>>We're back at Super Computing, 22 in Dallas, winding down the final day here. A big show floor behind me. Lots of excitement out there, wouldn't you say, Dave? Just >>Oh, it's crazy. I mean, any, any time you have NASA presentations going on and, and steampunk iterations of cooling systems that the, you know, it's, it's >>The greatest. I've been to hundreds of trade shows. I don't think I've ever seen NASA exhibiting at one like they are here. Dave Nicholson, my co-host. I'm Paul Gell, in which with us is Satish Ier. He is the vice president of emerging services at Dell Technologies and Satit, thanks for joining us on the cube. >>Thank you. Paul, >>What are emerging services? >>Emerging services are actually the growth areas for Dell. So it's telecom, it's cloud, it's edge. So we, we especially focus on all the growth vectors for, for the companies. >>And, and one of the key areas that comes under your jurisdiction is called apex. Now I'm sure there are people who don't know what Apex is. Can you just give us a quick definition? >>Absolutely. So Apex is actually Dells for a into cloud, and I manage the Apex services business. So this is our way of actually bringing cloud experience to our customers, OnPrem and in color. >>But, but it's not a cloud. I mean, you don't, you don't have a Dell cloud, right? It's, it's of infrastructure as >>A service. It's infrastructure and platform and solutions as a service. Yes, we don't have our own e of a public cloud, but we want to, you know, this is a multi-cloud world, so technically customers want to consume where they want to consume. So this is Dell's way of actually, you know, supporting a multi-cloud strategy for our customers. >>You, you mentioned something just ahead of us going on air. A great way to describe Apex, to contrast Apex with CapEx. There's no c there's no cash up front necessary. Yeah, I thought that was great. Explain that, explain that a little more. Well, >>I mean, you know, one, one of the main things about cloud is the consumption model, right? So customers would like to pay for what they consume, they would like to pay in a subscription. They would like to not prepay CapEx ahead of time. They want that economic option, right? So I think that's one of the key tenets for anything in cloud. So I think it's important for us to recognize that and think Apex is basically a way by which customers pay for what they consume, right? So that's a absolutely a key tenant for how, how we want to design Apex. So it's absolutely right. >>And, and among those services are high performance computing services. Now I was not familiar with that as an offering in the Apex line. What constitutes a high performance computing Apex service? >>Yeah, I mean, you know, I mean, this conference is great, like you said, you know, I, there's so many HPC and high performance computing folks here, but one of the things is, you know, fundamentally, if you look at high performance computing ecosystem, it is quite complex, right? And when you call it as an Apex HPC or Apex offering offer, it brings a lot of the cloud economics and cloud, you know, experience to the HPC offer. So fundamentally, it's about our ability for customers to pay for what they consume. It's where Dell takes a lot of the day to day management of the infrastructure on our own so that customers don't need to do the grunge work of managing it, and they can really focus on the actual workload, which actually they run on the CHPC ecosystem. So it, it is, it is high performance computing offer, but instead of them buying the infrastructure, running all of that by themself, we make it super easy for customers to consume and manage it across, you know, proven designs, which Dell always implements across these verticals. >>So what, what makes the high performance computing offering as opposed to, to a rack of powered servers? What do you add in to make it >>Hpc? Ah, that's a great question. So, I mean, you know, so this is a platform, right? So we are not just selling infrastructure by the drink. So we actually are fundamentally, it's based on, you know, we, we, we launch two validated designs, one for life science sales, one for manufacturing. So we actually know how these PPO work together, how they actually are validated design tested solution. And we also, it's a platform. So we actually integrate the softwares on the top. So it's just not the infrastructure. So we actually integrate a cluster manager, we integrate a job scheduler, we integrate a contained orchestration layer. So a lot of these things, customers have to do it by themself, right? If they're buy the infrastructure. So by basically we are actually giving a platform or an ecosystem for our customers to run their workloads. So make it easy for them to actually consume those. >>That's Now is this, is this available on premises for customer? >>Yeah, so we, we, we make it available customers both ways. So we make it available OnPrem for customers who want to, you know, kind of, they want to take that, take that economics. We also make it available in a colo environment if the customers want to actually, you know, extend colo as that OnPrem environment. So we do both. >>What are, what are the requirements for a customer before you roll that equipment in? How do they sort of have to set the groundwork for, >>For Well, I think, you know, fundamentally it starts off with what the actual use case is, right? So, so if you really look at, you know, the two validated designs we talked about, you know, one for, you know, healthcare life sciences, and one other one for manufacturing, they do have fundamentally different requirements in terms of what you need from those infrastructure systems. So, you know, the customers initially figure out, okay, how do they actually require something which is going to require a lot of memory intensive loads, or do they actually require something which has got a lot of compute power. So, you know, it all depends on what they would require in terms of the workloads to be, and then we do havet sizing. So we do have small, medium, large, we have, you know, multiple infrastructure options, CPU core options. Sometimes the customer would also wanna say, you know what, as long as the regular CPUs, I also want some GPU power on top of that. So those are determinations typically a customer makes as part of the ecosystem, right? And so those are things which would, they would talk to us about to say, okay, what is my best option in terms of, you know, kind of workloads I wanna run? And then they can make a determination in terms of how, how they would actually going. >>So this, this is probably a particularly interesting time to be looking at something like HPC via Apex with, with this season of Rolling Thunder from various partners that you have, you know? Yep. We're, we're all expecting that Intel is gonna be rolling out new CPU sets from a powered perspective. You have your 16th generation of PowerEdge servers coming out, P C I E, gen five, and all of the components from partners like Invidia and Broadcom, et cetera, plugging into them. Yep. What, what does that, what does that look like from your, from your perch in terms of talking to customers who maybe, maybe they're doing things traditionally and they're likely to be not, not fif not 15 G, not generation 15 servers. Yeah. But probably more like 14. Yeah, you're offering a pretty huge uplift. Yep. What, what do those conversations look >>Like? I mean, customers, so talking about partners, right? I mean, of course Dell, you know, we, we, we don't bring any solutions to the market without really working with all of our partners, whether that's at the infrastructure level, like you talked about, you know, Intel, amd, Broadcom, right? All the chip vendors, all the way to software layer, right? So we have cluster managers, we have communities orchestrators. So we usually what we do is we bring the best in class, whether it's a software player or a hardware player, right? And we bring it together as a solution. So we do give the customers a choice, and the customers always want to pick what you they know actually is awesome, right? So they that, that we actually do that. And, you know, and one of the main aspects of, especially when you talk about these things, bringing it as a service, right? >>We take a lot of guesswork away from our customer, right? You know, one of the good example of HPC is capacity, right? So customers, these are very, you know, I would say very intensive systems. Very complex systems, right? So customers would like to buy certain amount of capacity, they would like to grow and, you know, come back, right? So give, giving them the flexibility to actually consume more if they want, giving them the buffer and coming down. All of those things are very important as we actually design these things, right? And that takes some, you know, customers are given a choice, but it actually, they don't need to worry about, oh, you know, what happens if I actually have a spike, right? There's already buffer capacity built in. So those are awesome things. When we talk about things as a service, >>When customers are doing their ROI analysis, buying CapEx on-prem versus, versus using Apex, is there a point, is there a crossover point typically at which it's probably a better deal for them to, to go OnPrem? >>Yeah, I mean, it it like specifically talking about hpc, right? I mean, why, you know, we do have a ma no, a lot of customers consume high performance compute and public cloud, right? That's not gonna go away, right? But there are certain reasons why they would look at OnPrem or they would look at, for example, Ola environment, right? One of the main reasons they would like to do that is purely have to do with cost, right? These are pretty expensive systems, right? There is a lot of ingress, egress, there is a lot of data going back and forth, right? Public cloud, you know, it costs money to put data in or actually pull data back, right? And the second one is data residency and security requirements, right? A lot of these things are probably proprietary set of information. We talked about life sciences, there's a lot of research, right? >>Manufacturing, a lot of these things are just, just in time decision making, right? You are on a factory floor, you gotta be able to do that. Now there is a latency requirement. So I mean, I think a lot of things play, you know, plays into this outside of just cost, but data residency requirements, ingress, egress are big things. And when you're talking about mass moments of data you wanna put and pull it back in, they would like to kind of keep it close, keep it local, and you know, get a, get a, get a price >>Point. Nevertheless, I mean, we were just talking to Ian Coley from aws and he was talking about how customers have the need to sort of move workloads back and forth between the cloud and on-prem. That's something that they're addressing without posts. You are very much in the, in the on-prem world. Do you have, or will you have facilities for customers to move workloads back and forth? Yeah, >>I wouldn't, I wouldn't necessarily say, you know, Dell's cloud strategy is multi-cloud, right? So we basically, so it kind of falls into three, I mean we, some customers, some workloads are suited always for public cloud. It's easier to consume, right? There are, you know, customers also consume on-prem, the customers also consuming Kohler. And we also have like Dell's amazing piece of software like storage software. You know, we make some of these things available for customers to consume a software IP on their public cloud, right? So, you know, so this is our multi-cloud strategy. So we announced a project in Alpine, in Delta fold. So you know, if you look at those, basically customers are saying, I love your Dell IP on this, on this product, on the storage, can you make it available through, in this public environment, whether, you know, it's any of the hyper skill players. So if we do all of that, right? So I think it's, it shows that, you know, it's not always tied to an infrastructure, right? Customers want to consume the best thumb and if we need to be consumed in hyperscale, we can make it available. >>Do you support containers? >>Yeah, we do support containers on hpc. We have, we have two container orchestrators we have to support. We, we, we have aner similarity, we also have a container options to customers. Both options. >>What kind of customers are you signing up for the, for the HPC offerings? Are they university research centers or is it tend to be smaller >>Companies? It, it's, it's, you know, the last three days, this conference has been great. We probably had like, you know, many, many customers talking to us. But HC somewhere in the range of 40, 50 customers, I would probably say lot of interest from educational institutions, universities research, to your point, a lot of interest from manufacturing, factory floor automation. A lot of customers want to do dynamic simulations on factory floor. That is also quite a bit of interest from life sciences pharmacies because you know, like I said, we have two designs, one on life sciences, one on manufacturing, both with different dynamics on the infrastructure. So yeah, quite a, quite a few interest definitely from academics, from life sciences, manufacturing. We also have a lot of financials, big banks, you know, who wants to simulate a lot of the, you know, brokerage, a lot of, lot of financial data because we have some, you know, really optimized hardware we announced in Dell for, especially for financial services. So there's quite a bit of interest from financial services as well. >>That's why that was great. We often think of Dell as, as the organization that democratizes all things in it eventually. And, and, and, and in that context, you know, this is super computing 22 HPC is like the little sibling trailing around, trailing behind the super computing trend. But we definitely have seen this move out of just purely academia into the business world. Dell is clearly a leader in that space. How has Apex overall been doing since you rolled out that strategy, what, two couple? It's been, it's been a couple years now, hasn't it? >>Yeah, it's been less than two years. >>How are, how are, how are mainstream Dell customers embracing Apex versus the traditional, you know, maybe 18 months to three year upgrade cycle CapEx? Yeah, >>I mean I look, I, I think that is absolutely strong momentum for Apex and like we, Paul pointed out earlier, we started with, you know, making the infrastructure and the platforms available to customers to consume as a service, right? We have options for customers, you know, to where Dell can fully manage everything end to end, take a lot of the pain points away, like we talked about because you know, managing a cloud scale, you know, basically environment for the customers, we also have options where customers would say, you know what, I actually have a pretty sophisticated IT organization. I want Dell to manage the infrastructure, but up to this level in the layer up to the guest operating system, I'll take care of the rest, right? So we are seeing customers who are coming to us with various requirements in terms of saying, I can do up to here, but you take all of this pain point away from me or you do everything for me. >>It all depends on the customer. So we do have wide interest. So our, I would say our products and the portfolio set in Apex is expanding and we are also learning, right? We are getting a lot of feedback from customers in terms of what they would like to see on some of these offers. Like the example we just talked about in terms of making some of the software IP available on a public cloud where they'll look at Dell as a software player, right? That's also is absolutely critical. So I think we are giving customers a lot of choices. Our, I would say the choice factor and you know, we are democratizing, like you said, expanding in terms of the customer choices. And I >>Think it's, we're almost outta our time, but I do wanna be sure we get to Dell validated designs, which you've mentioned a couple of times. How specific are the, well, what's the purpose of these designs? How specific are they? >>They, they are, I mean I, you know, so the most of these valid, I mean, again, we look at these industries, right? And we look at understanding exactly how would, I mean we have huge embedded base of customers utilizing HPC across our ecosystem in Dell, right? So a lot of them are CapEx customers. We actually do have an active customer profile. So these validated designs takes into account a lot of customer feedback, lot of partner feedback in terms of how they utilize this. And when you build these solutions, which are kind of end to end and integrated, you need to start anchoring on something, right? And a lot of these things have different characteristics. So these validated design basically prove to us that, you know, it gives a very good jump off point for customers. That's the way I look at it, right? So a lot of them will come to the table with, they don't come to the blank sheet of paper when they say, oh, you know what I'm, this, this is my characteristics of what I want. I think this is a great point for me to start from, right? So I think that that gives that, and plus it's the power of validation, really, right? We test, validate, integrate, so they know it works, right? So all of those are hypercritical. When you talk to, >>And you mentioned healthcare, you, you mentioned manufacturing, other design >>Factoring. We just announced validated design for financial services as well, I think a couple of days ago in the event. So yep, we are expanding all those DVDs so that we, we can, we can give our customers a choice. >>We're out of time. Sat ier. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. At the center of the move to subscription to everything as a service, everything is on a subscription basis. You really are on the leading edge of where, where your industry is going. Thanks for joining us. >>Thank you, Paul. Thank you Dave. >>Paul Gillum with Dave Nicholson here from Supercomputing 22 in Dallas, wrapping up the show this afternoon and stay with us for, they'll be half more soon.

(uplifting music) >> Welcome to this CUBE conversation. In this segment, we're going to talk about the future of IoT and the critical role semiconductor technology plays in shaping this exciting space. As we've reported on our Breaking Analysis segments, the fabulous chip company enabled by the ARM ecosystem has permanently changed the semiconductor industry. Intel's fateful decision in the mid-2000s to pass on the chip design for the Apple iPhone was an ironic reminder of IBM's decision to outsource the microprocessor for the original IBM PC to Intel. In both cases, the market leader didn't appreciate the tectonic industry shifts that were possible, and importantly, the impact that volume economics would have on the power structure of the entire industry. Now fast forward today, and we believe ARM wafer volumes are 10X those of the general purpose x86. This means that the ARM ecosystem is on a cost curve that is unmatched in the business. Moreover, as we've reported, the ARM ecosystem is blowing away the historical performance curves that we've seen in the chip industry, AKA Moore's law. Whereas for years, the x86 performance curve grew roughly at 40% per annum has now moderated to the low thirties. Over the past five years, as evidenced by the progression of Apple's A series chip, based on ARM, when you observe the combined performance of the CPU, the GPU, the NPU, the XPU, DSPs, accelerators, et cetera, the alternative processors in combination have driven the average annual performance improvement to over a hundred percent per year. This is an astounding achievement. Why is this so important to IoT? Well, the edge is projected to be the next trillion dollar market. We believe we'll see a world with more than a trillion devices. And as we've reported, IoT use cases are going to require specialized and distributed processing power. And lots of it. AI Inference at the edge will enable real-time action and embedding intelligence in the chips that when the edge will be high performance, low power, inexpensive, and programmable with a much faster time to market profile than historical semiconductor cycles. We're already seeing that with companies like AWS, Apple, Tesla, and peer, and others going from design to tape out and under two years versus the historical norm of let's say four years to be generous. And with me to discuss innovation in IoT and some big news from the 2021 ARM's summit is Mohamed Awad, who is the vice president of IoT and embedded at ARM Mohamed. Good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. Thanks. I really appreciate the opportunity to have you. >> So, You're welcome. So tell us about your, your role at ARM. I know you were responsible for infrastructure previously and now sort of extended to, to IoT and embedded. Tell us more about. >> Yeah, sure. So I've been with ARM for a little over three years now. I started working with the infrastructure team when I was, we worked on a lot of different initiatives and one of the things that we launched was on Neo verse. And we went on to do some interesting things there, as, as I mentioned, we're making some great traction in the infrastructure space, but a year ago I took on the role to you ought to head up arms IOT and embedded business. And, you know, it's, it's interesting because my, my career really started in IOT and embedded. I was in the Boston area working for companies like Lucent Nortel, and then eventually I remembered very early IOT startup. So that was, that was 25 years ago now. But, but I still got roots in the Boston area. So I like your, like your hat in the back now. >> Yeah. Right. Go, go Sox. >> Go Sox. >> So how did we get here, you mean, you've had a lot of experience in embedded IOT, which is relatively new term to most people. It sort of evolved from a period of, you know, you had instrumentation for at least some components of, of the system. And then we focused on conductivity. But as I was saying in my upfront narrative, we're really now embedding AI and it's it's intelligence, but so there's phases. How do you see the progression in terms of how we got to where ARM is today in IOT? >> Yeah, it's really interesting because if you think about, if you think about ARM, then you really just think about IOT, you know, as you said, IOT started off with, Hey, let's, let's stick a microcontroller in everyday devices, you know, stick a micro controller to something like a vending machine, and then we went on and said, well, hey, what if we could remotely control that device for gathering data from that device, and then we, so we entered this phase of, you know, what we like to call interconnectivity, right, And that was all about, you know, connecting these devices with, with things like, you know, low power Bluetooth, or, you know, even now low latency 5G. And what's interesting is that, you know, together the work of the Arm ecosystem has done over the years has really solved the problems of how to add microcontrollers that connects the devices. I mean, that those problems have largely been solved for a lot of the reasons that you described earlier, which is, you know, we focused on lowering the barrier for folks to come in and innovate around sort of a core technology and, and lots of innovation happened as a result of that. We're entering this new phase now, which is really about, you know, you've got all these devices out there which can easily be connected, they've got microcontrollers or, or, or technology in them, which allows them to, to be intelligent. But how do we really extract the level of kind of AI intelligence out of those devices? Ultimately, what we're trying to do is, is, you know, the industry needs to figure out how to derive intelligence from the smallest sensor, all the way up to the largest cloud data center, you know, and, and, and that means local intelligence. It means regional intelligence, and it means global intelligence, you know, the potential is enormous, but the challenge is pretty enormous as well because of all those diversified use cases, all the diversified devices, all the, all of the sort of scale sort of number of platforms that we're talking about, and that that's really what, we're, what we're excited to kind of go work on, work on that. >> It is exciting. I mean, just the it's mind boggling the, the capabilities, the processing capabilities of this distributed world that we're, we're, we're evolving towards. Let's talk about the hard news of why are you announcing what you're announcing, I mean, what are the trends that are sort of informing that maybe you could hit some of the highlights of the announcement and give us a key details? >> Yeah, sure. So, so when we announced his ARM, total solutions for IOT, and that's really made up of three things, my favorite part is on virtual hardware. Our virtual hardware is all about making available a virtual representation of, of devices in the cloud for lots of developers to use. And I'll, I'll get to that in a minute, but I think, you know, in order to understand that you have to kind of understand the broader context of what ARM total solutions are. It starts with pre-integrated pre verified IP package. You talked earlier about how design cycles we're looking to accelerate people were looking to develop a Silicon much faster. Part of what we were doing at ARM is we're actually taking, you know, pre-integrated pre verified IP packages and call those ARM corstone. We're making those available to the market. So we give those to our Silicon partners, and then they can use that. They might include an neuro processing unit, a CPU. They might include the interconnect, all the, kind of the base IP. And then our Silicon partners can use that as a jumping off point so that they can quickly get Silicon to market. That's the first part of the news, which is, you know, we're doubling down on that too. Now, you know, in the last three years, we've had over 150 different designs, which have used our ARM core stone products. So moving forward, we're going to make that foundational to how we deliver IOT technology to the market. But the second part of it, which is, which is super exciting, is that not only are we going to accelerate the time to market for our Silicon partners, we're also making a virtual representation of that underlying core stone design available in the cloud for software developers all around the world to use at the same time that IP is ready. So at the same time, we hand IP to our Silicon partners. We're making a virtual representation in the cloud. So software developers can start. Now, let me just take a step back here and make sure that, you know, everyone kind of understands how, how big of a deal this is, right before the way this used to work, I would hand the IP to a Silicon partner. It would take them, you know, 18 months, maybe two years to get a piece of Silicon in market. And then a board manufacturer would have to go off. And then only maybe three or four years later, could the software developers start five years to get a product to market what we're doing here with ARM total solutions. We cut that five years down to three years, so we can massively accelerate time to market. And then the third part of what ARM total solution is, is something we call projects Centaury Project Centaury is about putting in place a set of standards to it's an ecosystem initiative, which puts in place a set of standards, reference software and, and specifications around things like security and how devices should communicate with, with, you know, the operating system or cloud service providers that allows that allows software developers to get a level of reuse and leverage. So, you know, today in the IOT, every time you develop a piece of software, you're going to develop it over and over again. But what we're talking about here is they can develop it once and, and be able to apply. And we use a lot of that software over and over again, the same way they do in other markets like infrastructure. >> Love it. So, okay. I want to ask you if that, if there's a blueprint there that we can, we can learn from, but before we do that. So if I, if I go back to the three items that you mentioned, so for example, one of your licensees can say, okay, I want to take just the standard components, the CPU, whatever, but I might want to customize the neural processing unit, as you said, and they have the flexibility to do that at the same time when they, when they bring it to the Foundry, because it's a standard platform that, you know, what's going to work, that's kind of a nuance that maybe people maybe don't fully appreciate, but am I getting that right? That standard platform has dramatically changed the industry. >> Yeah, that's right. I mean, the idea is, is that, you know, we take these, these IPS, we integrate them together. We verify them, we designed it as a subsystem. We target specific use cases, and then we make them available. Our partners are certainly free to go off and make modifications to it. They see fit. But when we hand it to them, it's ready to go. And that's the idea. >> Yeah. And then the point about the being able to, to give developers access in the cloud, and we've often said that, you know, the developers are going to shape IOT. And so I think what you're saying is essentially instead of this linear process, where you can get dependent on the previous one being done, you're actually parallelizing. If you will, the innovation. >> Yeah. That's exactly right. And I, and I'd actually take it one step forward. There's a, there's a subtlety there, which I didn't comment on, which I think it's important to call out, which is not only are we parallelize them, but we're enabling what I'll call modern development methodology. Right. You know, the way that development is done in areas like mobile and the cloud data centers, they use agile workflows, things like continuous integration, you know, broad-based testing as they go along. That's very different than the way that embedded development is done today. Embedded development today is done the same way. It was 25 years ago. You get a board on your desk, you mess around with a bunch of jumpers and cables and wires, hope you did it right. And then you write your software and you hope the hardware guy doesn't want to revise the hardware because then you're going to start all over again. Right. You know, the last thing that you'd want to do is set up a hardware form, right? Lots and lots of different hardware to go off and test over and over again. Now with virtual hardware, you can move all of that to the cloud. All that complexity goes away and you've massively reduced the investment required for software developers to get going and allow them to take on these more modern techniques. >> Well, Mohammed, thank you for clarity clarifying that, that nuance, because we're going to see a Renaissance in the way that that embedded development occurs. And I'm curious as to how you think about that in terms of you, because you're going to have a whole new breed of developers come in with, you know, the cloud developers, if you will. They have, they see IOT as a massive opportunity as well. You're going to see the, I would presume the embedded ecosystem. Up-skill a much in the same way you're seeing, you know, ops dev or dev ops or IT people, you know, learn Python to you know, to up-skill. And so you're going to see like a two vectors of innovation in terms of developers coming together. How do you see that? >> Yeah, that's exactly right. And that's exactly what we're driving to. And when we talk about this, we talk about changing the economics of IOT. That's exactly why, because what we, what we're saying is that, Hey, you can have all this massive innovation that can be unleashed from all these developers that didn't have access to these devices before. And you can also take all these embedded devices, embedded developers and make them so much more efficient with these new modern, modern development methodologies. A combination of those two things is going to, you know, not only is it going to lower the cost of development, but it's going to spur a massive amount of new innovation and all, you know, all new products and services, right. We really think can unleash the potential of IoT. >> So step back a little bit, help us understand kind of how you came to this, your strategy. You mean, what were the friction points or what are the friction points that you see in IOT and embedded in terms of being able to, to, to, to scale this capability? >> Yeah. Yeah. It's a good, it's a great question. And I got to tell you, we, we, when so when we, when I came, when I came into this role, you know, the first thing you do is you go off and talk to customers and partners, and you try to understand how people are using. But most of the time, when people think of ARM, they think of us as, Hey, they're the guys that are off talking to the Silicon partners are talking to the hardware guys. And we absolutely do. We have strong relationships with all of the Silicon partners, but because of our place in the ecosystem, you know, as a, as a company, which, you know, we've got shipped over 70 billion cortex spend devices today, you know, we underpinned, you know, the IOT basically runs on us. And so a lot of what we do too, is we talked to the software ecosystem. We talked to OEMs, and we talked to service providers looking to capitalize on all of that, you know, on the, on the depth and breadth of our ecosystem. And when I talked to OEMs, and when I talked to software service providers, two things became really clear. The OEM is wanting to find a faster path to market. They're like, it just takes too long for us to get our products to market. We need to figure out how to streamline it. So that was one. When I talked to the software service providers, they came to us with a little bit of a different problem. What they said is like, Hey, we really want to deploy software and services across this, this IOT edge space, but it's just so diverse. And so massively complex, you know, everybody's got a different view on thing. Can you help us, like, where's the, your, the common denominator, can you help us figure out how to attack this problem? And that's really what drove, what drove us. Right. >> Awesome. Let's talk a little bit more about some of the announcement, details, project Centaury particular, what are some of the things that you want people to really appreciate, and specifically, what does it mean to the ecosystem? I mean, you touched on it a little bit, but I don't know if you have any examples or customers and, and, and maybe also Mohamed, if you could help us understand how it relates to other arm projects like Cassini. >> Yeah, sure. So project, so, so, so two things. So first of all, let me just talk to what, what, what projects Centaury. So project Centaury is really looking to, you know, help enable a level of, of software leverage across that diverse M class devices that are out there in class with our microcontroller devices that are out there. And so it's really made up of 3, 3, 3 parts. One part is, is all about security. So it uses a PSA and our PSA certified framework, including TFM trusted firmware. So this is our security framework that we've put forward. And then our, the PSA standards initiative that's out there in the marketplace, you know, in all of the efforts that we bring to bear on that, the second part of it is, is around open CMSIS, and, and open CDI CMSIS, which is really, which is really about standardizing aspects about how software is delivered to an IOT device packaged and delivered. It's also about things like how any our thoughts. So any real-time operating system or any cloud service provider, you know, can be accessed from the device. So the idea is, is that a, you know, today, if you think about the way that this works, if you're a Silicon provider, you're a fiber manufacturer, you have to go off and support multiple different clubs, service providers. You may want to support multiple different operating systems, depending on you know, which, which, you know, which particular OS you're interested in. And, and what we're trying to do with, with, with, with projects Centaury is to specify key attributes of the services that exist down on your, on your Silicon, so that you can more easily integrate with, you know, whatever OS you want, whatever service provider you want on whatever hardware you want. It's still allowing plenty of differentiation. So it's not like we're saying, Hey, this is how you actually do over the air updates. For example, rather, what it's saying is that, Hey, this device supports over the updates. If you're going to ask for that service, here's how you present yourself. And that allows a level of software portability that you just didn't have in the IOT space previously. >> Right. And then the licensee can tune that to their specific use case and add their own value. Right. And so, again, go back to the thing we talked about before they, they know what's going to work and they can give it to the, Foundry and say, make this according to the spec and the Foundry's ready for it. That's how we've seen such massive volumes. I want to ask you about security. You, you touched on that. Do you leverage realms in this, or is that not in scope? Is that like. >> No, that's more of a, that right now, that's more focused on our A-class and V9 stuff. And you actually asked about project Cassini a little bit earlier. You know, project Cassini is really our initiative, which is focused on our A-class devices. So our A-class devices typically run a, you know, what I'll call a rich OS like a Linux or whatever. And it's really designed for allowing the level of virtualization and allowing a level of, of, of, of, of shared resources between different containers on, on an A-class type system that you can easily deploy and, and leverage the A-class device resources from, by, by different, by different workloads. >> The reason I asked, I'm trying to Mohamed connect the dots between mobile as kind of a blueprint, which can occur for IOT. I think that's maybe, but even some of the stuff that's going on in the data center, it's particularly as it relates to data intensive workloads, some of the work that we've seen that, you know, AWS do, and, you know, offloads, we're seeing, you know, all the new, like all the modern storage and networking and security offloads in the data center are moving to ARM. And it just seems like the use cases for ARM are exploding. And I'm wonder if he can help us connect the dots into IOT, which could, which could do or follow all of these markets. >> Yeah. I mean, what's interesting what we saw happen in mobile and what we saw happen in the infrastructure, what we see happening in both of those markets is that by creating a level of consistency in how software can be deployed on these devices, whether that's with the, you know, with the mobile phone and the ARM ecosystem and a mobile phone, or all the way through to the data center, what you've done is you unleashed a tremendous amount of innovation, you know, in the mobile space. There's something like 3 million apps out there today, right. And thousands of different smartphone models, you know, could you imagine if every one of those app developers had to test their application on every mobile phone in order to be sure that it worked, you know, you'd have a lot less innovation, a lot less, you know, a lot less, a lot less scale and a lot less, a lot less applications. So what we're talking about here is trying to unleash that same amount of value by creating that consistent. So that's a clear lesson we learned from, from both mobile and from, from infrastructure. The other thing that's clear is that a lot of these markets you've got, back to the idea of, of parallelized development flows and, and subsystems, and that's directly kind of what we're seeing in, in what we're putting forth in, with, ARM total solutions. >> Yeah. You know, it's kind of buzz wordy and people who watch my program know I'm a kind of a fan of the R model, but, but you talk about the new IOT economy. In my view, you're actually an underpinning of that economy. I mean, everybody talks about it, this multi-trillion dollar opportunity, but, but how do you think about this, this new economy? And we've obviously touched on it, but IOT, the edge it's really taking, taking shape now and becoming real. >> Yeah. I, I think that the idea here, when we talk about a new IOT economy, very clearly what I'm referring to is this idea that, you know, you've got today, you've got a lot of potential, which is lost because, you know, your you're limited to just the, a vertically integrated solution. Software is vertically integrated on the, on the specific hardware and the, the barriers and the cost to investing in that hardware from a software perspective is just, it's just too high given, given the sort of scale that you get with that software after the fact. So we're addressing that in two vectors or simplifying it, so that lots of different developers, you know, that developer that's sitting at the coffee shop can spin up an AWS instance with our ARM virtual hardware on it and write an app while they're sitting there. And at the same time, they can access a much broader set of devices than they would've been able to otherwise, if it's not, you know, it's not dissimilar, you know, I hate to keep going back to mobile, but it's not dissimilar from the mobile space where if you think about 15 years ago, when all of the applications that were written on your mobile phone were written by the phone manufacturer, you had a limited number of applications, and sure a phones were a great thing, but it was nothing like it is today. It was a mobile phone economy. Today, when you think about mobile, you know, mobile really underpins the financial economy. It underpins, you know, transport, the transportation economy. It underpins how we communicate with everybody, with social networks and it, and it's really taken a sort of life of its own in lots of different ways. It's not really a mobile economy. It is the economy. And we think IOT can be even larger than that. Right? >> Yeah. You know what I mean? Our industry has a tendency to hype a lot of new waves, but they certainly didn't, over-hype mobile. I mean, everybody, you know, migrated toward mobile. That's why I think it's such a relevant conversation. And so adaptable to IOT at the cloud as well, data as well. You know, they, they were probably under hyped. If anything, social, maybe we can put over here in a bucket, there's a lot, a lot of Friction. But those other three in terms of sort of enterprise and the edge. And I think, you know, from, from what we can see ARM has really in the ecosystem has, has completely and permanently altered the shape of the industry. It's a very exciting time. And I think the best is yet to come Mohamed. I really appreciate you coming to the cube. Thanks so much. >> No, I, I really, I really appreciate, I think thanks for taking the time. All right. >> Thank you for watching this CUBE conversation. This is Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time. (casual uplifting music)

from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley Palo Alto California this is a cute conversation hi and welcome to the cube Studios for another cube conversation where we go in-depth with thought leaders driving innovation across the tech industry I'm your host Peter Burris if there's one thing we know about cloud it's that it's going to drive new data and a lot of it and that places a lot of load on storage technologies who have to be able to capture persist and ultimately deliver that data to new classes of applications in support of whatever the digital business is trying to do so how is the whole storage industry and the relationship between data and storage going to evolve I can't think of a better person to have that conversation with in stanley's a phos senior vice president product marketing infinite dad Stan welcome to the cube thank you for it's my pleasure to be here and I'm flattered with that introduction well hold on look you and I have known each other for a long time we have been walking into user presentations and you've been walking out until recently though you were generally regarded as the thought leader when it came to user side concerns about storage what is that problem that users are fundamentally focused on as they think about their data data management and storage requirements fundamental problems and this afflicts all classes of users whether in a financial institution at university government small business medium-sized businesses is that they're coping with the number of primal forces that don't change and the first is that the environment is becoming ever more competitive and with the environment being ever more competitive that means that they're always under budget constraints they're usually suffering from skill shortages especially now when we see so many new technologies and the realization that we can coax value out of the information that we capture and store creating new demands elsewhere within the IT organization so what we see historically is that uses understand that there you have an insatiable demand for capacity they have finite budgets they have limited skills and they realize that recovering from a loss of data integrity is a far more painful process than recovering from an application blowing up or a networking issue and they got to do it faster and they have to do it faster so what we see in some ways is in effect the perfect storm and this is part of the reason that we've seen a number of the technical evolutions that we've witnessed over the past decade or two decades or however long we'd like to admit we've been tracking this industry occurring and growing in importance what we've also seen is that many of the technologies that are useful in helping to deliver usable availability to the application are in some ways becoming more commoditized so when we look across these industries some of the things that we're looking for is cost efficiency we're looking at increasing levels of automation we're looking of increases in data mobility with the ultimate objective being of course to allow data to reside where it naturally belongs and we're trying to deliver these new capabilities at scale in infrastructures that were built with storage arrays that would design for a terabyte world instead of a petabyte world and it won't be too long before we start talking about exabytes as we're already seeing so to be able to satisfy new scale problems with traditional and well understood issues is there are three basic types of storage companies that are targeting this problem the first of the established storage companies the incumbents the incumbents and the incumbents I really don't envy them because they have to maintain backwards compatibility which limits their ability to innovate at the same time they're competing against privately held newer companies that aren't constrained by the need for backwards compatibility and therefore able to take better advantage of the technology improvements that we're seeing to live it and when I say technology improvements not just in hardware but also in terms of software also in terms of management and government and governing philosophies so beginning with the point that all companies large small have some basic problems that are similar what we then see is there are three types of storage companies addressing them one of the in established and common vendors the other and they've gotten a lot of press or the companies that realize that flash media very media that delivers one to two orders of magnitude improvements in terms of performance in terms of bandwidth in terms of environmental x' that they could create storage solutions that address real pain points within a data center within an organization but at a very high price point and then it was the third approach and this is the approach that infinite I chose to take and that is to define the customer problem to find the customer market and then create an architecture which is underpinned by brilliant software to solve these problems in a way that is both cost-effective and extensible and of course meeting all of the critical capabilities that users are looking for so we've got the situation where we've got the incumbents who have install bases and are trying to bring their customers forward but right I have to do so within the constraints of past technology choices we've got the new folks who are basically technology first and saying jump to a new innovation curve and we've got other companies that are trying to bring the best of the technology to the best of the customer reality and marry it and you're asserting that's what infinite at ease and then it's precisely what we've done so let's talk about why did you then come to infinite at what is it about infinite act that gets you excited well one of the things that got well your number of things that got me excited about it so the first is that when I look at this and I approach these things as an engineer who's steeped in aerospace and weapon systems design so you look at the problem you superimpose capabilities there and then you blow it up and then if well we do blow it up but we blow it up using economics we blow it up using superior post-sale support effectiveness we blow it up with a fundamentally different approach to how we give our install base access to new capabilities so we're established storage companies and to some extent media based storage companies of forcing upgrades to avoid architectural obsolescence that is to gain access to new features and functions that can improve their staff productivity or deliver new capabilities to support new applications and workloads we're not forcing a cadence of infrastructure refreshes to gain access to that so if you take a look at our history our past behavior we allow today we're allowing current software to run on n minus 2 generation hardware so that now when you're doing a refresh on your hardware you're doing a refresh on the hardware because you've outgrown it because it's so old that it's moved past its useful service life which hasn't happened to us yet because that's usually on the order of about eight years and sometimes longer if it's kept in a clean data center and we have a steady cadence of product announcements and we understood some underlying economics so whether I talk to banking institutions colleges manufacturing companies telcos service providers everybody's in general agreement that roughly two-thirds of the data that they have online and accessible is stale data meaning that it hasn't been accessed in 60 to 90 days and then when I take a look at industry forecasts in terms of dollar per terabyte pricing for HD DS for disk drives and I look at dollar per terabyte forecast for flash technologies there's an order of magnitude difference in meaning 10x and even if you want to be a pessimist call it only 5x what you see is that we have a built-in advantage for storing 60% of the data that's already up and spinning and there are those questions of whether or not the availability of flash is going to come under pressure over the next few years as because we're not expanding another fabs out there they're generating flash so let me come back right it's kind of core points out there so we have quality yeah the right now you guys are trying to bring the economics of HDD to the challenges are faster more reliable more scalable data delivery right so that you can think about not only persisting your data from transactional applications but also delivering that data to the new uses new requirements new applications new business needs so you've made you know infinite out has made some choices about how to bring technology together that are some somewhat that are unique first thing is the team that did this tell us a little bit about the team and then let's talk about some of those torches so one of the draws for me personally is that we have a development team that has had the unique possibly the unique experience of having done three not one not two but three clean sheet designs of storage arrays now if you believe that practice makes perfect and you're starting off with very bright people that experience before they designed a storage array when we look at the InfiniBand when we look at in Finnegan what we see is the benefit of three clean sheet designs and what does that design look like what is it how did you guys bring these different senses of technology together to improve the notion of it all right so what we looked at we looked at trends instead of being married to a technology or married to an architecture we were we define the users problem we understood that they have an insatiable need for data we can argue whether they're growing at fifteen percent 30 percent or 100 percent per year but data growth is insatiable stale data being a constant megive n' and of course now with digital business initiatives and moving the infrastructure to the edge where we could capture ever more data if anything the amount of stale data that was storing is likely to increase so we've all seen survey after survey that 80% of all the data created is unstructured data meaning we're collecting it we know that may be a value at some point but we're not quite sure when so this is not data that you want to store in the most expensive media that we know how to manufacture or sell right not happening so we have a built-in economic advantage for this at least 60% of the data that users want to keep online we understand that if you implement an archiving solution that archive data still has to be stored somewhere and for practical purposes that's either disk or tape and we're not here to talk about the fact that I can take tape and store in a bunker for years but if I want to recover something if I have to answer a problem I want it on disk so the economic gap the price Delta between an archive storage solution per se and our approach is much narrower because we're using a common technology and when Seagate or West and digital a Toshiba cell and HDD they're not asking you where you're putting it they're saying you want this capacity this rpm this mean time between face its this is how much it's going to cost so when we take a look at a lot of the innovation and go to market models what they really are or revenue protection schemes for the existing established vendors and for the emerging companies the difference is there are in the problems that they're solving am i creating a backup restore solution the backup and restore is always a high impact pain point am i creating a backup restore solution am i building a system for primary storage a my targeting virtualized environments my targeting VDI now our install base the bulk of our install base I'm not sure we actually we should share percentages but it's well north of 50 and if you take a look at some virtualized estimates probably 80% of workloads today are virtualized we understood that to satisfy this environment and to have a built-in advantage that's memorable after the marketing presentations are done in other words treating these things as black boxes so if we take a look at my high-level description of an infinite box array installed at a customer site consistent sub-millisecond response times and we're able to do that because we service over 80% of all iOS out of DRAM which is probably about four orders of magnitude faster than NAND flash and then we have a large read cache to increase our cache hit ratio even further and when I say large we're not talking about single digits of terabytes we're talking about 20 plus terabytes and that can grow as necessary so that when we're done we're achieving cache hit ratios that are typically in excess of 90% now if I'm servicing iOS out of cache do I really care what's on the back end the answer is no but what I do care about for certain analytics applications is I want lots of bandwidth and I want and if I have workloads with high right content I don't want to be spending a lot of time paying my raid right penalty so what we've done is to take the obvious solution and coalesce rights so that instead of doing partial stripe rights we're always doing full stripe rights so we have double bit protection on data stored on HD DS which means that the world is likely to come to an end before we lose this slight exaggeration I think we're expecting the world to come to an end in 14 billion years yeah yeah let's do so so if I'm wrong get back to me in a Bay and it's a little bit less than that but it doesn't matter yeah okay high on that all so we've got a so we've got a built in economic advantage we've got a built in performance advantage because when I'm servicing most iOS out of DRAM which is for does magnitude faster than NAND flash I've got a lot of room to do a lot of very clever things in terms of metadata and still be faster so and you got a team that's done it before and we've got a team that's done it before and experimented because remember this is a team that has experience with scale-up architectures as in symmetric s-- they have experience with scale-out architectures which is XIV which was very disruptive to the market well so was it symmetric spec and now of course we've got this third bite at the Apple with infinite at where they also understood that the rate of microprocessor performance improvement was going up a lot faster than than our ability to transfer data on and off of HD DS or SSDs so what they realized is that they could change the ratio they can have a much lower microprocessor or controller to back-end storage ratio and still be able to deliver this tremendous performance and now if you have fewer parts and you're not affecting the ID MTBF by driving more iOS through I've lowered my overall cost of goods so now I've got an advantage in back-end media I have a bag I have an advantage in terms of the number of controllers I need to deliver sub sillas eken response time I have an advantage in terms of delivering usable availability so I'm now in a position to be able to unashamedly compete on price unashamedly compete on performance unashamedly compete on a better post sale support experience because remember if there's less stuff they had a break we're taking less calls and because of the way we're organized our support generally goes to what other vendors might think of it's third level support because of a guided answer answers the phone from us doesn't solve the problem he's calling development so if you take a look at gotten apear insights we're off the scale in terms of having great reviews and when you have I think it's 99% I may be off by a percent ninety eight to a hundred percent of our customers saying they'd recommend our kit to their to their peers that's a pretty positive endorsement yeah so let me let me break in and and kind of wrap up a little bit let me make this quick observation because the other thing that you guys have done is you've demonstrated that you're not bound to a single technology so smart people with a great architecture that's capable of utilizing any technology to serve a customer problem at a price point that reflects the value of the problem that's being solved right and in fact we it's very insightful observation because when you recognize that we've built a multimedia integrated architecture that makes our that makes very easy for us to include storage class memory and because of the way we've done our drivers we're also going to be nvme over if ready when that starts to gain traction as well excellent Stanley Zappos senior vice president product management Infini debt thanks very much for being in the cube we'll have you back oh it's my pleasure there's been a blast and once again I want to thank you for joining us for another cube conversation on Peterborough's see you next time [Music]

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from Boston, MA it's theCUBE covering Red Hat Summit 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat. (upbeat music continues) >> It is so good to have you back with us here on theCUBE as we continue our live coverage here at the BCEC at Red Hat Summit 2019. Glad to have you watching wherever you might be, Eastern Time Zone or maybe out West. Stu Miniman, John Walls here. Our coverage continuing; sixth year we've been at this summit. Eric Kern now joins us here. Both from Lenovo, Eric and Steve Brown. Eric is the Executive Distinguished Engineer. And Steve is the Managing Partner in the Software Business Unit and the DevOps practice leader. So gentlemen good to have you with us on theCUBE. Good to see you today! >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you. >> No surprise, right, that you're here; long term partnership, very successful get together. First off, I want your ideas or your impressions of what you've hear or what you've seen so far here in the day and a half that we've been underway. And whether it's keynote or maybe one of the side sessions, just what's your first impression of what's goin' on here? >> Yeah, I mean it's great. There's a lot of people here, a lot of activity. I mean we can see the Expo behind us. You know the food is great, lunch is great so- (laughter) >> Rub it in. (laughter continues) Rub it in just a little bit. Okay, so a little bit of news this week with regard to what you're up to. And if you would, I'm not gonna ask you to go terribly deep, but just give us an idea of what some of the headlines are you guys were sending out this week. Steve, why don't you take that? >> Yeah, so this week we announced six new reference designs and solutions, engineered solutions. But pretty excited about OpenShift 4 and certainly Rel8 after a five year I guess pause, if you will, on major releases. So that's exciting. >> So, Eric, why don't we start with building on those partnerships, talk about some of the solutions your talking to customers and some of the latest and greatest? There's a lot of interesting things we're doing; one of the things we've been doing recently is around TruScale. So TruScale is our infrastructure as a service on premise. So one of the things we do with it is we build overall solutions. So there's a number of reference architectures that we talked about with Red Hat. These solutions, think about them as having an overall CapEx price and then we convert that into a OpEx price. Probably one of the neat novel things, and this is kind of the area that I really got into, right, is around how do we build a metering system that doesn't require us to install a bunch of software and can be compatible with everything? So with TruScale what we've done is we've leveraged our what's called our xclarity controller, it's the chip basically on the motherboard, and that xclarity controller has the ability to measure power. And measure power both at the overall input consumption, as well measuring power in the CPU, the memory and the eye out. And we built an infrastructure around that. We can actually tell you exactly what percentage the system is being used and consumed based on that. And we can charge for the overall system on a monthly basis. So we have a portal that's set up for that, whether it be our hardware on its own or our hardware with the Red Hat software installed on top of it. >> So how's that effect the customer relationship then? All the sudden your- whether there was a- not I'd say a dispute, but might of been questions about how much usage am I getting? How am I using this? Why am I being billed as I'm being billed? So on and so forth. Now all the sudden you can just deliver the proof's in the pudding, right? You can say this is exactly what you're doing with this, this is exactly how much you're consuming. And I would assume from a pricing standpoint for that modeling standpoint, you give everybody a lot of comfort, I would think; right? >> You do, right. Not only do they see exactly what they're being charged for, they see exactly some of the usage on their own systems. A lot of times they don't know how well-balanced or unbalanced their systems are. And so we're actually providing real usage data. It's different than what you get in public cloud. It's different in what you get in other solutions where it's virtual allocation. So there's a difference in knowing the physical utilization versus the allocated utilization. What a lot of people do, a lot of companies do when they're renting public cloud infrastructure is they spend a lot of time in automation to actually deallocate. Right, so they're doing all this work just to try to save money. Whereas in the TruScale model, you just run it like you normally run it and you save money because you know, if you're not using it, you're not paying for it. >> John: You don't pay for it. >> Exactly, exactly. >> All right, well Steve, a lot of discussion at the show this week about OpenShift, not least this morning, OpenShift 4 was released. We've had a chance to talk to a number of customers, bring us inside, you know, Lenovo's worked with OpenShift for awhile. Oftentimes we think about the application layers like oh, it's totally divorced, I don't need to think of it. Well, we understand there's integration work that happens there and would love your insight into what is happening at he integration, where it's progressed, and any customer stories that you've got along those lines. >> Well, yeah, we've been doing a lot of work with OpenShift. I would say for an upwards of more than two years. We started with Intel and Red Hat and built a number of Intel Select solutions, reference designs, both bare metal and hyper converged. We are on our fifth edition now of the OpenShift design on Cascade Lake. We're the, I wanna say the pioneers in the industry. We have a center of competency in DevOps with software to really promote software development solutions. And we're excited with OpenShift 4 because of the CoreOS integration as well as the auto-provisioning. Key things, it makes it so much easier to adopt and integrate. >> Any customer deployments? When they come to you, what's the kind of a-ha moment that they have? Is it just the agility that it brings them? Is there anything you can share as to the customers that are actually doing this in the field? >> Well, I like to think the customers get the a-ha when they realize that there is an engineered platform that's been purpose built and they're not coddling software and tools together. It helps with the CI/CD pipeline process templating much more effectively. Overall it's, I think, a lot more streamlined than it was in the earlier editions of OpenShift, especially Open Source. So we're pretty excited with comprehensive business support. I think that businesses feel comfortable. >> Kind of a simple question, but what do you, in terms of what TruScale operates now, what is the- what are you allowing people to do now that they didn't do before? In the latest version here, what exactly is- where's, you think, this improvement? Or where's the new efficiency? What are they getting out of it that would make me, as a customer, have that- if I haven't converted yet, or if I'm perhaps ripe for the taking, what would make me jump? >> Part of it is customers don't want to be managing their infrastructure. And so this there's a big push to public cloud. They just wanna be managing their applications. They just wanna focus on what's paying the bills, right? And paying the bills are providing the IT service is all in the application layer for the most part. What TruScale allows them to do is to have that public cloud kind of management platform. So it's Lenovo premium support behind the scenes; so Lenovo is managing the hardware itself, Lenovo maintains the ownership of the hardware, so they're not even owning the hardware, very similar to public cloud. And they can go and use it on FREM. So they don't have to worry about any security issues with the public cloud. They don't have to worry about any kind of network issues, right, it's all in their data center. It's running just exactly the way they'd run CapEx, but they're running in the way that they have really liked with the public cloud infrastructure. >> So confidence, comfort, security and all that stuff right? >> Eric: There ya go. Yeah. >> Yeah, that's just- I'll pay for that! >> Sure! (laughter) So, we've seen software move heavily towards this model whether it be SaaS or various moving CapEx to OpEx. When I look at infrastructure it's been a little bit of a slower move, especially, I've got some background on the storage side, if you look at storage, it's like oh okay. I'm conditioned as a customer to think about my capacity, my performance, and how I'm tuning everything, and I need to make adjustments, and making changes usually takes a little bit longer. Red Hat's got a lot of software products in the storage space. Help us understand how this fits in and are customers gettin' more comfortable moving from the CapEx to the OpEx for their uses? >> Yeah, good segue. So Ceph and Gluster are some really interesting storage products from Red Hat. And they fit right on our servers, and so we install them; we build big solutions around both of them. I'm actually working on big architecture for another company, for another customer out in Germany. So it's huge stuff cluster. The neat thing about it is our TruScale model allows us to actually sell them on OpEx in a storage product. And what we're measuring is the storage, what I call storage in motion versus the storage at rest. So we see all the different usages of the different servers. The servers are acting as controllers, a multi-tenant controller. And there's a lot of information that's being stored and transmitted through the systems. TruScale's just accumulating all the usage of that. And Steve, maybe you want to talk about some of the software side of it from the storage perspective, but it's really, TruScale fits right in real nicely with the storage side of it. >> I'd actually like to talk about it more comprehensively from the Red Hat software side of it. Anywho, let's talk about how they're already no certification needed. We're looking at all Red Hat applications on TruScale; whether it's OpenShift, or Rel8, Gluster, Ceph, Ansible. So we're really excited because we're not limited in the portfolio. >> Exactly. Exactly. >> Yeah. >> So, Steve, it's interesting, you used to think about, okay, what boxes am I buying, what license I'm doing. If you talk about a real true software world it should be a platform that unifies these things together. So it sounds like you're saying we're getting there. I shouldn't have to think about- give us a little bit, kind of the old way and where customers are seeing it today. >> Yeah, well we're not getting there. We're there. What that allows us to do is to take the reference designs that we have and the testing that we've previously validated with Intel and Red Hat and be able to snap pieces together. So it's just a matter of what's different and unique for the client and the client's situation and their growth pattern. What's great about TruScale is that in this model we can predicatively analyze their consumption forward based on the business growth. So for example, if you're using OpenShift and you start with a small cluster for one or two lines of business, as they adopt DevOps methodologies going from either Waterfall or Agile, we can predicatively analyze the consumption forward that they're gonna need. So they can plan years in advance as they progress. And as such, the other snap-ins, say storage, that they're gonna need for data in motion or data at rest. So it's actually smarter. And what that ends up doing is obviously saving them money, but it saves them time. The typical model is going back to IT and saying we need these severs, we need the storage and the software, and bolt it altogether. And the IT guys are hair on fire running around already. So they can, as long as IT approves it, they can sort of bypass that big, heavy lift. >> So from what you've heard of this week, with Rel8, the big launch last night, a lot of fun, right? >> Steve: Yeah. >> And then OpenShift 4 earlier today talked about- >> Yeah. >> What if there are elements to those two, either one of them, that you find most attractive? Or that really kinda jump off the page to you? Is there anything out there that you're seein' or through the demos that we saw today, or last night even that you think wow, that's cool, that's good, that this is gonna be useful for us? >> OpenShift is one of the things that we're seeing in the industry that's just really enabling the whole DevOps practice. So OpenShift is interesting from the perspective of flexibility, automation, the tooling. Rel8, of course, we've all been waiting for it, I guess for a while now probably. >> Host: Right. >> It's just the next level, the next generation. The Red Hat software, see I'm a big fan of Ceph. I mean I just like Ceph, it's just a neat storage product. It's been around for awhile, but it keeps getting better. It's kinda like the old storage product that first came out with some soft-refined storage. But the whole ecosystem around Red Hat is just very appealing. I actually, Cloudforms is one I think is a little under-utilized today. Cloudforms is a real nice cloud management platform as well. So there's a lot of interesting Red Hat software. Steve, we've done all these reference architectures, are there any ones that stick out to you? I've just been kind of rattling off some of the ones that I like. >> Yeah, I really like the CoreOS integration, 'cause we now see that acquisition really taking shape in a true productization sense, in a practical use sense. I think with Red Hat owning that asset and controlling the development, they can build out features as needed. They're not having to wait on the ecosystem or to spin different cycles for growth. So I think that's my highlight. I've been looking for that. And auto-provisioning as well. I think that's a really key benefit to it, just to make things more smooth and simple. >> Well gentlemen, thanks for the time. >> Guest: Sure. >> Nice to meet you. Look forward to seeing you down the road. We were talkin' about Lenovo, Stu and I were there a couple of years ago, Ashton Kutcher out in San Francisco, so now we get the two of you guys. You're right there with Ashton, right? (laughter) >> That's right. >> Same celebrity! Thanks for sharing the time. Good to see you guys. >> Eric: Thank you. >> Steve: You too. >> Back with more live here at Red Hat Summit 2019, we're in Boston, and you're watching theCube. (electronic music)

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Barcelona, everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my cohost, Stu Miniman. This is day one of Cisco Live Barcelona. Katie Colbert is here. She's the vice president of alliances at Pure Storage, and she's joined by Kaustubh Das, otherwise known as KD, who's the vice president of computing systems at Cisco. Katie and KD, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Alright, so let's start off, KD2, if you could just tell us about the partnership. Where did it start, how did it evolve? We'll get into it. >> We just had a terrific partnership, and the reason it's so great is it's really based on some foundational things that are super compatible. Pure Storage, Cisco, both super technology-driven companies, innovating. They're both also super programmatic companies. They'll do everything via API. It's very modern in that sense, the frameworks that we work on. And then from a business perspective, it's very compatible. We're chasing common markets, very few conflicts. So it's been rooted in solid foundations. And then, we've actually invested over the years to build more and more solutions for our customers jointly. So it's been terrific. >> So, Katie, I hate to admit how long we talk about partnering with Cisco >> It's going to age us. >> So you and I won't admit how many decades it's been partnering with Cisco, but here we are, 2019, Cisco's a very different company than it was a decade or two ago. >> Absolutely. >> Tell me what it's like working with them, especially as a company that's primarily in storage and data at Pure, what it means to partner with them. >> Absolutely, you're right. So, worked with Cisco as a partner for many years at the beginning of my career, then went away for, I'd say, a good 10 years, and joined Pure in June, and I will tell you one of the most exciting reasons why I joined Pure was the Pure and Cisco relationship. When I worked with them at the beginning of my career, it was great and I would tell you it's even better now. I will say that the momentum that these two companies have in the market is very phenomenal. A lot of differentiation from our products separately, but both together, I think that it's absolutely been very successful, and to KD's point, the investment that both companies are making really is just astronomical, and I see that our customers are the beneficiaries of that. It makes it so much easier for them to deploy and use the technologies together, which is exciting. >> So we always joke about Barney deals, I love you, you love me, I mean, it's clear you guys go much much deeper than that. So I want to probe at that a little bit. Particularly from an engineering standpoint, whether it's validated designs or other innovations that you guys are working on together, can we peel the onion on that one a little bit? Talk about what you guys are doing below that line. >> I'll start there then I'll hand it over to the engineering leader from Cisco. But if you think about the pace of this, the partnership, I think, is roughly 3 or so years old. We've 16 Cisco-validated designs for our FlashStack infrastructure. So that is just unbelievable. So, huge amount of investment from engineers, product managers, on both sides of the fence. >> Yeah, totally second that. We start out with the... Cisco-validated designs are like blueprints, so we start out with the blueprints for the standard workloads: Oracle, SAP. And we keep those fresh as new versions come out. But then I think we've taken it further into new spaces of late. ACI, we saw in the keynote this morning, it's going everywhere, it's going multi-site. We've done some work on marrying that with the clustering service of Pure Storage. On top of that, we're doing some work in AI and ML, which is super exciting, so we got some CBDs around that that's just coming out. We're doing some work on automation, coupling Intersight, which is Cisco's cloud-based automation suite, with Pure Storage and Pure Storage's ability to integrate into the Intersight APIs. We talked about it, in fact, I talked about it in my session at the Cisco Live in the summer last year, and now we've got that out as a product. So tremendous amount of work, both in traditional areas as well as some of these new spaces. >> Maybe we can unpack that Intersight piece a bit, because people might look at it initially and say, "Okay, multi-cloud, on-prem, all these environments, "but is this just a networking tool?" And working we're working with someone with Pure, maybe explain a little bit the scope and how, if I'm a Pure administrator, how I live into this world. >> Absolutely, so let's start with what is Intersight, just for a foundational thing. Intersight is our software management tool driven from the cloud. So everything from the personality of the server, the bios settings, the WLAN settings, the networking and the compute pieces of it, that gets administered from the cloud, but it does more. What it does is it can deliver playbooks from the cloud that give the server a certain kind of personality for the workload that it's supporting. So then the next question that anyone asks is, "Now that we have this partnership, "well can it do the same thing for storage? "Can it actually provision that storage, "get that up and running?" And the answer is yes, it can, but it's better because what it can not only do is, not only can it do that, getting that done is super simple. All Pure Storage needed to do was to write some of those Intersight APIs and deliver that playbook from the cloud, from a remote location potentially, into whatever your infrastructure is, provisioning compute, provisioning networking, provisioning storage, in a truly modern cloud-driven environment, right? So I think that's phenomenal what it does for our customers. >> Yeah, I'd agree with that. And I think it'll even become more important as the companies are partnering around our multi-cloud solutions. So, as you probably saw earlier this year in February, sorry, the end of 2018, Pure announced our first leaning into hybrid cloud, so that's Pure Cloud Data Services. That enables us to have Purity, which is our operating system on our storage, running in AWS to begin with. So you can pretty easily start to think about where this partnership is going to go, especially as it pertains to Intersight integration. >> And just to bounce on that, strategically, you can see the alignment there as well. I mean, Cisco's been talking about multi-cloud for a bit now, we've done work to enable similar development environments, whether we're doing something on-prem or in the cloud, so that you can move workloads from one to the other, or actually you can make workloads on both sides talk to each other, and, again, combined with what Katie just said, it makes it a really really compelling solution. >> Like you said, you've got pretty clear swimming lanes for the two companies. There's very little overlap here. You can't have too many of these types of partnerships, right, I mean, you got 25 thousand engineers almost, but still, you still have limited resources. So what makes this one so special, and why are you able to spend so much time and effort, each of you? >> I could start, so from a Pure perspective, I think the cultures are aligned, you called it out there, there's inherently not a lot of overlap in terms of where core competencies are. Pure is not looking at all to become a networking company. And just a lot of synergies in the market make it one that our engineers want to invest in. We have really picked Cisco as our lean-in partner, truthfully, I run all of the alliances at Pure, and a lion's share of my resources really are focused at that partnership. >> Yeah, and if you look at both these companies, Pure is a relative youngster among the storage companies, a new, modern, in a good way, a new, modern company built on modern software practices and so forth. Cisco, although a pretty veteran company, but Cisco compute is relatively new as well as a compute provider. So we are very similar in how our design philosophies work and how modern our infrastructures are, and that gets us to delivering results, delivering solutions to our customers with relatively less effort from our engineers. And that pace of innovation that we can do with Pure is not something we can do with every other company. >> We had a session earlier today, and we went pretty deep into AI, but it's probably worth touching on that. I guess my question here is, what are the customers asking you guys for in terms of AI infrastructure? What's that infrastructure look like that's powering the machine and intelligence era? >> You want to start? >> You want to go, I'll go first. This is a really exciting space, and not only is it exciting because AI is exciting, it's actually exciting because we've got some unique ingredients across Pure and Cisco to make this happen. What does AI feed on? AI feeds on data. The model requires that volume of data to actually train itself We've got an infrastructure, so we just released the C4ATML, the UCC4ATML, highly powered infrastructure, eight GPUs, interconnected, 180 terabytes on board, high network bandwidth, but it needs something to feed it the data, and what Pure's got with their FlashBlade is that ability to actually feed data to this AI infrastructure so that we can train bigger models or train these models faster. Makes for a fantastic solution because these ingredients are just custom made for each other. >> Anything you can add? >> Absolutely I'd agree with that. Really, if you look at AI and what it needs to be successful, and, first of all, all of our customers, if they're not thinking about it, they should be, and I will tell you most of them are, is, how do you ingest that amount of data? If you can't ingest that quickly, it's not going to be of use. So that's a big piece of it, and that's really what the new Cisco platform, I mean, the folks over at Pure are just thrilled about the new Cisco product, and then you take a look at the FlashBlade and how it's able to really scale out unstructured data, object it and file, really to make that useful, so when you have to scrub that data to be able to use it and correlate it, FlashBlade is the perfect solution. So really, this is two companies coming together with the best of breed technologies. >> And the tooling in that world is exploding, open source innovation, it needs a place to run all the Kafkas and the Caffes and the TensorFlows and the Pythons. It's not just confined to data scientists anymore. It's really starting to seep throughout the organization, are you seeing that? >> Yeah. >> What's happening is you've got the buzzwords going around, and that leads to businesses and the leaders of businesses saying, "We've got to have an AI strategy. "We've got to hire these data scientists." But at the same time, the data scientists can get started on the laptop, they can get started on the cloud. When they want to deploy this, they need an enterprise class, resilient, automated infrastructure that fits into the way they do their work. You've got to have something that's built on these components, so what we provide together is that infrastructure for the ITTs so that the data scientists, when they build their beautiful models, have a place to deploy them, have a place to put that into production, and can actually have that life cycle running in a much more smooth production-grade environment. >> Okay, so you guys are three years in, roughly. Where do you want to take this thing, what's the vision? Give us a little road map for the future as to what this partnership looks like down the road. >> Yeah, so I can start. So I think there's a few different vectors. We're going to continue driving the infrastructure for the traditional workloads. That's it, that's a big piece that we do, we continue doing that. We're going to drive a lot more on the automation side, I think there's such a lot of potential with what we've got on Intersight, with the automation that Pure supports, bring those together and really make it simple for our customers to get this up and running and manage that life cycle. And third vector's going to be imparting those new use cases, whether it be AI or more data analytics type use cases. There's a lot of potential that it unleashes for our customers and there's a lot of potential of bringing these technologies together to partner. So you'll see a lot more of that from us. I don't know, will you add something? >> Yeah, no, I absolutely agree. And I would say more FlashStack, look for more FlashStack CVDs, and AI, I think, is one to watch. We believe Cisco, really, this step that Cisco's made, is going to take AI infrastructure to the next level. So we're going to be investing much more heavily into that. And then cloud, from a hybrid cloud, how do these two companies leverage FlashStack and all the innovation we've done on prem together to really enable the multi-cloud. >> Great, alright, well Katie and KD, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. It was great to have you. >> Great. Thanks for having us. >> Thank you very much. >> You're welcome, alright. Keep it right there everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE Live from Cisco Live Barcelona. We'll be right back. (techy music)

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's The Cube, covering Cisco Live Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Barcelona, everybody. You're watching The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my cohost, Stu Miniman. This is day one of Cisco Live Barcelona. Katie Colbert is here. She's the vice president of alliances at Pure Storage, and she's joined by Kaustubh Das, otherwise known as KD, who's the vice president of computing systems at Cisco. Katie and KD, welcome to The Cube, good to see you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Alright, so let's start off, KD2, if you could just tell us about the partnership. Where did it start, how did it evolve? We'll get into it. >> We just had a terrific partnership, and the reason it's so great is it's really based on some foundational things that are super compatible. Pure Storage, Cisco, both super technology-driven companies, innovating. They're both also super programmatic companies. They'll do everything via API. It's very modern in that sense, the frameworks that we work on. And then from a business perspective, it's very compatible. We're chasing common markets, very few conflicts. So it's been rooted in solid foundations. And then, we've actually invested over the years to build more and more solutions for our customers jointly. So it's been terrific. >> So, Katie, I hate to admit how long we talk about partnering with Cisco >> It's going to age us. >> So you and I won't admit how many decades it's been partnering with Cisco, but here we are, 2019, Cisco's a very different company than it was a decade or two ago. >> Absolutely. >> Tell me what it's like working with them, especially as a company that's primarily in storage and data at Pure, what it means to partner with them. >> Absolutely, you're right. So, worked with Cisco as a partner for many years at the beginning of my career, then went away for, I'd say, a good 10 years, and joined Pure in June, and I will tell you one of the most exciting reasons why I joined Pure was the Pure and Cisco relationship. When I worked with them at the beginning of my career, it was great and I would tell you it's even better now. I will say that the momentum that these two companies have in the market is very phenomenal. A lot of differentiation from our products separately, but both together, I think that it's absolutely been very successful, and to KD's point, the investment that both companies are making really is just astronomical, and I see that our customers are the beneficiaries of that. It makes it so much easier for them to deploy and use the technologies together, which is exciting. >> So we always joke about Barney deals, I love you, you love me, I mean, it's clear you guys go much much deeper than that. So I want to probe at that a little bit. Particularly from an engineering standpoint, whether it's validated designs or other innovations that you guys are working on together, can we peel the onion on that one a little bit? Talk about what you guys are doing below that line. >> I'll start there then I'll hand it over to the engineering leader from Cisco. But if you think about the pace of this, the partnership, I think, is roughly 3 or so years old. We've 16 Cisco-validated designs for our FlashStack infrastructure. So that is just unbelievable. So, huge amount of investment from engineers, product managers, on both sides of the fence. >> Yeah, totally second that. We start out with the... Cisco-validated designs are like blueprints, so we start out with the blueprints for the standard workloads: Oracle, SAP. And we keep those fresh as new versions come out. But then I think we've taken it further into new spaces of late. ACI, we saw in the keynote this morning, it's going everywhere, it's going multi-site. We've done some work on marrying that with the clustering service of Pure Storage. On top of that, we're doing some work in AI and ML, which is super exciting, so we got some CBDs around that that's just coming out. We're doing some work on automation, coupling Intersight, which is Cisco's cloud-based automation suite, with Pure Storage and Pure Storage's ability to integrate into the Intersight APIs. We talked about it, in fact, I talked about it in my session at the Cisco Live in the summer last year, and now we've got that out as a product. So tremendous amount of work, both in traditional areas as well as some of these new spaces. >> Maybe we can unpack that Intersight piece a bit, because people might look at it initially and say, "Okay, multi-cloud, on-prem, all these environments, "but is this just a networking tool?" And working we're working with someone with Pure, maybe explain a little bit the scope and how, if I'm a Pure administrator, how I live into this world. >> Absolutely, so let's start with what is Intersight, just for a foundational thing. Intersight is our software management tool driven from the cloud. So everything from the personality of the server, the bios settings, the WLAN settings, the networking and the compute pieces of it, that gets administered from the cloud, but it does more. What it does is it can deliver playbooks from the cloud that give the server a certain kind of personality for the workload that it's supporting. So then the next question that anyone asks is, "Now that we have this partnership, "well can it do the same thing for storage? "Can it actually provision that storage, "get that up and running?" And the answer is yes, it can, but it's better because what it can not only do is, not only can it do that, getting that done is super simple. All Pure Storage needed to do was to write some of those Intersight APIs and deliver that playbook from the cloud, from a remote location potentially, into whatever your infrastructure is, provisioning compute, provisioning networking, provisioning storage, in a truly modern cloud-driven environment, right? So I think that's phenomenal what it does for our customers. >> Yeah, I'd agree with that. And I think it'll even become more important as the companies are partnering around our multi-cloud solutions. So, as you probably saw earlier this year in February, sorry, the end of 2018, Pure announced our first leaning into hybrid cloud, so that's Pure Cloud Data Services. That enables us to have Purity, which is our operating system on our storage, running in AWS to begin with. So you can pretty easily start to think about where this partnership is going to go, especially as it pertains to Intersight integration. >> And just to bounce on that, strategically, you can see the alignment there as well. I mean, Cisco's been talking about multi-cloud for a bit now, we've done work to enable similar development environments, whether we're doing something on-prem or in the cloud, so that you can move workloads from one to the other, or actually you can make workloads on both sides talk to each other, and, again, combined with what Katie just said, it makes it a really really compelling solution. >> Like you said, you've got pretty clear swimming lanes for the two companies. There's very little overlap here. You can't have too many of these types of partnerships, right, I mean, you got 25 thousand engineers almost, but still, you still have limited resources. So what makes this one so special, and why are you able to spend so much time and effort, each of you? >> I could start, so from a Pure perspective, I think the cultures are aligned, you called it out there, there's inherently not a lot of overlap in terms of where core competencies are. Pure is not looking at all to become a networking company. And just a lot of synergies in the market make it one that our engineers want to invest in. We have really picked Cisco as our lean-in partner, truthfully, I run all of the alliances at Pure, and a lion's share of my resources really are focused at that partnership. >> Yeah, and if you look at both these companies, Pure is a relative youngster among the storage companies, a new, modern, in a good way, a new, modern company built on modern software practices and so forth. Cisco, although a pretty veteran company, but Cisco compute is relatively new as well as a compute provider. So we are very similar in how our design philosophies work and how modern our infrastructures are, and that gets us to delivering results, delivering solutions to our customers with relatively less effort from our engineers. And that pace of innovation that we can do with Pure is not something we can do with every other company. >> We had a session earlier today, and we went pretty deep into AI, but it's probably worth touching on that. I guess my question here is, what are the customers asking you guys for in terms of AI infrastructure? What's that infrastructure look like that's powering the machine and intelligence era? >> You want to start? >> You want to go, I'll go first. This is a really exciting space, and not only is it exciting because AI is exciting, it's actually exciting because we've got some unique ingredients across Pure and Cisco to make this happen. What does AI feed on? AI feeds on data. The model requires that volume of data to actually train itself We've got an infrastructure, so we just released the C4ATML, the UCC4ATML, highly powered infrastructure, eight GPUs, interconnected, 180 terabytes on board, high network bandwidth, but it needs something to feed it the data, and what Pure's got with their FlashBlade is that ability to actually feed data to this AI infrastructure so that we can train bigger models or train these models faster. Makes for a fantastic solution because these ingredients are just custom made for each other. >> Anything you can add? >> Absolutely I'd agree with that. Really, if you look at AI and what it needs to be successful, and, first of all, all of our customers, if they're not thinking about it, they should be, and I will tell you most of them are, is, how do you ingest that amount of data? If you can't ingest that quickly, it's not going to be of use. So that's a big piece of it, and that's really what the new Cisco platform, I mean, the folks over at Pure are just thrilled about the new Cisco product, and then you take a look at the FlashBlade and how it's able to really scale out unstructured data, object it and file, really to make that useful, so when you have to scrub that data to be able to use it and correlate it, FlashBlade is the perfect solution. So really, this is two companies coming together with the best of breed technologies. >> And the tooling in that world is exploding, open source innovation, it needs a place to run all the Kafkas and the Caffes and the TensorFlows and the Pythons. It's not just confined to data scientists anymore. It's really starting to seep throughout the organization, are you seeing that? >> Yeah. >> What's happening is you've got the buzzwords going around, and that leads to businesses and the leaders of businesses saying, "We've got to have an AI strategy. "We've got to hire these data scientists." But at the same time, the data scientists can get started on the laptop, they can get started on the cloud. When they want to deploy this, they need an enterprise class, resilient, automated infrastructure that fits into the way they do their work. You've got to have something that's built on these components, so what we provide together is that infrastructure for the ITTs so that the data scientists, when they build their beautiful models, have a place to deploy them, have a place to put that into production, and can actually have that life cycle running in a much more smooth production-grade environment. >> Okay, so you guys are three years in, roughly. Where do you want to take this thing, what's the vision? Give us a little road map for the future as to what this partnership looks like down the road. >> Yeah, so I can start. So I think there's a few different vectors. We're going to continue driving the infrastructure for the traditional workloads. That's it, that's a big piece that we do, we continue doing that. We're going to drive a lot more on the automation side, I think there's such a lot of potential with what we've got on Intersight, with the automation that Pure supports, bring those together and really make it simple for our customers to get this up and running and manage that life cycle. And third vector's going to be imparting those new use cases, whether it be AI or more data analytics type use cases. There's a lot of potential that it unleashes for our customers and there's a lot of potential of bringing these technologies together to partner. So you'll see a lot more of that from us. I don't know, will you add something? >> Yeah, no, I absolutely agree. And I would say more FlashStack, look for more FlashStack CVDs, and AI, I think, is one to watch. We believe Cisco, really, this step that Cisco's made, is going to take AI infrastructure to the next level. So we're going to be investing much more heavily into that. And then cloud, from a hybrid cloud, how do these two companies leverage FlashStack and all the innovation we've done on prem together to really enable the multi-cloud. >> Great, alright, well Katie and KD, thanks so much for coming to The Cube. It was great to have you. >> Great. Thanks for having us. >> Thank you very much. >> You're welcome, alright. Keep it right there everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching The Cube Live from Cisco Live Barcelona. We'll be right back. (techy music)

(upbeat music) >> Live from Barcelona, Spain it's theCUBE, covering the Cisco Live! Europe. Brought to you by Cisco, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to theCUBE, we're here in Barcelona. Welcome to theCUBE live here in Barcelona for Cisco Live! 2019. Cisco Live! Europe. I'm John Furrier with my hosts this week Stu Miniman, Dave Vellante breaking down all the action. Keynotes over. Three days of wall-to-wall coverage, guys, Cisco Live! Introducing some new innovations, Stu and Dave, around reinventing networking. Couple key themes big announcements around ACI, anywhere application-centric, infrastructure, HyperFlex and the new CloudCenter Suite where they're doubling down on Cloud, redefining the network. Stu, we've been here last year. We've been watching Cisco. Policy-based, intent-based networking, Cisco's tying it all together with new branding, The Bridge to Tomorrow, your thoughts. >> Yeah John, I actually, I like some of the new branding The Bridge to Tomorrow, I've been critical of Cisco. Cisco always said, oh well networking's everywhere and it's really important, and it's like, well okay but where's the meat? Where's the detail behind this? They've done a number of acquisitions in the space. They're making sure that they understand where they are. And they had some failures along the way. I mean, call a spade a spade, John, they are going to be a leader in multi-cloud is where they want to be, but, they had some falters along in being a public cloud. The inter-cloud message that they had, they confused the service providers, they didn't understand how they played with they hyper-scale players and now they're understanding where they sit, S.D. Wayne critically important, where they live in the data center and it's interesting we talk about the, do we talk about the data center? Or do we care where the data is centered? And of course that is not in one place but it is many places. We know customers today live in a multi-cloud word, how I get to my data how I leverage my data is critically important and the networking and management is something that is critical across all those so right, as you said, ACI and HyperFlex, the CloudCenter suite I know is an area we're going to dig into a bunch this week Because Cisco has an opportunity to play across these environments, but, Cisco has been trying for a long time to be the manager of managers in these environments, I mean, I think back to things Dave Vellante and the Wikibon team and I have done for years talking about, how do you manage this heterogeneous world and it's just, instead of multi-vendor, we're now talking multi-cloud. >> And you know what, everything is coming together, Dave, we've been covering Cisco we're looking at the timing of the positioning it's seems to be coming together, and around the re-branding, which by the way, I agree with Stu, I like it. The bridge to tomorrow, it resinates with me maybe because I'm from the Bay Area but, the bridging two worlds, a bridging on premises and cloud together in a very seamless way and an elegant way architecturally, so the branding ties in with really much a rounding out of the portfolio so a lot of story lines to follow the new branding, Chuck Robbins getting his sea legs now as Cisco goes to the next level And clearly they see multi-cloud as their positioning because this has been Cisco's core positioning for many, many years this idea of enabling other people to do innovation whether its applications and work loads now they're connecting two worlds Your thoughts on the timing and their position vis-a-vis industry. >> Well Cisco talked this morning in the keynote about another bridge on one side of the network is users and devices and the other side of the network are application and data and we've talked for years about how the network is flattening and traffic is going east-west etc. But, inter-clouding, if you will, puts increased pressure on that and that is clearly Cisco's strategy to be the best at connecting whether its on prim and public clouds and between public clouds. Cisco's got to make the case that on our networks, you're going to be higher performance and more secure. And that's certainly what they are implying. They're also making a big transition from being a hardware company to a software company. When you listen to VMware, they talk about Cisco they talk about oh they make the best hardware, the best switches and Cisco's like no. They're talking software capabilities across the network, new architectures, reinventing, coming at it from the network, which is obviously their strong point and it just really sets up an interesting competitive dynamic between Cisco, certainly VMware who's trying to do to networking and storage what it did to servers, and know you've got IBM and Red Hat coming at it from applications, and the development perspective. We're here in the DevNet zone and I think that's the other piece of the announcements that we're hearing today is developers can actually program with things like IoT, and new use cases, so pretty exciting times. >> Stu, story lines around the data center you made a comment that was kind of a play on words on the key note, data is centered, so center dash ed, center-ed, so the data center concept is moving into data being center of the value proposition. This has been interesting because if you look at what DevNet has spawned and DevNet created under Susie Wee's leadership you saw the role of API's. So if data moves around the network and that's the core competency of Cisco moving packets from point A to point B Adding automation, adding intelligence, with intent based networking and cloud enabling on the other side, you got to have access to the data, the data's got to be traversing and interoperating with multiple environments. This is now a architectural standard. Is Cisco, from a product portfolio stand point whether it's security, analytics, cloud app management, IoT, networking, does it all come together? Your thoughts? >> Yeah, so, first of all, Cisco plays in a lot of these environments. We talked not just data center, but, when you talk about branch office something Cisco has been doing for a really long time, and how do I network between all of those remote applications and my central location, and my central location might not be the data center, it might be a or multiple public clouds out there. So Cisco's been attacking this back when optimization many years ago. SD-Wan really has taken that and much more you know, super important when we talk about this multi-cloud environment and how I get that connectivity so they're there and Cisco from the ground up has gone through a lot of rebuild. So, the CloudCenter suite that we talk about, Microservice's architecture built with Kubernetes into that API economy that we're talking about which is a lot about what we talk about here in the DevNet zone. So, absolutely, Cisco has, they're known as space, they have a lot of the skills, they have a very broad platform of products out there. David Goeckeler this morning, he's just reeling off all the different areas they play to and saying, we've got like 6,000 people in the opening keynote, and he's like, I came and looked at this room, and I've got like four x the amount of engineers working on your networking security issues that were here. It's like 24,000 people it's an army, there's very few companies outside of Google, Amazon and Microsoft, that can call on that engineering strength and that's just the internal piece what we love, we talked to Susie Wee and she's like, we've got 500,000 on our community platform helping to build, IT, OT, IoT, all the network, all the security pieces so, Cisco is not new to a lot of these but, is re-focused on a lot of what they are doing. >> So the big news obviously is the ACI anywhere in hyperfex anywhere and putting the data center, connecting those two worlds and you got the cloud as well so the role of hyper-convergence is certainly key in this announcements here today. ACI application center infrastructure just code words for policy based, intent-based networking, all the stuff that Cisco's used to doing. Then when you connect to the cloud, you got data center, on premises, cloud, and then hyper-convergence at the edge. This is the core, right, they got the edge, multiple environments, you got cloud, and you got the data center, legacy environment which is evolving, Those are all coming together, Stu. This is cross-domain challenge. Is Cisco prepared? David I'd love to get your comments on this as well, to be that cross-domain vendor? Because multi-cloud truly will require data to be moving around, policies to be automated and deployed across domains. This is a huge challenge. >> Yeah, I mean, John, it is challenging, and if you look at the hyper-convergence infrastructure space, where Cisco plays with HyperFlex goes up against VMware vSAN, Nutanix and the rest there, the people that sell that and build that, are necessarily the ones that really understand multi-cloud. We've seen that space maturing for the last couple of years. Obviously Cisco's got a right to be at the table there and they're moving in that direction, but, to the data center folks, and they are data center folks that have done networking and storage and all that, are they getting trained up and and helping to help bridge to that multi-cloud environment? I think there's still a lot of work to go and I talked to the channel, when I talked to the people who are out there going to market on that. >> Well that's the big challenge, is how do you move the base, how do you get them from point A to point B without, spending a billion dollars? You heard Gordon today stand up there and say, you got to change. Now, and he admitted, anytime somebody tells me I have to change, I kind of get defensive about it. But some of the things that I. Well obviously this end-to-end architecture, they're in a position, in theory anyway to do that, what choice do they have? A couple of things that struck me is they've got a new consumption model, SaaS-based consumption model, they also announced four validated designs for OT from IoT apps. It's good to see some actually meat on that bone. You got like utility sub-stations and mining operations and fleet management, I mean, it's stuff that you would'nt traditionally think about from coming from a data center company. So they're making some moves that I think are substantive and necessary. >> Well I took some notes down I wanted to get your comments on this guys, cause, to me, this is the core news here, is that Cisco is truly trying to put that end-to-end architecture around cross-domains, you seeing their core data center business continue to be robust, that's they're bread and butter. You got the Edge that's developing nicely with IoT and Enterprise Edge and other places around campus. Then you got multi-cloud, so you got the three-legged stool. Core data center, multi-cloud, and Edge. Does this address the industries demand for apps changing, work loads being distributed, and then, management across these multiple domains or multi-cloud, because you got to manage this stuff. So cost to ownership, these are now the table stakes, your thoughts on those three areas, Stu, core data center, multi-cloud, and Edge? >> Yeah, I mean we've been talking about for the last year, the move from hardware to software is not an easy one. There are things that you need to change for product that you need to change how their field handles it, the whole. The compensation and how they support their channel, is super challenging. At VMworld last year, we really highlighted how that inter-cloud networking, what a critical piece it was. I was so excited, that the original vision of what Nicira had pre-acquisition was starting to come out there, because VMware's coming after Cisco in that manner. Cisco, not like they're trying to create high providers, they are going to live in all those worlds, but, there definitely is some conflict there and something I always look at, Cisco's got a gigantic ecosystem. They have, hundreds of thousands of certified Cisco engineers and they've got a great ecosystem here. >> And a strong channel. >> And a strong channel. Right, that go to market, partners as well as the technology partners, and they're still strong. We're going to have on this week a lot of those players here, but, that change is something that is tough to go through, and, it's this journey that they're on. >> Well, this, Dave brought up to consumption, I want to dig into the consumption piece because how people consume the cloud obviously means that they got to stand up the cloud, multi-cloud. Cisco's clearly got Azure AWS and Google Cloud. Google seems to be a strategic partner as well as Amazon, Azure, but I think Google, kind of feels like this more strategic alliance there, I'm just speculating from my opinion, but, if I'm a Cisco customer, it's pretty easy now to go multi-cloud, I don't need to a lot of things differently. The question is, how do I manage it, what's the cost, and how do I consume it? This is going to be critical. Your thoughts? >> Well, so, Cisco's claiming they're going to extract that complexity, and whatever API's and software infrastructure, infrastructure's a service that your using, they're going to make that simple, simplify that and allow you to have a, single management console. So that, I said before, they're coming at it from a networking perspective, VMware is coming at it from the traditional hypervisor and trying to elbow its way into the networking against storage space and as I said, you got other companies like IBM and Red Hat now coming at it from the application space and Kubernetes is obviously an important role there. I think personally, I think that networking is a right place, a good place to come from. The problem for customers is still going to be complexity. Because the cloud providers are going to have their own, management framework obviously, vSphere is a big player here and now you got Cisco at all, and a bunch of start-ups saying hey, ours are even better. >> Well in the IBM, Red Hat accommodation. >> Right, so I don't foresee a day where your going to have one single painted glass, we've never had in this industry, it's always been nirvana, and so, then comes down to Cisco getting its fair share. I think Cisco's in a very good position to get its fair share for the reasons that Stu just mentioned. >> Stu, so I want to get your thoughts we're in the DevNet zone, that's where theCUBE is. It's our second year at Cisco Live! We'll be at the North America show again this year, it's on the schedule, but the role of the developer, the role of infrastructure as code now is in place, actually happening within Cisco's customer base. So if your a Cisco customer, you're looking at this saying, okay, I've been running the Cisco network, I've got all the portfolios, services, what is the role of the network engineer? Is there a renaissance coming? We've said this last year, I kind of see it happening here, the network is now the computer, the network is the data. This is a great opportunity for Cisco. Your thoughts on the culture of the Cisco customer base and that vibe of infrastructure as code? >> Yeah, so, John, I used to bristle a little bit, when you said, well, we're going to turn all the network engineers and they're going to become coders, and I said, well, I know a lot of network engineers and some of them love and thrive that, but, a lot of them, they're in the CLI, they're doing their thing. If you walk around this DevNet zone, a lot of the stuff that happening isn't networking. They are builders. This reminds me of going to AWS Reinvent, taking about people here, the tools, the skills you need to have to be a builder. And absolutely, networking is a part of it, that management, orchestration, security, all the things that touch into the network, but it's not, oh how do I manage my network switch better? Which was kind of the hardware focus view, and maybe code this, but, it really is, how am I building API's, how am I leveraging things, I've got IoT demos out there and it's networking is in there, but, it's not necessarily the thing, and, so therefore, you've got this wave of developers and builders and, John, we know that's the future, you need to be a builder, how can you create faster, things like server lists, or moving in that direction where I don't need, it's less about the coding, it's more about my application, my data and my building. >> You bring up a great point, Stu, and this is something that I always, I point to when I look at who's kind of BSing the market place in terms of speeds and feeds, and announcements. When you see people actually coding and being enabled to do some creative value, you start to see that's a good signal, and here in the DevNet zone, I saw four-five demos that were writing software apps, to take advantage of the hardware, to take advantage of the network, so know the network is enabling through APIs to extend the data. This is kind of changing the the concept of how packets will move around the networks, so this is truly a tell sign, that in my opinion, of the modern infrastructure. The question is, Dave, how fast will the customers migrate to being true devops or infrastructure as code customers, writing apps, building new things, to create that value? >> Well, I would say this, that of all the sort of traditional large scale call them, whatever, legacy, enterprise, data center companies, I think Cisco is the only one that I can really point to that has kind of got developers right. I mean IBM, Bluemix, StartStop, remember the EMC Code initiative, that was kind of a joke, and so, Oracle owns Java, and it still sort of struggles with developers, so, I think Cisco got it right, and I think the reason they got it right is cause they're focused. I mean that's what I do like about Cisco's strategy and the reason why, you, know, obviously you give them high chances, it's because they're really focused on that networking piece. They're not trying to be all things to all people, even though you forecasted they're kind of heading in that direction, but they're still starting from a position of strength. >> Well, you made a good point. The success and failure of developer programs is about creating an environment where it's compatible with how they're expectations are. Microservices, containers, these abstraction layers that they're used to dealing with create value. Developers will love that. The other thing I would say is is that as developers look at what they can do, the worlds changed. It used to be the network that used to dictate what can happen to applications, now applications need to program the network. I think this was a shift we saw with DevNet Create and DevNet two years ago, where they started moving from the command line interface to more software abstractions or applications interfaces where, say hey, lets just do more with the network, so applications now require program ability. This is the shift, it's upside down from what it was when the industry started, so this new bridge has to be application-centric and to me, that's what I get out of the cloud announcement around multi-cloud. You're starting to see to see the portfolio up and down their stack, from security, they got stealthwatch tetration, that's, SaaS, analytics, app dynamics, among other things data center, HyperFlex, UCS, Nexus, all lined up. CloudCenter, container platform, on multiple clouds, IoT, Kinetic, Vedge, cloud services router, this is now a portfolio. They got the products too. >> Absolutely, John. >> Okay guys, we're going to have a great day, three days of wall-to-wall coverage kicking off here in Barcelona, stay with us for more coverage here at Cisco live, it's theCUBE. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

(bright symphony music) >> Hello, I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE Media and co-host of theCUBE. We're here in Paulo Alto at our studio here. I'm joining with Joseph Jacks, the founder and general partner of OSS Capital. Open Source Software Capital, is what OSS stands for. He's also the founder of KubeCon which now is part of the CNCF. It's a huge conference around Kubernetes. He's a cloud guy. He knows open source. Very well respected in the industry and also a great guest and friend of theCUBE, CUBE alumni. Joseph, great to see you. Also known as JJ. JJ, good to see you. >> Thank you for having me on again, John. >> Hey, great to have you come on. I know we've talked many times on theCUBE, but you've got some exciting news. You got a new firm, OSS Capital. Open Source Software, not operational support like a telco, but this is an investment opportunity where you're making investments. Congratulations. >> Thank you. >> So I know you can't talk about some of the specifics on the funds size, but you are actually going to go out, talk to entrepreneurs, make some equity investments. Around open source software. What's the thesis? How did you get here, why did you do it? What's motivating you, and what's the thesis? >> A lot of questions in there. Yeah, I mean this is a really profoundly huge year for open source software. On a bunch of different levels. I think the biggest kind of thing everyone anchors towards is GitHub being acquired by Microsoft. Just a couple of weeks ago, we had the two huge hadoop vendors join forces. That, I think, surprised a lot of people. MuleSoft, which is a big opensource middleware company, getting acquired by Salesforce just a year after going public. Just a huge outcome. I think one observation, just to sort of like summarize the year 2018, is actually, starting in January, almost on sort of like a monthly basis, we've observed a major sort of opensource software company outcome. And sort of kicking off the year, we had CoreOS getting acquired by Red Hat. Brandon and Alex, the founders over there, built a really interesting company in the Kubernetes ecosystem. And I think in February, Al Fresco, which is an open source content portal taking privatization outcome from a private equity firm, I believe in March we had Magento getting acquired by Adobe, which an open source based CMS. PHP CMS. So just a lot of activity for significant outcomes. Multibillion dollar outcomes of commercial open source companies. And open source software is something like 20 years old. 20 years in the making. And this year in particular, I've just seen just a huge amount of large scale outcomes that have been many years in the making from companies that have taken lots of venture funding. And in a lot of cases, sort of partially focused funding from different investors that have an affinity for open source software and sort of understand the uniqueness of the open source model when it's applied to business, when it's applied to company building. But more sort of opportunistic and sort of affinity oriented, as opposed to a pure focus. So that's kind of been part of the motivation. I'd say the more authentically compelling motivation for doing this is that it just needs to exist. This is sort of a model that is happening by necessity. We're seeing more and more software companies be open source software companies. So open source first. They're built in a distributed way. They're leveraging engineers and talent around the world. They're just part of this open source kind of philosophy. And they are fundamentally kind of commercial open source software companies. We felt that if you had a firm basically designed in a way to exclusively focus on those kind of companies, and where the firmware actually backed and supported by the founders of the largest commercial open source companies in the world before sort of the last decade. That could actually deliver a lot of value. So we've been sort of blogging a little bit about this. >> And you wrote a great post on it. I read about open source monetization. But I think one of the things I'm seeing as well that supports your thesis, and I like to get your reaction to it because I think this is something that's not really talked about, but open source is still young. I mean, you go back. I remember the days when we used to have to hide in the shadows to get licenses and pirate stuff and do all those crazy stuff. But now, it's only a couple decades away. The leaders that were investing were usually entrepreneurs that've been successful. The Rob Bearns, the Amar Wadhwa, the guy that did Spring. All these different open source. Linux, obviously, great success story. But there hasn't any been any institutional. Yeah, you got benchmark, other things, done some investments. A discipline around open source. Where open source is now table stakes in all software development. Cloud is scaling, scaling out globally. There's no real foc- There's never been a firm that's been focused on- Just open source from a commercial, while maintaining the purity and ethos of open source. I mean, is that. >> You agree? >> That's true. >> 100%, yeah. That's been the big part of creating the firm is aligning and solving for a pure focused structure. And I think what I'll say abstractly is this sort of venture capital, venture style approach to funding enterprise technology companies, software companies in general, has been to kind of find great entrepreneurs and in an abstract way that can build great technology companies. Can bring them to market, can sell them, and can scale them, and so on. And either create categories, or dominate existing categories, and disrupt incumbents, and so on. And I think while that has worked for quite a while, in the venture industry overall, in the 50, 60 years of the venture industry, lots of successful firms, I think what we're starting to see is a necessary shift toward accounting for the fundamental differences of opensource software as it relates to new technology getting created and going, and new software companies kind of coming into market. So we actually fundamentally believe that commercial open source software companies are fundamentally different. Functionally in almost every way, as compared to proprietary closed source software companies of the last 30 years. And the way we've sort of designed our firm and we'll about ten people pretty soon. We're just about a month in. We're growing the team quickly, but we're sort of a small, focused team. >> A ten's not focused small, I mean, I know venture firms that have two billion in management that don't have more than 20 people. >> Well, we have portfolio partners that are focused in different functional areas where commercial open source software companies have really fundamental differences. If you were to sort of stack rank, by function, where commercial open source software companies are really fundamentally different, sort of top to bottom. Legal would be, probably, the very top of the list. Right, in terms of license compliance management, structuring all the sort of protections and provisions around how intellectual property is actually shipped to and sold to customers. The legal licensing aspects. The commercial software licensing. This is quite a polarizing hot topic these days. The second big functional area where we have a portfolio partner focused on this is finance. Finance is another area where commercial open source software companies have to sort of behaviorally orient and apply that function very, very differently as compared to proprietary software companies. So we're crazy honored and excited to have world experts and very respected leaders in those different areas sort of helping to provide sort of different pillars of wisdom to our portfolio companies, our portfolio founders, in those different functional areas. And we provide a really focused kind of structure for them. >> Well I want to ask you the kind of question that kind of bridges the old way and new way, 'cause I definitely see you guys definitely being new and different, which is good. Or as Andy Jassy would say, you can be misunderstood for a while, but as you become successful, people will start understanding what you do. And that's a great example of Amazon. The pattern with success is traditionally the same. If we kind of encapsulate the difference between open source old and new, and that is you have something of value, and you're disrupting the market and collecting rents from it. Or revenue, or profit. So that's commercial, that's how businesses run. How are you guys going to disrupt with open source software the next generation value creation? We know how value's created, certainly in software that opensource has shown a path on how to create value in writing software if code is value and functionality's value. But to commercialize and create revenue, which is people paying something for something. That's a little bit different kind of value extraction from the value creation. So open source software can create value in functionality and value product. Now you bring it to the market, you get paid for it, you have to disrupt somebody, you have to create something. How are you looking at that? What's the vision of the creation, the extraction of value, who's disrupted, is it greenfield new opportunities? What's your vision? >> A lot of nuance and complexity in that question. What I would say is- >> Well, open source is creating products. >> Well, open source is the basis for creating products in a different kind of way. I'll go back to your question around let's just sort of maybe simplify it as the value creation and the value capture dynamics, right? We've sort of written a few posts about this, and it's subtle, but it's easy to understand if you look at it from a fundamental kind of perspective. We actually believe, and we'll be publishing research on this, and maybe even sort of more principled scientific, perhaps, even ways of looking at it. And then blog posts and research. We believe that open source software will always generate or create orders of magnitude more value than any constituent can capture. Right, and that's a fundamental way of looking at it. So if you see how cloud providers are capturing value that open source creates, whether it's Elasticsearch, or Postgres, or MySQL or Hadoop. And then commercial open source software companies that capture value that open source software creates, whether it's companies like Confluent around Kafka, or Cloudera around Hadoop, or Databricks around Apache Spark. Or whether it's the creators of those projects. The creators of Spark and Hadoop and Elasticsearch, sometimes many of them are the founders of those companies I mentioned, and sometimes they're not. We just believe regardless of how that sort of value is captured by the cloud providers, the commercial vendors, or the creators, the value created relative to the value captured will always be orders and orders of magnitude greater. And this is expressed in another way, which this may be easier to understand, it's a sort of reinforcing this kind of assertion that there's orders of magnitude value created far greater than what can be captured. If you were to do a survey, which we're currently in the process of doing, and I'm happy to sort of say that publicly for the first time here, of all the commercial open source software companies that have projects with large significant adoption, whether, say for example, it's Docker, with millions of users, or Apache Hadoop. How many Hadoop deployments there are. How many customers' companies are there running Hadoop deployments. Or it may be even MySQL. How many MySQL installations are there. And then you were to sort of survey those companies and see how many end users are there relative to how many customers are paying for the usage of the project. It would probably be something like if there were a million users of a given project, the company behind that project or the cloud provider, or say the end user, the developer behind the project, is unlikely to capture more than, say, 1% or a couple percent of those end users to companies, to paying companies, to paying customers. And many times, that's high. Many times, 1% to 2% is very high. Often, what we've seen actually anecdotally, and we're doing principled research around this, and we'll have data here across a large number of companies, many times it's a fraction of 1%. Which is just sort of maybe sometimes 10% of 1%, or even smaller. >> So the practitioners will be making more money than the actual vendors? >> Absolutely right. End users and practitioners always stand to benefit far greater because of the fundamental nature of open source. It's permissionless, it's disaggregated, the value creation dynamics are untethered, and it is fundamentally freely available to use, freely available to contribute to, with different constraints based on the license. However, all those things are sort of like disaggregating the creating of technology into sort of an unbounded network. And that's really, really incredible. >> Okay, so first of all, I agree with your premise 100%. We've seen it with CUBE, where videos are free. >> And that's a good thing. All those things are good. >> And Dave Vellante says this all the time on theCUBE. And we actually pointed this out and called this in the Hadoop ecosystem in 2012. In fact, we actually said that on theCUBE, and it turned out to be true, 'cause look at Hortonworks and Cloudera had to merge because, again, the market changed very quickly >> Value Creation. >> Because value >> Was created around them in the immediate cloud, etc. So the question is, that changes the valuation mechanisms. So if this true, which we believe it is. Just say it is. Then the traditional net present value cash flow metric of the value of the firm, not your firm, but, like, if I'm an open source firm, I'm only one portion of the extraction. I'm a supplier, and I'm an enabler, the valuation on cash flow might not be as great as the real impact. So the question I have for you, have you thought about the valuation? 'Cause now you're thinking about bigger construct community network effects. These are new dynamics. I don't think anyone's actually crunched a valuation model around this. So if someone knew that, say for example, an open source project created all this value, and they weren't necessarily harvesting it from a cash flow perspective, there might be other ways to monetize it. Have you though about that, and what's your reaction to that concept? 'Cause capitalism would kind of shake down the system. 'Cause why would someone be motivated to participate if they're not capturing any value? So if the value shifts, are they still going to be able to participate? You follow the logic I'm trying to- >> I definitely do. I think what I would say to that is we expect and we encourage and we will absolutely heavily invest in more business model innovation in the area of open source. So what I mean by that is, and it's important to sort of qualify a few things there. There's a huge amount of polarization and lack of consensus, lack of industry consensus on what it actually means to have or implement an open source based business model. In fact there's a lot of people who just sort of point blankedly assert that an opensource business model does not exist. We believe that many business models for monetizing and commercializing open source exist. We've blogged and written about a few of them. Their services and training and support. There's open core, which is very effective in sort of a spectrum of ways to implement open core. Around the core, you can have a thin crust or a thick crust. There's SAS. There are hardware based distribution models, things like Sourcefire, and Cumulus Networks. And there are also network based approaches. For example, project called Storj or Stor-J. Being developed and run now by Ben Golub, who's the former CEO of Docker. >> CUBE alumni. >> Ben's really great open source veteran. This is a network, kind of decentralized network based approach of sort of right sizing the production and consumption of the resource of a storage based open source project in a decentralized network. So those are sort of four or five ways to commercializing value, however, four or five ways of commercializing value, however what we believe is that there will be more business model innovation. There will be more developments around how you can better capture more, or in different ways, the value that open source creates. However, what I will say though, is it is unrealistic to expect two things. It is unrealistic and, in fact, unfair to expect that any of those constituents will contribute back to open source proportional to the value that they received from it, or the benefit, and I'm actually paraphrasing Doug Cutting there, who tweeted this a couple of years ago. Very profoundly deep, wise tweet, which I very strongly agree with. And it is also unrealistic to expect a second thing, which is that any of those constituents can capture a material portion of the value that open source creates, which I would assert is many trillions of dollars, perhaps tens of trillions of dollars. It's really hard to quantify that. And it's not just dollars in economic sense, it's dollars in productivity time saved, new markets, new areas, and so on. >> Yeah, I think this is interesting, and I think that we'll be an open book at that. But I will say that what I've observed in looking through all these CUBE interviews, I think that business model innovation absolutely is something that is an IP. >> We need it. Well, it's now intellectual property, the business model isn't, hey I went to business school, learned this at Babson or Harvard, I learned this business model. We're going to do SAS premium. Okay, I get that. There's going to be very interesting new innovations coming, and I think that's the new IP. 'Cause open source, if it's community based, there's going to be formulas. So that's going to be really inter- Okay, so now let's get back to actual funding itself. You guys are doing early stage. Can you take us through the approach? >> We're very focused on early stage, investing, and backing teams that are, just sort of welcoming the idea of a commercial entity around their open source project. Or building a business fundamentally dependent on an open source project or maybe even more than one. The reason for that is this is really where there's a lot of structural inefficiency in supporting and backing those types of founders. >> I think one of the things with ... is with that acquisition. They were pure on the open source side, doing a great job, didn't want to push the business model too hard because the open source, let's face it, you got people like, eh, I don't want to get caught on the business side, and get revenue, perverse incentives might come up, or fear of incentives that might be different or not aligned. Was a great a value. >> I think so. >> So Red Hat got a steal on that one. But as you go forward, there's going to be certainly a lot more stuff. We're seeing a lot of it now in CNCF, for instance. I want to get your thoughts on this because, being the co founder of KubeCon, and donating it to the CNCF, Kubernetes is the hottest thing on the planet, as we talked about many years ago. What's your take on that, now? I see exciting things happening. What is the impact of Kubernetes, in your opinion, to the world, and where do you see that evolving rapidly, and where is the focus here as the people should be paying attention to? >> I think that Kubernetes replaces EC2. Kubernetes is a disaggregated API for distributed computing anywhere. And it happens to be portable and able to run on any kind of computer infrastructure, which sort of makes it like a liquid disaggregated EC2-like API. Which a lot of people have been sort of chasing and trying to implement for many years with things like OpenStack or Eucalyptus. But interestingly, Kubernetes is sort of the right abstraction for distributed computing, because it meets people where they are architecturally. It's sort of aligned with this current movement around distributed systems first designs. Microservices, packaging things in small compartmentalized units. >> Good for integrating of existing stuff. >> Absolutely, and it's very composable, un-opinionated architecturally. So you can sort of take an application and structure it in any given way, and as long as it has this sort of isolation boundary of a container, you can run it on Kubernetes without needing to sort of retrofit the architecture, which is really awesome. I think Kubernetes is a foundational part of the next kind of computing paradigm in the same way that Linux was foundational to the computing paradigm that gave rise to the internet. We had commodity hardware meeting open source based sort of cost reduction and efficiency, which really Linux enabled, and the movement toward scale out data center infrastructure that supported the Internet's sort of maturity and infrastructure. I think we're starting to see the same type of repeat effect thanks to Kubernetes basically being really well received by engineers, by the cloud providers. It's now the universal sort of standard for running container based applications on the different cloud providers. >> And think having the non-technical opinion posture, as you said, architectural posture, allows it to be compatible with a new kind of heterogeneous. >> Heterogeneity is critical. >> Heterogeneity is key, 'cause it's not just within the environment, it's also within each vendor, or customer has more heterogeneity. So, okay, now that's key. So multi cloud, I want to get your thoughts on multi cloud, because now this goes into some of things that might build on top of if Kubernetes continues to go down the road that you say it does. Then the next question is, stateful applications, service meshes. >> A lot of buzz words. A lot of buzz words in there. Stateful application's real because at a certain point in time, you have a maturity curve with critical infrastructure that starts to become appealing for stateful mission critical storage systems, which is typically where you have all the crown jewels of a given company's infrastructure, whether it's a transactional system, or reading and writing core customer, or financial service information, or whatever it is. So Kubernetes' starting to hit this maturity curve where people are migrating really serious mission critical storage workloads onto that platform. And obviously we're going to start to see even more critical work loads. We're starting to see Edge workloads because Kubernetes is a pretty low footprint system, so you can run it on Edge devices, you can even run it on microcontrollers. We're sort of past the experimental, you know, fun and games was Raspberry Pi, sort of towers, and people actually legitimately doing real world Edge kind of deployments with Kubernetes. We're absolutely starting to see multi-geo, multi-replication, multi-cloud sort of style architectures becoming real, as well. Because Kubernetes is this API that the industry's agreeing upon sufficiently. We actually have agreement around this sort of surface area for distributed system style computing that if cloud providers can actually standardize on in a way that lets application specific vendors or new types of application deployment models innovate further, then we can really unlock this sort of tight coupling of proprietary services inside cloud providers and disaggregate it. Which is really exciting, and I forget the Netscape, Jim Barksdale. Bundling, un-bundling. We're starting to see the un-bundling of proprietary cloud computing service API's. Things like Kinesis, and ALB and ELB and proprietary storage services, and these other sticky services get un-bundled because of two big things. Open source, obviously, we have open source alternative data paths. And then we have Kubernetes which allows us to sort of disaggregate things out pretty easily. >> I want to hear your thoughts, one final concept, before we break, 'cause I was having a private conversation with three people besides myself. A big time CIO of a company that if I said the name everyone would go, oh my god, that guy is huge, he's seen it all going back many, many ways. Currently done a lot of innovation. A hardcore network chip guy who knows networking, old school infrastructure. And then a cloud native application founder who knows a lot about software development and is state-of-the-art cloud native. So cloud native, all experienced, old-school, kind of about my age, a cloud native app developer, a big time CIO, and a chip networking kind of infrastructure guy. And we're talking, and one thing that came out, I want to get you thoughts on this, he says, so what's going on with DevOps, how do you see this service mesh, is a stay for (mumbles) on top of the stack, no stacks, horizontally scalable. And the comment that came out was storage and networking have had this relationship with everything since day one. Network moves a packet from point A to point B, and nothing happens in between, maybe some inspection. And storage goes from here now to the then, because you store it. He goes, that premise moves up the stacks, so then the cloud native guy goes, well that's what's happening up at the top, there's a lot of moving things around, workloads and or services, provisioning services, and then from now to then state. In real time. And what dawned on the next conversation the CIO goes, well this is exactly our challenge. We have under the hood infrastructure being programmable, >> We're having some trouble with the connection. Please try again. >> My phone's calling me. >> Programmable connections. >> So you got the programmable on the top of the stack too, so the CIO said, that's exactly the problem we're trying to solve. We're trying to solve some of these network storage concepts now at an application level. Your thoughts to that. >> Well, I think if I could tease apart everything you just said, which is profound synthesis of a lot of different things, I think we've started to see application logic leak out of application code itself into dedicated layers that are really good at doing one specific thing. So traditionally we had some crud style kind of behavioral semantics implemented around business logic. And then, inside of that, you also had libraries for doing connectivity and lookups and service discovery and locking and key management and encryption and coordination with other types of applications. And all that stuff was sort of shoved into the single big application binary. And now, we're starting to see all those language runtime specific parts of application code sort of crack or leak out into these dedicated, highly scalable, Unix philosophy oriented sort of like layers. So things like Envoy are really just built for the sort of nervous system layer of application communication fabric up and down the layer two through layer seven sort of protocol transport stack, which is really profound. We're seeing things like Vault from Hashicorp handle secure key storage persistence of application dedication, authorization, metadata and information to sort of access different systems and end points. And that's a dedicated sort of stateful layer that you can sort of fragment out and delegate sort of application specific functionality to, which is really great for scalability reasons. And on, and on, and on. So we've started to see that, and I think one way of looking at that is it's a cycle. It's the sort of bundling and un-bundling aspect. >> One of the granny level services are getting a really low level- >> Yeah, it's a sort of like bundling and un-bundling and so we've got all this un-bundling happening out of application code to these dedicated layers. The bundling back may happen. I've actually seen a few Bay Area companies go like, we're going back to the monolith 'cause it actually gives us lots of efficiencies in things that we though were trade offs before. We're actually comfortable with a big monorepo, and one or two core languages, and we're going to build everything into these big binaries, and everyone's going to sort of live in the same source code repository and break things out through folders or whatever. There's a lot of really interesting things. I don't want to say we're sort of clear on where this bundling, un-bundling is happening, but I do think that there's a lot of un-bundling happening right now. And there's a lot of opportunity there. >> And the open source, obviously, driving it. So final question for you, how many deals have you done? Can you talk a little bit about the firm? And exciting things and plans that you have going forward. >> Yeah, we're going to be making a lot of announcements over the next few months, and we're, I guess, extremely thrilled. I don't want to say overwhelmed, 'cause we're able to handle all of the volume and inquiries and inbound interest. We're really honored and thrilled by the reception over the last couple weeks from announcing the firm on the first of October, sort of before the Hortonworks Cloudera merger. The JFrog funding announcement that week. The Elastic IPO. Just a lot of really awesome things happened that week. This is obviously before Microsoft open sourced all their patents. We'll be announcing more investments that we've made. We announced our first one on the first of October as well with the announcement of the firm. We've made a good number of investments. We're not able to talk to much about our first initiative, but you'll hear more about that in the near future. >> Well, we're excited. I think it's the timing's perfect. I know you've been working on this kind of vision for a while, and I think it's really great timing. Congratulations, JJ >> Thank you so much. Thanks for having me on. >> Joesph Jacks, also known as JJ, founder and general partner of OSS Capital, Open Source Software Capital, co founder of KubeCon, which is now part of the CNCF. A real great player in the community and the ecosystem, great to have him on theCUBE, thanks for coming in. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. >> Thanks, John. (bright symphony music)

>> From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018, brought to you by NetApp. >> Hey, welcome to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin, with Keith Townsend on the ground at SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018, we're in the NetApp booth, and we are joined by a CUBE alumni, Brian Ferrar, Marketing Manager for SAP at Cisco, welcome. >> Thank you, thank you, it's great to be here. >> So you are a veteran, you've been at Cisco, you said, about four years. But you have been in the SAP community for a long time. This is, I think I was reading, the 25th time that they've done an event like this. Now, obviously, an event with north of 20,000 people, a million people, Bill McDermott said, engaging online. Wow, we're in the NetApp booth. Tell us, Brian, about this trifecta: NetApp, Cisco, SAP. >> Well sure, thank you very much, first of all. We appreciate the invitation to be here. We've been working with Cisco, Cisco's been working with NetApp and SAP on solutions for our customers together for about 10 years. And in that time, our joint solution for SAP, which we called a FlexPod, which combines Cisco UCS servers with NetApp storage, and of course then there's Cisco networking. That's become one of the most preferred platforms to run SAP HANA on. There was a recent IDC survey, in fact, end of last year, in which they went out, without any consultation with us vendors, and did an independent, true market research survey, with over 300 end users of HANA, and they asked, what was the best platform, what was the most preferred platform to run on. And by far, it was FlexPod, with Cisco and NetApp. And the favorite storage platform, by far NetApp. So we think we're doing a really good job for our customers, but there's always room for improvement, so we're ever innovating, and that, I think, is the secret to our success. Constant, repetitive innovation, making it better and better and better. >> So if we look at these digital transformation platforms of the future: SAP HANA, Leonardo, and then we think about the Cisco, NetApp value prop. How does those individual components play in that equation? >> Well a couple of ways I think, it's a great question. First of all, you gotta start with the very core of what you're concerned about. This is a risky situation. You're running your companies most valuable asset, your supply chain, on this stuff. And so you wanna make sure that the platform you're using is rigorously tested and even more rigorously secured. So one of the things we're known for, and we do this with NetApp, on the FlexPod platform, is our CVDs, Cisco Validated Designs, in which we pretest and precertify everything that you would have to do to implement your SAP solution on a FlexPod. And that's all documented. So if you follow the instructions, you're gonna get a foolproof installation. Then the second way, is we need to make operation and management of these environments simpler and easier. Everybody's looking to reduce cost, reduce resources, improve performance. So one of the ways we've really distinguished ourselves in this market, especially with NetApp, is something we call policy-based infrastructure. We have a product called ACI, Application. (laughs) ACI, what's ACI? It's Application Centric Infrastructure. And it allows us to automate the deployment and management of HANA on these solutions. In fact, one SAP executive saw this and coined the term, One Click Deployment. And I won't say it's just one click deployment, there is some tweaking, but that speaks to the simplicity of deploying it on a FlexPod. But more than that, then we apply that automation to the management and the ongoing orchestration of that environment. And so, for example, if you wanna keep security threats out of your environment, you can automate our Tetration solution on top of that platform that looks at incoming code, looks for patterns, and detects inappropriate activity before it has time to harm your system. Another way we do that was with a product we're unveiling here at SAPPHIRE, which is AppDynamics for SAP. AppDynamics is a fairly famous company around monitoring applications, and Cisco acquired them about a year ago, and we're unveiling their solution for SAP in our booth with number 550, in fact. And that allows you to look all the way down to the code level and see what's happening. >> So, let's pick that apart a little bit, that's pretty amazing. I'm familiar with AppDynamics, it was a born-in-the-cloud solution. So when you think about SAP, and you think about traditional applications built on SAP, you don't think about AppDynamics, you know. AppDynamics was this thing that could allow you to monitor and troubleshoot code across clouds. What's their play with SAP. >> It's hard to say, anymore that anybody's running SAP just on premise, or just in cloud. We live in a hybrid world, a lot of people call it the multi cloud world. And you have to have these management and monitoring tools work both on prem and in the cloud. Basically, they gotta follow your data. And that's the beauty of AppDynamics, is it works across all those multi cloud environments. And I think that's the big play for us with them. We're very concerned about security, coming from a network background, we're very aware of intrusion capabilities, the size of your attack surface, how cloud actually increases the size of your attack surface. So you need a tool like AppDynamics, and other tools that Cisco has, as I mentioned our Tetration tool, to really watch that code and that data going across your infrastructure. And also to keep an eye out for bad actors. It's unfortunately a dangerous world now. Just read the news and see all the companies that have had their brand essentially held hostage with ransomware, for example. >> So let's talk about support. I love the idea of being able to take the infrastructure, outsource the engineering of that to Cisco, FlexPod, Tetration, these validated designs that makes deployment simple. But support, when there's a problem with a query, that's supporting a digital transformation initiative, who do I call? Do I call NetApp, do I call SAP, do I call Cisco? >> It's a great question, it's a great question, 'cause nobody here, not just Cisco, but no vendor here at the show today, implements a solution just on their own, and every environment has multiple pieces in the solution. Cisco takes ownership of the support of all the components, even our partner components, of any solution we deploy. So it's one stop shopping for your support calls. Now if we find it escalates to a higher and higher level, we have direct connections to our partners, third level support escalation teams, and we bring them in, and we solve the problem, but we never let go of it. We don't hand it off, we maintain that incident. No finger pointing, and if you've ever had any personal issues at home on your laptop, and tried to get somebody to help, and you call one person and they point you to another, Yeah, it just doesn't happen. >> My better half just always blames it on the network. And I'm not a network guy anymore, so it's never my fault. (laughing) >> But speaking of needing to delight customers, one of the things that, thematically, was talked about this morning in Bill Mcdermott's keynote is enabling the intelligent enterprise and really being able to embed AI into the technologies to unite the humans with the machines. I loved how he talked about augmenting humanity, and what he talked about there was really. >> The Brave New World, huh? >> Right, and kind of, not calling out their competitors by name, but we all know who they are, and really saying that what SAP is now doing is connecting, synchronizing, the demand chain with the supply chain. So enabling the customers who don't care what's under the hood, right? To focus on their customers, to get this comprehensive customer view. >> I actually really liked that part of the keynote because that description characterizes Cisco ourselves as SAP's customer. So we eat our own dog food, to use the cliche, but you talk about artificial intelligence and machine learning. Last year at SAPPHIRE, we won the HANA innovation award, for the innovation that we did on HANA with AI and machine learning. And we implement that internally, not just for our customers, but internally for ourselves, we do all our sales forecasting, and supply chain management with HANA using AI and machine learning for better insights. And it has made a world of difference to our internal supply chain and IT teams. I mean it's funny because, 20 years ago, we would have called it magic, and it's not, it's innovation. In fact that's the theme of our booth here at SAPPHIRE this week, is it's not magic, it's innovation. We actually have a magician in the booth sawing people in half. You're welcome to come by. If you fit in the booth, you can be sawed in half. >> I might be in trouble here. >> You have to be rather small, but we'll show you how the trick is even done. And that's the thing with innovation, differentiating it from magical claims that other vendors might make. We show you under the covers, how it's done, and we share everything and document everything. And that's actually going back to those CVDs that are so valuable to our customers. >> So let's talk about one of the pillars of Cisco, which is security. As we look at where data's at, we're talking about Edge, the data center, and somewhere in between, >> Yeah, everywhere in between. >> Everywhere in between, security has to follow the data. How does Cisco with NetApp help administrators follow the data? >> Oh, that's another good question. I was in a presentation from an analyst recently, it said the world's data is now increasing, it's doubling every two years. The entire world's data is doubling every two years. So how do you keep track of that and how do you manage it? One of the ways we do it, and we do this with NetApp as well and the FlexPod, is we have security embedded in every aspect, so we talk about computing at the Edge, with IOT devices, you know? Smart cars is an example everyone understands. But there's supply chain IOT out there on the Edge as well. Tracking shipments and ballots, and widgets, and units. And we talk about computing at the fog, and trying to get computing as close to the transaction as possible, for low latency, high performance. But then for deep analytics, you're bringing that data back to the core. So you've got a lot of places where you could be attacked, as I mentioned earlier, that attack surface has now grown dramatically, it's no longer isolated within the four walls of your data center. So we embed security at every place along that chain. Coming from a network heritage, we have intelligent routers, often ruggedized, that we can put out there in the Edge, with security, to catch inappropriate activity happening, coming in from an IOT source for example, from a sensor. That is not what we were expecting and could potentially be an attack. And then we can analyze it before it ever gets into your valuable data center. And so we're putting that security at the Edge, in the fog, on the servers, in the data center, on the routers, on the network, you name it. We think there's no one solution. You have to have an all encompassing end to end solution, that literally surrounds you with that security bubble, and that's what we're doing. In fact, we, by the way, to put a plugin for Cisco, we just came out with our annual Cybersecurity Report, which is one of the most popular supports on cyber security trends every year in the industry. So Cisco puts that together, and obviously takes it very seriously. >> So you mentioned AppDynamics before, monitoring SAP apps, you just mentioned security. Put that in the context of this next generation data center. What does a customer, what can they expect working with Cisco, NetApp, and SAP, to evolve to a next gen data center. >> It's an interesting question, because the very nature of the data center is changing now. I mean, you know if I'm on the road and I'm processing end of year financial closes or end of quarter financial closes, am I a data center? If I'm processing IOT data on the Edge, and because it's so critical, for example, take oil and gas. They can measure that remote oil well in dollars per second, or tens of thousands of dollars per second of down time. And so you want the data coming in from that well. Pressure, temperature, potential downtime, coming in in time to fix it before it breaks, is that now a data center? So we're talking about, what does it mean? The definitions of compute, of data capture have all changed. The idea is you've gotta follow that data. And that's what we're looking at for the future, I think, is the data center is no longer an internal monolithic, controlled environment, that you can be very certain of. Now you've gotta follow that data and adapt your security to the type of processing you're doing, whether it's in the data center core or out there on the Edge. And I think that's what we're evolving to. Someday we'll all be data centers. >> So let's talk about that, all on the data center. Developers are now developing applications, containers, they practically have data centers on their laptop. Connect the dots for us, where Cisco plays in. >> This is actually one of the latest developments, I think, in the industry, is the emergence of something called containers. And we're the first vendor to work with SAP to implement our Cisco container platform, to provide their SAP data hub with containerized access. So now, that SAP data hub can become the nucleus of all incoming data and processing all big data for new insights, regardless of the source of that data or the application that data's running on. And that's what the beauty of containers is, is it encapsulates that application, so those rules come with that data, and so now you can, literally, connect everything to that central SAP data hub, and have complete, what did Bill Mcdermott call it, 360 degree visibility. And that's made possible by the ability to tap into not just new big data solutions that you have out there, but legacy big data solutions. I mean, I'm old enough to remember when there was such a thing called the data warehouse. And they were all proprietary and there were a whole bunch of them. And there are still our customers out there running not only the new stuff, but the legacy stuff, 'cause it works, they figured it out, and they don't wanna change it, it gives them good insights. So how do you take that legacy stuff now, and link it and combine it with all the new stuff coming out of, for example, your SAP supply chain, and the answer is the containers on top of that SAP data hub will do that for you. And that's really where we're taking it. There was a language, Esperanto, years and years ago, that was created in the '60s, '50s even. And I think the idea was it was gonna be a universal language that anybody could speak. So I don't speak Spanish, if they don't speak English, but we both speak Esperanto. And of course it never took off, because it was yet another language to learn. But the idea, the concept of having this in between piece that makes anything connect to anything is still a very intriguing idea for the human mind. And you can apply that to this data sphere, this global data sphere, and now, with something like a data hub tool and containers, that serve that encapsulation purpose, you can actually have a nucleus of big data and analytics in your company, that doesn't care where the data was originated from or what application it's running. It's still available to plug into your analysis, your planning. >> Well who knew, SAP, we heard Kubernetes, and AppDynamics in one interview at SAP SAPPHIRE, that's amazing. >> Mind blown? >> I get paid by the buzzword, you know. >> Wow! >> Yeah, I'm in marketing. >> So am I, I gotta tap into your expertise now. Brian, thank you so much for stopping by theCUBE, and talking with Keith and me about what's new with Cisco, your partnership with SAP, and NetApp, and happy birthday. >> Thank you very much, I appreciate it. Come to the party. I'm actually having Justin Timberlake perform this year. >> That's very nice of you. >> You're all invited. >> Well thank you, wow, I'm glad I could make it to your birthday party. >> You guys have a great day. >> We wanna thank you for watching theCUBE, we are at SAP SAPPHIRE 2018. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend, thanks for watching.

hi this is David flora back at the open power foundation conference here in San Jose and with me I've got Erin Sullivan who is a distinguished engineer at Rackspace welcome our thank you so what do you think of the conference so far it's amazing it's grown so much in the last year 15 designs to almost 60 in a year and lots of system launches yeah very impressed well one of the things that has been announced today which was caught my eye in a big big way was the agreement so the announcement that you and Google have can you paint a little more put a little more light on that announcement yeah sure so Rackspace and Google started working together when Rackspace was developing barrel I of course Google had already had their system available at the time and our collaboration just on what we had with barrel I was very positive we were just kind of looking to trade notes and you know share our experience and a few months ago we got back in touch and said hey this was ministers posit enough we should think about doing the next one together from the start and so that's basically what we're doing now we're going to do a power 9 system that comes in multiple mechanical form factors but just one motherboard and we're going to like we did with barrel I we're going to contribute that to open compute when we're finished out of the Open Compute foundation part of the OpenStack yes heart of the open power founder that's right open everything open ever yeah yeah excellent so what about the barreleye that you also announced some things about today can you what is barrel i and what's what's what's different about it so so paralyzed named after a fish that's got a transparent body most of our servers are named after we thought having a server that was fully open would be great to have that name barrel I just entered its first data center shipments it's headed to our Virginia data centers right now and in a few months we expect we will begin providing services to customers on it so that's the progress on barrel I so far we contributed to open compute about 2-3 months ago now and it was accepted so the specifications are online and if you look around the show floor here you will see there are other companies that have put their brand on it or something else and are also taking at the market which is exactly what we hope for great well I've got a question which is why have you why have you put these resources into barrel I and in the future into the power 9 etc what are you looking for that's different about open power that for example you couldn't get with a standard x86 server yeah so I know it gets to be tired and people get tired of hearing the word open but really even with open compute and OpenStack the freedom that comes with developing in that particular universe is really significant before open power even started there were parts of the system we really wish we could get into in an open way where we could develop and share instead of just doing it all on our own and having open power come in the first place fit that but then we also have this problem this Moore's Law problem and the types of changes that we're going to have to implement as an industry to continue to accelerate and and and get higher performance computing and more efficient computing over the next year's they're really huge challenges they go from the chips all the way to the top of the stack and if you don't have the chip part open and you don't have the firmware part open it becomes really difficult to collaborate you can't bring to bear the sort of force of the world software developers onto it you end up in these little silos and niches so for us beryl I provides a lot of value as a business and it has a great influence on the industry at large and so wills IOUs the power 9 system Google but it also is there as a platform for developers to begin to start wrapping their minds around these new problems and opportunities that we have and if it's not done in the open these types of software aren't really scalable across the whole industry that that's a very interesting answer indeed and as you say um does laura has come to a screeching halt from the point of Mount of power per CPU is still going on in terms of the number of transistors etc that you can have what are the what are the things you as a distinguished engineer what are the things that really are most important about the power architecture that allow you to develop these new ways of doing things yeah I think it's it depends on the type of your business you're in but in our business I think in many cloud service providers and in some other environments certainly some HPC and a lot of enterprise the performance of a single core is still really important and it will continue to be for as long as we can keep getting more performance out of a single core so power provided a great platform with a very powerful core and it also has a huge number of threads per core so you get a little bit of the best of both worlds there and you need a really powerful core you have it if you want to spread your load really wide over a more cloudy webby type application you get to use all those threads and there's all that memory bandwidth and so forth so so that was the benefit of power in general and then we run out of core performance and those cycles per you know CPU aren't going up and maybe we can't even scale cores like we used to anymore which is coming in a few years I the the fact that the platform is open in areas that others aren't allows us to bend the rules about how components communicate and we cut out a lot of overhead between them so that's a sort of software in silicon type argument you want to bring the software closer to the silicon yeah closer and in many cases to do the same work that we do today like that's the hard part is people think it's all about genomics or oil and gas or something it's the same work but you know we've already demonstrated that open harcum you it is demonstrated that there are certain workloads that are very common today that you can boost tenfold or more simply by reintegrating your software tighter the hardware right you pull out overhead that we were fine with when Moore's Law is working but now we got to do something yeah great well thanks very much indeed for for being here and thanks very much for watching