>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Spark became a top level Apache project in 2014, and then shortly thereafter, burst onto the big data scene. Spark, along with the cloud, transformed and in many ways, disrupted the big data market. Databricks optimized its tech stack for Spark and took advantage of the cloud to really cleverly deliver a managed service that has become a leading AI and data platform among data scientists and data engineers. However, emerging customer data requirements are shifting into a direction that will cause modern data platform players generally and Databricks, specifically, we think, to make some key directional decisions and perhaps even reinvent themselves. Hello and welcome to this week's wikibon theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we're going to do a deep dive into Databricks. We'll explore its current impressive market momentum. We're going to use some ETR survey data to show that, and then we'll lay out how customer data requirements are changing and what the ideal data platform will look like in the midterm future. We'll then evaluate core elements of the Databricks portfolio against that vision, and then we'll close with some strategic decisions that we think the company faces. And to do so, we welcome in our good friend, George Gilbert, former equities analyst, market analyst, and current Principal at TechAlpha Partners. George, good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Good to see you, Dave. >> All right, let me set this up. We're going to start by taking a look at where Databricks sits in the market in terms of how customers perceive the company and what it's momentum looks like. And this chart that we're showing here is data from ETS, the emerging technology survey of private companies. The N is 1,421. What we did is we cut the data on three sectors, analytics, database-data warehouse, and AI/ML. The vertical axis is a measure of customer sentiment, which evaluates an IT decision maker's awareness of the firm and the likelihood of engaging and/or purchase intent. The horizontal axis shows mindshare in the dataset, and we've highlighted Databricks, which has been a consistent high performer in this survey over the last several quarters. And as we, by the way, just as aside as we previously reported, OpenAI, which burst onto the scene this past quarter, leads all names, but Databricks is still prominent. You can see that the ETR shows some open source tools for reference, but as far as firms go, Databricks is very impressively positioned. Now, let's see how they stack up to some mainstream cohorts in the data space, against some bigger companies and sometimes public companies. This chart shows net score on the vertical axis, which is a measure of spending momentum and pervasiveness in the data set is on the horizontal axis. You can see that chart insert in the upper right, that informs how the dots are plotted, and net score against shared N. And that red dotted line at 40% indicates a highly elevated net score, anything above that we think is really, really impressive. And here we're just comparing Databricks with Snowflake, Cloudera, and Oracle. And that squiggly line leading to Databricks shows their path since 2021 by quarter. And you can see it's performing extremely well, maintaining an elevated net score and net range. Now it's comparable in the vertical axis to Snowflake, and it consistently is moving to the right and gaining share. Now, why did we choose to show Cloudera and Oracle? The reason is that Cloudera got the whole big data era started and was disrupted by Spark. And of course the cloud, Spark and Databricks and Oracle in many ways, was the target of early big data players like Cloudera. Take a listen to Cloudera CEO at the time, Mike Olson. This is back in 2010, first year of theCUBE, play the clip. >> Look, back in the day, if you had a data problem, if you needed to run business analytics, you wrote the biggest check you could to Sun Microsystems, and you bought a great big, single box, central server, and any money that was left over, you handed to Oracle for a database licenses and you installed that database on that box, and that was where you went for data. That was your temple of information. >> Okay? So Mike Olson implied that monolithic model was too expensive and inflexible, and Cloudera set out to fix that. But the best laid plans, as they say, George, what do you make of the data that we just shared? >> So where Databricks has really come up out of sort of Cloudera's tailpipe was they took big data processing, made it coherent, made it a managed service so it could run in the cloud. So it relieved customers of the operational burden. Where they're really strong and where their traditional meat and potatoes or bread and butter is the predictive and prescriptive analytics that building and training and serving machine learning models. They've tried to move into traditional business intelligence, the more traditional descriptive and diagnostic analytics, but they're less mature there. So what that means is, the reason you see Databricks and Snowflake kind of side by side is there are many, many accounts that have both Snowflake for business intelligence, Databricks for AI machine learning, where Snowflake, I'm sorry, where Databricks also did really well was in core data engineering, refining the data, the old ETL process, which kind of turned into ELT, where you loaded into the analytic repository in raw form and refine it. And so people have really used both, and each is trying to get into the other. >> Yeah, absolutely. We've reported on this quite a bit. Snowflake, kind of moving into the domain of Databricks and vice versa. And the last bit of ETR evidence that we want to share in terms of the company's momentum comes from ETR's Round Tables. They're run by Erik Bradley, and now former Gartner analyst and George, your colleague back at Gartner, Daren Brabham. And what we're going to show here is some direct quotes of IT pros in those Round Tables. There's a data science head and a CIO as well. Just make a few call outs here, we won't spend too much time on it, but starting at the top, like all of us, we can't talk about Databricks without mentioning Snowflake. Those two get us excited. Second comment zeros in on the flexibility and the robustness of Databricks from a data warehouse perspective. And then the last point is, despite competition from cloud players, Databricks has reinvented itself a couple of times over the year. And George, we're going to lay out today a scenario that perhaps calls for Databricks to do that once again. >> Their big opportunity and their big challenge for every tech company, it's managing a technology transition. The transition that we're talking about is something that's been bubbling up, but it's really epical. First time in 60 years, we're moving from an application-centric view of the world to a data-centric view, because decisions are becoming more important than automating processes. So let me let you sort of develop. >> Yeah, so let's talk about that here. We going to put up some bullets on precisely that point and the changing sort of customer environment. So you got IT stacks are shifting is George just said, from application centric silos to data centric stacks where the priority is shifting from automating processes to automating decision. You know how look at RPA and there's still a lot of automation going on, but from the focus of that application centricity and the data locked into those apps, that's changing. Data has historically been on the outskirts in silos, but organizations, you think of Amazon, think Uber, Airbnb, they're putting data at the core, and logic is increasingly being embedded in the data instead of the reverse. In other words, today, the data's locked inside the app, which is why you need to extract that data is sticking it to a data warehouse. The point, George, is we're putting forth this new vision for how data is going to be used. And you've used this Uber example to underscore the future state. Please explain? >> Okay, so this is hopefully an example everyone can relate to. The idea is first, you're automating things that are happening in the real world and decisions that make those things happen autonomously without humans in the loop all the time. So to use the Uber example on your phone, you call a car, you call a driver. Automatically, the Uber app then looks at what drivers are in the vicinity, what drivers are free, matches one, calculates an ETA to you, calculates a price, calculates an ETA to your destination, and then directs the driver once they're there. The point of this is that that cannot happen in an application-centric world very easily because all these little apps, the drivers, the riders, the routes, the fares, those call on data locked up in many different apps, but they have to sit on a layer that makes it all coherent. >> But George, so if Uber's doing this, doesn't this tech already exist? Isn't there a tech platform that does this already? >> Yes, and the mission of the entire tech industry is to build services that make it possible to compose and operate similar platforms and tools, but with the skills of mainstream developers in mainstream corporations, not the rocket scientists at Uber and Amazon. >> Okay, so we're talking about horizontally scaling across the industry, and actually giving a lot more organizations access to this technology. So by way of review, let's summarize the trend that's going on today in terms of the modern data stack that is propelling the likes of Databricks and Snowflake, which we just showed you in the ETR data and is really is a tailwind form. So the trend is toward this common repository for analytic data, that could be multiple virtual data warehouses inside of Snowflake, but you're in that Snowflake environment or Lakehouses from Databricks or multiple data lakes. And we've talked about what JP Morgan Chase is doing with the data mesh and gluing data lakes together, you've got various public clouds playing in this game, and then the data is annotated to have a common meaning. In other words, there's a semantic layer that enables applications to talk to the data elements and know that they have common and coherent meaning. So George, the good news is this approach is more effective than the legacy monolithic models that Mike Olson was talking about, so what's the problem with this in your view? >> So today's data platforms added immense value 'cause they connected the data that was previously locked up in these monolithic apps or on all these different microservices, and that supported traditional BI and AI/ML use cases. But now if we want to build apps like Uber or Amazon.com, where they've got essentially an autonomously running supply chain and e-commerce app where humans only care and feed it. But the thing is figuring out what to buy, when to buy, where to deploy it, when to ship it. We needed a semantic layer on top of the data. So that, as you were saying, the data that's coming from all those apps, the different apps that's integrated, not just connected, but it means the same. And the issue is whenever you add a new layer to a stack to support new applications, there are implications for the already existing layers, like can they support the new layer and its use cases? So for instance, if you add a semantic layer that embeds app logic with the data rather than vice versa, which we been talking about and that's been the case for 60 years, then the new data layer faces challenges that the way you manage that data, the way you analyze that data, is not supported by today's tools. >> Okay, so actually Alex, bring me up that last slide if you would, I mean, you're basically saying at the bottom here, today's repositories don't really do joins at scale. The future is you're talking about hundreds or thousands or millions of data connections, and today's systems, we're talking about, I don't know, 6, 8, 10 joins and that is the fundamental problem you're saying, is a new data error coming and existing systems won't be able to handle it? >> Yeah, one way of thinking about it is that even though we call them relational databases, when we actually want to do lots of joins or when we want to analyze data from lots of different tables, we created a whole new industry for analytic databases where you sort of mung the data together into fewer tables. So you didn't have to do as many joins because the joins are difficult and slow. And when you're going to arbitrarily join thousands, hundreds of thousands or across millions of elements, you need a new type of database. We have them, they're called graph databases, but to query them, you go back to the prerelational era in terms of their usability. >> Okay, so we're going to come back to that and talk about how you get around that problem. But let's first lay out what the ideal data platform of the future we think looks like. And again, we're going to come back to use this Uber example. In this graphic that George put together, awesome. We got three layers. The application layer is where the data products reside. The example here is drivers, rides, maps, routes, ETA, et cetera. The digital version of what we were talking about in the previous slide, people, places and things. The next layer is the data layer, that breaks down the silos and connects the data elements through semantics and everything is coherent. And then the bottom layers, the legacy operational systems feed that data layer. George, explain what's different here, the graph database element, you talk about the relational query capabilities, and why can't I just throw memory at solving this problem? >> Some of the graph databases do throw memory at the problem and maybe without naming names, some of them live entirely in memory. And what you're dealing with is a prerelational in-memory database system where you navigate between elements, and the issue with that is we've had SQL for 50 years, so we don't have to navigate, we can say what we want without how to get it. That's the core of the problem. >> Okay. So if I may, I just want to drill into this a little bit. So you're talking about the expressiveness of a graph. Alex, if you'd bring that back out, the fourth bullet, expressiveness of a graph database with the relational ease of query. Can you explain what you mean by that? >> Yeah, so graphs are great because when you can describe anything with a graph, that's why they're becoming so popular. Expressive means you can represent anything easily. They're conducive to, you might say, in a world where we now want like the metaverse, like with a 3D world, and I don't mean the Facebook metaverse, I mean like the business metaverse when we want to capture data about everything, but we want it in context, we want to build a set of digital twins that represent everything going on in the world. And Uber is a tiny example of that. Uber built a graph to represent all the drivers and riders and maps and routes. But what you need out of a database isn't just a way to store stuff and update stuff. You need to be able to ask questions of it, you need to be able to query it. And if you go back to prerelational days, you had to know how to find your way to the data. It's sort of like when you give directions to someone and they didn't have a GPS system and a mapping system, you had to give them turn by turn directions. Whereas when you have a GPS and a mapping system, which is like the relational thing, you just say where you want to go, and it spits out the turn by turn directions, which let's say, the car might follow or whoever you're directing would follow. But the point is, it's much easier in a relational database to say, "I just want to get these results. You figure out how to get it." The graph database, they have not taken over the world because in some ways, it's taking a 50 year leap backwards. >> Alright, got it. Okay. Let's take a look at how the current Databricks offerings map to that ideal state that we just laid out. So to do that, we put together this chart that looks at the key elements of the Databricks portfolio, the core capability, the weakness, and the threat that may loom. Start with the Delta Lake, that's the storage layer, which is great for files and tables. It's got true separation of compute and storage, I want you to double click on that George, as independent elements, but it's weaker for the type of low latency ingest that we see coming in the future. And some of the threats highlighted here. AWS could add transactional tables to S3, Iceberg adoption is picking up and could accelerate, that could disrupt Databricks. George, add some color here please? >> Okay, so this is the sort of a classic competitive forces where you want to look at, so what are customers demanding? What's competitive pressure? What are substitutes? Even what your suppliers might be pushing. Here, Delta Lake is at its core, a set of transactional tables that sit on an object store. So think of it in a database system, this is the storage engine. So since S3 has been getting stronger for 15 years, you could see a scenario where they add transactional tables. We have an open source alternative in Iceberg, which Snowflake and others support. But at the same time, Databricks has built an ecosystem out of tools, their own and others, that read and write to Delta tables, that's what makes the Delta Lake and ecosystem. So they have a catalog, the whole machine learning tool chain talks directly to the data here. That was their great advantage because in the past with Snowflake, you had to pull all the data out of the database before the machine learning tools could work with it, that was a major shortcoming. They fixed that. But the point here is that even before we get to the semantic layer, the core foundation is under threat. >> Yep. Got it. Okay. We got a lot of ground to cover. So we're going to take a look at the Spark Execution Engine next. Think of that as the refinery that runs really efficient batch processing. That's kind of what disrupted the DOOp in a large way, but it's not Python friendly and that's an issue because the data science and the data engineering crowd are moving in that direction, and/or they're using DBT. George, we had Tristan Handy on at Supercloud, really interesting discussion that you and I did. Explain why this is an issue for Databricks? >> So once the data lake was in place, what people did was they refined their data batch, and Spark has always had streaming support and it's gotten better. The underlying storage as we've talked about is an issue. But basically they took raw data, then they refined it into tables that were like customers and products and partners. And then they refined that again into what was like gold artifacts, which might be business intelligence metrics or dashboards, which were collections of metrics. But they were running it on the Spark Execution Engine, which it's a Java-based engine or it's running on a Java-based virtual machine, which means all the data scientists and the data engineers who want to work with Python are really working in sort of oil and water. Like if you get an error in Python, you can't tell whether the problems in Python or where it's in Spark. There's just an impedance mismatch between the two. And then at the same time, the whole world is now gravitating towards DBT because it's a very nice and simple way to compose these data processing pipelines, and people are using either SQL in DBT or Python in DBT, and that kind of is a substitute for doing it all in Spark. So it's under threat even before we get to that semantic layer, it so happens that DBT itself is becoming the authoring environment for the semantic layer with business intelligent metrics. But that's again, this is the second element that's under direct substitution and competitive threat. >> Okay, let's now move down to the third element, which is the Photon. Photon is Databricks' BI Lakehouse, which has integration with the Databricks tooling, which is very rich, it's newer. And it's also not well suited for high concurrency and low latency use cases, which we think are going to increasingly become the norm over time. George, the call out threat here is customers want to connect everything to a semantic layer. Explain your thinking here and why this is a potential threat to Databricks? >> Okay, so two issues here. What you were touching on, which is the high concurrency, low latency, when people are running like thousands of dashboards and data is streaming in, that's a problem because SQL data warehouse, the query engine, something like that matures over five to 10 years. It's one of these things, the joke that Andy Jassy makes just in general, he's really talking about Azure, but there's no compression algorithm for experience. The Snowflake guy started more than five years earlier, and for a bunch of reasons, that lead is not something that Databricks can shrink. They'll always be behind. So that's why Snowflake has transactional tables now and we can get into that in another show. But the key point is, so near term, it's struggling to keep up with the use cases that are core to business intelligence, which is highly concurrent, lots of users doing interactive query. But then when you get to a semantic layer, that's when you need to be able to query data that might have thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of joins. And that's a SQL query engine, traditional SQL query engine is just not built for that. That's the core problem of traditional relational databases. >> Now this is a quick aside. We always talk about Snowflake and Databricks in sort of the same context. We're not necessarily saying that Snowflake is in a position to tackle all these problems. We'll deal with that separately. So we don't mean to imply that, but we're just sort of laying out some of the things that Snowflake or rather Databricks customers we think, need to be thinking about and having conversations with Databricks about and we hope to have them as well. We'll come back to that in terms of sort of strategic options. But finally, when come back to the table, we have Databricks' AI/ML Tool Chain, which has been an awesome capability for the data science crowd. It's comprehensive, it's a one-stop shop solution, but the kicker here is that it's optimized for supervised model building. And the concern is that foundational models like GPT could cannibalize the current Databricks tooling, but George, can't Databricks, like other software companies, integrate foundation model capabilities into its platform? >> Okay, so the sound bite answer to that is sure, IBM 3270 terminals could call out to a graphical user interface when they're running on the XT terminal, but they're not exactly good citizens in that world. The core issue is Databricks has this wonderful end-to-end tool chain for training, deploying, monitoring, running inference on supervised models. But the paradigm there is the customer builds and trains and deploys each model for each feature or application. In a world of foundation models which are pre-trained and unsupervised, the entire tool chain is different. So it's not like Databricks can junk everything they've done and start over with all their engineers. They have to keep maintaining what they've done in the old world, but they have to build something new that's optimized for the new world. It's a classic technology transition and their mentality appears to be, "Oh, we'll support the new stuff from our old stuff." Which is suboptimal, and as we'll talk about, their biggest patron and the company that put them on the map, Microsoft, really stopped working on their old stuff three years ago so that they could build a new tool chain optimized for this new world. >> Yeah, and so let's sort of close with what we think the options are and decisions that Databricks has for its future architecture. They're smart people. I mean we've had Ali Ghodsi on many times, super impressive. I think they've got to be keenly aware of the limitations, what's going on with foundation models. But at any rate, here in this chart, we lay out sort of three scenarios. One is re-architect the platform by incrementally adopting new technologies. And example might be to layer a graph query engine on top of its stack. They could license key technologies like graph database, they could get aggressive on M&A and buy-in, relational knowledge graphs, semantic technologies, vector database technologies. George, as David Floyer always says, "A lot of ways to skin a cat." We've seen companies like, even think about EMC maintained its relevance through M&A for many, many years. George, give us your thought on each of these strategic options? >> Okay, I find this question the most challenging 'cause remember, I used to be an equity research analyst. I worked for Frank Quattrone, we were one of the top tech shops in the banking industry, although this is 20 years ago. But the M&A team was the top team in the industry and everyone wanted them on their side. And I remember going to meetings with these CEOs, where Frank and the bankers would say, "You want us for your M&A work because we can do better." And they really could do better. But in software, it's not like with EMC in hardware because with hardware, it's easier to connect different boxes. With software, the whole point of a software company is to integrate and architect the components so they fit together and reinforce each other, and that makes M&A harder. You can do it, but it takes a long time to fit the pieces together. Let me give you examples. If they put a graph query engine, let's say something like TinkerPop, on top of, I don't even know if it's possible, but let's say they put it on top of Delta Lake, then you have this graph query engine talking to their storage layer, Delta Lake. But if you want to do analysis, you got to put the data in Photon, which is not really ideal for highly connected data. If you license a graph database, then most of your data is in the Delta Lake and how do you sync it with the graph database? If you do sync it, you've got data in two places, which kind of defeats the purpose of having a unified repository. I find this semantic layer option in number three actually more promising, because that's something that you can layer on top of the storage layer that you have already. You just have to figure out then how to have your query engines talk to that. What I'm trying to highlight is, it's easy as an analyst to say, "You can buy this company or license that technology." But the really hard work is making it all work together and that is where the challenge is. >> Yeah, and well look, I thank you for laying that out. We've seen it, certainly Microsoft and Oracle. I guess you might argue that well, Microsoft had a monopoly in its desktop software and was able to throw off cash for a decade plus while it's stock was going sideways. Oracle had won the database wars and had amazing margins and cash flow to be able to do that. Databricks isn't even gone public yet, but I want to close with some of the players to watch. Alex, if you'd bring that back up, number four here. AWS, we talked about some of their options with S3 and it's not just AWS, it's blob storage, object storage. Microsoft, as you sort of alluded to, was an early go-to market channel for Databricks. We didn't address that really. So maybe in the closing comments we can. Google obviously, Snowflake of course, we're going to dissect their options in future Breaking Analysis. Dbt labs, where do they fit? Bob Muglia's company, Relational.ai, why are these players to watch George, in your opinion? >> So everyone is trying to assemble and integrate the pieces that would make building data applications, data products easy. And the critical part isn't just assembling a bunch of pieces, which is traditionally what AWS did. It's a Unix ethos, which is we give you the tools, you put 'em together, 'cause you then have the maximum choice and maximum power. So what the hyperscalers are doing is they're taking their key value stores, in the case of ASW it's DynamoDB, in the case of Azure it's Cosmos DB, and each are putting a graph query engine on top of those. So they have a unified storage and graph database engine, like all the data would be collected in the key value store. Then you have a graph database, that's how they're going to be presenting a foundation for building these data apps. Dbt labs is putting a semantic layer on top of data lakes and data warehouses and as we'll talk about, I'm sure in the future, that makes it easier to swap out the underlying data platform or swap in new ones for specialized use cases. Snowflake, what they're doing, they're so strong in data management and with their transactional tables, what they're trying to do is take in the operational data that used to be in the province of many state stores like MongoDB and say, "If you manage that data with us, it'll be connected to your analytic data without having to send it through a pipeline." And that's hugely valuable. Relational.ai is the wildcard, 'cause what they're trying to do, it's almost like a holy grail where you're trying to take the expressiveness of connecting all your data in a graph but making it as easy to query as you've always had it in a SQL database or I should say, in a relational database. And if they do that, it's sort of like, it'll be as easy to program these data apps as a spreadsheet was compared to procedural languages, like BASIC or Pascal. That's the implications of Relational.ai. >> Yeah, and again, we talked before, why can't you just throw this all in memory? We're talking in that example of really getting down to differences in how you lay the data out on disk in really, new database architecture, correct? >> Yes. And that's why it's not clear that you could take a data lake or even a Snowflake and why you can't put a relational knowledge graph on those. You could potentially put a graph database, but it'll be compromised because to really do what Relational.ai has done, which is the ease of Relational on top of the power of graph, you actually need to change how you're storing your data on disk or even in memory. So you can't, in other words, it's not like, oh we can add graph support to Snowflake, 'cause if you did that, you'd have to change, or in your data lake, you'd have to change how the data is physically laid out. And then that would break all the tools that talk to that currently. >> What in your estimation, is the timeframe where this becomes critical for a Databricks and potentially Snowflake and others? I mentioned earlier midterm, are we talking three to five years here? Are we talking end of decade? What's your radar say? >> I think something surprising is going on that's going to sort of come up the tailpipe and take everyone by storm. All the hype around business intelligence metrics, which is what we used to put in our dashboards where bookings, billings, revenue, customer, those things, those were the key artifacts that used to live in definitions in your BI tools, and DBT has basically created a standard for defining those so they live in your data pipeline or they're defined in their data pipeline and executed in the data warehouse or data lake in a shared way, so that all tools can use them. This sounds like a digression, it's not. All this stuff about data mesh, data fabric, all that's going on is we need a semantic layer and the business intelligence metrics are defining common semantics for your data. And I think we're going to find by the end of this year, that metrics are how we annotate all our analytic data to start adding common semantics to it. And we're going to find this semantic layer, it's not three to five years off, it's going to be staring us in the face by the end of this year. >> Interesting. And of course SVB today was shut down. We're seeing serious tech headwinds, and oftentimes in these sort of downturns or flat turns, which feels like this could be going on for a while, we emerge with a lot of new players and a lot of new technology. George, we got to leave it there. Thank you to George Gilbert for excellent insights and input for today's episode. I want to thank Alex Myerson who's on production and manages the podcast, of course Ken Schiffman as well. Kristin Martin and Cheryl Knight help get the word out on social media and in our newsletters. And Rob Hof is our EIC over at Siliconangle.com, he does some great editing. Remember all these episodes, they're available as podcasts. Wherever you listen, all you got to do is search Breaking Analysis Podcast, we publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com, or you can email me at David.Vellante@siliconangle.com, or DM me @DVellante. Comment on our LinkedIn post, and please do check out ETR.ai, great survey data, enterprise tech focus, phenomenal. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time on Breaking Analysis.

(bright upbeat music) >> Welcome to theCUBE's continuing coverage of AMD's fourth generation EPYC launch, along with the way that Dell has integrated this technology into its PowerEdge server lines. We're in for an interesting conversation today. Today, I'm joined by Dilip Ramachandran, Senior Director of Marketing at AMD, and Juergen Zimmermann. Juergen is Principal SAP Solutions Performance Benchmarking Engineer at Dell. Welcome, gentlemen. >> Welcome. >> Thank you David, nice to be here. >> Nice to meet you too, welcome to theCUBE. You will officially be CUBE alumni after this. Dilip, let's start with you. What's this all about? Tell us about AMD's recent launch and the importance of it. >> Thanks, David. I'm excited to actually talk to you today, AMD, at our fourth generation EPYC launch last month in November. And as part of that fourth generation EPYC launch, we announced industry-leading performance based on 96 cores, based on Zen 4 architecture. And new interfaces, PCIe Gen 5, as well as DDR5. Incredible amount of memory bandwidth, memory capacity supported, and a whole lot of other features as well. So we announced this product, we launched it in November last month. And we've been closely working with Dell on a number of benchmarks that we'd love to talk to you more about today. >> So just for some context, when was the last release of this scale? So when was the third generation released? How long ago? >> The third generation EPYC was launched in Q1 of 2021. So it was almost 18 to 24 months ago. And since then we've made a tremendous jump, the fourth generation EPYC, in terms of number of cores. So third generation EPYC supported 64 cores, fourth generation EPYC supports 96 cores. And these are new cores, the Zen 4 cores, the fourth generation of Zen cores. So very high performance, new interfaces, and really world-class performance. >> Excellent. Well, we'll go into greater detail in a moment, but let's go to Juergen. Tell us about the testing that you've been involved with to kind of prove out the benefits of this new AMD architecture. >> Yeah, well, the testing is SAP Standard Performance benchmark, the SAP SD two tier. And this is more or less a industry standard benchmark that is used to size your service for the needs of SAP. Actually, SAP customers always ask the vendors about the SAP benchmark and the SAPS values of their service. >> And I should have asked you before, but give us a little bit of your background working with SAP. Have you been doing this for longer than a week? >> Yeah, yeah, definitely, I do this for about 20 years now. Started with Sun Microsystems, and interestingly in the year 2003, 2004, I started working with AMD service on SAP with Linux, and afterwards parted the SAP application to Solaris AMD, also with AMD. So I have a lot of tradition with SAP and AMD benchmarks, and doing this ever since then. >> So give us some more detail on the results of the recent testing, and if you can, tell us why we should care? >> (laughs) Okay, the recent results actually also surprised myself, they were so good. So I initially installed the benchmark kit, and couldn't believe that the server is just getting, or hitting idle by the numbers I saw. So I cranked up the numbers and reached results that are most likely double the last generation, so Zen 3 generation, and that even passed almost all 8-socket systems out there. So if you want to have the same SAP performance, you can just use 2-socket AMD server instead of any four or 8-socket servers out there. And this is a tremendous saving in energy. >> So you just mentioned savings in terms of power consumption, which is a huge consideration. What are the sort of end user results that this delivers in terms of real world performance? How is a human being at the end of a computer going to notice something like this? >> So actually the results are like that you get almost 150,000 users concurrently accessing the system, and get their results back from SAP within one second response time. >> 150,000 users, you said? >> 150,000 users in parallel. >> (laughs) Okay, that's amazing. And I think it's interesting to note that, and I'll probably say this a a couple of times. You just referenced third generation EPYC architecture, and there are a lot of folks out there who are two generations back. Not everyone is religiously updating every 18 months, and so for a fair number of SAP environments, this is an even more dramatic increase. Is that a fair thing to say? >> Yeah, I just looked up yesterday the numbers from generation one of EPYC, and this was at about 28,000 users. So we are five times the performance now, within four years. Yeah, great. >> So Dilip, let's dig a little more into the EPYC architecture, and I'm specifically also curious about... You mentioned PCIe Gen five, or 5.0 and all of the components that plug into that. You mentioned I think faster DDR. Talk about that. Talk about how all of the components work together to make when Dell comes out with a PowerEdge server, to make it so much more powerful. >> Absolutely. So just to spend a little bit more time on this particular benchmark, the SAP Sales and Distribution benchmark. It's a widely used benchmark in the industry to basically look at how do I get the most performance out of my system for a variety of SAP business suite applications. And we touched upon it earlier, right, we are able to beat a performance of 4-socket and 8-socket servers out there. And you know, it saves energy, it saves cost, better TCO for the data center. So we're really excited to be able to support more users in a single server and meeting all the other dual socket and 4-socket combinations out there. Now, how did we get there, right, is more the important question. So as part of our fourth generation EPYC, we obviously upgraded our CPU core to provide much better single third performance per core. And at the socket level, you know, when you're packing 96 cores, you need to be able to feed these cores, you know, from a memory standpoint. So what we did was we went to 12 channels of memory, and these are DDR5 memory channels. So obviously you get much better bandwidth, higher speed of the memory with DDR5, you know, starting at 4,800 megahertz. And you're also now able to have more channels to be able to send the data from the memory into the CPU subsystem, which is very critical to keep the CPUs busy and active, and get the performance out. So that's on the memory side. On the data side, you know, we do have PCIe Gen five, and any data oriented applications that take data either from the PCIe drives or the network cards that utilize Gen five that are available in the industry today, you can actually really get data into the system through the PCIe I/O, either again, through the disk, or through the net card as well. So those are other ways to actually also feed the CPU subsystem with data to be processed by the CPU complex. So we are, again, very excited to see all of this coming together, and as they say, proof's in the pudding. You know, Juergen talked about it. How over generation after generation we've increased the performance, and now with our fourth generation EPYC, we are absolutely leading world-class performance on the SAP Sales and Distribution benchmark. >> Dilip, I have another question for you, and this may be, it may be a bit of a PowerEdge and beyond question. What are you seeing, or what are you anticipating in terms of end user perception when they go to buy a new server? Obviously server is a very loose term, and they can be configured in a bunch of different ways. But is there a discussion about ROI and TCO that's particularly critical? Because people are going to ask, "Well, wait a minute. If it's more expensive than the last one that I bought, am I getting enough bang for my buck?" Is that going to be part of the conversation, especially around power and cooling and things like that? >> Yeah, absolutely. You know, every data center decision maker has to ask the question, "Why should I upgrade? Should I stay with legacy hardware, or should I go into the latest and greatest that AMD offers?" And the advantages that the new generation products bring is much better performance at much better energy consumption levels, as well as much better performance per dollar levels. So when you do the upgrade, you are actually getting, you know, savings in terms of performance per dollar, as well as saving in space because you can consolidate your work into fewer servers 'cause you have more cores. As we talked about, you have eight, you know. Typically you might do it on a four or 8-socket server which is really expensive. You can consolidate down to a 2-socket server which is much cheaper. As also for maintenance costs, it's much lower maintenance costs as well. All of this, performance, power, maintenance costs, all of that translate into better TCO, right. So lower all of these, high performance, lower power, and then lower maintenance costs, translate to much better TCO for the end user. And that's an important equation that all customers pay attention to. and you know, we love to work with them and demonstrate those TCO benefits to them. >> Juergen, talk to us more in general about what Dell does from a PowerEdge perspective to make sure that Dell is delivering the best infrastructure possible for SAP. In general, I mean, I assume that this is a big responsibility of yours, is making sure that the stuff runs properly and if not, fixing it. So tell us about that relationship between Dell and a SAP. >> Yeah, for Dell and SAP actually, we're more or less partners with SAP. We have people sitting in SAP's Linux lab, and working in cooperative with SAP, also with Linux partners like SUSE and Red Hat. And we are in constant exchange about what's new in Linux, what's new on our side. And we're all a big family here. >> So when the new architecture comes out and they send it to Juergen, the boys back at the plant as they say, or the factory to use Formula One terms, are are waiting with baited breath to hear what Juergen says about the results. So just kind of kind of recap again, you know, the specific benchmarks that you were running. Tell us about that again. >> Yeah, the specific benchmark is the SAP Sales and Distribution benchmark. And for SAP, this is the benchmark that needs to be tested, and it shows the performance of the whole system. So in contrast to benchmarks that only check if the CPU is running, very good, this test the whole system up from the network stack, from the storage stack, the memory, subsystem, and the OS running on the CPUs. >> Okay, which makes perfect sense, since Dell is delivering an integrated system and not just CPU technology. You know, on that subject, Dilip, do you have any insights into performance numbers that you're hearing about with Gen four EPYC for other database environments? >> Yeah, we have actually worked together with Dell on a variety of benchmarks, both on the latest fourth generation EPYC processors as well as the preceding one, the third generation EPYC processors. And published a bunch of world records on database, particularly I would say TPC-H, TPCx-V, as well as TPCx-HS and TPCx-IoT. So a number of TPC related benchmarks that really showcase performance for database and related applications. And we've collaborated very closely with Dell on these benchmarks and published a number of them already, and you know, a number of them are world records as well. So again, we're very excited to collaborate with Dell on the SAP Sales and Distribution benchmark, as well as other benchmarks that are related to database. >> Well, speaking of other benchmarks, here at theCUBE we're going to be talking to actually quite a few people, looking at this fourth generation EPYC launch from a whole bunch of different angles. You two gentlemen have shed light on some really good pieces of that puzzle. I want to thank you for being on theCUBE today. With that, I'd like to thank all of you for joining us here on theCUBE. Stay tuned for continuing CUBE coverage of AMD's fourth generation EPYC launch, and Dell PowerEdge strategy to leverage it.

>>Hey, everyone. Welcome back to San Francisco. Lisa Martin and John furrier live on the floor at VMware Explorer, 2022. This is our third day of wall to wall coverage on the cube. But you know that cuz you've been here the whole time. We're pleased to welcome up. First timer to the cubes we saw is here. The CEO and founder of ZDA. Saed welcome to the program. >>Thank you for having me >>Talk to me a little bit about what ZDA does in edge. >>Sure. So ZDA is a company purely focused in edge computing. I started a company about five years ago, go after edge. So what we do is we help customers with orchestrating their edge, helping them to deploy secure monitor application services and devices at the edge. >>What's the business model for you guys. We get that out there. So the targeting the edge, which is everything from telco to whatever. Yeah. What's the business model. Yeah. >>Maybe before we go there, let's talk about edge itself. Cuz edge is complex. There's a lot of companies. I call 'em lens company nowadays, if you're not a cloud company, you're probably an edge company at this point. So we are focusing something called the distributed edge. So distributed edge. When you start putting tiny servers in environments like factory floors, solar farms, wind farms, even inside machines or well sites, et cetera. And a question that people always ask me, like why, why would you want to put, you know, servers there on servers supposed to be in a data center in the cloud? And the answer to the question actually is data gravity. So traditionally wherever the data gets created is where your applications live. But as we're connecting more and more devices to the edge of the network, we basically customers now are required to push the applications to the edge cause they can't go all the data to the cloud. So basically that's where we focus on people call it the far edge as well. You know, that's the term we've heard in the past as well. And what we do in our business model is provide customers a, a software as a service solution where they can basically deploy and monitor these applications at these highly distributed environments. >>Data, gravity comes up a lot and I want you to take a minute to explain the definition as it is today. And people have used that term, you know, with big data, going back to 2010 leads when we covering the Hadoop wave, which ended up becoming, you know, data, data, bricks, and snowflake now, but, but a lots changed, but what does it mean to be data gravity? It means that staying local, it's just what specifically describe and, and define what data gravity is. >>Yeah. So for me, data gravity is where you need to process the data, right? It's where the data usually gets created. So if you think about a web app, where does the data get created? Where people click on buttons, they, they interface with it. They, they upload content to it, et cetera. So that's where the data gravity therefore is therefore that's where you do your analytics. That's where you do your visualization processing, machine learning and all of those pieces. So it's really where that data gets created is where the data gravity in my view says, >>What are some of the challenges that data and opportunities that data gravity presents to customers? >>Well, obviously I think every enterprise in this day is trying to take data and make it a competitive advantage, right? Like faster decisions, better decisions, outcompete your competition by, you know, being first with a product or being first with a product with the future, et cetera. So, so I think, you know, if you're not a data driven enterprise by now, then I think the future may be a little bit bleak. >>Okay. So you're targeting the market distributed edge business model, SAS technology, secret sauce. What's that piece. >>Yeah. So that's, that's what the interesting part comes in. I think, you know, if you kind of look at the data center in the cloud, we've had these virtualization and orchestration stacks create, I mean, we're here in VMware Explorer. And as an example, what we basically, what we saw is that the edge is so unique and so different than what we've seen in the data center, in the cloud that we needed to build a complete brand new purpose-built illustration and virtualization solution. So that's really what we, we set off to do. So there's two components that we do. One end is we built a purpose-built edge operating system for the edge and we actually open sourced it. And the reason we opensource it, we said, Hey, you know, edge is so diverse. You know, depending on the environment you're running in a machine or in a vehicle or in a well site, you have different hardware, different networks, different applications you need to enable. >>And we will never be able to support all of them ourselves. As a matter of fact, we actually think there's a need for standardization at the edge. We need to kind of cut through all these silos that have been created traditionally from the embedded way of thinking. So we created basically an open source project in the Linux foundation in LFS, which is a sister organization through the CNCF it's called project Eve. And the idea is to create the Android of the edge, basically what Android became for mobile computing, an a common operating system. So you build one app. You can run in any phone in the world that runs Android, build an architecture. You build one app. You can run in any Eve powered node in the world, >>So distributed edge and you get the tech here, get the secret sauce. We'll get more into that in a second, but I wanna just tie one kick quick point and get your clarification on edge is becoming much more about the physical side too. I mean, absolutely. So when you talk about Android, you're making the reference of a phone. I get that's metaphor to what you're doing at the edge, wind farms, factories, alarms, light bulbs, buildings. I mean, that's what you're talking about, right? Yes. We're getting down to that very, >>Very physical, dark distributed locations. >>We're gonna come back to the CISO CSO. We're gonna come back to the CISO versus CSO question because is the CISO or CIO or who runs that anyway? So that's true. What's the important thing that's happening because that sounds like old OT world, like yes. Operating technology, not it information technology, is it a complete reset of those worlds or is it a collision? >>It's a great question. So what we're seeing is first of all, there is already compute in these environments, industrial PCs of existed well beyond, you know, an industrial automation has been done for many, many decades. The point is that that stuff has been done. Collect data has been collected, but never connected, right? So with edge computing, we're connecting now this data from an industrial machine and industrial process to the cloud, right? And one of the problems is it's data that comes of that industrial process too much to upload to the cloud. So I gotta analyze, analyze it locally. So one of the, the things we saw early on in edge is there's a lot of brownfield. Most of our customers today actually have applications running on windows and they would love to make in Linux and containers and Kubernetes, but it took them 20, 30 years to build those apps. And they basically are the money makers of the enterprise. So they are in a, in a transitionary phase and they need something that can take them from the brown to the Greenfield. So to your point, you gotta support all of these types of unique brownfield applications. >>So you're, you're saying I don't really care if this is a customer, how you get the data, you wanna start new start fresh. That's cool. But if you wanna take your old data, you'll >>Take that. Yeah. You don't wanna rebuild the whole machine. You're >>Just, they can life cycle it out on their own timetable. Yeah. >>So we had to learn, first of all, how do we take and lift and shift windows based industrial application and make it run at the edge on, on our architecture. Right? And then the second step is how do we then Sen off that data that this application is generating and do we fuse it with cloud native capability? Like, >>So your cloud, so your staff is your open source that you're giving to the Linux foundation as part of that Eve project that's available to everybody. So they can, they can look at the code, which is great by the way. Yeah. So people wanna do that. Yeah. Your self source, I'm assuming, is your hardened version with support? >>Well, we took what we took, what the open source companies did, opensource companies traditionally have sold, you know, basically a support model around the open source. We actually saw another problem. Customers has like, okay, now I have this node running and I can, you know, do this data analytics, but what if I have 15 or 20,000 of these node? And they're all around the world in remote locations on satellite links or wireless connectivity, how do I orchestrate them? So we actually build an orchestration service for these nodes running this open source >>Software. So that's a key secret sauce right there. >>That is the business model that taking open store and a lot. >>And you're taking your own code that you have. Okay. Got it. Cool. And then the customer's customer piece is, is key. So that's the final piece, I guess who's using it. >>Yeah. Well, and, >>And, and one of the business outcomes that they're achieving. Oh >>Yeah. Well, so maybe start with that first. I mean, we are deployed in customers in all and gas, for instance, helping them with the transition to renewable energy, right? So basically we, we have customers for instance, that deploy us in the, how they drill Wells is one use case and doing that better, faster, and cheaper and, and less environmental impacting. But we also have customers that use us in wind farms. We have, and solar farms, like we, one of the leading solar energy companies in the world is using us to bring down the cost of power by predicting failures ahead of time, for >>Instance. And when you're working with customers to create the optimal solution at the distributed edge, who are you working with in, within an organization? Yeah. >>It's usually a mix of OT and it people. Okay. So the OT people typically they're >>Arm wrestling, well, or they're getting along, actually, >>I think they're getting along very well. Okay, good. But they also agree that they have to have swim lanes. The it folks, obviously their job is to make sure, you know, everything is secure. Everything is according to the compliance it's, it's, you know, the, the best TCO on the infrastructure, those type of things, the OT guy, they, they, or girl, they care about the application. They care about the services. They care about the support new business. So how can you create a model that too can coexist? And if you do that, they get along really well. >>You know, we had an event called Supercloud and@theurlsupercloud.world, if you're watching check it out, it's our version of what we think multicloud will merge into including edge cuz edge is just another node in the, in the, in the network. As far as we're concerned, hybrid is the steady state. That's distributed computing on premise, private cloud, public cloud. We know what that looks like. People love that things are happening. Edge is like a whole nother new area. That's blossoming and with disruption, yeah. There's a lot of existing market and incumbents that need to be disrupted. And there's also a new capabilities that are coming that we don't yet see. So we're seeing it with the super cloud idea that these new kinds of clouds are emerging. Like there could be an edge cloud. Yeah. Why isn't there a security cloud, whereas the financial services cloud, whereas the insurance cloud, whereas the, so these become super clouds where the CapEx could be done by the Amazon, whatnot you've been following them is edge cloud. Can you make that a cloud? Is that what you guys are trying to do? And if so, what does that look like? Cause we we're adding a new track to our super cloud site. I mentioned on edge specifically, we're trying to figure out you and if you share your opinion, it'd be great. Can the E can edge clouds exist and be run by companies? Yeah. Or is that what you guys are trying to do? >>I, I, I mean, I think first of all, there is no edge without cloud, right? So when I meet any customer who says, Hey, we're gonna do edge without cloud. Then I'm like, you're probably not gonna do edge computing. Right. And, and the way we built the company and the way we think about it, it's about extending the cloud experience all the way into these embedded distributed environments. That's really, I think what customers are looking for, cuz customers love the simplicity of the cloud. They love the ease of use agility, all of that greatness. And they're like, Hey, I want that. But not in a, you know, in an Amazon or Azure data center. I want that in my factories. I want that in my wealth sites, in my vehicles. And that's really what I think the future >>Is gonna. And how long have you guys been around? What's the, what's the history of the company because you might actually be that cloud. Yeah. And are you on AWS or Azure? You're building your own. What's the, >>Yeah. Yeah. So >>Take it through the, the architecture because yeah, yeah, sure. You're a modern startup. I mean you gotta, and the edges you're going after you gotta be geared up. Yeah. To win that. Yeah. >>So, so the company's about five years old. So we, when we started focusing on edge, people didn't necessarily talk as much about edge. We kind of identified the it's like, you know, how do you find a black hole in, in the universe? Cuz you can't see it, but you sort of look around that's why you in it. And so we were like looking at it, like there's something gonna happen here at the edge of the network, because everybody's saying we're connecting these vice upload the data to the cloud's never gonna work. My background is networking. I worked at companies like Juniper and Ericsson ran several products there. So I know how the internet networks have built. And it was very Evan to me. It's not gonna be possible. My co-founders come from open source companies like pivotal and Cloudera. My auto co-founder was a, an engineer at sun Microsystems built the first network stack in the solar is operating system. So a lot of experience that kind of came together to build this. >>Yeah. Cloudera is a big day. That's where the cube started by the way. Yeah. >>Yeah. So, so we, we, we have, I think a good view on the stack, the cloud stack and therefore a good view of what the ed stack needs to look like. And then I think, you know, to answer your other question, our orchestration service runs in the cloud. We have, we actually are multi-cloud company. So we offer customers choice where they want to orchestrate the node from the nodes themself, never sit in a data center. They always highly embedded. We have customers are putting machines or inside these factory lines, et cetera. Are >>You running your SAS on Amazon web services or which >>Cloud we're running it on several clouds, including Amazon, all of, pretty much the cloud. So some customers say, Hey, I'd prefer to be on the Amazon set. And others customers say, I wanna be on Azure set. >>And you leverage their CapEx on that side. Yes. On behalf of yeah. >>Yeah. We, yes. Yes. But the majority of the customer data and, and all the data that the nodes process, the customer send it to their clouds. They don't send it to us. We don't get a copy of the camera feed analytics or the machine data. We actually decouple those though. So basically the, the team production data go straight to the customer's cloud and that's why they love us. >>And they choose that they can control their own desktop. >>Yeah. So we separate the management plane from the data plane at the edge. Yeah. >>That's a good call >>Actually. Yeah. That was another very important part of the architecture early on. Cause customers don't want us to see their, you know, highly confidential production data and we don't wanna have it either. So >>We had a great chat with Chris Wolf who works with kit culvert about control plane, data, plane. So that seems to be the trend data, plane customers want full yeah. Management of that. Yeah. Control plane. Maybe give multiple >>Versions. Yeah. Yeah. So our cloud consumption what the data we stories about the apps, their behavior, the networking, the security, all of that. That's what we store in our cloud. And then customers can access that and monitor. But the actual machine that I go somewhere else >>Here we are at VMware. Explore. Talk a little bit about the VMware relationship. You just had some big news the other day. >>Yeah. So two days ago we actually made a big announcement with VMware. So we signed an OEM agreement with VMware. So we're part now of VMware's edge compute stack. So VMware customers, as they start using the recently announced edge compute stack 2.0, that was announced here. Basically it's powered by Edda technology. So it's a really exciting partnership as part of this, we actually building integrations with the VMware organization products. So that's basically now extending to more, you know, other groups inside VMware. >>So what's the value in it for VMware customers. >>Yeah. So I think the, the, the benefit of, of VMware customers, I think cus VMware customers want that multi-cloud multi edge orchestration experience. So they wanna be able to deploy workloads in the cloud. They wanna deploy the workloads in the data center. And of course also at the edge. So by us integrating in that vision customers now can have that unified experience from cloud to edge and anywhere in between. >>What's the big vision that you see happening at the edge. I mean, a lot of the VMware customers here, they're classic it that have evolved into ops now, dev ops. Now you've got second data ops coming. The edge is gonna right around the corner for them. They're dealing with it now, probably just kicking the tires, towing the water kind of thing. Where do you see the vision going? Cuz now, no matter what happens with VMware, the Broadcom, this wave is still here. You got AWS, got Azure, got Google cloud, you got Oracle, Alibaba internationally. And the cloud native surges here. How do you see that disrupting the existing edge? Because let's face it the O some of those OT players, a little bit old and antiquated, a little bit outdated. I mean, I was talking to a telco person. They, they puked the word open source. I mean, these people are so dogmatic on, on their architecture. Yeah. They're gonna get disrupted. It's a matter of time. Yeah. Where's the new guard come in. How do you see the configuration changing in the landscape? Because some people will cross over to the right side of the street here. Yeah. Some won't yeah. Open circle. Dominate cloud native will be key. Yeah. >>Well, I mean, I think, again, let's, let's take an example of a vertical that's heavily disrupted now as the automotive market, right? The, so look at Tesla and look at all these companies, they built, they built software first cars, right? Software, first delivery of capabilities and everything else. And the, and the incumbents. They have only two options, right? Either they try to respond by adopting open source cloud, native technologies. Like the, these new entrants have done and really, you know, compete with them at that level, or they can become commodity. Right. So, and I think that's the customers we're seeing the smart customers go like, we need to compete with these guys. We need to figure out how to take this technology in. And they need partners like us and partners like VMware for them. >>Do you see customers becoming cloud super cloud players? If they continue to keep leveraging the CapEx of the clouds and focus all their operational capital on top line revenue, generating activities. >>Yeah. I, so I think the CapEx model of the cloud is a great benefit of the cloud, but I think that is not, what's the longer term future of the cloud. I think the op the cloud operating model is the future. Like the agility, the ability imagine embedded software that, you know, you do an over the year update to fix a bug, but it's very hard to make a, an embedded device smarter over time. And then imagine if you can run cloud native software, you can roll out every two weeks new features and make that thing smarter, intelligent, and continue to help you in your business. That I think is what cloud did ultimately. And I think that is what really these customers are gonna need at their edge. >>Well, we talked about the value within it for customers with the VMware partnership, but what are some of your expectations? Obviously, this is a pretty powerful partnership for you guys. Yeah. What are some of the things that you're expecting that this is gonna drive? Yeah, >>So we, we, we have always operated at the more OT layer, distributed organizations in retail, energy, industrial automotive. Those are the verticals we, so we've developed. I think a lot of experience there, what, what we're seeing as we talk to those customers is they obviously have it organizations and the it organizations, Hey, that's great. You're looking at its computing, but how do we tie this into the existing investments we made with VMware? And how do we kind of take that also to this new environment? And I think that's the expectation I have is that I think we will be able to, to talk to the it folks and say, Hey, you can actually talk to the OT person. And both of you will speak the same language. You probably will both standardize on the same architecture and you'll be together deploying and enabling this new agility at the edge. >>What are some of the next things coming up for ZDA and the team? >>Well, so we've had a really amazing few quarters. We just close a series B round. So we've raised the companies raised over 55 million so far, we're growing very rapidly. We opened up no new international offices. I would say the, the early customers that we started deploying, wait a while back, they're now going into mass scale deployment. So we have now deployments underway in, you know, the 10 to hundred thousands of nodes at certain customers and in amazing environments. And so, so for us, it's continuing to prove the product in more and more verticals. Our, our product is really built for the largest of the largest. So, you know, for the size of the company, we are, we have a high concentration of fortune 500 global 500 customers, and some of them even invested in our rounds recently. So we we've been really, you know, honored with that support. Well, congratulations. Good stuff, edges popping. All right. Thank you. >>Thank you so much for joining us, talking about what you're doing in distributed edge. What's in it for customers, the VMware partnership, and by the way, congratulations on >>That too. Thank you. Thank you so much. Nice to meet you. Thank >>You. All right. Nice to meet you as well for our guest and John furrier. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube live from VMware Explorer, 22, John and I will be right back with our next guest.

(digital pulsing music) >> We're back at VeeamON 2022. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my co-host David Nicholson. I've got another mass boy coming on. Patrick Osborne is the vice president of the storage business unit at HPE. Good to see you again, my friend. It's been a long time. >> It's been way too long, thank you very much for having me. >> I can't even remember the last time we saw each other. It might have been in our studios in the East Coast. Well, it's good to be here with you. Lots have been going on, of course, we've been following from afar, but give us the update, what's new with HPE? We've done some stuff on GreenLake, we've covered that pretty extensively and looks like you got some momentum there. >> Quite a bit of momentum, both on the technology front and certainly the customer acquisition front. The message is certainly resonating with our customers. GreenLake is, that's the transformation that's fueling the future of Hewlett Packard Enterprise. So the momentum is great on the technology side. We're at well over 50 services that we're providing on the GreenLake platform. Everything from solutions and workloads to compute, networking and storage. So it's been really fantastic to see the platform and being able to really delight the customers and then the momentum on the sales and the customer acquisition side, the customers are voting with their dollars, so they're very happy with the platform, certainly from an operational perspective and a financial consumption perspective and so our target goal, which we've said a bunch of times is we want to be the hyperscaler on on-prem. We want to provide that customer experience to the folks that are investing in the platform. It's going really well. >> I'll ask you a question, as a former analyst, it could be obnoxious and so forth, so I'll be obnoxious for a minute. I wrote a piece in 2010 called At Your Storage Service, saying the future of storage and infrastructure as a service, blah, blah, blah. Now, of course, you don't want to over-rotate when there's no market, there was no market for GreenLake in 2010. Do you feel like your timing was right on, a little bit late, little bit early? Looking back now, how do you feel about that? >> Well, it's funny you say that. On the timing side, we've seen iterations of this stops and start forever. >> That's true. Financial gimmicks. >> I started my career at Sun Microsystems. We talked about the big freaking Web-tone switch and a lot of the network is the computer. You saw storage networks, you've seen a lot, a ton of iterations in this category, and so, I think the timing's right right now. Obviously, the folks in the hyperscaler class have proved out that this is something that's working. I think for us, the big thing that's really resonating with the customers is they want the operational model and they want the consumption model that they're getting from that as a service experience, but they still are going to run a number of their workloads on-prem and that's the best place to do it for them economically and we've proved that out. So I think the time is here to have that bifurcated experience from operational and financial perspective and in the past, the technology wasn't there and the ability to deliver that for the customers in a manner that was useful wasn't there. So I think the timing's perfect right now to provide them. >> As you know, theCUBE has had a presence at HPE Discover. Previous, even HP Discover and same with Veeam. But we got a long history with HP/HPE. When Hewlett Packard split into two companies, we made the observation, Wow, this opens up a whole new ecosystem opportunity for HPE generally, in storage business specifically, especially in data protection and backup, and the Veeam relationship, the ink wasn't dry and all of a sudden you guys were partnering, throwing joint activities, and so talk about how that relationship has evolved. >> From my perspective, we've always been a big partnering company, both on the route to market side, so our distributors and partners, and we work with them in big channel business. And then on the software partnership side, that's always evolving and growing. We're a very open ecosystem and we like to provide choice for our customers and I think, at the end of the day, we've got a lot of things that we work on jointly, so we have a great value prop. First phase of that relationship was partnering, we've got a full boat of product integrations that we do for customers. The second was a lot of special sauce that we do for our customers for co-integration and co-development. We had a huge session today with Rick Vanover and Frederico on our team here to talk about ransomware. We have big customers suffering from this plague right now and we've done a lot together on the engineering side to provide a very, very well-engineered, well thought out process to help avoid some of these things. And so that wave, too, of how do we do a ton of co-innovation together to really delight our customers and help them run their businesses, and I think the evolution of where we're going now, we have a lot of things that are very similar, strategically, in terms of, we all talk about data services and outcomes for our customers. So at the end of the day, when we think about GreenLake, like our virtual machine backup as a service or disaster recovery, it's all about what workloads are you running, what are the most important ones, where do you need help protecting that data? And essentially, how can we provide that outcome to you and you pay it as an outcome. And so we have a lot of things that we're working on together in that space. >> Let's take a little bit of a closer look at that. First of all, I'm from California, so I'm having a really hard time understanding what either of you were saying. Your accents are so thick. >> We could talk in Boston. >> Your accents are so thick. (Dave laughing) I could barely, but I know I heard you say something about Veaam at one point. Take a closer look at that. What does that look like from a ransomware perspective in terms of this concept of air gaping or immutable, immutable volumes and just as an aside, it seems like Veeam is a perfect partnership for you since customers obviously are going to be in hybrid mode for a long time and Veeam overlays that nicely. But what does it look like specifically? Immutable, air gap, some of the things we've been hearing a lot about. >> I'm exec sponsor for a number of big HPE customers and I'll give you an example. One of our customers, they have their own cloud service for time management and essentially they're exploited and they're not able to provide their service. It has huge ripple effect, if you think about, on inability to do their service and then how that affects their customers and their customers' employees and all that. It's a disaster, no pun intended. And the thing is, we learn from that and we can put together a really good architectures and best practices. So we're talking today about 3-2-1-1, so having three copies of your data, two different types of media, having an offline copy, an offsite copy and an offline copy. And now we're thinking about all the things you need to do to mitigate against all the different ways that people are going to exploit you. We've seen it all. You have keys that are erased, primary storage that is compromised and encrypted, people that come in and delete your backup catalog, they delete your backups, they delete your snapshots. So they get it down to essentially, "I'm either going to have one set of data, it's encrypted, I'm going to make you pay for it," and 40 percent of the time they pay and they get the data back, 60 percent of the time they pay and they get maybe some of the data back. But for the most part, you're not getting your data back. The best thing that we can do for our customers that come with a very prescriptive set of T-shirt configuration sizes, standardization, best practices on how they can take this entire ecosystem together and make it really easy for the customers to implement. But I wouldn't say, it's never bulletproof, but essentially, do as much as you can to avoid having to pay that ransomware. >> So 3-2-1-1, three copies, meaning local. >> Patrick: Yeah. >> So you can do fast recovery if you need to. Two different types of media, so tape fits in here? Not necessarily flashing and spinning disks. Could it be tape? >> A lot of times we have customers that have almost four different types. So they are running their production on flash. We have Alletras with HPE networking and servers running specific workloads, high performance. We have secondary storage on-prem for fast recovery and then we have some form of offsite and offline. Offsite could be object storage in the cloud and then offline would be an actual tape backup. The tape is out of the tape library in a vault so no one can actually access it through the network and so it's a physical copy that's offline. So you always have something to restore. >> Patrick, where's the momentum today, specifically, we're at VeeamON, but with regard to the Veeam partnership, is it security and ransomware, which is a new thing for this world. The last two years, it's really come to the top. Is it cloud migration? Is it data services and data management? Where's the momentum, all of the above, but maybe you could help us parse that. >> What we're seeing here at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, especially through GreenLake, is just an overall focus on data services. So what we're doing is we've got great platforms, we always had. HPE is known as an engineering company. We have fantastic products and solutions that customers love. What we're doing right now is taking, essentially, a lot of the beauty of those products and elevating them into an operational experience in the cloud, so you have a set of platforms that you want to run, you have machine critical platform, business critical, secondary storage, archival, data analytics and I want to be able to manage those from the cloud. So fleet management, HCI management, protocol management, block service, what have you, and then I want a set of abstracted data services that are on top of it and that's essentially things like disaster recovery, backup, data immutability, data vision, understanding what kind of data you have, and so we'll be able to provide those services that are essentially abstracted from the platforms themselves that run across multiple types of platforms. We can charge them on outcome based. They're based on consumption, so you think about something like DR, you have a small set of VMs that you want to protect with a very tight RPO, you can pay for those 100 VMs that are the most important that you have. So for us driving that operational experience and then the cloud data service experience into GreenLake gives customers a really, gives them a cloud experience. >> So have you heard the term super cloud? >> Patrick: Yeah. (chuckles) >> Have you? >> Patrick: Absolutely. >> It's term that we kind of coined, but I want to ask you about it specifically, in terms of how it fits into your strategy. So the idea is, and you kind of just described it, I think, whether your data is on-prem, it's in the cloud, multiple clouds, we'll talk about the edge later, but you're hiding the underlying complexities of the cloud's APIs and primitives, you're taking care of that for your customers, irrespective of physical location. It's the common experience across all those platforms. Is that a reasonable vision, maybe, even from a technical standpoint, is it part of HPE strategy and what does it take to actually do that, 'cause it sounds nice, but it's probably pretty intense? >> So the proof's in the pudding for us. We have a number of platforms that are providing, whether it's compute or networking or storage, running those workloads that they plum up into the cloud, they have an operational experience in the cloud and now they have data services that are running in the cloud for us in GreenLake. So it's a reality. We have a number of platforms that support that. We're going to have a set of big announcements coming up at HPE Discover. So we led with Alletra and we have a block service, we have VM backup as a service and DR On top of that. That's something that we're providing today. GreenLake has over, I think, it's actually over 60 services right now that we're providing in the GreenLake platform itself. Everything from security, single sign on, customer IDs, everything, so it's real. We have the proof point for it. >> So, GreenLake is essentially, I've said it, it's the HPE cloud. Is that a fair statement? >> A hundred percent. >> You're redefining cloud. And one of the hallmarks of cloud is ecosystem. Roughly, and I want to talk more about you got to grow that ecosystem to be successful in cloud, no question about it. And HPE's got the chops to do that. What percent of those services are HPE versus ecosystem partners and how do you see that evolving over time? >> We have a good number of services that are based on HPE, our tried and true intellectual property. >> You got good tech. >> Absolutely, so a number of that. And then we have partners in GreenLake today. We have a pretty big ecosystem and it's evolving, too. So we have customers and partners that are focused, our customers want our focus on data services. We have a number of opportunities and partnerships around data analytics. As you know, that's a really dynamic space. A lot of folks providing support on open source, analytics and that's a fast moving ecosystem, so we want to support that. We've seen a lot of interest in security. Being able to bring in security companies that are focused on data security. Data analytics to understand what's in your data from a customer perspective, how to secure that. So we have a pretty big ecosystem there. Just like our path at HPE, we've always had a really strong partnership with tons of software companies and we're going to continue to do that with GreenLake. >> You guys have been partner-friendly, I'll give you that. I'm going to ask Antonio this at Discover in a couple of weeks, but I want to ask you, when you think about, again, to go back to AWS as the prototypical cloud, you look at a Snowflake and a Redshift. The Redshift guys probably hate Snowflake, but the EC2 guys love them, sell a lot of compute. Now you as a business unit manager, do you ever see the day where you're side by side with one of your competitors? I'm guessing Antonio would say absolutely. Culturally, how does that play inside of HPE? I'm testing your partner-friendliness. How would you- >> Who will you- >> How do you think about that? >> At the end of the day, for us, the opportunity for us is to delight our customers. So we've always talked about customer choice and how to provide that best outcome. I think the big thing for us is that, from a cost perspective, we've seen a lot of customers coming back to HPE repatriation, from a repatriation perspective for a certain class of workloads. From my perspective, we're providing the best infrastructure and the best operational services at the best price at scale for these costumers. >> Really? It definitely, culturally, HPE has to, I think you would agree, it has to open up. You might not, you're going to go compete, based on the merit- >> Absolutely. >> of your product and technology. The repatriation thing is interesting. 'Cause I've always been a repatriation skeptic. Are you actually starting to see that in a meaningful way? Do you think you'll see it in the macro numbers? I mean, cloud doesn't seem to be slowing down, the public cloud growth, I mean, the 35, 40 percent a year. >> We're seeing it in our numbers. We're seeing it in the new logo and existing customer acquisition within GreenLake. So it's real for us. >> And they're telling you? Pure cost? >> Cost. >> So it's that's simple. >> Cost. >> So, they get the cloud bill, you do, too. I'd get the email from my CFO, "Why the cloud bill so high this month?" Part of that is it's consumption-based and it's not predictable. >> And also, too, one of the things that you said around unlocking a lot of the customer's ability from a resourcing perspective, so if we can take care of all the stuff underneath, the under cloud for the customer, the platform, so the stores, the serving, the networking, the automation, the provisioning, the health. As you guys know, we have hundreds of thousands of customers on the Aruba platform. We've got hundreds of thousands of customers calling home through InfoSight. So we can provide a very rich set of analytics, automated environment, automated health checking, and a very good experience that's going to help them move away from managing boxes to doing operational services with GreenLake. >> We talk about repatriation often. There was a time when I think a lot of us would've agreed that no one who was born in the cloud will ever do anything other than grow in the cloud. Are you seeing organizations that were born in the cloud realizing, "Hey, we know what our 80 percent steady state is and we've modeled this. Why rent it when we can own it? Or why rent it here when we can have it as operational cost there?" Are you seeing those? >> We're seeing some of that. We're certainly seeing folks that have a big part of their native or their digital business. It's a cost factor and so I think, one of the other areas, too, that we're seeing is there's a big transformation going on for our partners as well, too, on the sell-through side. So you're starting to see more niche SaaS offerings. You're starting to see more vertically focused offerings from our service provider partners or MSPs. So it's not just in either-or type of situation. You're starting to see now some really, really specific things going on in either verticals, customer segmentation, specific SaaS or data services and for us, it's a really good ecosystem, because we work with our SP partners, our MSP partners, they use our tech, they use our services, they provide services to our joint customers. For example, I know you guys have talked to iland here in the past. It's a great example for us for customers that are looking for DR as a service, backup as a service hosting, so it's a nice triangle for us to be able to please those customers. >> They're coming on to tomorrow. They're on 11/11. I think you're right on. The one, I think, obvious place where this repatriation could happen, it's the Sarah Wong and Martin Casano scenario where a SaaS companies cost a good sold become dominated by cloud costs. And they say, "Okay, well, maybe, I'm not going to build my own data centers. That's probably not going to happen, but I can go to Equinix and do a colo and I'm going to save a ton of dough, managing my own infrastructure with automation or outsourcing it." So Patrick, got to go. I could talk with you forever. Thank you so much for coming back in theCUBE. >> Always a pleasure. >> Go, Celts. How you feeling about the, we always talk sports here in VeeamON. How are you feeling about the Celts today? >> My original call today was Celtics in six, but we'll see what happens. >> Stephen, you like Celtics? Celtics six. >> Stephen: Celtics six. >> Even though tonight, they got a little- >> Stephen: Still believe, you got to believe. >> All right, I believe. >> It'd be better than the Miami's Mickey Mouse run there, in the bubble, a lot of astronauts attached to that. (Dave laughing) >> I love it. You got to believe here on theCUBE. All right, keep it right- >> I don't care. >> Keep it right there. You don't care, 'cause you're not from a sports town. Where are you in California? >> We have no sports. >> All right, keep it right there. This is theCUBE's coverage of VeeamON 2022. Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson. We'll be right back. (digital music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a CUBE conversation. >> As you know by now, Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, is stepping aside from his CEO role and AWS CEO, Andy Jassy, is being promoted to head all of Amazon. Bezos, of course, is going to remain executive chairman. Now, 15 years ago, next month, Amazon launched it's simple storage service, which was the first modern cloud offering. And the man who wrote the business plan for AWS, was Andy Jassy, and he's navigated the meteoric rise and disruption that has seen AWS grow into a $45 billion company that draws off the vast majority of Amazon's operating profits. No one in the media has covered Jassy more intimately and closely than John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. And John joins us today to help us understand on theCUBE this move and what we can expect from Jassy in his new role, and importantly what it means for AWS. John, thanks for taking the time to speak with us. >> Hey, great day. Great to see you as always, we've done a lot of interviews together over the years and we're on our 11th year with theCUBE and SiliconANGLE. But I got to be excited too, that we're simulcasters on Clubhouse, which is kind of cool. Love Clubhouse but not since the, in December. It's awesome. It's like Cube radio. It's like, so this is a Cube talk. So we opened up a Clubhouse room while we're filming this. We'll do more live hits in studio and syndicate the Clubhouse and then take questions after. This is a huge digital transformation moment. I'm part of the digital transformation club on Clubhouse which has almost 5,000 followers at the moment and also has like 500 members. So if you're not on Clubhouse, yet, if you have an iPhone go check it out and join the digital transformation club. Android users you'll have to wait until that app is done but it's really a great club. And Jeremiah Owyang is also doing a lot of stuff on digital transformation. >> Or you can just buy an iPhone and get in. >> Yeah, that's what people are doing. I can see all the influences are on there but to me, the digital transformation, it's always been kind of a cliche, the consumerization of IT, information technology. This has been the boring world of the enterprise over the past, 20 years ago. Enterprise right now is super hot because there's no distinction between enterprise and society. And that's clearly the, because of the rise of cloud computing and the rise of Amazon Web Services which was a side project at AWS, at Amazon that Andy Jassy did. And it wasn't really pleasant at the beginning. It was failed. It failed a lot and it wasn't as successful as people thought in the early days. And I have a lot of stories with Andy that he told me a lot of the inside baseball and we'll share that here today. But we started covering Amazon since the beginning. I was as an entrepreneur. I used it when it came out and a huge fan of them as a company because they just got a superior product and they have always had been but it was very misunderstood from the beginning. And now everyone's calling it the most important thing. And Andy now is becoming Andy Jassy, the most important executive in the world. >> So let's get it to the, I mean, look at, you said to me over holidays, you thought this might have something like this could happen. And you said, Jassy is probably in line to get this. So, tell us, what can you tell us about Jassy? Why is he qualified for this job? What do you think he brings to the table? >> Well, the thing that I know about Amazon everyone's been following the Amazon news is, Jeff Bezos has a lot of personal turmoil. They had his marriage fail. They had some issues with the smear campaigns and all this stuff going on, the run-ins with Donald Trump, he bought the Washington post. He's got a lot of other endeavors outside of Amazon cause he's the second richest man in the world competing with Elon Musk at Space X versus Blue Origin. So the guy's a billionaire. So Amazon is his baby and he's been running it as best he could. He's got an executive team committee they called the S team. He's been grooming people in the company and that's just been his mode. And the rise of AWS and the business performance that we've been documenting on SiliconANGLE and theCUBE, it's just been absolutely changing the game on Amazon as a company. So clearly Amazon Web Services become a driving force of the new Amazon that's emerging. And obviously they've got all their retail business and they got the gaming challenges and they got the studios and the other diversified stuff. So Jassy is just, he's just one of those guys. He's just been an Amazonian from day one. He came out of Harvard business school, drove across the country, very similar story to Jeff Bezos. He did that in 1997 and him and Jeff had been collaborating and Jeff tapped him to be his shadow, they call it, which is basically technical assistance and an heir apparent and groomed him. And then that's how it is. Jassy is not a climber as they call it in corporate America. He's not a person who is looking for a political gain. He's not a territory taker, but he's a micromanager. He loves details and he likes to create customer value. And that's his focus. So he's not a grandstander. In fact, he's been very low profile. Early days when we started meeting with him, he wouldn't meet with press regularly because they weren't writing the right stories. And everyone is, he didn't know he was misunderstood. So that's classic Amazon. >> So, he gave us the time, I think it was 2014 or 15 and he told us a story back then, John, you might want to share it as to how AWS got started. Why, what was the main spring Amazon's tech wasn't working that great? And Bezos said to Jassy, going to go figure out why and maybe explain how AWS was born. >> Yeah, we had, in fact, we were the first ones to get access to do his first public profile. If you go to the Google and search Andy Jassy, the trillion dollar baby, we had a post, we put out the story of AWS, Andy Jassy's trillion dollar baby. This was in early, this was January 2015, six years ago. And, we back then, we posited that this would be a trillion dollar total addressable market. Okay, people thought we were crazy but we wrote a story and he gave us a very intimate access. We did a full drill down on him and the person, the story of Amazon and that laid out essentially the beginning of the rise of AWS and Andy Jassy. So that's a good story to check out but really the key here is, is that he's always been relentless and competitive on creating value in what they call raising the bar outside Amazon. That's a term that they use. They also have another leadership principle called working backwards, which is like, go to the customer and work backwards from the customer in a very Steve Job's kind of way. And that's been kind of Jobs mentality as well at Apple that made them successful work backwards from the customer and make things easier. And that was Apple. Amazon, their philosophy was work backwards from the customer and Jassy specifically would say it many times and eliminate the undifferentiated heavy lifting. That was a key principle of what they were doing. So that was a key thesis of their entire business model. And that's the Amazonian way. Faster, cheaper, ship it faster, make it less expensive and higher value. While when you apply the Amazon shipping concept to cloud computing, it was completely disrupted. They were shipping code and services faster and that became their innovation strategy. More announcements every year, they out announced their competition by huge margin. They introduced new services faster and they're less expensive some say, but in the aggregate, they make more money but that's kind of a key thing. >> Well, when you, I was been listening to the TV today and there was a debate on whether or not, this support tends that they'll actually split the company into two. To me, I think it's just the opposite. I think it's less likely. I mean, if you think about Amazon getting into grocery or healthcare, eventually financial services or other industries and the IOT opportunity to me, what they do, John, is they bring in together the cloud, data and AI and they go attack these new industries. I would think Jassy of all people would want to keep this thing together now whether or not the government allows them to do that. But what are your thoughts? I mean, you've asked Andy this before in your personal interviews about splitting the company. What are your thoughts? >> Well, Jon Fortt at CNBC always asked the same question every year. It's almost like the standard question. I kind of laugh and I ask it now too because I liked Jon Fortt. I think he's an awesome dude. And I'll, it's just a tongue in cheek, Jassy. He won't answer the question. Amazon, Bezos and Jassy have one thing in common. They're really good at not answering questions. So if you ask the same question. They'll just say, nothing's ever, never say never, that's his classic answer to everything. Never say never. And he's always said that to you. (chuckles) Some say, he's, flip-flopped on things but he's really customer driven. For example, he said at one point, no one should ever build a data center. Okay, that was a principle. And then they come out and they have now a hybrid strategy. And I called them out on that and said, hey, what, are you flip-flopping? You said at some point, no one should have a data center. He's like, well, we looked at it differently and what we meant was is that, it should all be cloud native. Okay. So that's kind of revision, but he's cool with that. He says, hey, we'll revise based on what customers are doing. VMware working with Amazon that no one ever thought that would happen. Okay. So, VMware has some techies, Raghu, for instance, over there, super top notch. He worked with Jassy, directly in his team Sanjay Poonen when they went to business school together, they cut a deal. And now Amazon essentially saved VMware, in my opinion. And Pat Gelsinger drove that deal. Now, Pat Gelsinger, CEO, Intel, and Pat told me that directly in candid conversation off theCUBE, he said, hey, we have to make a decision either we're going to be in cloud or we're not going to be in cloud, we will partner. And I'll see, he was Intel. He understood the Intel inside mentality. So that's good for VMware. So Jassy does these kinds of deals. He's not afraid he's got a good stomach for business and a relentless competitor. >> So, how do you think as you mentioned Jassy is a micromanager. He gets deep into the technology. Anybody who's seen his two hour, three hour keynotes. No, he has a really fine grasp of the technology across the entire stack. How do you think John, he will approach things like antitrust, the big tech lash of the unionization of the workforce at Amazon? How do you think Jassy will approach that? >> Well, I think one of the things that emerges Jassy, first of all, he's a huge sports fan. And many people don't know that but he's also progressive person. He's very progressive politically. He's been on the record and off the record saying things like, obviously, literacy has been big on, he's been on basically unrepresented minorities, pushing for that, and certainly cloud computing in tech, women in tech, he's been a big proponent. He's been a big supporter of Teresa Carlson. Who's been rising star at Amazon. People don't know who Teresa Carlson is and they should check out her. She's become one of the biggest leaders inside Amazon she's turned around public sector from the beginning. She ran that business, she's a global star. He's been a great leader and he's been getting, forget he's a micromanager, he's on top of the details. I mean, the word is, and nothing gets approved without Andy, Andy seeing it. But he's been progressive. He's been an Amazon original as they call it internally. He's progressive, he's got the business acumen but he's perfect for this pragmatic conversation that needs to happen. And again, because he's so technically strong having a CEO that's that proficient is going to give Amazon an advantage when they have to go in and change how DC works, for instance, or how the government geopolitical landscape works, because Amazon is now a global company with regions all over the place. So, I think he's pragmatic, he's open to listening and changing. I think that's a huge quality >> Well, when you think of this, just to set the context here for those who may not know, I mean, Amazon started as I said back in 2006 in March with simple storage service that later that year they announced EC2 which is their compute platform. And that was the majority of their business, is still a very large portion of their business but Amazon, our estimates are that in 2020, Amazon did 45 billion, 45.4 billion in revenue. That's actually an Amazon reported number. And just to give you a context, Azure about 26 billion GCP, Google about 6 billion. So you're talking about an industry that Amazon created. That's now $78 billion and Amazon at 45 billion. John they're growing at 30% annually. So it's just a massive growth engine. And then another story Jassy told us, is they, he and Jeff and the team talked early on about whether or not they should just sort of do an experiment, do a little POC, dip their toe in and they decided to go for it. Let's go big or go home as Michael Dell has said to us many times, I mean, pretty astounding. >> Yeah. One of the things about Jassy that people should know about, I think there's some compelling relative to the newest ascension to the CEO of Amazon, is that he's not afraid to do new things. For instance, I'll give you an example. The Amazon Web Services re-invent their annual conference grew to being thousands and thousands of people. And they would have a traditional after party. They called a replay, they'd have a band like every tech conference and their conference became so big that essentially, it was like setting up a live concert. So they were spending millions of dollars to set up basically a one night concert and they'd bring in great, great artists. So he said, hey, what's been all this cash? Why don't we just have a festival? So they did a thing called Intersect. They got LA involved from creatives and they basically built a weekend festival in the back end of re-invent. This was when real life was, before COVID and they turned into an opportunity because that's the way they think. They like to look at the resources, hey, we're already all in on this, why don't we just keep it for the weekend and charge some tickets and have a good time. He's not afraid to take chances on the product side. He'll go in and take a chance on a new market. That comes from directly from Bezos. They try stuff. They don't mind failing but they put a tight leash on measurement. They work backwards from the customer and they are not afraid to take chances. So, that's going to board well for him as he tries to figure out how Amazon navigates the contention on the political side when they get challenged for their dominance. And I think he's going to have to apply that pragmatic experimentation to new business models. >> So John I want you to take on AWS. I mean, despite the large numbers, I talked about 30% growth, Azure is growing at over 50% a year, GCP at 83%. So despite the large numbers and big growth the growth rates are slowing. Everybody knows that, we've reported it extensively. So the incoming CEO of Amazon Web Services has a TAM expansion challenge. And at some point they've got to decide, okay, how do we keep this growth engine? So, do you have any thoughts as to who might be the next CEO and what are some of their challenges as you see it? >> Well, Amazon is a real product centric company. So it's going to be very interesting to see who they go with here. Obviously they've been grooming a lot of people. There's been some turnover. You had some really strong executives recently leave, Jeff Wilkes, who was the CEO of the retail business. He retired a couple of months ago, formerly announced I think recently, he was probably in line. You had Mike Clayville, is now the chief revenue officer of Stripe. He ran all commercial business, Teresa Carlson stepped up to his role as well as running public sector. Again, she got more power. You have Matt Garman who ran the EC2 business, Stanford grad, great guy, super strong on the product side. He's now running all commercial sales and marketing. And he's also on the, was on Bezos' S team, that's the executive kind of team. Peter DeSantis is also on that S team. He runs all infrastructure. He took over for James Hamilton, who was the genius behind all the data center work that they've done and all the chip design stuff that they've innovated on. So there's so much technical innovation going on. I think you still going to see a leadership probably come from, I would say Matt Garman, in my opinion is the lead dog at this point, he's the lead horse. You could have an outside person come in depending upon how, who might be available. And that would probably come from an Andy Jassy network because he's a real fierce competitor but he's also a loyalist and he likes trust. So if someone comes in from the outside, it's going to be someone maybe he trusts. And then the other wildcards are like Teresa Carlson. Like I said, she is a great woman in tech who's done amazing work. I've profiled her many times. We've interviewed her many times. She took that public sector business with Amazon and changed the game completely. Outside the Jedi contract, she was in competitive for, had the big Trump showdown with the Jedi, with the department of defense. Had the CIA cloud. Amazon set the standard on public sector and that's directly the result of Teresa Carlson. But she's in the field, she's not a product person, she's kind of running that group. So Amazon has that product field kind of structure. So we'll see how they handle that. But those are the top three I think are going to be in line. >> So the obvious question that people always ask and it is a big change like this is, okay, in this case, what is Jassy going to bring in? And what's going to change? Maybe the flip side question is somewhat more interesting. What's not going to change in your view? Jassy has been there since nearly the beginning. What are some of the fundamental tenets that he's, that are fossilized, that won't change, do you think? >> I think he's, I think what's not going to change is Amazon, is going to continue to grow and develop their platform business and enable more SaaS players. That's a little bit different than what Microsoft's doing. They're more SaaS oriented, Office 365 is becoming their biggest application in terms of revenue on Microsoft side. So Amazon is going to still have to compete and enable more ecosystem partners. I think what's not going to change is that Bezos is still going to be in charge because executive chairman is just a code word for "not an active CEO." So in the corporate governance world when you have an executive chairman, that's essentially the person still in charge. And so he'll be in charge, will still be the boss of Andy Jassy and Jassy will be running all of Amazon. So I think that's going to be a little bit the same, but Jassy is going to be more in charge. I think you'll see a team change over, whether you're going to see some new management come in, Andy's management team will expand, I think Amazon will stay the same, Amazon Web Services. >> So John, last night, I was just making some notes about notable transitions in the history of the tech business, Gerstner to Palmisano, Gates to Ballmer, and then Ballmer to Nadella. One that you were close to, David Packard to John Young and then John Young to Lew Platt at the old company. Ellison to Safra and Mark, Jobs to Cook. We talked about Larry Page to Sundar Pichai. So how do you see this? And you've talked to, I remember when you interviewed John Chambers, he said, there is no rite of passage, East coast mini-computer companies, Edson de Castro, Ken Olsen, An Wang. These were executives who wouldn't let go. So it's of interesting to juxtapose that with the modern day executive. How do you see this fitting in to some of those epic transitions that I just mentioned? >> I think a lot of people are surprised at Jeff Bezos', even stepping down. I think he's just been such the face of Amazon. I think some of the poll numbers that people are doing on Twitter, people don't think it's going to make a big difference because he's kind of been that, leader hand on the wheel, but it's been its own ship now, kind of. And so depending on who's at the helm, it will be different. I think the Amazon choice of Andy wasn't obvious. And I think a lot of people were asking the question who was Andy Jassy and that's why we're doing this. And we're going to be doing more features on the Andy Jassy. We got a tons, tons of content that we've we've had shipped, original content with them. We'll share more of those key soundbites and who he is. I think a lot of people scratching their head like, why Andy Jassy? It's not obvious to the outsiders who don't know cloud computing. If you're in the competing business, in the digital transformation side, everyone knows about Amazon Web Services. Has been the most successful company, in my opinion, since I could remember at many levels just the way they've completely dominated the business and how they change others to be dominant. So, I mean, they've made Microsoft change, it made Google change and even then he's a leader that accepts conversations. Other companies, their CEOs hide behind their PR wall and they don't talk to people. They won't come on Clubhouse. They won't talk to the press. They hide behind their PR and they feed them, the media. Jassy is not afraid to talk to reporters. He's not afraid to talk to people, but he doesn't like people who don't know what they're talking about. So he doesn't suffer fools. So, you got to have your shit together to talk to Jassy. That's really the way it is. And that's, and he'll give you mind share, like he'll answer any question except for the ones that are too tough for him to answer. Like, are you, is facial recognition bad or good? Are you going to spin out AWS? I mean these are the hard questions and he's got a great team. He's got Jay Carney, former Obama press secretary working for him. He's been a great leader. So I'm really bullish on, is a good choice. >> We're going to jump into the Clubhouse here and open it up shortly. John, the last question for you is competition. Amazon as a company and even Jassy specifically I always talk about how they don't really focus on the competition, they focus on the customer but we know that just observing these folks Bezos is very competitive individual. Jassy, I mean, you know him better than I, very competitive individual. So, and he's, Jassy has been known to call out Oracle. Of course it was in response to Larry Ellison's jabs at Amazon regarding database. But, but how do you see that? Do you see that changing at all? I mean, will Amazon get more publicly competitive or they stick to their knitting, you think? >> You know this is going to sound kind of a weird analogy. And I know there's a lot of hero worshiping on Elon Musk but Elon Musk and Andy Jassy have a lot of similarities in the sense of their brilliance. They got both a brilliant people, different kinds of backgrounds. Obviously, they're running different things. They both are builders, right? If you were listening to Elon Musk on Clubhouse the other night, what was really striking was not only the magic of how it was all orchestrated and what he did and how he interviewed Robin Hood. He basically is about building stuff. And he was asked questions like, what advice do you give startups? He's like, if you need advice you shouldn't be doing startups. That's the kind of mentality that Jassy has, which is, it's not easy. It's not for the faint of heart, but Elon Musk is a builder. Jassy builds, he likes to build stuff, right? And so you look at all the things that he's done with AWS, it's been about enabling people to be successful with the tools that they need, adding more services, creating things that are lower price point. If you're an entrepreneur and you're over the age of 30, you know about AWS because you know what, it's cheaper to start a business on Amazon Web Services than buying servers and everyone knows that. If you're under the age of 25, you might not know 50 grand to a hundred thousand just to start something. Today you get your credit card down, you're up and running and you can get Clubhouses up and running all day long. So the next Clubhouse will be on Amazon or a cloud technology. And that's because of Andy Jassy right? So this is a significant executive and he continue, will bring that mindset of building. So, I think the digital transformation, we're in the digital engine club, we're going to see a complete revolution of a new generation. And I think having a new leader like Andy Jassy will enable in my opinion next generation talent, whether that's media and technology convergence, media technology and art convergence and the fact that he digs music, he digs sports, he digs tech, he digs media, it's going to be very interesting to see, I think he's well-poised to be, and he's soft-spoken, he doesn't want the glamorous press. He doesn't want the puff pieces. He just wants to do what he does and he puts his game do the talking. >> Talking about advice at startups. Just a quick aside. I remember, John, you and I when we were interviewing Scott McNealy former CEO of Sun Microsystems. And you asked him advice for startups. He said, move out of California. It's kind of tongue in cheek. I heard this morning that there's a proposal to tax the multi-billionaires of 1% annually not just the one-time tax. And so Jeff Bezos of course, has a ranch in Texas, no tax there, but places all over. >> You see I don't know. >> But I don't see Amazon leaving Seattle anytime soon, nor Jassy. >> Jeremiah Owyang did a Clubhouse on California. And the basic sentiment is that, it's California is not going away. I mean, come on. People got to just get real. I think it's a fad. Yeah. This has benefits with remote working, no doubt, but people will stay here in California, the network affects beautiful. I think Silicon Valley is going to continue to be relevant. It's just going to syndicate differently. And I think other hubs like Seattle and around the world will be integrated through remote work and I think it's going to be much more of a democratizing effect, not a win lose. So that to me is a huge shift. And look at Amazon, look at Amazon and Microsoft. It's the cloud cities, so people call Seattle. You've got Google down here and they're making waves but still, all good stuff. >> Well John, thanks so much. Let's let's wrap and let's jump into the Clubhouse and hear from others. Thanks so much for coming on, back on theCUBE. And many times we, you and I've done this really. It was a pleasure having you. Thanks for your perspectives. And thank you for watching everybody, this is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time. (soft ambient music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. >>Hello and welcome back to the cubes Virtual coverage of AWS reinvent 2020. Um, John for your host with a cube virtual were not there in person, but we're gonna do it our job with the best remote we possibly can. Where? Wall to wall coverage on the AWS reinvent site as well as on demand on the Cube. Three new 3 65 platform. We got some great power panel analysts here to dig in and discuss Partner Day for a W S what it means for the customer. What it means for the enterprise, the buyer, the people trying to figure out who to buy from and possibly new partners. How can they re engineer and reinvent their company to partner better with Amazon, take advantage of the benefits, but ultimately get more sales? We got Tim Crawford, star Beat Joel and Day Volonte, Friends of the Cube. We all know him on Twitter, You guys, the posse, the Cube policy. Thanks for coming on. I'm sure it's good guys entertaining and we're >>hanging out drinking beer. Oh, my God. That'd be awesome. You guys. >>Great to have you on. I wanted to bring you on because it's unique. Cross section of perspectives. And this isn't This is from the end user perspective. And, Tim, you've been talking about the c x o s for years. You expert in this? Sorry. You're taking more from a cloud perspective. You've seen the under the hood. What's happening? Let's all put it together. If your partner Okay, first question to the group. I'm a partner. Do I win with Amazon, or do I lose with Amazon? First question. >>Yeah, I'll jump in. I'll say, you know, regardless you win, you win with Amazon. I think there's a lot of opportunity for partners with Amazon. Um, you have to pick your battles, though. You have to find the right places where you can carve out a space that isn't too congested but also isn't really kind of fettered with a number of incumbents. And so if you're looking at the enterprise space, I think that there is a ton of potential because, let's face it, >>Amazon >>doesn't have all of the services packaged in a way that the enterprise can consume. And I think that leaves a lot of fertile ground for s eyes and I SVS to jump in and be able to connect those dots so I'd say it's win, win >>start be if you're like a so cohesively onstage. Jackson's coming out talking about China, the chips and data. If you're like a vendor and I s V you're a startup or your company trying to reinvent How do you see Amazon as a partner? >>Yeah, I see Amazon as a big market for me. You know, it increased my sort of tam, if you will. Uh, the one big sort off trend is that the lines between technology providers and service providers are blurred. Actually, it's flipping. I believe it will flip at some time. We will put consume technology from service providers, and they are becoming technology providers. Actually, they're not just being pipe and power kind of cloud. They are purely software, very high sort of highly constructed machinery, if you will. Behind the scenes with software. >>That's >>what Amazon is, uh, big machine. If you are, and you can leverage that and then you can help your customers achieve their business called as a partner. I think's the women and the roll off. Actually, Assize is changing, I believe a size. Well, I thought they were getting slow, sidetracked by the service providers. But now they have to actually change their old the way they they used to get these, you know, shrink wrap software, and then install and configure and all that stuff. Now it's in a cloud >>on >>they have to focus a little more on services, and and some of the s eyes are building tools for multi cloud consumption and all that. So things are changing under under this whole big shift to go out. >>I mean, I think if you're in S I and you're lifting and shifting, you make a few bucks and helping people do that deal with the tech. But I think we're the rial. Money is the business transformation, and you find the technology is there, it's it's another tool in the bag. But if you can change your operating model, that's gonna drive telephone numbers to the bottom line. That's a boardroom discussion, and that's where the real dollars are for s eyes. That's like that's why guys like Accent you're leading leading into the cloud Big time >>e think I think you're absolutely right, David. I think that's that's one aspect that we have to kind of call out is you can be one of those partners that is focused on the transaction and you'll be successful doing that. But you're absolutely right. If you focus on the long game. I think that is just like I said, completely fertile ground. And there are a lot of opportunities because historically Amazon was ah was a Lego parts, uh, type of cloud provider, right? They provided you with the basic building blocks, which is great for Web scale and startups not so good for enterprise. And so now Amazon is starting to put together in package part, so it's more consumable by enterprises. But you still need that help. And as Sarpy just mentioned, you also have to consider that Amazon is not the only aspect that you're gonna be using. You're gonna be using other providers to. And so I think this again is where partners they pick a primary, and then they also bring in the others where appropriate. >>All right, I want to get into this whole riff. I have a cherry chin on day one. Hey, came on the special fireside chat with me and we talked about, um, cloud errors before cloud Amazon. And now I'll call postcode because we're seeing this kind of whole new, you know, in the cloud kind of generation. And so he said, OK, this pre cloud you had Amazon generation, whereas lift and shift. Ah, lot of hybrid And you have everything is in the cloud like a snowflake kind of thing. And he kind of call it the reptiles versus the amphibians you're on. See your inland, your hybrid, and then you're you're in the water. I mean, so So he kind of went on, Took that another level, meaning that. Okay, this is always gonna be hybrid. But there's a unique differentiation for being all in the cloud. You're seeing different patterns. Amazon certainly has an advantage. See, Dev Ops guru, that's just mining the data of their entire platform and saying Okay, Yeah, do this. There's advantages for being in the cloud that aren't available. Hybrid. So amphibian on land and sea hybrid. And then in the cloud. How do you guys see that if you're a partner. You wanna be on the new generation. What's the opportunity to capture value? He has hybrid certainly coexist. But in the new era, >>remember Scott McNealy used to talk about car makers and car dealers. And of course, Sun's gone. But he used to say, We want to be a carmaker. Car dealers. They got big houses and big boats, but we're gonna be a carmaker. Oh, I think it's some similarities here. I mean, there's a lot of money to be made as a as a car dealer. But you see, companies like Dell, H P E. You know, they want to be carmakers. Obviously Google Microsoft. But there are gonna be a lot of successful really big carmakers in this game. >>Yeah, I believe I believe I always call it Amazon Is the makers cloud right, So they are very developer friendly. They were very developer friendly for startups. Uh, a stem said earlier, but now they are very developer, friendly and operations friendly. Now, actually, in a way for enterprises, I believe, and that the that well, the jerry tend to sort of Are you all all in cloud are sitting just in the dry land. Right now, I think every sort off organization is in a different sort off mature, at different maturity level. But I think we're going all going towards a technology consumption as a service. Mostly, I think it will be off Prem. It can be on Prem in future because off age and all that. And on that note, I think EJ will be dominated by Tier one cloud providers like crazy people who think edge will be nominally but telcos and all that. I think they're just, uh, if >>I made Thio, if I may interject for a second for the folks watching, that might not be old enough to know who Scott McNealy is. He's the founder of Sun Microsystems, which was bought by Oracle years ago. Yeah, basically, because many computer, there's a lot of young kids out there that even though Scott McNealy's But remember, >>do your homework, Scott, you have to know who Scott Scott McNealy >>also said, because Bill Gates was dominant. Microsoft owns the tires and the gas to, and they want to own the road. So remember Microsoft was dominating at that time. So, Tim Gas data is that I mean, Amazon might have everything there. >>I was gonna go back to the to the comment. You know, McNeely came out with some really, really good analogies over his tenure. Um, it's son and you know, son had some great successes. But unfortunately, Cloud is not as simplistic as buying a car and having the dealership and the ecosystem of gas and tires. And the rest you have to think about the toll journey. And that journey is incredibly complicated, especially for the enterprise that's coming from legacy footprints, monolithic application stacks and trying to understand how to make that transition. It's almost it's almost, in a way mawr analogous to your used to riding a bike, and now you're gonna operate a semi. And so how do you start to put all of the pieces into place to be able to make that transition? And it's not trivial. You have to figure out how your culture changes, how your processes changes. There are a lot of connected parts. It's not a simple as the ecosystem of tires and gas. We have to think about how that data stream fits in with other data streams where analytics are gonna be done. What about tying back to that system of record that is going to stay on the legacy platform. Oh, and by the way, some of that has to still stay on Prem. It can't move to the cloud yet. So we have this really complicated, diverse environment that we have to manage, and it's only getting more complicated. And I think that's where the opportunity comes in for the size and s visas. Step into that. Understand that journey, understand the transitions. I don't believe that enterprises, at least in the near term, let alone short term, will be all in cloud. I think that that's more of a fantasy than reality. There is a hybrid state that that is going to be transitory for some period of time, and that's where the big opportunity is. >>I think you're right on time. I think just to double down on that point, just to bring that to another level is Dave. Remember back in the days when PCs where the boom many computers with most clients there was just getting started? There was a whole hype cycle on hard drives, right? Hard drives were the thing. Now, if you look out today, there's more. Observe, ability, startups and I could count, right? So to Tim's point, this monolithic breakdown and component izing decomposing, monolithic APs or environments with micro services is complex. So, to me, the thing that I see is that that I could relate to is when I was breaking in in the eighties, you had the mainframes. Is being the youngun I'm like, Okay, mainframes, old monolithic client server is a different paradigm thing. You had, uh, PCs and Internet working. I think all that change is happening so fast right now. It's not like over 10 years to Tim's points, like mainframes to iPhones. It's happening in like three years. Imagine crunching all that complexity and change down to a short window. I think Amazon has kind of brought that. I'm just riffing on that, But >>yeah, you're absolutely right, John. But I think there's another piece and we can use a very specific example to show this. But another piece that we have to look at is we're trying to simplify that environment, and so a good place to simplify that is when we look at server lis and specifically around databases, you know, historically, I had to pick the database architecture that the applications would ride on. Then I have to have the infrastructure underneath and manage that appropriately so that I have both the performance a swell, a security as well as architecture. Er and I have to scale that as needed. Today, you can get databases of service and not have to worry about the underpinnings. You just worry about the applications and how those data streams connect to other data streams. And so that's the direction that I think things were going is, and we see this across the enterprise we're looking for. Those packaged package might be a generalized term, but we're looking for um, or packaged scenario and opportunity for enterprises rather than just the most basic building blocks. We have to start putting together the preformed applications and then use those as larger chunks. And >>this is the opportunity for a size I was talking before about business transformation. If you take, take Tim's database example, you don't need somebody anymore. Toe, you know, set up your database to tune it. I mean, that's becoming autonomous. But if you think about the way data pipelines work in the way organizations are structured where everything because it goes into this monolithic data lake or and and And it's like generic content coming in generic data where the business owner has to get in line and beg a data scientist or quality engineered or thio ingest a new data source. And it's just like the old data warehouse days where I think there's tremendous opportunities for s eyes to go in a completely re architect. The data model. Sergeant, This is something you and I were talking about on Twitter. It's That's why I like what snowflakes doing. It's kind of a AWS is trying to do with lasted glue views, but there's a whole business transformation opportunity for s eyes, which I just think is huge. Number l >>e all talk. Go ahead. Sorry. Yeah, >>I think we >>all talk, but we know we all agree on one thing that the future is hybrid for at least for next. You know, 10 years, if not more. Uh, hybrid is hard. The data proximity is, uh, very important. That means Leighton see between different workloads, right? That's super important. And I talk about this all the time and almost in every conversation I have about about. It's just scenario, is that there three types of applications every every enterprise systems or fractured systems, systems of engagement and the systems of innovation and my theory of cloud consumption tells me that sooner or later, systems off record. We'll move into SAS SAS world. That's that's how I see it. There's no other way around, I believe, and the systems off engagement or systems off differentiation something and call it. They will leverage a lot off platforms, the service and in that context context, I have said it many times the to be a best of the breed platform. As a service, you have to be best off the breed, um, infrastructure as a service provider. And that's Amazon. And that is that's also a zero to a certain extent, and then and and Google is trying to do that, too. So the feature sort off gap between number one cloud and two and three is pretty huge. I believe I think Amazon is doing great data democratization through several less. I just love serving less for that Several things over. Unless there is >>a winning formula is no doubt about several times I totally agree. But I think one of the things that I miss it has done is they've taken server lists. They brought their putting all the I as and the chips, and they're moving all the value up to the service layer, which gives them the advantage over others. Because everyone else is trying to compete down here. They're gonna be purpose built. If you look what Apple is doing with the chips and what the Amazon is doing, they're gonna kind of have this chip to chip scenario and then the middle. Where in between is the container ization, the micro services and Lambda? So if you're a developer, you approach is it's programmable at that point that could that could be a lock spec. I think for Amazon, >>it absolutely could be John. But I think there's another aspect here that we have to touch on, especially as we think about partners and where the opportunities come in. And that is that We often talk about non cloud to cloud right, how to get from on Prem to cloud. But the piece that you also have thio bring into the conversation is Theo edge to cloud continuum and So I think if you start to look at some of the announcements this week from AWS, you start looking at some of the new instance types uh, that are very ai focused. You look at the two new form factors for outposts, which allows you to bring cloud to a smaller footprint within an on premise premises, situation, uh, different local zones. And then Thea other piece that I think is really interesting is is their announcements around PCs and eks anywhere being able to take cloud in kubernetes, you know, across the board. And so the challenge here is, as I mentioned earlier, complexity is paramount. It's concern for enterprises just moving to cloud. You start layering in the edge to cloud continuum, and it just it gets exponentially more complicated. And so Amazon is not going to be the one to help you go through that. Not because they can't, but frankly, just the scale of help that is going to be needed amongst enterprises is just not there. And so this is really where I think the opportunity lies for the s eyes and I SVS and partners. You >>heard how Jassy defined hybrid John in the article that you wrote when you did your one on one with him, Tim and the in the analyst call, you answered my question and then I want to bring in Antonio near his comment. But Jassy basically said, Look, we see the cloud bring We're gonna bring a W s to the edge and we see data centers. This is another edge node and San Antonio Neary after HP is pretty good quarter uh came out and said, Well, we heard the public cloud provider talking about hybrid welcome, you know? >>Yeah, they were going and then getting here jumped on that big time. But we'll be looking hybrid. Tim nailed The complexity is the is the evil is friction is a friction area. If the complexity could be mastered by the edge provider closest to the customer, that's gonna be valuable, um, for partners. And then we can do that. Amazon's gonna have to continue to remove the friction and putting that together, which is why I'm nervous about their channel partners. Because if I'm a partner, I asked myself, How do I make money with Amazon? Right? At the end of the day, it's money making right. So how can I be successful? Um, not gonna sell more in the marketplace. Will the customer consumer through there? Is it friction or is a complex So this notion of complexity and friction becomes a double edged sword Tim on both sides. So we have five minutes left. Let's talk about the bottom side Complexity, >>friction. So you're absolutely right, John. And you know, the other thing that that I would say is for the partner, you have to look beyond what Amazon is selling today. Look at where the customers are going. And you know, David, I think you and I were both in an analyst session with Andy Jassy several years ago where one of the analysts asked the question. So you know, what's your perspective on Hybrid Cloud? In his response, candidly was, while we have this particular service and really, what he was talking to is a service that helps you on board to Amazon's public cloud. There was there was not an acknowledgment of hybrid cloud at the time, But look at how things have changed just in a short few years, and I understand where Jassy is coming from, but this is just exemplifies the fact that if you're a partner, you have to look beyond what Amazon is saying and think toe how the customer is evolving, how the enterprise is evolving and get yourself ahead of them. That will position you best for both today. And as you're building for the future. >>That's a great point, Dave. Complexity on buying. I'm a customer. You can throw me a marketplace all you want, but if I'm not gonna be tied into my procurement, how I'm consuming technology. Tim's point. Amazon isn't the only game in town. I got other suppliers. >>Yeah, well, certainly for some technology suppliers, they're basically could bring their on prem estate if it's big enough into the cloud. Uh, you know what is big enough? That's the big question here. You know, our guys like your red hats big enough. Okay, we know that Nutanix pure. They're sort of the next layer down. Can they do? They have enough of a customer base that they could bring into the cloud, create that abstraction layer, and then you got the born in the cloud guy Snowflake, Colombia or two good examples. Eso They've got the technology partners and then they're the size and consultants. And again, I see that is the really big opportunity is 10 points out? Amazon is acknowledging that hybrid Israel in in a newly defined way, they're going out to the edge, find you wanna call data center the edge. How are they going to support those installations? How are they gonna make sure that they're running properly? That they're connected to the business process? Those air That's s I whitespace. Huge. >>Guys, we have to wrap it up right now. But I just end on, you know, we'll get everyone go A little lightning around quick soundbite on the phrase with him, which stands for what's in it from me. So if I'm a partner, I'm a customer. I look at Amazon, I think. What's in it for me? Yeah. What a za customer like what do I get out of this? >>Yeah, having done, like more than 100 data center audits, and I'm seeing what mess up messes out there and having done quite a few migrations to cloud migrations of the messy messages piece, right? And it doesn't matter if you're migrating 10% or 20 or 30 it doesn't matter that how much you're migrating? It's a messy piece, and you cannot do with our partners that work. Actually, you need that. Know how you need to infuse that that education into into your organization, how to consume cloud, how toe make sense of it, how you change your processes and how you train your people. So it touches all the products, people and processes. So on three years, you gotta have partners on your side to make it >>so Hey, I'll go quick. And, Tim, you give you the last word. Complexity is cash. Chaos is cash. Follow the complexity. You'll make cash. >>Yeah, you said it, David. I think anyway, that you can help an enterprise simplify. And if you're the enterprise, if you're the customer, look for those partners. They're gonna help you simplify the journey over time. That's where the opportunity really lies. >>Okay, guys, Expert power panel here on Cuba live program, part of AWS reinvent virtual coverage, bringing you all the analysis from the experts. Digital transformations here. What's in it for me is a partner and customer. Help me make some money, master complexity and serve my customer. Mister Cube. Thanks for watching >>que Yeah, from around the globe. It's the cute

>>from Menlo Park, California In the heart of Silicon Valley, it's the Cube covering cloud now. Awards 2020 Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. Now here's Sonia category. >>Hi and welcome to the Cube. I'm your host Sonia category, and we're on the ground at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California covering Cloud now's top women entrepreneurs in Cloud Innovation Awards. Joining us today is Tao Johnson, who's the CEO and founder of Kaizen Technology Partners. Now welcome to the Cube. Thank you. Thank you for having me. So give us a brief overview of your background. >>Sure, I actually have a finance degree and have no idea what technology was. I started as a finance analyst at Sun Microsystems and had no idea who they were or what job awas but having the interest to be a CFO one day, our CEO in another company, I figured I'd go into sales and really understand what drives a company growth and revenue. So I was actually trained by Scott McNealy's best of the best program and was in sales class with him and his with his sister in law. And, um, I never left sales after them, >>so um So you mentioned that you have a finance background? How do you think that background has helped you to become a successful CEO versus, say, a technical background? >>And I think having the finance background is very important because your cash flow management is one of the biggest reasons companies fail. You know, before they can get their next round of funding, they run out of their overhead costs, their monthly overhead costs. The other thing is really to understand how to sell in our ally and total cost of ownership to the decision powers that be at the CFO level and CEO CIO. >>Okay, Um, so you're on the cloud now advisory board to tell us, How did you join And how was that experience? Like, I think >>it grew organically having been a participant to a few of the events with Jocelyn and then helping her. Where can I help? How can I get speakers for you or winners? And over time, just like just came to me and said, You know, you have such a network, Why don't you join our board and help us where we can? Hence we have mailing today, um, as our keynote because of our network. >>And speaking of entrepreneurs, you, um, I just want to mention that you are at this program for Harvard, for entrepreneurs. Can you talk more about that? >>Sure, it's an amazing program. I wish that there were more women who applied and were able to invest the money and time into the program. It's, ah, owners and entrepreneurs who have companies around the world. There's 41 countries represented. Unfortunately, only about 17% of women of 151 participants in class. We meet three times once a year, and we go through three weeks of intensive training to discuss marketing finance how to scale operations. But the best thing you get out of it is 1 30% of it is learning this case studies method and Harvard, the other 30% is really the network and the different industry's. You get to meet. We have film. As you know, we've talked about retail and other industries there that you can self reflect on. How does that involve with technology? Um, and then the other 30 self reflection time. A lot of entrepreneurs, especially CEOs, don't have the time to get away from their business, and it really forces you to not be the operator. Walk away and be able to self reflect on Where do you want to take the business >>today >>and speaking about networking? What's your advice on networking within the industry? What are some tips and tricks >>in my belief? You know, we have social media, but the best way to meet people is through other people. So going to events like this and really having an idea of your goals at the event when you're going there, who's going to help you get to that person? Um, and having a focus, not. I want to meet 100 80 people, and I don't know who they're going to be really being able to say, Who do I want to meet at that event who can help me get there and preparing plan as much triple the time that you're gonna be even at the event? >>Yes, the networking can be really difficult. So as an entrepreneur, what do you think makes a great entrepreneur? >>You know, entrepreneurship is very hard because you really have to touch all facets of a company and find the right people to trust to do certain areas, but then be able to understand all the different parts of the company, right, from supply chain to partnerships to sales and finance. So what, you really have to be diverse and ambidextrous, and that makes it very difficult for some people who are only analytical or only sales e to be able to run a company in scale. >>And what advice do you have for female technologists who maybe feel that so it's really difficult to navigate in this male dominated industry? I would >>say to them they're stand out, make your different standout, right? Why make it a negative? The positive is you are female and you stand out so less men get called on by you and you might have a chance to get in the door. But you better have your ideas in line and your resource is and you better be >>kick ass. But use it to your >>advantage that you are different and that they're not used to hearing from women. >>So you've been with carved out for many years now. Where do you hope to see cloud now in the future, I >>would love to see cloud now be more, uh, geographically worldwide as we're doing more work in my non profit for women Rwanda, in Afghanistan as entrepreneurs, Um and I think, you know, we've upped and stepped up so much more with Facebook bringing in investments to us to compared to what we've done before, Um, I think just the awareness and may be doing this on a, um, twice a year basis instead of only once a year to be ableto celebrate these wonderful women. >>Don, thank you so much for being on the Cube. This has been really knowledgeable. Thank you for having me. I'm Sonia Tagaris. Thank you for watching the Cube stay tuned for more. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

>>from Menlo Park, California In the heart of Silicon Valley, it's the Cube covering cloud now. Awards 2020 Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. Now here's Sonia category. >>Hi, and welcome to the Cube. I'm your host Sonia category, and we're on the ground at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California covering Cloud now's top women entrepreneurs in Cloud Innovation Awards. >>Joining us today is Get the Schmidt CEO of Human. Get that. Welcome to the Cube. >>Thank you. Thanks for having me. >>So just give us a brief overview of your background and more about Humira. All right, A brief >>overview. Let's see. Um, I'll start off that I've been in the industry for some time now. Um, since ah, 97 which I used to actually work at this campus that we're here today at when it used to be Sun Microsystems. So I started out in technology in product management and marketing. Mainly, um, when java was coming out so early days and really learned a lot about what it takes to take a product or a concept out to market very exciting in those early days and sort of, you know, move towards looking at Industries and Sister focused on financial services into the lot around financial services marketing. Also it son. >>And then I moved >>to Denmark, which is sort of a surprise, But I'm married to a day and we decided we would try something different. So I moved to Denmark, working at a consulting company software consulting company based in Denmark, fairly small and Ah, and was part of sort of building out of the conference and business development business they had over there. And ah, and that was a way for us, for me to understand a completely other side of the business consulting aspects where you really build software for a customer and really understand, you know, sort of the customer solution needs that are required versus when you're working at a large enterprise company kind of are separated away from the customers. And that was there where I met the two founding team members of Humi Oh, Christian and Trust in at Tri Fork into you. Essentially, we've been working together for 10 years, and, uh, we sort of all felt like we could really come out with the world's best logging solution and, ah, this was out of some of the pain we were running into by running other solutions in the market. And so we took a leap into building our own product business. And so we did that in 2016. And so that's really what brought me here into the CEO role. So we have a three person leisure leadership or executive team, our founding team, which is to verily technical folks. So the guys that really built the product and and, uh, and keep it running and take it to the next level every single day. But what was missing was really that commercial kind of leader that was ready to take that role, and that's where I came in. So they were very supportive and and bringing me on board. So that was into 2016 where I started that >>that's awesome. So how do you think having like a business and marketing background versus a technical background has helped you become a successful CEO? Um, I >>think it's really, really hard if you don't have different profiles on your founding team to be able to run a successful tech business. So there's technology that you could have the world's greatest technology like an example would be my you know, my co founders were building an amazing product, but until they came into the room, they hadn't thought about going out and trying to get a customer to use it. And essentially, that is one of the issues there is that you can sit and build something and build the best product out there. But if you're not getting feedback really, really early in the design and the concepts of product development, then customers our search of it's not built in. And so a lot of the thought process around him. EOS We like to say customers are in our DNA. We build >>our product >>for people to use 6 to 8 hours a day, and they're in it every day. And so it keeps this feeling of a customer feedback loop. And even if you're technical, it's really exciting. You know that you build something that somebody uses every day. It looks at every day, and so that's the kind of energy that we've tried to, you know, instill. Or maybe I've tried to instill in Humi Oh, that you know, our customers really matter, and I think that's one of the ways that we've been able to move, Let's say really, really fast in building the right features the right functionality, um, and the right things for people are using it on the on the on, the on the other and essentially >>so okay. And, um so you're here to receive an award for being one of the top female entrepreneurs in cloud innovation. So congratulations and And how does it feel to win this award? Super >>exciting. I mean, I'm glad that there are organizations like Cloud now that are doing amazing things for women and and also, you know, making examples of folks that are doing interesting roles in our industry, especially around B two B software. I think that's a real area where there's not many CIOs or leaders in our space where there should be. And, uh, and I think part of it is actually kind of highlighting that. But, you know, the other side is sort of an event like this today is bringing together a lot of other profiles that are women or diverse profiles together to sort of, you know, talk about this problem and acknowledge and also take, let's say, more of an active stance around, you know, making this place not so scary. I mean, I think I remember one of my early events and I was raising our series A when I walked into a VC event where there were no other female CIOs out there. There's 100 CIOs and I was the only one. And I think one of the hard parts is I walked in there and, you know, it felt a bit uncomfortable, But there were some. There were two amazing VC partners at the company that I first started talking to, and that just really used the sort of like, you know, I guess. Uncomfortable, itty. So I think the main focus at things like today or, you know, the people that are here today. So I think we can help each other. And I think that's something that you know. That's something that I'd like to see more of, that we actively sort of create environments and communities for that to happen, and cloud now is one of them. >>So I think a lot of women have had that experience where they're the only woman in the room, you know, and it's just really hard to like. Figure out your path from there. So as the company as Julio, how do you What's your strategy for inclusion? >>Um, so, like I like to call it active inclusion. I think part of this is like having a diverse workforce, which is, you know, obviously including women and different backgrounds. Other things. But >>one of >>the big things we think about at Hume Eo is we really like to, let's say, celebrate people's differences so like that you're able to be yourself and almost eccentric is a good thing. And be able to feel safe in that environment to feel safe, that you can express your opinions, feel comfortable and safe when you're, you know, coming with a opposite viewpoint. Because the diversity of thought is really what we're trying to include in our company. So it means bringing together folks that don't look like each other where exactly, the same clothes and do the exact same hobbies and come from the same countries like we have. Ah, very, you know, global workforce. So we have folks, you know in Denmark of an office in Denmark. We have an office in the UK, and we have folks all over the U. S. We have a lot of backgrounds that have come from different cultures, and I think there's a beauty to that. There's a beauty to actually combining a lot of ways to solve problems. Everyone from a different culture has different ways of solving those. And so I think part of this is all around making that. Okay, right. So, you know, active inclusion is a way to to sort of put it into terms. So So we're definitely looking for people, Actively, that would like to join something like >>this. So I love that. Um, So if you were personally, if you were to have your own board of directors, like, who would they be? Um, it's not really >>the who. It's almost like the profiles or the people. I mean, we already have a personal board like I call it. I mean, it's something that I actively started doing. Um, once I once I started with a company board, I realized, you know, I probably need my own personal board, my own sort of support infrastructure That includes folks like my family, my sisters and my mom. It also includes you know, some younger junior folks that are actually much younger >>than me. >>But I learned so much from so um, to one of my good friend Cindy, who's who is brilliant at describing technology concepts. And and I think just some of the conversations I've had with her just opened my eyes to something that I hadn't seen before. And I think that's the area where I like to say the personal board isn't exactly you know people. It's it's profile. So along the way, as you grow, you're looking for new types of profiles. Let's say you want to learn about a new concept or a new technology or, you know, get better at running or something. So it's part of bringing those profiles in tow, learn about it and then back to this board concept. It's It's not as though it's a linked in network or it's actually sort of a group of people that you sort of rely on. And then it's a It's a two way street. So essentially, you know, there could be things that the other person could gain from knowing me, and ideally, that those were the best relationships in a personal board. So so I encourage alive women to do this because it builds a support infrastructure that is not related to your job. It's not your manager. It's not your co worker. You kind of feel some level of freedom having those discussions because those people aren't looking at your company. They're looking at helping you. So So that's That's sort of the concepts around >>the personal board idea and anything as women like having a sport system is so necessary, especially in this, like male dominated industry. Well, I think it's back >>to that whole feeling like you're the one person in the room, right? Right, so you're not the one person in the room, and I think we need to change that. And I think that's like some you know, all of our kind of roles that for all the women intact. I mean, it's sort of like something that we could help each other with right, and and if we don't do it actively, I mean, you know the numbers and we know you know the percentages of these things. If we want to change that, it does require some active interest on on our part to make that happen. And I think those are the areas where I see, like, the support infrastructures, the events like this really kind of engaging, um, us to be aware and doing something about the >>problem. Thank you so much for being on the key of love having you here. Thanks for >>having me. I really appreciate it. >>I'm Sonia to Garry. Thanks for watching the Cube. Stay tuned for more. >>Yeah, yeah.

>> Narrator: Live from London, England. It's theCUBE. Covering AWS Summit London 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hello and welcome to the AWS Summit here at the XL Center in London. I'm Susannah Streeter and Dave Vellante is my co-host on The CUBE today. So much to talk about. It is immense this Summit. Thousands upon thousands of attendees talking about everything to do with the Cloud, of course. AI machine learning, but privacy keeps coming up again and again. And I'm please to say that Bill Mew is here. He's a privacy campaigner and tech consultant and is now CEO of crisisteam.co.uk. Now Bill, we have talked a lot really about the growth of AWS and also the start-ups using the public Cloud. It's interesting that that growth is intensified even though the GDPR regulations came into force and right now lobbyists are really hard at work, 6aren't they? Particularly in the United States trying to limit the impact of coming regulations. Do you think that they'll be successful? >> Well, I think there was a big argument when we first looked at the introduction of regulation around privacy and sort of ethical issues. But it would be a big restraint on innovation and I think what we're seeing here at this AWS Summit is the fact that innovation is well, and it's alive, and it's really healthy and there's a great deal happening. We just need to be careful with what we do with people's data and there's a very good reason for this. It really matters to people. You, me, people in the street, consumers. Number one issue, now, for most people is security and privacy and how their data is handled. It's interesting that only six months, eight months ago, if you surveyed the same group of people, they might have said diversity or sustainability. Now, because of a number of the horror stories around data breaches, the number one issue out there is now how their data is handled. And therefore, companies need to take it very seriously. And obviously AWS has got an enormous infrastructure and it's claiming that it's GDPR compliant in the way it handles it's own data. But there are a lot of people that host on its platform and they're sometimes vulnerable. So, what I'm doing is I'm helping to influence where some of the regulation is going to try and head things off, to ensure we have the right balance between meaningful protections because that needs to be in place, but ensuring that meaningful protections don't hinder innovation or economic and social value. But at the same time, I also work, I was apart of the crisis team with some of the top lawyers in Cyber Law and a whole bunch of crisis management experts, or ex UN or whoever, and we help step in when things go wrong for companies. Not only helping them come together with a legally defensible position, helping them communicate it effectively, and actually across our social media campaign and our reach and some of the other channels like this that we use, we help to counter some of the hysteria and misinformation that is often inevitable in that type of situation. So, there's a whole spectrum there and an enormous scope for debate. >> So you're talking there about fake news in particular, are you? >> Well, I think that when a story breaks there can be a lot of misinformation about exactly what happened. Things can get a little bit out of hand and hysteria can take off. You can talk about alternative facts, you can talk about hysteria, you can talk about fake news. What we try and do is not only help companies formulate what is likely to be the most realistic defensible position they have, but also to make sure that they're countering some of the really terrible hysteria that can occur at a time when typically their own credibility in the market is an all time low. And maybe there are, if you've got some credible privacy campaigners, some real thought leaders in the market who can step in and say, "Hold on guys, look, there's a little bit of reality we need to touch on here. This isn't quite what happened, this may have happened, and this is what they're doing to try to address it". Then maybe we can counter some of that hysteria. We can help people who might be unduly concerned, and also we can help protect some brands out there that are sometimes facing a lot of reputational harm. >> So Scott McNealy famously said one day that, he was the former CEO of Sun Microsystems, a very successful company that was sold to Oracle, but he said, "There is no privacy in the internet, get over it". And that was before social media took off. Social media obviously has affected this discussion. But, for years, and still, people put stuff on the social channels that is absurdly private. Yet, it's open for the public. So- >> Yeah, but I think there was a level of naivety once upon a time. If we were to ask a number of questions a while ago about privacy, I think people would not be really too concerned, but they've seen some of the breeches like the Equifax breech, where there was some really very sensitive information made available. Sometimes. that led to very real concerns around people. But also, we're looking at new technologies that are going to come along. We've got AI on the horizon, we've got facial recognition. These kind of technologies are actually going to dominate our lives in the future. And we're already seeing in countries like China, where they're using facial recognition to score people, a bit like you have a credit score, you have a citizenship score, a how good a citizen you are, whether you jaywalk, whether you do all sorts of other different things. And your access to credit, your access to travel opportunities, your access to a whole load of services is based on your score. I think there will be a lot of people in the possibly democratic western societies who might see that as a little bit Big Brother. >> Even though you are still seeing some states and cities already bringing in regulations to limit some of the advances we see here. >> Yeah, it's interesting, I think in Washington state in the U.S., there have been a number of different proposals put forward in terms of how they introduce the sort of privacy regulations we've already seen California and elsewhere. And some of the proposals there would be nigh on sort of a banning facial recognition entirely because the barometric constraints were really quite severe. And I think, part of what I've been doing, I work with a lot of privacy campaigners, but I also work with other corporates to see how we can strike the right balance. We want meaningful protections, absolutely, because there's some really sensitive data out there. And the way it's used can affect our lives. At the same time, we don't want to stifle innovation, the type of innovation we're seeing here at the AWS Summit. We want maximize the economic and social value. And that's a really delicate balance to strike. >> Susannah: It's a tight rope, isn't it? >> It sounds good, but so, I think of the cloud, how it's enabled small businesses to have access to IT infrastructure that's the same quality as large companies. In a way, doesn't this stack the deck for large companies who can actually afford the compliance officers and all the infrastructure necessary in the software and the people to actually comply with these new regulations. >> I think there is some truth in that, because there is absolutely an overhead, but I don't think we need to get away from the fact that data is really important and it needs to be protected. I don't think we're just looking at privacy here, we're also looking at data protection and I don't think you should underestimate the vulnerability that we now see. I mean, we are more of an inter connected society than we have ever been. The number of attacks that are on the horizon are growing exponentially. We are also seeing the fact that the number of opportunities, the threat landscape, is increasing. We've got massive numbers of IOT devices and other things. It's going to be very, very difficult. It's going to be a full time challenge. Indeed it's a sort of AI arms race as either side use AI to discover either vulnerabilities to introduce attacks, or vulnerabilities in order to introduce patches. >> We hear a lot about just how valuable our data is. And we were even discussing at one point that it's more valuable than oil for many companies. Do you think that consumers have really woken up to the fact, just how valuable their data is? And could you foresee a time where by actually the consumers say, "You want my data, you've really got to pay me for it"? >> I think there have been some proposals along that front in terms of how we separate private data and give people control over it. The right to be forgotten was a step in that direction. But, if we can have some sort of infrastructure that does allow people separate their own private data and allow access to it on a permissions basis, then that could provide a future internet. There's been a lot of discussion along that front from Tim Berners-Lee and a number of other really top thinkers in that particular arena. But the value of that data possibly was overlooked in the past. Plus also the vulnerability as well, and therefore I think people are waking up to it now. That's why they care so much more about it now then they ever have in the past. >> Well there's certainly a lot of talk in the Blockchain and crypto world about using that technology to allow the users to own their own data, to control their own data. I mean take Facebook for example, there's a built in incentive for them to appropriate our data, so they can sell ads to us. But, what if, as the theory goes, the user could control it, the user could monetize his or her own data. So there is some discussion going on there, there is some technology development going on there at the low level protocol. What do you think about that? >> I certainly think that technology will provide the answer. Exactly how we do a sort of new version of the internet that allows that sort of control, is still open to discussion and there are a lot of opinions both on, on either side here. Interestingly enough, Blockchain has been put forward as a possible solution, but there's a slight irony in the fact that Blockchain's immutability's actually at odds with GDPR's right to be forgotten. So, the two are actually mutually incompatible. So there's some real difficult issues for us to address here. >> So technology got us into this problem, it can potentially help us get out of this problem, but maybe not is what I'm hearing. >> It's not entirely straight forward, and actually if we are going to be moving in a direction where we give users more control over their data, it's actually gonna have to be an internationally adopted standard. At the moment, GDPR has come forward as a standard here in Europe, but it is set sort of the golden benchmark against which other regulations are now going to be measured. >> Susannah: And are you seeing signs of that? Do you expect the U.S. to adopt a model which is very much based on the one Europe has. >> It may not be exactly GDPR like, but there will be things in common. I think many of the organizations world wide that really care about their user's data, and I told you earlier about the attitudinal surveys that have been out there. Companies are very wise if they wake up to this and actually take proactive steps to change the culture in their organization, to have a digital ethics culture. It means not only are they going to care for data more often, more carefully, they're going to be less prone to the type of inadvertent leaks, as well as a sort of hacks. But at the same time, a culture of that nature helps them to deal with a situation if it even does occur. It's actually having the right culture. And those companies that have a truly digital ethics oriented culture have not only adopted GDPR in Europe, they've chosen to adopt it globally. >> I think there's a sentiment in the U.S., that look, we're doing this for European consumers, we might as well adopt the same standards globally. >> Bill: Yeah. >> We've got the processes in place, they seem to be working for Europe, why not use them? It's just more convenient, it's going to be lower cost to do that, so it just makes sense. >> That's why GDPR has emerged as a global benchmark. And many of the other countries, in India and America and elsewhere are measuring their potential regulations against GDPR. >> I've heard it criticized on this show as a socialist agenda, but it seems to having quite a bit of momentum, and a lot of sensible parts of GDPR. >> Well it, I'm not sure we could call it socialist or whatever. >> Dave: Not my words, (laughter) I'm just quoting somebody. >> What I think we've seen is a change in the balance, where actually previously, people's right to privacy wasn't recognized at all. And we had a sort of the tech revolution where people didn't really care. Facebook were talking all about a sharing culture and that was their orientation. We've seen the tech backlash where Facebook and others have all been punished and there's been a sort of sudden switch or pivot towards privacy. What we need to do is look beyond those because we need to have a level playing field. We need to have an equilibrium where we're absolutely balancing the right protections, meaningful protections, with absolutely maximizing the sort of innovation you see here and the economic and social value that's going to underpin our lives. >> Self governance is not likely to work, let's face it. >> I think we've seen, and Facebook is an example, we'll be oft quoted in this respect, that self regulation doesn't work necessarily in this way because it's just too tempting to use data in the way that you see fit. Unwinding some of the mistakes they've made in the past is not going to be easy for them, but we'll see how well they keep to the new promise of their pivot to privacy. >> Dave: I think it'll define their legacy, personally. >> Yeah. >> Well, Bill it's been fascinating having you on here, because you've really been at the forefront of all of these changes, so it's great to hear your thoughts. So, thank you very much. Bill Mew, CEO of crisisteam.co.uk. And you've been watching theCUBE at the AWS Summit in London. (tech music)

(digital music) >> Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube. Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Kay, welcome back everyone. Live Cube coverage here in Las Vegas for Dell Technology World 2019. I'm John Furrier with my co-host, Dave Vellante. Three days of wall-to-wall coverage. Cheryl Cook, senior vice president of Global Partner Marketing in Dell Technologies joining us. We just reminiscing about the old days of how computing was going on, cloud computing, Sun Microsystems to now, Dell Technologies is doing extremely well. Congratulations. Welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you. It's a fantastic time. Thanks for being here and having me. >> And what a time to be in tech. Michael is on stage. This is just a pre-game show of what's coming. Kind of teasing out like best is yet to come. A lot of things are going on in tech. Certainly the business performance for Dell is strong but you guys have a huge partner ecosystem, huge global channel. That's changing and transforming. That's your wheelhouse. Tell us what's going on in the channel because you have partners that are making money with you. How's that going? What's happening? >> Thank you. Actually, we are thrilled with the momentum we've seen in the partner community and thanks to a lot of their engagement and support and solutions that they're developing around Dell Technologies. I mean our channel business has just hit fifty billion dollars in orders this year, growing faster than the market, growing faster than our competition and I honestly think it's an expression and a reflection of just the opportunity they see in the family of companies and just the assets of the technology that we have. >> One of the things that's happening with cloud and data is that these trends are kind of rising tides. There's no zero sum game anymore, this verses that, it's like a whole new shift. What are some of the trends going on that's impacting the channel specifically, that allows the partners to take advantage of the trends and either serve customers, have happy customers, and ultimately make more profit. Cash. >> Absolutely. You know, I kind of call it the art of the and. I think there Is a lot of traditional consumption that's still happening right now, while at the same time they're increasingly being asked by customers for as a service business model. So I think our partners are realizing that opportunity and meeting that demand right now. That's why you see the growth figures we have, frankly, in the channel in our traditional server and storage business, but also in our Dell Financial Services and really meeting these dynamic consumption model request as a cloud, as a service, manage services opportunities. We actually think some of the announcements we've made here this week, it's going to allow our partners to really enable and build services capabilities for their businesses that are highly lucrative, high margin service capabilities around these cloud offerings, these integrated solutions, really leaning in and leveraging their expertise across Dell, EMC, VMware and the rest of the family of businesses. >> Take a minute to explain some of the notable announcements here at Dell Technology World and what'll be the impact to the partners? >> Well, I think one of the most exciting things is we've been on an evolution as a company and we unveiled the new name of our partner program. We're now the Dell Technologies Partner Program. In many ways just simplifying the ability for the partners to lean in and realize the advantage of the offers, solutions, and capabilities of the family of companies. So all of the requirements for their tier attainment and tier status go unchanged. The strategically aligned businesses, such as VMware, will continue to have their own independent programs but the opportunity for the partners is it really empowers them to now be able to get access to these integrated offers, more access to the strategically aligned businesses, and go build out services that, as I said, that allow them to really bring those customer solutions at the level of expertise, either in a verticle or an industry, that their customers are struggling with their own transformations. >> How are they transforming, specifically? What are partners doing? I mean I always, you know we love selling boxes but if you're a box seller you just can't keep doing that. So you've got to change your business model. What are some of the things that they're doing? >> What I've seen, actually in the community, is I've seen certainly M & A. There's been some mergers and acquisitions where you'll see traditional integrators or solution providers investing and augmenting their capabilities with application development expertise. So they understand that not only do we have to modernize infrastructure, but it's about the work load. And we have to modernize the application. So, we've seen those kind of mergers happen. We've seen alliances form, where you have different partners that may not possess security capabilities, for example, they team and they partner. So I think the community in the ecosystem is evolving and they're leaning on their strengths and really trying to best position themselves to realize the opportunity. >> So you think about trends like converged infrastructure, hyperconverged, some of the stuff you guys announced. Ten years ago I remember when the modern CI first came on the scene. A lot of the channel partners didn't like that. They were like, no we want to screw the bolts in, we make money doing that. That has completely changed, hasn't it? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think it's less about, how do I integrate the bag of parts and the piece parts of the infrastructure, and it's much more about the work load and the outcome. So, I think where partners are really savvy and where they're uniquely advantaged and positioned well to help customers is in those complex work loads, in those inventory and assessment services of which work load is best served in a public cloud, which is best served in a private cloud, and helping their customers navigate that journey. It's richer services but they have to monetize their Value-Ad in those type services than traditional system integration-type services. >> How to secure it, how to manage it... >> Absolutely. How to migrate it, how to modernize it. Absolutely. >> So those services used to be reserved for a unique qualification of partner. Highly technical solution architect. Now someone says, I need to multicloud architecture, if you go back a couple years in DevOps you'd be like, okay got to get a alpha geek and we got to lay out architecture, you know, usually a higher priced person, but kind of what we're seeing now is almost a democratization or an increase aperture of opportunity capture for partners because the tools and technologies are, I won't say totally turn-key, but they're composable so as you don't need to have an advanced computer scientist degree to be a solution architect. You can be more of a composer of solutions, not the tech lead. So this is a trend we're seeing. Do you agree with that and if so how's that increasing your capabilities? >> Well I do and I think, frankly, we at Dell Technologies are uniquely positioned and one of our aims is to simplify the access to that type technology. So when you look at the announcements around our Dell Technologies cloud platform and the integration with VMware, it really is to provide that seamless, simple, common management layer, operational and orchestration layer, to be able to migrate and move your work loads to public, on-premise so the skills in our partners are really leverageable, so their VMware expertise, it really is about the work load, less about the infrastructure and how to go standup a virtualized environment. >> Cheryl, talk about the impact it's had on your job because I can only imagine the complexity involved in soft dollar programs, incentive programs, compensation programs, how to get more training, skill gaps closed down, and now that's hard in and of itself so I'm sure there's a lot going on there that you're spending and working on but when you start overlaying, oh VMware's got a program, I got this program, it's like, are you wiring up a bunch of programs or is it just first... Take us through the stages of your evolution because you now have to be agile with how you market globally. >> Absolutely. And we're trying to be as thoughtful as possible with an outside in perspective to be fair. So across the family of companies we're actively engaged with my peers at VMware and Pivotal and we're really looking at, how do we take the investment that our partners are making into their capabilities and make that leverageable and protect that investment across the offers. So we, for example, are offering reciprocal recognition within the credentials, for like credentials so the VMware capabilities they earn with VMware we'll recognize in our Dell Tech cloud competency. We want to try and offer an easier path for them to engage across the companies and to be honest, incentives, capabilities, they're on their own evolution and we're trying to help just to ensure that we can externalize a lot of the training that we create internally for our people. How can we leverage the strategically aligned companies, jointly, for what we're doing in the program, so that it at least holistically can be common and make sense for the partners to engage. >> So training's important to you? >> Sure, absolutely. >> Partners now account for over half the revenue of the company. You've said that you're growing faster than the competition. That's something that we've heard a lot this week. (Cheryl laughs) A two-part question. One is, how is it that you guys, it's almost like you're being set up by a great coach to win and everybody seems to be growing faster than the competition. That's what we're hearing as a theme. So, how does that happen? Why is that? And then the second is, do you set targets for how much of your business you want to be through the channel, or is it just, let the business go as it may? >> Well, first of all, I would say we are really clear inside the company on what the strategy and vision is of the company and as we take that to market, both on the direct side and through the partner community, we try and listen to the partners and gain feedback from them on what they need to be most successful, but then again, we are really ruthless in aligning our strategies, our goals, our metrics, our measures, our rewards, to ensure that we can go deliver those results and the outcome and I think frankly, the success we've been seeing and enjoying is, I think it's resonating. Our partners are responding with the strategy and the enablement that we're bringing to market and it's combination of good strategy, good vision, relentless execution, and commitment. And we listen. Right? There's always more to do. We know we're not perfect. We have a lot of advisory capacities with our partner community, our distributors, our system integrators, for them to tell us how they can monetize and realize the maximum value out of what we're bringing to market and we adapt, we adapt, we adapt. >> Cheryl, final question for you. Over the past three years it's been an interesting journey. EMC comes in, you guys went public, got the VMware relationship clicking, you've got the things going on. So you got the end-to-end operational consistency as a big land grab. We see that as a big strategic opportunity for Dell, as well as specialism up to the top of the stack around vertical industries with data. Clean strategy, we've been saying that in The Cube for years. That's the killer form, you guys are doing it. But without learnings along the way, take us through personal observations that you've had inside Dell around just getting the ship tightened up to keep executing going. What's it been like? Share some stories. >> I'll have to say, a merger as large as we did and certainly as large as we are now, growing at the pace we are, is never easy, and I think we have an amazing culture in the company and I think it starts with Michael from the top down, and I think as we came together as teams and we started really decomposing and working on what we needed to strategize we quickly found ourselves very like-minded. Really like-minded. Very complimentary. So it allowed us to move faster. So I would say my learnings are you've got to be really authentic, you've got to have a lot of trust, you got to lean on the culture which is a bit of an intangible, and then there's all the obvious strategy and execution. But I would say one of the enjoyable learnings out of this has been, you have to just trust and we've been very like-minded. We've been very fortunate. Really good talent. Amazing talent. >> Now the plantation of brands has got some fruit coming off the tree, business performance is coming out, you're seeing some results. >> Yeah. Well, I think we're realizing the vision of the mutual R & D and I think we're so uniquely positioned for the level of R & D in innovation going forward, the expression of bringing those technologies together is now coming to market. You're really seeing the work of the joint innovation bear fruit. >> Cheryl Cook, senior vice president of the Global Partner Marketing in Dell Technologies, here in The Cube sharing her insight and observations and learnings over the past couple years and what's happening. They're doing great. This is The Cube bringing you all the content from Dell Technology World, three days of coverage, day two. We'll be right back with more after this short break. Stay with us. (digital music)

>> So welcome to the special. Keep conversation here in Palo Alto, California John, for a host of the Cube. We're here with two co founders. Adam Casella was the CTO and Glenn Sullivan's cofounder. Snap Route Hot Start up, guys. Welcome to this Cube conversation. Thank you. Thank you. So left on the founders in because you get the down and dirty, but you guys are launching. Interesting product is for Cloud Cloud Native Super sighting. But first, take a man to explain what is snap brought. What do you guys do? What's the main core goal of the company? >> Right? So your your audience and you familiar with white Box now working disaggregated networking, where you're buying your hardware and your software from different companies. There's a lot of different Network OS is out there, but there's nobody doing what we're doing for the now ergo es, which is a cloud native approach to that where it's a fully containerized, fully micro serviced network OS running on these white box, which is >> test your background. How did you guys start this company? Where'd you come from? What was the epiphany? Was the motivation? >> Sure. So our heritage is from operations running at some of the largest Edison is in the world. We came from Apple. Ah, and running the networks there. And the issues and problems that we saw doing that is what led us to found stabbed. >> And what are some of the things that apples you guys notice on a huge scale? Yep. I mean, Apple. You know, a huge market share most probable company. I think it's now the largest cat. Microsoft was there for a while, but and apples, the gold standard, get from privacy to scale. What were some of the things that you saw, that what was the authority? >> So, I mean, there was a couple of things going on there, one we were driving driving too, doing white box for more control. So we wanted to have a better sense of what we could do with the network operating system on those devices. And we found very quickly that the operating systems that were out there, whether they be from a traditional manufacturer Ah, we and the planes or from someone from a disaggregated marketplace were basically using the same architecture. And this was this old, monolithic single binary item that goes in the pleasant device, and you know that worked in, you know, back in the day when you know applications didn't move, they were static there, One particular location. But as we were seeing, and one things that we were really pushing on is being able to dynamically have move workloads from one location to another quickly to meet demand. The network was not able to keep up with that, and we believe that it really came down to the architecture that was there. Not being flexible enough and not allowing our control to be able to put in the principles would actually allow us to allow that that application time to service be faster. >> You know, one of these on personally fascinated, you know, seeing startups out there and living in this cloud error and watching those like Facebook and Apple, literally build the new kind of scale in real time. It's like you have, you know, changing the airplane engine out of thirty five thousand feet. As the expression goes, you have to be modern. I mean, there's money on the line that's so much scale, and when you see an inefficiency, you've got to move on it Yeah, this is like, what, you guys did it. Apple. What were some of the things that yet you observed was that the box is Was it the software? A CZ? You wanted to be more agile. What was the the problem that you saw? >> So it it's really in fragility, right? It's it's basically, this Network OS is as they were, our design in a way so that you don't touch him right. If you look at the code releases and how often they, you know, fixed security vulnerabilities or you know they have patches or even knew regular versions right there. The cycle isn't weekly. It's not daily like you see in some C I C. Environments, right? You might have a six month or a twelve month or an eighteen month cycle for doing this sort of a new release for for, you know, whatever issue new features or or fixes, right. And the problem that we would see is we would be we would be trying to test a version in the lab, right? We would be qualifying code and say there's a security vulnerability. You know, something like heart bleed, right? That comes out the guys on the server side, they push a new patch using, you know, answerable Scheffer puppet and, you know, two days later, everything's good, even two hours later in some environments. But we had to wait for the new release to come from one of the traditional vendors we had to put in our lab, and we get this sort of kitchen sink of every other fix. There'd be enhancements to be GP that we didn't ask for. There'd be enhancements to, you know, Spanish or that we didn't ask for. Even if they patched it, you'd still get this sort of all in one update. And by the time you're done qualifying, there might be another security vulnerability. So you got to start over. So you'd be in this constant cycle of months of qualified, you know, qualifying the image because you you'd be testing everything that's in the image. And not just that. The update. And that's really the key difference between what we're >> going to work involves shapes you eventually chasing your tail. Exactly. One thing comes in and opens up a lot of consequences, but that's what systems over >> all about this consequences, right? This is right systems are challenging. And what it does is it is it creates this culture and no from the network folks, right? Because the network folks are basically, like, not in my backyard. You want to add this new thing? No. Because they're judged by up time. They're judged by how long the network is up and how long the applications available. They're not judged by how quickly they can put a new feature out or how how quickly they can roll an update. Their They're literally judged in most organizations by up time. How many nines are they giving? So if I'm judged by up time and somebody wants to add something new, my first answer as a network person has anybody really is gonna be No, no, no, don't touch anything. It's it's fragile >> because they're jerks or anything. They just know the risk associate with what could come from the consequence exactly touching something. So, yes, it's hard right now to yes, Okay, so I gotta ask you guys a question. How come the networking industry hasn't solved this problem? >> Well, there's a There's a few different reasons I feel it is, and that's because we've had very tightly coupled, very tightly controlled systems that have been deployed his appliances without allowing operators to go ahead and add their innovations onto those items. So if you look at the way thie compute world is kind of moved along in the past fifteen, you know, fifty, thirty years, you mean, really a revolution started to athletics, right? From their particular perspective, you have Lennox. You can open up the system, you get people constructing open source items everyone knows just end. A story that makes the most is the most successful, monolithic, you know, piece of code base that's ever existed, right? It took fifteen years later for anyone in the network industry to even run the linens on a switch. I mean, that's that's pretty, you know, huge in my mind, right? That's that's that's called like Yeah, and so and even when they've got it on the particular switch to running older versions of Colonel, they're running different things. They don't you know, back Porter versions of code that don't work with the most modern applications that are out there, and they really have it in their tight, little walled garden that you can't adjust things with and >> that was their operational mode at the time. I mean, networks were still stable. They weren't that complicated. And hence the lag and many felt had been left >> behind. Theocracy. Inefficiencies that may have function when you have dozens of devices doesn't function when you have hundreds and thousands of devices. And so when you look at, like even from the way they they presented their operating system from a config standpoint, it is a flat config file that's loaded from filing booted. That's the same paradigm people of file for forty years. Why do we still think that hotel today compute has left that behind? They're going the programmatic AP diversions with you know whether it be you know, Cooper netease war with Doctor, where they have everything built into one ephemeral container that gets deployed. Why it hasn't been working in the same thing. And I really believe it's for that close ecosystem that hasn't allowed. People look to put their innovations onto their Yeah, it's >> almost as a demarcation point in time. You think about history and him and how we got here, where it's like, Okay, we got perimeters. We got firewalls and switches top Iraq stuff. So you got scale. It's bolted down, it's secure. And incomes Cloud comes I ot So there's almost a point, You know, it almost picked. The year was a two thousand eight doesn't through two thousand twelve. You started to see that philosophy. So the question I've asked for you is that what was the tipping point? So because, you know, the fire being lit under the butts of networking guys finally hit and someone saying, Well, they don't evolve to be like the mainframe guys. I was like, not really, because mainframes is just different from client server. Networks aren't going away there around. What's the tip was the tipping point. What made the network industry stand up? >> So yeah, what it is, is it's it's being able to buy infrastructure with a credit card, Right? Because as soon as I've got a problem as an application owner was a developer, I say, Hey, I've got this thing that I've got a release, right and I go to the network came and said, I've got this new thing and I get any sort of pushback. Now you look a cloud, right? Eight of us is our Google, like all the different options out there. Fine. I don't need these guys anymore. When the grab credit card slide it, boom. Now I can buy my infrastructure. That's that's really the shift. That's what's pushing folks away from using those kind of classic network infrastructure is because they could do something else, right? >> So cloud clearly driving it, think >> I would. I would say so. Yeah, absolutely. All >> right, So the path of solve these problems, you guys have an interesting solution. What's the path? What's the solution that you guys are bringing to market? Sure. >> So the way I had kind of view, the way the landscape is set up is really if you look at you know where this innovation has happened in the compute side in the last little bit Weatherby Cloud, whether it be, you know, some of the club native items would come out there. They've all come for the operators. I haven't been a vendor to sitting there and going to play. They've kind of mirth, morph himself into vendors. But they didn't originate as vendors, right to go and supply these systems. And so what I see from the solution to that is sort of enabling operators and people who are running networks to be ableto controller their own destiny to manage how their networks are deployed right. And this boils down from our perspective to a micro services containerized network operating system that is not be spoke, not proprietary, but is using the ecosystem has been built from this P people on the computes side specifically the cloud native universe in a cloud native world and applying those perimeters and shims onto network >> learned, learned from the cloud, Right? Like don't try to make something better. Look at the reasons why folks are going to the cloud Look at the AP structures looking. He's of launching instances. Look, att the infrastructure you build with a few clicks and say, What can I learn from that environment to Moto? Mimic that in my private environment? >> Yeah, and this is why we kinda looked at cu burnett. He's is a really big piece of our infrastructure and using the company as a p I as the main interface in tor device. So that you, Khun, you know multi different reasons, is expandable. You could do, you know, a bunch of different custom options to expand that a P i But it allows people who are either in. Deva loves to look at that and go. I understand how this works. I know how these shims function and started getting in the realization that networking is not that much different than what the computer world is. >> So you guys embraced integration, his deployment, CCD pipeline, all that good stuff. And Cooper netease even saw Apple at sea Ncf conference that they have a booth there. No one would talk, but certainly communities is getting part that cloud native. What's the important solution that you guys are building to solve to solve from the problems that you're going after with now the cloud needed because Dev ops ethos is trickling down, helping down the stack. Certainly we know what cloud is, so it's So what is specifically the problem that you solved >> So a couple things that air So obviously you have your, you know, application time of service. The faster you can double your application, the faster you can get up and running the factory. People using out it is, you know, you get more money, you save money, right? Um, you have security. No one wants to be in that that, you know, that box of having a security voluntarily happened on there, but they >> were non compliance, >> Yes, or non compliance with particular thing with a P i. P. I C P C high socks and all in all things that come along with that. And finally it's the operational efficiency of day two operations. We've gotten pretty good as industry as deploying Day one operations and walking away. We don't do anything. No, no, no. We can't change the network anymore. It's really that next day when you have to to things like apply those applications or have a new application, it gets moved. Containers are ephemeral. The average container last two to three days. Viens last twenty three days. Monolithic caps last for years. That air that are not in those things that are just compute bare metal piece. So when we start moving to a location or a journey of having a two to three day ephemeral app that can be removed or moved, replace different location. The network needs to be able to react to that, and it needs to be able to take that and ensure that that not only up time but availability is there for that, >> and it's not management tools that are going to fix it, right? This is this is sort of our core argument is that you look at all of the different solutions that have come out for the last seven, eight, nine years in the networking in the open networking space. This trying to solve this from management perspective with, you know, different esti n profiling different, different solutions for solving this management. Day two operations issues, right. And our core argument is that the management layers on top aren't what needs to change. That can change. If you adopt communities, you get that kind of along with it. But you need to change the way the network OS itself is built so that it's not so brittle so that it's not so fragile breaking into micro services, breaking the containers so that you can put it into a CCD pipeline. You try to take a monolithic network OS and put it in your C. C I. C D Pipeline. You're going to be pushing a rock up. Help. >> It's funny. We've had Scott McNealy on the Cube founder Sun Microsystems and we said, You know, he has from one time. Hey, you know what about the cloud he goes? I should I had network is the computer was his philosophies. I should should we call the cloud? So if the network is the computer kind of concept thie operating environment management's not aki sub system of the network. It's a component, but the operating system has subsystems. So I like this idea of a network, operates system talk about what you guys do with your work operating system and what is day to mean. What is actually that means >> sure. So when you take your services and you divide them up into containers and, you know, call the micro services, basically taking a single service, putting container and having a bunch of dependency that might be associate with that, what you end up doing is having your ability to, uh, you know, replace or update that particular container independently of the other components on the system. If an issue happens, or if you want to get a new feature functionally for that, the other thing you could do is you, Khun Slim, down what you're running. So you don't have to run these two hundred plus features, which is the average amount you see and just a top Iraq device. And you only use maybe ten to twenty percent of those. Why do I have all these extra features that I have to qualify that may introduce a bug into my particular environment. I want to run the very specific items that I know I need to give my application, uh, up and running and the ability to go ahead and pull in the cloud native environment and tools to do that allows you to get the efficiencies that they've learned from not only the cloud way, but also even doing some on Prem communities. You know, private cloud items to get those efficiencies on their forwarding, your network running your applications. >> It's learning from the hyper sailors to write like this. This is Well, I mean, we had this when we were running networks, right? You put every protocol on the board on a white board, and then you'd start crossing them off and you start arguing in a room full of people saying, Why do I need this feature? Why do I need this other feature and it's like you have to justify it. And we know this is happening up the road at, you know, places like Facebook because, like Google, right, we know that they're that they're saying, Hey, the fewer features I have running the simple or my environment is the easier it is to troubleshoot, the less that can go wrong and the less security vulnerabilities. I have these air all. It's all goodness to run less right. So if you give people the ability to actually do that, they have a substantially better network. Yeah, >> what's unique about what you guys doing? How would you describe the difference between what you're doing and what people mean she might be looking at? >> So if you look at what you know other folks, that you know that we're going to see that look at collaborative Riku Burnett ys everything they do is a bolt on until his old architecture that's been around for twenty five years. So it's like a marriage between these two items. It's how you go ahead and have this plug in that interacts with that. Forget all that you're going to get up in the same spot with another thing you're adding on to another thing you're adding on to another thing. Hearing onto it seized these abstraction layers on top of distraction layers were taking the approach where it is native to the non core operating system. You know, Cooper, Daddy's Docker, Micro Services and containers. They're native to the system. We're not anything on. We're not bolting anything on there. That's how it is. Architect designed to be run. >> And that's key, right? The thing that we were really walking away from from our operational experience, we know that the decisions being made at that, you know, CEO Seo level and even in the you know, director of infrastructure level are going to be We're looking to build an on Prem solution, Mr Customers saying I need it to be orchestrated by an open, nonproprietary platform that gets rid of all of the platforms that are currently out there by the traditional network. Oh, yeah, Bs right. If you start out saying my orchestration platform has to be shared from compute storage network and it has to be open and has to be not proprietary, that pretty much leaves communities is you're really only choice and combinations important. It's hugely important to us, right? We knew that when we broke everything into, you know, containerized Micro Services. You need something to orchestrate those. So what we've done is we said, Hey, we're going to use this Cuban eighties tool. We're going to embed it on the device itself, and we're going to run it natively so that it can be the control point for all the different containers that are running on the system. >> That's awesome, guys. Great Chef will go forward to chatting more final question. What words of wisdom you have for other folks out there, Because there are a lot of worlds colliding as we look at the convergence of a cloud architect, which, by the way, is not a well defined position >> where you >> have infrastructure, folks who have gone through machinations of roles. Network engineer this that the other thing programmable networks air out there. You seeing this thing really time data? I oh, ti's. Also, you're all coming together yet. So what, you gotta re evaluating? What's your advice to folks out there? Who who are either evaluating running POC is rethinking their architecture. >> So the first thing that you know I think this is pretty common from folks that to hear is that evolve, or you're not going to be relevant anymore. You need to actually embrace these other items you can't ignore. Cloud. You can't pretend like I have a network. These applications will never move because eventually they will and you're going to be out of a job. And so we need you to start looking at some of the items that are out there from the cloud native universe to couldn't see Cooper nineties universe and realizing that networking is not a special Silent is completely different from, you know, dev ops every items they need to be working together. And we need to get these two groups and to communicate to each other, to actually move the ball forward for getting applications out there faster for customers. >> Don't let the thing I would say to infrastructure, folks, especially those that are going to cloud strategy is don't let the Ivy and the Moss grow on your own prime solution yesterday. Right? Go into your multi cloud strategy with I'm gonna have some stuff in eight of us and have some stuff deserve. I'm not stuff some stuff and Google. I might have some stuff overseas because the data sovereignty. But I'm also gonna have things that are on prep. Look at your on from environment and make it better to reflect what you could do in the cloud. Because once you're developers get using the AP structures in the cloud. They're going to want something very similar on Prem. And if they don't have it than your own, Prem is going to rot. And and you're going to have some part of your business that has to be on Prem and you're going to give it a level of service that isn't as good as the cloud, and nobody wants to be in that situation. >> Glenn, Adam Thanks so much for sharing. Congratulations on the launch of Snap Out every year and thanks for coming and sharing conversation. >> Thanks. Great. >> I'm John for here in Palo Alto. The Cube Studios for Cube Conversation with Snapper Out. Launching. I'm shot for you. Thanks for watching

>> Everyone, welcome to this special CUBE conversation. We are here in the Palo Alto studios of theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host here with Rehan Jalil, former president and CEO of Elastica, here to talk about the People First network and his approach and experiences and his entrepreneurial journey. Rehan thanks for joining us. >> Thank you so much. Thanks for inviting. >> So we were talking before we came on. You have a great entrepreneurial journey. It's a great podcast up on the Mayfield.com website. Really a good story about what you've done. But you had a lot of different kind of experiences through your progression journey in entrepreneurship. You had some failures and some successes. And certainly now with cloud security hot, I'm sure you're probably go into another one. But what it's like right now for you? You just left Semantic. You're kind of out on your own. Are you clipping coupons? Going to go to the beach and hang out? Are you working on a new startup? What's happening? >> I think there's a lot to do. Frankly for me it's very important to actually understand some new problems that needs to be solved. Especially there's so much changing with AI and all the intrusions are you're seeing and breaches that are going on. There are new problems to solve and that's where my head is. I'm not going to take too much of a break. I'm going to get going. >> Yeah you seem to get it going. And that's, most entrepreneurs do that. Let's talk about some of the experience you have. And one of the things we were talking about, before I got my cameras out, back in the old days when before internet, broadband wireless was hot, you get a startup around Wimax, which was early days of broadband wireless. And then you had some failures that successes but didn't work out. Then you had another wireless startup that was successful that became part of that 4G movement. This is an example of being correct in the thesis but you picked the wrong door to go through. Talk about that journey because I think that time in history, this was around 2001, 2002, 2003 timeframe. This was the internet was growing. Wireless, we didn't have the phones we have now. Obviously it's smartphone in 2007 years later. This was pre-mobile boom. This was the beginning of the shift to broadband, true broadband. Now we see it everywhere: LTE, 5G's around the corner. This was a pivotal moment, but for you, you were as an entrepreneur, you had the right decision, broadband wireless, but it was shifting. Feels like cloud today but I want to get in touch here. What did you learn? >> I think they were two very different companies. The mission of the first company which I joined as an employee, the first company, which was to take the high speed internet to the masses. In US and some developed world, they were DSL and cable kind of first coming up, but that infrastructure did not exist in the rest of the world, and the mission was that if we could take same level of high speed connectivity and enable it for the rest of the world, it'd be really cool. And this is back in the day. So thesis was right and hence I joined that company. And it was a lot of fun. I learned a lot. But I think one thing you have to realize, even in those times, to do such a massive project and to go against some massive incumbents which exist in those ecosystems, the differentiation has to be extremely high. And to create differentiation on the radio side of things is just very difficult. And I think so, and of course at that time, the economy took a bad turn and that company didn't have some significant big outcome. From that learning I evolved a thesis that this technology needs to go mobile and this is again pre-iPhone times. It was Blackberry times. So if you were to go talk to investor and say look the world is going to look like when we will have internet in our pocket, the people would smile at you. It's like what are you talking about? So even raising money for that was not easy and that was my first company that I started myself called WiChorus. And these there was what if you could have DSL-type connectivity and literally all internet's power in your pocket. But the learnings from that first company were that if you go try to do that in straight in the wireless side of things in a telco environment, the competition is going to be significantly high. >> The scale, the presence, the market power they have. >> And the purchasing side. Most important is the purchasing cycles. People take time. Even if you come up with something really compelling, by the time it's going to be getting deployed, somebody will catch up to you. >> I mean just think about the time. This is a time for the folks watching, if you're younger or even older like my age, think about it. To actually have a phone in the car and surfing the internet didn't exist. I mean you could barely get email just through a lower latency and a lower bandwidth internet tower. They didn't have the broadband. And so today we surf, watch movies in the car. This was pre-broadband. So I remember a time when we were testing one router, it's like look it we're getting a ping back while we're driving down 101. That was like a miracle. Now it's standard. This is when big shifts happen and a lot of people are comparing that kind of environment to what we're seeing with cloud computing now. You're seeing Amazon Web Services, 26, 27 billion dollar run rate from just 47% a year. Google with great technology and now entering in. Microsoft pivoting to cloud. Those are big players and startups are now trying to figure out what you learned and how to not get in the way but also draft off the momentum. What's your view of this and what advice do you have for entrepreneurs that are out there because this is the number one question that I hear and I talk about entrepreneurs, either behind closed doors or on theCUBE. >> I think it's a blessing to have actually some infrastructure like that, but if you don't do it right it could be a curse. What I mean by that is that you have to leverage something that is available to you and not trying to kind of reinvent, do something slightly better. So I think on the infrastructure side, you have to be very thoughtful on where you could potentially play. And we're frankly some of the big players like AWS or Microsoft and perhaps Google is going to be basically wanting to actually play themselves in that area. However having said that, but the ecosystem and the layer of services that is made available, it's actually a big, big blessing for startups because all the value creation is kind of moving up the chain. And if you leverage that, then the cost of building startups and cost of doing new things is kind of gone down. So we did something very similar with Elastica, which was all about security for the cloud from the cloud. And if we didn't have that infrastructure and the layer available the amount of money that would have required would have been significantly higher. >> So the cloud gets you scaled up, leveled up quicker. Faster to go to market, more agile and dynamic, and then you could wrap IP around those old tasks of provisioning servers. >> There's plenty of intellectual property that first you can put on top of it but in a verticalized fashion. At least for Elastica it was very much kind of a vertical solution of security for the cloud in SaaS applications itself instead of trying to redo your own servers and server stack and our mission. I mean things that are available, just make use of it. >> So you guys were successful with the cloud and you sold that company to Symantec. What year was that? >> Actually it was 2015. We sold it to Bluecoat. And the Bluecoat got acquired by Symantec but then Bluecoat management took over Symantec and that was hurried. So we had like two acquisitions back to back. >> That's nice. It's a good experience. So I want to, before we move on to some of the things that are more personal, I want to get your take on an entrepreneurial dynamic that a lot of successful entrepreneurs take and I want to get your reaction to. Most entrepreneurs are very optimistic. They see the opportunity recognition. They go for it. They're persistent. But they're also in discovery mode to validate their thesis and always kind of self-aware, but there's always the fatal flaw out there that potentially could be there. We talked about broadband wireless, directionally correct, good concept, its fatal flaw was the incumbents. How do you in essence debug a startup venture, venture architecture or venture plan because if there's a fatal flaw in there it's like a bug in software. How as an entrepreneur do you debug that? I mean in your journey as you've had successes and you learned from some of the things that were teachable moments for you, is there a debugging formula? How would you react to that? How would you explain to entrepreneurs? Because that's what they always are naturally doing. Where's the fatal flaw? Where's the fatal flaw? >> And it's I think extremely important. Firstly, the intellectual honesty in setting your own direction is very important. You certainly have to have the aspiration to go do something and have that initiative to go do it, but at the same time setting direction is the most important thing or keep tuning the direction over time is actually extremely important. And then there is no one answer. The key thing is that if you're going to be building something, you have to see if there's going to be a big market for it. That's the first thing. And then when you're going to get there, how the adoption is going to be there. Would you have advantage in adoption as compared to incumbents if they get there? So I think you have to have a thesis because you just can't always project the right way, especially in the enterprise side of things. And if you can actually crack that code, and then if when you do offer this to the market, is it going to be easy to adopt? Easy to accept by the customers? And would it have some kind of an effect of quick movement? I think you have to have all those right. And some trend, if it kind of gives you support. Like when we built Elastica, there was thesis the cloud is going to take over. The SaaS is going to happen. >> That was a tailwind for you. >> So it was a tailwind. So it happened interestingly at the times when we had the product. Same actually happened for WiChorus interestingly, with a thesis that the need of very high speed internet to a mobile device, this is pre-iPhone times, would happen and luckily iPhone came on in around 2007 timeframe and we had the product which telco's would have needed and the iPhone came along. And we ended up building one of the first 4G networks along with ClearY in southern California. So I think all these things kind of have to line up. The market timing, your strategic advantage, your acceptance, all these stuff. >> The self awareness is a great point. Also having versatility and having the skills to flex because to get all those things right you're kind of juggling. And that persistence. Okay I got to ask you about People First. What does People First mean to you? >> At the end I think frankly that is the core, core of startups. And we've been kind of lucky within Elastica. Our main reason for success has been that the team that we ended up having and building over time, they not only had actually very good, diverse skill set because Elastica required very diverse skill set from networking to cloud to AI to all those. But the chemistry between the team was also quite amazing. So I think if you understand that not only the people and the company and the dynamics within them is going to be, which is going to be required, then you start paying attention to the culture that goes along with it. So the culture of executing as well as doing it with kindness and humility along the way. >> Sharing your experience, the journey together, co-creating, kind of creating that superglue in the culture. That's super important. What have you learned over your journey around the where it's worked, where it hasn't cause a lot of people are trying to figure out that people equation, and it's people they really if they sincerely believe they want to do it then but sometimes people don't know the playbook. Is there a playbook or people just go by their gut? What's your advice on in terms of hey I really want to get my people equation right. I want to get that right. We have a mission, you share that mission. What are some of the things that entrepreneurs and companies can do like immediately that's easy to get going? >> I think being is communication. And upfront I continue to start communicating not just in words, but in the things that you do yourself. Because it's not words don't count. How you actually deal with people and how you should treat them and how you actually collaborate additionally really matters. And that actually is the driving force of actually starting a culture I would say in place. And then if you observe anything that aren't working out, communication is going to be the key. You openly communicate and do it in a way that it is not a hostile environment. >> I love your history. I love your background. My personal family as a family of immigrants has come to the United States. You have a very immigrant story. Andy Grove was an immigrant, founder of Intel. I mean Silicon Valley is born, entrepreneurship is indiscriminate. Entrepreneurs are who they are but you have an interesting story where you came from, how you came to Silicon Valley. Tell that story. >> So I was born in Pakistan. My parents were born in India so they migrated to Pakistan which just happens to be that I came here for studies. Interestingly I didn't know much about Silicon Valley to be honest and I happened to have a job in Sun Microsystems that happened to be in Silicon Valley, but when I came here it was kind of a blessing. This is exactly where I needed to be because even when I was going to grad school I had the aspiration to actually go do something on my own but I didn't know how. And when you come here to Silicon Valley, the people around you and the friendships that you create here and the relations that you build here and what you learn from the other people is actually quite amazing. So I feel very blessed. >> And it really is a special place and you have to kind of understand that vibe and culture. I want to ask you a personal question. A lot of entrepreneurs think they can go to business school and get an entrepreneurship degree, and some do, but I always have that debate. You're kind of born with this kind of my philosophy. Some people might debate that. It's always a classic debate: are you born with it or can you learn it or both. Some people know their entrepreneurship early on. Some figure out like me when I'm in my 30's. That's when I kind of figured it out that I have that entrepreneurial talent looking back at some of the things I did. When did you find out that you knew that you were entrepreneurial and wanted to build stuff on your own and this is who I am as a person. What was that moment like? >> I think very early. I didn't have any doubt. This was undergrad times back in my undergrad school in Pakistan. I think I just knew that I'll be doing something on my own and that's exactly what I wanted to do so how I would do it, what time it was going to be, I didn't know any of that. But I had some belief in my mind that I'm going to basically build some things and build business around it. So it was quite early. >> You were lucky, got some time. And when you came to Silicon Valley, what were some of the things you did? Was it like a oh my God this is an amazing place or did you have to do some networking? What were some of the things that you did when you first came in to really kind of get in to that groove swing, entrepreneurial groove swing? >> This is one of those times when Sun was, is an amazing place. I ended up at Sun Microsystems and the people there were unbelievably talented. They have all kind of talented people there. >> Very entrepreneurial. Two coming out of Stanford, Scott McNeely, all the early DNA was very entrepreneurial. >> Exactly. So I think that was again a place where you could learn a lot not just in technology but actually how to solve problems, how to understand customer problems that you could solve and build new technology on top of it. And I didn't stay there that long. Within a couple of years, I decided that I need to go basically join a small company where I could do more things beyond just designing one aspect. I was building microprocessor designs. Instead of just doing that I could do other roles also. So I joined the broadband wireless company after that opportunity. >> As an entrepreneur, one of the big decisions is who are you going to marry in terms of the VC or partner, financial partner. It truly is taking on a new partnership and that's a big struggle and I think we've seen the programmer culture certainly amplified. It's just recently passed decade where everyone wants to go for the big valuations and like wow look it, I only sold 15% of my company and raised ten million or a big number, look how great it is. But then you realize that when they come to board meetings you got them a good valuation but they may not be receptive on the other side. So there's a dynamic in fundraising early on, not just market selection as a venture but partner selection. Talk about how important that is, how you handled it, and advice for people thinking about selection of a financial partner. >> In technology companies where you have to invest a bunch in R&D early on, you do need money. It's just the way it works. But money is not everything because right now at least, today, money is kind of commodity. You can actually raise from many, many different sources, many different VC's. But one thing I've learned within the startups is that any and all startups will have good times and bad times, will have doubt in a strategy and will have conviction. And when those times are not so good, you need people who you can just go talk frankly without having to worry about it and without getting judged along the way. >> Trust. >> Trust is the key. So I think you pick people essentially based on how much you actually trust them, especially very, very early stage startups. And then as you go along, perhaps things change over time because over time if the company's scaling you may need a lot more money. But I think again people first. You want to partner people you can actually trust. >> In that hard conversation sometimes, you want to be self aware and that's always step one but two, vulnerability and then partnering with a financial partner that's going to sit on the same side of the table at the right times and maybe on the other side to be a counterbalance at the right times. And also when you need more money they got to help you sell the next round too. There's a lot of things that they have do to, and the dynamic is critical. And you've had success with that. >> So far it's been a success. >> Well what's the big thing happening right now in your mind, just to kind of take it forward now as we look forward. You see a lot of cloud computing. You got a great experience with cloud. You've been successful. Cloud security is really hot. What do you see as opportunities in the cloud space now that you got your entrepreneurial 20 mile stare out, they're looking for opportunities. I'm sure you probably mean more security space but in general as an entrepreneur, what do you see as things that people can go after markets? >> In general I sit on the enterprise side of things. Anything that simplifies work and automates it, whether it's using AI and whether they're using other technologies, software technologies, I think that space is going to grow more because the horizontal layers where you have big data platforms and you have infrastructure providers, I think they are doing a great job in integrating the system, but now you're going to see a lot more verticalized solutions based on machine learning and AI and automation. I think we're going to see a lot more of that. There's plenty of opportunities. >> It's super early. Do you agree with that? Great, well thanks for coming in the CUBE conversation. I appreciate this part of the Mayfield People First conversations. I'm John from theCUBE. We are here with Rehan Jalil, former president and CEO of Elastica. Successful serial entrepreneur about to embark on his next adventure. Good luck and I'm looking forward to catching up. >> You know, thank you so much for inviting me. >> Thanks for watching. This is the CUBE conversation People First network. I'm John Furrier.

>> Live from Seattle, Washington it's theCUBE covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon, North America 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, The CloudNative Computing Foundation, and Antico System Partners. (upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, welcome back to theCUBE. Day two live coverage here in Seattle of the CNCF KubeCon and CouldNative. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE with Stu Miniman here all week for three days as multiple years we've been covering KubeCon. We've been covering this community, all the way back to the OpenStack days to now CloudNative and Kubernetes, rise of Kubernetes, and KubeCon has been great. CloudNative Computing Foundation and the center of it has been an individual CUBE alumni that we've talked to many times, Lew Tucker, VP and CTO of Cloud Computing at Cisco Systems. Great to have Lew on, good to see you. >> Great to be back again. >> We got a great history of conversations and every year we kind of have a pinch me moment where it's like it's so awesome right now, the technology's coming together, now more than ever, the standardization, the maturization of Kubenetes and what's going on around it, is probably one of the most exciting trends. It's not just about Kubernetes, it's about what that's enabling, ecosystems, storage, networking and compute, now the, is working now magically creating a lot of value. So, we've talked about it, what's the update from your perspective, how do you see it evolving now? >> I see it very much the same way, I had a short little keynote today, yesterday, and was talking about I think we've entered this kind of golden age of software where because of the number of projects that are now going into the CNCF for example, and elsewhere, and get up repositories, we just have a major driving force which is the accumulation of the software that's used now to power the cloud, power data centers, totally transforming infrastructure. We're no longer cabling as I sort of say has no become code. >> Yeah. >> And that's all about the software, it's about through the open source communities. >> We've been talking about before we came on camera about the, and we've had other conversations about the historical waves of innovation. AI's been around for a while, you know all these things have kind of been around but now with cloud computing and the resources available in terms of compute power, storage, and networking now programmable, it's creating a lot of innovation right. And this has been a tailwind for some and a headwind for others, companies that have transformed and understood that have been leveraging it. We've seen conversations from Net App, Cisco, you guys are transform, you turned it into a tailwind, for Cisco, because now all that magic can come in for the programmability on the networking side. >> Exactly right, yeah. We see AI as having a big impact across the board on all of these, we're big contributors also into Cube Clove, for example, because on top of Kubernetes, the biggest issue we're going to have in AI going forward is we don't have enough AI engineers. We don't have enough people who are trained in that. So we need to create these tools and the services that we see coming out in the cloud now for AI are designed to make it easy to consume AI. You don't have to be an AI expert in order to use it and that sort of thing is really exciting. >> How is the CloudNative environment changing IT investments 'cause again, the old days I'd have to throw a machine at something, I got to buy this and siloed, you got now horizontal capabilities, you got the vertical specialization with machine learning and AI as you just referenced. How is it changing investments, people now are looking at re-imagining their infrastructure, they're re-imagining how apps are built. How is Kubernetes, CloudNative impacting IT investments? >> So we've found for example when we talk to our customers and everything else, they're all using multiple clouds. So I think internally we're getting to see a rise here now is this multi-cloud environment that we have. And so Cisco with what we've been doing with our hybrid solutions for AWS and hybrid solutions that we're having with Google is making it so that you can have the same environment within your data center as you have in the cloud, and then we connect the two so that now the IT infrastructure really is looking like a cloud and there's many clouds, multiple clouds in your own data center, in multiple service providers. That makes it easier for IT to really consume CloudNative technology. >> I wonder if you can chill us down a level from what we're talking- you talk about cube flow and machine learning remember back to big data, was like okay, well what do we have to do with the network? Well, I need some more buffering but you know, how are we what is just the base infrastructure layer and where Kubernetes and this ecosystem just becomes the platform for all of the modern applications, and what has to be done differently, I wonder if you could help- >> Yeah so one of the big challenges I think is this how do we connect the different clouds together with your own data center. And that's why we, the hybrid solutions, where Cisco's driving now are designed specifically to make that easy because it's scary for IT organizations to say they're going to open up some part of their firewall to have connections coming in, and so we provide a solution that makes it easy for people. And that means that things such as cube flow, and things like that, they can be running, perhaps they might do some of their research in a hybrid- in a public cloud provider, such as AWS or Google. And then they want to run it now in production within their own data center, and they don't want to change a thing. And at the same time, we're seeing other capabilities. You want to access some service in the cloud as a part of your enterprise app. >> Yeah one of the things people have a hard time understanding is what is just kind of standardized, okay I've got compliant Kubernetes it can run all these places and then there's areas where Cisco has done deep integration work with both Google Cloud and with AWS, maybe help understand what are the standard pieces and what's the extra engineering work needed to be done to support some of these? >> Well I think what has helped us all is the fact that Kubernetes has really taken off. So we really are seeing if you have a Kubernetes platform and you adhere to the public APIs of Kubernetes and everything else like that, you then can have the portability of applications back in the java days we were going after that, and now we're seeing it with Kubernetes. And so by what we've developed has been with the Cisco container platform is an on premise manage Kubernetes environment that looks identical to what you find in the Kubernetes environment at AWS or at Google. So the same interfaces are there, the IT doesn't have to relearn things, they can actually get the advantage of that standardization. >> And that's key for operations and IT because that is the promise of cloud operations. Similar on both platforms on premises and in the cloud. And the next question is okay from a networking perspective, we've had many conversations with Suzie Wee at Cisco around network programmability or net dev options as you guys call it, which is kind of a play on dev ops. This is the future because with multi-cloud the apps don't need to know about where to provision workloads, which cloud when, is it better region over here, latency, network factors come in, you still got to move things around, put A to B, edge of the network for IOT. Talk about the importance of network programmability now more than ever with CloudNative why it's so important. >> Well the first and foremost, it has to be driven by APIs. The old days of actually going out and having people configure network switches to make connectivity or open up provisions and firewalls and things like that, that's behind us. Now we have that all being because of programmability of the network through what we've been doing with ACI and other technologies, we can make it so we can connect these clouds and make it, maintain the security. We're also seeing other things such as isteo and edgebased computing and things like that come into play, where again, the ordinary developer doesn't have to learn all of the details of networking and security, but the operations people need it to be secure, need it to be able to be moved around, need to be able to have telemetry so they can tell what's going on. >> One of the things we've been talking about on theCUBE, Stu and I were yesterday riffing on this but for a while, but it's also now trickled into the Silicon Valley conversations around some of the tech elite people around architecture. Cloud architects are in high demand and there's two schools of thought. There's a persona around a systems architect, more of a systems view, operating systems kind of view, that's cloud that's operating, environment, serverless, advanced, these are kind of concepts that is a systems-oriented thinker. And then you have the application developer that looks like an app server kind of world. Those are all paradigms that we've lived through. >> Right. >> Now coming together now in one, horizontally scaled both cloud that's a system, vertical specialization around the apps, and with dev ops layer, having these guys work together. Talk about this dynamic, your thoughts on it, how it shapes employee selection, people who lead projects. 'Cause the CTO and architect role's now more important, but the software side's just as important. >> Yeah so I think one thing that's become very clear is that we need to make it easier for the domain experts in an application area to just take care of their part. And so that's why like one of the previous episodes we talked about here was about istea, where we've actually separated out essentially the data play, the transport of data around with security, encryption, identity, and everything else from the actual application code of the micro service. That makes it much easier because now the engineering teams are too large, you can't have everybody know everything anymore, like you say, we've got specialists in different areas. We need to be able to provide then, underlying systems that connect these things and that underlying system then has to be managed by your operations people. So we've got dev ops where the application people are writing code actually that the operations people use, so that we can actually have this kind of uniform infrastructure that is maintainable. >> And security is super important and all that good stuff. >> Yeah so Lew it's interesting, we've been watching so many of the pieces we've worked on OpenStack, it was really from the bottoms up building the infrastructure, we've seen the dynamic the last two years, Kubernetes some, and server-less even more, coming from the top down. We want to get your thoughts on that, we've been digging in and trying to tease out some of the Knative pieces that are being discussed here, versus some of the functions things that are happening, especially in Amazon and Microsoft, I'd love to get your take. >> I think we're always seeing this progression in platforms for computing, and programming languages, and paths we've talked about years ago. All of these things are designed always to make it easier. So you're right we've got for example Knative now really coming on as saying can we standardize a way specifically helping Kubernetes people move into this area. Like I've mentioned before the Kubeflow again, how can we start to standardize these pieces? The beauty of this is, the standardized pieces are coming out in open source. So everybody gets it, and that means it's deployable in your public clouds, it's deployable in your data center, and then through a lot of the hybrid technology that Cisco's working, you can connect those together. But you're right we're going to continue to see innovation, that's great, because we need that, we need that constantly. What we need to be able to do is make it easier to consume and then integrate into these systems. And that's where I think Kubernetes has a lot do with how we make it easier. >> Final question on Cisco then I want to go on a more personal note with you on your situation which is news breaking here on theCUBE. Cisco has successfully transformed it's direction, it's been always a great leader in networking, always a great business, billions and billions of dollars in revenue. Now with CloudNative and Kubernetes, the relationship I saw with Amazon, you got Google, you guys have taken that systems view in making things programmable. Explain the Cisco strategy from your perspective as a CTO and as a legend in the industry, for the people that know Cisco, know the old Cisco, what is the new Cisco? And how does Kubernetes and how does all this CloudNative fit into the new Cisco? >> I think the new Cisco really is focused now on where customers are taking their computing resources and it is in this multi-cloud world where we're seeing it's not a fight anymore. You can't say I have a reason to keep things here in my data center, I'm never going to go to cloud, and other customers are saying I'm never going to have a data center, now everybody's saying we're probably going to have both. And Cisco as a networking company, this plays right into our strength because what you have to be able to do is now connect those environments in a secure way, in a manageable way. And so this plays right into where Cisco's growth I think is going to be, it'll be in much more of these kinds of services that allow that to happen, and in the relationships and partnerships that we have with the major cloud providers. >> This basically, the decomposition of monolithic applications into sets of microservices is connected by the network. >> Exactly right. >> This is the fundamental beauty of where you guys see that tailwind. >> Exactly. >> Awesome. Well Lew you've been a legend in the industry, I've been following your career from the beginning. You've been- you have product that's in the Computers Museum you've done amazing work at Sun Microsystems, I mean just a great story career, the work you've done at Cisco, you've been on theCUBE so many times, I don't know that number. You've really contributed to the industry and this news now about your situation, share the news about what's happening with you. >> Well I made announcements at our CNCF board and our OpenStack board meetings that I'm leaving Cisco and so I'm having to withdraw from the board positions as well as Cloud Foundry and that's sad in a way because I have relationships with those people, but it many ways after I want to spend some time to really see where the future is again, because as you know in my career I've changed several times. And I'm so looking forward to actually, now going into sort of a new direction which may be much more moving up the stack. I think there's very exciting things going on in AI, there's exciting things going on in genomics. There's a lot of activity going on so we've been building this technology for a purpose to allow us to have those kinds of things. Now I want to start focusing much more directly. >> And you're leaving Cisco on what date? >> Leaving Cisco beginning of January. >> Well congratulations, great work and I think one of the trends I think this speaks to is I see a lot of computer scientists, a lot of people who have some DNA from the old ways like you do, and been there, and contributed at a seminal level, just some great contributions. Seeing computer science as an opportunity to solve problems. This is kind of a renaissance from seasoned pioneers and young people coming together. This is a great opportunity, is that kind of what you're thinking, you're just going to attack the problem? >> There's 8000 people here, this show's sold out and this is all developers so people who have background in computer science or are getting online and learning it themselves, this is an opportunity and the time to get in. >> You've been a great mentor to many, you've been a great contributor in the open source community, again, your contributions at the systems level and you understand certainly what's going on with CloudNative, looking forward to following up and congratulations. >> Yep, well I hope to be back again. >> Of course, you're VIP CUBE alumni. Lew Tucker, exciting news, Cisco's transformed. He's moving on to- taking on some big new challenges, thanks for coming on theCUBE really appreciate it. Lew Tucker, Vice President CTO systems, Cisco systems, moving on to some new endeavors. Here in theCUBE we're covering the live coverage here at KubeCon CloudNative I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, back with more day two interviews after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From Chicago, it's The Cube. Covering Veritas Vision Solution Day 2018. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to the Windy City everybody. You're watching The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We're goin' out to the events, we extract a signal from the noise. We're here at the Veritas Vision Solution Days in Chicago. We were just a few weeks ago we were at the iconic Tavern on the Green in New York City. We're here at the Palmer House Hotel, beautiful hotel right in downtown Chicago near the lake. It's just an awesome venue, it's great to be here. Arista Thurman III is here, he's the principle computer engineer at the Argonne National Labs. Great to see you, thanks for coming on The Cube. >> Yah, good to be here, thanks. >> So tell the audience about Argonne National Labs. What do you guys all about? >> About science, so we're all about the advancement of science. We do a lot of different experiments from technology for batteries and chemistry. The project we're working on is the advanced photon source, which is a light source that's used to collect data in experiments with a photon source. >> OK, so you're an IT practitioner, >> Arista Thurman: That is correct. >> Serving scientists. >> Arista Thurman: Yes. >> What's that like? Is that like an IT guy serving doctors? Are they kind of particular? >> Arista Thurman: A little bit. >> There's some challenges there, but yah it's great. So basically you have a unique customer base, and they have additional requirements. So, it's not like a normal customer base. They're very smart people. They have a lot of demands and needs, and we do our best to provide all the services they require. >> Yah, so given that they're technical people, they may not be IT people but they have an affinity to technology. First of all, it must be hard to BS them, right? (laughter) >> Arista Thurman: No doubt, no doubt. >> They'd cut through that, so you got to be straight with them. And they're probably pretty demanding, right? I mean, they have limited resources and limited time and limited budgets, and they're probably pounding you pretty hard. Is that the case, or are they more forgiving? >> They're great people to work with, but there can be some challenges. I mean, it's unique in the idea that they work on multiple platforms. So it's from Unix to Linux to Mac. Multiple computers in their offices, multiple data requirements. And a lot of things happen without a lot of process and planning. Some things are ad hoc. So, it puts a little bit of strain sometimes on you to try to make everything happen in the amount of time they have. And everything is There's some challenges with regard to how to get things done in a timely fashion when you don't know what's going to happen with some of these experiments. >> I mean I imagine, right? They can probably deal with a lot of uncertain processes because that's kind of their lives, right? You must have to cobble things together for them to get them a solution sometimes, is that the case? >> We do sometimes. I think it's all about getting enough funding and enough resources to take care of all the different experiments. >> Dave Vellante: A balancing act. >> Yah. >> Dave Vellante: Ya so you look after, compute and storage. >> Arista Thurman: Yes. >> Right, so talk about what's happening generally there and then specifically data protection. >> So in general, my primary focus is Linux. Linus administration, Red Hat Linux. And we've seen a lot of data growth over the last five years and we've got projection for more growth as we are planning for an upgrade. So we're going to change our bmine and make it more efficient. Have a better light source and that's all planned in the next two to three years. And so, there's a lot of extra projects on top of our normal workload. We have a lot of equipment that probably needs to be refreshed. There's resources and with IT and any kind of data management things change. So whatever we're doing today, in the next three years we'll be doing something different because things change with regard to CPU speeds, performance of IO networking, storage requirements. All those things are continually growing exponentially. And when scientists want to do more experiments and they get new resources in, it's going to require more resources for us to maintain and keep them operational at the speeds and performance they want. >> Yah, we do hundreds of events with The Cube. We do about 130 events this year, and a lot of them are so-called "big data" orientation. And when you go to those data oriented events, you hear a lot of, sort of the roots of that. Or at least similarities to the scientific technical computing areas and it's sort of evolved into big data. A lot of the disciplines are similar. So, you're talking about a lot of data here. Sometimes it's really fast data, and there's a lot of variety, presumably, in that data. So how much data are we talking about? Is it huge volumes? Maybe you could describe your data environment. >> Primarily we have things broken up into different areas. So we have some block storage, and that provides a lot of our virtual the back-end for our virtualization environments which is either Microsoft or Red Hat RHV. I would estimate that's somewhere in a petabyte range. And then we also have our NAS file systems which spread across multiple environments providing NFS version three and four and also to Windows clients CIFS and some of the Mac clients also utilize that. And that's at about a little less than a petabyte. We also have high performance computing and that's a couple petabytes, at least. And all those numbers are just estimates because we're constantly growing. >> Any given time it's changing. But you're talking about multiple petabytes. So how do you back up, how do you protect multiple petabytes? >> Well I think it has to, it's all about a balancing act 'cause it's hard to back up everything in that same time window. So we have multiple backup environments providing resources for individual platforms. Like for Windows we'd do something a little different than we'd do for Linux. And we have different retention policies. Some environments need to be retained, retention is three years and some is six months, some three months, and so you have to have a system of migrating your storage to faster discs and then layer off the tape for long term retention. It's a challenge that we're constantly fighting with. >> How do you use Veritas? You're a customer obviously? >> Yah, we've been a Veritas customer for many years and we utilize Veritas in our virtualization environments. They kind of help us out with central platform. We've actually explored other things but the most cost effective thing to us at this point has been Veritas. We utilize them to back up primarily our NAS and our black files, our black file systems that provide most of the virtualization. >> Why Veritas? What is it about them that you have an affinity for? There's a zillion other backup software vendors out there, why Veritas? >> I think we have invested a lot in Veritas over the years. Predating my time at Argonne we've been using Veritas. In my previous career, in Sun Microsystems we also had some kind of relationship with Veritas. So it's easy and I think, like I mentioned earlier, we explored other things but it wasn't cost effective to make that kind of change. And it's been a reliable product. It does require work but it has been a reliable product. >> So, you'd mentioned your Linux, Red Hat Linux. >> Arista Thurman: Yes. >> So you saw this IBM announced it's going to buy Red Hat for 34 billion dollars. What were your thoughts when you heard that news? >> I was like, "Wow, what is going to happen now?" I was like, "How is that going to impact us?" Is it going to change our licensing model? Or is it going to be a good thing, or a bad thing? Right now we just don't really know. We're just kind of waiting and seeing. But it's like, OK, I mean that's a big deal. It is a biggest deal certainly from IBM. Their biggest previous deal was I think Cognos at five billion, so this dwarfs that. The deal of course doesn't close probably till the second half of 2019. So it's going to take a while. But look, IBM is known when it buys software companies, saw this with SPSS, you've seen it with other companies that it buys, it often times will change the pricing model. How do you license Red Hat? Do you have an enterprise license agreement? Do you know offhand? >> We do have an agreement with them. >> Dave Vellante: Lock that in. Lock that long term in now before the deal goes down. >> One of my counterparts is in charge of that part of it. So I'm sure we'll be having that conversation shortly. >> Yah, interesting. Well listen, Arista thanks very much for coming on The Cube, really appreciate your insight. >> Thank you. >> It's great to meet you, all right, you're welcome. Thanks for watching everybody, it's a wrap from Chicago. This has been The Cube, Veritas Vision Days. Check out SiliconAngle.com for all the news. TheCube.net is where you'll find these videos and a lot of others. You'll see where The Cube is next. Wikibon.com for all the research. Thanks for the team here, appreciate your help on the ground. We're out from Chicago, this is Dave Vellante. We'll see ya next time.

[Music] hi I'm Stu Mittleman and welcome to a cube conversation really excited to have to the program a first-time guest and a user Vinny Chopra is an IT engineer with Medallia Vinny thank you so much for joining us thank you and - Vinny's left we have Krishnan bad Rena Ryan in who's a director of product marketing with Nutanix Chris thanks so much for you here okay so we always love to be able to dig in with the customers understand the challenges they're facing Chris let's set the table first I'm very familiar with Nutanix we go to all the new tannic shows and the like but for customers what is Nutanix to them why do they turn to Nutanix okay absolutely so I think it's a great time to be in IT you see new businesses that are sprouting at all the last 10 years or so starting with uber Airbnb specifically the ones we've really heard of that have disrupted some really really big industries right so technology is making it happen while IT teams are the ones that help make that happen and helps those CEOs disrupt they're not in the best of positions to utilize infrastructure they have today the way it's set up to be able to get more done be more agile and truly serve the needs of the business and help create those competitive differentiation which is why neutronics is here to help our partners within companies such as yourself to be able to be those people to lean in and help CEOs really achieve what they're trying to get that yeah that's great yeah we definitely see it used to be okay IT was a cost center IT you know business would actually ask for something in IT would often be the no or be really slow and do they work with that so Vinnie before we dig into the IDE piece of it tell us a little bit about Medallia the business what's happening what's Sherma Delia's been around for about 15 years now we're located in it we're headquartered in San Mateo we used to be in Palo Alto moved last year we have a brand new building right off 101 a 92 we our analytics company and we and there's a lot of lots of fields in analytics we specialize in an area called CX which stands for customer experience and our goal is to make our customers customers happy which therefore makes our customers happy and we specialize in doing surveys and then especially in designing surveys for different types of companies and then and then we analyze that data you know surveys well Vinny I I find there's very few companies that I talked to whose industries are stagnant or not changing much the analytic space space that we cover heavily you know here here on the cube and with our research it's boy has that changed a lot I mean five years ago we were talking very much about Big Data today you know all the AI ml and and things like that what what give us a little bit about what's it like being in that business you know fast driving your silicon valley-based I have to imagine that the business is going through a lot of changes that put stresses and strains on IT oh definitely so I better the IT industry for many years and IT area different big companies Sun Microsystems Juniper Networks NetApp in the past excite calm which was a search engine way back when before Google days I remember excite you know because Microsoft didn't they buy that or things well there was an early cerulean at home there's a partnership with that on but yeah excited people would confuse as to wait excite calm what kind of site was that it's like no no it's a search engine back before by the way audience for those of you that haven't been around a while it wasn't all just being in Google there were a lot of predecessors that there was four or five big search engines at that time so most of my company had been out we've always been packaging stuff in a box and selling it in this is my first time at an analytics company and it's it's like you said it's a fast-moving field things are being the things there's no development staging production type of stuff things are just continuously being put into production changes are made you know customized you know customer's applications and their interface so it's it's a very fast-moving alright and Vinny you say IT engineers your job what does that encompass what your role how many people in the group what is your sure so we have basically two IT groups we have one that manages our production data centers which are which our customers interface with and we have one that supports our engineers so I'm part of that group and it's kind of a week up art of the IT system and engineering team and that involves traditional IT tasks like backups monitoring application install new server installs managing storage networking basically keeping infrastructure and applications running as efficiently as possible and therefore keeping our engineers happy because they can get their work done and their development done okay sounds like a you know pretty typical from from what I hear from companies is it what do you hear from customers structure-wise challenges they're facing absolutely so it's very much in line with what you were just talking about where there's these multiple needs from the business and customer expectations so how do you really help IT organizations be able to keep up with those needs infrastructure needs to be the big quittez data needs to be Vic witness application services need to be Vic Willis and you need to be able to scale out as your business needs needs to do so to be able to serve all those multiple requirements so whether it's standardizing internal applications that are delivered through virtual desktops or deploying databases are starting up customer websites you need to be able to do that and respond as quickly as possible and if you're spending cycles on acquiring infrastructure deploying it making sure it's well integrated and then once it's up and running figuring out what went wrong and enjoying those multiple nights of pizza right to figure out how to get this thing going back to the way it was it's it just distracts you from what's important so it's only when you make infrastructure invisible and truly scalable very much cloud-like and and make it your own as a process of doing so can you truly be that business partner and you and I hope we've done that with you definitely all right so Bennie let's go inside was there a specific project rollout that you would that led towards Nutanix was there a pain point you were having would give us kind of the before and what was the mature so traditionally an IT you would you want to set up a new application at you in your infrastructure environment you would buy servers and you would buy storage you would buy HBA cards which helps you connect the servers to the storage you've got things like worldwide numbers to worry about getting the right cables getting the right cards and then you put it all together you get all the stuff delivered and then two weeks later you might have things working and but you having some permission issues security issues so it was always a big challenge to get things up and running so it was the fun of ideas let's roll up our sleeves let's turn those geek knobs and you know optimize everything and yeah within six months I'm sure everything's rocking in right everything's rocking rolling but you're still not quite confident that things are running you're worried that a card might go bad you're worried that a world-wide number might change somewhere or somebody might you know mess up your security so you would spend a lot of time just getting things up and running versus spending time on development and you know working with your people you're supporting and trying to try to enhance things versus just keeping things getting things up and running so Nutanix you know with the hyper-converged infrastructure you know what kind of we're not worried about those things anymore it has our storage needs it has our compute needs it has our memory needs so what was it a refresh cycle what was the impetus that led to looking at a new arc sugar as we were growing and entering base was growing an IT was growing and our requests and you know what we need to satisfy was increasing tremendously we before we were working with just individual desks like desktops or blade servers but each one was kind of working individually with its own storage its own applications not the notion things weren't being shared or anything and we were just growing fast so we needed some we need a new infrastructure where we could actually have everything working of most efficiently and be secure and fast and and easy to manage and so we did look at we did some analysis on a few products and Nutanix you know after some a few pocs Nutanix was our product of choice yeah I mean you described something we heard a lot is it used to be every application you would kind of build your own temple for it yeah let me build it let me get the performance I need let me optimize certain things let me forecast how it's gonna grow but I get islands out there as opposed to I want to be able to scale I don't want to worry about you know here's one of the challenges out there most people and across the board forecasting is really hard or impossible I either overestimated a bunch and then I bought stuff I didn't eat her right under missed it estimate it and then oh my gosh I need to look to a new architecture yeah and then things ended up burning like at 10% of you know you utilizing temperature of the resources that you're purchasing yeah I remain poor virtualization it was like you know six seven percent is usually what we were running awesome so challenges before and we had you know silos out there I couldn't share I couldn't do talk about that that role how did you get from that old environment to the new one there's something I said when you you look at this wave of really a distributed architecture in the old world migrations were really really tough yeah and you had to do it with every cycle hopefully moving to an architecture like this this is your last migration it was like you know my wife always said the last time that's the last time I never want to have to move well I T I'm sure those migrations were always painful what was the experience my heading to migrations was is one thing that we went through but also just now it's just setting up new VMs or new applications new servers it's you know within a few minutes versus hours as far as migration we were we were running a hypervisor before but like I said it was on individual servers so the migration was basically picking your VMs or your servers one at a time and just migrating over to Tenex once it was there and you know with the hypervisor tools that are available it's very easy to use it's like things like vmotion or different types of migration tools that Nutanix offers with their hv hypervisor so it was just it was pretty seamless it was just you just pick and choose and identify your destination host ons Nutanix node or Nutanix cluster and all your stories that you want to move it to and just go okay so so Vinnie you went through a bit of a bake-off to figure out the solution tell us when you finish the deployment how are you measuring what does success mean to in deployment of your stand point and give us the after what show does this change for your process your organization sure qualitatively success is when our engineers are smiling and not calling us too much and asking us go to lunch versus telling us about issues they're having so that's qualitatively quantitatively looking at performance CPU memory I ops performance on a storage how our applications responding that that's what we measured it quantitatively yeah did you know like what kind of utilization you're getting on your current infrastructure then with the Nutanix um also currently you meet as far as uh what you said you were lucky to get 10% in the old world do you measure that yeah we met her that week we kind of um you know we have our kind of have our choices of how much storage you want to use how much CPU remember you want to allocate to each VM and we we just monitor it and through the prism interface that Nutanix offers the image you can actually see performance of each VM and you can decide when to throttle things so but as far as you know how much we're utilizing we're you know we have it we have a structured where we have room to grow so yeah absolutely and if we do need to grow later we can easily add nodes or you know chassis wood notes yeah I think back to the early years of you know what we call hyper converge environments and it was like oh well they are monolithic blocks even if they're small and but you don't have flexibility there when I look at you know many of the solutions especially what Nutanix ups there's a lot of flexibility into how I can grow in scale and get the the utilization that I need but get the performance the ops and everything what I think from your customers how is that story play out today yeah I mean ultimately it's all about empowering people right it's about making IT people truly successful broadening their skillset giving them greater control over the full stack if you will right so it's no longer siloed across functions you're no longer found helpless relying on a different team to deliver upon something that was promised based on a certain SLA so how do we do that how do we make evolved functional specialists into IT journalists would then become cloud engineers true cloud engineers right the world is changing technology is adapting businesses are a craving for more and the only way we can keep up is to adapt ourselves and utilize the best of breed technologies that gives us that power so as a result we hear that a lot where we find a lot of a customer's progressing from being either storage admins network specialists but most likely virtualization admins who then become these cloud engineers if you will they reorganize that way they tend to be in a position where they are a lot more infrastructure we're talking about 100x of what they used to do prior in the in the earlier days so the the number of the ratios just grow immensely as well as the quality of service provided the SAS are far reduced as they used to be so all of that goodness that our customers are able to deliver to their state goes in the organization makes us feel good about what we do if any would love we talked about you know this the engineers now they're smiling and going out to further then you know fighting bugs anything complaining about is yeah anything kind of when you look at skill set if they're you know I've talked to some entertainment customer he's like oh you know I had that security project that was sitting on my desk for years I can finally tackle that or there's I can be more responsive to the business so that they don't you know I can engage with them rather than just going off running it and do in stealth IT any anything along those lines that you can share I mean one thing like IT admins we typically want to know everything right so we all know what's happening behind the scenes with Nutanix we don't have to as much but we still like to and so we we take the opportunity to you know do trainings learn what's happening in an interface you support when needed so as far as yeah as far as skills go I think it's you know the skills you keep up with it's just different like Chris mentioned it's different different type of administration like we're managing virtualization or managing cloud you know you're not just managing loans and cables you know I love you sounds like you've got a team that's got that intellectual curiosity wants to understand what's going on how was the how was the on-ramp how was the kind of the cycle to understand the Nutanix piece how did you yeah so we learned a lot of the POC of course that's when you kind of you know you can play around with stuff and break stuff and try to break stuff if you want we use professional we used some freshly served since to help us get set up originally and after that it was just kind of learning day to day and just improving improving our knowledge in different areas like not if we're not used to having everything in one like in you know in one kind of a couple jassi's storage and you know compute so that was a networking as well so that was a little bit not challenged technically but just just you just need to reset the mindset these are the way I used to do things versus the the way now I can't do three and in troubleshooting um you know the great thing is when we have troubleshooting we're not calling three different vendors like a networking company a storage company in a compute company and having them point fingers oh it's networking now we if I ever have an issue or a question I call Nutanix supporting it so if any how long has it been since you the solution was deployed about two and a half years now awesome so it but you first of all I love your viewpoint as to how Nutanix has changed in those two those two years and along those lines too now that you look at things through the lens of 2018 if you could go back to peers of yours what would you tell them now that you wish you had known back when you rolled this out a couple of years ago I would you know how to tell them there's a much easier way to minute you know the deploy and manager infrastructure and you know this is this is one of the new techniques is definitely something you should look at alright Chris what what advice do you give to the IP people of the world that you know I'm sure most of them heard about this but you know what misconceptions might they have what what things do we want to make sure we open the door for sure so as a former developer myself you know several years ago I think it's very easy for us to forget the role we play in our organizations we're not all about the applications we're not all over the speeds and feeds we had a critical core part of how businesses go to market and achieve success right so let us recognize that and use the best approaches that are available out there to be able to deliver that value right if it means going where the good hyper-converged infrastructure solution if it means leaning in and building new disruptive technologies and such that can help your businesses do better the other thing that I want to highlight is just as you are in the the customer service business I believe we are as well we pride ourselves on our support so if you have if ask questions about how hyper-converged infrastructure can add value call us give support a call you would be put in touch with anyone who can speak about all the values we deliver to our customers and begin to get some of those ideas all right Vinnie uh want to ask you you you've got some experience works for some of the you know really well-known companies you not only here in the valley but in tech in general what's exciting you these days what do you look at either in the analytic space or an IT that that's getting you excited for me it's I like to get up without stress and so ease of management ease of deployment in the IT area is very that that's one of things I look forward to like you know being able to do other stuff than just focusing on data you know routine stuff yeah and one of those lines if I could give you you know the one wish to help make that goal even more either from Nutanix or you know the broad ecosystem out there what would what would make your job even easier you know it's it's I don't know I'm trying to think of a good answer but it's typically you know when issues once them all we have application issues it would just be some kind of self-healing type things you know maybe or maybe some automatic adjustments that could be done that maybe something in the future yeah like I just means as far as resources allocated to different types of yeah all right Chris sure I'll let you have the final word there cuz absolutely once we simplify modernize the platform modernizing the application some it's definitely something I've heard from many of your customers as to you know that role of infrastructure really is to serve up and support those applications and that seems to be where it's going that's right that's right the the business partners right partners the business CFO whoever on the other side of the fence they care about applications and services not so much about all the blood sweat and tears we put into the infrastructure so I think it's an opportunity for us to help us elevate beyond the infrastructure and focus on apps and services along with making sure we have some of those self-healing capabilities such that take care of us and not require us to pay heat to all those infrastructure speeds and feeds so it's a great opportunity to do and you know be truly strategic in the company right alright well Chris really appreciate you sharing the updates Vinny really appreciate you sharing your customer story it's our purpose here at the cube to always help bring out the information so make sure to check out the cube net if you actually go to the top there's a search we've got over five or six thousand interviews we've done including many customers including many of Nutanix go in search Nutanix you'll find a plethora of content out there if you ever have any question for us please reach out to us see us at any of the shows or in between so I'm Stu minimun and thanks again for watching the cube thank you

(upbeat music) >> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE covering .conf18. Brought to you by Splunk. >> Hello everybody, welcome to Orlando. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, and we're here at Splunk conf .conf 2018. The hashtag is #splunkconf18. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with my co-host Stu Miniman. Stu it's great to be in Orlando again. Last year we were in D.C. This is our seventh year covering Splunk.conf and we've seen the company really move from essentially analyzing log files on PRAM in a perpetual license model, to now a company that is permeating all of IT into the lines of business. Security, IT performance, application performance, moving into IOT. Really becoming a mature company. It's a company with $1.7 billion in revenue forecasted for this year. They were talking about a $17 billion market cap, they're growing at 36%, and they're a company Stu, that is in the process of successfully going from a perpetual license model to a renewable model. Splunk set the goal of being 75% renewable by 2020. Sounds like renewable energy, but repeatable renewable from a subscription standpoint, they're already there. So you're seeing that in the execution. This is your first .conf, or conf as they like to say. We were at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Center, you saw what, what's the number, 8,000 people? >> Yeah I think 8,000 at the show this year, it's strong growth, and Dave I've been hearing from the team for years the excitement of the show, the passion of the show, saw like, right over near where we were sitting there's the whole group of that was the Splunk trust. They've got the fezzes on, a lot of them have superhero capes on, and it's what you'd expect from a passionate, technical maybe even geeky audience. Things like, we're announcing the S3 API-compatible storage. Everybody's like, yay we're so excited for this. It's hardcore techies. >> What was the other big clap? Screen? >> Yeah, that's right dark mode. We're going to go to dark mode, I don't have to play with the CSS. Anybody that's played with a website, changing these things is not trivial. I click a little button and the joke was this was the bright one for the executives, but when I'm down in the gamer center I don't want this glaring screen here, so I can switch it over to dark mode. And people were pretty excited about that. >> So again the roots of Splunk, they took log data and analyzed it. Doug Merritt the CEO, talked today talked about, making things happen with data. I thought he did a really good job of laying out the past, putting the past behind us in terms of he said, "I've been to I can't tell you "how many Master Data management classes "trying to optimize the database, "trying to codify business processes "and harden those business processes." The problem is data is messy. Data is growing so fast, business processes are changing so fast, the competition is moving so fast, customers are changing. So you have to be able to organize your data in the moment. So, the whole idea that, even go back to the early big data days and Hadoop, the whole idea was to bring five megabytes of compute to a petabyte of data. And no schema on write, or what some call schema on read. Splunk was really a part of that. Put the data, get the data organized in a way that you can look at in in a moment, but then let the data flow. So that has definite implications in terms of how you think about data. It's not trying to get the data all perfect so you can use it, it's trying to get the data into your data ocean, as we like to say, and then have the tooling to be able to analyze it very, very quickly. They announced Splunk 7.2 today which is a big deal. Some things, we'll talk about a few of the features, obviously focused on performance, but one of the things they talked about was basically being able to split storage and compute. So previously you had to add essentially a brick of storage and compute simultaneously. We've heard about these complaints for years in the conversion infrastructure space, it's obviously a problem in the software space as well. Now customers are able to add storage or compute in a granular fashion, and they're cozying up to Amazon doing S3 compatible store. >> Dave, I love that message that he put out there you said, "life is messy. "You can't try to control the chaos, "you want to be able to ride those waves of data "take advantage of them and not overly "make things rigid with structure." Because once you put things in place you're going to get new data or something else that's going to come along and your structure is going to be blown away. So when you need to search things you want to be able to look at them in that point in time but be able to ride those waves, flow with the data, live the way your data lives. That's definitely something that resonates in this community. Dave, something I've watching this space, as an infrastructure guy and watching the Cloud movement, there were a lot of reasons why traditional big data failed. I kind of never looked at Splunk like most of those other big data companies. Yes they had data, yes they're part of the movement of taking advantage of data, but they weren't, oh well we have this one tool that we're going to create to do it all, like some of the new players. They're playing with all the latest things. You want tentraflow, you want to do the A.I, the ML. Splunk is ready to take advantage of all of these new waves of technologies, and they've done a couple of acquisitions like VictorOps in the space that they keep growing and the goal is, you mentioned the revenue, but Splunk today has I think it's 16,000 customers. They have a short term goal of getting to 20,000 but with what they started talking about in the keynote today, Splunk Next, they really want to be able to do an order of magnitude of more customers and when you get great customer examples like Carnival Cruises. The CEO I thought, talked about the sea of data. Lots of good puns in the keynote there but mobile cities floating around and lots of data that they want to be able to get the customer experience and make sure the customer gets what they need and make sure that Carnival knows what they have to make sure that they're running better and optimizing their business too, so great example. Looking forward to talking to them on theCUBE. >> Well and they have many dozens, I think it's in last quarter, it was like 60 plus deals over a million dollars. They have many $10 million plus deals. That's an outcome of happy customers, it's not like they're trying to engineer those deals. I'm sure some of the sales guys would love to do that. But that's a metric that I think was popularized by the likes of Aneel Bhusri at Workday, certainly Frank Slootman at ServiceNow. It's one that Wall Street watches and Splunk it's an indicator. Splunk is doing some very very large deals that underscores the commitment that many customers are making to Splunk. Having said that, there are many more that are still smaller users of Splunk. There's a lot of upside here. And they're going into a serious TAM expansion that's something we're going to talk to Doug Merritt about. Making acquisitions of a company, VictorOps was their most recent acquisition sort of security orchestration and management. They're doing, the ecosystem is growing, they're doing bigger deals or partnerships with the likes of Accenture, Deloitte is here, EY. Accenture actually has a huge space at this event, and those are indicators. I want to go back to something you said earlier about the failure of big data. Certainly big data failed to live up to the hype in many ways. You didn't see a lot of wholesale replacement of traditional databases and EDWs. You did see a reduction in cost, that was the big deal. But clearly enterprise data warehouses and ETL, they're still a fundamental part of people's data strategies despite what Doug Merritt saying, hey, the data is messy and you've just got to let it flow, essentially what he's saying. There is still a need for structured data and mixing, sort of, interacting of structured and unstructured data. Bringing transaction data and systems of intelligence together, analytic data. But the one thing that big data did do and the Hadoop movement, it did a couple things: one is, architecturally it pushed data out and back in the day you had to get a big Unix box and stuff everything in there. It was your god box of data. And you had Oracle licenses and Sun Microsystems boxes and it was very expensive. And you had a couple of people who knew how to get the data out. So the goal of democratizing data, what it did is, it is messy. Data went out to the distributed nodes and now the edge. But it brought attention to the importance of data and the whole bromide of data driven companies. And so now we're in a position to make a new promise and that promise is A.I, machine learning, machine intelligence, which seems to be substantive. We talk a lot on theCUBE is this old wine, new bottle? And we had an event in New York last month and the consensus from a lot of practitioners and others in the room was: no there's something substantive, the data substrate is now in place. Now it's all about taking advantage of it. Tooling is still complex but emerging or evolving. And I think the cloud, to your point, is a huge part of that. By integrating data pipelines in the cloud it dramatically simplifies the deployment model and the complexity of managing big data. >> Yeah, Dave, as you said, there used to be these giant boxes and some of these initiatives I needed 18 months, you know, millions of dollars and a large time you either need to be a country or a multi-national company to be able to put this thing together. I remember one of the earliest case studies that David Floyer did when we were looking at big data it was how do I take that 18 month deployment and drive it down to more like a six week deployment, and when you talk about A.I, ML, and deep learning, the promise is that a business user should be able to get answers in a much much shorter window. So actionable on that data, being able to do things with it not just looking backwards but hear the team. So I want to be able to be proactive, I want to be able to be responsive. I want to even predict what my client is going to need and be ready for it. >> So as Doug Merritt said that digital and physical worlds they're coming together. They don't stop evolving. They're organic. Your data model has to be flexible. It's a sea of data. It's an ocean of data. It's not a confined data lake, as John Furrier and others like to say. And so I was happy to hear Doug Merritt talking about a sea. We use the term oceans because that's really what it is. And oceans are unpredictable, they're sometimes really harsh, they can sometimes be messy. But they're constantly evolving and so I think that kind of metaphor works in this world of Splunk. We've got two days here of coverage. A lot of customers coming on today, in fact, Splunk is one of those companies that puts many customers on theCUBE, which we love. We love to dig in to the case studies. We've got some ecosystem partners. Some of the big SIs are coming on and of course, we're going to hear from some of the product people at Splunk that go to market people. Doug Merritt will be on tomorrow. And a number of folks. I'm Dave Vellante, @DVellante on Twitter. He's @Stu. Stu Miniman. Keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching day one from Splunk conf18 in Orlando. Be right back. (soft bouncy music)