>> Narrator: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back to the Fira in Barcelona. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with David Nicholson, day four of MWC '23. Show's winding down a little bit, but it's still pretty packed here. Lot of innovation, planes, trains, automobiles, and we're talking 5G all week, private networks, connected breweries. It's super exciting. Really happy to have Warren Jackson here as the Edge Gateway Product Technologist at Dell Technologies, and Scott Waller, the CTO of the 5G Open Innovation Lab. Folks, welcome to theCUBE. >> Good to be here. >> Really interesting stories that we're going to talk about. Let's start, Scott, with you, what is the Open Innovation Lab? >> So it was hatched three years ago. Ideated about a bunch of guys from Microsoft who ran startup ventures program, started the developers program over at Microsoft, if you're familiar with MSDN. And they came three years ago and said, how does CSPs working with someone like T-Mobile who's in our backyard, I'm from Seattle. How do they monetize the edge? You need a developer ecosystem of applications and use cases. That's always been the thing. The carriers are building the networks, but where's the ecosystem of startups? So we built a startup ecosystem that is sponsored by partners, Dell being one sponsor, Intel, Microsoft, VMware, Aspirant, you name it. The enterprise folks who are also in the connectivity business. And with that, we're not like a Y Combinator or a Techstars where it's investment first and it's all about funding. It's all about getting introductions from a startup who might have a VR or AI type of application or observability for 5G slicing, and bring that in front of the Microsoft's of the world, or the Intel's and the Dell's of the world that they might not have the capabilities to do it because they're still a small little startup with an MVP. So we really incubate. We're the connectors and build a network. We've had 101 startups over the last three years. They've raised over a billion dollars. And it's really valuable to our partners like T-Mobile and Dell, et cetera, where we're bringing in folks like Expedo and GenXComm and Firecell. Start up private companies that are around here they were cohorts from our program in the past. >> That's awesome because I've often, I mean, I've seen Dell get into this business and I'm like, wow, they've done a really good job of finding these guys. I wonder what the pipeline is. >> We're trying to create the pipeline for the entire industry, whether it's 5G on the edge for the CSPs, or it's for private enterprise networks. >> Warren, what's this cool little thing you got here? >> Yeah, so this is very unique in the Dell portfolio. So when people think of Dell, they think of servers laptops, et cetera. But what this does is it's designed to be deployed at the edge in harsh environments and it allows customers to do analytics, data collection at the edge. And what's unique about it is it's got an extended temperature range. There's no fan in this and there's lots of ports on it for data ingestion. So this is a smaller box Edge Gateway 3200. This is the product that we're using in the brewery. And then we have a bigger brother of this, the Edge Gateway 5200. So the value of it, you can scale depending on what your edge compute requirements are at the edge. >> So tell us about the brewery story. And you covered it, I know you were in the Dell booth, but it's basically an analog brewery. They're taking measurements and temperatures and then writing it down and then entering it in and somebody from your company saw it and said, "We can help you with this problem." Explain the story. >> Yeah, so Scott and I did a walkthrough of the brewery back in November timeframe. >> It's in Framingham, Mass. >> Framingham, Mass, correct. And basically, we talked to him, and we said, what keeps you guys up at night? What's a problem that we can solve? Very simple, a kind of a lower budget, didn't have a lot money to spend on it, but what problem can we solve that will realize great benefit for you? So we looked at their fermentation process, which was completely analog. Somebody was walking around with a clipboard looking at analog gauges. And what we did is we digitized that process. So what this did for them rather than being completely reactive, and by the time they realized there was something going wrong with the fermentation process, it's too late. A batch of scrap. This allowed them to be proactive. So anytime, anywhere on the tablet or a phone, they can see if that fermentation process is going out of range and do something about it before the batch gets scrapped. >> Okay. Amazing. And Scott, you got a picture of this workflow here? >> Yeah, actually this is the final product. >> Explain that. >> As Warren mentioned, the data is actually residing in the industrial side of the network So we wanted to keep the IT/OT separation, which is critical on the factory floor. And so all the data is brought in from the sensors via digital connection once it's converted and into the edge gateway. Then there's a snapshot of it using Telit deviceWISE, their dashboarding application, that is decoding all the digital readings, putting them in a nice dashboard. And then when we gave them, we realized another problem was they're using cheap little Chromebooks that they spill beer on once a week and throw them out. That's why they bought the cheap ones 'cause they go through them so fast. So we got a Dell Latitude Rugged notebook. This is a brand new tablet, but they have the dashboarding software. So no matter if they're out there on the floor, but because the data resides there on the factory they have access to be able to change the parameters. This one's in the maturation cycle. This one's in the crashing cycle where they're bringing the temperature back down, stopping the fermentation process, getting it ready to go to the canning side of the house. >> And they're doing all that from this dashboard. >> They're doing all from the dashboard. They also have a giant screen that we put up there that in the floor instead of walking a hundred yards back behind a whole bunch of machinery equipment from a safety perspective, now they just look up on the screen and go, "Oh, that's red. That's out of range." They're actually doing a bunch of cleaning and a bunch of other things right now, too. So this is real time from Boston. >> Dave: Oh okay. >> Scott: This is actually real time from Boston. >> I'm no hop master, but I'm looking at these things flashing at me and I'm thinking something's wrong with my beer. >> We literally just lit this up last week. So we're still tweaking a few things, but they're also learning around. This is a new capability they never had. Oh, we have the ability to alert and monitor at different processes with different batches, different brews, different yeast types. Then now they're also training and learning. And we're going to turn that into eventually a product that other breweries might be able to use. >> So back to the kind of nuts and bolts of the system. The device that you have here has essentially wifi antennas on the back. >> Warren: Correct. >> Pull that up again if you would, please. >> Now I've seen this, just so people are clear, there are also paddle 5G antennas that go on the other side. >> Correct. >> That's sort of the connection from the 5G network that then gets transmogrified, technical term guys, into wifi so the devices that are physically connected to the brew vats, don't know what they're called. >> Fermentation tanks. >> Fermentation tanks, thank you. Those are wifi. That's a wifi signal that's going into this. Is that correct? >> Scott: No. >> No, it's not. >> It's a hard wire. >> Okay, okay. >> But, you're right. This particular gateway. >> It could be wifi if it's hard wire. >> It could be, yes. Could be any technology really. >> This particular gateway is not outfitted with 5G, but something that was very important in this application was to isolate the IT network, which is on wifi and physically connected from the OT network, which is the 5G connection. So we're sending the data directly from the gateway up to the cloud. The two partners that we worked with on this project were ifm, big sensor manufacturer that actually did the wired sensors into an industrial network called IO-Link. So they're physically wired into the gateway and then in the gateway we have a solution from our partner Telit that has deviceWISE software that actually takes the data in, runs the analytics on it, the logic, and then visualizes that data locally on those panels and also up to their cloud, which is what we're looking at. So they can look at it locally, they're in the plant and then up in the cloud on a phone or a tablet, whatever, when they're at home. >> We're talking about a small business here. I don't know how many employees they have, but it's not thousands. And I love that you're talking about an IT network and an OT network. And so they wanted, it is very common when we talk about industrial internet of things use cases, but we're talking about a tiny business here. >> Warren: Correct. >> They wanted to separate those networks because of cost, because of contention. Explain why. >> Yeah, just because, I mean, they're running their ERP system, their payroll, all of their kind of the way they run their business on their IT network and you don't want to have the same traffic out on the factory floor on that network, so it was pretty important. And the other thing is we really, one of the things that we didn't want to do in this project is interrupt their production process at all. So we installed this entire system in two days. They didn't have to shut down, they didn't have to stop. We didn't have to interrupt their process at all. It was like we were invisible there and we spun the thing up and within two days, very simple, easy, but tremendous value for their business. >> Talk about new markets here. I mean, it's like any company that's analog that needs to go digital. It's like 99% of the companies on the planet. What are you guys seeing out there in terms of the types of examples beyond breweries? >> Yeah, I could talk to that. So I spent a lot of time over the last couple years running my own little IoT company and a lot of it being in agriculture. So like in Washington state, 70% of the world's hops is actually grown in Washington state. It's my hometown. But in the Ag producing regions, there's lack of connectivity. So there's interest in private networks because the carriers aren't necessarily deploying it. But because we have the vast amount of hops there's a lot of IPAs, a lot of hoppy IPAs that come out of Seattle. And with that, there's a ton of craft breweries that are about the same size, some are a little larger. Anheuser-Busch and InBev and Heineken they've got great IoT platforms. They've done it. They're mass scale, they have to digitize. But the smaller shops, they don't, when we talk about IT/OT separation, they're not aware of that. They think it's just, I get local broadband and I get wifi and one hotspot inside my facility and it works. So a little bit of it was the education. I have got years in IT/OT security in my background so that education and we come forward with a solution that actually does that for them. And now they're aware of it. So now when they're asking questions of other vendors that are trying to sell them some type of solution, they're inherently aware of what should be done so they're not vulnerable to ransomware attacks, et cetera. So it's known as the Purdue Model. >> Well, what should they do? >> We came in and keep it completely separated and educated them because in the end too we'll build a design guide and a starter kit out of this that other brewers can use. Because I've toured dozens of breweries in Washington, the exact same scenario, analog gauges, analog process, very manual. And in the end, when you ask the brewer, what do they want out of this? It keeps them up at night because if the temperature goes out of range, because the chiller fails, >> They ruined. >> That's $30,000 lost in beer. That's a lot to a small business. However, it's also once they start digitizing the data and to Warren's point, it's read-only. We're not changing any of the process. We augmented on top of their existing systems. We didn't change their process. But now they have the ability to look at the data and see batch to batch consistency. Quality doesn't always mean best, it means consistency from batch to batch. Every beer from exhibit A from yesterday to two months from now of the same style of beer should be the same taste, flavor, boldness, et cetera. This is giving them the insights on it. >> It's like St. Louis Buds, when we were kids. We would buy the St. Louis Buds 'cause they tasted better than the Merrimack Buds. And then Budweiser made them all the same. >> Must be an East coast thing. >> It's an old guy thing, Dave. You weren't born yet. >> I was in high school. Yeah, I was in high school. >> We like the hops. >> We weren't 21. Do me a favor, clarify OT versus IT. It's something we talk about all the time, but not everyone's familiar with that separation. Define OT for me. >> It's really the factory floor. You got IT systems that are ERP systems, billing, you're getting your emails, stuff like that. Where the ransomware usually gets infected in. The OT side is the industrial control network. >> David: What's the 'O' stand for? >> Operation. >> David: Operation? >> Yeah, the operations side. >> 'Cause some people will think objects 'cause we think internet of things. >> The industrial operations, think of it that way. >> But in a sense those are things that are connected. >> And you think of that as they are the safety systems as well. So a machine, if someone doesn't push the stop button, you'd think if there's a lot of traffic on that network, it isn't guaranteed that that stop button actually stops that blade from coming down, someone's going to lose their arm. So it's very tied to safety, reliability, low latency. It is crafted in design that it never touches the internet inherently without having to go through a security gateway which is what we did. >> You mentioned the large companies like InBev, et cetera. You're saying they're already there. Are they not part of your target market? Or are there ways that you can help them? Is this really more of a small to mid-size company? >> For this particular solution, I think so, yeah. Because the cost to entry is low. I mean, you talk about InBev, they have millions of dollars of budgets to spend on OT. So they're completely automated from top to bottom. But these little craft brewers, which they're everywhere in the US. Vermont, Washington state, they're completely manual. A lot of these guys just started in their garage. And they just scaled up and they got a cult kind of following around their beers. One thing that we found here this week, when you talk around edge and 5G and beer, those things get people excited. In our booth we're serving beer, and all these kind of topics, it brings people together. >> And it lets the little guy compete more effectively with the big giants. >> Correct. >> And how do you do more with less as the little guy is kind of the big thing and to Warren's point, we have folks come up and say, "Great, this is for beer, but what about wine? What about the fermentation process of wine?" Same materials in the end. A vessel of some sort, maybe it's stainless steel. The clamps are the same, the sensors are the same. The parameters like temperature are key in any type of fermentation. We had someone talking about olive oil and using that. It's the same sanitary beverage style equipment. We grabbed sensors that were off the shelf and then we integrated them in and used the set of platforms that we could. How do we rapidly enable these guys at the lowest possible cost with stuff that's at the shelf. And there's four different companies in the solution. >> We were having a conversation with T-Mobile a little earlier and she mentioned the idea of this sounding scary. And this is a great example of showing that in fact, at a relatively small scale, this technology makes a lot of sense. So from that perspective, of course you can implement private 5G networks at an industrial scale with tens of millions of dollars of investment. But what about all of the other things below? And that seems to be a perfect example. >> Yeah, correct. And it's one of the things with the gateway and having flexibility the way Dell did a great job of putting really good modems in it. It had a wide spectrum range of what bands they support. So being able to say, at a larger facility, I mean, if Heineken wants to deploy something like this, oh, heck yeah, they probably could do it. And they might have a private 5G network, but let's say T-Mobile offers a private offering on their public via a slice. It's easy to connect that radio to it. You just change the sims. >> Is that how the CSPs fit here? How are they monetized? >> Yeah, correct. So one of our partners is T-Mobile and so we're working with them. We've got other telco partners that are coming on board in our lab. And so we'll do the same thing. We're going to take this back and put it in the lab and offer it up as others because the baseline building blocks or Lego blocks per se can be used in a bunch of different industries. It's really that starter point of giving folks the idea of what's possible. >> So small manufacturing, agriculture you mentioned, any other sort of use cases we should tune into? >> I think it's environmental monitoring, all of that stuff, I see it in IoT deployments all over the world. Just the simple starter kits 'cause a farmer doesn't want to get sold a solution, a platform, where he's got to hire a bunch of coders and partner with the big carriers. He just wants something that works. >> Another use case that we see a lot, a high cost in a lot of these places is the cost of energy. And a lot of companies don't know what they're spending on electricity. So a very simple energy monitoring system like that, it's a really good ROI. I'm going to spend five or $10,000 on a system like this, but I'm going to save $20,000 over a year 'cause I'm able to see, have visibility into that data. That's a lot of what this story's about, just giving visibility into the process. >> It's very cool, and like you said, it gets people excited. Is it a big market? How do you size it? Is it a big TAM? >> Yeah, so one thing that Dell brings to the table in this space is people are buying their laptops, their servers and whatnot from Dell and companies are comfortable in doing business with Dell because of our model direct to customer and whatnot. So our ability to bring a device like this to the OT space and have them have that same user experience they have with laptops and our client products in a ruggedized solution like this and bring a lot of partners to the table makes it easy for our customers to implement this across all kinds of industries. >> So we're talking to billions, tens of billions. Do we know how big this market is? What's the TAM? I mean, come on, you work for Dell. You have to do a TAM analysis. >> Yes, no, yeah. I mean, it really is in the billions. The market is huge for this one. I think we just tapped into it. We're kind of focused in on the brewery piece of it and the liquor piece of it, but the possibilities are endless. >> Yeah, that's tip of the spear. Guys, great story. >> It's scalable. I think the biggest thing, just my final feedback is working and partnering with Dell is we got something as small as this edge gateway that I can run a Packet Core on and run a 5G standalone node and then have one of the small little 5G radios out there. And I've got these deployed in a farm. Give the farmer an idea of what's possible, give him a unit on his tractor, and now he can do something that, we're providing connectivity he had never had before. But as we scale up, we've got the big brother to this. When we scale up from that, we got the telco size units that we can put. So it's very scalable. It's just a great suite of offerings. >> Yeah, outstanding. Guys, thanks for sharing the story. Great to have you on theCUBE. >> Good to be with you today. >> Stop by for beer later. >> You know it. All right, Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson and the entire CUBE team, we're here live at the Fira in Barcelona MWC '23 day four. Keep it right there. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Las Vegas. theCUBE is here, live at AWS re:Invent 2021. Lisa Martin with Dave Nicholson. theCUBE has two sets today, two, not one, two, two live sets, two remote sets, over 100 guests on the program at this event, it's a lot, talking about the next generation of cloud innovation with AWS and its massive ecosystem of partners and we are pleased to welcome Walton Smith to the program, the public sector, director of strategic partnerships for Worldwide Technology, Walton welcome to the program. >> Thank you so much for having me, it's really amazing to be here and look forward to a great conversation. Isn't it great to be in person again? >> It's so nice to be in person, I mean I'm glad everybody's being safe and, and checking vaccine status and whatnot, but it's good to get back and, and, and work with people cause we can really drive innovation when, when we get together. >> Those hallway conversations or those conversations here at events that you just can't replicate by video conferencing, right? Not replicate that, you getting grabbed in the hall and say, hey, have you thought about leveraging XYZ to do something? To me that's what makes this conference great. >> Talk to me about what's going on at WWT. What are some of the, the things that you guys have been working on? >> It's a really exciting time at Worldwide, we're really working closely with AWS to drive innovation to the edge. We're excited about their outpost offering, we actually have one in our data center, Sandy announced it today in a partnership with Intel to, to allow our customers to try to work out use cases, to, to kick the tires, so to speak, to see how it works as well as our partners to get their ISV products certified on the outpost platform. >> So I'm familiar with your ATC in St. Louis, is that what you're referring to? >> That's correct. >> Give us a little, give us a little insight into what goes on there, I know it's pretty amazing from a customer perspective because you are agnostic. because you are agnostic. >> Walton: Correct. >> You're there to serve the customer, but tell me, tell me what happens in the ATC. >> We say we're agnostic, but we have our, our, our preferences because we know- >> sure, sure, okay. what actually works. But our ATC is our crown jewel, it's about a $600 million data center that we built solely for proof of concepts for our customers. So our, our top customers come in and say, I have this problem, how can I solve it? And so with us being the single biggest reseller of just about every ISV is out there, I can stand up a, a, a Dell, I can stand up a, a, a Dell, Dell compute next to NetApp storage with Cisco router on top of it to replicate what my customer has at the VA, for example, and then to be able to plug in an outpost to show how leveraging the outpost can give them a single pane of glass to be able to work on their workload, so the training that our FSI, Federal System Integrators have put into their staff or our government customers on the Amazon platform can now be driven into their data center, so it's really taking the cloud down to where the data is. >> In terms of public sector, what are some of the prominent use cases that you guys are helping customers to solve, especially given the tumultuous times that we're still living in? Sure, so what we saw during COVID especially was how most of the government agencies had the capability to allow say 5% to 10% of their workforce to work remotely. And then with COVID, they went to 95% to a 100% workforce. So, a lot of the time we've spent over the last year is how do we securely allow our government employees to get access to the information, because as we know, the government was more valuable than ever to get us through this pandemic, we had to give them the tools that they needed to be able to make the decisions to, to move the country forward. >> Talk about security if you will for a second, we have seen such a dramatic change in the security landscape, the threat landscape, ransomware as a service, it's, you know, the cyber criminals, lot of money in it, they're becoming far more brazen. What are some of the things that you're seeing specifically with respect to security use cases? >> It's, it's gone from, let me just buy everything that's out there and that'll give me security to, I need to have visibility into my environment, because if, if you look at target, it's a great case studies around that, they had all the tools, they just didn't tie it all together. And so as more and more nation state actors And so as more and more nation state actors try to attack our government, or it's a great way to make money, I mean, in, in this, in the presentation, Sandy's today, they talked about, if you looked at the GDP of what's been taken in ransomware, it's like the 10th biggest country in the world, I mean, it's scary and staggering how much money is lost. So what we think, going back to our ATC, we can stand up their environment, we can work with the top security providers in the world to show those customers how we can give them that visibility, the, the, the protection and the ability to get back up, because there's really only two types of organizations, those who've been hacked and those who don't know they've been hacked, they're going to get in, it's how do we mitigate the damage, how do we get them back up and running and how we protect my customers or have some of the most sensitive data in the world, how do we protect that so our government can keep us safe and keep us moving forward. >> Yeah, cause these days it's a matter of when we get hacked, not if. And of course we are only hearing about the large attacks. >> Walton: Correct. We don't hear about- all of the ones that go on day in and day out, I think, I think I saw a stat recently that a ransomware attack happens like once every 11 seconds. >> Correct, I mean, just walking through here, how many text messages you've gotten? You want a free iPad click here, I mean, they're, they're down to the individual level. It's a whole lot cheaper to give a couple people, really powerful laptops, pizza and beer, and have them go attack, than it is to, to set up a real business and so, unfortunately, as long as there's money in it, there's going to be bad actors out there. We think partnering with AWS and other partners can help build solutions. >> You know, WWT has had an interesting history because you didn't start with the dawn of cloud. >> Walton: Right. So you've been in the business of AT for a long time So you've been in the business of AT for a long time and logistics out of St. Louis in a lot of ways. What does that look like in terms of navigating that divide? You know, there's a, there's a whole storied history of companies that were not able to cross the divide from the mainframe era to the client server era, let alone to cloud. You seem to have, you seem to be doing that pretty well. >> I, I appreciate that, I mean, we're the biggest company no one's ever heard of. We're 14, $15 billion privately held firm, the same two guys that founded it, still run it today and all they want to do is do cool things, they want it to be truly the best place to work. So from day one, they've invested in training our staff, building the ATC to give us the tools we need to be successful and then because we're a trusted partner with Amazon Intel and our other partners out there, they're investing in us to help build solutions, so we have over 6,000 engineers, they get up every day, how do I build something that can help our customers really drive change and innovation? So it's been a really fun ride and the, the best is yet to come. >> Talk to me about your customer focus, you know, when we talk, here we are at reinvent, we always talk with AWS about their, you know, Dave, we talked about this customer obsession, the fact that they're working backwards from the customer, do you share that sort of philosophy? Does WWT share that philosophy with AWS? >> 100%?, if you go to WWT.com we've published everything that we have so you can get full access to our lab to learn about x ISV and go deep to learn about x ISV and go deep and see the million and a half labs we've built around, say Red Hat and go and get access to it. So we think that if we educate our customers, there are going to be customers for life, and they're going to come to us with their biggest problems. And that what's, is what's exciting and what enables us to, to really continue to grow. >> And how did the customers help you innovate? And that's one of the things we, I was thinking yesterday with, with this AWS flywheel of when Adam was introducing, and now we have a, now we have, and it was because he would say, we did this, but you needed more, but you being the customer needed more. >> 100%, it, it's we want our customers to come to us with their biggest problems, because that's when we, the exciting innovation works. And so the ability to sit down with the foremost expert in, in virus control and be able to, in, in virus control and be able to, what are the tools that she need to be able to get ahead of the next change to COVID? How can we give them the tools to do that? That's what we want to do, the scalability, the ability to reach out to others is what Amazon brings. So we can bring the data science, we can bring the understanding of the storage, the security, and the network and then AWS gives that limitless scalability to solve those problems and to bring in someone from Africa, to bring in someone from the European Union to, to work together to solve those problems, that's what's, what's exciting and then coming back to the outpost, to be able to put that in the data center, we know the data center is better than just about anybody out there, so it would be the ability to add innovation to them, to bring those part ISV partners together. It's really exciting that Intel is funding it because they know that if, if customers can see the art of the possible, they're going to push that innovation. >> One of the things we've also sort of thematically Dave and I with guests, and the other has been talking about this week is that every company has to be a data company, whether it's public sector, private sector, if you're not, or if you're not on your way, there's a competitor right here in the rear view mirror ready to take your place. How do you help public sector organizations really develop, embrace an execute a data full course strategy? >> So we have a cadre of over 125 data scientists that work every day to help organizations unlock their most valuable asset, that data, their people and be able to put the data in the right place at the right time and so by investing in those data scientists, investing in the networking folks to be able to look at the holistic picture is how we can bring those solutions to our customers, because the data is the new oil of, of the environment and sorry for my Southern twang on the oil, but it, but it truly is the most valuable asset they have and so, how do we unlock that? How do they pull that data together, secure it? Because now that you're aggregating all that data, you're making it a treasure trove for those bad actors that are out there, so you've got to secure it, but then to be able to learn and, and automate based on, on what you learned from that data. >> You know I, I think with hindsight, it's easy to, it's easy to say, well, of course WWT is where WWT is today. Five years ago, though, I think it would have been an honest question to ask, how are you going to survive in the world of cloud? And here we are, you've got outposts. >> Walton: Sure. >> And, and of course it makes sense because you're focused on customers, sounds like I'm doing a commercial for you, But I'm a fan- >> I'll gladly apreciate that- because I, I, I've worked with you guys in a variety of roles for a long time, seems like yesterday we were testing a bunch of different storage arrays of the ATC and now you've got outposts in cloud and you're integrating it together. It's really more of the same, I'm sure if we had your founders here, they'd tell you, Dave, it's all the same. >> Walton: Correct. It's all the same. >> It's AT, it's where, where's the compute, where's the storage, how do you get access to it and the cloud has given the ability to, to scale and do things you could never imagine. I think it's the reason we're here is because our leadership continues to invest and pushing that envelope to give people the freedom to go out with that crazy idea, what if we did this? And having the tools and the ability to do that is, is what, what drives our innovation and that's what we bring to our customers and our partners, that ability to innovate to, that ability to innovate to, to tackle that next problem. >> So what's the tip of the spear right now for you guys? What are you, what's, what's, what's kind of, what's next? What are you waiting to have delivered to the ATC to racket, stack and cable up? >> Lot's of stuff that I can't tell you about because there, there's things that Amazon is, is always working on that we work with before it, it's, it's made public, so there's a lot of really cool stuff in the pipeline, because the, as you think about moving to the data center, that's one thing, moving to truly to the edge, where you can help that war fighter, where you can help that mission, where you can do disaster recovery, leveraging the snowball family, the outpost family, and custom built tools that really allow for quick response and custom built tools that really allow for quick response to whatever that problem is, is that next front and that's where we've been for a long time, helping our, our war fighters and folks do what needs to be done. Outpost sees that you can leverage big AWS Outpost sees that you can leverage big AWS to build the models, push it down to the edge because you don't have time or the bandwidth to get it back into the big cloud, to be able to put that compute and storage and analytics on the edge to make real time decisions, is what we have to do to stay relevant and that's where the joint partnership is really exciting. >> It's what you have to do to stay relevant, it's also what your customers need, cause one of the things that we've learned in the pandemic is that real-time data and access to it is no longer, longer a nice to have, this is business critical for everything. >> Correct and even if you have a fat pipe to get it, you need to make real time decisions and if you're in a really sandy space, excuse me, making hard decisions, you've got to get the best information to that soldier when, when they need it to, to save our lives or to save the other people's lives so it's, it's, it's not just a nice to have, it's mission critical. >> It is mission critical, Walton, thank you so much, we're out of time, but thank you for joining Dave and me talking about- >> Really enjoyed it. all the stuff going on with, with worldwide, the partnership with AWS, how you're helping really transform the public sector, we appreciate your time and your insights. >> Thank you so much, have a great conference. >> Thanks, you too. >> Okay, thanks. >> All right, from my buddy, Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE, the global leader in live tech coverage. 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(gentle music) >> Hello and welcome today's session theCUBE presentation of AWS Startup Showcase powered by theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, for your host of theCUBE. This is a session on breaking through with DevOps data analytics tools, cloud management tools with MontyCloud and cloud management migration, I'm your host. Thanks for joining me, I've got two great guests. Venkat Krishnamachari who's the co-founder and CEO of MontyCloud and Shruthi Sreenivasa Murthy, solution architect research computing group St. Louis University. Thanks for coming on to talk about transforming IT, day one day two operations. Venkat, great to see you. >> Great to see you again, John. So in this session, I really want to get into this cloud powerhouse theme you guys were talking about before on our previous Cube Conversations and what it means for customers, because there is a real market shift happening here. And I want to get your thoughts on what solution to the problem is basically, that you guys are targeting. >> Yeah, John, cloud migration is happening rapidly. Not an option. It is the current and the immediate future of many IT departments and any type of computing workloads. And applications and services these days are better served by cloud adoption. This rapid acceleration is where we are seeing a lot of challenges and we've been helping customers with our platform so they can go focus on their business. So happy to talk more about this. >> Yeah and Shruthi if you can just explain your relationship with these guys, because you're a cloud architect, you can try to put this together. MontyCloud is your customer, talk about your solution. >> Yeah I work at the St. Louis University as the solutions architect for the office of Vice President of Research. We can address St. Louis University as SLU, just to keep it easy. SLU is a 200-year-old university with more focus on research. And our goal at the Research Computing Group is to help researchers by providing the right infrastructure and computing capabilities that help them to advance their research. So here in SLU research portfolio, it's quite diverse, right? So we do research on vaccines, economics, geospatial intelligence, and many other really interesting areas, and you know, it involves really large data sets. So one of the research computing groups' ambitious plan is to move as many high-end computation applications from on-prem to the AWS. And I lead all the cloud initiatives for the St. Louis university. >> Yeah Venkat and I, we've been talking, many times on theCUBE, previous interviews about, you know, the rapid agility that's happening with serverless and functions, and, you know, microservices start to see massive acceleration of how fast cloud apps are being built. It's put a lot of pressure on companies to hang on and manage all this. And whether you're a security group was trying to lock down something, or it's just, it's so fast, the cloud development scene is really fun and you're implementing it at a large scale. What's it like these days from a development standpoint? You've got all this greatness in the cloud. What's the DevOps mindset right now? >> SLU is slowly evolving itself as the AWS Center of Excellence here in St. Louis. And most of the workflows that we are trying to implement on AWS and DevOps and, you know, CICD Pipelines. And basically we want it ready and updated for the researchers where they can use it and not have to wait on any of the resources. So it has a lot of importance. >> Research as code, it's like the internet, infrastructure as code is DevOps' ethos. Venkat, let's get into where this all leads to because you're seeing a culture shift in companies as they start to realize if they don't move fast, and the blockers that get in the way of the innovation, you really can't get your arms around this growth as an opportunity to operationalize all the new technology, could you talk about the transformation goals that are going on with your customer base. What's going on in the market? Can you explain and unpack the high level market around what you guys are doing? >> Sure thing, John. Let's bring up the slide one. So they have some content that Act-On tabs. John, every legal application, commercial application, even internal IT departments, they're all transforming fast. Speed has never been more important in the era we are today. For example, COVID research, you know, analyzing massive data sets to come up with some recommendations. They don't demand a lot from the IT departments so that researchers and developers can move fast. And I need departments that are not only moving current workloads to the cloud they're also ensuring the cloud is being consumed the right way. So researchers can focus on what they do best, what we win, learning and working closely with customers and gathering is that there are three steps or three major, you know, milestone that we like to achieve. I would start the outcome, right? That the important milestone IT departments are trying to get to is transforming such that they're directly tied to the key business objectives. Everything they do has to be connected to the business objective, which means the time and you know, budget and everything's aligned towards what they want to deliver. IT departments we talk with have one common goal. They want to be experts in cloud operations. They want to deliver cloud operations excellence so that researchers and developers can move fast. But they're almost always under the, you know, they're time poor, right? And there is budget gaps and that is talent and tooling gap. A lot of that is what's causing the, you know, challenges on their path to journey. And we have taken a methodical and deliberate position in helping them get there. >> Shruthi hows your reaction to that? Because, I mean, you want it faster, cheaper, better than before. You don't want to have all the operational management hassles. You mentioned that you guys want to do this turnkey. Is that the use case that you're going after? Just research kind of being researchers having the access at their fingertips, all these resources? What's the mindset there, what's your expectation? >> Well, one of the main expectations is to be able to deliver it to the researchers as demand and need and, you know, moving from a traditional on-prem HBC to cloud would definitely help because, you know, we are able to give the right resources to the researchers and able to deliver projects in a timely manner, and, you know, with some additional help from MontyCloud data platform, we are able to do it even better. >> Yeah I like the onboarding thing and to get an easy and you get value quickly, that's the cloud business model. Let's unpack the platform, let's go into the hood. Venkat let's, if you can take us through the, some of the moving parts under the platform, then as you guys have it's up at the high level, the market's obvious for everyone out there watching Cloud ops, speed, stablism. But let's go look at the platform. Let's unpack that, do you mind pick up on slide two and let's go look at the what's going on in the platform. >> Sure. Let's talk about what comes out of the platform, right? They are directly tied to what the customers would like to have, right? Customers would like to fast track their day one activities. Solution architects, such as Shruthi, their role is to try and help get out of the way of the researchers, but we ubiquitous around delegating cloud solutions, right? Our platform acts like a seasoned cloud architect. It's as if you've instantly turned on a cloud solution architect that should, they can bring online and say, Hey, I want help here to go faster. Our lab then has capabilities that help customers provision a set of governance contracts, drive consumption in the right way. One of the key things about driving consumption the right way is to ensure that we prevent a security cost or compliance issues from happening in the first place, which means you're shifting a lot of the operational burden to left and make sure that when provisioning happens, you have a guard rails in place, we help with that, the platform solves a problem without writing code. And an important takeaway here, John is that a was built for architects and administrators who want to move fast without having to write a ton of code. And it is also a platform that they can bring online, autonomous bots that can solve problems. For example, when it comes to post provisioning, everybody is in the business of ensuring security because it's a shared model. Everybody has to keep an eye on compliance, that is also a shared responsibility, so is cost optimization. So we thought wouldn't it be awesome to have architects such as Shruthi turn on a compliance bot on the platform that gives them the peace of mind that somebody else and an autonomous bot is watching our 24 by 7 and make sure that these day two operations don't throw curve balls at them, right? That's important for agility. So platform solves that problem with an automation approach. Going forward on an ongoing basis, right, the operation burden is what gets IT departments. We've seen that happen repeatedly. Like IT department, you know, you know this, John, maybe you have some thoughts on this. You know, you know, if you have some comments on how IT can face this, then maybe that's better to hear from you. >> No, well first I want to unpack that platform because I think one of the advantages I see here and that people are talking about in the industry is not only is the technology's collision colliding between the security postures and rapid cloud development, because DevOps and cloud, folks, are moving super fast. They want things done at the point of coding and CICB pipeline, as well as any kind of changes, they want it fast, not weeks. They don't want to have someone blocking it like a security team, so automation with the compliance is beautiful because now the security teams can provide policies. Those policies can then go right into your platform. And then everyone's got the rules of the road and then anything that comes up gets managed through the policy. So I think this is a big trend that nobody's talking about because this allows the cloud to go faster. What's your reaction to that? Do you agree? >> No, precisely right. I'll let Shurthi jump on that, yeah. >> Yeah, you know, I just wanted to bring up one of the case studies that we read on cloud and use their compliance bot. So REDCap, the Research Electronic Data Capture also known as REDCap is a web application. It's a HIPAA web application. And while the flagship projects for the research group at SLU. REDCap was running on traditional on-prem infrastructure, so maintaining the servers and updating the application to its latest version was definitely a challenge. And also granting access to the researchers had long lead times because of the rules and security protocols in place. So we wanted to be able to build a secure and reliable enrollment on the cloud where we could just provision on demand and in turn ease the job of updating the application to its latest version without disturbing the production environment. Because this is a really important application, most of the doctors and researchers at St. Louis University and the School of Medicine and St. Louis University Hospital users. So given this challenge, we wanted to bring in MontyCloud's cloud ops and, you know, security expertise to simplify the provisioning. And that's when we implemented this compliance bot. Once it is implemented, it's pretty easy to understand, you know, what is compliant, what is noncompliant with the HIPAA standards and where it needs an remediation efforts and what we need to do. And again, that can also be automated. It's nice and simple, and you don't need a lot of cloud expertise to go through the compliance bot and come up with your remediation plan. >> What's the change in the outcome in terms of the speed turnaround time, the before and after? So before you're dealing with obviously provisioning stuff and lead time, but just a compliance closed loop, just to ask a question, do we have, you know, just, I mean, there's a lot of manual and also some, maybe some workflows in there, but not as not as cool as an instant bot that solve yes or no decision. And after MontyCloud, what are some of the times, can you share any data there just doing an order of magnitude. >> Yeah, definitely. So the provisioning was never simpler, I mean, we are able to provision with just one or two clicks, and then we have a better governance guardrail, like Venkat says, and I think, you know, to give you a specific data, it, the compliance bot does about more than 160 checks and it's all automated, so when it comes to security, definitely we have been able to save a lot of effort on that. And I can tell you that our researchers are able to be 40% more productive with the infrastructure. And our research computing group is able to kind of save the time and, you know, the security measures and the remediation efforts, because we get customized alerts and notifications and you just need to go in and, you know. >> So people are happier, right? People are getting along at the office or virtually, you know, no one is yelling at each other on Slack, hey, where's? Cause that's really the harmony here then, okay. This is like a, I'm joking aside. This is a real cultural issue between speed of innovation and the, what could be viewed as a block, or just the time that say security teams or other teams might want to get back to you, make sure things are compliant. So that could slow things down, that tension is real and there's some disconnects within companies. >> Yeah John, that's spot on, and that means we have to do a better job, not only solving the traditional problems and make them simple, but for the modern work culture of integrations. You know, it's not uncommon like you cut out for researchers and architects to talk in a Slack channel often. You say, Hey, I need this resource, or I want to reconfigure this. How do we make that collaboration better? How do you make the platform intelligent so that the platform can take off some of the burden off of people so that the platform can monitor, react, notify in a Slack channel, or if you should, the administrator say, Hey, next time, this happens automatically go create a ticket for me. If it happens next time in this environment automatically go run a playbook, that remediates it. That gives a lot of time back that puts a peace of mind and the process that an operating model that you have inherited and you're trying to deliver excellence and has more help, particularly because it is very dynamic footprint. >> Yeah, I think this whole guard rail thing is a really big deal, I think it's like a feature, but it's a super important outcome because if you can have policies that map into these bots that can check rules really fast, then developers will have the freedom to drive as fast as they want, and literally go hard and then shift left and do the coding and do all their stuff on the hygiene side from the day, one on security is really a big deal. Can we go back to this slide again for the other project? There's another project on that slide. You talked about RED, was it REDCap, was that one? >> Yeah. Yeah, so REDCap, what's the other project. >> So SCAER, the Sinfield Center for Applied Economic Research at SLU is also known as SCAER. They're pretty data intensive, and they're into some really sophisticated research. The Center gets daily dumps of sensitive geo data sensitive de-identified geo data from various sources, and it's a terabyte so every day, becomes petabytes. So you know, we don't get the data in workable formats for the researchers to analyze. So the first process is to convert this data into a workable format and keep an analysis ready and doing this at a large scale has many challenges. So we had to make this data available to a group of users too, and some external collaborators with ads, you know, more challenges again, because we also have to do this without compromising on the security. So to handle these large size data, we had to deploy compute heavy instances, such as, you know, R5, 12xLarge, multiple 12xLarge instances, and optimizing the cost and the resources deployed on the cloud again was a huge challenge. So that's when we had to take MontyCloud help in automating the whole process of ingesting the data into the infrastructure and then converting them into a workable format. And this was all automated. And after automating most of the efforts, we were able to bring down the data processing time from two weeks or more to three days, which really helped the researchers. So MontyCloud's data platform also helped us with automating the risk, you know, the resource optimization process and that in turn helped bring the costs down, so it's been pretty helpful then. >> That's impressive weeks to days, I mean, this is the theme Venkat speed, speed, speed, hybrid, hybrid. A lot of stuff happening. I mean, this is the new normal, this is going to make companies more productive if they can get the apps built faster. What do you see as the CEO and founder of the company you're out there, you know, you're forging new ground with this great product. What do you see as the blockers from customers? Is it cultural, is it lack of awareness? Why aren't people jumping all over this? >> Only people aren't, right. They go at it in so many different ways that, you know, ultimately be the one person IT team or massively well-funded IT team. Everybody wants to Excel at what they're delivering in cloud operations, the path to that as what, the challenging part, right? What are you seeing as customers are trying to build their own operating model and they're writing custom code, then that's a lot of need for provisioning, governance, security, compliance, and monitoring. So they start integrating point tools, then suddenly IT department is now having a, what they call a tax, right? They have to maintain the technical debt while cloud service moving fast. It's not uncommon for one of the developers or one of the projects to suddenly consume a brand new resource. And as you know, AWS throws up a lot more services every month, right? So suddenly you're not keeping up with that service. So what we've been able to look at this from a point of view of how do we get customers to focus on what they want to do and automate things that we can help them with? >> Let me, let me rephrase the question if you don't mind. Cause I I didn't want to give the impression that you guys aren't, you guys have a great solution, but I think when I see enterprises, you know, they're transforming, right? So it's not so much the cloud innovators, like you guys, it's really that it's like the mainstream enterprise, so I have to ask you from a customer standpoint, what's some of the cultural things are technical reasons why they're not going faster? Cause everyone's, maybe it's the pandemic's forcing projects to be double down on, or some are going to be cut, this common theme of making things available faster, cheaper, stronger, more secure is what cloud does. What are some of the enterprise challenges that they have? >> Yeah, you know, it might be money for right, there's some cultural challenges like Andy Jassy or sometimes it's leadership, right? You want top down leadership that takes a deterministic step towards transformation, then adequately funding the team with the right skills and the tools, a lot of that plays into it. And there's inertia typically in an existing process. And when you go to cloud, you can do 10X better, people see that it doesn't always percolate down to how you get there. So those challenges are compounded and digital transformation leaders have to, you know, make that deliberate back there, be more KPI-driven. One of the things we are seeing in companies that do well is that the leadership decides that here are our top business objectives and KPIs. Now if we want the software and the services and the cloud division to support those objectives when they take that approach, transformation happens. But that is a lot more easier said than done. >> Well you're making it really easy with your solution. And we've done multiple interviews. I've got to say you're really onto something really with this provisioning and the compliance bots. That's really strong, that the only goes stronger from there, with the trends with security being built in. Shruthi, got to ask you since you're the customer, what's it like working with MontyCloud? It sounds so awesome, you're customer, you're using it. What's your review, what's your- What's your, what's your take on them? >> Yeah they are doing a pretty good job in helping us automate most of our workflows. And when it comes to keeping a tab on the resources, the utilization of the resources, so we can keep a tab on the cost in turn, you know, their compliance bots, their cost optimization tab. It's pretty helpful. >> Yeah well you're knocking projects down from three weeks to days, looking good, I mean, looking real strong. Venkat this is the track record you want to see with successful projects. Take a minute to explain what else is going on with MontyCloud. Other use cases that you see that are really primed for MontyCloud's platform. >> Yeah, John, quick minute there. Autonomous cloud operations is the goal. It's never done, right? It there's always some work that you hands-on do. But if you set a goal such that customers need to have a solution that automates most of the routine operations, then they can focus on the business. So we are going to relentlessly focused on the fact that autonomous operations will have the digital transformation happen faster, and we can create a lot more value for customers if they deliver to their KPIs and objectives. So our investments in the platform are going more towards that. Today we already have a fully automated compliance bot, a security bot, a cost optimization recommendation engine, a provisioning and governance engine, where we're going is we are enhancing all of this and providing customers lot more fluidity in how they can use our platform Click to perform your routine operations, Click to set up rules based automatic escalation or remediation. Cut down the number of hops a particular process will take and foster collaboration. All of this is what our platform is going and enhancing more and more. We intend to learn more from our customers and deliver better for them as we move forward. >> That's a good business model, make things easier, reduce the steps it takes to do something, and save money. And you're doing all those things with the cloud and awesome stuff. It's really great to hear your success stories and the work you're doing over there. Great to see resources getting and doing their job faster. And it's good and tons of data. You've got petabytes of that's coming in. It's it's pretty impressive, thanks for sharing your story. >> Sounds good, and you know, one quick call out is customers can go to MontyCloud.com today. Within 10 minutes, they can get an account. They get a very actionable and valuable recommendations on where they can save costs, what is the security compliance issues they can fix. There's a ton of out-of-the-box reports. One click to find out whether you are having some data that is not encrypted, or if any of your servers are open to the world. A lot of value that customers can get in under 10 minutes. And we believe in that model, give the value to customers. They know what to do with that, right? So customers can go sign up for a free trial at MontyCloud.com today and get the value. >> Congratulations on your success and great innovation. A startup showcase here with theCUBE coverage of AWS Startup Showcase breakthrough in DevOps, Data Analytics and Cloud Management with MontyCloud. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (gentle music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto Studios on this kind of continuing leadership series that we've put together. Reaching out to the community for tips and tricks on kind of getting through what is, this kind of ongoing COVID crisis and situation as it continues to go weeks and weeks and weeks. And I'm really excited to have one of my favorite members of our community, is Nick Mehta, the CEO of Gainsight. Had the real pleasure of interviewing him a couple times and had to get him on. So Nick, thanks for taking some time out of your very busy day to join us. >> Jeff, honored to be here, thank you. >> Pleasure, so let's just jump into it. One of the reasons I wanted to get you on, is that Gainsight has been a distributed company from the beginning, and so I think the COVID, suddenly everyone got this work from home order, there was no prep, there was no planning, it's like this light switch digital transformation moment. So love to hear from someone who's been doing it for awhile. What are some of the lessons? How should people think about running a distributed company? >> Yeah, it's really interesting, Jeff, 'cause we are just by happenstance, from the beginning, distributed where we have, our first two offices were St. Louis and Hyderabad, India. So two places you cannot get there through one flight. So, you have to figure out how to collaborate asynchronously and then over time, we have offices in the Bay Area. We have tons of people that work from home. And so we try to tell people we don't have a headquarters. The headquarters is wherever you are, wherever you live and wherever you want to work. And so we've always been super flexible about come in to the office if you want, don't come in, et cetera. So different than some companies in that respect. And because of that, pre-COVID, we always a very heavy video culture, lots of video conferencing. Even if some people were in an office, there's always somebody else dialing in. One benefit we got from that is you never had to miss your kids' stuff or your family things. I would go to my daughter's performance in the middle of the day and know I can just dial into a call on the way there. And so we always had that. But what's amazing is now we're all on a level playing field, there's nobody in our office. And I got to say, this is, in some ways, even better 'cause I feel like when you're the person dialed in, and a lot of people are in a room, you probably had that experience, and it feels like you're kind of not on the same playing field, right? Hard to hear the jokes or the comments and you might not feel like you're totally in crowd, so to speak, right? But now everyone's just at their computer, sitting there in a chair all day doing these Zooms and it does feel like it's equalizing a little bit. And what it's caused us to do is say, hey, what are ways we can all recreate that community from home? So as an example, every 7:45 a.m. every day, we have a Zoom call that's just pure joy and fun. Trivia, pets, kids. The employees' kids announce people's birthdays and the weather. And so these ways we've been able to integrate our home and our work that we never could before, it's really powerful. It's a tough situation overall, and we feel for all the people affected. But even in tough situations, there are silver linings, and we're finding 'em. >> Yeah, it's funny, we just had Darren Murph on the other day. I don't know if you know Darren. He is the head of Remote Work at GitLab, and he-- >> Oh, yeah. >> And he talked about kind of the social norms. And one of the instances that he brought up was, back in the day when you had some people in the office, some people joining via remote, that it is this kind of disharmony because they're very different situations. So one of his suggestions was have everybody join via their laptop, even if they're sitting at their desk, right? So, as you said, you get kind of this level playing field. And the other thing which dovetails off what you just said is he always wanted executives to have a forcing function to work from home for an extended period of time, so they got to understand what it's all about. And it's not only looking through a little laptop or this or that, but it's also the distractions of the kids and the dogs and whatever else is happening around the house. So it is wild how this forcing function has really driven it. And his kind of takeaway is, as we, like say, move from can we get it into cloud to cloud first? And does it work on mobile to mobile first? >> Now it's really-- >> Yeah. >> It's really remote first. And if you-- >> Remote first. >> A remote first attitude about it and kind of turn it on it's head, it's why shouldn't it be remote versus can it be remote? It really changes the conversation and the dynamic of the whole situation. >> I love that. And just, GitLab, by the way, has been a true inspiration 'cause they are the most remote, remote company. And they share so much, I love what you said. As just two examples of reacting to what you said, pre-COVID, we always wanted to keep a level playing field. So we actually moved our all-hands meetings to be instead of being broadcast from one room, and you're kind of seeing this small screen with all these people, we all just were at computers presenting. And so everyone's on a level playing field. So I thought what GitLab said is great. And then the other point, I think post-COVID we have learned is the kids and the dogs aren't distractions, they're part of our life. And so embracing those and saying, hey, I see that kid in the background, bring them onto the screen. Even during work meetings, even customer meetings, you know? And I'm seeing, I'm on a customer meeting and the customer's bringing their kids onto the screen and it's kind of breaking this artificial wall between who we are at home and who we are at work 'cause we're human beings all throughout. At Gainsight, we talk about a human first approach to business and we've never been more human as a world than we are right now. >> Love it, love it. So another, get your thoughts on, is this whole idea of measurement and productivity at home. And it's really, I have to say, disturbing to see some of the new product announcements that are coming out in terms of people basically snoopin' on people. Whether it's trackin' how many hours of Zoom calls they're on, or how often are they in the VPN, or having their camera flip on every so many minutes or something. We had Marten Mickos on, who's now the CEO of HackerOne. He was CEO at MySQL years ago before it went to Sun and he had the great line, he said, it's so easy to fake it at the office, but when you're at home and you're only output is your deliverable, it makes it a lot easier. So I wonder if you can share some of your thoughts in terms of kind of managing output, setting expectations, to get people to get their work done. And then, as you see some of these new tools for people that are just entering this thing, it's just not right (chuckles). >> Yeah, I agree with you and Marten. I'm a huge fan of Marten, as well, I totally agree with both of it. And I think there's an older approach to work, which is more like a factory. It's like you got to see how many widgets you're processing and you got to micromanage and you got to monitoring and inspecting. Look, I don't run a factory, so maybe there are places where that model makes sense. So I'm not going to speak for every leader, but I could say if you're in a world where your job is information, services, software, where the value is the people and their knowledge, managing them that way is a losing battle. I go back to, some folks probably know, this famous TED Talk by Dan Pink on basically what motivates people. And in these knowledge worker jobs, it's autonomy, mastery and purpose. So autonomy, we have the freedom to do what we want. Mastery, we feel like we're getting better at jobs. And purpose, which is I have a why behind what I do. And I think, take that time you spend on your micromanagement and your Zoom, analyzing the Zoom sessions, and spend it on inspiring your team, on the purpose. Spend it on enabling your team in terms of mastery. Spend it on taking away barriers so they have more autonomy. I think you'll get way more out of your team. >> Yeah, I agree. I think it's, as Darren said, again, he's like, well, would you trust your people if you're on the fourth floor and they're on the sixth? So just-- >> Yeah, exactly. >> If you don't trust your people, you got to bigger issue than worrying about how many hours they're on Zoom, which is not the most productive use of time. >> People waste so much time in the office, and getting to the office. And by the way, I'm not saying that it's wrong, it's fine too. But it's not like the office is just unfettered productivity all the time, that's a total myth. >> Yes, so let's shift gears a little bit and talk about events. So, obviously, the CUBE's in the event business. We've had to flip completely 'cause all the events are, well, they're all going digital for sure, and/or postponing it or canceling. So we've had to flip and do all dial-ins and there's a whole lot of stuff about asynchronous. But for you, I think it's interesting because as a distributed company, you had Gainsight Pulse as that moment to bring people together physically. You're in the same boat as everybody else, physical is not an option this year. So how are you approaching Gainsight Pulse, both because it's a switch from what you've done in the past, but you at least had the benefit of being in a distributed world? So you probably have a lot of advantages over people that have never done this before. >> Yeah, that's a really interesting, insightful observation. So just for a context, Pulse is an event we do every year to bring together the customer success community. 'Cause, as you observed, there is value in coming together. And so this is not just for our employees, this is for all the customer success people, and actually increasingly product management people out there, coming together around this common goal of driving success for your customers. And it started in 2013 with 300 people, and last year, we had 5,000 people at our event in San Francisco. We had similar events in London and Sydney. And so it's a big deal. And there's a lot of value to coming together physically. But obviously, that's not possible now, nor is it advisable. And we said, okay, how do we convert this and not lose what's special about Pulse? And leverage, like you said, Jeff, the fact that we're good at distributed stuff in general. And so we created what we call Pulse Everywhere. We didn't want to call it Pulse Virtual or something like that, Pulse Webinar, because we didn't want to set the bar as just like, oh, my virtual event, my webinar. This is something different. And we called it Everywhere, 'cause it's Pulse wherever you are. And we joke, it's in your house, it's in your backyard, it's on the peloton, it's walking the dog. You could be wherever you are and join Pulse this year, May 13th and 14th. And what's amazing is last year we had 5,000 people in person, this year we already have 13,000 people registered as of the end of April. And so we'll probably have more than three times the number of people at Pulse Everywhere. And we're really bringing that physical event concept into the virtual, literally with, instead of a puppy pit, where you're in a physical event, you'll bring puppies often, we have a puppy cam where you can see the puppies. We're not giving up on all of our silly music videos and jokes and we actually ship cameras and high-end equipment to all the speakers' houses. So they're going to have a very nice digital experience, our attendees are. It's not going to be like watching a video conference call. It's going to be like watching a TV show, one much like what you try to do here, right? And so we have this amazing experience for all of our presenters and then for the audience. And we're really trying to say how do we make it so it feels like you're in this really connected community? You just happen to not be able to shake people's hands. So it's coming up in a few weeks. It's a big experiment, but we're excited about it. >> There's so many conversations, and we jumped in right away, when this was all going down, what defines a digital event? And like you, I don't like the word virtual. There's nothing fake or virtual. To me, virtual's second to life. And kind of-- >> Yeah. >> Video game world. And like you, we did, it can't be a webinar, right? And so, if you really kind of get into the attributes of what is a webinar? It's generally a one-way communication for a significant portion of the allocated time and you kind of get your questions in and hopefully they take 'em, right? It's not a truly kind of engaged process. That said, as you said, to have the opportunity to separate creation, distribution and consumption of the content, now opens up all types of opportunity. And that's before you get into the benefits of the democratization, as you said, we're seeing that with a lot of the clients we work with. Their registration numbers are giant. >> Totally. >> Because-- >> You're not traveling to spend money, yeah. >> It'll be curious to see what the conversion is and I don't know we have a lot of data there. But, such a democratizing opportunity. And then, you have people that are trying to force, as Ben Nelson said on, you know Ben from Minerva, right? A car is not a mechanical horse, they're trying to force this new thing into this old paradigm and have people sit for, I saw one today, 24 hours, in front of their laptop. It's like a challenge. And it's like, no, no, no. Have your rally moment, have your fun stuff, have your kind of your one-to-many, but really there's so much opportunity for many-to-many. >> Many-to-many. >> Make all the content out there, yeah. >> We've created this concept in this Pulse Everywhere event called Tribes. And the idea is that when you go to an event, the goal is actually partially content, but a lot of times it's connection. And so in any given big event, there's lots of little communities out there and you want to meet people "like you". Might be people in a similar phase of their career, a similar type of company, in our case, it could be companies in certain industry. And so these Tribes in our kind of Pulse Everywhere experience, let people break out into their own tribes, and then kind of basically chat with each other throughout the event. And so it's not the exact same thing as having a drink with people, but at least a little bit more of that serendipitous conversation. >> Right, no, it's different and I think that's really the message, right? It's different, it's not the same. But there's a lot of stuff you can do that you can't do in the physical way, so quit focusing on what you can't do and embrace what you can. So that's great. And good luck on the event. Again, give the plug for it. >> Yeah, it's May 13th and 14th. If you go to gainsightpulse.com you can sign up, and it's basically anything related to driving better success for your customers, better retention, less churn, and better product experience. It's a great event to learn. >> Awesome, so I want to shift gears one more time and really talk about leadership. That's really kind of the focus of this series that we've been doing. And tough times call for great leadership. And it's really an opportunity for great leaders to show their stuff and let the rest of us learn. You have a really fantastic style. You know I'm a huge fan, we're social media buddies. But you're very personable and you're very, kind of human, I guess, is really the best word, in your communications. You've got ton of frequency, ton of variety. But really, most of it has kind of this human thread. I wonder if you can share kind of your philosophy behind social, 'cause I think a lot of leaders are afraid of it. I think they're afraid that there is reward for saying something stupid is not worth the benefit of saying okay things. And I think also a lot of leaders are afraid of showing some frailty, showing some emotion. Maybe you're a little bit scared, maybe we don't have all the answers. And yet you've really, you're not afraid at all. And I think it's really shines in the leadership activities and behaviors and things you do day in and day out. So how do you think about it? What's your strategy? >> Yeah, it's really interesting you ask, Jeff, because I'm in a group of CEOs that get together on a regular basis, and I'm going to be leading a session on social media for CEOs. And honestly, when I was putting it together, I was like, it's 2020, does that still need to exist? But somehow, there is this barrier. And I'll talk more about it, but I think the barrier isn't just about social media, it's just about how a CEO wants to present herself or himself into the world. And I think, to me, the three things to ask yourself are, first of all, why? Why do you want to be on social media? Why do you want to communicate to the outside? You should have a why. Hopefully you enjoy it, but also you're connecting from a business perspective with your customers. And for us, it's been a huge benefit to really be able to connect with our customers. And then, who are you targeting? So, I actually think an important thing to think about is it's okay to have a micro-audience. I don't have millions of Twitter followers like Lady Gaga, but within the world of SaaS and customer success and retention, I probably have a decent number. And that means I can really connect with my own specific audience. And then, what. So, the what is really interesting 'cause I think there's a lot of non-obvious things about, it's not just about your business. So I can tweet about customer success or retention and I do, but also the, what, about you as an individual, what's happening in your family? What's happening in the broader industry, in my case of SaaS? What's happening in the world of leading through COVID-19? All the questions you've asked, Jeff, are in this lens. And then that gets you to the final which is the, how. And I think the, how, is the most important. It's basically whether you can embrace the idea of being vulnerable. There's a famous TED Talk by Brene Brown. She talks about vulnerability is the greatest superpower for leaders. I think the reason a lot of people have a hard time on social media, is they have a hard time really being vulnerable. And just saying, look, I'm just a human being just like all of you. I'm a privileged human being. I have a lot of things that luckily kind of came my way, but I'm just a human being. I get scared, I get anxious, I get lonely, all those things. Just like all of you, you know. And really being able to take off your armor of, oh, I'm a CEO. And then when you do that, you are more human. And it's like, this goes back to this concept of human first business. There's no work persona and home persona, there's just you. And I think it's surprising when you start doing it, and I started maybe seven, eight, nine years ago, it's like, wow, the world wants more human leaders. They want you to just be yourself, to talk about your challenges. I had the kids, when we got to 13,000 registrations for Pulse Everywhere, they pied me in the face. And the world wants to see CEOs being pied in the face. Probably that one, for sure, that's a guaranteed crowd pleaser. CEOs being pied in the face. But they want to see what you're into outside of work and the pop culture you're into. And they want to see the silly things that you're doing. They want you to be human. And so I think if you're willing to be vulnerable, which takes some bravery, it can really, really pay off for your business, but I think also for you as a person. >> Yeah, yeah. I think it's so insightful. And I think people are afraid of it for the wrong reasons, 'cause it is actually going to help people, it's going to help your own employees, as well, get to know you better. >> Totally, they love it. >> And you touched on another concept that I think is so important that I think a lot of people miss as we go from kind of the old broadcast world to more narrow casting, which is touching your audience and developing your relationship with your audience. So we have a concept here at theCUBE that one is greater than 1% of 100. Why go with the old broadcast model and just spray and you hope you have these really ridiculously low conversion rates to get to that person that you're trying to get to, versus just identifying that person and reaching out directly to those people, and having a direct engagement and a relative conversation within the people that care. And it's not everybody, but, as you said, within the population that cares about it it's meaningful and they get some value out of it. So it's a really kind of different strategy. So-- >> I love that. >> You're always get a lot of stuff out, but you are super prolific. So you got a bunch of projects that are just hitting today. So as we're getting ready to sit down, I see you just have a book came out. So tell us a little bit about the book that just came out. >> Sure, yeah, it's funny. I need to get my physical copy too at my home. I've got so a few, just for context. Five years ago, we released this first book on "Customer Success" which you can kind of see here. It's surprising really, really popular in this world of SaaS and customer success and it ties, Jeff, to what you just said which is, you don't need to be the book that everyone in the world reads, you need to be the book that everyone in your world reads. And so this book turned out to be that. Thousands of company management teams and CEOs in software and SaaS read it. And so, originally when this came out, it was just kind of an introduction to what we call customer success. Basically, how do you retain your customers for the long-term? How do you get them more value? And how do you get them to use more of what they've bought and eventually spend more money with you? And that's a mega-trend that's happening. We decided that we needed an update. So this second book is called "Customer Success Economy." It just came out, literally today. And it's available on Amazon. And it's about the idea that customer success started in tech companies, but it's now gone into many, many industries, like healthcare, manufacturing, services. And it started with a specific team called the customer success management team. But now it's affecting how companies build products, how they sell, how they market. So it's sort of this book is kind of a handbook for management teams on how to apply customer success to your whole business and we call it "Customer Success Economy" 'cause we do think the future of the economy isn't about marketing and selling transactional products, but it's about making sure what your customers are buying is actually delivering value for them, right? That's better for the world, but it's also just necessary 'cause your customers have the power now. You and I have the power to decide how to transport ourselves, whether it's buying a car or rideshare, in the old world when we could leave our house. And we have the power to decide how we're going to stay in a city, whether it's a hotel or Airbnb or whatever. And so customers have the power now, and if you're not driving success, you're not going to be able to keep those customers. And so "Customer Success Economy" is all about that. >> Yeah, and for people that aren't familiar with Gainsight, obviously, there's lots of resources that they can go. They should go to the show in a couple weeks, but also, I think, the interview that we did at PagerDuty, I think you really laid out kind of a great definition of what customer success is. And it's not CRM, it has nothing to do with CRM. CRM is tracking leads and tracking ops. It's not customer success. So, people can also check that. But I want to shift gears again a little bit because one, you also have your blog, MehtaPhysical, that came out. And you just came out again recently with a new post. I don't know when you, you must have a army of helper writers, but you talk about something that is really top of mind right now. And everyone that we get on theCUBE, especially big companies that have the benefit of a balance sheet with a few bucks in it, say we want to help our customers, we want to help our people be safe, obviously, that's first. But we also want to help our customers. But nobody ever really says what exactly does that mean? And it's pretty interesting. You lay out a bunch of things that are happening in the SaaS world, but I jumped on, I think it's number 10 of your list, which is how to think about helping your customers. And you give some real specific kind of guidance and guidelines and definitions, if you will, of how do you help our customers through these tough times. >> Yeah, so I'll summarize for the folks listening. One of the things we observed is, in this terrible tough times right now, your customers are in very different situations. And for simplicity, we thought about three categories. So the companies that we call category one, which are unfortunately, adversely affected by this terrible crisis, but also by the shutdown itself, and that's hotels, restaurants, airlines, and you can put other folks in that example. What do those customers need? Well, they probably need some financial relief. And you have to figure out what you're going to do there and that's a hard decision. And they also just need empathy. It's not easy and the stress level they have is massive. Then you've got, on the other extremes, a small number of your customers might be doing great despite this crisis or maybe even because of it, because they make video conferencing technology or remote work technology, or they make stuff for virtual or telemedicine. And those folks actually are likely to be super busy because they're just trying to keep up with the demand. So what they need from you is time and help. And then you got the people in between. Most companies, right, where there may be a mix of some things going well, some don't. And so what we recommended is think about your strategy, not just inside out, what you want, but outside in, what those clients need. And so as an example, you might think about in that first category, financial relief. The second category, the companies in the middle, they may need, they may not be willing to spend more money, but they may want to do more stuff. So maybe you unlock your product, make it available, so they can use everything in your suite for a while. And maybe in that third category, they're wiling to spend money, but they're just really busy. So maybe you offer services for them or things to help them as they scale. >> Yeah, so before I let you go, I just want to get your reaction to one more great leader. And as you can tell, I love great leaders and studying great leaders. Back when I was in business school we had Dave Pottruck, who at that time was the CEO of Schwab, come and speak and he's a phenomenal speaker and if you ever get a chance to see him speak. And at that point in time, Schwab had to reinvent their business with online trading and basically kill their call-in brokerage for online brokerage, and I think that they had a fixed price of 19.99, whatever it was. This was back in the late 90s. But he was a phenomenal speaker. And we finished and he had a small dinner with a group of people, and we just said, David, you are a phenomenal speaker, why, how, why're you so good? And he goes, you know, it's really pretty simple. As a CEO, I have one job. It's to communicate. And I have three constituencies. I kind of have the street and the market, I have my internal people, and then I have my customers and my ecosystem. And so he said, I, and he's a wrestler, he said, you know I treated it like wrestling. I hired a coach, I practiced my moves, I did it over and over, and I embraced it as a skill and it just showed so brightly. And it's such a contrast to people that get wrapped around the axle with their ego, or whatever. And I think you're such a shiny example of someone who over communicates, arguably, in terms of getting the message out, getting people on board, and letting people know what you're all about, what the priorities are, and where you're going. And it's such a sheer, or such a bright contrast to the people that don't do that that I think is so refreshing. And you do it in a fun and novel and in your own personal way. >> That's awesome to hear that story. He's a inspirational leader, and I've studied him, for sure. But I hadn't heard this specific story, and I totally agree with you. Communication is not something you're born with. Honestly, you might know this, Jeff, or not, as a kid, I was super lonely. I didn't really have any friends and I was one of those kids who just didn't fit in. So I was not the one they would pick to be on stage in front of thousands of people or anything else. But you just do it over and over again and you try to get better and you find, I think a big thing is finding your own voice, your own style. I'm not a super formal style, I try to be very human and authentic. And so finding your style that works for you, I agree, it's completely learnable. >> Yeah, well, Nick, thank you. Thanks for taking a few minutes. I'm sure you're super, super busy getting ready for the show in a couple weeks. But it's always great to catch up and really appreciate you taking some time to share your thoughts and insights with us. >> Thank you, Jeff, it's an honor. >> All right, he's Nick Mehta, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (soft music)

I'd say for me it's called it's really the power of the of the better together you know to me it's nobody's great apart it takes really an ecosystem of players to kind of work together for the customer benefit and the one that we've demonstrated the VMware with NetApp plus VMware has been a powerful one for well well over 17 years and the person they're putting in terms of the joint customers that have a ton of loyalty to both of us and they want us just to work it out so you know whether you're whether your allegiance on one side of the kubernetes community's battle or another or you're on one side of anyone's you know storage choice or another and I think customers want NetApp and VMware to work this out and in como solutions and we've done that and now what we for the second activist to come out will start that tomorrow I mean to me it starts from what the customer would like to do right and what what we're seeing from customers is it's increasingly a multi cloud world right that expands spans private cloud public cloud and Ed you're smiling when I yeah now there's an opportunity yeah but it's a chance for customers right and so if you look at how VMware is trying to help their meso sort of square the circle I think the first piece is this idea of consistent operations right then we have these management tools that you can use to consistently operate those environments whether they're based on a VMware based infrastructure or whether they're based on a native cloud infrastructure right so if you look at our cloud health platform for example it's a great example where that service can help you under get visibility to your cloud spend across different cloud platforms also be store based platforms and can help you reduce that spend over time so that's sort of what we refer to as consistent operations right which can span any any cloud you know my team is responsible for is more in that consistent infrastructure space and that's really all about how do we deliver consistent compute network and storage service that spans on from multiple public clouds an edge so that's really where we're bringing that same VMware cloud foundation stacked all those different environments you know the networking folks and networking was always relegated to being the underlay or the plumbing now what's becoming important is that the application are making their intent aware to the network and the intent is becoming aware as the intern becomes aware we networking people know what to do in the Estevan layer which then shields all the intricacies of what needs to get done in the underlay so to put it in very simple terms the container is what really drives the need and what we're doing is we're building the outcome to satisfy that need now containers are critical because as Pat was saying you know all of the new digital applications are going to be built with containers in mind so the reason we call it client to cloud to containers because the containers can literally be anywhere you know we're talking about them in the private cloud and in the public cloud they could be right next to where the client is because of the edge cloud they could be in the telco network which is the telco cloud so between these four clouds you literally have a network of these containers and the underlying infrastructure that we are doing is to provide that Estevan layer that will get the containers to talk to one another as well as to talk to the clients that are getting access to those application yeah I mean more than McAfee I think you know you you it's sort of you think of the and the the analog analog to cloud Security's data center security where you think of this sort of Amazon Cloud living in an Amazon datacenter and you know how can we protect that you know the data and the egress access into those cloud and you know same technology sort of apply but to your point that you sort of just touched upon its that cloud is not living in isolation right first of all that Amazon Cloud is connected to a whole bunch of you know applications that are still sitting in a data center right so they may not they're potentially not moving the Oracle database today since they're moving some workloads to the cloud right that's what most most companies are hey guess what there's all these endpoints that are connecting they're connecting both the data center and the cloud you're not gonna proxy to the cloud to get to the data center so there is a gateways so to me cloud security can't be an isolated you know sort of technology that companies have to sort of think about now is there is there opportunity to leverage the cloud to manage security better and get visibility in their security environments to do security analytics absolutely so I think to me that's where it's going because security I think has been proven is no longer you know sort of one thing single thing it's just you have to do multiple things every time I go talk to CIA source they tell me they got this technology that I said he made a minute you you have 20 did you cut down any yeah we've cut down a few but you know they just nervous about cutting down too much because if that one piece of software gets Paul so look I mean I think we again we're kind of really evolving our strategic aims you know historically we've looked at how do we really virtual eyes an entire data center right this concept of the software-defined data center really automating all that and driving great speed efficiency increases and now as we've been talking about we're in this world where you kind of STD sees everywhere right on pram and the cloud different public clouds and so how do you really manage across all those and these are the things we've been talking about so the cloud marketplace fits into that whole concept in the sense that now we can get people one place to go to get easy access to both software and solutions from our partners as well as open source solutions and these are things that come from the bitNami acquisition that we recently did so the idea here is that we cannot make it super simple for customers to become aware of the different solutions to draw those consistent operations that exists on top of our platform with our partners and then make it really easy for them to consume those as well I think we've really broaden and expanded our reach over the last ten years it used to be we're known primarily for our sports programming so now we have inclusive education and health programs we're being able to bring together people with and without intellectual disabilities through those mediums so we've divided resources to schools and education and they run Special Olympics programming during the school day so educators wanna have us because we're improving school clamp campuses reducing bullying enhancing social-emotional learning and so the work that we're doing is so so critical with that community then the air if health we have inclusive health so now we've got health and medical professionals that are now providing health screenings for our athletes so some of the the younger volunteers that we get that are there wanting to make a career in in the medical field they're exposed to our population right and so they learn more about their specific health needs so it's really about changing people's attitudes and so this community of supporters volunteers health Vettel's education were really our goal is to change people's attitudes fundamentally worldwide about people with intellectual disabilities and really kind of produce inclusive mindsets we call it really promote understanding and so now that the the road map that was shared in terms of what VMware looks to do to integrate containers into the ESXi platform itself right it's you know managing VMs and containers Nextiva that's perfect in terms of not having customers have to pick or choose between which platform and where you're gonna deploy something allow them to say you can deploy on whichever format you want it runs in the same ecosystem and management and then that trickles down to the again your storage layer so we do a lot of object storage within the container ecosystems today a lot of high-performance objects because you know the the the file sizes of instances or applications is much larger than you know a document file that URI might create online so there's a big need around performance in that space along with again management at scale the whole multi cloud hybrid cloud movement what's going on out at the enterprise your perspective on kind of where we are in that shift if you will or that transformation and and what's what's driving it you know what's what's creating all the bang you get that question a lot right people ask me what inning are we in question you know it's a regular you know I would say a couple years ago you know as people said I don't think that I think the national anthem is still being played kind of thing you know and I think the game has probably started you know but but I still were think for very early innings and you know I think I'd actually bring it up to even a higher level and talk about what's happening in terms of how companies are thinking about digital transformation and it would I what I think is happening is it's becoming a board level priority for companies they can't afford to ignore it you know digital is changing the Commun obey suspended of advantage in most industries around the globe and so they're investing in digital transformation and I think they're going to do that frankly independent of whatever macroeconomic climate we operate in and so and I think you know the big driving force probably you know in digital transformation today the cloud and so and what we're seeing is there's a you know it's a particular architecture of choice that's emerging for customers yep and I think you know you hit the nail on the head networking has changed it's no longer about speeds and feeds it's about availability and simplicity and so you know Dell and VMware I think are uniquely positioned to deliver a level of automation where this stuff just works right I don't need to go and configure these magic boxes individually I want to just write you know a line of code where my infrastructure is built into the CI CD pipeline and then when I deploy a workload it just works I don't need an army of people to go figure that out right and and I think that's the power of what we're working together to unleash so that was pretty dramatic moment of truth when we deployed atrium and we started the imaging process and it was finished and to be honest I thought that is broken but it actually was that fast so gave us a tremendous amount of I mean ability to deploy and manage and do the work during the workday instead of working after hours and what we doing for data protection before date really we use variety of different solutions backups just to tape and variety of services that actually backed up are they still do or know we've given that a lot up the floor of all the legacy stuff it got rid of that did you have to change your processes or what was that like Wow info we have to we have to get rid of a lot of process they were focused on backup focus on a time that it took to manage backup with atrium date reom didn't have the backup from the day one this is something that they designed I think a second year and that was very different to see the company that deals with storage creating such an innovative vision for developing old I mean developing a roadmap that was actually coming true with every iteration of the software deployment so the second tier that we provisioned was the snapshot and the snapshots that were incredibly fast that didn't take a lot of space that was you know give us ability to restore almost instantly gave us a huge amount of you know focus on not focusing and on storage anymore well since we're here at vmworld right you know be immoral has about 70 million work I think it's actually bigger than the public cloud I you correct me if I'm wrong right uh yeah I mean the I look I'm premise way bigger than the public cloud I have no question exactly and and and what's happening of course is faster sorry but the line is blurring between you know what's a public cloud what's a you know hybrid cloud multi-cloud edge and so look our opportunity is to really make all that go away for customers and allow them to choose and express our unique value add in whatever form the customer wants to use it so you've seen us align with all the public clouds you know you're seeing us take steps in the edge we're continuing to improve the on-premise systems you know with project dimension now it's the VMware cloud on Dell EMC that we're managing for you and it's on demand its consumption and it's consumed just like a public cloud I spend about 50 percent of my time talking to these customers so we learn a lot and here are the four big challenges they're facing first is the explosion of data data is just growing so fast Gartner estimates they'll be a hundred and seventy-five zettabytes of data in 2025 if you cram that into iphone so you take two point six trillion iPhones and go to the Sun and back right it's an enormous amount of data second they're worried about ransomware it's not a question of if you'll be attacked it's when you'll be attacked look at what's happening in Texas right now with the 22 municipalities dealing with that what you want in that case is a resilient infrastructure you want to be the ripples to restore from a really good backup copy of data third they want the hybrid multi cloud world just like Pat Gelson juror has been talking about that's what customers want but they want to be able to protect their data wherever it is make it highly available and get insights in their data wherever it's located and then finally they're dealing with this massive growth in government regulations around the world because of this concern about privacy I was in Australia a few weeks ago and one of our customers she was telling me that she deals with 27 different regulatory environments another customer was saying that California Privacy Act will be the death of him and he's based in st. Louis right so our strategy is focused on taking away the complexity and helping the largest companies in the world deal with these challenges and that's why we introduced the enterprise data services platform and that's why we're here at VMworld talking kubernetes the technology enabler I mean tcp/ip was that in the old networking days it enabled a lot of shifts in the industry you were far that way yeah kubernetes that disruptive enabler yeah I really see it as one of those key transition points in the industry and as I sort of joked if my name was Scott and we were 20 years ago I'd be banging the table calling it Java and Java defined enterprise software development for two decades by the way Scott's my neighbor he's down the hill so I looked down on mr. McNeely I always liked but you know the you know it changed how people did enterprise software development for the last two decades and kubernetes has that same kind of transformative effect but maybe even more important it's not just development but also operations and I think that's what we're uniquely bring together with project Pacific really being able to bridge those two worlds together so you know and if we deliver on this you know I think it is you know that X decade or two will be the center of innovation for us how we bridge those two roles together and really give developers what they need and make it operator friendly out-of-the-box across the history to the future this is pretty powerful yes so this conference is is I think a refreshing return to form so VMware is as you say this is an operators conference and VMware is for operators it's not for devs there was a period there where cloud was scary and and it was all this cloud native stuff and VMware tried to appeal to this new market and I guess tried to dress up and as something that it really wasn't and it didn't pull it off and we didn't it didn't feel right and now VMware has decided that well no actually this is what VMware is about and no one can be more VMware than VMware so it's returning to being its best self and I think against software they know software they know software so the the addition of putting project hands are in and having kubernetes in there and and it's it's to operate the software so it's it's going to be in there and apps will run on it and they want to have kubernetes baked into vSphere so that now yeah we'll have new app new apps and yeah there might be sass ups for the people who are consuming them but they've got to run somewhere and now we could run them on vmware whether it's on site at the edge could be in the cloud your vmware on AWS steve emotions [Music] you

>>LA Las Vegas. It's the cube covering AWS reinvent 2019 brought to you by Amazon web services and along with its ecosystem partners. >>Good morning from Las Vegas. Lisa Martin with Summa and Amanda, we are coming to you live from AWS reinvent 19. This is the QSA second full day of coverage and Stu and I are pleased to welcome one of our cube alum back to the program. We have Greg Hughes, the CEO of bear toss. Greg, welcome back. Good morning. >>Be here. Thank you. Yeah, >>this, this is 10, 10, 15 in the morning and this is already jam pack. Lots of buzz. Lots of, lots of news yesterday. I think that's kind of an understatement. Give us a little, a bit of an overview of their and AWS, what you guys got going on. >>It's, it's an amazing show, first of all. And uh, I was, the keynote yesterday was pretty incredible. Three hours long. I mean that, that stamina involved in a three hour keynote. I got to get hats off to Andy Jassy for doing that. Uh, one of the big announcements that was in that, uh, keynote was that outpost has been, is now generally available. And, uh, Amazon outpost is basically the Amazon web services that you can put within your data center. Okay. So we talk a lot about this hybrid cloud model on-prem in your data center and private cloud all the way to the public cloud. And so that is the outpost announcement and we're really excited to say that we are a partner with AWS on Amazon, uh, outpost and we have a designed and tested and validated solution on AWS outpost. So if you move your applications of customer moves, their applications on to outpost, they have the peace of mind knowing that their data is protected by Veritas. >>So we're really excited. Yeah. So, so Greg, everybody absolutely is very interested in outposts. Uh, I've just spent a couple of days in meetings trying to dig in. Uh, it is the building block, Amazon juicing for things like AWS, local zones, uh, AWS wavelength for 5g. One of the questions I really have for the ecosystem, cause I've seen a lot of announcement is this is yes it's the nitro chip and hardware and a subset of services that you would get from AWS. And from a management standpoint it looks like you've just put in a Z in your data center. But talk to us a little bit about what does it mean to actually integrate there. Cause Veritas has been an AWS partner for a number of years. I understand what it means to use Veritas in the public cloud. Walk us through some of the nuance and detail of what new we, well we have a very, very close partnership with AWS. >>Our engineers work very closely together and we did proceeding this announcement. And basically in this specific case, it means if you have an application or data on Alpos, it will be automatically backed up to the cloud, to a S3 through Veritas NetBackup. And so you can manage your outposts through Amazon, you're Veritas to state through our NetBackup console. And though things work seamlessly together. Yeah. So, so just one, when I looked at it, it's a, there, there's things like a, you know, ECS and EMR and RDS are in there. Yes. Three is not yet a service available on outpost, not available on outposts, but we can button connect it as three in the back. So that's what I'm trying to understand is where does my data live and how do I protect it without posts? Well you can, you can manage that through a essentially. So that's primarily the use case is for backing up to make sure your data is protected when it's on outpost. We see customers that want to experiment with outposts, they want to try cloud services. They have certain applications and certain workloads that are low latency and need low latency. And so they're going to run those in their data centers and those applications, those workloads can be protected through Veritas just like everything else is protected by Veritas. That's the idea. >>So for customers who have been with Veritas for a long time and they've got a cloud strategy that they're working on, walk us through maybe a, I don't want to use the word migration, but maybe an evolution. If they're saying, all right, there's workloads that we want to move to public cloud, what would that process be like for an existing customer? We spend >>a lot of time working with AWS on what that journey looks like and, uh, we developed a set of what we call well architected reviewed solutions that, that Amazon reviews and that we've invested in so that, uh, our customers can depend on this. These solutions working well together usually starts with backing up to the cloud. Okay. Instead of using secondary storage or tape backing up to the cloud. And so, uh, we have a customer put to furrow grope. It's a financial services firm that was able to leverage our appliances for on-prem rapid restore, but tear off the data to S three. So that's usually the start. Uh, the second step is using the cloud as a dr site. A lot of companies as you know, invest in data center capacity just for disaster recovery. It's not used all that often. And so that's an obvious thing. >>You can move to the cloud and have a data center on demand, so to speak. So we have a customer China Marine that is using our, our product Veritas resiliency platform to do that with AWS. And then finally it's moving your whole application stack to the cloud in migrating your data to the cloud. It still needs to be protected, right? Uh, it's still a customer's responsibility to protect that data in the cloud. And in that case, the Veritas products work really well in AWS. We can protect the workloads in the cloud. We have a environmental services firm, they, uh, that has moved their applications cloud still using Veritas for data protection. So that's really how we think about it. So Greg Veritas, what one of your strengths do you have? A very large install base and therefore I expect you to have a good visibility into what your customers are doing. >>Bring us on site a little bit when we talk about, you know, leveraging the cloud, it's agility and a modernizing my applications. We know, you know, changing my application stack is a longterm challenging thing to do. But do you have any kind of business outcomes, any proof points as to, you know, what your customers, you know, what do they get as they're uh, maturing their, their, their cloud journey. And evolution has a Veritas, so we work with, you know, our customers are 86% of the fortune 500. We work with the largest institutions on the planet the most. So I like to say the largest, most complicated, most highly regulated enterprises on the, on in the world, 10 of the top 10 financial services, 10 of the top 10 telco healthcare. Those are all our customers and they're all moving towards a hybrid world to leverage the cloud, but also have on prem data centers in a hybrid environment. >>And one of these they really want to leverage is that cheap and deep storage in the cloud. So, and we're seeing a very easy thing for our customers to do is to migrate from backing up to disk and tape for long term retention to backing up to the cloud, leveraging S3 glacier deep archive. Andy talked about it yesterday. It's lower than the price to tape our cus. Many of our customers still using tape for longterm retention. And it's just very simple step to data protection modernization, leveraging the cloud to replace though that secondary storage and tape with, with the cloud and the storage in the cloud. So for an organization that has thousands of endpoints, servers, virtual environments, SAS applications, can they manage all of that in the cloud through like a, a single bear toss dashboard? How do you allow that, like comprehensive data protection? >>That's our journey essentially. And you know, weight and, and our value proposition is that end to end data management. Uh, we, we kind of think of ourselves as the Switzerland of the storage and data protection world. We work with everything. Uh, we work with a 500 different workload types. We back up to 150 different, uh, storage targets, including many of the cloud service providers. So that's really our whole value proposition is that ability to give you that abstraction across all the complex storage silos you have. We can take care of availability, protection and insights. That's what we do. So a few years ago, uh, we, we saw a little bit of a bit flip when we talk about security and the cloud. It used to be, you know, for, for the early days of the cloud it was, I can't do cloud because I'm worried about the security. And now many thought security is an opportunity, uh, when I go to the cloud the last year or two, it's a very nuanced discussion. >>Uh, and the relationship between my data, my cloud providers, my information and data protection, uh, is something that we've been digging into a lot. Uh, at the 80 most reinforced show inaugural show this year. Uh, we had a lot of great conversations. CSOs, um, have a challenge. It's a board level discussion. Uh, what are you hearing from your customers and what's their tosses role? And a straight question. Uh, look, uh, security is a board level conversation and when I go talk, I spend about 30 to 50% of my time talking to customers and the cyber threat is real in particular ransomware. What are, what the enterprise is worried about is uh, that their data gets completely encrypted through a ransomware attack and they're dead in the water. You know, they can't ship product, they can't bill, they can't run payroll. And the challenge is that the malware is going to get in spearfishing works. >>When you get those emails that say click on this link, you know, in many cases people still click on the link and the bad stuff gets in. So what you need is you need a resilient infrastructure and at the foundation of that is to make sure you've got a protected copy of your data that you can depend on and roll back to that, you know, is good. And that's really driven a lot of our business in the last few years is making sure we have, we can help our customers have that resilient data. It's true, whether in the public cloud or on prem, same, same challenge, right? From a ransomware perspective to help reduce spread is data protection in the cloud and an enabler of mitigating the rest that ransomware provides in terms of data not traversing through a customer's network. If it's protected in the cloud, ransomware attack can occur too in your cloud or on prem. >>It really doesn't matter. It's a. They don't really care. The bad guys don't care. Uh, but what you need ultimately is your copy of your data that you can go back to and you can restore everything else you can. Uh, you know, you, you can create, but that data, that state of your business, that's really the crown jewels and if they've corrupted that, you know, you're in trouble. So related to the security governance of course, has been a big discussion. Uh, last year, uh, every single show I went to was talking about GDPR. This year we're all waiting for the California law to roll out and we expect more of this to happen. Uh, you know, what are the discussions you're having with your customers there? And, uh, what, what, what's the, the regulatory environment is really moving fast. A lot more regulations around data. I was taught, it's funny, I was talking to a customer in st Louis and they said the California data privacy act was going to be the death of them. >>Yeah. You don't think about that for a customer in st Louis, a big customer. Uh, I was talking to a customer in Australia and she said she has to deal with 27 different regulatory regimes. So how do you do that when the dirty secret is you don't know where all your data is, you don't know what's important, what's not. Uh, you know, most of our customers have very difficult time assessing that. So where Veritas comes in is we have some solutions that provide insight into that to allow you to understand where is your data, what can be deleted, what's really important, what's pie, what's protected, what's not protected. To really give you some insight in that across all the different silos that Andy was talking about. Yes. >>Showing them really where some of the vulnerabilities are that they might be completely blind to >>say the risks and vulnerabilities that they have that they don't know and that's now becoming a board level topic. So we're getting pulled in. I was actually in Europe a couple of weeks ago and one of our customers said, look, I need to present to the board they insights that Veritas is providing me on my infrastructure is safe so that they're aware, >>let's push them for you. Yesterday when everything kicked off and you're right, it was a marathon. A three hour keynote is very impressive. There's a lot of news packed in there. One of the biggest themes is transformation. It's a word that we talk about transformation, right? We talk about security, transformation, digital transformation, workforce transformation. It's used commonly, but yesterday was really sort of like this, this sort of reinvention of of AWS, but this transformation that Andy was saying, and it sounds like something that you're hearing that this has to come from senior, the senior level of really understanding transformation. Not just do we go to the cloud, how, when, what? But also ultimately it's about data and if you can't access the data, if you can't restore data quickly, if there is, whether it's a human error or some sort of catastrophic event, you can't get to what you need, the business suffers. Right. And there's going to be another competitor whose objects are close to the Napier in the mirror. Right. Who are ready to come in and take over that business. Give me a little bit of a, of a kind of an overview as we wrap up here about their tosses transformation as customers are having to pivot really quickly to use data as a competitive advantage. Yes. >>Well look, we think about, uh, you know, our, our role in digital transformation is in the data transformation part of that. Uh, you can't have digital transformation without transforming your data. Uh, we've talk a lot here about data has gravity. It can distance to stick where it is. We're trying to make that data mobile flexible, protected, available and visible. And that's really our role is in, in digital transformation to give you the freedom to use your data wherever you want to. >>That's what we do. One last question actually on the data has gravity. We talk about that a lot. Your last thoughts on Amazon and moving towards where that gravity is with post for an example, this is another example of I think yesterday and John furrier even uncovered this and his exclusive with Andy Jassy. It's AWS everywhere, which is just like Amazon. >>I can actually just to to build on that, uh, John furrier and I to Andy Jassy like three years ago said the next flywheel for Amazon is data. You stayed, absolutely. Data's come up over and over again. I think, you know, we're working very closely together with AWS to help make this journey easy for our customers. We're both very customer obsessed, you know, that came up a lot. We are customer obsessed as well. We're innovating step-by-step. We were the first launch launch partner with a glacier deep archive. So we attend to be at the forefront of allowing our customers to leverage AWS and know that they're protected by their AtoZ. >>Yeah, those demanding customers. Right. Well, Greg, thank you for joining Stu and me on the program sharing what's new with their toss and AWS and the transformation that you're both undergoing. We appreciate it. Take care of our student, man. I am Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube live from day two of our coverage of AWS reinvent 19 thanks for watching.

>> live from San Francisco celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage. It's the Cube covering Veum World 2019 brought to you by IBM wear and its ecosystem partners. >> Well, good afternoon. And welcome back to San Francisco. Where Mosconi north along with David Dante, John Wall's You're watching our coverage here. Live on the Cuba Veum world. 2019 days. I've been over on the other set. I know you've been busy on this side as well. Show going. All right for you >> so far. Yeah, A lot of action going on over here. We had a pact Hellsing on this morning, Michael Dell, with this VM wear hat, we get Sanjay Putin downtown later. >> Yeah, yeah. Good light up. And that lineup continues. Great. Use the CEO Veritas. >> Great to be here. Very John, >> actually, just outside the Veritas Meadow here. Sponsored the this area. This is the meadow set. That >> nice to be here? Yeah, I didn't know >> that. All right, just first off, just give me your your idea of the vibe here. What you are. You're feeling >> what? I think there's a tremendous amount of energy. It's been a lot of fun to be here Obviously VM was talking about this hybrid multi cloud world, and Veritas is 100% supportive of that vision. We work with all the major cloud service providers, you know, eight of us. Google. Microsoft is or we share thousands of customers with the M, where some of the biggest customers, the most complicated customers in the world, where we provide availability and protection and insights for those customers has always >> been the ethos of veritas. When you go back to the early days of Veritas, essentially, it was the storage management, you know, the no hardware agenda, the sort of independent storage company, but pure software. >> That sounds. You >> know, years ago there was no cloud, but there were different platforms, and so that that that that culture has really migrated now into this multi cloud work world. Your thoughts on that >> absolutely look, you know, I'll give an example of a customer that we worked with closely with VM wear on, and that is Renault. America's Renault is Ah, big joint venture. They've got a huge ASAP installation 8000 users 40 terabytes, Big Net backup customer. They also use their products in for a scale and V. R P for availability and D r. And they work with us because we are hardware agnostic. They looked at us against the other competitors, and we're hardware agnostic. And because of that where we came in its 60% lower TCO than those other providers. So we that hardware agnostic approach works really well. You were >> Just touch it on this great little bit when you said, You know whether Tiger, whether it's multi, whether it's private, whatever it is, you know we're here to provide solutions. The fact that this stuff is hard to figure out and really kind of boggle the mind a bit, it's very complex. Um, how much of an inhibitor is that? In terms of what you're hearing from clients and in terms of their progress and and their decision making >> well, let me explain where we sit. And we are the leader in enterprise data protection, availability and insights. We work with the largest, most complex, most high route, highly regulated and most demanding customers on the planet. 99 of the Fortune 100 are customers of Veritas. 10 of the top 10 tell coast 10 of the top 10 healthcare companies and 10 of the top 10 financial institutions. I spend about 50% of my time talking to these customers, so we learn a lot. And here the four big challenges they're facing first is the explosion of data. Data is just growing so fast, Gardner estimates will be 175 Zita bytes of data in 2025. If you cram that in, iPhones will take 2.6 trillion iPhones and go to the sun and back, right? It's an enormous amount of data. Second, they're worried about Ransomware. It's not a question off if you'll be attacked. It's when you'll be attacked. Look at what's happening in Texas right now with the 22 municipalities dealing with that. What you want in that case is a resilient infrastructure. You wanna be terrible to restore from a really good backup copy of data. Third, they want the hybrid multi cloud world, just like Pak Gil Singer has been talking about. That's what customers want, but they want to be able to protect their data wherever it is, make it highly available and get insights in the data wherever it's located. And then finally, they're dealing with this massive growth in government regulations around the world because of this concern about privacy. I was in Australia a few weeks ago and one of our customers she was telling me that she deals with 27 different regulatory environments. Another customer was saying the California Privacy Act will be the death of him. And he's based in St Louis, right? So our strategy is focused on taking away the complexity and helping the largest companies in the world deal with these challenges. And that's why we introduce the enterprise. Data Service is platform, and that's why we're here. VM world Talking >> about Greg. Let's unpack some of those, Asai said. Veritas kind of created a market way back when and now you see come full circle, you got multi cloud. You have a lot of new entrance talking about data management. That's it's always been your play, but you came to the king of the Hell's. Everybody wants a piece of your hide, so that's kind of interesting, But but data growth. So let's let's start there. So it used to be data was, ah, liability. Now it's becoming an asset. So what? What your customers saying about sort of data is something that needs to be managed, needs to be done cost effectively and efficiently versus getting more value on data. And what's Veritas is sort of perspective. >> They're really trying to get insights in their data. Okay. And, uh, that's why we acquired a company called Apt Are. So when I This is my second time of Veritas. I was here from 2003 to 2010 rejoined the company of 2018. I talked to a lot of customers. I've found that their infrastructure was so complex that storage infrastructure so complex the companies were having a hard time figuring out anything about their data. So they're having the hardest time just answering some fundamental questions that boards were asking. Boards are saying because of the ransomware threat. Is all our data protected? Is it backed up? Are all our applications backed up and protected and customers could not answer that question. On the other hand, they also were backing up some data 678 times wasting storage. What apt are does, and it's really amazing. I recommend seeing a demo of that. If you get a chance, it pulls information from Santa raise network file systems, virtual machines, uh, san networking and all data protection applications to get a complete picture of what's happening with your data. And that is one example off what customers really want. >> Okay, so then that kind of leads to the second point, which is ransomware now. Part of part of that is analytics and understanding what's going on in the system as well. So but it's a relatively new concept, right? And ransom. Where is the last couple of years? We've really started to see it escalate. How does Veritas help address that problem? And does apt our play a role there? >> Well, Veritas, it just helps it. Cos address that problem because veritas helps create a resilient infrastructure. Okay, the bad guys are going to get in spear. Phishing works. You know, you you are going to find some employees were gonna click on a link, and the malware is going to get in so all you can do to protect you ultimately have tohave a good backup copies so you can restore at scale and quickly. And so there's been a lot of focus from these large enterprises on restoring at scale very quickly after ransom or attack, it's you're not beholden. You can't be extorted by the ransom or >> the third piece was hybrid. And of course, that leads to a kind of hybrid multi cloud. Let's let's put that category out there now. I've been kind of skeptical on hybrid multi cloud from an application perspective in other words, the vision that you can run any app anywhere in the world without having a retest Rica pile. I've been skeptical that, but the one area that I'm not skeptical and the courage with is data protection because I think actually, you can have a consistent data protection model across your on Prem different on prams, different clouds, because you know you're partnering with all the different cloud cos you obviously have expertise in on premise. So so talk about your approach, their philosophy and maybe any offering. >> Well, this is really what sets us apart. We have been around for 25 years, 2000 patents. We protect everything. 500 different sources of data 150 different targets, 60 different cloud service providers, you know, we compete with two categories of players. We compete with the newcomers, and they only they will only protect your most current technology. They don't go back. We've been around for 25 years. We protect everything, right? We also can't compete with the conglomerates, Okay? In their case, they're not focused. They're trying to do everything. All we do is availability, protection and insights. And that's why we've been in Gardner M Q 13 times and where the market share leader also absolutely >> touch me. Someone Dave was saying about the application side of this. I mean, just your thoughts about, you know, the kinds of concerns the day raises. I mean, it is not alone in that respect. I mean, there are general concerns here, right about whether that that'll fly. What do you think? In terms, >> I think the vision is spot on and like, oh, visions, it takes a while to get to. But I think what VM wears done recently in the acquisition, there've been basically trying to make the control plane for compute okay, and their acquisition of carbon, black and pivotal add to that control plane we're gonna be We are the control plane for data protection. I mean, that's that's the way our customers rely on, >> but that makes sense to me. So I think I feel like the multi cloud vision is very aspirational today, and I think it's gonna be really hard to get there without homogeneous infrastructure. And that's why you see things like Outpost to see the Oracle has clouded customer. You've got Azure Stack. So and I think it's gonna be a multi vendor world. However I do think is it relates the data protection you can set a standard and safe. We were going to standardize on Veritas. So one of us So I think that it's it's achievable. So that was my point there. The last one was was regulations. Do you think GDP are will be a sort of a framework globally body of customers seeing there? >> Well, they're dealing with more than GDP are like I talked about that one customer, 27 different regulatory environments and the challenge there is. How do you deal with that when you don't know what you have in terms of data, the 50% of data is what we call dark data. You don't know anything about right, so you need help classifying it, understanding and getting insight into that data, and that's what we can help >> our customers. But howdy, howdy, dildo. In that environment, I mean, I mean, a day raises the point. This is obvious. A swell that mean you cite California right, which is somewhat infamous for its own regulatory mindset. I mean, how do you exist? What? The United States has privacy concerns and Congress can address it, and various federal agencies could do the same Europe. Obviously we talked about now Australia. Now here. Now there you get this Balkan I system that has no consistency, no framework. And so how do you operate on a global scale? >> A. Mentally. It relies on classifying that data right. Understanding what's where and what do you have is a P I. I personally identifiable information. Is it information that's intellectual property? What kind of data you have once you have that insight, which is what we provide, you can layer on top of the regulatory Is that compliance? >> Star I P. Is that Veritas i p. A blender? >> It's a blend of avatar and veritas I p. We have a product called Info Studio that helps toe provide that now Remember one of the things that are net backup product has is a catalogue of data. So we know where the data is primary to secondary storage, and we have all the versions of that data. And then we can run analytics against the secondary storage and not hit the primary systems. Right? So we're out of band to the primary systems, and that turns out to be very valuable in the state's a >> question. The catalog. I can't do this without a catalogue in the enough to geek out here a little bit, but but you've got a little bit when you bring in multi clouds. Other clouds. How do you incorporate you know that knowledge into your catalog? >> Yeah. Art, art, technology work Idol of works across multiple clouds. So we work with 60 different Cloud service providers. There's three big ones represented here today. Microsoft, AWS and Google. We work very closely with all three, and >> that's because you do the engineering at the A P. I level. Our engineering teams work very, very closely together. Okay, um, so let's talk about competition a little bit. The markets heated up. It's great. It's good to see all this VC money floating in. Everybody I said wants a piece of your hide. Why Veritas? >> Well, I explained that, you know, we are the leader in enterprise, data protection, availability and insights. There are some newcomers. They just will support you on your current technology. They don't support the infrastructure you've had for many years. If your large complicated enterprise you have layers of technology, we support all that with VIN amount for 25 years against, the big conglomerates were completely focused. And that's why we're the leader, according to Gartner, in the Leader's Quadrant 13 years >> now. And just as we close up you talked about, you brought up the case in Texas, about 22 municipalities. You do a lot of public sector work states, federal government ever. It's just what is the difference of different animal between public and private and and what you need to do in terms of providing that >> we're struggling with the same challenge. In fact, we work with some of the largest government agencies in the world, and they're struggling with exactly the same challenge. They also want leverage the public cloud. They're worried about ransom where you know they're dealing with data growth. All of these are challenges to them. And that's the, uh So these are common challenges we're addressing. Our strategy is to help our customers with these challenges so they can focus on the value of data >> 18 months in. You seem pumped up. Does having a great time team fired up >> way. Get that right. Great. But you're okay with big geeking out to write a very good thanks for the time You've run out of time. 40 Niners next time. All right. Greg Hughes joining us from Veritas. Back with more Veum, World 2019 right here on the Cube. >> Thank you.

>> Narrator: Live from Anaheim, California, it's theCUBE, covering Nutanix .NEXT 2019, brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix .NEXT here in Anaheim, California. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, John Ferrier. We have two guests for this segment. We have PJ Farmer, she is the Director, Cloud Product Management at TierPoint. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you, I'm very excited. >> Rebecca: And we have David Hines, VP, Architecture and Engineering at TierPoint. Thanks, David. >> Yes, thank you. >> So, for our viewers that maybe unfamiliar with TierPoint, can you tell us all about this St. Louis based company, what you do, give us an introduction. >> Oh, absolutely. So, TierPoint is a managed services, data services, and colocation provider. We have a broad footprint. We have over 40 data centers in the United States, and we have a broad portfolio of services we offer because we're really interested in meeting customers where they are in their digital transfortation, or transformation, excuse me. So everything from colo to cloud and beyond, we offer because customers come to us for a consultative approach. They have a problem, they needed solutions, and we can offer them those solutions, right. So we manage all of that. >> So you're helping them with their digital transformations and everything. >> Absolutely. >> And where does Nutanix come into play here? >> So, Nutanix is a part of that cloud services really that we're offering our customers, but also giving them a dedicated environment really that they can manage their workloads, but also have some more control, security, compliance, so that overall, the customers end up with a solution that helps them drive their business forward. And of course, TierPoint, our goal is to make sure that we're taking care of all that underlying infrastructure and systems and components, so again, the customer can focus on driving their business forward, and taking that burden off of IT and Nutanix is a great platform that really helps enable us and enable our customers, at the end of the day. >> Talk about the technical challenges you guys had before Nutanix, after Nutanix. What changed, what was the journey like, how did the door open up for them? >> Yeah, that's a great question. So, I think overall, we as technologists, work very hard to piece together solutions, varied solutions, to provide a platform for our customers that they can consume, but that is challenging, right, as a company, technology changes quickly. There are a lot of different vendors in the marketplace offering a lot of different technologies, and I think one of the things that we see as a huge value for Nutanix, is they've got a very complete platform, across the spectrum. It's not just a box with compute and storage. It is so much more than that, and so for us, that's very exciting, it's very intriguing, and something that really helps us be efficient, and also our customers, be efficient. >> So, digital transformation is something that we're talking about so much, on theCUBE in general, here at this show. What are you hearing from customers and what is sort of their bugaboos and their pain points? >> So, we recently had a customer who, their hypervisor of choice is something they're super familiar with, right. They have a great amount of comfort, but over time they can see, there could be some cost savings in Nutanix, with going with the Acropolis hypervisor that's included. So our customer came to us and said, hey, can you help us with this? Said, absolutely. So they are in our data center, we're taking care of them, we are consulting through their transformation and they are starting out with what they're comfortable with and as time changes and as they mature and transition, we're gonna help them get there, right. We're gonna help them change, if it's a hypervisor, if it's a different service, if it's a different way to set it up and present it out to their innovative IT developers, right. We're gonna help them do that. >> Talk about, can you guys share your insight into how you're operating the business? I mean obviously, you've got customers, a lot of customers. What's it like, operating this? 'Cause you got developers out there who want applications to be supported. I'm sure you got latency challenges around. We went to the cloud, a lot of multi-cloud conversations. People still gotta store stuff in their data centers or colos. So the edge, the network change, all these things are evolving. What's going on inside your company, in terms of how you operate? >> So, that's a great question. So, it is challenging to keep up with that landscape as it evolves but we are investing heavily in that. So the great thing about TierPoint, is we are in these edge markets. That is one of our real value adds, and so we're investing very heavily in our network. We also have some really strong partnerships with carriers that give us that on-ramp into the hyperscale. So it really helps complete that multi-cloud story that customers need. So yeah, they can come to us, colocate that equipment that they really have to hold on to, mainframes, mid-range servers, other legacy systems, while gaining that connectivity to those hyperscale environments. And then there's the middle, the middle where we provide a layer, like Nutanix, that gives them that enterprise type cloud. But again, it's dedicated to them, it's in our data center, it's local to their other systems, while also getting that reach to the hyperscale. So it's a really, really powerful story for us. >> On the hypervisor challenge question, this is interesting, we hear people saying, I got Hyper-Vi, I got Hyper-V, I got VMware, I wanna just use, Nutanix' got their own hypervisor. AVH has been an interesting product for Nutanix. The full stack is compelling for a lot of customers, but you guys probably have a lot of customers who wanna parole their own, or bring their own hypervisor. How do you deal with that, does that fit in to the value proposition? >> Well, I think there is some talk about the hypervisor, maybe being irrelevant, like it's obsolete, it's not something to be concerned about, and I think Dave said it earlier, best today, he said that-- >> John: You could be nice when you say that, by the way. >> I'm sorry, what? >> John: A lot of people are saying that. >> Well, yeah, a lot of people are saying that. I just think it's less of a focus, right, because TierPoint helps people focus on what is innovative, what is your business outcome, what are you really doing for your business? So I feel like the hypervisor is just less of a focus, right, than it is necessarily, not important. >> It's more commodity now. >> Yeah. >> It is, and we don't want the customers to have to focus on that, because again, IT really needs to drive business, not be a drag on business and so the less that they have to focus, as an IT organization, on the maintenance and management of infrastructure, and even up the stack towards operating systems, where we can take that burden off of them, then again, they can be a leader for their business and driving the business as a whole, not be held back. >> Okay, what's the playbook for doing that, not being a drag on the business? Because that's what everyone wants to do but they might have legacy stuff. What's the playbook? >> The playbook, is being a part of that business discussion and when the business itself is making decisions about how to drive forward, IT has that seat at the table, and again, is thinking about, how can we drive savings or cost cutting, how can we enable transactions, how can we enable the customer base? And not thinking about, oh, do I have my storage system updated, am I dealing with the old boxes that I have to replace, and do I have power and cooling problems in a data center. They don't need to be dealing with that. They need to be up front with the business, making business decisions. >> What you're talking about, really represents a complete shift in the role of the technologist. Do they have the skills to be thinking about, they obviously, can think about more than just the maintenance, and do I have the storage, and things like that. But does there need to be much more education around these business strategy questions that they should be thinking about? As you said, this is their role, to really help the business transform. >> David: Yeah. >> So, I think that often times I see people feel like they are just technology, oh, I'm just hands on keyboard, I'm doing this, but what their exposure and their natural interests, lead them to have a broad picture of how things can work, what is expected, and how do these things operate, what have I had experience with, and when they have a seat at the table and they're making, with the business decisions, they have value to add there. Right. That value is in that perspective, what they've seen, because that may not be forefront for some of the other business leaders at the table, right? And it is a collaborative discussion, that generates quality output, that generates innovation, that generates thinking outside of the box, and unique solutions that really lead the market. >> But I do think it really does, to your point, mean new education, new skills for these IT technologists and so that's part of, we've gone through this at TierPoint, transforming the engineers and the technologists that we have working on our staff and really teaching them new ways to work, new ways to think, new ways to collaborate, so that they're helping us move the business forward and not sitting behind a keyboard, isolated from the business itself. >> I was gonna ask you about the skill gap 'cause one of the things that comes up as the shift at DevOps is happening, with more development going on to make the infrastructure programmable so it's not a drag on the business, changing roles are a huge thing 'cause Nutanix essentially, the values, they enable new things to happen, the result is consolidation, so it's not consolidation as the primary. You get consolidation as a benefit of what they do. So people be like, whoa, what do I do now? But the benefit is people shift. So the IT Ops role has changed, it's best probably to get it before the operations. Where do you guys see that trend evolving? Because if this continues with AI and automation, you can almost imagine it's completely programmable infrastructure. >> Yeah, we do see a consolidation of Siloed Technologists, right, so this idea of I'm only a network engineer, I'm only a storage engineer, I'm only a cloud engineer, that is definitely going away and again, we've done this at TierPoint. We've kind of mixed those roles, right, educate the staff, but from additional education programmability, somebody'd be able to do the automation and the development in an engineering role verses having a separate development team working on that. It's gonna be really important as companies evolve their groups. >> I think you've had a lot of infrastructure engineers that 20 years ago, 15 years ago, knew Pearl, they knew scripting, they knew these things, and as time has gone on, now they know APIs, now they know RESTful APIs, now they're interacting, but we all know, in IT, it's always change and it's always learning, I mean, you got into this, right. So I think a lot of the infrastructure engineers, over time, are finding they were already automating things in some ways and they're becoming more mature in the ways that they automate things, right? I think it's a great transition as they go on, yeah. >> So, talk about the relationship with Nutanix. What's it like, partnering with them? They got a lot of momentum in enabling a partner strategy. We saw news with Hewlett Packard enterprise, potential channel opportunity there. They're a partner centric, they're partner friendly. What's it like, working with them? >> Fantastic, I mean absolutely fantastic, from go, see our customers were coming to us wanting to, they brought Nutanix to us, honestly, they came up. A lot of people that use Nutanix are like fans of Nutanix, right, you've seen some of those, and so our customers brought Nutanix to us, and as we began to see this trend, and we decided to make a private cloud product out of it, we engage with Nutanix. They've provided so many resources, they've been there for us, been very responsive. It's really been a natural and easy collaboration with them. And like you said, they do everything through partners so that has made it easy. We are another partner, right? They enable us, they know that part of their success is our success and vice versa, so it's almost like an extension of the team, which is fantastic. >> So what do you say to the new Nutanix customer that comes in, 'cause I agree with you, they're very hardcore loyal fans because they took a chance and they see benefits, so they took a chance and it paid off. It's like gambling, you put a number on the roulette wheel and it comes up black or red, whatever. They've had great success there and their promoter score is 90. But what about new people, are like, hey, I heard this Nutanix thing is out there, or software. How are you guys looking at these new opportunities, when is Nutanix a good fit? 'Cause you gotta balance it all for all your customers. >> Yeah. >> Depending on what they wanna do. >> Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. Honestly, for us it's really about enabling the higher order applications and workloads for our customers, so I don't know, unless the customer themselves is really bringing Nutanix to us, that we're having that conversation. It's really like, look, this is a solution that's gonna provide you the capabilities, and again, trying to not have the customer really worry too much about that and let us own that relationship, and as PJ mentioned, Nutanix has invested very heavily, not only in the partnership but also developing this platform and solution for us so it's been-- >> So you guys could provide it, if no one asks, just provide the best solution. >> Absolutely. >> Right. >> And that's the key, right? >> I want to ask you a question about geographics. So, I'm based in Boston, John's based in the Valley, you're a technology company based in St. Louis. I'm interested, we may just come to this with our east coast, west coast biases and I'm just, what's it like to be a technology company in St. Louis, in the heartland, do you feel part of the community? >> Oh absolutely, in fact, St. Louis really has been, you see several articles about all the startup tech in St. Louis because it is an affordable place to live. You have access to all the cities, usually direct flights, right, so from a community perspective, there's a lot more technology startups than you might think in St. Louis, but they do have access to-- >> Rebecca: And great barbecue too. >> Great barbecue, absolutely. And it really is a beautiful place. You also have lots of parks, lots of rivers, lots of outdoor, I mean, it's kinda surprising, honestly. We have a main technology center also, in Raleigh, North Carolina, so we are split between the two. >> David: Yeah. >> We do a lot of flights back and forth. >> WWT is out there too. >> RTP, yeah, the research truck will park in North Carolina, as a very big tech hub, so that split really provides a balance. There's a very big business hub in St. Louis and a lot of collaborational partnerships there from the business side, but also that Raleigh Tech Hub on the east coast is really a huge benefit to us. And a lot of our partners are there, >> PJ: And like a lot of-- >> Nutanix actually, is right there, down the street. >> We'll have to come down and visit you in North Carolina. My daughter's going to UNC >> Oh, okay. >> So I gotta find some excuses to get down there. >> That'd be great. >> Anytime. >> Maybe see your business. >> Some TierPoint shows. >> Oh, that's right. >> Exactly. >> And do a little, couple interviews. >> Anytime. >> Anytime. >> Well, thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE. It was great talking to you. >> Yeah, we really enjoyed it. >> Thank you for having us. Thank you so much. >> Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for John Ferrier, you are watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

live from Las Vegas it's the cube covering Dell technologies world 2019 to you by Dell technologies and its ecosystem partners welcome back everyone to the cubes live coverage of Dell technologies world 2019 here in Las Vegas at the sands Expo I'm your host Rebecca night along with my co-host do minimun we are joined by Steve Nolan he is the lead product manager private cloud at CenturyLink thank you so much for coming and direct from st. Louis Missouri thank you thanks for having me today so let's start by having you tell our viewers a little bit about CenturyLink ok centrelink is a very large carrier international with our recent acquisition of level 3 we have a little over 500,000 fiber optic miles belong to us we're wired into over a hundred thousand buildings globally across approximately 60 countries connected into over 300 data centers so that's kind of our telecom network story I actually work within a division of essentially that handles managed hosting products it's through an acquisition they did a number of years ago called a company called sabes where we now have about 20 years a little over 20 years and managed hosting services to customers in the business and there's been a lot of news this week at Dell technologies world and you your CenturyLink had a big announcement just this morning yes we just released a press release on a two-prong option we've been working on for about six months now it's for a private cloud product that I manage that I released actually a year and a half ago we just added it now Dell options for that product based on the Dell PowerEdge six are 640 server and that of course we did that to be able to expand options and choices for our customers to UM open up the opportunities to those situations where we weren't able to get into before so we're very excited about it so it's it's new it's it's exciting it's of course a great great platform very very amazing technology so Steve that the term private cloud you know is it's almost about 15 years old now but there were many years that we didn't all agree as to what private cloud should be you know I run article recently about hybrid cloud and you know even hybrid cloud was basically like oh I had private cloud and public cloud and a bunch of pieces and I put them together and like well the hybrid multi-cloud stories were hearing this mean many of their shows very different we're trying to get our heart around this so you know I'm familiar with Savas you know I've seen century like many times at vmworld so bring us inside that private cloud it tell us a little bit about you know what you've been seeing in the environment some of those key use cases to what customers are doing and and how this is different than you know the virtualized environments of the past certainly so so what we've been seeing happen in the industry and and it's some and you go back a number of years a few years well to the cloud and you have six people what does cloud me and you get six definitions right but what we've seen is that there's this huge move towards public cloud over the last number years the hyper cloud all-day activity we see plenty of it and there's been challenges associated that you don't find out day one you find out over time certain things that were challenged to work with and in a public cloud type of scenario customers at you know what I still want to hold on to some infrastructure and what we're seeing now also do what private cloud is it is a an infrastructure there's a hum percent dedicated to one client and a story all of that infrastructure belongs to one one one company one entity it is not shared nothing is shared that is true private cloud and so that's what what I manage for our company is our private cloud products we're and we've we have one that's been with us not for about 15 years it's on VMware we're a large VMware shop where a hundred percent VMware today we've been working with VMware for I think a total 15 years a little over 15 years and the various types of products and solutions and platforms we work with them for a year and a half to be able to create our new private cloud product that is a hyper conversion infrastructure software fine networking based on VMware's VMware cloud foundation software suite right so that's where the movements are and and what's happening with this now a we want to go into kind of what's happening in the industry in the world is the way that you built infrastructure historically right as you build your compute your network your storage and your security those are the four minimum columns of which technology you need for a solution and then you connect it all together it's some by four different groups for different subject matter expert groups and and it can be very time-consuming to piece all that together now we roll into this hyper-converged world and you just give me a stack of servers that have some cpu some RAM some disks and I layer on some very well designed and architected software like some VMware Cloud Foundation and I define everything from one interface through software it makes of the ability for enterprise customers to be able to move a much faster or making change to the environment I can spin up a firewall in minutes a several a balancer a router that's very powerful compared to how it was done in the past so Steve one of the years expertise I know CenturyLink has is on the networking side of it's something we've heard Dell talking about their networking and how that's expanding the HCI market today and as well as if you talk about that hybrid or multi cloud environment networking is a critical component things like an ST when put into so can you help you know where does that those those pieces fit into your environment where we see that that going and is these are it's a common theme and that we've been talking through a little over a year now and this this topic of milliseconds matter is the edge and so that's where it's really evolving to and that's what we're working towards as well so so one of the things we're doing with our products is moving in our products out to them the data centers many more data centers what we've done in the past and then taking that a step further we go to edge computing because of our telecom expertise and experience and our thousands of points of presence we can put those systems into a pop if you would we can put those systems of course on customer Prem getting the response times down to just a few milliseconds which is critical to business's response times delivery companies or various comers where that that's important to the middle of stiffens milliseconds matters because it saves them money because they're very able to be more responsive to their customers that's exactly what I want to drill into a little bit you say milliseconds matter which is which is absolutely true and you're talking about how customers feel this need to move so much faster and we know about the breakneck speed of technological change can you give us a real business impact I mean as you said this this really is game-changing for so many companies can you just give us an example of a customer you're working with and how this really the ROI on the stuff yeah okay so we're working with some shipping companies who of course they've got the little responders when they delivered the package they have hundreds maybe as many as a few thousand locations they want to be able to put that data right neck in those locations so that the response on that package gets that information faster they they get closure on that they are able to bill faster they're able to move on to the next item faster provide the information to their customers faster those are the real live examples that we're seeing with the Middlesex and spanner type of scenario we actually did a demo of this at vmworld last year we just give an example where and we did a test of going across the internet and then going across a dedicated circuit and we painted us one page one screen and it took a second going across the internet and it took a half a second to go across the dedicated circuit and so it's like will you take that one page and it's the thousands of pages that one of your employees goes through in a day and then multiply it by your thousands of ploys that's not where we're adding up to cost savings more efficiencies of your employees when they can get that information faster all right so one of the important areas here is that is the management piece so we can understand your partnering deeply with VMware is it primarily the V realized suite for from management tooling anything what's what's special about the CenturyLink offering so relative to my product offering is in the private cloud we actually have because here's the situation customers don't just have one cloud we all know the true story is it's it's not about public or private it's about both it's not about one cloud or one other cloud is about many and so we actually through an acquisition we had done we created a product called cloud application manager it's a multi cloud management product that is designed today to support from one interface I can have a W us as your Google my private cloud product we call the centrally private cloud on VMware cloud foundation our public cloud product all from one interface I can manage my workloads I can monitor the oasis we will manage a monitor those OS as an application for the customer Larrin will be call our managed services anywhere a methodology - for customers that want that management to provide that for them right so it's it's really about it being able to take all those different environments in that hybrid IT solution the vast majority of enterprise folks either have one or are stuck with right and be able to trim it down to singular interfaces to be able to support them how closely are you working with customers on the actual implementation onboarding of these new technologies and making sure that employees are also really onboard with these things so well first of all when we work through solutions with our customers we don't just say here pick this from a menu and so we sit down and design for them so so we're very specific in how we've designed our products to where we actually allow over a thousand configuration options so we want that you have to right-size the infrastructure that's what you start that's the foundation your right size that infrastructure for your work environment for what it is that you're trying to accomplish and you allow flexibility to be able to grow it and so we have flexibility to be able to have RAM or storage to those systems or add more systems give the flexibility to grow as you need to grow whatever but it is you want to push it's growing on you fine so so that's where we start with this in that design aspect of this and that's how we solution all of our mana Hosting sub products great well Steve you started this conversation at cube Ricky you're ending a cube alum so thanks so much for coming on the show well thank you for having us having me all right appreciate it I'm Rebecca Nightforce - minimun we will have much more of the cubes live coverage of Dell technologies world coming up in just a little bit

>> from the Silicon Angle Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts. It's the cue. Here's your host. Still Minutemen. >> Hi, I'm Stew Minutemen. And welcome to a special cute conversation here in our Boston Areas studio where in spring 2019 whole lot of shows where the cubes gonna be on going to lots of events so many different technologies were covering on one of the areas we always love to be able to dig into is what's happening with the users. Many of these shows, we go to our user conferences as well as the community. Really happy to Boca Burger. Believe first time on the program. Steve Methodists famous. Who is the newly elected president of the mug s. So I think most of Ronan should know the V mug organization to the VM where User group. We've done cube events at, you know, the most related events. Absolute talked about the mug we've had, you know, the CEO of the mug on the program. And of course, the VM were Community 2019 will be the 10th year of the Cube at VM World. Still figuring out if we should do a party and stuff like that. We know all the ins and outs of what happened at that show. But you know the V mugs itself? I've attended many. Your Boston V mug is one that I've been, too. But before we get into the mug stuff, Steve could just give us a little bit of your back, because you are. You're practicing your user yourself. >> Yeah, well, first thanks for having me. You know what? I've been watching the cube for years, and it's ah, it's great to be on this side of the of the screen, right? So, yes. So I'm Steve. I think I, you know, show up every day as the associate chief information officer of the University of Massachusetts. Little just for 95 here, and that's my day job. That's my career, right? But what? You know what? I'm excited to be here to talk about what I'm excited in general with the mug is it's a community organization. And so it's a volunteer gig, and that's true of all of our leadership, right? So the from the president of the board of directors to our local leaders around the world, they're all volunteers, and that's I think, what makes it special is We're doing this because we're excited about it. We're passionate about it. >> Yeah, you know the mugs, It's, you know, created by users for user's. You go to them, talk a little bit. It's evolved a lot, you know, It started as just a bunch of independent little events. Is now you know, my Twitter feed. I feel like constantly every day. It's like, Oh, wait, who is at the St Louis? The Wisconsin one? I'll get like ads for like, it's like a weight is the Northeast one. I'm like, Oh, is that here in New England that I don't know about? No, no, no. It's in the UK on things like that. So I get ads and friends around the world and I love seeing the community. So, boy, how do you guys keep it all straight? Man, is that allow both the organic nature as well as some of the coordination and understanding of what's going on. How do you balance that? >> Yeah, that's a great question. And you know, So I was a V mug member for many, many years before I ever got interested in becoming a leader, and you're right it when it started, it was 10 of us would get around with a six pack of beer and a box of pizza, right? And we'd be talking shop and that, you know, that was awesome. And that's what would that was, how it started. But you get to a certain scale when you start talking about having 50,000 now, over 125,000 members around the world. You gotta coordinate that somehow you're right on the money with that. And so that's why you know, we have, you know, a strong, um, coordination effort that is our offices down in Nashville, Tennessee, and their their role is to enable our leaders to give back to their community and take the burden out of running these things. You know, sourcing venues and, you know, working with hotels and stuff. That is effort that not everybody wants to do all the time. And so to do that for them lets them focus on the really cool stuff which is the tech and connecting users. >> Yeah. Can you speak a little bit too? You know what were some of the speeds and feed to the event? How many do you have How much growing, you know, Like I'm signed up. I get the newsletter for activities as well as you know, lots of weapons. I've spoken on some of the webinars too. >> Yeah, well, first thanks for that s o. We have over 30 user cons around the world on three continents. >> In fact, what's the user cough? >> Great questions. So user kind is user conference, you know, consolidated into user Connery. And those are hundreds of end users getting together around the world were on three continents. In fact, I was fortunate enough in March, I went to Australia and I spoke at Sydney and Melbourne on That was awesome, getting to meet users literally, almost a sw far away from Boston. As you can get having the same challenges in the office day today, solving the same business problems with technology. So that was exciting. And so we've got those all over. We also have local meetings which are, you know, smaller in scope and often more focused on content. We've got 235 or Maur local chapters around the world. They're talking about this, and so we're really engaged at multiple levels with this and like you talk about. We have the online events which are global in scope. And we do those, you know, we time so that people in our time zone here in the States could get to them as well as folks in, you know, e m b A and a factory. >> Yeah, and I have to imagine the attendees have to vary. I mean, is it primarily for, you know, Sylvie, um, where admin is the primary title there up to, you know, people that are CEOs or one of the CEOs? >> Yes. So that actually we've seen that change over the past couple years, which is exciting for me being in the role that I'm in is you're right historically was vey Sphere admits, right? And we're all getting together. We're talking about how do we partition our lungs appropriately, right? And now it has switched. We see a lot more architect titles. We Seymour director titles coming in because, you know, I said the other day I was in Charlotte talking and I said, You know, business is being written in code, right? And so there's a lot more emphasis on what it's happening with V m wearing his VM worth portfolio expands. We've got a lot of new type of members coming into the group, which is exciting. >> Yeah, And what about the contents out? How much of it is user generated content versus VM were content and then, you know, I understand sponsorships or part of it vendors. The vendor ecosystem, which vm where has a robust ecosystem? Yes, you know, help make sure that it's financially viable for things to happen and as well as participate in the contest. >> Yes, I feel like I almost planted that question because it's such a good one. So, you know, in 2018 we started putting a strong emphasis on community content because we were, you know, we heard from remembers that awesome VM were content, awesome partner content. But we're starting to miss some of the user to user from the trenches, battle war stories, right? And so we put an emphasis on getting that back in and 2018 we've doubled down in 2019 in a big way, so if you've been to a user kind yet in 2019 but we've limited the number of sponsors sessions that we have, right so that we have more room for community content. We're actually able to get people from around the world to these events. So again, me and a couple folks from the States went toe Australia to share our story and then user story, right? And at the end of the day, we used to have sponsored sessions to sort of close it out. Now we have a community, our right, and Sophie Mug provides food and beverages and a chance to get together a network. And so that is a great community. Our and you know, I was at one recently and I was able to watch Ah, couple folks get to them. We're talking about different problems. They're having this and let me get your card so we can touch base on this later, which at the end of the day, that's what gets me motivated. That's what >> it's about. It's Steve. I won't touch on that for a second. You know what? Get you motivated. You've been doing this for years. You're, you know, putting your time in your president. I know. When I attended your Boston V mark the end of the day, it was a good community member talking about career and got some real good, you know, somebody we both know and it really gets you pumped up in something very, a little bit different from there. So talk a little bit without kind of your goals. For a CZ president of Emma, >> Sure eso I get excited about Vima because it's a community organization, right? And because, you know, I've said this a bunch of times. But for me, what excites me is it's a community of people with similar interests growing together right and reinforcing each other. I know for a fact that I can call ah whole bunch of people around the world and say, Hey, I'm having a problem technically or hey, I'm looking for some career advice or hey, one of my buddies is looking for work. Do you know of any opening somewhere? And that's really powerful, right? Because of the end of the day, I think the mug is about names and people and not logos, right? And so that's what it motivates me is seeing the change and the transformation of people and their career growth that V mug can provide. In fact, I know ah ton of people from Boston. In fact, several of them have. You know, they were administrators at a local organization. Maybe they moved into partners. Maybe they moved into vendors. Maybe they stay where they are, and they kept accelerating their growth. But I've seen tons of career growth and that that gets me excited watching people take the next step to be ableto to build a >> career, I tell you, most conferences, I go to the kind of jobs take boards, especially if you're kind of in the hot, cool new space they're all trying to hire. But especially when you go to a local on the smaller events, it's so much about the networking and the people. When I go to a local user, event it. Hey, what kind of jobs you hiring for who you're looking for and who do I know that's looking for those kind of things and trying to help connect? You know, people in cos cause I mean, you know, we all sometime in our career, you know we'll need help alone those lines that I have, something that's personally that you know, I always love to help >> you. I have a friend who said it. I think best, and I can't take credit for this, right? But it's It can be easy to get dismissed from your day job, right? One errant click could be the career limiting click. It is nigh impossible to be fired from the community, right? And that that, to me, is a powerful differentiator for folks that are plugged into a community versus those that are trying to go it >> alone. Yeah, there are some community guidelines that if you don't follow, you might be checking for sure, but no, if if we're there in good faith and we're doing everything like out, tell me it's speaking. You know, this is such, you know, change. Is this the constant in our world? You know, I've been around in the interview long enough. That's like, you know, I remember what the, um where was this tiny little company that had, you know, once a week, they had a barbecue for everybody in the company because they were, like, 100 of them. And, you know, you know, desktop was what they started working on first. And, you know, we also hear stories about when we first heard about the emotion and the like. But, you know, today you know Veum world is so many different aspects. The community is, you know, in many ways fragmented through so many different pieces. What are some of the hot, interesting things? How does seem a deal with the Oh, hey, I want the Aye Aye or the Dev Ops or the you know where where's the vmc cloud versus all these various flavors? How do you balance all that out? All these different pieces of the community? >> Yeah, it's an interesting question. And to be fair with you, I think that's an area that were still getting better at. And we're still adapting to write. You know, if you look at V mug Five years ago, we were the V's fear, sort of first, last and always right. And now you know, especially is VM. Where's portfolio keeps increasing and they keep moving into new areas. That's new areas for us, too. And so, you know, we've got a big, uh, initiative over the next year to really reach out and and see where we can connect with, you know, the kubernetes environment, right? Cause that the hefty oh acquisition is a really big deal. and I think fundamentally changes or potential community, right? And so you know, we've launched a bunch of special interest groups over the span of the past couple years, and I think that's a big piece of it, which is, if you're really interested in networking and security, here's an area that you can connect in and folks that are like minded. If you're really interested in and user computing, here's what you can connect into. And so I think, you know, as we continue to grow and you know, we're, you know, hundreds of thousands of people now around the world so that you can be a challenge. But I think it's It's also a huge opportunity for us to be ableto keep building that connection with folks and saying, Hey, you know, as you continue to move through your career, it's not always gonna be this. You're right. Change is constant. So hey, what's on the horizon for >> you? When I look at like the field organization for being where boy, I wonder when we're gonna have the sand and NSX user groups just because there's such a strong emphasis on the pieces, the business right now? Yeah, All right, Steve, let's change that for a second. Sure said, You know, you're you got CEO is part of your title, their eyes, what you're doing. Tell me about your life these days and you know the stresses and strains And what what's changing these days and what's exciting? You >> sure? So you know, it's exciting to have moved for my career because I'm an old school admin, right? I mean, that's my background. Uh, so, you know, as I've progressed, you know, I keep getting different things in my portfolio, right? So it started out as I was, you know, I was the admin, and then I was managing the systems engineering team. And then they added desktop support that was out of necessity was like, I'm not really a dustup person, right? So something new you need to learn. But then you start seeing where these synergies are, right? Not to hate, like the words energies. But the reality is that's where we launched our VD. I project at U Mass. Lowell, and that has been transformative for how we deliver education. And it has been a lot of ways. Reduced barriers to students to get access to things they couldn't before. So we had engineering students that would have to go out and finance a 3 $4000 laptop to get the horsepower to do their work. Now, that can use a chromebook, right? They don't have to have that because we do that for them and just they have to have any device t get access via via where horizon. Right, So that happened, and then, you know, then they moved in. Our service is operation, right? So what I'm interested now is how do we deliver applications seamlessly to users to give them the best possible experience without needing to think about it? Because if you and I have been around long enough that it used to be a hassle to figure out okay, I need to get this done. That means they need to get this new applications I have to go to I t there and I have my laptop. Now it's the expectation is just like you and I really want to pull out my phone now and go to the APP store and get it right. So how do we enable that to make it very seamless and remove any friction to people getting their work >> done? Yeah, absolutely. That the enterprise app store is something we've talked about is not just the Amazon marketplace these days. >> In some ways, it is so not all applications rate. Some applications are more specific to platforms. And so that's a challenge, which is, you know, I'm a professor. I really like my iPad. Well, how do I get S P ss on that? Okay, well, let me come up with some solutions. >> Yeah, it's interesting. I'm curious if you have any thoughts just from the education standpoint, how that ties into i t. Personally myself, I think I was in my second job out of school before I realized I was in the i t industry because I studied engineering they didn't teach us about. Oh, well, here's the industry's You're working. I knew tech, and I knew various pieces of it and, you know, was learning networking and all these various pieces there. But, you know, the industry viewpoint as a technology person wasn't something. I spend a lot of time. I was just in a conference this week and they were talking about, you know, some of the machine learning pieces. There was an analyst got up on stage is like here I have a life hack for you, he said. What you need to do is get a summer intern that's been at least a junior in college that studied this stuff, and they can educate you on all these cool new things because those of us have been here a while that there's only tools and they're teaching them at the universities. And therefore that's one of those areas that even if you have years, well, if you need to get that retraining and they can help with that >> no, that's that to me is one of most exciting parts about working in education is that our faculty are constantly pushing us in new directions that we haven't even contemplated yet. So we were buying GPU raise in order to start doing a I. Before I even knew why we were doing and there was like, Hey, I need this and I was like, Are you doing like a quake server? Like they were mining Bitcoins? I don't think so, but it was, you know, that was that was that was an area for us and now we're old. Had it this stuff, right? And so that is a exciting thing to be able to partner with people that are on the bleeding edge of innovation and hear about the work that they're doing and not just in in the tech field, but how technology is enabling Other drew some groundbreaking research in, you know, the life sciences space that the technology is enabling in a way that it wasn't possible before. In fact, I had one faculty member tell me, Geez, maybe six months ago. That said, the laboratory of the past is beakers and Silla scopes, right? The laboratory of the future is how many cores can you get? >> Yeah, all right, So next week is Del Technologies world. So you know the show. The combination of what used to be A M, C World and Del World put together a big show expecting around 15,000 people in Las Vegas to be the 10th year actually of what used to be M. C world. We actually did a bunch of dead worlds together. For me personally, it's like 17 or 18 of the M C world that I've been, too, just because disclaimer former emcee employees. So V mugs there on dhe, Maybe explain. You know, the mugs roll there. What you're looking to accomplish what you get out of a show like that. >> Sure. So V mug is a part of the affiliation of del Technologies user communities. Right? And what I love about user communities is they're not mutually exclusive, right? You absolutely can. Being a converged and Avi mug and a data protection user group. It's all about what fits your needs and what you're doing back in the office. And, you know, we're excited to be there because there's a ton of the move members that are coming to Deltek World, right? And so we're there to support our community and be a resource for them. And that's exciting for us because, you know, Del Del Technologies World is a whole bunch of really cool attack that were that were seeing people run vm were on Ray. We're seeing via more partner with, and so that's exciting for us. >> Yeah, and it's a try. Hadn't realized because, like, I've been to one of the converted user group events before, didn't realize that there was kind of an affiliation between those but makes all the sense in the world. >> Yeah, right. And it's, you know, again, it's an open hand thing, right? Beaten and one being the other. You realize them both. For what? They're what They're great at connecting with people that are doing the same thing. There's a ton of people running VM wear on. Ah, myriad. Like you talked about earlier VM Where's partner? Ecosystem is massive, right? But many, many, many in fact, I would say a huge majority of converged folks are running VM we're >> on it. All right. So, Steve want to give you the final word? What's the call to action? Understand? A lot of people in the community, but always looking from or always, ways for people to get involved. So where do they go? What? What would you recommend? >> Yeah, thanks. So if if you are not plugged into user community now, when you're in the tech field, I would strongly encourage you to do so. Right? V mug, obviously, is the one that's closest to my heart, right? If you're in that space, we'd love to have you as part of our community. And it's really easy. Go to V mug. dot com and sign up and see where the next meet up is and go there, right? If you're not into the VM where space and I know you have lots of folks that air, they're doing different things. Go check out your community, right? But I tell you, the career advantages to being in a user community are immense, and I frankly was able to track my career growth from admin to manager to director to associate CEO, right alongside my community involvement. And so it's something I'm passionate about, and I would encourage everybody to check out. >> Yeah, it's Steve. Thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, I give a personal plug on this. There are a lot of communities out there, the virtual ization community, especially the VM. One specifically is, you know, a little bit special from the rest. You know, I've seen it's not the only one, but is definitely Maur of. It's definitely welcoming. They're always looking for feedback, and it's a good collaborative environment. I've done surveys in the group that you get way better feedback than I do in certain other sectors in just so many people that are looking to get involved. So it's one that you know, I'm not only interviewing, but, you know, I can personally vouch for its steeple. Thank you. Thank you so much. Always a pleasure to see you. >> Thanks for having me. >> Alright. And be sure to check out the cube dot net. Of course, we've got dealt technologies world in the immediate future. Not that long until we get to the end of summer. And vm World 2019 back in San Francisco, the Q will be there. Double set. So for both del world del Technologies world and VM World. So come find us in Las Vegas. If you're Adele or Mosconi West in the lobby is where will be for the emerald 2019 and lots and lots of other shows. So thank you so much for watching. Thank you.

(upbeat funky music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California. This is a Cube conversation. >> Hello everyone welcome to this special Cube conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier. Co-host of the Cube. We got two special expert guests here talking multi-cloud, Jonathan King, Vice President of Strategy, Data Center, and Cloud for WWT. And Fabio Gori, Senior Director Cloud Solution and Marketing at Cisco. Multi-cloud is the topic. Guys are in the throes of it. Jonathan, you're in the front wave of a massive shift. Cisco powers networks for all companies these days, so guys multi-cloud is a reality. It's here. I want to get your thoughts on that, have a conversation. Thanks for joining us. >> Great, glad to be here. >> So multi-cloud is not really been debated. I mean people generally now step back and say multi-cloud is a reality. It's here, people have multiple clouds. Should only have data center on premise. But this idea of multi-cloud and hybrid cloud are somewhat getting mixed up, but multi-cloud is certainly more realistic in the reality sense than anything else. What's your take on multi-cloud, Jonathan? >> So I think we're at a point where there's a growing acceptance of multi-cloud as the architecture of the future. And when you arrive at that point it also means that multi-cloud is the architecture for today. Because if you see your competitors, you see new entrants in your space, moving in a rapid digital pace to meet their business needs, and you're not on the same kind of architecture. The same footing. Then you're going to be left behind. So, used to debate private cloud, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud. The way we see it is that we're in this multi-cloud world. And multi-cloud embraces an end-to-end imperative. How am I getting my apps and my development teams building those apps closer to my business and meeting my needs more rapidly? And then how am I connecting my entire business, my data, my network, all of it, to meet that needs. So multi-cloud architecture's really an imperative. It doesn't mean it's the only thing. There's other elements in terms of having a clear digital strategy. Thinking about how you're going to modernize your infrastructure. Of course, thinking about how you're transforming your security. All four of those elements really comprise a enterprise architecture. Multi-cloud being a core part of it. >> Fabio, Cisco, you guys have seen the waves of innovation, internet, connecting companies together through networking etc. Multi-cloud's a big part of your focus. Certainly at Cisco Live we covered that. What's the definition of multi-cloud now, because I've heard, it's been debunked, but I've heard people say, oh multi-cloud's an application workload moving across multiple clouds. Some say, no, it just means I have two clouds. So what is the definition? Baseline us here. >> So it's interesting because you can go Wikipedia and actually read the definition of multi-cloud, but what I'm really interested in is exactly what Jonathan was saying a moment ago. This is one of those rare cases where what you hear architecture is actually a technology architecture and the business architecture really coincide. People want to use innovation wherever it comes from. And because you can't allow yourself to be just restricted your choice, people want to have choice. Multiple choices. And that's why we're seeing adoption of multiple cloud services. Multiple SaaS solutioning for structure service solutions and the likes. So this is really what multi-cloud means. You're satisfying a business need. And while cloud computing was born, as we know, around 10 years ago, and it probably started with a kind of cost connotation, the speed and agility that you can get out of it now overwhelm the other parameters. And people are ready to spend anything it takes to become faster than their competitor, because that ultimately will really determines your destiny in the marketplace. >> And I want to drill into the tech side and have some specific pointed questions I'd love to ask you. Jonathan, first, talk about the relationship that WWT, World Wide Technology, has with Cisco, and your credibility in multi-cloud. You guys have a unique view First of all you work with Cisco, you guys partner together. A big part of your business. But you guys are in the middle of a lot of the action. Talk about the company. What kind of deals you guys are doing? What visibility do you guys have? Is it a landscape? Give an example of some of the work that you guys do, and then talk about the relationship with Cisco. >> Yeah so, the Cisco is a very strategic partner of ours. They have been for a long time. And we have the benefit of being at scale with Cisco. For repeatable waves of technology roll outs. In repeatable domains of technologies. So, customers come to us and look for our help as a trusted advisor to help them with their architectural decisions. And to help them often with knowledge gaps. So, architecture is a challenge. Especially when you're dealing with rapid change. So you have a pace of change externally. You cover this space. I mean every day, right? We were sitting here there's some kind of new thing going on. And, that change, I mean even companies who know what they're doing, and have deep benches of talent, have architectural challenges. But you take it to an enterprise or a government agency. How are they going to keep up? Well that's really our job and the value we bring is. We are constantly watching, talking to partners, talking to customers. And there's almost no one we're that as closely with as we are with Cisco, in terms of how we're watching trends, looking what's happening. And from a multi-cloud standpoint, in answer to your question there, it's a bit of a thought experiment. So if you define multi-cloud as really just, oh it's just between Amazon, Azure, Google. Multi-cloud is just multi public cloud. We do not see it that way, our clients don't see it that way. Our clients see it as a bigger domain. That multi-cloud includes how you're connecting to SaaS. How you're, there's multiple public clouds, a bigger definition there. But then it's also the edge, the cloud edge, the different edges that are out there are are being deployed in a cloud architecture. Your core data center has a private cloud. All of that we see as multi-cloud. And when you define it that way, you start to look at it. Companies are saying who do I turn to to help me with a multi-cloud architecture? Do I turn to someone that was born in the cloud. Who just really knows AWS. They know it really well. But that's what they know. Or a similar consulting company who's over here. The credibility that we have, we have those capabilities. But we also have depth and breadth, and history, and knowledge, and contracts and relationships. An incredible ecosystem. And important with Cisco, it's not just a one-way relationship. We have an ecosystem around us, collectively, that Cisco benefits because we have that ecosystem. And that's really what companies look for. It puts us in a very unique position because we see this AND world. It's not an OR world. And I think even the investments and movements that the public clouds have made recently. The hybrid offerings that they're bringing, and where Kubernetes is going to enable portability. All these things really are about a multi-cloud world, and we're just excited about where we are. >> It's interesting, there's the first wave, Amazon, I call it the Amazon wave because they really did take out the beach. And then public cloud. It kind of showed the way, the economics and the value creation piece. And you mentioned a few things that point at this next wave. That next big wave I see it is about people and technology. This holistic view around multiple architectures is a systems concept so it's not unproven. And Fabio we've seen this movie before in systems. Operating systems. You need networking. You got to connect things together. So this next wave of thinking about workloads and applications in context to an architecture see to the next narrative that people are starting to talk about. Versus. >> Absolutely >> Public cloud, because the people equation, who's going to run it, who's going to service it, who's the coders, what tools and APIs do I use. People behave in certain ways, and they like their favorite cloud, so it's a whole different ball game. You're thoughts. What's driving all this? >> I would say, look, we could talk about this forever. But I think we're seeing a pretty dramatic shift into an architectural model, right? I mean, if you remember a few years ago, we had networking specialists in the data center, storage specialists and compu-specialists, well guess what, people moved to full-stack type of expertise, right? And now we even have systems that are completely converged. Or hybrid converged. Well, we're seeing the same movie in the cloud. Where we're seeing the rise of cloud architectures, enterprise architectures, which become really determinable of the business. And these people, especially in the companies that are ahead of the game, in terms of cloud adoption and expertise. These guys are issuing the new guidance and guardrails for the entire organization in terms of what governance role you need to take, right? And the other groups actually execute this kind of strategy. This is, some people say this is finally SOA coming alive. The SOA, Service Oriented Architecture. That's exactly what it is without probably some of the kind of propriety underpinnings, or driven by certain market players in the past. This is a true, so if you think about microservices in containers, that's exactly what it is. And also we're seeing a lot of companies that are starting getting even organized by microservices. Which is the ultimate demonstration that the technology architecture and the business architecture are really converged. It's a fairly complicated concept, but in the end it's about really connecting the business to the underlying technology. >> And it's a shift that's happening in front of our eyes. And we're covering a lot of the news. Some notable news that we've been covering lately, the Department of Defense JEDI contract. That's in the public sector and military. CNCF, Amazon re:Invent. Google Nexus coming out. You're starting to see the formation where it's not about the cloud vendor or the cloud supplier anymore, as much as it is about the workload. So, there's been a debate of sole sourcing the cloud, that's certainly, we're seeing that on the DOD side 'cause it's more a military procurement thing. But that's not the right answer anymore, we're seeing that whole, spread the multi-vendor love around. It's not so much like it used to be. It's different now, there's new architecture. So, Jonathan, I want to go back to your multi-cloud architecture because I think the strategic question that I'd like to get to is. It might not be a bad thing to pick a cloud, a sole cloud for workload. But that's not meaning you're going to not use other clouds. This is a whole different thinking. So I can pick Amazon for this workload or pick Azure for that workload and Google for that workload. And holistically connect them all together. Seamlessly, this is not a bad thing. Your thoughts. >> There's a somewhat of a paradox when you talk about multi-cloud architecture and then you talk about moments in time where it makes architectural sense to pick one cloud, right? That particular decision there's issues around people and training and technology, and time to market, and API coverage. So there's all these things that you're trying to get a job done or a mission done and the amount of time that you have to achieve that job or that mission. What path am I going to choose? What engine am I going to put on the plane to get me there? Now that doesn't mean that that's the only engine you're going to put on your fleet. It just means that particular plane is going to have that kind of engine. And then the next time, you got another engine, you got a different kind of plane. You're thinking about how you're doing these things in waves and modules, and you're trying to build your aggregate velocity, 'cause really if you strip it all down. You know earlier we were talking about multi-cloud and people and talent, we're in a distributed computing land rush. And businesses of all sizes, government agencies, companies are trying to figure out how do we, you know. Electricity came along, now cloud has come along, right over the horizon cognification's coming along. How am I as an enterprise getting digitally ready, and getting on a footing to be able to do what I need to do in that domain? And really, it's about velocity and movement, so. Now that means that, that's why architecture is so important, because you have to make, you want a, people talk about one-way doors and two-way doors. So you want stop and think about, am I going through a one-way door or am I going through a two-way door? Meaning, do I have a way to come back? Is this a decision that I'm going to live with? If so how long? Is this a decision I can go through and I can come back? These kinds of approaches let you look across it. So an example would be networking. So networking is a foundation to every multi-cloud strategy. So you have to think, today my network in many enterprises is still a campus branch architecture. Well traffic patterns have changed. Even if you've just done nothing your customers have moved. Like all of a sudden, you know we talk to customers. We work with retailers, we work with all kinds of people, and it is like Global Climate Change. It's like global network change. The scale at which the clouds have arrived have changed the network patterns. So, if you start to look at it, you're saying, well what is a multi-cloud networking strategy? How do I need to rethink, well, guess what, the campus, my headquarters, is no longer the hub it used to be. The hub is now at the cloud edge, where all the other clouds are geographically aggregated. I need to move my network closer to that location. So we do a lot of work with Equinix in that context, right? So they have and have built a business around >> Sort of re-architecture's happening, and it's being driven by value creation, value shifting. >> Yes. >> Moving everything around. >> And that's where from a cloud networking standpoint, you look at that's a discussion where Cisco's so uniquely situated, because they are the networking company. They've been through the generations and they've been through different changes of generations. You know Wi-Fi, didn't used to be Wi-Fi. Now it is, right, it's here. And now we're in this next paradigm, where cloud networking didn't used to be here. Now it is, so. >> What's the new thought process for cloud networking. Because it makes a lot of sense, you have to connect clouds, obviously networking latency, SLAs around moving things around from point a to point b, storing stuff as well. Fabio, what's the equation look like? What's changed? Where do your customers go in this new architecture? >> Well, just building on top of what Jonathan was saying before, first of all the way we architect the networks, enterprise networks were networks in the past. Of course this is coming to an end. We need to rethink them, right? The fact that users now are going to use an enormous amount of software as a service applications that don't sit in your data center, means that constricting all the software in a single place doesn't make any more sense. But there's not just the traffic element. Think about all the intrusion detection and prevention, firewalling capabilities. Because you're moving away from that model, you need to start visualizing also those security functions and distributing them all the way to the edge of the network. In some cases, you need to have them in the cloud as well. We believe that the best way is a fully distributed model. Where you have a choice. Whether you keep it in your data center, or you put into the cloud, or even the to edge of the network. Again, you got to be ready for any kind of scenario. It's interesting how, you know, we're going to distributed computing as you said. But everything else is getting distributed as well. >> Oh yeah. >> Your entire infrastructure needs to follow your application and data. Wherever they go. And that's actually something unprecedented that we're seeing right now. >> And you brought up cloud architecture earlier, Jonathan. You mentioned it briefly. And this comes back to some of that this nuanced point around cloud architecture. The procurement standards aren't driving what you buy, its architectural workload dynamics are now telling procurement how we're buying. So the world shifting from, oh, I'm going to buy these servers. I'm going to buy this gear, the approved vendors. When you think about architecture the way you pointed it out, it's a completely different decision making process. So what's happening is old ways of procuring and buying and consuming technology are now shifting to. Still not going to stand up a cloud with a credit card if I'm doing dev ops, but now you start thinking holistically. The decision making on what that will look like has changed. This is probably impacting the cultural people side as well. What's your thoughts on this dynamic between cloud selection, security, architecture, and procurement? >> The example I normally give is, it's changing but it's also evolving, right? Because you're dealing with patterns that are there, and they're not going to go away, right? Money still has to be paid. Processes have to be followed and respected. The examples that I give would be, I've run large clouds in my past. Different platforms. And one thing you always watch out for when you're running a cloud is capacity. How much money do I have in the bank, so to speak, right? Am I going to have a run on the bank? So if you're running that cloud, either, and this is true if you're a service provider or you have your own private cloud. You're very concerned about you don't want to run out of capacity. Because bad things happen. Even unrecoverable bad things happen. Well in the public cloud, hey, I'm free and clear, I no longer have a capacity management team, I don't need to worry about them anymore. No, no, no no. 'Cause, you know, we just saw some press recently of a company that had a big overage. In cloud, what used to be capacity management is now cost optimization. 'Cause if you don't have it, you're going to have a similarly bad outcome. It's those kinds of things, right? How do you go, and it's those things, right? >> Once a benefit, now it's a challenge. So this could back down to the billion dollar question on the table in the industry is, how do I manage all this? I know how to connect it. Cisco could help me there. I understand multi-cloud, I totally buy into the architecture. I think this is clearly the direction. The management piece is kind of a fuzzy area. Can you guys help unpack cloud management? What are the table stakes? How should people be thinking about it? Because you mentioned security and intrusion detection. Not just moving packets around. We were talking before you came on about Kubernetes. There's all new sets of services moving up the stack, inside this dynamic. How do I manage it all? What single pane of glass is going to do it for me? >> Well, yeah, it's interesting you mentioned there. We've talked a lot about almost like an East West type shift you can think of where, multi-cloud is this thing that goes this way. Well, there's an equally crazy paradigm that's happening in a very fast period of time where it's almost like a North South North shift. Which is, Kubernetes, containers, service meshes. These architectures that are abstracting and lifting everything up. And in some ways, coming underneath as well, at the same time. Because now you've got a return of bare metal. You have these concepts architecturally where the VM is here to stay, it ain't going anywhere. It's still, the tooling around is insanely valuable. But you have now another benefit layer at a container orchestration layer, where there's portability, speed. There's all these benefits that come. And you just look at the stats of how fast containers are growing as a share. You're approaching a billion containers out there right now. And therein lies the challenge. Is that it'd be enough of a difficulty if you were saying I need to go from managing my private cloud, the stuff I have at a cloud edge, edge location, and the stuff I have in multiple public clouds. That's not all we're saying. We're saying also, you have a new tooling and a new set, and it's all software defined, and there's security, network, there's data. It just it's -- >> Complex. >> Exploding, it's complex. So the area that we're working on and want to hear more from Fabio is were innovating with Cisco on, we have great offerings and capabilities around cross cloud and VM orchestration. We're also looking now at that Kubernetes layer. >> Absolutely. >> What's real on that, the complexity he just pointed out is an opportunity at the same time because it just validates the shift that's going on. >> Absolutely. >> Management is an opportunity. >> Jonathan almost went through the entire set of needs. And what you take away from this is that fundamentally you have to instrument this incredibly distributed environment multiple sources and sourcing of this. In fact I love the analogy that you did with the planes, because there's a lot of kind of similarities to a supply chain management kind of business model, right? Where you want to supply different services. But a bottom line is that you're now moving away from what you have. It's a journey. And so this instrumentation, whether it's networking, security, analytics, management, these are actually the four pillars of our company multi-cloud strategy. They need to work across the old and the new. You can't afford to build another silo and maybe leveraging a bunch of open stores like-- >> So a data plane strategy is critical. >> It's, yeah, and it has to-- >> Across the hybrid and multi-cloud. >> East West, North South, and across the old and the new. It sounds very complex, but in reality the-- >> But you could build a taxonomy around this. And we've seen some research come out certainly from Wikiban and others. If it fits into the architecture that seems to be the question. So Jonathan, where does that fit in to the multi-cloud architecture in your opinion? >> So we, there's, you get into different terminology. We think about every company needs a cloud services strategy. So there's a taxonomy of services that we've developed. Where companies have to think about their application services strategy. Their operation strategy, governance strategy, foundation strategy. And this is, it's sort of coming what I teased upon earlier about moving from capacity planning when you own the cloud to cost optimization when you're running the cloud, right? It's the same, but different. And a lot of that difference gets down to services. I am going from a model of running my own product in an information technology modality to now I'm consuming services. So, I used to architect, and design, and build. Now I have to architect and really understand those differences. And so that's our cloud services strategy portfolio. And what we often see is we also have a dev ops portfolio. And we short-hand it, you could call it cloud native, right? Where we're looking at solutions around infrastructures code, around CICD pipelines, around cloud foundation capabilities that connect back-- >> Are they best practices or actually implementation? >> So both, we have content and workshops that we've developed, and then we have. Helping clients on projects very actively. And, you know, that's where it gets back to that architectural gap and knowledge gap. Is companies are looking for, hey, what's the pattern, what are the best practices. And then they don't expect, 'cause there's so many elements that change for a given company. And that change in the market, that there's a shelf-life to this. And it's like fresh produce. >> I love your example of engine in a plane. Do you have it for a single plane or fleet of planes? Does your company have two three big planes. It depends really, I mean, beauty's in the eye of the beholder, here, right? How you build and architect cloud, there's no boilerplate. It really is comes down to figuring it out. >> Where you are. >> So, with that, I want to go to my final point I want to dig into on the people side. So technology shift, business shift, check. You guys did a great job there. Great insight. Comes up every time I have to go to a Cube event and talk about cloud, is the cultural people skills gap problem. One, our company doesn't have the culture and/or we don't have the skill and we don't have the people to run it. So, automation certainly can help there but at the end of the day, if you don't have the people to do this. How do you solve the people problem? How are you guys helping companies? What is some of the state-of-the-art techniques? What's out there? >> So, I'll say a little. I appreciate Fabio's perspective, too. I think for us, really, you know, the old saying, culture eats strategy for breakfast. Culture's more important than ever. Because really, you're now moving to a mode where siloed organizations implementing siloed technology is enormously challenging. You have to move, and that's where dev ops and other patterns come in, where the people who build the app are doing the operations. Storage and networking and compute and apps and the business, they're all talking to each other. So culture really is foundational so that a culture where you're not making boundaries more rigid, you have to get to a point, and there's different ways to do this. I already recommend if people haven't already read the Phoenix Project. Hard to believe but it's an excellent book. And it's a fictional work about tech. It's like a novel about tech. >> I haven't read it yet, I'm going to get that. >> It's awesome. And it really gets you in the mindset of an organization going through change with the net. And it really, I mean I'm a geek, so I like it, but I've had other non-Geeks read it and they like it. But that's the key, it's a-- >> So you really got to set the table and invest in culture, making sure it's >> Culture's foundational. >> appropriately aligned. >> Culture's foundational. And then there's other best practices that always apply, right? So, what is your business vision? What is your mission? What are your values? What are the objectives you're trying to achieve in this space and time relationship? How are you prioritizing? These are all things because then if you have the right build around all that. Then what you drive to is an outcome at a certain point of time. And time's critical. We're in a market that's competing on time. So if you are not hyper aware of time. And what you're doing in a set point of time. And the trade-offs in making changes if your assumptions are wrong. These are all things that are foundational. >> Fabio, I want to get your thoughts. Chuck Robbins talks about solving the tech problems just because a tech company can solve tech problems all day long. He's also behind the people skillset. I've heard him publicly talk about it. But you guys at Cisco have actually had a great transformation with the DevNet Create community, where you harness the culture, and everyone's engaged around cloud, cloud native, and you have a kind of cloud DNA developing out of the core network. Your thoughts and Cisco's view on culture and people solving the problem. Because we need an army of cloud architects out there. There's not enough people. >> So that's true, but we carry an enormous responsibility in the marketplace as a vendor. We have to make things simple, right? There's still, you know, most of the IT infrastructure's still very complex to program and automate and the likes. That's why we're putting an enormous amount of RnD efforts, right? DevNet is like the tip of the spear. It's showing fundamentally our very loyal CCIEs and everybody else there's a better way to do things, right? Where you can actually really automate things together. You can get access to the APIs and simplify your life. You can simplify your life and the life of the business 'cause you can get faster. So making things simple, automating them, I don't know, if you think about, for instance, our cloud management orchestration philosophy. With the cloud center, we have a patent where we can actually model the application at once. And deploying it to wherever you want. We can deploy that application on-prem, on a VM, or like viralize kind of infrastructure. You can put it into AWS, you can put it into Azure, whatever you want. Kubernetes is kind of target on-prem. That is simplicity, right? We have to drive simplicity. And for me, it's all about automation, and sometimes you hear things like, in 10-base architecture and infrastructure all of that means simplicity and security. And that's the complexity of the whole thing for us is trading off, of course some of the complexity, richness, and flexibility. But it's got to be simple. If we don't make it simple, we are actually failing our goals. And that's where we're putting an enormous amount of RnD effort. >> And Jonathan, you guys at WWT have a unique aperture, view of the marketplace. You see a lot of the landscape, knowing what you guys do. Every vendor says they it, but you're really customer focused, so you're in you're digging in with the customers, it's a real value added service. I got to ask you the question with multi-cloud it sounds easy just to connect them all, right? It's like a subnet plug it in the coax, put a hub there. Put some adapter cards on a PC. The old days of connecting things. It just metaphorically seems easy What's the opportunity for connecting multi-cloud? So, as people realize when they wake up tomorrow or today. And they go, hey, you know what, I got lot of multi-cloud around. How do I connect them together? What's the opportunity, what's the opportunity for Cisco. 'Cause that seems to be the first order of business. I can connect things together in the architecture. And then what happens next? What's the opportunity to connect these clouds. >> The opportunity is gigantic. If you look at just the growth of the public clouds themselves. The CAGRs that they're representing. They're growing the rate their growing on very big numbers already. And it often gets overlooked, but Gartner will tell you also that the co-location, that cloud edge space, is also growing at a good CAGR. So you have just more and more going there. All of that needs to be connected. All of it needs to be protected. So networking is not just networking. Networking is security. A critical pillar of any security practice is really understanding and knowing in-depth your network. The introspection of it all. And at the same time, we're moving from a physical world. And we've moved and virtualized, but now the virtualization of the network now with SD-WAN coming, you're moving to a programmable model, where everything needs to be programmed. So it's not humans. So it's almost like every arc. Just in terms of the amount of data, the amount of traffic, that's all growing. Now, it's not just humans, it's machines doing things. And then also it's not just physical connections. It's software. So it's a three dimensional plot and it's growing on every axis. >> It just not in every device, it's software as a device. Software device connections. Service connections. What's Cisco's opportunity? How positioned are they that can do this? Because there's a lot of conversation around edge. Now you just mentioned a few of them, 5G. What's Cisco's opportunity in all this? >> Well I mean I think Cisco's shown recently and then through generations that they have a unique ability to lead and move with the market. And they're demonstrating that now. So, I think the importance of where the network sits, and not just the network, but again there's an adjacency of security. There's an adjacency of orchestration and management. Their global presence, their global operation. The sophistication of their channel business. All those things put them in a really strong place, we feel. >> You mentioned SD-WAN in a previous comment around talking about edge and stuff. If you think about Office 365, when companies roll that out. That basically takes SD-WAN from a little niche industry to all the internet. SD-WAN is basically the internet now. Your old grandfather's SD-WAN was over here, now everything's SD-WAN. That's basically the internet. So talk about the SD-WAN impact in this because with edge, that's super important too. Your thoughts. >> Well, it was back when we were talking about that traffic patterns are changing. So you're moving to no longer really this campus branch closed network. There's still an important need for that, of course. But now you're doing your business where your customers are. On their phone, in their car. Which means you're having to traverse and work and scale in a very different way. It's part where you have to put the network. And then, it's how you have to run and connect the network in your retail store or in these other things. Part of it is doing what we've always done in a better way. And then probably every day, more of it is about doing things in a new way that you couldn't do in the past to achieve a new business objective. >> Well Jonathan, thanks for coming on theCUBE conversation. I'd love to have you back on. Great insight. We could also do remotes. So when you go back to the home branch in St. Louis we can bring you in. >> Tells you Silicon Valley and St. Louis, man. Silicon angle, Silicon Valley, St. Louis. >> Let's do it. And I'll say congratulations on your success with Cisco. Fabio, it's been great to see you. Final word, Fabio, just bring it all together. Multi-cloud, it's here, kind of that's the reality. >> Yeah, I want to go back really to where we started the conversation, right? We can't forget the multicloud is still like a mean to and end. The end is, companies want to become and need to become innovative and fast. And that's actually why all this interest in multicloud. It's a business engine. That's why we're all so excited. Because it's a business issue. It's not so much a brand new technology that probably in two years is going to be out of fashion. My personal prediction, we're going to be talking about multicloud for several years. On the contrary of other trends. >> And just to real quickly bring in what we talked about before we came on camera. This is a CEO issue of companies, not CIO. >> Absolutely. >> This is showing the culture and the urgency, really, in all this. >> That's right. >> Absolutely. Guys, thanks so much for coming on. Great insight. Multi-cloud conversation, fantastic. Jonathan King, Vice President of Strategy, Data Center, and Cloud for WWT. Also Fabio Gori, friend of theCUBE, Senior Director Cloud Solution and Marketing at Cisco. Thanks for coming on. This theCUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat funky music)

>> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown San Francisco at The Hotel Nikko. It's International Women's Day, March 8th. A lot of stuff happening all over the world. We came here today 'cause Accenture's got a great program, put together about 400 people, a number of panels on a number of topics. We're excited that they invited us to cover it and we've got some really exciting guests. And our next guest is Sabeen Ali, she's the founder and CEO of AngelHack. Sabeen welcome. >> Thank you so much. >> And she's joined by Ellen McGirt, the senior editor of Fortune, welcome. >> Thank you. >> So I think we all know what Fortune is. >> Ellen: We do. >> But we don't probably all know what AngelHack is. So Sabeen, what is AngelHack? Give us kind of the overview. >> Yeah, I'll give you the eight second elevator pitch. We are an international hackathon organizing company. We travel the world and organize hackathons all over the world. And we basically create a bridge between Silicon Valley and the rest of the world to bring entrepreneurs here and give them the same opportunities that Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have. >> So do you do independent hackathons or do you like contract it? 'Cause every conference we go to, we do like 100 conferences a year, always has some hackathon component. Do you help other people put on hackathons or you just do your own kind of independent? >> We do both, actually. So we organize a 50 city global hackathon series which is our own, and then we also work with corporate partners such as Accenture and HPE and others to organize hackathons for their brand. >> And is it thematic? Is there a special thing about the hackathons that you guys do and why you think that that's a interesting way to either develop talent, deliver a message, deliver solutions, what's special about hackathons? >> Yeah, well, what I can tell you is, what's special about hackathons is that it's a community space where people feel comfortable exploring themselves and exploring their talents, working with new individuals, and really giving them an opportunity to learn new things and try new things. What's very different about AngelHack is we're actually the world's largest and most diverse in developer ecosystem, so we actually have a wide range of diverse backgrounds and genders that come to our events, and we personally think that that's really where innovation happens, when you bring a variety of different backgrounds and minds together to get together and solve problems using technology. >> Can I just brag on you for a second? Because we just got off stage together where she just wowed the crowd with stories of these hackathons from around the world, and it's not just that there's diversity, and it's not just that they've given them the tools to succeed. She's going to Kabul, she's going to San Diego, she's bringing people who ordinarily never get the attention although plenty of people in San Diego get attention, I didn't name all the right cities, and she's bringing them together and then she's helping them fine tune, and then she's bringing them to the attention of people in power, it is extraordinary. >> Thank you. >> This is the sign of the times. The innovation, like things are starting to happen and markets are opening up, and Sabeen is one of the people who is absolutely making it happen. And that's what Fortune does best, we brag on the people that we write about. (laughing) >> That's great. And why do you think, Ellen, why are things changing now? It definitely feels like they are. >> Ellen: It does. >> But, you know, the cynic would say, yeah we've heard all this before, and, you know, pick your favorite time, you know, it's not really different, you know, this too will pass. Why is it different now? >> You know, and we were talking about this and I actually wish I knew, and I'm a cynic too depending on where I am in my deadline cycle, so sometimes I'm super optimistic and sometimes I think it's just crazy, but I think it's the confluence of many, many things. We've had a lot of stories about injustice and lack of access from every possible sphere, and race, and age, and country, and religion, all of it. And we have the very same tools, social media tools that are spreading things that are false, are spreading things that are true. And people are legitimately finding each other, and people are legitimately finding a tribe, for lack of a better term, and it's kind of exciting. So when you hear about things like AngelHack, which I always am looking for these in my daily column, it can resonate with people who are not part of the ecosystem and they can absorb the lessons of inclusion and optimism and bring it to the rest of their lives. And plus everything's crazy right now, in the world. >> Yeah, I think it's really important to also point out that in America our political climate and certain personalities that are in power right now, there's certain topics and subject matters that are becoming everyday topics. People are becoming a lot more comfortable talking about sexual harassment and talking about women in the workplace and it's not like a lot of the stories that women are telling are things that just happened yesterday, this is stuff that's from, that's happened in the past that now unlocked in their memories or they're feeling a lot more comfortable talking about it because we're actually creating an environment where people can talk about it and we're actually creating a language that people can use to express their experiences and their emotions about it. >> You're absolutely right. >> So many places we could go. But it was interesting that we're in kind of this rough middle ground where we haven't really kind of made this transition to where we're hoping to go, and it was an interesting comment at one of the other panels, you probably weren't in it, you were in your panel, about the Me Too has actually scared some men away from being mentors, and somebody said, you know, there's less. We cover the Grace Hopper Celebration and the sum of the numbers of women coming out of engineering programs, computer science specifically, are actually not going in the direction that you would think. So we're still kind of in these choppy waters, but I'm just wondering, when you set up your hackathon have you ever set up just not diverse teams to show that the output with the diverse team of opinions, points of view, backgrounds, race, sex, pick your favorite variable, actually deliver better results? >> Well, there's a ton of scientific research that actually shows that diverse groups and a diverse set of backgrounds delivers better results. So groupthink, it's been proven to be very detrimental. At our events we don't form the teams, we let the community self-organize, and we've seen time and time again that we can actually never predict who the winning team is going to be and what the make up of that team is going to look like. >> Yeah, you have to try that sometime. Put 'em in little, I don't even know, it doesn't even matter which single group you chose, you just know, as you said, the evidence is pretty clear, they're not going to perform as well as difference of opinions. Ellen, you're shaking your head. >> I know, I just sort of thought about like the sad little homogenous group who is sort of like set up to fail. (laughing) And that maybe there's a kinder way to make the case. >> Give them gummy bears or something. (laughing) So, with all you've done at AngelHack, where are you going next? What do you see as you look down the road? I still can't believe it's 2018 and we're almost a quarter of the way through this calendar year. What are some of your priorities if we come together a year form now, what will you have worked on? >> Yeah, hopefully a year from now we would have expanded into more than 92 cities, into more remote regions than we have now, and also we're doubling down on our accelerator. We want to make sure that our winning teams have an opportunity to really come to Silicon Valley or get access to funding that's available in Silicon Valley so that they can have funding and they can be successful for many years to come. >> And do you see within some of the groups that don't have access, obviously, to the money and the location in Silicon Valley, that people realize kind of what a powerful world changer technology can be, that you can actually write some code and deliver it to the entire world, that people actually use your code to do something different? >> Yeah, absolutely, that's what we're advocating for, that's really, honestly, what a lot of out topics discuss, that technology doesn't discriminate. It's really when people take a look at it, and in fact, GitHub did some research that they put code that was written by men versus code that was written by women and then they had people rate it, and immediately people were rating the code that was written by men higher, and then they didn't put what gender wrote it and then the code that was written by women was higher. So I think the research is starting and people are starting to realize to put technology first and gender maybe doesn't even belong in the judging criteria here. >> And do you think, Ellen, part of it's maybe just because we need more people? I mean there's, you know, on one hand autonomous everything is going to knock out all the jobs, on the other hand check the job listings 'cause we need a lot more people. >> We do, we do. And you're right, we're losing, what, 25% of jobs with new technology coming in, but we're also going to bring all kinds of people online who do not have access to even modern services. We're going to need some very basic things and they're going to need access to markets, and then they're going to become more responsible consumers and they, in turn, will then propose ideas that will make everybody's lives better because one of things that we talked about is that innovation tends to happen in a bubble and people are solving problems that they themselves are happening, but there's a whole world that would be improved by new levels of thinking and that would also create more jobs. >> And they're new jobs, right? There wasn't such a thing as a software developer, you know, 20 years ago, and if you're a buggy whip guy it's probably not a great time to be in business today. So while there are many jobs that are going to get wiped out, there's new jobs. You know, social media manager, I mean, that didn't exist, what, five years ago at most companies, now it's a huge part of a lot of corporations. So it's this constant evolution and yin and yang. >> Constant evolution. >> So what are you looking forward to in 2018 as you kind of, you've got kind of a broad view of the landscape. >> I do, and I write a daily column about race and culture, so that is how we got a chance to meet. You know, diversity and inclusion has been sort of the thing I've been studying for the last two years and as difficult as the world is and as crazy as it is, I really do see an opening that's happening where people are becoming more open to the idea of thinking different ways and embracing people who are different from themselves and not feeling threatened. We're still in choppy waters though, you're absolutely right. >> Well, and the other thing too, right? I was thinking if you're a 100 miles from a coast in the United States, I won't speak for other countries 'cause I don't know it as well, you know, there's a point of view and if you're more than 100 miles from the coast, maybe with Chicago as an island or Denver, there's a little bit of a difference, are you seeing, kind of, it getting beyond those kind of short borders, 'cause obviously, as you said, a lot of social stuff going on right now, there's a lot of diametrically opposed views, and I blame actually technology for a lot of it because thanks to the recommendation engines we tend to get served up things that we've read in the past, so unlike where you had kind of one newspaper in town, everybody had to read it so it had to be kind of down the middle. Now, the silly algorithms will keep delivering stuff that supports my point of view and other people will get delivered with their point of view, and I think the surprise after the election illustrated it more than anything that people didn't know anything about the other side, the shock, so are we getting past that? Do you see, kind of, what's your take on that? >> I'll start and then you jump in. I think that when we invest in communities that are under invested in, wherever they are, I live in St. Louis, you will see innovations. And maybe you won't always see the innovations that you're hoping for that will knit society together, but investment will flow and new product ideas will flow, and most importantly to your point, an understanding of how the world actually works will flow. The reason why to study software and code engineering is maybe that you don't want to be that, maybe you want to be an opera singer, but it will make you a better, more informed citizen. It will make you understand what's real and what's not real. I'm a big fan of liberal arts education in technology because it helps you understand how people actually behave and what markets actually need. >> Right. >> So I think that as people have the tools and use the tools, investments will follow, lifestyle will follow. So I guess I'm just outing myself as an optimist here. >> Jeff: Good, that's good. >> Sabeen, what do you think? >> I have to be optimistic, as well. Again, being at the forefront of emerging technology, I know that there's people looking to solve that very problem, and they're coming form a diverse group of engineers, and I really feel like that we're going to come up with a lot of tech solutions that are going to make a lot more diversity, inclusion, easier to facilitate, and easier to implement in corporations as well. >> Well, keep up your good work. I mean, at the end of the day it's about democratization. It's giving more people more access to the tools and you're going to get better solutions, more solutions, more diverse solutions. So, great job, and thanks for taking a few minutes. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much. >> Alright, I'm Jeff Frick, we're at the Accenture International Women's Day Celebration. Thanks for watching. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from the Computer History Museum, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering Food IT, Fork to Farm. Brought to you by Western Digital. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin, with Jeff Frick, and we have just spent a really interesting educational day at the Fork to Farm event, Food IT. Jeff we've spoken with investors, ag-tech experts, folks in academia who are training the next generation of farmers, to Campbell Soup, who's been around since the late 1800s, are really focused on helping the agriculture and food industry combat the challenges of environmental sustainability, of climate change, of labor shortages, it's been a really, really intriguing day, where tech meets food and agriculture. >> Yeah and just a huge opportunity. One of the themes that kept coming up over and over again, is the average age of the farmers today. Heard 70 something, 60 something, whatever, they're getting old, so there's going to be a huge turnover in this industry, so both a challenge as well as an opportunity for the next generation of ag-people to make some of these changes, and change the way the industry works. The other thing that's really interesting that I found Lisa, is that there's really big social issues that are at play here. We talked about water, we talked about labor, that play into this whole thing, sustainability. And again, tying it back to their theme of its fork to farm, how much of that's now driven by the consumer and the industry, it's kind of a reaction to the consumer, which we see over and over and over in all the other shows that we go. The consumerization IT, driven by younger people's interactions with their phones, is setting an expectation of the way they want everything to work. And so, it sounds like the food industry is really at the cutting edge of this, still really early on, but as we saw in some of those market maps, and the innovation is rich, feels like we're really at the start of this thing. So even though this show has been around for a few years, they have the big show in Salinas next week, the Forbes show, that's still really early days of leveraging tech, innovation, to change the food industry. >> It is, and you brought up that the labor shortages, and that was echoed quite a bit today, for a number of reasons. One, the aging population of farmers as you mentioned. Two, also in California, the minimum wage going up, and that's not only going to be a problem Jeff for farmers, but it's actually now pervading into the retail space, where they're going to have to start depending on robotics to be able to create, or to reduce their cost, to provide even fast food. That was something that was quite interesting to me, I hadn't really quite thought about, from that channel perspective. >> Right, right. >> And then as you mentioned, on the tech enabled consumer side, I was talking with Jeff earlier, I kept thinking farm to fork, 'cause farm to table is so trendy now, right? There's a lot of apps. And you gave me this a-ha grasshopper look, and it was really because as consumers we've really demanded so much. We want transparency, we want to know exactly what's in things, and we want organic, and hormone-free, and we also want things delivered whenever, and wherever we want them. We think of the distribution model, has really become very decentralized, and a lot of that being driven by the consumer. On the farm side too, regarding the attrition, there's also a lot of antiquated, especially in the post-harvest supply chain, things that are still written down on paper, traceability is a huge challenge for them. And I think from some of the things we heard today, a lot of the farming, especially in California, they can't really quite see all the data that they have, but they are sitting on a lot of information, that not only could make their farms more efficient, but could also facilitate you think, even knowledge transfer to the next generation of farmers. Right, right. Yeah a lot of talk about kind of there wasn't a lot of data, now it's a data flood. So how do you use those data sources to be more intelligent in what you do? And I specifically asked some of the guests, you know, are kind of the classic big data players participating in this space, and she said, "Not really." They're all kind of holding off on the side waiting to get in. But these are big numbers, this is a big impact. The professor from St. Louis Episcopal talked about a billion dollars worth of strawberries that you got to get off the field, and if you don't have the labor to get it off, and the data to get the labor and to time it right, it's a billion dollars worth of strawberries, and these are big numbers. And the other thing that just fascinated me, is again, this power of the consumer. The Google guy who took basically what was a service just to feed employees and keep them around so they write more code, but using that as a platform to drive much more thoughtfulness and intelligence. And supply chain changes around food, and even called it food shot in reference to the moon shot. >> The moon shot, yes. >> Enabled better diets, shift diets, food transparency, reduced loss and waste, accelerate transformation to a circular food economy. So, and they said, I think he's been at it for 15 years or thereabout. So really an interesting kind of a twist, on what you would not expect from the food service people, you think of them just supplying food. >> Exactly. >> Not trying to drive cultural change. >> Exactly, and trying to scale, but they're using data from their own googlers, to help determine and evaluate what people are doing, what they want, preferences, making it more personal, and using data in that way to also then facilitate some of the upstream, you know from the supply perspective, making things, meeting those challenges that the consumers are demanding, but you said he's been at Google for five years, and when he first got the call being in hospitality for so long, he just thought, "Google, what do they want to talk to me for?" And how revolutionary they've been, and you can think of how much education can happen from Google Food alone. I was quite blown away by that. >> Yeah, the other kind of theme is unused resources. So, one of the food trucks that they had seaweed. Why seaweed? Because it takes no fresh water, it takes no fertilizer, and it's carbon negative. So not really about how does it taste, but some specific reasons to try to make seaweed a better food, a more satisfying food. Talked about kale, and really again what a great example of a, can't say it, Fork to Farm tradition, 'cause before kale was a throwaway, nobody grew kale, now suddenly everybody wants kale smoothies, and so there's nothing, plant became something of importance, driven by the consumer, not necessarily by the producers. So, very dynamic times. I think again, the trend we see over and over and over, finding the hollowing out of the middle. You know, you don't want to be just a generic provider in the middle, you better have massive scale, or you better be a real specialty provider. And then finally the ramifications of the Amazon purchase of Whole Foods, really validating, yes you want digital, yes you want data, yes you want to provide better customer service. But at the same time, you still need a physical presence, kind of validating the physical presence of the store like Whole Foods. So really a very dynamic activity going on in this space. >> And it'll be interesting to see what happens over the next five to 10 years, as farming generationally changes hands. And there is technology that's available today, right? We talked about big data, there's many, many sources of public data, whether it's satellite imagery, water data that can be utilized and then paired with private data that a farm has. Or using GPS devices on tractors and combines, robotics. You talked to the inventor of the Sally Salad machine, there's a lot of technology that might be, I don't know if I'd say ahead of its time, but I think from a farming perspective, there's a little bit of a gap there right now. So it'll be very interesting to see how farms evolve from a technology perspective. I love how the Forbes AgTech Summit, I think it's tomorrow and Thursday in Salinas Valley, what a great juxtaposition of Silicon Valley and a world hub of technology innovation, to Salinas, which is the salad bowl of the world. I think that is quite interesting, and some of the dynamics that they've seen, I think this was their fourth event tomorrow. >> Jeff: Fourth event, right, right. >> Really starting to get more farmers interested in understanding the potential that ag-tech can have on profitability, efficiencies, reducing waste, even things like discovering and preventing foodborne pathogens. >> Right, and robots, we need robots, we don't have enough labor. Michael Rose said there's going to be a shortage of hundreds of thousands of line cooks. Just regular, ordinary line cooks at restaurants, and that's really kind of one of the applications of the salad machine, because as you hit the button below that cook, you can hit the button to load that salad, while you run off and pull the rest of the entree meals together. So, again, it's really fun to see the consistent themes that we see over and over, that's computing cloud and data-driven decision making, applied to what's arguably one of the most important things going on, which is feeding us a lot of conversation about the world's population getting to 10 billion in the not too distant future, that have to be fed. And again, with the aging of the population, the traditional farmers, a real opportunity to do kind of a refresh with a bunch of people that have grown up with these things. So, really cool show, a great day, hope you had fun, I had fun. >> Oh, I had a great time, it was really educational. I think that you hit the nail on the head, there's a tremendous amount of opportunity. I think what the Mixing Bowl is doing, along with Better Foods, is really bringing the people that are creating food, and producing it together, and connecting them with the people that are creating technology. So, I think this is the tip of the iceberg head of lettuce, maybe? So, I am excited to see what happens over time, but not only was it a great event, but I'm now very hungry. >> Now you're very hungry, there's more food trucks outside. Alright Lisa, well thank you again for hosting. >> Thank you. >> Again, another great show. I think last time we were together was at the NAB. >> NAB. >> Talking about media entertainment, so the digitization, transformation continues, driven by all these huge macro-factors of cloud, big data, so the beat rolls on. >> It does. >> Alright, she's Lisa Martin, and I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCube. Thanks for watching, we've got a busy spring coming to an end. Had a little bit of a lull in the summer then we'll hit it hard again in the fall, so thanks for watching siliconangle.tv, youtube.com/siliconangle, and siliconangle.com for complete coverage of a lot of stories beyond just theCUBE. I'm Jeff Frick, signing off with Lisa Martin from Food IT, from Fork to Food, thanks for watching.

live from Gillette Stadium in Foxboro Massachusetts extracting the signal from the noise it's the kue covering Vitas New England winter warmer 2016 now your host Stu minimum welcome back to the cube I'm Stu miniman with Wikibon com we are here at the 2016 v tug winter warmer at Gillette Stadium home of the New England Patriots and very excited to have a patriot Hall of Famer three-time Super Bowl champion number 80 Troy brown Troy thank you so much for stopping by oh man thank you for having me on I appreciate it alright so so so Troy you know we got a bunch of geeks here and they they they we talked about you know their jobs are changing a lot and you know the question I have for you is you did so many different jobs when you're on the Patriot you know how do you manage that how do you go about that from a mindset i mean i think so many of the job you did we're so specialized never spent years doing it yet you know you excelled in a lot of different positions i think first of all i think the coach bill belichick you know I think he does a good job of evaluating is his people and his players and the people that work for them and think about him he never asked an individual to do more than they can handle and I think I was one of those individuals that he saw that could you know didn't get her out about too many different things that didn't get seemed like I was overwhelmed at any moment with the job that I was at already asked to do and if I had to do multiple jobs then I would probably be one of those guys that could handle that type of situation so it started with him and in me I guess it was just my personality and my work havoc and my work ethic and just never letting the opponent know that I was a little bit shaken a little bit weary a little bit tired at times and I just continue to chip away and be my job and not you know and I took a lot of pride in being able to manage and do a lot of different things at one time and and then really accelerate yeah so you saw the transformation in the Patriot organization I mean you know it great organization here in New England but you know we were living in a phenomenal time for the Patriots over the last 20 years it and what do you attribute that that transformation to well I think it started you know you look at when Robert crab bought the team in 94 which I was here year before he bought the team in 93 I was glad to be true Bledsoe and parcels are the first year and that really Parcells really kind of got people around here excited about football I think for the first time they were having you know capacity crowds at training camp out at Bryant college you know something they never did before I mean you're talking about a team that won two games the year prior they were two and 14 and things got so lucky winning those two games in 1992 so you bringing a guy that's you know when a couple super bowls with the Giants high-profile guy gets everybody excited about the possibility of winning and I think things started to change then and then you bring in a hands-on owner because I believe James awethu wine was the previous owner that he bought the team from and lived in st. Louis it can't be hands-on when you you know live you know half the country away from from here so he bought the team and bought the local guy and again that the enthusiasm goes through the roof and expectations in through the roof we make the playoffs in 1994 and you know the things happen they don't get along and then when you go through another coach Pete Carroll for three years and you bring in Belo check and he drives a young quarterback by the name of Tom Brady and you know those types of things those people those guys able to handle different things and different jobs as well you know and you couple that with you surround them with good people like myself david patten Antwone Smith I laws or the lawyer milloy Rodney Harrison guys that kind of embody the Patriot Way and you get what you have today and it all started with the fact that mr. Kraft and Bill Belichick now been together with 15 16 years and I think you look across the NFL across any sport you don't see the type of longevity and the type of continuity that those who have and you throw on Tom Brady into that mixers been along for that entire ride as well you just think you're not going to find out in any other sport any other team maybe a couple here you notice end Antonio Spurs no in longevity I believe it is the key and you have to build that you know see you see too many owners that throwing the town were too quick yeah you know what the young coast is trying to build a team in the system yeah so I have to ask you if you had to choose one for 15 years pray to your Belichick for 15 years yeah 15 years that maybe Brady because you know it eventually will come to an end you know Bella chikan probably coach I want to know one only known for longer than 15 years we had to choose one for 15 years I guess I'll go with Brady but you know I don't think I know if one works not the other you know so that's kind of how to be a question that people be asking for many many years to come yeah so personally for you when you look back at your career you know any favorite moments that they have that mean there's so many to so many the franchise for yourself i mean i could think of all the ones that i had the pleasure to say that was a big punt return against the pittsburgh starters yeah AFC championship no well botas me start up the scoring for us yeah that was a big moment that the strip in 06 in the superbowl that year it was a big play yeah able to get us into the AFC championship game this all the Super Bowls that we were part of and then were able to win and all those moments are just so treasured and value about me that is kind of hard to place a place one over the other but you know it was all a lot of great and fantastic moments for us all right so last question I have for you looking at the Patriots today what's your prediction for the Patriots you know going on in the playoffs here going to the AFC champ I think it a bit difficult task Denver's not been a friendly place for the Patriots over the history of this franchise not just now but it is specifics as to why it's so tough to find there I don't know I don't know what it is I mean you could say the altitude but we've been out then we played well at times even there's team this year they played well the first time they went out there had an unfortunate drop punt you know that kind of changed the complexity of the game and things just changed I mean it's that's the kind of luck that we have the last time I played out there was I think 05 I think of something in the divisional round and I fumbled Kevin Faulk fumble Tom Brady threw a pick-six basically and it was like you threw your most dependable players that turned the football over and didn't play well you know how often that would that happen so Rob Gronkowski gets hit in the knee this year so and then lose him for a couple games and his season starts to turn so just so many unfortunate things that happen out there but you have to give Denver a lot of credit as well because you know they come out and they play hard to have a really good defense quarterback that can be really good you know he's a game manager at this point in his career that's a great job of doing it you know and it seemed to rally behind his presence on the field so it'll be a tough task for the Patriots even though I think the Patriots do have the better football team overall it's just been a difficult place for the New England Patriots to get wins yeah in the past I said you have a matchup for the Super Bowl that you're picking I'm picking the Patriots for sure and from what I saw from Carolina last week I got to go with Carolina playing at home against Arizona I think the defense is just too tough and Cam Newton and that run game and that offensive line has just been been pretty remarkable and surprising after losing probably the best offensive weapon in Kelvin Benjamin so yeah well you know a little something about a Carolina versa you know New England Super Bowl so hopefully things will turn out like it did last time try really appreciate you stopping by thank you so much for trying to save the program will be right back here with a wrap-up of the cubes coverage of the V tug 2016 winter warmer thanks so much for watching you