask that on that thread, Andy, where did you see your customers going? Because I think, you know, as you work backwards from the customers, you guys do, what's their needs, how do you see them? You know, where's the puck going? Where can they skate to where the puck's going? Because you can almost look forward and say, okay, I've got to build modern apps. I got to do the digital transformation. Everything is a service. I get that, but what do they, what, what solutions are you building for them right now to get there? >>Yeah. And, and of course, with, with, you know, industries blurring and multiple companies, it's always hard to boil down to the exact situations, but you can probably look at it from a sort of a thematic lens. And what we're seeing is as the cloud transformation journey picks up from us perspective, we've seen a material shift in the solutions and problems that we're trying to address with clients that they are asking for us, uh, to, to help, uh, address is no longer just the back office where you're sort of looking at cost and efficiency and, um, uh, driving gains from that perspective. It's beyond that, it's now materially the top line. It's, how'd you get the driving to the, you know, speed to insights, how'd you get them decomposing, uh, their application set in order to derive those insights. Um, how'd you get them, um, to, to, um, uh, sort of adopt leading edge industry solutions that give them that jump start, uh, and that accelerant to winning the customers, winning the eyeballs. >>Um, and then, and then how'd you help drive the customer experience. We're seeing a lot of push from clients, um, or ask for help on how do I optimize my customer experience in order to retain my eyeballs. And then how do I make sure I've got a soft self-learning ecosystem at play, um, where I, you know, it's not just a practical experience, but I can sort of keep learning and iterating, um, how treat my, eat, my customers, um, and a lot of that, um, that's still self-learning that comes from, you know, putting in, uh, intelligence into your, into your systems, getting an AI and ML, uh, in that. And so as a result of that, where it was seeing a lot of push and a lot of what we're doing, uh, is pouring investments into those areas. And then finally, maybe beyond the bottom line and the top line is how do you harden that and protect that with, um, security and resilience? Uh, so I'll probably say those are the three areas. John >>Brian on the business model side, obviously the enablement is what Amazon has. Um, we see things like SAS factory coming on board and the partner network I've see a, is a big, huge partner of you guys. Um, the business models there. You've got I, as, as doing great with chips, you have this data modeling this data opportunity to enable these modern apps. We heard about the partner strategy from Andy. I'm talking about yesterday now about how can partners within even a center. What's the business model side on your side that you're enabling this. Can you just share your thoughts on that? >>Yeah. And so it's, it's interesting. And again, I'm kind of build it in a build a little bit on some of the things that Andy really talked about there, right? And that we, if you think of that from the partnership, we are absolutely helping our customers with kind of that it modernization piece and we're investing a lot and that there's hard work that needs to get done there. And we're investing a lot as a partnership around the tools, the assets and the methodology. So in AWS and Accenture show up together as AEG, we are executing off a single blueprint with a single set of assets so we can move fast. So we're going to continue to do that with all the hybrid announcements from this past week, those get baked into that, that migration modernization theme, but the other really important piece here as we go up the stack, Andy mentioned it, right? >>The data piece, like so much of what we're talking about here is around data and insights. Right? I did a cube interview last week with, uh, Carl hick. Um, who's the CIO from Takeda. And if you hear Christophe Weber from Takeda talk, he talks about Takeda being a data company, data and insights company. So how do we, as a partnership, again, build the capabilities and the platforms like with Accenture's applied insights platform so that we can bootstrap and really accelerate our client's journey. And then finally, on the innovation on the business front, and Andy was touching on some of these, we are investing in industry solutions and accelerators, right? Because we know that at the end of the day, a lot of these are very similar. We're talking about ingesting data, using machine learning to provide insights and then taking action. So for instance, the cognitive insurance platform that we're working together on with Accenture, if they get about property and casualty claims and think about how do we enable touchless claims using machine learning and computer vision that can assess based on an image damage, and then be able to triage that and process it accordingly, right? >>Using all the latest machine learning capabilities from AWS >>With that deep, um, AI machine learning data science capability from Accenture, who knows all those algorithms that need to get built and build that library by doing that, we can really help these insurance companies accelerate their transformation around how they think about claims and how they can speed those claims on behalf of their policy holder. So that's, what's an example of a, kind of like a bottom to top view of what we're doing in the partnership to address these new needs. >>That's awesome. Andy, I want to get back to your point about culture. You mentioned it twice now. Um, challenge is a big part of the game here. Andy Jassy referenced Lambda. Next generation developers were using Lambda. He talked about CIO stories around, they didn't move fast enough. They lost three years. A new person came in and made it go faster. This is a new, this is a time for a certain kind of, um, uh, professional and individual, um, to, to be part of, um, this next generation. What's the talent strategy you guys have to attract and attain the best and retain the best people. How do you do it? >>Um, you know, it's, it's, um, it's an interesting one. It's, it's, it's oftentimes a, it's, it's a significant point and often overlooked. Um, you know, people, people really matter and getting the right people, um, in not just in AWS or, but then on our customers is super important. We often find that much of our discussions with, with our clients is centered around that. And it's really a key ingredient. As you touched on, you need people who are willing to embrace change, but also people who are willing to create new, um, to invent new, to reinvent, um, and to keep it very simple. Um, w we're we're we're seeing increasingly that you need people who have a sort of deep learning and a deep, uh, or deep desire to keep learning and to be very curious as, as they go along. Most of all, though, I find that, um, having people who are not willing or not afraid to fail is critical, absolutely critical. Um, and I think that that's, that's, uh, a necessary ingredient that we're seeing, um, our clients needing more off, um, because if you can't start and, and, and you can't iterate, um, you know, for fear of failure, you're in trouble. And I think Andy touched on that you, you know, where that CIO, that you referred to last three years, um, and so you really do need people who are willing to start not afraid to start, um, and, uh, and not afraid to lead. Yeah. >>It takes a gut-check there. I just said, you guys have a great team over there. Everyone at the center I've interviewed strong, talented, and not afraid to lean in and, and into the trends. Um, I got to ask on that front cloud first was something that was a big strategic focus for Accenture. How does that fit into your business group? That's, uh, Amazon focus, obviously their cloud, and now hybrid everywhere, as I say, um, how does that all work it out? >>We're super excited about our cloud first initiative, and I think it fits it, um, really, uh, perfectly it's it's, it's what we needed. It's, it's, it's a, it's another accelerant. Um, if you think of first, what we're doing is we're, we're putting together, um, a capability set that will help enable him to and translations as Brian touched on your help companies move, you know, from just, you know, migrating to, to, to modernizing, to driving insights, to bringing in change, um, and, and, and helping on that, on that talent. So that's sort of component number one is how does Accenture bring the best, uh, end to end transformation capabilities to our clients? Number two is perhaps, you know, how do we, um, uh, bring together pre-assembled as Brian touched on preassembled industry offerings to help as an accelerant, uh, for our, for our customers three, as, as we touched on earlier, is, is that sort of partnership with the ecosystem. >>We're going to see an increasing number of SAS providers in an estate in the enterprises States out there. And so, you know, parts of our cloud first and our AEG strategy is to increase our touchpoints and our integrations and our solutions and our offerings where the ecosystem partners out there, the ISV partners out there, and the SAS providers out there. And then number four is really about, you know, how do we, um, extend the definition of the cloud? I think oftentimes people thought of the cloud just as sort of on-prem and prem. Um, but, but as Andy touched on earlier this week, you know, you've, you've got this, the concept of hybrid cloud and that in itself, um, uh, is, is, is, uh, you know, being redefined as well, you know, where you've got the intelligent edge and you've got various forms of the edge. Um, so that's the fourth part of, of our, of our cloud first strategy. And, and, and for us was super excited because all of that is highly relevant for ABG, as we look to build those capabilities as industry solutions and others, and as we look to enable our customers, but also how we, you know, as we, as we look to extend how we go to market, uh, I joined tally PS, uh, in, uh, in our respective skews and products. >>Well, what's clear now is that people now realize that if you contain that complexity, the upside is massive. And that's great opportunity for you guys. We got to get to the final question for you guys to weigh in on, as we wrap up next five years, Brian, Andy weigh in, how do you see that playing out? What do you see this exciting, um, for the partnership and the cloud first cloud, everywhere cloud opportunities share some perspective. >>Yeah, I, I, they, you know, just kinda building on that cloud first, right? What cloud first. And we were super excited when cloud first was announced and you know, what it signals to the market and what we're seeing in our customers, which is cloud really permeates everything that we're doing now. Um, and, and so all aspects of the business will get infused with cloud in some ways, you know, it, it touches on all pieces. And I think what we're going to see is just a continued acceleration and getting much more efficient about pulling together the disparate, what had been disparate pieces of these transformations, and then using automation using machine learning to go faster. Right? And so, as we start thinking about the stack, right, well, we're going to get, I know we are, as a partnership is we're already investing there and getting better and more efficient every day as the migration pieces and the moving assets, the cloud are just going to continue to get more automated, more efficient, and those will become the economic engines that allow us to fund the differentiated, innovative app activities up the stack. >>So I'm excited to see us, you know, kind of invest to make those, those, um, those bits accelerated for customers so that we can free up capital and resources to invest where it's going to drive the most outcome for their end customers. Um, and I think that's going to be a big focus and that's going to have the industry, um, you know, focus. It's going to be making sure that we can consume the latest and greatest of AWS has capabilities and, you know, in the areas of machine learning and analytics, but then Andy's also touched on it bringing in ecosystem partners, right? I mean, one of the most exciting wins we had this year, and this year of COVID is looking at the universe, uh, looking at Massachusetts, the COVID track and trace solution that we put in place is a partnership between Accenture, AWS, and Salesforce, right? So again, bringing together three really leading partners who can deliver value for our customers. I think we're going to see a lot more of that. As customers look to partnerships like this, to help them figure out how to bring together the best of the ecosystem to drive solutions. So I think we're going to see more of that as well. >>All right, Andy final word, your take >>Of innovation is, is picking up. Um, the split things are just going faster and faster. I'm just super excited and looking forward to the next five years as, as you know, the technology invention, um, comes out and continues to sort of set new standards from AWS. Um, and as we, as Accenture bringing our industry capabilities, we marry the two, we, we go and help our customers super exciting times. >>Well, congratulations on the partnership. I want to say thank you to you guys, because I've reported a few times some stories around real successes around this COVID pandemic that you guys worked together on with Amazon that really changed people's lives. Uh, so congratulations on that too as well. I want to call that out. Thanks for coming >>Up. Thank you. Thanks for coming on. >>Okay. This is the cubes coverage, Accenture AWS partnership, part of the center's executive summit at Avis reinvent 2020. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching.

(digital music) >> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> The storage business as we know it has changed forever. On-prem storage was once a virtually unlimited and untapped bastion of innovation, VC funding and lucrative exits. Today it's a shadow of its former self and the glory days of storage will not return. Hello everyone, and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights Powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we'll lay out our premise for what's happening in the storage industry, and share some fresh insights from our ETR partners, and data that supports our thinking. We've had three decades of tectonic shifts in the storage business. From the simplified history of this industry shows us there've been five major waves of innovation spanning five decades. The dominant industry model has evolved from what was first the mainframe centric vertically integrated business, but of course by IBM and it became a disintegrated business that saw between like 70 or 80 Winchester disk drive companies that rose and then fell. They served a booming PC industry in this way it was led by the likes of Seagate. Now Seagate supplied the emergence of an intelligent controller based external disc array business that drove huge margins for functions that while lucrative was far cheaper than captive storage from system vendors, this era of course was led by EMC and NetApp. And then this business was disrupted by a flash and software defined model that was led by Pure Storage and also VMware. Now the future of storage is being defined by cloud and intelligent data management is being led by AWS and a three letter company that we'll just call TBD, otherwise known as Jump Ball Incorporated. Now, let's get into it here, the impact of AWS cannot be overstated now while legacy storage players, they're sick and tired of talking about the cloud, the reality cannot be ignored. The cloud has been the most disruptive force in storage over the past 10 years, and we've reported on the spending impact extensively. But cloud is not the only factor pressuring the on-prem storage business, flash has killed what we call performance by spindles. In other words, the practice of adding more disk drives to keep performance from tanking. So much flash has been injected into the data center that that no longer is required. But now as you drill down into the cloud, AWS has been by far the most significant factor in our view. Lots of people talked about object storage before AWS, but there sure wasn't much spending going on, S3 changed that. AWS is getting much more aggressive about expanding its storage portfolio and its offerings. S3 came out in 2006 and it was the very first AWS service and then Elastic Block Service EBS came out a couple of years later, nobody really paid much attention. Well last fall at storage day, we saw AWS announce a number of services, many fire-related and this year we saw four new announcements of Amazon at re:Invent. We think AWS' storage revenue will surpass 8 billion this year and could be as high as 10 billion. There's not much data out there, but this would mean that AWS' storage biz is larger than that of a NetApp, which means AWS is larger than every traditional storage player with the exception of Dell. Here's a little glimpse of what's coming at the legacy storage business. It's a clip of the vice-president of AWS storage, her name is Mahlon Thompson Bukovec, watch this. Okay now, you may say Dave, what the heck does that have to do with anything? Yeah, I don't know, but as an older white guy, that's been in this business for awhile, I just think it's badass that this woman boxes and runs a business that we think is approaching $10 billion. Now let's take a quick look at the storage announcements AWS made at re:Invent. The company made four announcements this year, let me try to be brief, the first is EBS io2 Block Express Volumes, got to love the names. AWS was claims this is the first storage area network or sand for the cloud and it offers up to 256,000 IOPS and 4,000 megabytes per second throughput and 64 terabytes of capacity. Hey, sounds pretty impressive right, Well let's dig in a little bit okay, first of all, this is not the first sand in the cloud, at least in my view there may be others but Pure Storage announced cloud block store in 2019 at its annual accelerate customer conference and it's pretty comparable here. Maybe not so much in the speeds and feeds, but the concept of better block storage in the cloud with higher availability. Now, as you may also be saying, what's the big deal? The performance come on, we can smoke that we're on-prem vendor We can bury that. Compared to what we do, AWS' announcement is really not that impressive okay, let me give you a point of comparison there's a startup out there called VAST Data. Just there for you and closure with bundled storage and compute can do 400,000 IOPS and 40,000 megabytes per second and that can be scaled, so yeah, I get it. And AWS also announced that io2 two was priced at 20% less than previous generation volumes, which you might say is also no big deal and I would agree 20% is not as aggressive as the average price decline per gigabyte of any storage technology. AWS loves to make a big deal about its price declines, it's essentially following the industry trends but the point is that this feature will be great for a lot of workloads and it's fully integrated with AWS services meaning for example, it will be very convenient for AWS customers to invoke this capability for example Aurora and other AWS databases through its RDS service, just another easy button for developers to push. This is specially important as we see AWS rapidly expanding its machine learning in AI capabilities with SageMaker, it's embedding ML into things like Redshift and driving analytics, so integration is very key for its customers. Now, is Amazon retail going to run its business on io2 volumes? I doubt it. I believe they're running on Oracle and they need much better performance, but this is a mainstream service for the EBS masses to tap. Now, the other notable announcement was EBS Gp3 volumes. This is essentially a service that lets let you programmatically set SLAs for IOPS and throughput independently without needing to add additional storage. Again, you may be saying things like, well atleast I remember when SolidFire let me do this several years ago and gave me more than 3000 IOPS and 125 megabytes per a second performance, but look, this is great for mainstream customers that want more consistent and predictable performance and that want to set some kind of threshold or floor and it's integrated again into the AWS stack. Two other announcements were made, one that automatically tiers data to colder storage tiers and a replication service. On the former, data migrates to tier two after 90 days of inaccess and tier three, after 180 days. AWS remember, they hired a bunch of folks out of EMC years ago and they put them up in the Boston Seaport area, so they've acquired lots of expertise in a lot of different areas I'm not sure if tiering came out of that group but look, this stuff is not rocket science, but it saves customers money. So these are tried and true techniques that AWS is applying but the important thing is it's in the cloud. Now for sure we'd like to see more policy options than say for example, a fixed 90 day or 180 day policy and more importantly we'd like to see intelligent tiering where the machine is smart enough to elevate and promote certain datasets when they're needed for instance, at the end of a quarter for comparison purposes or at the end of the year, but as NFL Hall of Fame Coach Hank Stram would have said, AWS is matriculating the ball down the field. Okay, let's look at some of the data that supports what we're saying here in our premise today. This chart shows spending across the ETR taxonomy. It depicts the net score or spending velocity for different sectors. We've highlighted storage, now don't put too much weight on the January data because the survey was just launched, but you can see storage continues to be a back burner item relative to some other spending priorities. Now as I've reported, CIOs are really focused on cloud, containers, container orchestration, automation, productivity and other key areas like security. Now let's take a look at some of the financial data from the storage crowd. This chart shows data for eight leading names in storage and we put storage in quotes because as we said earlier, the market is shifting and for sure companies like Cohesity and Rubrik, they're not positioning as storage players in fact, that's the last thing they want to do. Rather they're category creators around data management or intelligent data management but their inadjacency to storage, they're partnering with all the primary storage companies and they're in the ETR taxonomy. Okay, so as you can see, we're showing the year over year, quarterly revenue growth for the leading storage companies. NetApp is a big winner, they're growing at a whopping 2%. They beat expectations, but expectations were way down so you can see in the right most column upper right, we've added the ETR net score from October and net score of 10% says that if you ask customers, are you spending more or less with a company, there are 10% of the customers that are essentially spending more than are spending less, get into that a little further later. For comparison, a company like Snowflake, it has a net score approaching 70% Pure Storage used to be that high several years ago or high sixties anyway. So 10% is in the red zone and yet NetApp, is the big winner this quarter. Now Nutanix isn't really again a storage company, but they're an adjacency and they sell storage and like many of these companies, it's transitioning to a subscription pricing model, so that puts pressure on the income statement, that's why they went out and did a deal with Bain, Bain put in $750 million to help Bridge that transition so that's kind of an interesting move. Every company in this chart is moving to an annual recurring revenue model and that as a service approach is going to be the norm by the end of the decade. HPE's doing it with GreenLake, Dell has announced Apex, virtually every company is headed in this direction. Now speaking of HPE, it's Nimble business that has momentum, but other parts of the storage portfolio are quite a bit softer. Dell continues to see pressure on its storage business although VxRail is a bright spot. Everybody's got a bright spot, everybody's got new stuff that's growing much faster than the old stuff, the problem is the old stuff is much much bigger than the new stuff. IBM's mainframe storage cycle, well that's seems to have run its course, they had been growing for the last several quarters that looks like it's over. And so very very cyclical businesses here now as you can see, The data protection data management companies, they are showing spending momentum but they're not public so we don't have revenue data. But you got to wonder with all the money these guys have raised and the red hot IPO and tech markets, why haven't these guys gone public? The answer has to be that they're either not ready or maybe their a numbers weren't where they want them to be, maybe they're not predictable enough, maybe they don't have their operational act together or maybe they need to you get that in order, some combination of those factors is likely. They'll tell you, they'll give other answers if you ask them, but if they had their stuff together they'd be going out right now. Now here's another look at the spending data in terms of net score, which is again spending velocity. The ETR here is measuring the percent of respondents that are adopting new, spending more, spending flat, spending less or retiring the platform. So net score is adoptions, which is the lime green plus the spending more, which is the forest green. Add those two and then subtract spending less, which is the pink and then leaving the platform, which is the bright red, what's left over is net score. So, let's look at the picture here, Cohesity leads all players in the storage taxonomy, the ETR storage taxonomy, again they don't position that way, but that's the way the customers are answering. They've got 55% net score which is really solid and you can see the data in the upper right-hand corner, it's followed by Nutanix. Now they're really not again in the scope of Pure play storage play but speaking of Pure, its net score has come down from its high of 73% in January, 2016. It's not going to climb back up there, but it's going to be interesting to see if Pure net scorecard rebound in a post COVID world. We're also watching what Pure does in terms of unifying file and object and how it's fairing in cloud and what it does with the Portworx acquisition which is really designed to bring forth a new programming model. Now, Dell is doing fine with VxRail, but VSAN is well off its net score highs which we're in the 60% plus range a couple of years ago, VSAN is definitely been a factor from VMware, but again that's come off its highs, HPE with Nimble still has some room to improve, I think it actually will I think that these figures that we're showing here they're are somewhat depressed by the COVID factor, I expect Nimble is going to bounce back in future surveys. Dell and NetApp are the big leaders in terms of presence or market share in the data other than VMware, 'cause VMware has a lot of instances, it's software defined that's why they're so prominent. And with VMware's large share you'd expect them to have net scores that are tepid and you can see a similar pattern with IBM. So Dell, NetApp, tepid net scores as is IBM because of their large market share VMware, kind of a newer entry into the play and so doing pretty well there from a net score standpoint. Now Commvault like Cohesity and Rubrik is really around intelligent data management, trying to go beyond backup into business recovery, data protection, DevOps, bringing that analytics, bringing that to the cloud, we didn't put Veeam in here and we probably should have. They had pre-COVID net scores well in to the thirties and they have a steadily increasing share of the market, so we expect good things from Veeam going forward. They were acquired earlier this year by Insight, capital private equity firm. So big changes there as well, that was their kind of near-term exit maybe more to come. But look, it's all relative, this is a large and mature market that is moving to the cloud and moving to other adjacencies. And the core is still primary storage, that's the main supreme prerequisite and everything else flows from there, data protection, replication, everything else. This chart gives you another view of the competitive landscape, it's that classic XY chart it plots net score in the vertical axis and market share on the horizontal axis, market share remember is a measure of presence in the dataset. Now think about this from the CIO's perspective, they have their on-prem estate, got all this infrastructure and they're putting a brick wall around their core systems. And what do they want out of storage for that class of workload? They want it to perform consistently, they want it to be efficient and they want it to be cost-effective, so what are they going to do? they're going to consolidate, They're going to consolidate the number of vendors, they're going to consolidate the storage, they're going to minimize complexity, yeah, they're going to worry about the blast radius, but there's ways to architect around that. The last thing they want to worry about is managing a zillion storage vendors this business is consolidating, it has been for some time, we've seen the number of independent storage players that are going public as consolidated over the years, and it's going to continue. so on-prem storage arrays are not giving CIOs the innovation and strategic advantage back when things like storage virtualization, space efficient snapshots, data de-duplication and other storage services were worth maybe taking a flyer on a feature product like for example, a 3PAR or even a Data Domain. Now flash gave the CIOs more headroom and better performance and so as I said earlier, they're not just buying spindles to increase performance, so as more and more work gets pushed to the cloud, you're seeing a bunkering in on these large scale mission-critical workloads. As you saw earlier, the legacy storage market is consolidating and has been for a while as I just said, it's essentially becoming a managed decline business where RnD is going to increasingly get squeezed and go to other areas, both from the vendor community and on the buy-side where they're investing on things like cloud, containers and in building new layers in their business and of course the DX, the Digital Transformation. I mentioned VAST Data before, it is a company that's growing and another company that's growing is Infinidat and these guys are traditional storage on-prem models they don't bristle If I say traditional they're nexgen if you will but they don't own a cloud, so they were selling to the data center. Now Infinidat is focused on petabyte scale and as they say, they're growing revenues, they're having success consolidating storage that thing that I just talked about. Ironically, these are two Israeli founder based companies that are growing and you saw earlier, this is a share shift the market is not growing overall the part of that's COVID, but if you exclude cloud, the market is under pressure. Now these two companies that I'm mentioning, they're kind of the exception to the rule here, they're tiny in the grand scheme of things, they're really not going to shift the market and their end game is to get acquired so they can still share, but they're not going to reverse these trends. And every one on this chart, every on-prem player has to have a cloud strategy where they connect into the cloud, where they take advantage of native cloud services and they help extend their respective install bases into the cloud, including having a capability that is physically proximate to the cloud with a colo like an Equinix or some other approach. Now, for example at re:Invent, we saw that AWS has hybrid strategy, we saw that evolving. AWS is trying to bring AWS to the edge and they treat the data center as just another edge note, so outposts and smaller versions of outposts and things like local zones are all part of bringing AWS to the edge. And we saw a few companies Pure, Infinidant, Veeam come to mind that are connecting to outpost. They saw the Qumulo was in there, Clumio, Commvault, WekaIO is also in there and I'm sure I'm missing some so, DM me, email me, yell at me, I'm sorry I forgot you but you get the point. These companies that are selling on-prem are connecting to the cloud, they're forced to connect to the cloud much in the same way as they were forced to join the VMware ecosystem and try to add value, try to keep moving fast. So, that's what's going on here, what's the prognosis for storage in the coming year? Well, where've of all the good times gone? Look, we would never bet against data but the days of selling storage controllers that masks the deficiencies of spinning disc or add embedded hardware functions or easily picking off a legacy install base with flash, well, those days are gone. Repatriation, it ain't happening it's maybe tiny little pockets. CIOs are rationalizing their on-premises portfolios so they can invest in the cloud, AI, machine learning, machine intelligence, automation and they're re-skilling their teams. Low latency high bandwidth workloads with minimal jitter, that's the sweet spot for on-prem it's becoming the mainframe of storage. CIOs are also developing a cloud first strategy yes, the world is hybrid but what does that mean to CIOs? It means you're going to have some work in the cloud and some work on-prem, there's a hybrid We've got both. Everything that can go to the cloud, will go to the cloud, in our opinion and everything that can't or shouldn't won't. Yes, people will make mistakes and they'll "repatriate" but generally that's the trend. And the CIOs they're building an abstraction layer to connect workloads from an observability and manageability standpoint so they can maintain control and manage lock-in risk, they have options. Everything that doesn't go to the cloud will likely have some type of hybridicity to it, the reverse won't likely be the case. For vendors, cloud strategies involve supporting your install basis migration to the cloud, that's where they're going, that's where they want to go, they want your help there's business to be made there so enabling low latency hybrids in accommodating subscription models, well, that's a whole another topic, but that's the trend that we see and you rethink the business that you're in, for instance, data management and developing an edge strategy that recognizes that edge workloads are going to require new architecture and that's more efficient than what we've seen built around general purpose systems, and wow, that's a topic for another day. You're seeing this whole as a service model really reshape the entire cultures in the way in which the on-prem vendors are operating no longer is it selling a box that has dramatically marked up controllers and disc drives, it's really thinking about services that could be invoked in the cloud. Now remember, these episodes are all available as podcasts, wherever you listen, just search Breaking Analysis podcasts and please subscribe, I'd appreciate that checkout etr.plus for all the survey action. We also publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. A lot of ways to get in touch. You can email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com. you could DM me @dvellante on Twitter, comment on our LinkedIn posts, I always appreciate that. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights Powered by ETR. Thanks for watching everyone stay safe and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Welcome. My name is Richard Henshall. I'm a senior manager for product management, for Ansible Automation Platform. Think to yourself, how did you adapt to the changes this year? How was your team forced to adapt? And were you prepared and had you been automating already? Talking for the Ansible team, we're ready to move forward. Now we suspect that sentiment is shared by many of us here. We just had a good lesson in why being able to adapt quickly is so important. The previous ways of working may not always be available to us, and we have to change the way we focus and look at things. And this is why I have such a strong belief in the power that automation can gift us. And if we remind ourselves of what the goal of automation is, and to put it very simply, to perform work with minimal human interaction On one hand, this sounds great, no work. But it can also seem very impersonal. And the reality is automation cannot be achieved without knowledge and experience. Because what needs to be automated is what we learn. So much of what we do is specific to our circumstances, to our business or our own personal backgrounds. So how we approach automation is also important. And that's why this year's message "Automate to connect" is relevant to the times we find ourselves in. As a rhetorical question, and of course, all of these are rhetorical questions. I'm sat in a room at my house, staring at a camera. I would next ask you why we need to connect? And what do we connect for? Do we connect to share knowledge, to learn from others, to work on common goals and objectives? Reality is it should be all of these. Any intent when we connect from our work perspective, needs to be about collaboration. Collaboration is essential when we approach how we deal with change. Because when we talk about change, we often see it explained as people process and technology. But when we're forced to change, the unexpected circumstances, you can't always be prepared. You're not always given the time to plan and prepare the way you'd like. So having a way to connect, to build relationships and to collaborate is more important than ever. Back in the days when I was learning my trade, middleware engineering before the endless video calls, presentations and spreadsheets, the most difficult relationship to improve was between us in engineering and the network team. And it wasn't because of the skills it wasn't because we didn't like each other, at least I'd like to think so. And it wasn't for lack of trying. It's because the network team, they're on a different floor, big security door, magnetic locks, special key cards that you needed to have access for. It was aggressively protected so they couldn't be interfered with. It wasn't this opportunity to build the relationships in the same way that we could when we could go and collaborate with the Linux Windows or storage teams. You couldn't wander off and discuss a problem, just have a chat, they were locked away. Now, maybe they like that and sometimes it's good to be locked away, but it forms a barrier. And it's a barrier to collaboration. And so with this group, collaboration required meetings, it required planning and this made it harder. And when something's hard, it makes it easier not to do it. And additionally, we didn't have a platform to help us. So ask yourself, does that sound familiar to your circumstance? What we needed to connect those relationships and we've seen this time and time again, is that for automation we need a consistent technology foundation to connect. With the foundation encourages simplicity for collaboration foundation to connect the people, process and technology and a foundation to help us build trust in those relationships. If we'd had that foundation, that platform, we could have been successful much faster. 'Cause it's important we understand that success depends on trust between groups. To be successful in adapting to change we need to know we trust when the situation may not be perfect. It might be different offices, could be different countries, probably different languages, maybe even different objectives between these different groups. It might be a global pandemic, which is a phrase I never thought I would say in a keynote, but connecting with your colleagues, collaborating and therefore participating in the work that's done. Working as a wider team, enables you to see a broader perspective. Because how else do we trust? Unless we understand each other. How do we trust what we can create? Who has created it? Is he up to standard? And how do we trust what's running where? And who's been running it that we can scale with the correct control? And how do we trust that we can engage removing friction and complexity. And we can do all these things by being given the opportunity to participate, to be included in the overall process. Ultimately, how do we participate to achieve our goals? And what goals do we choose? Your goals are your business challenges automate what makes both your business and IT successful because participation is key to that process. And the more people you can bring together to connect, the more benefit you can achieve. If we've connected and collaborated, we trust what's being produced because automation can be a selfish act. I, the individual do something to make my job easier, but you should think of automation as a gift of knowledge and experience. How can you automate your job to make your colleagues' lives easier? So as we assume and know that participation enables collaboration, how do we help you to collaborate? Well with Ansible, the language of collaboration. And to collaborate, we need to connect. And for that, we have the Ansible Automation Platform. Everything I've described so far is drawn from our collective experience with customers. When Ansible the tool was released, it started as a way to perform automation in a simpler way. As your needs changed, we added more domains and then your needs changed again. As complexity and scale surfaced, a different set of challenges for us to look after. Not only did you do the automation, you need to do more automation as you achieve some successes. And afterwards you have to manage all that automation. To be successful we have deserved that it's not just what you do, it's how and where you do it. It's not just about the tool. It's about the structure, the framework. A focal point and a user experience in maintaining your automation assets. And this is why we focused all of our product offerings into Ansible Automation Platform, a single offering for enterprise grade automation. We've supported your changes in the past, and we've been working to support your changes for the future, help you adapt and connect. Now, if Ansible is the language of collaboration, collections, Ansible content collections are the building blocks of how you simplify the connection of your trusted technologies. Last year, we launched collections as a way to improve the management of content distributed within the Ansible project and the Ansible products. The teams involved were busy working on making this happen over the last 12 months. Working with our community and partners to migrate over 4000.5 modules. This work including this summer with the Ansible collections, 1.0 release. Last Ansible Fest we unveiled certified platforms with the Ansible certified partner program. End to end support for Ansible content between Red Hat and our trusted partners. We now have over 50 certified platforms focused on curated enterprise technology domains. The platforms that you use and rely upon because connecting these domains is connecting your teams. I'm talking about connecting teams. I'm sure that your planning has started already working on cloud native adoption. Key to that cloud native journey and story are containers. And that brings its own set of changes to the way that we work. And we want to support you as you adapt to these changes. I assume most of you are aware that OpenShift is Red Hat's intuivating container orchestration platform based on Kubernetes. And I'd like to announce the release of certified Ansible content collections of Red Hat OpenShift. Whether it be for augmenting provisioning, customizing cluster nodes, or data operations. Collections gives us the perfect opportunity to deliver these use cases and more. Because we know Red Hat customers have chosen and trust Ansible Automation and OpenShift platforms to drive transformation programs. But the connection between these two platforms and the teams that deliver these has always been very implementation efforts. We know that we need to move away from that implementation effort and move to product integration. The reality of evolving tech is it's never all or nothing. If you're fortunate, you can deploy your cloud native application entirely on OpenShift. But what happens, we need to manage across clusters or access existing infrastructure like networks or databases. We're excited to bridge traditional container and edge through Ansible Automation. Perhaps the only automation and container platform solution that is truly agnostic Ansible just doesn't care whose platform you're running on. The new Ansible resource operator, which we deployed as part of Red Hat advanced cluster management is our answer. We're making the Ansible Automation platform a first class provider inside ACM. To enable call outs to automation assets deployed on the automation platform and to make it easily accessible to container management workflows and connect two industry leading technology platforms. Enabling this integration with our customers to identify and enforce policies, applied governance models consistently across multiple clusters, as a deploy and scale complex applications across hybrid multi cluster environments. In the future, the resource operator will be available for any OpenShift deployed service to integrate to the Ansible Automation Platform. And to find out more about this, be sure to checkout Matt Jones' "Future of Ansible Automation Talk" as well as the ACM breakout sessions. Now, as collections are about connecting technology and product integrations are about connecting process. We still need to think about connecting people. How do we ensure that users can find trusted content? So while many users are happy to get content from Ansible galaxy, we know that many enterprises are far less comfortable with that situation. And certainly not comfortable uploading private developed content themselves. We also know that galaxy isn't the only source of content for you to use. There are other source control, repositories, other locations, perhaps even file shares where you allow your teams to collaborate and connect. With all these different sources it can be hard for your users, your internal communities to connect and trust they're using approved content. So we want to connect teams, help them collaborate, have shared goals and ensure trust in how they automate. We need to fill that gap. And that's why last year we launched the automation hub on cloud@redhat.com. As a trusted source for download downstream certified Ansible content supported as part of ground sports automation platform subscription. And this is where you access the collections for those 50 certified platforms I mentioned earlier. But that was only part one of the plan. So while we can provide a location for trusted content that doesn't bring together content from other sources. Before, I mentioned collections were introduced to help the management of automation content. By adopting collections, you provide a path for automation developers to bring content together in a common location, allow multiple teams to increase their time to value in the automation adoption journeys. But to connect internal communities of practice, we need to provide a focal point for all things related to automation content. And that's why we're pleased to announce that the private version of automation hub will be released to the content and knowledge management component of the Ansible Automation Platform. Your privately hosted location for all your Ansible content, to allow you to curate which content is available from which sources, whether it's from Red Hat, the Ansible community, or develop internally. You now have the control over which content you trust. Finally, this year we launched our third hosted service and no additional cost to platform customers. The automation services catalog. The purpose of this service was to allow you to connect your business users with rules-based governance and a simplified user experience to the automation creator deployed via the platform. We're announcing a tech preview launch with the connected technology security connect to your own prem platform environments. It's based on a technology that's part of our future plans. And again, if you attend Matt Jones' "Future of Ansible Automation Talk", you'll hear more about what we're planning in this area. Because this year has been somewhat challenging, automation and Ansible have become more important to many individuals and organizations. So I could leave you with one set of thoughts to adapt and to change as we face, keep things simple, participate in making automation happen and understand the problems to be solved, but always try and keep it simple. Evolve and scale as you connect your teams, as you would grow and expand your automation, grow and expand the scale you're working at as you move forward. And collaborate to break down the silos and domains that build and build your automation that makes change possible. Whether you're an Ansible expert or someone looking for some way to start, we have sessions we hope will inspire you to make your own changes and sessions that will give you the knowledge of how to adapt for the future. Thank you and happy automating.

>> from Cambridge, Massachusetts. It's the Cube covering M I T. Chief data officer and information quality Symposium 2019. Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. >> Welcome back to M I. T. In Cambridge, Massachusetts. Everybody. You're watching the cube. The leader in live tech coverage. This is M I t CDO I Q the chief data officer and information quality conference. Someday Volonte with my co host, Paul Galen. Professor Dr Stewart, Mad Nick is here. Longtime Cube alum. Ah, long time professor at M i. T soon to be retired, but we're really grateful that you're taking your time toe. Come on. The Cube is great to see you again. >> It's great to see you again. It's been a long time. She worked together and I really appreciate the opportunity to share our spirits. Hear our mighty with your audience. Well, it's really been fun >> to watch this conference evolved were full and it's really amazing. We have to move to a new venue >> next year. I >> understand. And data we talk about the date explosion all the time, But one of the areas that you're focused on and you're gonna talk about today is his ethics and privacy and data causes so many concerns in those two areas. But so give us the highlight of what you're gonna discuss with the audience today. We'll get into >> one of things that makes it so challenging. It is. Data has so many implications. Tow it. And that's why the issue of ethics is so hard to get people to reach agreement on it. We're talking people regarding medicine and the idea big data and a I so know, to be able to really identify causes you need mass amounts of data. That means more data has to be made available as long as it's Elsa data, not mine. Well, not my backyard. If he really So you have this issue where on the one hand, people are concerned about sharing the data. On the other hand, there's so many valuable things would gain by sharing data and getting people to reach agreement is a challenge. Well, one of things >> I wanted to explore with you is how things have changed you back in the day very familiar with Paul you as well with Microsoft, Department of Justice, justice, FTC issues regarding Microsoft. And it wasn't so much around data was really around browsers and bundling things today. But today you see Facebook and Google Amazon coming under fire, and it's largely data related. Listen, Liz Warren, last night again break up big tech your thoughts on similarities and differences between sort of the monopolies of yesterday and the data monopolies of today Should they be broken up? What do you thought? So >> let me broaden the issue a little bit more from Maryland, and I don't know how the demographics of the audience. But I often refer to the characteristics that millennials the millennials in general. I ask my students this question here. Now, how many of you have a Facebook account in almost every class? Facebook. You realize you've given away a lot of nation about yourself. It it doesn't really occurred to them. That may be an issue. I was told by someone that in some countries, Facebook is very popular. That's how they cordoned the kidnappings of teenagers from rich families. They track them. They know they're going to go to this basketball game of the soccer match. You know exactly what I'm going after it. That's the perfect spot to kidnap them, so I don't know whether students think about the fact that when they're putting things on Facebook than making so much of their life at risk. On the other hand, it makes their life richer, more enjoyable. And so that's why these things are so challenging now, getting back to the issue of the break up of the big tech companies. One of the big challenges there is that in order to do the great things that big data has been doing and the things that a I promises do you need lots of data. Having organizations that can gather it all together in a relatively systematic and consistent manner is so valuable breaking up the tech companies. And there's some reasons why people want to do that, but also interferes with that benefit. And that's why I think it's gonna be looked at real Kim, please, to see not only what game maybe maybe breaking up also what losses of disadvantages we're creating >> for ourselves so example might be, perhaps it makes United States less competitive. Visa VI China, in the area of machine intelligence, is one example. The flip side of that is, you know Facebook has every incentive to appropriate our data to sell ads. So it's not an easy, you know, equation. >> Well, even ads are a funny situation for some people having a product called to your attention that something actually really want. But you never knew it before could be viewed as a feature, right? So, you know, in some case of the ads, could be viewed as a feature by some people. And, of course, a bit of intrusion by other people. Well, sometimes we use the search. Google, right? Looking >> for the ad on the side. No longer. It's all ads. You know >> it. I wonder if you see public public sentiment changing in this respect. There's a lot of concerns, certainly at the legislative level now about misuse of data. But Facebook user ship is not going down. Instagram membership is not going down. Uh, indication is that that ordinary citizens don't really care. >> I know that. That's been my I don't have all the data. Maybe you may have seen, but just anecdotally and talking to people in the work we're doing, I agree with you. I think most people maybe a bit dramatic, but at a conference once and someone made a comment that there has not been the digital Pearl Harbor yet. No, there's not been some event that was just so onerous. Is so all by the people. Remember the day it happened kind of thing. And so these things happen and maybe a little bit of press coverage and you're back on your Facebook. How their instagram account the next day. Nothing is really dramatic. Individuals may change now and then, but I don't see massive changes. But >> you had the Equifax hack two years ago. 145,000,000 records. Capital one. Just this week. 100,000,000 records. I mean, that seems pretty Pearl Harbor ish to me. >> Well, it's funny way we're talking about that earlier today regarding different parts of the world. I think in Europe, the general, they really seem to care about privacy. United States that kind of care about privacy in China. They know they have no privacy. But even in us where they care about privacy, exactly how much they care about it is really an issue. And in general it's not enough to move the needle. If it does, it moves it a little bit about the time when they show that smart TVs could be broken into smart. See, TV sales did not Dutch an inch. Not much help people even remember that big scandal a year ago. >> Well, now, to your point about expects, I mean, just this week, I think Equifax came out with a website. Well, you could check whether or not your credentials were. >> It's a new product. We're where we're compromised. And enough in what has been >> as head mind, I said, My wife says it's too. So you had a choice, you know, free monitoring or $125. So that way went okay. Now what? You know, life goes >> on. It doesn't seem like anything really changes. And we were talking earlier about your 1972 book about cyber security, that many of the principles and you outlined in that book are still valid today. Why are we not making more progress against cybercriminals? >> Well, two things. One thing is you gotta realize, as I said before, the Cave man had no privacy problems and no break in problems. But I'm not sure any of us want to go back to caveman era because you've got to realize that for all these bad things. There's so many good things that are happening, things you could now do, which a smartphone you couldn't even visualize doing a decade or two ago. So there's so much excitement, so much for momentum, autonomous cars and so on and so on that these minor bumps in the road are easy to ignore in the enthusiasm and excitement. >> Well and now, as we head into 2020 affection it was. It was fake news in 2016. Now we've got deep fakes. Get the ability to really use video in new ways. Do you see a way out of that problem? A lot of people looking a Blockchain You wrote an article recently, and Blockchain you think it's on hackable? Well, think again. >> What are you seeing? I think one of things we always talk about when we talk about improving privacy and security and organizations, the first thing is awareness. Most people are really small moment of time, aware that there's an issue and it quickly pass in the mind. The analogy I use regarding industrial safety. You go into almost any factory. You'll see a sign over the door every day that says 520 days, his last industrial accident and then a sub line. Please do not be the one to reset it this year. And I often say, When's the last time you went to a data center? And so assign is at 50 milliseconds his last cyber data breach. And so it needs to be something that is really front, the mind and people. And we talk about how to make awareness activities over companies and host household. And that's one of our major movements here is trying to be more aware because we're not aware that you're putting things at risk. You're not gonna do anything about it. >> Last year we contacted Silicon Angle, 22 leading security experts best in one simple question. Are we winning or losing the war against cybercriminals? Unanimously, they said, we're losing. What is your opinion of that question? >> I have a great quote I like to use. The good news is the good guys are getting better than a firewall of cryptographic codes. But the bad guys are getting batter faster, and there's a lot of reasons for that well on all of them. But we came out with a nautical talking about the docking Web, and the reason why it's fascinating is if you go to most companies if they've suffered a data breach or a cyber attack, they'll be very reluctant to say much about unless they really compelled to do so on the dock, where they love to Brent and reputation. I'm the one who broke in the Capital One. And so there's much more information sharing that much more organized, a much more disciplined. I mean, the criminal ecosystem is so much more superior than the chaotic mess we have here on the good guys side of the table. >> Do you see any hope for that? There are service's. IBM has one, and there are others in a sort of anonymous eyes. Security data enable organizations to share sensitive information without risk to their company. You see any hope on the collaboration, Front >> said before the good guys are getting better. The trouble is, at first I thought there was an issue that was enough sharing going on. It turns out we identified over 120 sharing organizations. That's the good news. And the bad news is 120. So IBM is one and another 119 more to go. So it's not a very well coordinated sharing. It's going just one example. The challenges Do I see any hope in the future? Well, in the more distant future, because the challenge we have is that there'll be a cyber attack next week of some form or shape that we've never seen before and therefore what? Probably not well prepared for it. At some point, I'll no longer be able to say that, but I think the cyber attackers and creatures and so on are so creative. They've got another decade of more to go before they run out of >> Steve. We've got from hacktivists to organized crime now nation states, and you start thinking about the future of war. I was talking to Robert Gates, aboutthe former defense secretary, and my question was, Why don't we have the best cyber? Can't we go in the oven? It goes, Yeah, but we also have the most to lose our critical infrastructure, and the value of that to our society is much greater than some of our adversaries. So we have to be very careful. It's kind of mind boggling to think autonomous vehicles is another one. I know that you have some visibility on that. And you were saying that technical challenges of actually achieving quality autonomous vehicles are so daunting that security is getting pushed to the back burner. >> And if the irony is, I had a conversation. I was a visiting professor, sir, at the University of Niece about a 12 14 years ago. And that's before time of vehicles are not what they were doing. Big automotive tele metrics. And I realized at that time that security wasn't really our top priority. I happen to visit organization, doing really Thomas vehicles now, 14 years later, and this conversation is almost identical now. The problems we're trying to solve. A hider problem that 40 years ago, much more challenging problems. And as a result, those problems dominate their mindset and security issues kind of, you know, we'll get around him if we can't get the cot a ride correctly. Why worry about security? >> Well, what about the ethics of autonomous vehicles? Way talking about your programming? You know, if you're gonna hit a baby or a woman or kill your passengers and yourself, what do you tell the machine to Dio, that is, it seems like an unsolvable problem. >> Well, I'm an engineer by training, and possibly many people in the audience are, too. I'm the kind of person likes nice, clear, clean answers. Two plus two is four, not 3.94 point one. That's the school up the street. They deal with that. The trouble with ethic issues is they don't tend to have a nice, clean answer. Almost every study we've done that has these kind of issues on it. And we have people vote almost always have spread across the board because you know any one of these is a bad decision. So which the bad decision is least bad. Like, what's an example that you used the example I use in my class, and we've been using that for well over a year now in class, I teach on ethics. Is you out of the design of an autonomous vehicle, so you must program it to do everything and particular case you have is your in the vehicle. It's driving around the mountain and Swiss Alps. You go around a corner and the vehicle, using all of senses, realize that straight ahead on the right? Ian Lane is a woman in a baby carriage pushing on to this onto the left, just entering the garage way a three gentlemen, both sides a road have concrete barriers so you can stay on your path. Hit the woman the baby carriage via to the left. Hit the three men. Take a shop, right or shot left. Hit the concrete wall and kill yourself. And trouble is, every one of those is unappealing. Imagine the headline kills woman and baby. That's not a very good thing. There actually is a theory of ethics called utility theory that says, better to say three people than to one. So definitely doing on Kim on a kill three men, that's the worst. And then the idea of hitting the concrete wall may feel magnanimous. I'm just killing myself. But as a design of the car, shouldn't your number one duty be to protect the owner of the car? And so people basically do. They close their eyes and flip a coin because they don't want anyone. Those hands, >> not an algorithmic >> response, doesn't leave. >> I want to come back for weeks before we close here to the subject of this conference. Exactly. You've been involved with this conference since the very beginning. How have you seen the conversation changed since that time? >> I think I think it's changing to Wei first. As you know, this record breaking a group of people are expecting here. Close to 500 I think have registered s o much Clea grown kind of over the years, but also the extent to which, whether it was called big data or call a I now whatever is something that was kind of not quite on the radar when we started, I think it's all 15 years ago. He first started the conference series so clearly has become something that is not just something We talk about it in the academic world but is becoming main stay business for corporations Maur and Maur. And I think it's just gonna keep increasing. I think so much of our society so much of business is so dependent on the data in any way, shape or form that we use it and have >> it well, it's come full circle. It's policy and I were talking at are open. This conference kind of emerged from the ashes of the back office information quality and you say the big date and now a I guess what? It's all coming back to information. >> Lots of data. That's no good. Or that you don't understand what they do with this. Not very healthy. >> Well, doctor Magic. Thank you so much. It's a >> relief for all these years. Really Wanna thank you. Thank you, guys, for joining us and helping to spread the word. Thank you. Pleasure. All right, keep it right, everybody. Paul and >> I will be back at M I t cdo right after this short break. You're watching the cue.

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's the Cube, covering KubeCon CloudNativeCon Europe 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and Ecosystem Partners. >> Welcome back, this is theCube getting towards the end of two days live wall-to-wall coverage here at KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2019 in Barcelona. I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host for this week has been Corey Quinn and happy to have on one of our hosts for this week from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Dee Kumar, the Vice President of Marketing, also helps with developer relations. Dee, welcome back to the program. >> Thanks for having me. >> And thank you for having us. We've been having a great time this week, a lot of buzz, a lot of people and obviously always a lot of enthusiasm at the show here. Thanks so much. Alright, so your team has been super busy. I've talked with a lot of them leading up to the show. >> That's right. >> Anybody that knows any show of this kind of magnitude know we're usually pretty exhausted before we get on planes and change all the time zones. So, you know, thank you for holding strong. Give us a little bit about, you know, when we talk marketing, you have a big annual report that came out recently from 2018. Give us some of the highlights of some of the things you've been seeing. >> Yeah, sure. Like you mentioned, you're seeing all the excitement and buzz here so this is our largest open-source developer conference, when compared to the last year we did in Copenhagen. So we have close to 8,000 attendees so we're really excited about that. And you're absolutely right, with that comes, we're so exhausted, but we really appreciate. I think the reason the conference has been so successful is primarily just because of the community engagement, which I highlight in the annual report. So it's a combination of our community, which is the developers, the contributors, also our end users, and the third significant portion of our ecosystem is our members. So we recently just announced that CNCF has crossed over 400 members, our end user community is growing, I think Sheryl mentioned this morning in the keynote, we have about 81 end users and this is phenomenal because end of the day, end users are companies who are not commercializing Cloud Native, but essentially they're using these products or technologies internally, so they are essentially the guinea pig of Cloud Native technologies and it's really important to learn from them. >> Well Dee, and actually it's interesting, you know, celebrating the five years of Kubernetes here, I happened to talk to a couple of the OG's of the community, Joe Beta, Tim Hawkin and Gabe Monroy. And I made a comment to Joe, and I'm like, "Well Google started it, but they brought in the Ecosync and pulled in a lot of other vendors too, it's people. And Gabe said, he's like "yeah, I started Deis and I was one of the people >> Absolutely. >> that joined in." So, we said this community is, it's people more than it's just the collection of the logos on the slides. >> Absolutely, I completely agree. And the other thing I also want to point out is a neutral home, like CNCF, it definitely increases contributions. And the reason I say that is, having a neutral home helps the community in terms of engaging and what is really interesting again, going back to the annual report is Google had a leadership role and most of the contributors were from Google, and now with having a neutral home, I think Google has done a phenomenal job to make sure that the contributors are not just limited to Google. And we're seeing all the other companies participating. We're also seeing a new little graph of independent contributors, who are essentially not associated with any companies and they've been again, very active with their comments or their engagement with overall, in terms of, not just limiting to Kubernetes, but all the other CNCF projects. >> So, this is sort of a situation of being a victim of your own success to some extent, but I've mentioned a couple of times today with various other guests, that this could almost be called a conference about Kubernetes and friends, where it feels like that single project casts an awfully long shadow, when you talk to someone who's vaguely familiar with the CNCF, it's "Oh you mean the Kubernetes people?" "Cool, we're on the same page." How do you, I guess from a marketing perspective begin to move out from under that shadow and become something that is more than a single project foundation? >> Yeah, that's a great question, and the way we are doing that is, I think, Kubernetes has become an economic powerhouse essentially, and what it has done is, it's allowed for other start-ups and other companies to come in and start creating new projects and technologies built around Kubernetes, so essentially, now, you're no longer talking about one single project. It's no longer limited to containers or orchestration, or just micro-services, which was the conversation 3 years ago at KubeCon, and today, what you will see is, it's about talking about the ecosystem. So, the way, from a marketing perspective, and it's actually the reality as well, is Kubernetes has now led to other growing projects, it's actually helped other developers come onboard, so now we are seeing a lot more co-ord, a lot more contributions, and now, CNCF has actually become a home to 35+ projects. So when it was founded, we had about 4 projects, and now it's just grown significantly and I think Kubernetes was the anchor tannin, but now we're just talking about the ecosystem as a whole. >> Dee, I'm wondering if it might be too early for this, but do you have a way of measuring success if I'm someone that has rolled out Kubernetes and some of the associated projects? When I talked to the early Kubernetes people, it's like, Kubernetes itself is just an enabler, and it's what we can do with it and all the pieces that go with it, so I don't know that there's spectrums of how are we doing on digital transformation, and it's a little early to say that there's a trillion dollars of benefit from this environm... but, do you have any measure today, or thoughts as to how we can measure the success of everything that comes out of the... >> Yeah, so I think there was Redmont, they published a report last year and it looks like they're in the process of updating, but it is just phenomenal to see, just based on their report, over 50% of fortune 100 companies have started to use Kubernetes in production, and then I would say, more than, I think, to be accurate, 71% of fortune 100 companies are using containers, so I think, right there is a big step forward. Also, if you look at it last year, Kubernetes was the first project to graduate, so one of the ways we also measure, in terms of the success of these projects, is the status that we have within CNCF, and that is completely community driven, so we have a project that's very early stage, it comes in as a sandbox, and then just based on the community growth, it moves onto the next stage, which is incubating, and then, it takes a big deal to graduate, and to actually go to graduation, so we often refer to those stages of the projects to Jeffery Moore, in terms of crossing the chasm. We've talked about that a lot. And again, to answer your question, in terms of how exactly you measure success is just not limited to Kubernetes. We had, this year, a few other projects graduates, we have 6 projects that have graduated within CNCF. >> How do you envision this unfolding in the next 5 years, where you continue to accept projects into the foundation? At some point, you wind up with what will only be described as a sarcastic number of logos on a slide for all of the included projects. How do you effectively get there without having the Cheesecake Factory menu problem of... the short answer is just 'yes', rather than being able to list them off coz no one can hold it all in their head anymore? >> Great question, we're still working on it. We do have a trail map that is a representation of 'where do I get started?', so it's definitely not prescriptive, but it kind of talks about the 10 steps, and it not only talks about it from a technology perspective, but it also talks about processes and people, so we do cover the DevOp, CICD cycle or pipeline. The other thing I would say is, again, we are trying to find other creative ways to move past the logos and landscape, and you're absolutely right, it's now becoming a challenge, but, you know, our members with 400+ members within CNCF. The other way to actually look at it is, back to my earlier point on ecosystems. So one of the areas that we are looking at is, 'okay, now, what next after orchestration?', which is all about Kubernetes is, now I think there's a lot of talks around security, so we're going to be looking at use cases, and also Cloud Native storage is becoming another big theme, so I would say we now have to start thinking more about solutions, solution, the terminology has always existed in the enterprise world for a long time, but it's really interesting to see that come alive on the Cloud Native site. So now we are talking about Kubernetes and then a bunch of other projects. And so now, it's like that whole journey from start to finish, what are the things that I need to be looking at and then, I think we are doing our best with CNCF, which is still a part of a playbook that we're looking to write in terms of how these projects work well together, what are some common use cases or challenges that these projects together can solve. >> So, Dee, we're here at the European show, you think back a few years ago it was a public cloud, there was very much adoption in North America, and starting to proliferate throughout the world. Alibaba is doing well in China and everything. CNCF now does 3 shows a year, you do North America, you do Europe and we've got the one coming up in China. We actually did a segment from our studio previewing the OpenStack Summit, and KubeCon show there, so maybe focus a little bit about Europe. Is there anything about this community and this environment that maybe might surprise people from your annual data? >> Yes, so if you look at... we have a tool called DevStart, it's open source, anyone can look at it, it's very simple to use, and based on that, we kind of monitor, what are the other countries that are active or, not just in terms of consuming, but who are actually contributing. So if you look at it, China is number 2, and therefore our strategy is to have a KubeCon in China. And then from a Euro perspective, I think the third leading country in terms of contributions would be Europe, and therefore, we have strategically figured out where do we want to host our KubeCon, and in terms of our overall strategy, we're pretty much anchoring to those 3 regions, which is North America, Europe as well as China. And, the other thing that we are also looking at is, we want to expand our growth in Europe as well, and now we have seen the excitement here at our KubeCon Barcelona, so we are looking to offer some new programs, or, I would say, new event types outside of KubeCon. Kind of you want to look at it as mini KubeCons, and so those would explore more in terms of different cities in Europe, different cities in other emerging markets as well. So that's still in the works. We're really excited to have, I would say 2 new event types that we're exploring, to really get the community to run and drive these events forward as well, outside of their participation in KubeCon because, oftentimes, I hear that a developer would love to be here, but due to other commitments, or, their not able to travel to Europe, so we really want to bring these events local to where they are, so that's essentially a plan for the next 5 years. >> It's fascinating hearing you describe this, because, everything you're saying aligns perfectly with what you'd expect from a typical company looking to wind up, building adoption, building footprints etc., Only, you're a foundation. Your fundamental goal at the end of it is user engagement, of people continuing to participate in the community, it doesn't turn into a 'and now, buy stuff', the only thing you have for sale here that I've noticed is a T-shirt, there's no... Okay, you also have other swag as well, not the important part of the story, I'm curious though, as far as, as you wind up putting all of this together, you have a corporate background yourself, was that a difficult transition to navigate, as far as, getting away from getting people to put money in towards something in the traditional sense, and more towards getting involved in a larger ecosystem and community. >> That was a big transition for me, just having worked on the classic B2B commercial software side, which is my background, and coming in here, I was just blown away with how people are volunteering their time and this is not where they're getting compensated for their time, it's purely based on passion, motivation and, when I've talked to some key community organizers or leaders who have done this for a while, one of the things that has had an impact on me is just the strong core values that the communities exhibit, and I think it's just based on that, the way they take a project and then they form a working group, and then there are special interest groups that get formed, and there is a whole process, actually, under the hood that takes a project from where Kubernetes was a few years ago, and where it is today, and I think it's just amazing to see that it's no longer corporate driven, but it's more how communities have come together, and it's also a great way to be here. Oftentimes... gone are the days where you try to set up a meeting, people look forward to being at KubeCon and this is where we actually get to meet face-to-face, so it's truly becoming a networking event as well, and to build these strong relationships. >> It goes even beyond just users, I mean, calling this a user conference would not... it would be doing it a bit of disservice. You have an expo hall full of companies that are more or less, in some cases, sworn enemies from one another, all coexisting peacefully, I have seen no fist-fights in the 2 days that we've been here, and it's fascinating watching a community effort get corporate decision makers and stakeholders involved in this, and it seems that everyone we've spoken to has been having a good time, everyone has been friendly, there's not that thousand yard stare where people are depressed that you see in so many other events, it's just something I've never experienced before. >> You know, that's a really amazing thing that I'm experiencing as well. And also, when we do these talks, we really make it a point to make sure that it's not a vendor pitch, and I'm not being the cop from CNCF policing everyone, and trying to tell them that, 'hey, you can't have a vendor pitch', but what I'm finding is, even vendors, just did a silverless talk with AWS, and he's a great speaker, and when he and I were working on the content, he in fact was, "you know, you're putting on that hat", and he's like, "I don't want to talk about AWS, I really want to make sure that we talk about the underlying technology, focusing on the projects, and then we can always build on top, the commercial aspect of it, and that's the job for the vendor. So, I think it's really great collaboration to see how even vendors put on the hat of saying, 'I'm not here to represent my products, or my thing', and of course they're here to source leads and stuff, but at the end of the day, the underlying common protocol that's already just established without having explicit guidelines saying, 'this is what you need to be following or doing', it's just like an implicit understanding. Everyone is here to promote the community, to work with the community, and again, I think I really want to emphasize on the point that people are very welcoming to this concept of a neutral home, and that really had helped with this implicit understanding of the communities knowing that it's not about a vendor pitch and you really want to think about a project or a technology and how to really use that project, and what are the use cases. >> It's very clear, that message has resonated well. >> Dee, thank you. We've covered a lot of ground, we want to give you the final word, anything else? We've covered the event, we've covered potential little things and the annual report. Any last words you have for us that you want people to take away? >> Not really, I think, like I said, it's the community that's doing the great work. CNCF has been the enabler to bring these communities together. We're also looking at creating a project journey it terms of how these projects come into CNCF, and how CNCF works with the communities, and how the project kind of goes through different stages. Yeah, so there are a lot of great things to come, and looking forward to it. >> Alright, well, Dee, thank you so much for all of the updates, and a big thank you, actually, to the whole CNCF team for all they've done to put this together. We really appreciate the partnership here. For Corey Quinn, I'm Stu Miniman. Back to wrap 2 days, live coverage, here at KubeCon, Cloud Native Con 2019, Thanks for watching the Cube. >> Thank you.

[Music] Andre one of the things that have come up is your relation with Russia as we talked about so I have to ask you a direct question do you to work with sanctioned Russian entities or Russian companies shown we and c5 we do not work with any company that's sanctioned from any country including Russia and the same applies to me we take sanctions very very seriously the one thing you don't mess with is US sanctions which has application worldwide and so you always have to stay absolutely on the right side of the law when it comes to sanctions so nothing nothing that's something that's connection nets are trying to make they're also the other connection is a guy named Victor Vail Selberg Viktor Vekselberg Vekselberg to go with the Russian names as people know what is your relationship with Viktor Vekselberg so victim Viktor Vekselberg is a is a very well known Russian businessman he's perhaps one of the best known Russian businessman in the West because he also lived in the US for a period of time it's a very well-known personality in in in Europe he's a donor for example to the Clinton Foundation and he has aggregated the largest collection of Faberge eggs in the world as part of national Russian treasure so he's a very well known business personality and of course during the course of my career which has focused heavily on also doing investigations on Russian related issues I have come across Viktor Vekselberg and I've had the opportunity to meet with him and so I know him as a as a business leader but c5 has no relationship with Viktor Vekselberg and we've never accepted any investment from him we've never asked him for an investment and our firm a venture capital firm has no ties to Viktor Vekselberg so you've worked had a relationship at some point in your career but no I wouldn't on a daily basis you don't have a deep relationship can you explain how deep that relationship is what were the interactions you had with him so clarify that point so so I know Viktor Vekselberg and I've met him on more than one occasion in different settings and as I shared with you I served on the board of a South African mining company which is black owned for a period of a year and which Renova had a minority investment alongside an Australian company called South 32 and that's the extent of the contact and exposure I've had to so casual business run-ins and interactions not like again that's correct deep joint ventures are very kind of okay let's get back to c5 for a minute cause I want to ask you it but just do just a circle just one last issue and Viktor Vekselberg Viktor Vekselberg is the chairman of scope over the Russian technology innovation park that we discussed and he became the chairman under the presidency of President Dmitry Medvedev during the time when Hillary Clinton was doing a reset on Russian relations and during that time so vekselberg have built up very effective relationships with all of the or many of the leading big US technology companies and today you can find the roster of those partners the list of those partners on the scope of our website and those nuclear drove that yes Victor drove that Victor drove that during during in the Clinton Secretary of this started the scope of our project started during the the Medvedev presidency and in the period 2010-2011 you'll find many photographs of mr. vekselberg signing partnership agreements with very well known technology companies for Skolkovo and most of those companies still in one way or another remain involved in the Skolkovo project this has been the feature the article so there are I think and I've read all the other places where they wanted to make this decision Valley of Russia correct there's a lot of Russian programmers who work for American companies I know a few of them that do so there's technology they get great programmers in Russia but certainly they have technology so oracles they're ibm's they're cisco say we talked about earlier there is US presence there are you do you have a presence there and does Amazon Web service have a presence on do you see five it and that's knowing I was alright it's well it's a warning in the wrong oh sorry about that what's the Skog Obama's called spoke over so Andres Kokomo's this has been well report it's the Silicon Valley of Russia and so a lot of American companies they're IBM Oracle Cisco you mentioned earlier I can imagine it makes sense they a lot of recruiting little labs going on we see people hire Russian engineers all the time you know c5 have a presence there and does AWS have a presence there and do you work together in a TBS in that area explain that relationship certainly c5 Amazon individually or you can't speak for Amazon but let's see if I've have there and do you work with Amazon in any way there c-5m there's no work in Russia and neither does any of our portfolio companies c5 has no relationship with the Skolkovo Technology Park and as I said the parties for this spoke of a Technology Park is a matter of record is only website anyone can take a look at it and our name is not amongst those partners and I think this was this is an issue which I which I fault the BBC report on because if the BBC report was fair and accurate they would have disclosed the fact that there's a long list of partners with a scope of our project very well known companies many of them competitors in the Jedi process but that was not the case the BBC programme in a very misleading and deceptive way created the impression that for some reason somehow c5 was involved in Skolkovo without disclosing the fact that many other companies are involved they and of course we are not involved and your only relationship with Declan Berg Viktor Vekselberg was through the c5 raiser bid three c5 no no Viktor Vekselberg was never involved in c5 raiser Petco we had Vladimir Kuznetsov as a man not as a minority investor day and when we diligence him one of our key findings was that he was acting in independent capacity and he was investing his own money as a you national aniseh Swiss resident so you if you've had no business dealings with Viktor Vekselberg other than casual working c-5 has had no business dealings with with Viktor Vekselberg in a in a personal capacity earlier before the onset of sanctions I served on the board of a black-owned South African mining company and which Renault bombs the Vekselberg company as a minority investment alongside an Australian company called South 32 and my motivation for doing so was to support African entrepreneurship because this was one of the first black owned mining companies in the country was established with a British investment in which I was involved in and I was very supportive of the work that this company does to develop manganese mining in the Kalahari Desert and your role there was advisory formal what was the role there it was an advisory role so no ownership no ownership no equity no engagement you call them to help out on a project I was asked to support the company at the crucial time when they had a dispute on royalties when they were looking at the future of the Kalahari basin and the future of the manganese reserve say and also to help the company through a transition of the black leadership the black executive leadership of the cut year is that roughly 2017 so recently okay let on the ownership of c5 can you explain who owns c5 I mean you're described as the owner if it's a venture capital firm you probably of investors so your managing director you probably have some carry of some sort and then talk about the relationship between c5 razor bidco the Russian special purpose vehicle that was created is that owning what does it fit is it a subordinate role so see my capital so Jones to start with c5 razor boot code was was never a Russian special purpose vehicle this was a British special purpose vehicle which we established for our own investment into a European enterprise software company vladimir kuznetsov later invested as an angel investor into the same company and we required him to do it through our structure because it was transparent and subject to FCA regulation there's no ties back to c5 he's been not an owner in any way of c5 no not on c5 so C fibers owned by five families who helped to establish the business and grow the business and partner in the business these are blue chip very well known European and American families it's a small transatlantic community or family investors who believe that it's important to use private capital for the greater good right history dealing with Russians can you talk about your career you mentioned your career in South Africa earlier talk about your career deal in Russia when did you start working with Russian people I was the international stage Russian Russia's that time in 90s and 2000 and now certainly has changed a lot let's talk about your history and deal with the Russians so percent of the Soviet Union I think there was a significant window for Western investment into Russia and Western investment during this time also grew very significantly during my career as an investigator I often dealt with Russian organized crime cases and in fact I established my consulting business with a former head of the Central European division of the CIA who was an expert on Russia and probably one of the world's leading experts on Russia so to get his name William Lofgren so during the course of of building this business we helped many Western investors with problems and issues related to their investments in Russia so you were working for the West I was waiting for the West so you are the good side and but when you were absolutely and when and when you do work of this kind of course you get to know a lot of people in Russia and you make Russian contacts and like in any other country as as Alexander Solzhenitsyn the great Russian dissident wrote the line that separates good and evil doesn't run between countries it runs through the hearts of people and so in this context there are there are people in Russia who crossed my path and across my professional career who were good people who were working in a constructive way for Russia's freedom and for Russia's independence and that I continue to hold in high regard and you find there's no technical security risk the United States of America with your relationship with c5 and Russia well my my investigative work that related to Russia cases are all in the past this was all done in the past as you said I was acting in the interest of Western corporations and Western governments in their relations with Russia that's documented and you'd be prepared to be transparent about that absolutely that's all those many of those cases are well documented to corporations for which my consulting firm acted are very well known very well known businesses and it's pretty much all on the on the Podesta gaiting corruption we were we were we were helping Western corporations invest into Russia in a way that that that meant that they did not get in meshed in corruption that meant they didn't get blackmailed by Russia organized crime groups which meant that their investments were sustainable and compliant with the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and other bribery regulation at war for everyone who I know that lives in Europe that's my age said when the EU was established there's a flight of Eastern Europeans and Russians into Western Europe and they don't have the same business practices so I'd imagine you'd run into some pretty seedy scenarios in this course of business well in drug-dealing under I mean a lot of underground stuff was going on they're different they're different government they're different economy I mean it wasn't like a structure so you probably were exposed to a lot many many post-conflict countries suffer from predatory predatory organized crime groups and I think what changed and of course of my invested investigative career was that many of these groups became digital and a lot of organized crime that was purely based in the physical world went into the into the digital world which was one of the other major reasons which led me to focus on cyber security and to invest in cyber security well gets that in a minute well that's great I may only imagine some of the things you're investigated it's easy to connect people with things when yeah things are orbiting around them so appreciate the candid response there I wanna move on to the other area I see in the stories national security risk conflict of interest in some of the stories you seeing this well is there conflict of interest this is an IT playbook I've seen over the years federal deals well you're gonna create some Fahd fear uncertainty and doubt there's always kind of accusations you know there's accusations around well are they self dealing and you know these companies or I've seen this before so I gotta ask you they're involved with you bought a company called s DB advisors it was one of the transactions that they're in I see connecting to in my research with the DoD Sally Donnelly who is Sally Donnelly why did you buy her business so I didn't buy Sonny Donnelly's business again so Sally Tony let's start with Sally darling so Sally Donny was introduced to me by Apple Mike Mullen as a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Sally served as his special advisor when he was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Apple Mullen was one of the first operating parties which we had in c5 and he continues to serve Admiral Mullen the four start yes sir okay and he continues to serve as one of operating partners to this day salad only and that will Mike worked very closely with the Duke of Westminster on one of his charitable projects which we supported and which is close to my heart which is established a new veteran rehabilitation center for Britain upgrading our facility which dates back to the Second World War which is called Headley court to a brand-new state-of-the-art facility which was a half a billion dollar public-private partnership which Duke led and in this context that Ron Mullen and Sally helped the Duke and it's team to meet some of the best experts in the US on veteran rehabilitation on veteran care and on providing for veterans at the end of the service and this was a this was a great service which it did to the to this new center which is called the defense and national rehabilitation center which opened up last summer in Britain and is a terrific asset not only for Britain but also for allies and and so the acquisition she went on to work with secretary Manus in the Department of Defense yes in February Feb 9 you through the transaction yes in February 2017 Sally decided to do public service and support of safety matters when he joined the current administration when she left her firm she sold it free and clear to a group of local Washington entrepreneurs and she had to do that very quickly because the appointment of secretary mattis wasn't expected he wasn't involved in any political campaigns he was called back to come and serve his country in the nation's interest very unexpectedly and Sally and a colleague of us Tony de Martino because of their loyalty to him and the law did to the mission followed him into public service and my understanding is it's an EAJA to sell a business in a matter of a day or two to be able to be free and clear of title and to have no compliance issues while she was in government her consulting business didn't do any work for the government it was really focused on advising corporations on working with the government and on defense and national security issues I didn't buy Sonny's business one of c-5 portfolio companies a year later acquired SPD advisors from the owner supported with a view to establishing and expanding one of our cyber advising businesses into the US market and this is part of a broader bind bolt project which is called Haven ITC secure and this was just one of several acquisitions that this platform made so just for the record c5 didn't buy her company she repeat relieved herself of any kind of conflict of interest going into the public service your portfolio company acquired the company in short order because they knew the synergies because it would be were close to it so I know it's arm's length but as a venture capitalist you have no real influence other than having an investment or board seat on these companies right so they act independent in your structure absolutely make sure I get that's exactly right John but but not much more importantly only had no influence over the Jedi contract she acted as secretary mitosis chief of staff for a period of a year and have functions as described by the Government Accounting Office was really of a ministerial nature so she was much more focused on the Secretary's diary than she was focused on any contracting issues as you know government contracting is very complex it's very technical sally has as many wonderful talents and attributes but she's never claimed to be a cloud computing expert and of equal importance was when sally joined the government in february 17 jeddah wasn't even on the radar it wasn't even conceived as a possibility why did yet I cannot just for just for the record the Jedi contract my understanding is that and I'm not an expert on one government contracting but my understanding is that the RFP the request for proposals for the July contract came out in quarter three of this year for the first time earlier this year there was a publication of an intention to put out an RFP I think that happened in at the end of quarter one five yep classic yeah and then the RFP came out and called a three bits had to go in in November and I understand a decision will be made sometime next year what's your relationship well where's she now what she still was so sunny left finished the public service and and I think February March of this year and she's since gone on to do a fellowship with a think-tank she's also reestablished her own business in her own right and although we remain to be good friends I'm in no way involved in a business or a business deal I have a lot of friends in DC I'm not a really policy wonk of any kind we have a lot of friends who are it's it's common when it administrations turnover people you know or either appointed or parked a work force they leave and they go could they go to consultancy until the next yeah until the next and frustration comes along yeah and that's pretty common that's pretty cool this is what goes on yeah and I think this whole issue of potential conflicts of interest that salad only or Tony the Martino might have had has been addressed by the Government Accounting Office in its ruling which is on the public record where the GAO very clearly state that neither of these two individuals were anywhere near the team that was writing the terms for the general contract and that their functions were really as described by the GAO as ministerial so XI salient Antonia was such a long way away from this contact there's just no way that they could have influenced it in in in any respect and their relation to c5 is advisory do they and do they both are they have relations with you now what's the current relationship since since Sally and Tony went to do public service we've had no contact with them we have no reason of course to have contact with them in any way they were doing public service they were serving the country and serving the nation and since they've come out of public service we've we've not reestablished any commercial relationship so we talked earlier about the relation with AWS there's only if have a field support two incubators its accelerator does c5 have any portfolio companies that are actually bidding or working on the Jedi contract none what Santa John not zero zero so outside of c5 having relation with Amazon and no portfolios working with a Jedi contract there's no link to c5 other than a portfolio company buying Sally Donnelly who's kind of connected to general mattis up here yeah Selleck has six degrees of separation yes I think this is a constant theme in this conspiracy theory Jonas is six degrees of separation it's it's taking relationships that that that developed in a small community in Washington and trying to draw nefarious and sinister conclusions from them instead of focusing on competing on performance competing on innovation and competing on price and perhaps that's not taking place because the companies that are trying to do this do not have the capability to do so Andre I really appreciate you coming on and answering these tough questions I want to talk about what's going on with c5 now but I got to say you know I want to ask you one more time because I think this is critical you've worked for big-time company Kroll with terminus international market very crazy time time transformation wise you've worked with the CIA in Quantico the FBI nuclei in Quantico on a collaboration you were to know you've done work for the good guys you have see if I've got multiple years operating why why are you being put as a bad guy here I mean you're gonna you know being you being put out there with if you search your name on Google it says you're a spy all these evil all these things are connecting and we're kind of digging through them they kind of don't Joan I've had the privilege of a tremendous career I've had the privilege of working with with great leaders and having had great mentors if you do anything of significance if you do anything that's helping to make a difference or to make a change you should first expect scrutiny but also expect criticism when that scrutiny and criticism are fact-based that's helpful and that's good for society and for the health of society when on the other hand it is fake news or it is the construct of elaborate conspiracy theories that's not good for the health of society it's not good for the national interest is not good for for doing good business you've been very after you're doing business for the for the credibility people questioning your credibility what do you want to tell people that are watching this about your credibility that's in question again with this stuff you've done and you're continuing to do what's the one share something to the folks that might mean something to them you can sway them or you want to say something directly what would you say the measure of a person it is his or her conduct in c-five we are continuing to build our business we continue to invest in great companies we continue to put cravat private capital to work to help drive innovation including in the US market we will continue to surround ourselves with good people and we will continue to set the highest standards for the way in which we invest and build our businesses it's common I guess I would say that I'm getting out as deep as you are in the in term over the years with looking at these patterns but the pattern that I see is very simple when bad guys get found out they leave the jurisdiction they flee they go do something else and they reinvent themselves and scam someone else you've been doing this for many many years got a great back record c5 now is still doing business continuing not skipping a beat the story comes out hopefully kind of derail this or something else will think we're gonna dig into it so than angle for sure but you still have investments you're deploying globally talk about what c5 is doing today tomorrow next few months the next year you have deals going down you're still doing business you have business out there our business has not slowed down for a moment we have the support of tremendous investors we have the support of tremendous partners in our portfolio companies we have the support of a great group of operating partners and most important of all we have a highly dedicated highly focused group of investment teams of very experienced and skilled professionals who are making profitable investments and so we are continuing to build our business we have a very full deal pipeline we will be completing more investment transactions next week and we are continue to scalar assets under management next year we will have half a billion dollars of assets under management and we continue to focus on our mission which is to use private capital to help innovate and drive a change for good after again thank you we have the story in the BBC kicked all this off the 12th no one's else picked it up I think other journals have you mentioned earlier you think this there's actually people putting this out you you call out let's got John wheeler we're going to look into him do you think there's an organized campaign right now organized to go after you go after Amazon are you just collateral damage you mentioned that earlier is there a funded effort here well Bloomberg has reported on the fact that that one of the competitors for this bit of trying to bring together a group of companies behind a concerted effort specifically to block Amazon Web Services and so we hear these reports we see this press speculation if that was the case of course that would not be good for a fair and open and competitive bidding process which is I think is the Department of Defense's intention and what is in the interests of the country at a time when national security innovation will determine not only the fate of future Wars but also the fate of a sons and daughters who are war fighters and to be fair to process having something undermine it like a paid-for dossier which I have multiple sources confirming that's happened it's kind of infiltrating the journalists and so that's kind of where I'm looking at right now is that okay the BBC story just didn't feel right to me credible outlet you work for them you did investigations for them back in the day have you talked to them yes no we are we are we are in correspondence with the BBC I think in particular we want them to address the fact that they've conflated facts in this story playing this parlor game of six degrees of separation we want them to address the important principle of the independence of the in editorial integrity at the fact that they did not disclose that they expert on this program actually has significant conflicts of interests of his own and finally we want them to disclose the fact that it's not c5 and Amazon Web Services who have had a relationship with the scope of our technology park the scope of our technology park actually has a very broad set of Western partners still highly engaged there and even in recent weeks of hosted major cloud contracts and conferences there and and all of this should have been part of the story in on the record well we're certainly going to dig into it I appreciate your answer the tough questions we're gonna certainly look into this dossier if this is true this is bad and if there's people behind it acting behind it then certainly we're gonna report on that and I know these were tough questions thanks for taking the time Andre to to answer them with us Joan thanks for doing a deep dive on us okay this is the Q exclusive conversation here in Palo Alto authority narc who's the founder of c-5 capital venture capital firm in the center of a controversy around this BBC story which we're going to dig into more this has been exclusive conversation I'm John Tory thanks for watching [Music] you

(upbeat techno) [Announcer] Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering NetApp Insight 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of NetApp Insight 2018 There's over 5000 customers, partners, Netappians, analysts, press here. TheCUBE is here as well, I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman back for our second year of covering. We're joined by two guests, one an alumni and one a new guest to theCUBE, Henri Richard EVP a worldwide field and customer operations from NetApp, welcome. >> Good morning. >> Morning. And Kamran Amini, the VP and GM of data center infrastructure from Lenovo, welcome back! >> Glad to be here. >> So guys, Lenovo, NetApp, just about a month ago announced some exciting news, Henri let's start with you, kind of give our viewers who may not be that familiar with the news announcement what this new technology partnership is all about. >> Well, it's a multi-faceted partnership. I think it's important to understand that for us there is a component that has to do with a worldwide engagement of Lenovo around storage solutions that will be infused with NetApp technology. There's a second element, which is the opportunity for us to pull or go to market organization in certain countries, and get to critical mass to cover the needs of customers. And then the last part, the one that's probably the most talked about, is a joint venture in China where we will combine our forces to serve the needs of the very fast-growing Chinese market. >> Alright, yeah. Henri, I was at the Lenovo event where this was announced, want you to give us a little bit about the field engagement, because it really does seem a place where NetApp and Lenovo, there's good synergies there, but there's not a ton of overlap. Maybe explain a little bit from the field engagement. >> That is really one of the reasons we were excited, I think, on both sides to do this agreement. You know, we feel that Lenovo is a fantastic server company, that's demonstrated incredible momentum in the last 12 months. We have ourselves, you know, modestly a pretty nice momentum in the storage business, and in coming together I think we can be stronger in serving the needs of customers that have both compute and storage needs. When we did the analysis of our market coverage, it so happens that there's a lot of places where we're strong and Lenovo can benefit from that, and other places where they're strong, and we can benefit from it, so you're correct in stating that there was not that much overlap. And then lastly, we've put in place a process where our go-to-market organizations are going to combine their strength and help each other in some of accounts where both a strong compute story and a strong storage - needs to be integrated to serve the needs of the customer. >> Let's talk a little bit more, guys, about the impetus from the customers. The keynote this morning, as I was mentioning was jam packed, and we heard a lot, Stu, about the customer experience, and how NetApp is an enabler of customers to harness their data to become data-driven. Kamran, from your perspective, what was some of the customer input that really sort of brought this partnership - and this multi-faceted partnership - together? >> I think as we see customers looking their applications, not only current applications, but emerging applications, data's becoming very critical. And be able to accelerate data and the availability of data is going to be key for them, alright? As you heard earlier this morning, data's gold, right? It's the next oil, as we think about it. So we looked at our customers and at their transforming moving toward machine learning and AI, big data analytics, and it's driving massive amount of data that you have to be able to accelerate and be able to give results back. The partnership was the best of breed here. Looking at a leader partner around all flash and growing massively with their data-management solutions, and us leveraging our server technology and the capability we bring as a data center group, bring the both of best breeds to deliver an end solution for customers is really what we're focused on. And it's all being driven, really, by data, really where we see the acceleration happening in the workload aspect of it. >> You know, I was listening to the keynote this morning it talked about how customers today, it's a hybrid, multi-cloud world, is what NetApp positioned, and what I actually like is both NetApp and Lenovo are really aware and work with, really, the hyper scalers out there. There's a bunch of years that we kind of - there was this fighting from certain vendors out there, it was like, "Don't go that, that's not the future," you know, "We know what we're telling." Maybe talk a little bit about how that plays into philosophy, how you deal with customers, and how that leads to co engineered solutions that you'll work with together. >> Well, I think that both companies have a history of being good partners in the industry. Let's start there. Secondly, you're right, that some vendors in what we call traditional IT, are still fighting the reality of the hybrid multi-cloud, and I think that that's the path to death. Lenovo doesn't have that position, we certainly don't have that position, and we believe that combining our strength, when we're serving the customer to help them go to the public cloud, to help them leverage both great compute capabilities on prem and the extraordinary innovation that happens in the cloud is the right way to serve the customers. >> No, absolutely. I think that customers are looking to be more agile, all right? As their business evolves, and they're seeing competitive nature in their line of business, agility is becoming more and more important. Everybody also has to fit within a budget, so the hybrid-cloud story is really the path. And today, again, Lenovo is serving six of the top 10 hyper-scalers today from a technology, and we believe the hybrid-cloud story for on prem is the path of the future, where the customer adopt and deploy, to be more agile and reactive to their markets. >> George Kurian talked about, in his keynote this morning, that we seemed to kind of initially address, stand up has a massive install base, a lot of enterprises that were not born in the digital age, so he kind of talked about something that reminded me of what you said, Henri, is, "If customers don't adapt, transform rapidly at scale, they're out of business." So NetApp itself has undergone a very significant transformation, I'd love to understand from both of your perspectives, Henri, we'll start with you. How does the NetApp Lenovo multi-faceted partnership deliver differentiators? Presumably Lenovo has a lot of choices to do a partnership with a cloud storage data management company. What are some of those unique things from NetApp's field? >> So, one of the salient points that George made this morning is that for legacy companies, you know, they have to understand that the fact that they already have data is a huge asset that they need to leverage, right? That's using that data is how they're not going to become disrupted by a new company. Startups have agility, but they don't have the data. So jumping on that opportunity was certainly something we did at NetApp, and we have an application called Active IQ that actually takes a massive data lake of information we get from our systems, and is helping our customers make better usage of our technology. So just an example of our digital transformation. To the point of the relationship with Lenovo, the nice thing about our data fabric strategy is that it is not related to NetApp hardware, it's really all encompassing, it's there to serve the needs of the customer to be able to leverage the value of their data. And so it makes it very easy to partner with us, because really we're not parochial about, how we go about leveraging the technology. >> Yeah, I think what we see is, you know this digital transformation is driving many new use cases. IOT's becoming a big thing, putting edge to the cloud. So, data and our understanding data, and what you can do with data, is going to become more relevant across all lines of business. And that's where we're really focused on, and our transformation as Lenovo it's all around, "How do we address that shift that's happening in the market, where customers are moving away from data being just there to actually leveraging data and being able to create an outcome out of that data so it's going to be effective?" >> Alright, so this was announced about a month ago. Give us a little insight, how's the rollout been going? What's the reaction been from customers, channel partners, and the like? >> So I think channel partners, analysts, and press have been very positive, right? I think as we talked about being frictionless, it's been there, right? I think people see that what we said is actually out there. We're seeing good success in parts of geography worldwide already for the parts that have been shipping as of 09/14. We have our DE series shipping shortly, in early November, and we're going to continue acceleration in our channel partners and our customers. So we're very excited, I think as we saw prior to announcement we were growing triple digits in all flash as Lenovo. I think that with the expanded TAM going from 15% to averaging above 90% on market with the storage portfolio, we're excited here. We're anxious to keep going. >> Yeah, I'll go a little further, I would tell you that I think many channel partners felt hostage to some of the other choices in the industry. And the overwhelming feedback to the announcement of this relationship is, "Thank God, I now have an alternative that is powerful, with great focus on the compute side, great momentum on the storage side, bringing together best of great portfolio, and now I've got choice that I didn't have before." So I think there's a very high level of expectation, excitement, and I expect the momentum with channel partners and distributors to be very high. >> Let's unpack that joint go-to-market GTM strategy a little bit more. Let's talk about it first from the NetApp side. How are you going to market with an image and your partners? The selling motion, how do customers engage? Help us understand that. >> So NetApp is really coming from a very high-touch sales model, you know the beauty of our partnership with Lenovo is they have a velocity model. So for the part of the markets that are really about having velocity, I think it's a perfect marriage. The second thing is, they have a much larger world-wide presence than we do, I mean they've got physical location in many countries where we are not present. So that's expanding the footprint of potential close in service to NetApp customers. And then lastly, you know, the world is evolving very quickly, it's all about the apps, and I am excited about the fact that my go-to-market team rubbing shoulders with the Lenovo team is going to get more intelligent about compute, which is important for us to understand the real needs of the customers. >> Lisa: And Kamran, from your view? >> I mean I think we - And Lenovo serves over 160 countries, as you know, Henri, so we have a very expanded. We serve customers all the way from SMB all the way to very large enterprise like cloud service providers and MSBs. I think the momentum we have based on the park announcement is really provides an alternative solution to the HPE 3PAR and Delhi AMC, right? As Henri stated I think a lot of our channel partners, our disties, our value-added resellers are looking for an alternative route of a solution between the two leading platform solution providers here. And I think we're seeing that momentum, right? I think as of 09/13 when we made the announcement at Transform, we're seeing the excitement and the pull coming from the field and driving it, and of course we of course have a direct sales model, right? Having that high touch with a customer, selling the value prop of this storage solution and entire portfolio we can bring in, and the partnership value that brings in with NetApp here. >> Alright, so what should we expect to see from this partnership in the near future? >> Well, I think, you know, expansion of the product portfolio, particularly in the case of the China JV. One of the mission of that JV will be to design products specifically for the Chinese market, which we all know is very big and growing extremely fast, so that's one aspect that is yet to be seen. And then the second thing is as we collaborate on solving real customer problems, I expect to see a higher level of innovation, as we understand both sides of the equation and how we can bring our technologies together to solve real customer problems. >> The last question for both of you. You both talked about this joint partnership gives both NetApp and Lenovo and your respective install bases choice. What is the one differentiator? Why would a customer choose to go this route versus, as you mentioned, Delhi MC, HPE...? >> So I think you look at where NetApp has had leadership performance in all flash, and Ontap's amazing software, data management software solution. And look at Lenovo, we've been the fastest-growing server provider in the world. We see where we're bleeding in HPC environments, and really driving software to find. So I think customers are looking for, "How do I take the best of breed of things and bring it together? And making sure when you bring it together it is working together." So part of having the relationship of leveraging the NetApp technology is that Lenovo storage portfolio also provides that ability that says, it's a proven technology, the server technologies and the storage are proven. So it doesn't matter if a customer wants to leverage a NetApp technology with a Lenovo server, it is a proven solution for them, and they can depend on the value it's going to deliver. >> From my standpoint, you've got two credible, long term, solid people in the industry, partnering to get best-of-breed solutions with an eye towards being leaning into the cloud, and I think that in two days, IT business with a new wave of IT, if you don't embrace the cloud, the cloud will kill you. And so I think that's our unique differentiation, is that we have two companies that can serve our customers on prem needs, but have a very comprehensive private cloud, public cloud, and on prem strategy. And I think that nobody else can claim that differentiation. >> Henri, Kamran, thank you so much for stopping by theCUBE and chatting and sharing a little bit more about this exciting partnership. We look forward to hearing news next year! >> It's been a pleasure. >> Thank you. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman, and we are live from NetApp Insight 2018, we'll be back after a short break. (upbeat techno)

>> From the Regency Center in San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering Serverlessconf San Francisco 2018 brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> I'm Stu Miniman and you're watching theCUBE's coverage of Serverlessconf 2018 here in San Francisco at the Regency ballroom. I'm happy to welcome back to the program Simon Wardley, who's a researcher with the Leading Edge Forum, I spoke with you last year at Serverless in New York City, and thanks for joining me again here in San Francisco. >> Absolute pleasure, nice to be back. >> Alright, so many things have changed, Simon, we talked off camera and we're not going into it, your wardrobe stays consistent >> Always. >> But, you know, technology tends to change pretty fast these days. >> Mhmm. >> You do a lot of predictions and I'm curious starting out when you think about timelines and predictions, how do you deal with the pace of change, and put things out, I have my CTOs, like well, if I put a 10 year forecast down there, I can be off on some of the twists and curves, and kind of hit closer to the mark. Give us some of your thoughts as to how you look out and think about things when we know it's changing really fast. >> Okay, okay, so there are a number of different comments in there, one about how do you do predictions, one about the speed of change, okay? So I'm going to start off with the fact that one of the things I use is maps. And maps are based on a couple of characteristics. Any map needs an anchor, in the case of the maps of business that I do, that's the user, and often the business, and often regulators. You also need movement and position in a map. So position's relative to the anchor, so a geographical map, if you've got a compass then this piece is north, south, east or west of that. In the sort of maps that I do, it's the value chain which gives you position relative to the user or the business at the top. Movement, in a geographical map you have consistency of movement, so if I go, I don't know, north from England I end up in Scotland, so you have the same thing with a business map, but that evolution is described, sorry, that movement is described by evolution. So what you have is the genesis of novel and new activities custom-build examples, products and rental services, commodity and utility services, and that's driven by supply and demand competition. Now, that evolution axis, in order to create it, you have to abolish time. So one of the problems when you look at a map is there is no easy use of time in a map. You can have a general direction and then you have to use weak signals to get an idea of when something is likely to happen. So for example if I take nuts and bolts, they took 2,000 years to go from genesis to commodity, electricity was 1,400 years from genesis to commodity, utility, computing 80 years. So, there are weak signals that you can use to identify roughly when something is going to transition, particularly between stages like product to a commodity. Product-product substitution very unpredictable, genesis of novel acts, you can usually say when stuff might appear, but not what is going to appear because in that space it's actually what we call the uncharted, the unexplored space. So, one of the problems is time is an extremely difficult thing to predict without the use of weak signals. The second thing is the pace of change. Because what happens is components evolve, and when we see them shift from product to more commodity and utility, we often see a big change in the value chains that that impacts. And you can get multiple components evolving, and they overlap, and so we feel that the pace is very very fast, despite the fact that it actually takes about 30 to 50 years to go from genesis to the point of industrialization, becoming a commodity, and then about 10 to 15 years for that to actually happen. So if you look at something like machine learning, we can start with it back in the '70s, 3D printing 1968, the Battelle Institute, all of this stuff, virtual reality back in the 1960s as well. So the problem is, one, time's very difficult. The only way to effectively manage time is to use weak signals, it's probability. The second thing is the pace of change is confusing because what we're seeing is overlapping points of industrialization like for example cloud, and what's going here with Serverless. That doesn't actually imply that things are rapidly changing because you've actually got this overlapping pattern. Does that make sense? >> Yes, it does actually. >> Perfect. >> Because you think, we have in hindsight we always think that things happen a lot faster but-- >> Yeah. >> it's funny, infrastructure space when I talk to some of the people that I came up with, they were like oh yeah, come on, we did this in mainframe decades ago. and now we're trying again, we're trying again. Things like-- >> Containers, for example, you've got LXE before that, and we had Solaris Zones before that, so it's all sort of like, interconnected together. >> Okay, so tie this into Serverless for us. >> Okay. >> You were a rather big proponent of Platform as a Service, is this a continuation of us trying to get that abstraction of the application or is it something else? What is the map we are on, and, you know, help us connect things like PaaS and Serverless and that space. >> So back in 2005, the company I ran, we mapped out our value chain, and we realized that compute was shifting from product to utility. Now that had a number of impacts. A, that shift from product to utility tends to be exponential, people have inertia due to past practice, you see a co-evolution of practice, around the changing characteristic. It's normally to do with something called MTTR, mean time to recovery changes. And so you see rapid efficiency, rapid speed of development, being able to build new sources, new areas of value. So that happened with infrastructure, and we also knew it was going to happen with platform, which is why we built something called Zymkey, which was a code execution environment, totally stateless, event-driven, utility billing, and billing to the function, and that was basically a shift of the code execution platform from a product, lamp.net stack, to a much more utility form. Now we were way too early, way too early, because the educational barriers to get people into this idea of building with functions, functional program, much more declarative environment, was really different, I mean when Amazon launched EC2 in 2006, that was a big enough shock for everybody else, and now of course, now we're in 2014, Lambda represents that shift, and the timing's much much better. Now the impact of the shift is not only efficiency and speed of development of new things, and being able to explore new sources of value, but also a change of practice, and in the past, change of practice created DevOps, this is likely to create a new type of practice. For us, we've also got inertia to change because of pre-existing systems and governance and ways of working, sunk capital, physical capital, social capital. So it's all perfectly normal. So in terms of being able to predict and far-predict these types of future, well for me, actually, Lambda's my past, because that's where we were. It's just the timing was wrong, and so when it came out, it was like for me, it was like, this is really powerful stuff and the timing is much, and we're seeing it here, it's now really starting to grow. >> Alright, you've poked a little bit at some of the container discussions going on in the industry, you know, I look at the ecosystem here, and of course AWS is the big player, but there's lots of other Serverless out there. There's discussion of Multicloud. >> Yeah. >> How does things like Kubernetes, and there was this new term canative, or cane-native project, that was just announced, and we're all, don't expect that you've dug in too deeply, but, if you look at containers and Kubernetes, and Serverless, do these combine, intersect, fight? How do you see this playing out? >> So when I look at the map, you know, you've got the code execution layer, the framework which has now become more of a utility, and that's what we call platform. The problem is, is people will application to containers, and therefore describe their environments as application-container platforms, and the platform term became really messy, basically meant everything, okay. But if we break it down into code execution, this is what we call frameworks, this is becoming utility, this is where things like Lambda is, underneath that, are all these components like operating systems, and containers, and container management, Kubernetes type systems. So if you now look at the value chain, the focus is on building applications, and those applications need functions, and then lower down the stack are all these other components. And that will tend to become less visible over time. It's a bit like your toaster. I mean, your toaster contains nuts and bolts and all sorts of things, do you care? Have you ever noticed? Have you ever broken one open and had a look? >> Only if something's not working right. >> (laughs) Only if something, maybe, a lot of people these days wouldn't even go that far, they'd just go and buy themselves a new toaster. The point is, what happens is, as layers industrialize, the lower-order systems become much less visible. So, containers, I'm a big fan of containers. I know Solomon and the stuff in Docker, and I take the view that they are an important but invisible subsystem, and the same with container management and things like containers. The focus has got to be on the code execution. Now when you talk about canative, I've go to say I was really excited with Google Next last week, with their announcements like functions going GA, I thought that was really good. >> We've been hoping that it would have happened last year. >> Yeah exactly, I wanted this before, but I'm really pleased they've got functions coming out GA. There was some really interesting stuff around SDO, and there was the GRPC stuff which is, sort of, I think a hidden gem. In terms of the canative stuff, really interesting stuff there in terms of demos, not something I've played with, I'm sort of waiting for them to come out with canative as a service, rather than, you know, having to build your own. I think there was a lot of good and interesting stuff. The only criticism I would have was the emphasis wasn't so much on basically, serverless code execution building, it was too much focused on the lower end systems, but the announcements are good. Have I played with canative? No, I've just gone along and seen it. >> So Simon, the last question I have for you is, we spoke a year ago today, what are you excited about that's matured? What are you still looking for in this space, to really make the kind of vision you've been seeing for a while become reality, and allow serverless to dominate? >> So, when you get a shift from, say, product to utility, you get this co-evolution of practice, this practice is always novel and new. It starts to emerge, and gets better over time. The area that I think we're going to see that practice is the combining of finance and development, and so when you're running your application, and your application consists of many different functions, it's being able to look at the capital flow through your application, because that gives you hints on things like what should I refactor? Refactoring's never really had financial value. By exposing the cost per function and looking at capital flow, it's suddenly does. So, what I'm really interested in is the new management practices, the new tooling around observing capital flow, monitoring, managing capital flow, refactoring around that space and building new business models. And so there's a couple of companies here with a couple of interesting tools, it's not quite there yet, but it's emerging. >> Well, Simon Wardley, really appreciate you. >> Oh, it's a delight! >> Mapping out the space a little bit, to understand where things have been going. >> Absolute pleasure! >> And thank you so much, for watching as always, theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> From Boston Massachusetts, it's The Cube! Covering LiveWorx 18. Brought to you by PTC. >> Welcome to Boston everybody. You're watching The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. And we're here with a special presentation in coverage of the LiveWorx show sponsored by PTC of Needham, soon to be of Boston. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my co-host Stu Miniman. And Stu, this is quite a show. There's 6,000 people here. Jim Heppelmann this morning was up giving the keynote. PTC is a company that kind of hit the doldrums in the early 2000s. A company that as manufacturing moved offshore, its core business was CAD software for manufacturers, and it went through a pretty dramatic transformation that we're going to be talking about today. Well, fast forward 10 years, 12 years, 15 years on, this company is smokin, the stock's up 50 percent this year. They got a billion dollars plus in revenue. They're growing at 10 to 15 percent a year. They've shifted their software business from a perpetual software license to a recurring revenue model. And they're booming. And we're here at the original site of The Cube, as you remember well in 2010, the Boston Convention Center down at the seaport. And Stu, what are your initial impressions of LiveWorx? >> Yeah, it's great to be here, Dave. Good to be here with you and they dub this the largest digital transformation conference in the world. (laughing) So, I mean, Dave, you and I have been to much bigger conferences and we've been to a lot of conferences that are talking about digital transformation. But, IOT, AI, Augmented Reality, Block Chain, Robotics, all of these things really are about software, it's about digital transformation, and a really interesting space as you mentioned kind of the legacy of PTC. I have been around long enough. I remember when we used to call them Parametric Technologies. They kind of rebranded themselves as PTC. Windchill brings back some memories for me. When I worked for a high tech manufacturing company, it was that's the life cycle management tool that we used back in the early 2000s. So, I had a little bit of background in them. And, as you said, they're based in Needham, and they're moving to the Seaport. Hot area, especially, as we've said Dave, Boston has the opportunity to be the hub of IOT. And it's companies like PTC that are going to help bring those partnerships and lots of companies to an event like this. >> Well PTC has always been an inquisitive company, as you were pointing out to me off camera. They brought Prime Computer, Computer Vision. A number of acquisitions that they made back in the late 90s, which essentially didn't pan out the way they had hoped. But now again, fast forward to the modern era, Jim Heppelmann came in I think around 2010, exceeded ThingWorx, a company called Cold Light, Kept Ware is another company that they purchased. And took these really sort of independent software components and put them together and created a platform. Everybody talks about platform. We'll be talking about that a lot today, where the number of customers and partners of PTC. And we even have some folks from PTC on. But, basically, talking about digital transformation earlier, Stu, IOT is a huge tailwind for a company like PTC. But they had to really deliberately pivot to take advantage of this market. And if you think about it, yes, it's about connecting and instrumenting devices and machines, it's about reaching them, creating whatever wireless connections. But it's also about the data. We talk about that all the time. And constructing data that goes from edge to core, and even into the cloud, whether that cloud's on prem or in the data center. So you're seeing the transformation of this company. Obviously, I talked about some of the financials. We'll go into some of that. But an evolving ecosystem we heard Accenture's here, Infosys is here, Deloitte is here. As I like to say, the SI's like to eat at the trough. If the SI's are here, that means there's money here, right? >> Yeah Dave and actually a number that jumped out at me when Microsoft was up on stage, and it wasn't that Microsoft is investing five billion dollars in diode, the number that caught my ear was the 20 to 25 partners that it takes to deploy a single IOT solution. So, anybody that's been in tech for a long time, when you see these complicated stack solutions, the SIs need to be here. It takes a long time to work through them, and integration is a big challenge. How do I get all of these pieces together? It's not something that I just tit buy off the shelf. It's not shrink wrap software. This is complicated solution. It is very fragmented in how we make them up. Very specific to the industry that we're building, so really fascinating stuff that's going on. But we are still very early in the life-cycle of IOT. Huge, huge, huge opportunities but big players like Microsoft, like Google, like Amazon are going to be here making sure that they're going to simplify that environment over time. Huge, you know Dave, what's the original forecast I think we did at Wiki Bon, was a 1.2 trillion dollar opportunity, which most of that, that was actually for the industrial Internet, which is not the commercial things that we think about all the time, when we talk about the home sensors and some of the things, some of the consumer stuff, but also the industrial here. >> Well, I think a couple of key points that you're making here. First of all, the market is absolutely enormous. It's almost impossible to size. I mean you're talking about a trillion dollars in sort of spending on hardware, software, services, virtually everything. But to your point, Stu. It's highly highly fragmented, virtually every industry. And a lot of different segmented technologies. But it's also important to point out this is the mashing together of operations technology, OT with Information Technology, IT, and those four leading companies IT is actually leaning in and embracing this notion of edge, computing, and IOT. Now, I wouldn't even say that IT and OT are Hatfield and McCoy's. They're not. They're parts of the organization that don't talk to each other. So they are cultural differences. They use different languages. They think differently. One is largely engineers who make machines work. The other IT guys, which we obviously know what they do, they keep information technology systems running. They deploy a lot of new IT projects. So, really different worlds that have to start coming together. Jim Heppelmann today I thought did a really good job in his keynote. He talked about innovation. Usually you start with okay we're here at point A, we want to go here. We want to get to point B. And we're going to take a straight line and have a bunch of linear steps and milestones to get there. He pointed out that innovation today is really sort of a non-linear process. And he talked about the combinatorial effects of really three things. Machines, or the physical, computers and humans. Machines are strong, they can do heavy lifting. Computers are fast, and they can do repetitive tasks very accurately. And humans are creative. And he talked about innovation in this new world coming together by combining those three aspects, finding new ways to attack problems, to solve nature's challenges. And bringing nature into that problem solving. He gave a lot of examples of how mother nature mimicking mother nature is now possible with AI and other technologies. Pretty cool. >> Yeah, absolutely Dave. I'm sure we'll be talking a lot today about the fourth Industrial Revolution. A lot of discussion as to what jobs are Robots going to take. I look around the show floor here and there's a lot of cool robotics going on. But as Eric Manou said and Aaron McAfee, the folks from MIT that we've interviewed a couple of times talked about the second machine age. Really the marring of people and machines that are going to be powerful. And absolutely Jim Heppelmann talked about that a lot. It's humans, it's physical, and it's digital. Putting those together and then, the other thing that he talked about is we're talking a lot about voice lightly with all of these assistants, but, you're really limited as to how much input and how fast you can take information in from an auditory standpoint. I mean, I know that I listen to podcasts at 1.5 to 2 X to try to get more information in faster, but it is sight that we're going to get 80 percent of the information in, and therefore, it's the VR and AR that are huge opportunities. I know when I've been talking to some of the large manufacturers, what they used to have in written documentations and then they went digital with, they're now getting you inside to be able to configure the systems with the hollow lens, or some of the AR headsets, the VR headsets, to be able to play with that. So, we're really early but excited to see where this technology has come so far. >> Yeah, we're seeing a lot of practical applications of VR and AR. We go to a lot of these shows and they'll have the demos, and you go, okay, what will I do with this? Well, you're really seeing here at LiveWorx some of the things you actually can do. One good example I thought they did was BEA Systems up in Nashua, actually showing the folks that are doing the manufacturing, little tutorial in how to do that. We're going to see some surgical examples today. Remote surgery. There are thousands, literally thousands of examples. In the time we have remaining, I want to just do the rundown on PTC. Cause it really is quite an amazing transformation story. You're talking about a company with 1.1 billion dollars in revenue. Their aspiration is by 2021 to be a two billion dollar company. They're growing at ten percent a year, their software business has grown at 12 to 15 percent a year. 15 percent is that annual recurring revenue. So this is an example of a company that has successfully shifted from that perpetual model to that recurring model. They got 200 million dollars this year in free cash flow. Their stock, as I said, is up 50 percent this year. They got 350 million dollars in cash, but they just got a billion dollar investment from Rockwell Automation that took about 8.4 percent of the company given them an implied evaluation of almost 11 billion dollars, which has got a little uplift from the stock market there. They're selling a lot of seven figure deals. Really, the core is manufacturing product life-cycle management, CAD. That's the stuff that we know PTC well from. And I talked about some of those acquisitions that they made. They sell products like Creo, which is their 3D CAD software. I think they're on Rev five or six by now. So they've taken their sort of legacy software and sort of updated that for the digital world. >> Yep ,it is version five that they were just announced today. Talking about really the 3D effort they're doing there. Some partnerships around it, and like every other software Dave that we've been hearing about AI is getting infused in here because with so many devices and so much data, we really need the machines to help us process that and do things that humans can't keep up with. >> And the ecosystem's grown. This is a complicated marketplace. If you look at the Gartner Magic Quadrant, there is no leader, even though PTC is the leader. But there is no leader. They're all sort of in the lower right, PTC is up highest. GE is interestingly is not in there, because it doesn't have an on prem solution. I don't know why GE doesn't have an on prem solution. And I don't know why they're not in there. >> Is there another version of the magic quadrant that includes the Amazons and GEs of the world? >> I don't know. So that's kind of interesting. We'll try to unpack that as we go on here. PTC announced today a relationship with a company called Ansys, which does simulation software. Normally, simulation comes sort of after the design. They're bringing those two worlds together. The CAD design piece and the simulation piece, sort of closer to real time. So, there's a lot of stuff going on. As you said, it's data, analytics, edge computing. It's cloud, it's on prim, it's block chain for security. We haven't talked about security. A lot bigger threat metrix, so block chain comes into play. >> Yeah, Dave. I saw a great joke. Do you realize that the S in IOT stands for security? Did you know that? (laughing) Oh wait, there's no S in IOT. Well, that's the point. >> All right, good. So Stu and I will be here all day today. This is actually a three day conference. The Cube will only be there for day one. Keep right there everybody. And we'll be right back. You're watching The Cube, Live from Liveworx in Boston. (upbeat music)