>> Welcome back to Los Angeles. TheCUBE is live. I can't say that enough. The cube is live. We're at KubeCon Cloud Native Con 21. We've been here all day yesterday, and today and tomorrow I'm talking with lots of guests, really uncovering what's going on in the world of Kubernetes. Lisa Martin, here with Dave Nicholson. We've got some folks. Next we're going to be talking about a customer use case, which is always one of my favorite things to talk about. Please welcome Micah Coletti, the principal platform engineer at CHG healthcare, and Venkat Ramakrishnan VP of products from Portworx by Pure Storage, guys welcome to the program. >> Thank you. >> Happy to be here. >> Yeah. So Micah, first of all, let's go ahead and start with you. Give the audience an overview of CHG healthcare. >> Yeah. So CHG healthcare, we're a staffing company. So we try like a little companion. So our clients are doctors and hospitals, so we help staff hospitals with temporary doctors or even permanent placing. So we deal with a lot of doctors, a lot of nursing and we're a combination of multiple companies. So CHG is the parent. So, and yeah, we're known in the industry as one of the leaders in this field and providing hospitals with high quality doctors and nurses. And, you know, our customer service is like number one, and one of the things our CEO is really focused on is now how do we make that more digital? How do we provide that same level of quality of service, but a digital experience as rich for her. >> I can imagine it was a massive need for that in the last 18 months alone. >> COVID definitely really raised that awareness up for us and the importance of that digital experience and that we need to be out there in the digital market. >> Absolutely. So you're a customer port works by pure storage, we're going to get into that, but then Venkat talk to us about what's going on, the acquisition of port works by pure storage was about a year ago. Talk to us about your VP of products what's going on. >> Yeah, I mean, you know, first of all, I think I could not say how much of a great fit for a Portworx will be part of pure storage, it's, pure itself is a very fast moving, large startup that's a dominant leader in the flash and data center space, and, you know, pure recognizes the fact that Kubernetes is the new operating system of the cloud is not how, you know, it's kind of virtualizing the cloud itself, and there's a, you know, a big burgeoning need for data management and Kubernetes and how you can kind of orchestrate workloads between your on-prem data centers and the cloud and back. So Portworx fits right into the story as complete vision of data management for our customers, and it's been phenomenal. Our business has grown as part of being part of a pure, and you know, we're looking at launching some new products as well, and it's all exciting times. >> So you must've been pretty delighted to be acquired as a startup by essentially a startup because, because although pure has reached significant milestones in the storage business and is a leader in flash storage still that that startup mindset is absolutely unique. That's not, that's not the same as being acquired by a company that's been around for a hundred years seeking to revitalize itself. >> Absolutely. >> Can you talk a little bit about that aspect? >> Yeah, So I think, you know, purist culture is a highly innovation-driven and it's a very open, flat culture, right? I mean, it's, everybody in pure is accessible. It can easily have a composition with folks and everybody has his learning mindset and Portworx is and has always been the same way. Right? So when you put these teams together, if we can create wonders, I mean, we right after the acquisition, just within a few months, we announced an integrated solution that portworx orchestrates volumes and file shares in pure splash products and then delivers as an integrated solution for our customers, and pure has a phenomenal cloud-based monitoring and management system called pure one that we integrated well into. Now, we're bringing the power of all of the observability that pure's customers are used to for all of the corporate customers, and I've been super happy, you know, delegating that capability to our customers and our customers are delighted. Now they can have a complete view all the way from Kubernetes app to the flash. and I don't think any one company in the planet can even plan they can do that. >> I think it's fair to acknowledge that pure one was observability before observability was a word that everyone used regularly. >> Yep. >> Sounds very interesting. >> Micah Talk to us about, obviously you are a customer. CHG is a customer of Portworx now Portworx by Pure Storage. Talk to us about the use case. What, what was the compellent? Was there a compelling event and from a storage perspective that led you to Portworx in the first place. >> So we beat, they began this, our CEO base came to the vision, we need to have a digital presence we need enhances. and this was even before COVID. So they brought me on board and my, my manager read glossary. We basically had this task to, how are we going to get out into the cloud? How are we going to make that happen? And we chose to follow a very much a cloud native strategy and the platform of choice, I mean, it just made sense with Kubernetes. And so when we were looking at Kubernetes, we were starting to figure out how we're doing. We knew that data is going to be a big factor. You know, being a, provide data. We're very much focused on an event driven. We're really pushing to event driven architecture. So we leverage Kafka on top of Kubernetes, but at the time we were actually leveraging Kafka with a MSK down, out in AWS, and that was just a huge cost to us. So I came on board, I had experienced with Portworx, a prior company before that, and I basically said, we need to figure out a great storage relay overlay. and the only way to do is we got to have high performance storage, we've got to have secure. We got to be able to backup and recover that storage. And the Portworx was the right match. And that allowed us to have a very smooth transition off of MSK onto Kubernetes saving us a significant amount of money per month, and just leverage that already existing hardware that our existing compute memory and just, and the, and move right to Portworx. >> Leveraging your existing investments. >> Exactly. >> Which is key, >> Very key, very key so. >> So how common are the challenges that when you guys came together with CHG, how common are the challenges? >> It's actually a, that's a great question. You know, this is, you know, I'll tell you the challenges that Micah and his team are running into is what we see a lot in the industry where people pay a ton of money, you know to other vendors are, you know, especially in some cases use some cloud native services, but they want to have control over the data. They want to control the cost and they want higher performance and they want to have, you know, there's also governance and regulatory things that they need to control better. So they want to kind of bring these services and have more control over them. Right? So now we will work very well with all of our partners, including the cloud providers, as well as, you know, on-prem and server vendors and everybody, but different customers have different kinds of needs. And Portworx gives them that flexibility. If you are a customer who want, you know, have a lot of control over your applications, the performance, the latency, and want to control costs very well and leverage your existing investments Portworx can deliver that for you in your data center. Right now, you can integrate that with pure slash and you get a complete solution, or you want to run it in cloud, and you still want to have leverage the agility of the cloud and scale Portworx delivers a solution for you as well. So it kind of not only protects their investment its future proves their architecture, you get future proving your architecture completely. So if you want to tear the cloud or burst the cloud, you have a great solution that you can continue to leverage >> Micah, when you hear future-proof and I'm a marketer. So I always go, I love to know what it means to different people. What does that mean to you in your environment? >> My environment. So a future-proof means like one of the things we've been addressing lately, that's just a real big challenge. And I'm sure it's a challenge in the industry, especially the Q and A's is upgrading our clusters. The ability to actually maintain a consistent flow with how fast Kubernetes is growing, you know, they're, they they're out. I think he cast, we leverage the cast. So it's like 121 or 122 now, and that effort to upgrade a cluster, it can be a daunting one. With Portworx, we actually were able to make that to where we could actually spin up a brand new cluster. And with Portworx shift, all our applications, services, data migrated completely over, Portworx handles all of that for us and stand up that new cluster in, in less than a day. And that effort, I mean, it would take us a week, two weeks to do so, not even man hours and time spent there, but just the reliability of being able to do that in the cost, you know, instead of standing up a new cluster and configuring it and doing all that and spending all that time, we can just really, we move to what we call blue green cut-over strategy. And Portworx is an essential piece of that. >> So Venkat, is it fair to say that there are a variety of ways that people approach Portworx from a value perspective in terms of, I know that one area that you are particularly good in is the area of backups in this environment, but then you get data management and there's a third kind of vector there. What is the third vector? >> As all of the data services, >> Data services, >> Yeah Like for example, deep database as a service on any Kubernetes cluster feed on your cloud or your on-prem data centers. >> Which data, what kind of databases are you talking about? >> I mean we're talking about anything from Reddit Kafka, Post-stress my sequel console, we are supporting. We just announced something called a Portworx Data Services Offering that essentially delivers all these databases as a service on any Kubernetes cluster that a customer can point to and lets them kind of get the automated management of the database from day one to day three, the entire life cycle, you know, through regular Kubernetes, scoop cuddle experience through APIs and SDKs and a nice slick UI that they can, you know, that's, role-based access control and all of that, that they can completely control their data and their applications through it. And you know, that's the third vector of Portworx office. >> Micah a question for you. So Portworx has been a part of pure storage? You've known it since obviously for several years before you were at CHG, you brought it to CHG. You now know it a year into being acquired by a fast paced startup. Talk to me about the relationship and some of the benefits that you're getting with Portworx as a part of pure storage? >> Well, I mean, one of the things I, you know, when I heard about the acquisition, my first thing was, I was a little bit concerned is that relationship going to change? And when we were acquiring, when we were looking at adopting Portworx, one thing I would tell my management is Portworx is not just a vendor that wants to throw a solution on you and provide some capability. They're a partner. They want to partner with you and your success in your journey and this whole cloud native journey to provide this rich digital experience in the, for not only our platform engineering team, but our Dev teams, but also be able to really accelerate the development of our services. So we can provide that digital portal for our end users. And that didn't change. If anything, that it accelerated that relationship did not change. You know, I came to Venkat with an issue. We just we're, we're dealing with, he immediately got someone on a phone call with me. And so that has not changed. So it's really exciting to see that now that they've been acquired, that they still are very much invested in the success of their customers and making sure we're successful. You know, it's not all of a sudden. I was worried I was going to have to do a whole different support PA process, and it was going to go into a black hole. Didn't happen. They still are very much involved with their customers. >> It's sounds kind of Venkat similar to what you talked about with the cultural alignment. I've known here for a long time and they're very customer centric sounds like one of the areas in which there was a very strong alignment with Portworx >> Absolutely. and Portworx has always taken pride in being customer first company. Our founders are heavily customer focused. You know, they are aligned. They want, they have always aligned. our portraits business to our customers' needs. Now Pure is a company that's maniacally focused on customers, right? I mean, that's all in a pure pounder cars and everybody cared about. And so, you know, bringing these companies together and being part of the Pure team, I kind of see how, how synergistic it is. And, you know, we have, you know, that has enabled us to serve our customer's customers even better than before. >> So I'm curious about the two of you personally, in terms of your, your histories, I'm going to assume that you didn't both just bounce out of high school into the world of Kubernetes, right? So like Lisa and I you're spanning the generations between the world of say virtualization based on x86 architecture, virtualization, where you're not, you don't have microservices, you have a full blown operating system that you're working with. Kind of talk about, you know, Micah with you first talk about what that's been like navigating that change. We were in the midst of that. Do you have advice for others that are navigating that change? >> Don't be afraid of it. You know, a lot of people want to, you know, I call it we're moving from where we're name me. We still have cats and dogs. They have a name that the VMs either whether or not they're physical boxes or their VMs to where it's more like, he'd say cattle, you know, it's like we don't own the OOS and not to be afraid of afraid of that, because change is really good. You know, the ability for me to not have to worry about patching and operating system, it's huge, you know, where I can rely on someone like EKS and, and the version and allow them to, if a CV comes out, they let me know. I go and I use their tools to be able to upgrade. So I don't have to literally worry about owning that OOS and containers as the same thing. You know, you, you know, it's all about being fault-tolerant right. And being able to be changed or where, you know, you can actually roll out a new version of a container, a base image with a lot of ease without having to go and patch a bunch of servers. I mean, patch night was hell and sorry if I could say that, but it was a nightmare, you know, but this whole world has just been a game changer with that. >> So Venkat from your perspective, you were coming at it, going into a startup, looking at the landscape in the future and seeing opportunity. What what's that been like for you? I guess the question for you is more something, Lisa and I talk about this concept of peak Kubernetes, where are we in the wave? Is this just, is this just the beginning? Are we in the thick of it? >> I think I would say we're kind of transitioning from early adopters, early majority phase in the whole, you know, crossing the chasm analogy, right? So I would say we're still early stages of this big wave. That's going to transform how infrastructure is built. Apps are apps are built and managed and run in production. I think some of the pieces, the key pieces are falling in place and maturing. There are some other pieces like observability and security, you know, kind of edge use cases need to be, you know, they're kind of going to get a lot more mature and you'll see that the cloud, as we know today, and the apps, as we know today, they're going to be radically different. And you know, if you're not building your apps and your business on this modern platform, on this modern infrastructure, you're going to be left behind. You know, I, my wife's birthday was a couple of days ago. I was telling the story to my couple of friends is that I, I used another flowers delivery website. They miss delivering the flowers on the same day, right. So they told me all kinds of excuses. Then I just went and looked up a, you know, like door dash, which is delivers, you know, and then, you know, like your food, but there's also flower delivery and door dash and I don't do I door dash flowers to her, and I can track the flower delivery all the way she did not need them, but my kids love the chocolates though. Right. So, and you know, the case in point is that you cannot be in a building, a modern business without leveraging the model tool chain and modern tool chain and how the business is going to be delivered at that thing is going to be changing dramatically. And those kinds of customer experience, if you don't deliver, you're not going to be successful in business. And Kubernetes is the fundamental technology that enables this containers is a fundamental piece of technology that enables building new businesses, you know, modernizing existing businesses. And the 5G is going to be, there's going to be new innovations. It's going to get unleashed. And again, Kubernetes and containers enable us to leverage those. And so we're still scratching the surface on this. It's big. Now, it's going to be much, much bigger, you know, as, as we go into the next couple of years. >> Speaking, scratching the surface, Micah, take us out in the last 30 seconds or so with where CHG healthcare is on institutional transformation, how is Portworx facilitating that? >> So we're, we're right in the thick of it. I mean, we are, we still have what we call the legacy. We're working on getting those, but I mean, we're really moving forward to provide that rich experience, especially with event driven platforms like Kafka and Kubernetes and partnering with Portworx is one of the key things for us with that. And AWS along with that. But we're a, and I remember I heard a talk and I can't, I can't remember her name, but he talked about how, how Pure Kubernetes is sort of like the 56K modem, right. You're hearing it and see, but it's got to get to the point where it's just there. It's just the high-speed internet and Kelsey Hightower. That's great. But yeah, and I really liked that because that's true, you know, and that's where we are. We're all in that transition where we're still early, it's still at 50. So you still want to hear note, you still want to do cube CTL. You want to learn it the hard way and do all that fun stuff. But eventually it's going to be where it's just, it's just there. And it's running everything like 5G. I mean, stripped down doing micro, you know, Kate's things like that. You know, we're going to see it in a lot of other areas and just periphery and really accelerate the industry in compute and memory and storage, and. >> Yeah, a lot of acceleration. Guys thank you. This has been a really interesting session. I always love digging into customer use cases. How CHG is really driving its evolution with Portworx. Venkat, thanks for sharing with us, What's going on with Portworx a year after the acquisition. It sounds like all good stuff. >> Thank you. Thanks for having us. >> Pleasure. All right. For Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Los Angeles. This is our coverage of KubeCon Cloud Native Con 21.

you hey welcome back everybody jeff rick here with the cube we're at the Accenture technology vision 2018 pre-event the actual paper comes out in a couple days we got invited for a preview or excited to be here we came last year and it's pretty wild you know five big trends influencing the technology world Accenture is at the leading edge so we're happy to be here we've got a new guest Jason well she's the managing director of a centers extended reality are you doing Rachel it see you nice to meet you so you guys are not doing a our VR ER BR you've come up with it you coulda grabbed at all in extender II out right sort of XR every one of it I like it so you're running this business you know give us kind of an update how its evolving you know we see the devices the movies are starting to come out but it's still so nascent it is but at you know what we're seeing we've seen a lot of it up shift from a year ago two years ago all this stuff was being done in the Innovation Lab so the corporate Innovation Lab sitting in Silicon Valley they were trying things out for concepts of what have you we've seen a ship now where it's the business starting to push the agenda so it maybe it's the VP of Operations maybe it's the chief Learning Officer and I think that trends a big difference because it starts to mean the business is seeing this as it could provide value now still we're seeing a lot of pilots so we've kind of moved into proof of concept to the pilot to some major deployments but it's a pretty big trend that we've done that that shift even you know we're starting to see our P's come out right but again is another key signpost that this is moving beyond that just test and learn phase - actually real implementations so it's pretty interesting we talked to bail BAP Studios and they make movies and MBR and it's you know it's kind of an interesting parallel when they used to make movies that's just filming what used to be on stage right and it takes a while to understand kind of this new platform and to start to operate in that new platform are there some examples that you can that you've seen where it's no longer just a 3d version of what I used to do is shoot 2d but actually starting to take advantage of this new medium yeah well I think in terms of the different types of trainings we look at immersive training or VR training probably the hottest segment of that you know we kind of have the world broken down into ten different segments the immersive training is definitely the hottest of the ten segments that we're seeing client interested and partially because it applies to every organization right now so they move them from CBT to VR type training and I think in that space there's still a lot of lot to be learned around okay how do I reinvent that experience I can do things in three dimensions I could create personally the idea of presence where I'm actually kind of getting to the subconscious level of people if I can recreate an experience to them it's pretty real right so just understanding how to use the medium and not just repeat that same CBT based training right it's an evolution that we're going through right now so you're the creative directors the experienced designers that are used to 2d or having to relearn this this medium and that's a specific use case where we're seeing the you know some of those challenges and some of the opportunities and what is it about that what are some of the things are discovering that that is either makes it easier learning better learning is it just a different type of experience or there is the type of experience that they can now throw in a training environment so different than they could ever represent before I think you know welcome one of the things is you can do training in in situations you couldn't have done before you know put somebody in a nuclear power plant meltdown but I can't really do that in the real world I can drop you into VR and again this idea if you do it really well you see the mind it's pretty much real right I could put someone through that pressure cooker multiple times over and over again and it's just I can't do that in the real world if I do that two dimensions on a flat screen I'm not getting that that lingering effect where you know I actually felt like I wanted it experience and you know the military's been doing that for years so recreating types of situational awareness simulations to basically get people prepared for that now you see companies like Walmart Paul talked about right at Walmart doing it for Black Friday right it's kind of crazy that's it out all black right exactly weeks before so I think those kind of you think about inclusion and diversity training you know sexual harassment training so things that the medical field has been looking at VR for like treating post-traumatic stress syndrome or you know addiction therapy they've been doing that for a number of years now so you know how do you take that in a good way in an ethical way and start to apply that right to training and you know the thing there is is I think this is why we're in the early stages some of that is we need more data around the effectiveness of it so the academic research says it's gonna be better like because because that's spatial awareness the fact that it's right I've recreated a real situation in my head but we just need more metrics and more data that shows the really the powerful effect of that over time okay I think that's what some of our clients are waiting for and you said there's two kind of 10 categories you guys have broken it down what are some of the other leading ones beyond education shirts so you know if I take on just run through them real quick we kind of break the world into enterprise use cases where the user of the glasses of the headsets is an employee and then the consumer base or customer base use cases on the enterprise side we're looking at the value chain from design and engineering kind of factoring in operations is the second category immersive training being the third pretty much the digital workplace so the idea if you saw the demo the teleportation so I replaced videoconferencing with with VR conferencing I don't know if I'm ready for that hey so how about tell the conference's we save that one to the end yeah I don't want to say I want to be sitting at home you know in my lounge where I'm trying to die and then you get stuck on the conference and then on the consumer side there's sort of the obvious use case immersive marketing right we've had digital marketing for years we had the web we had mobile now we're gonna have AR and VR that's gonna be a big advertising space for for brands then you look at companies like unity are doubling down and how they're gonna enable that so immersive marketing the ARV our commerce post-sale services and and then you know a big category is the you know not just a our VR and how it enables the value chain but how is it going to become a product feature for brand new products the companies to go after so you know I've been a reality in the car we already have HUDs up displays but we have driverless cars you're gonna start to put v are inside the driverless cars as an entertainment platform so it's a whole different sort of segment beyond just how do i how do i been able to value troy how do i actually start to to create new products to services a new monetization so early really still to figure out you know what to do with this medium which you really haven't had before and in fact the guys that bail Bob said don't only they have to figure out to do the medium but the only way to do it is to actually do the development inside the medium you know you don't develop outside then go in and check it out it doesn't work you got to be actually in the medium itself to be doing really effective velvet well I think what's interesting is you look at the studios that are really kind of moved into the VR space for entertainment Penrose Studios here in San Francisco great studio they're just so amazed amazing work they are ones that are pushing the envelope just like the movie industry did on the tools to create VR right well let those those those innovations will find their way into the main street tools for those of us who aren't coding and entertainment you know but we still need the tools to create these types of experiences alright Jason well it's gonna be an exciting year and I look forward to to an update a year from now that sounds good all right he's Jason wells I'm Jeff Rick you're watching the queue from the Accenture technology vision 2018 thanks for watching to catch you next time