>> live from Orlando, Florida It's the que covering Accelerate nineteen. Brought to you by Ford. >> Hey, welcome back to the Cube. We are live at forty nine. Accelerate twenty nineteen in noisy Orlando, Florida, and Lisa Martin welcoming to Guest to the program one you know and love Well, John Madison, the executive vice president of Products and Solutions at fourteen. That and gentle Mary, please toe also welcome Peter Jogger, the vice president of business development from Symantec. Welcome back. Welcome. >> Thank you. >> So, guys, Partnerships, symbiotic partnerships. We've been talking about partnerships all day. Now we want to talk about what's new? Fortinet and semantic. You guys just announced a couple months ago an expansive partnership. Peter, let's go ahead and start with you. You guys just like we're gonna partner to deliver the most robust and comprehensive cloud security service. Why did semantic decide to partner and collaborate with forty minutes and why now? >> Absolutely. So when we think about what our customers they're going through, they're going through a digital transformation to Billy to the cloud on DH. We wanted to make sure that we perform the best possible technology for our customers. We chose fortunate way were great partners. Actually, before this whole thing started, we looked the technology that they had to offer repaired it with what we had in our Web security service. There was a fantastic fit, and so far with the show today and accelerate, we made the right choice. >> That's always good, right to get some validation there talks to us about the from from Maybe from a customer's perspective, what were some of the drivers saying, Hey, guys, this partnership could be really beneficial for your doing part. Customers, partners and each company. Yeah, well, they think it's >> a very expensive relationship. Peter just talked about having our next year firewall inside their cloud, providing security there. There's also opportunity at the end point for sound. Full semantic is the largest endpoint hundred seventy five million or something. In points out, there were the largest network security vendor in terms of implementation. Some four million firewalls out there what customs they're saying they want their security solutions to work together there, one the end point to see the network. They want the networks to the end point one exchange information, so one of the other integration points is between the end point on our next generation firewalls providing policy exchange, providing the ability to exchange information. So if I'm a large customer and I've got a very all encompassing degree off implementation ofthe semantic endpoint separate think it's called on DH, they've got Fortinet taken. Simply connect those two together, provide a very comprehensive solution. So we get some great feedback from our customers around them. >> Talk to me a little bit more about that. Are you seeing this adoption on? You know, both semantic and forty eight have customers in every industry of many sizes, but in terms of some of the successes that you're seeing, I know this is still really early on. What are some of those that really excite you? That, like Peter, you said we've made the right choice. >> Yeah, I'll just follow on from a comment you made Whether you're a medium size customer, the largest financial customer, security is a very tough thing to solve on. What you don't do is add complexity to that problem. You also wanna make sure you don't cost as well. So the really cool thing we're doing here is through the collaboration through the integrations that John spoke about between the employment network and secure rst. One of the fabric we're actually solving those problems in very intuitive ways is seamless for the customer. It just clicks together. That's what it should be like. We don't have any complexity here, and that's you know, that's what we're doing this, right? >> Yeah, and I think, think for customers Every time they need toe, add a security solution, it makes more complex. It's more costs, more operational overhead. So if they've got existing vendors like Semantic at the end, point off a cloud security and they've got Fortinet in there for SD when our next fire war, if >> we could >> simply switch on the connectivity policy exchange threat, intelligent exchange between those two things is great for the customer because they instantly get a better solution is more secure. It's more cost effective, >> of course, customers. You mentioned you guys both mentioned a couple of words that every customer wants seamless wanted to click in kind of plug and play. Obviously, it's it's a cut ostensible undertaking to integrate your solutions talked to us since this was just announced a few months ago. Where are you in terms of integrating the technologies. I think we saw the next Gen firewall integrated into semantics. Web security service and semantics. Endpoint solutions integrated into the security fabric. Where are you guys on the faces of those integrations? >> Well, let people talk about the WSSC. >> Yes, eso I think one big yellow into this as I just mentioned Wass Web security service. We have data centers around the planet on what we're doing is we're taking the virtual Forget solutions were installing them. Now in all of our data pods Andi were in the We're starting the rollout phase this summer. Andi will be probably finished done with it as we get into the fall season around the planet and we'LL be switching that that that on and they really cool bit about This is it's going to be one single interface. The customer just simply switches on five walling i ps Next one firewall. It's completely seamless >> from a management perspective policy upside looking through one crystal ball, >> one cloud security says service. >> Yes, on the end points mourners to develop. So we have to develop this connector of our election and firewall into the end point. And we're looking probably toward the end of this port early Q three. To do that on we'LL start rolling that out across are different operating systems. >> Talk to me about part about the channel, so I know forty nine is very much dedicated to the channel we've had with a number of your partner's on. I know you've Got John both coming up next and Facebooking with him for several years. Saw a lot of statistics, a lot of revenue growth, front of growth, affording that driven by the channel. One of the main kind of pillars that was discussed in the keynotes this morning was education. Talked about technology, talked about equal system collaboration. Education. How are you guys working together to educate your joint partners? Teo. Understand that the impact potential that Fortinet and Cemented customers are about to have? >> Yeah, from a training perspective. Obviously we have our own individual training programs, and as I was saying earlier, I think one thing that's very important to customers is more of an architectural approach. I want to look at an architecture of a four or five years. I don't make sure all these pieces are integrated inside there, so one of things we do initially for something, something like this for our partners. This produced boats are fast track. A fast track is a small module. Off training was focused on hands on training off both components to make sure that all our partners understand how to integrate. How to make that work as soon as possible. Then, before I followed that up with some more detailed training on on both solutions. >> Excellent. And from a relative perspective, this is something that's going to be going global by the way it's >> gonna go fast. It's going to start next week. So and the nice thing is when we map out our channel party because semantic is a channel very channel friendly company as well. We've got some great overlap, but there's also a ton of white space there for a partner, too. So I think it's going to really help both, obviously, our fields, but also our channel partners engaged, group broader and grow deeper into opportunities, >> and we need that. Security is a pan industry challenge, as every organization now lives and successful lives in this hybrid multi cloud world, millions of connected devices every industry has to react otherwise every business in every industry. Otherwise they face going out of business. I noticed that, though, that there were a couple of tracks here. John. Some sessions focused on a couple of verticals healthcare financial services. Retail, for example. Are you expecting to see any leading edge industries joint customers that really are ripe for this integrated solution? >> Maybe. But I also think that smacked. It's got a huge footprint across all the verticals across all the segments, the same as us. And so I think initially, you'LL see some of the larger companies who have these huge footprints of M points and network security. Implement these connectors, implement the cloud security and, as you see that roll down into the segments as well. >> So we're at the event today in the last couple days. What is that? Some of the feedback been from partners, but from also and user customers. Since there's about about four thousand people here today, John, what are some of the things that you're hearing? >> Well, we've been talking to some of our customers before here, obviously on DH overwhelmingly positive feedback from the large customers I spoke to some partners to hear today as well. They really like the ability to bring together on M point leading edge endpoint solution on network solution with cloud attached to it as well. So it's not often, actually I've done a partner announcement and I've seen so much excitement, not only with some of our some of the customers, all the customers on all the partners, but also both organizations. We announced it to ourselves. Organizations were doing that with semantics later on. That's right this week and I see a lot of excitement. So I think that bodes well going forward. >> And I imagine, Peter, you're hearing similar feedback from semantics and Sol days. >> Yeah, I mean, it's just been tremendous. This show for me has cemented the fact this is gonna be a very special partnership. The feedback I've been hearing from potential customers, our own customers coming to us, who say, Hey, I've got these solutions. It's fantastic. You doing this now to our partners saying, You know, this is this is truly amazing what you're doing it is very rare. You find these two companies that could come together in a meaningful way that can actually really impact what we're all trying to do here is find the adversary. >> Yeah, I mean, you look at that. Both companies that are big companies Cyrus critic companies think semantics. Probably enterprise in the top two. Top Juan we're in the top five easy, huge companies on our footprints. From a part of perspective is a bit of overlap here and there, but not really. Which makes is exciting, I think, for our partners for both companies, I think, yes, we you know, I see these relationships where it's a local exchange or we'LL do a bit of this integration on this AP I hear this is a truly very integrate solution for both our channel partners on our customers. >> And let's talk about competition that came up a lot during the general session this morning where just a few times a few people mentioned it, you know, in past saying on giant slides with arrows pointing, No, I'm kidding, but really what? What was very clear, I think, from not only the general session this morning, but also somatic that we've heard on the Cube today is the industry leadership, the product leadership that forty nine is demonstrating, but also, you know, telephoto networks Cisco some of your other competitors where really proudly showing this is where we are in relation even so far as the number of Gardner Insight partner appearance I reviews that Fortinet has gotten vs your competitors. So let's start with you, Peter. Talk to us about the competitive advantage that Symantec sees this partnership being able to generate. >> So the the way the way we look at it, is we're going to come to market now. We're both way with love technology. I think we can agree that we're both very much technology forward, very research forward, bringing this pieces together. When you do that, you're goingto win. Andi. If you do that in a way that is highly integrated, you're going to be. The competition is going to have a clear advantage. We're going to do text a faster. We're going to respond to start faster. It's just going to show Ray very well on DH. I'm not going to appoint a particular competitors. Don't mention the name way. We're obviously very large player in industry, but way like this a lot again. We think that if you make a very big impact, so let's see where it goes >> and John any predictions on what those graphs might look like it accelerate twenty, twenty, >> twenty twenty. That's a long time away from now, but I You know what? We continue to grow as a company. We take marketshare. We're aligning with some of the big players, such a semantic in the marketplace. So those graphs definitely up until the right, is that the right direction? >> That's the right direction. And last question is, we talked a lot about data sharing on a number of our segments. Today is semantic and forty that sharing threat intelligence and if so, why? Is that a good thing? Why is that >> important? Where where she, both founders of the cyber threat, aligns the C t a way already share way did that for two years ago. At least I know we're expanding. That strong was staying with really time on the ground. Three intelligence sharing between our products between the fabrics that would happen just automatically. >> It's important that you got the global sharing through the T A, but also going for because of targeted attacks. You have the local sharing, so we'LL have global sharing with big amounts of threat intelligence and data, but at the local level between the end points on the network's puree will have threat sharing there as well. >> But this is important to do that fast Security changes by the second. If you don't react to something quickly, If you don't share the intelligence that's actionable on relevant, you may as well just give up. You're gonna be fast, responsive >> and lasting. Last question is you mentioned the word react and we talked about that a lot today, as well as how and I'll ask you both thiss Peter, we'LL start with you. How is this partnership going to enable your joint customers to eventually go from being reactive to proactive to predictive? >> They're for sure. Well, I thinks of these integrations we're working on is all about being proactive. So is an example. If we see something in our network we've seen in a corner case, we can automatically give it over Too fortunate they'LL be inoculated everywhere around the planet in every single device. Advice first. So, unfortunately, something in their network that we've never seen before we can inoculate all ofher own points. All of our customers, that's been truly proactive. That's how you get ahead. >> Yeah, it's all about showing that threat intelligence is fastest possible across much of the attack surface is possible, and that's where the relationship >> Well, guys, thanks so much for stopping by the Cuban sharing with us a little bit more about the partnership with semantic and Fortinet. We look forward to hearing what comes in this year ahead, and we'LL talk to you next year. You look, we want to thank you for watching the Cube. I'm Lisa Martin Live from Fortinet. Accelerate twenty nineteen. Thanks for watching.

>> Live from San Francisco. It's the Cube covering artists. A conference twenty nineteen Brought to You by Four Scout >> Welcome back, everybody, Geoffrey. Here with the cue, we're in North America and the newly refinished Mosconi Center Downtown San Francisco in the force Cow boo. Happy to be here first time and we have our next guest. She's Charlotte Wiley, chief of staff from Symantec. Great to meet you. >> Nice to meet you, teacher. Thanks for having >> absolutely so impressions of the show. This is a crazy show. Forty dollars, people. Aren't many shows like this >> it issue just a little overwhelming. It's my second year here, and it's no less overwhelming. Second year here. It's, uh it's just prolific. Everything that say the session, the keynotes all day, all the networking, the basis. Amazing. >> So I'm curious how your perception has changed. I >> was looking at your background, Your hearing a financial institution before your own kind of the purchaser side of the house. >> Now you're over on >> this side of the house. How's that kind of change your perception when you walk this crazy floor, I imagine before you're like, Yeah, how am I going to digest all this? >> Well, no one wants to be my friend anymore, which is interesting. So, um, you know, working on the vendor side of the defense is the dark side. It's It's a very different experience. When I came here a couple years go to bank. Everyone wants to talk to you. Or is this time? Is this a healthy, competitive nature going on between all the vendors, which is great. You want to see that? Yeah. It sze got the same enthusiasm. Same vase on the floor, which is wonderful. >> So semantics. Been a leader in the space for a very, very long time. One of the original, you know, kind of original security companies back in the day when we're just trying to protect that. You know, I guess our Web browser right from from some malicious activity. Wow. The world has changed. And one of the big new components now is his internet of things. In this tie of it with ot operations technology. You know something you've spent some time on a wonderful get your take on how that's increasing the threat surface, you know, increasing the complexity. And yet there's still a lot of value there if you can bring those systems together. >> Yeah, absolutely. So I think that Kate thing is this. You know, this simplicity here is, uh What? What you don't know, You can see. And what you can't see you can't monitor on DH. That's the key thing to remember when you think about t n OT so with Coyote specifically, if you, uh you've definitely got a nice routine, you network somewhere everyone has. But if you can't see that thing, it is incredibly vulnerable Throat vector for any organization. So really, it's it's a point of egress for any doubt of ex filtration. And if you've got someone compromised in the network already on your way, see it as being a very opportune ingress point to getting a lateral move. Right. So they are incredibly, inherently vulnerable. Right? These things are they're usually hard coded, authenticated. They are. They have massive under. Police often remain unpatched. When you cannot see, you don't know, Right? So some of the dirty side of the fence, right? The same problem exists. They typically were not built to connect to the Internet. Right. So this is something very new that we're trying to tackle right. And one of the key things I think about is that it's probably a little bit few tile to make these OT and I and I. A device is inherently secure. You think about in twenty twenty. We're going to see like twenty five billion devices proliferating our globe, which is incredible. So how do we how do we make it more school? Let's back off from becoming inherently secure. Let's up on the visibility. If you visualize you, Khun Segment, and you can enforce. And then you can take control of what has access to your network, right? A >> lot of interesting conversations about this today, obviously or in the force cow boo. But I think one of the people earlier said they had fifty percent more devices on the network than they anticipated. And it turns out his remote offices and people are plugging things in. Another little factoid is that maybe that hit no s on that device is actually windows in tea. Is it a tea? A little box. And nobody even knew because you knew that's an embedded in team. But then on the other side, we had a lease on, and she was talking about great example on security cameras and just that a lot of these newer devices that you can connect have a plethora of services packaged in on the assumption that you might use them. So rather than have not too many, they put them all in. But you don't necessarily need to turn all those things on. So again, you're just opening up this huge kind of exposure. >> Huge explosion. That's it. I think it's a really good conversation to have with your stakeholders about talking about the target breach. So when people start to understand that that really originated from a hate tax system, right compromise haystack system. So when you're talking about T initialization, that's a really good years case to say. Look, this is a huge bridge that was compromised from because we didn't They didn't have visibility over the anxiety. >> It's funny if you each Max keep coming up, over and over and over there. Obviously the biggest threat that way have I'm jacket to see if I could see like a movie with me. Nasty HBC think come until that munching up the company. But it's funny. Different topic. Shifting gears completely, really, about kind of diversity, diversity of opinion, diversity of perspective, diversity of thought and how that's a really important and effective tool use in trying to accomplish missions. In this really crazy, complex task, you can't abs single point of view, single point of reference, kind of a single pain that you think about. I know that's something that you've been in a lot of time on, >> so my role it's semantic because Chief of staff, I own the diversity agenda for the global security office. And it's bean aerial laser focus on me for the past twelve months, which is our industry has a systemic problem around attracting and retaining talent from diverse backgrounds. Right? We're gonna tackle it head on on We don't really successfully in semantics. Oh, wait. Give this fabulous mandate through to our leadership who got on board with laser focus around, making sure that we get a diverse slate of candidates when we bring in new people and that that translated incredibly well. So we saw a rise of interview to conversion. Foreign ft for females in six months off forty percent >> fourteen or forty four zero for zero. >> So just by making it part of the interviewing experience. Having a diverse slate of candidates, making sure that we're really giving a foreign opportunities coming right really has changed playing Plainfield. >> And then the other thing, of course, is the retention, which is a big problem for attention that we're, you know, women dropping out and not coming back. >> That's and this every organization has to step up to make sure that they're waiting, but their making a workforce that is flexible, that accommodates so some of that. Some of the mental load that women have, whether it's through a child, care whether it's to do with older parents. But also when we talk about diversity, it's nothing. You know just about the gender piece, right? We're going to accommodate for other people as well underrepresented minorities. Early Korea, Different people have different socio economic backgrounds, maybe haven't come from a typical university training course, right, Something that we've focused on heavily. We've been working with a large enough profits to bring in early career guys who have not had a university background who may have had a really rough time coming out of school, getting them in, training them up through internships, bringing them up to speed over six months and converting them into FDA, which I feel is really a way tio to build a diverse workforce and get people an opportunity that didn't have it >> now was someone spearheading that before you came on border was there Was there an effort that really kind of put a dedicated resource on it when you when you took it over? >> So I took over about a year ago and I double down on the effort. We were working with Europe before that. Had a fantastic colleague was doing a lot of work with Europe on. We're just seeing fabulous results with converted nearly thirty three percent of our internships into FT. >> Thirty three and you're not in those thirty three or not coming from, you know, kind of a classic. They're not coming pig population. >> Absolutely these air IGA passionate, enthusiastic young people who have a tenacity to just pick things up because they're so grateful to be there right there, so happy to be given the opportunity. And it's some It's an untapped resource that I think a lot of people who are looking to have solved aside the security talent shortages should be looking into great that we get programs in place for a Girl Scout middle school. But let's think about alternative ways of getting new talent in. And I think that they're not for profit right way after >> such a big problem. And like you say, it's a big problem, you know, from from little girls. And, you know, all the way up to mid mid career women that air dropping out and not coming back before you even get into the boardroom. We work with a ton of organization like Athena Alliance with towards that the boardroom level all the way down to Grace Hopper. You know, this working more kind of college graduate level girls intact? I mean, there's a lot of luckily, a lot of people are trying to focus on the problem, but unfortunately, the numbers or not turning in the correct direction, they're actually turning in the wrong direction. Yeah, >> so really, that's it for me. It's about laser focus. You really got it. If you make your party your agenda making party returned right? Don't give it. The nursery had not. Don't say that you will do the things actually commit to it and get it done right. I'm not a huge fan of talk. It's Qatargas work on. So, yeah, I think there's a lot of opportunity. The people they don't step up to the great doing enough >> to to your earlier first line, right? If you're not measuring it, you know, and tracking against it, how do you know if you're being silly and what it's under served? You have to give it a little juice, right? You can't just have to expect the status quo to suddenly change, right? >> Absolutely metrics. Incredibly employed. And start with you metrics. Dashboard record where your tracking, in terms of your representation of females, underrepresented minorities. Your bets. You're early Korea. Really? What you want to see is a huge influx or the interviewing stage into the into the FT conversion. You want to see an influx in your leadership. You want more women in your leadership team because that's the way to drive a better female pipeline, right? Same goes on because I'm are minority. Same guys. Early career. >> Yeah, so important that they look up and see somebody that looks like one hundred percent C. C an opportunity to be that person, something alright. Charlotte. Well, thanks for, uh, for taking a few minutes of your day. And great Teo learned about all your What you working on? That's >> great. Thanks. Having >> alright? She Charlotte? I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube? Where are, say twenty nineteen in the force Cow booth. Thanks for watching. >> We'LL see you next time.

(clicking) >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at PagerDuty Summit in San Francisco at Pier 27, I got to look at it. I've never been here before. It's a cool facility right on the water, between Pier 39 and the Bay Bridge. We're really excited to have back, I can't believe it's been like three years. To have Sheila Jordan, she's a CIO of Symantec and last we saw you was, I looked it up it was Service Now Knowledge 2014. >> Yes that's correct. >> Sheila, great to see you. >> Sheila: Nice to see you. Thanks for being here. >> Absolutely. So I think when we first talked you were just starting in your role in Symantec and now you're three years into it, you just got off a panel about leading digital transformation, so just give us kind of a general view of what you've been up to and how has that journey been progressing? >> Right, well it's been quite a journey and I would say that it's been really a transformational journey. So the vision for Symantec really is to become the largest cyber security company in the world. And that vision really started two, two and half years ago and I'd say that today it's a reality. When I was hired, I was actually hired to in source IT, so we completed that and then when we went through the Veritas separation, so we separated the company with Veritas which was a pretty significant separation. And then subsequently we've acquired four or five companies, we've recently acquired the Blue Coat company, which with that acquisition, we get our CEO Greg Clark. And then we've also acquired some other companies on the consumer side so the LifeLock business is really tied to our consumer digital safety. So we've been very busy and now we've just announced a small divestiture on our website security business. So lots of acquisitions, lots of change, lots of transformation, that really would been bringing into the organization. >> Jeff: Right and you talked on the panel your job is you got to keep the lights on and keep things moving. Then you've got this acquisition and in your case big, the split the divestiture. But then you still want to innovate and you've talked about looking at new applications, and I thought a really interesting comment you made was about shadow IT. >> Right >> And shadow IT is not all bad. There's a reason that somebody decided to take that action. And really they're trying to understand why? And what was the application requirement? And not just throw it out as unauthorized use. Pretty interesting lesson. >> Sheila: Well a couple things on that. Working in an engineering organization you can't ignore when there's apps being used and come up, because there's a need. Obviously there's a need that the IT organization isn't providing and so what it that need? And what is that capability that the organization is looking for? Now the cool thing is we have technology called CASB which is the Cloud Access Security Broker. That allows us to look at the entire environment of what both cloud applications of who's using what. So for example, we are sanctioned and our standard is box, but I can look across the organization and see what cloud applications we're using and if Drop Box appears, that's a question to say no that doesn't make sense, our standard's box. But the reality is is that all other applications that might be coming out of the engineering organization's using, we should be asking ourselves why? What capability are we not delivering? And how do we bring that into the IT arsenal? >> Jeff: Right, right. And essentially you bring up the box example because another thing you talked about on the stage was your cloud adoption. So kind of you threw out a number, 62%. So I'm not exactly sure what 62% is. But where was it when you got there? What is 62%? What are you measuring? And there's conversations about direct ROI but it's a much more complicated formula than just a simple ROI. >> Yes it really is, and I would say that first of all, from an IT perspective, I think any CIO has the obligation to help the organization run, change, and grow. And forward thinking CEOs really understand that technology can be used to not only run the company, that's kind of old school legacy total cost of ownership costs. Really super important, but it's not only run, but how do you use the technology to change and grow? So when you have opportunities like Saas, that allow the CIOs to have, reduce our total cost of ownership, be more agile, have the Saas providers update their products and solutions and all of that, that's kind of on the Saas providers. It makes our job a little easier or different I'd say. What I mean by that is the role of the CIO hasn't changed. Our job is to protect the company's assets. All of our company's assets and our data whether that's customer data, employee data, partner data. And yet five or seven years ago, it was these monolithic applications it was a private data center. on-prem physical data center. It was massive or monolithic geopcs. All of that has changed. So the role hasn't changed but now we've got to think about Saas applications. Cloud, infrastructure as a service. Public cloud on the infrastructure side. We think about all the applications that are coming in on our mobile devices. We think about IOT, we think about structured and unstructured data. Our role is the same, but how we have to manage that complexity to help our companies and enable our companies run, change, and grow; it's just very different. >> Jeff: And then you get involved in kind of investigating how the second order impacts? Kind of the law of unintended positive consequences by going to a Saas application, for instance. Or going to some of these platforms that doesn't show up in the simple ROI analysis. >> No, I agree with that. But I also think it's total cost of ownership but it's also as important today, as a agility. Everyone wants to get to market faster. Everyone wants to feel to be more productive. So it's really the combination of both total cost of ownership and agility. >> Yeah you said an interesting thing too. "Speed is a habit." Which is a really interesting quote. Because everybody wants speed. >> Absolutely >> And we just had another guest who talked about speed actually does correlate to better software. Because it forces you to do that. But everybody wants speed. You got to have it. So the other, you were all over, I got notes. We could go on all day. I won't go on all day, but somebody talked about what are the limits? What are the limits of applications? As you made a really interesting comment that at the end of the day, it's just about the data flow, and having a horizontal view from your seat. You may find that there's other ways to skin that cat based on what other people are doing. >> Sheila: Right, so I would say one of the reasons I love being in IT, is we see horizontally. There's many functions in the company that see in those silos, but we get to see horizontally which means we see the redundancies in an organization and some of the gaps. And so and as the world changes, that it's less about these monolithic, huge applications, but more about cloud and Saas. It really becomes important about the data flow. Where is the data? Not only is it in that say sales force application, but how does that sales force application move to a box? And how does that content move from box to say some of the collaboration tools in technology and how does that move and flow? Our role has to be about, one: Understanding the data flow and really where that exists. And how do we enable the entire business? Every function to be even more productive. But also how we protect and secure that. So, I think it's so exciting that not only are we doing, our view in IT is to deliver that unified, end to end experience. And it all comes down to the reference architecture approach. But the other part why I'm so excited about Symantec is because we're moving into the notion and the vision of having an integrated cyber defense platform. And I'll explain that for one second. Because historically, the security business has been really fragmented. Point solutions to protect every layer of your architecture. So whether you had a point solution in infrastructure, or end points, or data, or at the web gateway layer. Whatever that was, and what happened is, over time, our recent report would suggest that a large enterprise has anywhere between 65 and 85 security products in there enterprise. Large, large enterprise. >> 65 to 85. >> Security products >> Point solutions. >> In their enterprise. (Jeff chuckles) Yeah and so >> Tough to manage. >> It becomes, yeah it really does. One of the visions that Greg Clark and Mike Fey have for our company, is why can't we be, and deliver this integrated, cyber defense platform? Because it's really connected. We then have products that will live at each layer of the architecture but connected. And so the really super cool thing about that, is that the white spaces between those fragmented products, really are breeding grounds for the bad guys to come in and stay awhile and sit and watch and observe. If you have all that legacy technology and legacy applications, it just becomes a breeding ground. And when you have an integrated cyber trends platform that actually allows it to be much more integrated and really reduce some of the risks and all for our CEOs and customers, a better opportunity to effectively manage their environment. >> Right and you guys are a security company, but also you're a CIO of trying to protect stuff. So you're in a really good spot. Cause the other thing that's happening is this radical increase in the tax services. Especially as we go beyond cloud and APIs to edge economy and IOT devices. As you kind of look at the future of both for protecting your own stuff but also helping to deliver the products for your customers, if the security space is really really rapidly evolving. >> Rapidly evolving and becoming even more important. Because again, the flow of data from your sales force application to your mobile device to IOT back to a content solution. Back to some of the collaboration. The flow of data, is now app to app, or Saas to Saas. Saas to device, device to infrastructure as a service, so it really is the flow of data is so dynamic, and so security becomes just super critical to make sure we're securing that data in motion. >> Right, Right. Yeah it's crazy. And even if you have the most secure systems, you might have lapses in protocol which we hear like some of the CAWS breaches, where somebody didn't configure something right. Alright so, I could keep you here all day (Sheila chuckles) But I won't. But I want to give you that last word. What's next? And there was a little bit of conversation on the panel, so I want to open that up again. As you kind of look forward or, the cloud thing's kind of done, the API thing is kind of done as you look forward, what's kind of the next ... Never say five years in this business. Next couple years, you're excited about the move in the industry forward. >> Sheila: Well I actually think, and I know it might be an overused term, but I really think that we're just scratching the surface on AI artificial intelligence and machine learning. We're using a lot of that in our products today and how we're building our security products. But when I think about corporate IT, and I think about how we deliver statistics and information about our business. So transactional reporting on bookings and revenue and forecast and expenses, there needs to be a better, more predictive way of analyzing that data and understanding it in a much more sophisticated AI. Machine learning that we get our customer insights. And we really start to use those insights into building out that kind of knowledge as we move forward. I look forward to really beginning to really really have some strategies on AI and machine learning in corporate IT. >> Alright, well Sheila Jordan it was great to see you. Hopefully it won't be >> Nice to see you! >> Three years >> Three years till we see you again! CIO of Symantec. I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from PagerDuty Summit San Francisco. Thanks for watching. >> Sheila: Thank you so much. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Male: TheCUBE presents, UIPATH, Forward 5 brought to you by, UIPATH. >> Okay the party has started here at forward 5 UIPATH big customer event if you're watching the cube. We're wrapping up day one with the co-CE0 segment. Daniel Dines is here. He's the founder and Co-CEO of UIPATH and Rob Enslin, is co-CEO. Gents, great to see you. Thanks for spending some time with us. I know you're super busy. >> Thanks Dave. >> So I've been looking forward to this. Daniel you know I've followed the company for a long time. The really interesting path you took, to get to where you are today. How did you guys meet? And why did you decide to hire Rob? >> Male: (laughs) >> Rob: Well let me start. I uh, I was looking for a partner. Actually, in our work to your stand here, we are talking about how, how you feel in this job. You feel so alone. Because you are the center of all pressure points. And having a partner, having someone that has your back, it's kind of awesome. So I was looking for a partner. And our current friend, Carl Escenbach, he introduced us to each other, and we instantly clicked. And this is the type of job where it's uh either work well or it doesn't. It cannot be anything in the middle. >> Right, okay with Carl, we know Carl well. Awesome operator. Knows the business super well. So Rob, what attracted you to UIPATH? You had a great situation at google. You guys were growing like crazy. Why did you decide to come here? What did you see that attracted you? >> Yeah you know when I, when I went to google, I went to google because I really believed that data and AI was necessary for companies. And business is to be competitive in the future. And we did some great stuff at google cloud in the 3 years. But I knew UIPATH from a couple of years ago when they were mainly a RPA space. And I just felt that there was a place in time when automation was going expand. And as I sat down with Carl a couple of times, spoke to carl. And then I sat down with Daniel, I knew that there was something special with UIPATH, that could be a generational opportunity. Not any for myself but for the company in the future. And then I, you know I got to know Daniel. And at this stage of my career I was like, I'm pretty fussy about what I want to do and what I want and where I want to go. First of all, I want to go to a company that had great product, had a great culture, and I wanted to work with somebody that we could shake the future together and you know, Daniel and I just hit it off from the very first time we met. He got to meet my family, my dogs and we did the whole, we did the whole courting thing before we actually decided this was going to be a good thing for both of us. >> Dave: That's good. >> Rob: Yeah. >> Dave: You got to meet the family. That's very good. >> We just had, John Furrier and I just had, Mohit Aron and Sanjay Poonen into out studio. Cause Mohit, you know, formal google. Long time. And they decided to kind of split duties. Mohit's going into product, he didn't keep his CEO title. He walked. How are you guys splitting you time? What are each of you going to, responsible for? >> Daniel: Well its, its kind of similar. On a day by day operation I, I rely heavily on Rob. We do it together. Strategic decisions about the company's destiny. I'm doing mostly the product these days. Which is a big relief for me. And I think we also split a bit of customers visit. Which is great. I still enjoy meeting customers. I need, customers are food for my cause. >> Dave: (laughs) yeah and your awesome product visionary. You've been there since day one. Now Rob, you said in the key note today that you've seen around about a hundred customers. You've transverse the world. What did you learn from them that informed you? That gave you confidence that the the move to the internet platform, even though you had already started that. >> Male: Yeah. >> But you're really doubling down on that >> Rob: You know when I... >> from a stand point. >> Rob: You know Dave, when you think about it, like I was, I was so impressed that Daniel had the vision to create a platform 3 years ago. >> Dave: Yeah. >> All right. And as we went around the world. As I went around the world, and it was one of the very first things I've seen. I've got to understand how customers see UIPATH, from their advantage point. What are they looking for from us? Why is this company, why doe customers like this company so much? And as I went around the world. I went to Asia a couple, I went to Asia, Australia, Singapore, Japan. I was in Europe twice. We did the trip together. We went to visit customers. And it was very much the same thing. Helps us expand automation faster. And we are so surprise, at the break of your platform. We never knew that. And so it kind of just had, for me, it was conviction. It's like, this walls is the right decision you've made. There's so much opportunity there. And that's, you know that's kind of what I've learned through the last four five months. >> Dave: Now as you know Daniel, I've written a lot about your company. One of the things I've said is that, that start ups, if I can call you that back pre-IPO, typically don't have as much international exposure as UIPATH had. I mean you sort of, you sort of started as an international company and became more US centric. You said, in the, in the key note today, you're talking to Ray Wong about people may don't understand that challenges of FX. Point being, when you convert international dollars into US dollars there are less of them cause the dollars stronger. But still, I've always felt like that international footprint is an advantage. Rob you came from SAP, you know, again European based company. I don't, (stutters), do you regret that? Now? I mean I know it's technical, I'm sure you don't, but talk about that sort of international exposure? Why that's a long term benefit. >> Well, you, first of all, you expand faster. I think we expanded faster than our competition because our global footprint was larger. And we had the courage. Go in Japan, for instance. Everybody told me, it's impossible to make for such a small starter. It's impossible to make a business in Japan. But we didn't believe it. We're just crazy and we went there, and be built a very sizable business in Japan. Fifty-five percent of our revenue, even today, it's outside U.S. Now of course that has a down side. When uh, When the local currencies, you know, are losing the value compared to the dollars, we're impacted. As we go to... to investors, until now, so we are seeing like a (indistinct) in terms of ARI. It's huge. Only because (indistinct) and losing the business in Russia. But it still, it's the strength of our company. Things will come back. And then, you know, the growth engine will re-accelerate again. >> Dave: Yeah but when the dollars weakens that'll be in your favor. Rob I want to pick up on something you said today in your keynote. You went back and started, you know the cycles of ERP and you know, internet, et cetera. I kind of have a love hate with ERP. I have to be honest. >> Male: (laughing) >> But it, but but (chuckles) but if I go back to that. Late eighties nineties, you wouldn't have be able to pick SAP as the winner. And then SAP emerged. You know, very clearly. But the more interesting thing, is that the customers who are implementing ERP well. The practitioners did better than their peers, and dominated their industries. And their stocks went up. Their evaluations went up. Different worlds obviously but, do you see the same thing happening with RPA and automation? What gives you confidence that that's the case? >> I absolutely do see the same thing happening with automation and RPA being a part of, in being a part of that. The reason, the reason I believe that is speed is so critical. (stutters) And if you think about how hard it is for a CIO or a c level executive to consume the technology coming at them, plus all the changes in the world being thrown at them. It's compiling and compiling and compiling. We have an incredible solution, that can help companies. And there comes certain times, the love outcomes to the business. Like no one else gets. And when I see that, I view that as just like the beginning of what's going to happen in the future so, in many ways, and I've said this to many of my friends, it feels like 1992, 1993 to me. And it's interesting because no one really understood then why SAP would be great in 1992 and 93. And they got a couple of things right. They got the eco system right. Their new partners were important. And the knew they needed to drive business outcome for companies, in which they did. And so I feel like we are in a very similar place. Very different technology obviously. And the speed of change now is so dramatic, compared to what it was. And there's very few technology that can provide that level of speed and accomodation to their customers. >> All right, let's talk about priorities. You guys got a lot of work to do and you've, you've laid it out to the financial community. You've got to have profitable growth, because of FX, it part, you've lowered your forecast. But I think there's some conservative in their as well. Um, but you got to do that balance. You've given some guidance on gross margins. Cloud maybe brings that down a little bit. RnD I saw wide range. Thirteen to seventeen percent. I hope you keep spending on RnD. Big fan of that. You know stock buybacks and, RnD if in your position are going to be better. And the product priorities, continue to build that out. But question, let's start with the product. So you've got an on-prem stack and you've got a cloud stack that's emerging, how do you balance those out? How do you do the integration? You've done a great job with the integration. Does it, are you concerned about your ability to continue to work at that speed with two code bases? I wonder if you could address that? >> Daniel: We've become a cloud first company. We deliver all of our products first in the cloud. We've deliver on the two week (indistinct) in the cloud. So that helps us integrate quite fast. I think we made a very good business decision to build our cloud team in Seattle. In Bellevue to be specific. And we have access to great talent that knows how to build serious cloud service. Which is hard to find dollar. And uh, so, and also we, we have, we benef- one of our only benefits was, we have the really good architecture. We have an architecture that work easily on-prem and on the cloud. And even today, our work flow foundation, our local designers, were easy to modernize. So right now we are launching studio weapon. But behind the scene, it's the same workflow engine. Our customers don't have to rewrite anything. It just works. And it does the same to take our own brand product and brand it in the multicloud. So, it's, there is no friction at all. Actually cloud is just helping us accelerate. But we benefit then again of a really solid architectural foundation. >> Daniel: Architecture matters. We've seen that in this industry. We got the B52s rocking out in the background, I love it, but I've got so many questions for you guys. I want to talk about the go to market. Because Rob, it's obviously a strength of yours. You've come in. You've communicated to the street, that you're reshaping the sales floors. Are they lowering the ratios of sales? People, the customers at the high end, mid range as well, using digital. I mean the numbers are one to ten now. At the top. One to maybe fifty at the mid range. Where are you in terms of that journey? You've got to find people, you got to train them, how do you get the productivity out of those guys? Take us through your thinking there? >> Rob: Yeah firstly, I think we have enough resources. Having resources is not an issue. Um, we have an incredible vehicle to acquire customers inside the company. Our digital sales motion, it's probably the best I've seen. And so we have the ability to acquire customers really fast. And we get the first workload in really fast. The challenge is we need to, we need to be able to drive a (indistinct) model and we graduate customs when we acquire them into the direct sales floors. And then direct sales floors, we're not going to go one to thirty, we're talking one to ten for the direct sales floor. And even the high up in the pyramid, we want to have an even denser model than that. And the whole purpose is to drive the time to consumption much quicker, much faster. So we know exactly if we acquire a customer, will they spend? Do they have a (indistinct) spend? On what level do they have a (indistinct) spend? And therefore when we capture them, we can immediately surround them, and put the right resources so we can grow faster. We think this will have a significant impact on the organization. We'll start to implement certain pieces in the next quarter. Um, things like packaging solutions. Putting them in, enabling the sales organization. And buy the beginning of next year, we'll be ready to actually go full board, globally. We already put some pieces in place when I joined. Chris Weber, my chief business officer, did a great job doing some of those pieces. So we're on the journey already. >> Dave: Yeah and even before you guys were public and you weren't publishing your NRR numbers. Our ETR survey partner, we, we always thought you had very low churn. And I think you broke out just yesterday. The, the NRR for overseas vs U.S, U.S I think was 140 plus percent. >> Male: Yeah >> Very very strong. A little, a little less overseas but the churn is still very low. >> Male: Yep. >> Okay so that's super positive. Customer affinity, I was wanted to code these events. I listen to the key notes very carefully, and then interview customers on the cube, and I try to identify, is there alignment there? And I see very strong alignment, I have to say, and strong customer affinity. So that's in your favor. I have, Daniel, I got another question for you on product. What is Symantec automation? What the heck is that? Can you explain that? I don't understand >> Dave, have you seen the demo in my (indistinct)? >> Dave: You know, I had to leave and do interviews, so I, uh, I missed it. >> I think, I think that demo answer complete your question. So in the s-, you know there saying that great, you can not distinguish great technology by magic. I think technology should be simple. And we, we show today, one of the simplest demo that you can imagine. But it's so, such a complex technology behind the scene, that you also can not imagine. So what was demo? We show how one business user, without any technical skills, can build any type of document. Can be a passport, can be an invoice, can be a legal (indistinct), and just go, "I want to copy data from here, and I want to paste data there". Can be a spreadsheet, can be another obligation, and like a human user, without understanding, without having prior knowledge about data, document layout, about screens, screens layouts, nothing, we analyze real time. Document. We discover, we discover the meaning of the information. We analyze the screen. We understand the screen but we understand the meaning of the screen. And we understand how the information in one side relate to the other side. And we just connects the dots and we copy the information and we paste it. A job that you'll do as a human user, maybe three minutes, is done in ten seconds. This is powerful. >> Yeah that is powerful. Thank you for that. I mean, and you take the date, whether it's transaction data or unstructured data and and and bring meaning out of it. That's powerful. Last question and I'll let you guys go. Rob, you got traders, and you've got long term investors. All right traders going to be defensive, today. I get that. Make the case for UIPATH, for long term investors. >> Rob: I think we're going to be a multi-gern- multi-billion company and we're going to be a generational company of our time. And we will define enterprise automation. And it's going to be a long term game and we feel like really strong that we'll be the lead in that game. >> Dave: Guys, thanks so much for coming to the cube. Great show. Always fun at UiPath Forward. Really appreciate your time. Thank you. >> Thanks dave. >> Appreciate it as well. >> Okay wrap it up, day one, we're here tomorrow, first thing, Dave Vellante and Dave Nicholson. Thanks for watching, forward 5, Uipath big customer event, we'll see you tomorrow. (music)

>> We're back at the ARIA Las Vegas. We're covering CrowdStrike's Fal.Con 22. First one since 2019. Dave Vellante and Dave Nicholson on theCUBE. Adam Meyers is here, he is the Senior Vice President of Intelligence at CrowdStrike. Adam, thanks for coming to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> Interesting times, isn't it? You're very welcome. Senior Vice President of Intelligence, tell us what your role is. >> So I run all of our intelligence offerings. All of our analysts, we have a couple hundred analysts that work at CrowdStrike tracking threat actors. There's 185 threat actors that we track today. We're constantly adding more of them and it requires us to really have that visibility and understand how they operate so that we can inform our other products: our XDR, our Cloud Workload Protections and really integrate all of this around the threat actor. >> So it's that threat hunting capability that CrowdStrike has. That's what you're sort of... >> Well, so think of it this way. When we launched the company 11 years ago yesterday, what we wanted to do was to tell customers, to tell people that, well, you don't have a malware problem, you have an adversary problem. There are humans that are out there conducting these attacks, and if you know who they are what they're up to, how they operate then you're better positioned to defend against them. And so that's really at the core, what CrowdStrike started with and all of our products are powered by intelligence. All of our services are our OverWatch and our Falcon complete, all powered by intelligence because we want to know who the threat actors are and what they're doing so we can stop them. >> So for instance like you can stop known malware. A lot of companies can stop known malware, but you also can stop unknown malware. And I infer that the intelligence is part of that equation, is that right? >> Absolutely. That that's the outcome. That's the output of the intelligence but I could also tell you who these threat actors are, where they're operating out of, show you pictures of some of them, that's the threat intel. We are tracking down to the individual persona in many cases, these various threats whether they be Chinese nation state, Russian threat actors, Iran, North Korea, we track as I said, quite a few of these threats. And over time, we develop a really robust deep knowledge about who they are and how they operate. >> Okay. And we're going to get into some of that, the big four and cyber. But before we do, I want to ask you about the eCrime index stats, the ECX you guys call it a little side joke for all your nerds out there. Maybe you could explain that Adam >> Assembly humor. >> Yeah right, right. So, but, what is that index? You guys, how often do you publish it? What are you learning from that? >> Yeah, so it was modeled off of the Dow Jones industrial average. So if you look at the Dow Jones it's a composite index that was started in the late 1800s. And they took a couple of different companies that were the industrial component of the economy back then, right. Textiles and railroads and coal and steel and things like that. And they use that to approximate the overall health of the economy. So if you take these different stocks together, swizzle 'em together, and figure out some sort of number you could say, look, it's up. The economy's doing good. It's down, not doing so good. So after World War II, everybody was exuberant and positive about the end of the war. The DGI goes up, the oil crisis in the seventies goes down, COVID hits goes up, sorry, goes down. And then everybody realizes that they can use Amazon still and they can still get the things they need goes back up with the eCrime index. We took that approach to say what is the health of the underground economy? When you read about any of these ransomware attacks or data extortion attacks there are criminal groups that are working together in order to get things spammed out or to buy credentials and things like that. And so what the eCrime index does is it takes 24 different observables, right? The price of a ransom, the number of ransom attacks, the fluctuation in cryptocurrency, how much stolen material is being sold for on the underground. And we're constantly computing this number to understand is the eCrime ecosystem healthy? Is it thriving or is it under pressure? And that lets us understand what's going on in the world and kind of contextualize it. Give an example, Microsoft on patch Tuesday releases 56 vulnerabilities. 11 of them are critical. Well guess what? After hack Tuesday. So after patch Tuesday is hack Wednesday. And so all of those 11 vulnerabilities are exploitable. And now you have threat actors that have a whole new array of weapons that they can deploy and bring to bear against their victims after that patch Tuesday. So that's hack Wednesday. Conversely we'll get something like the colonial pipeline. Colonial pipeline attack May of 21, I think it was, comes out and all of the various underground forums where these ransomware operators are doing their business. They freak out because they don't want law enforcement. President Biden is talking about them and he's putting pressure on them. They don't want this ransomware component of what they're doing to bring law enforcement, bring heat on them. So they deplatform them. They kick 'em off. And when they do that, the ransomware stops being as much of a factor at that point in time. And the eCrime index goes down. So we can look at holidays, and right around Thanksgiving, which is coming up pretty soon, it's going to go up because there's so much online commerce with cyber Monday and such, right? You're going to see this increase in online activity; eCrime actors want to take advantage of that. When Christmas comes, they take vacation too; they're going to spend time with their families, so it goes back down and it stays down till around the end of the Russian Orthodox Christmas, which you can probably extrapolate why that is. And then it goes back up. So as it's fluctuating, it gives us the ability to really just start tracking what that economy looks like. >> Realtime indicator of that crypto. >> I mean, you talked about, talked about hack Wednesday, and before that you mentioned, you know, the big four, and I think you said 185 threat actors that you're tracking, is 180, is number 185 on that list? Somebody living in their basement in their mom's basement or are the resources necessary to get on that list? Such that it's like, no, no, no, no. this is very, very organized, large groups of people. Hollywood would have you believe that it's guy with a laptop, hack Wednesday, (Dave Nicholson mimics keyboard clacking noises) and everything done. >> Right. >> Are there individuals who are doing things like that or are these typically very well organized? >> That's a great question. And I think it's an important one to ask and it's both it tends to be more, the bigger groups. There are some one-off ones where it's one or two people. Sometimes they get big. Sometimes they get small. One of the big challenges. Have you heard of ransomware as a service? >> Of course. Oh my God. Any knucklehead can be a ransomwarist. >> Exactly. So we don't track those knuckleheads as much unless they get onto our radar somehow, they're conducting a lot of operations against our customers or something like that. But what we do track is that ransomware as a service platform because the affiliates, the people that are using it they come, they go and, you know, it could be they're only there for a period of time. Sometimes they move between different ransomware services, right? They'll use the one that's most useful for them that that week or that month, they're getting the best rate because it's rev sharing. They get a percentage that platform gets percentage of the ransom. So, you know, they negotiate a better deal. They might move to a different ransomware platform. So that's really hard to track. And it's also, you know, I think more important for us to understand the platform and the technology that is being used than the individual that's doing it. >> Yeah. Makes sense. Alright, let's talk about the big four. China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia. Tell us about, you know, how you monitor these folks. Are there different signatures for each? Can you actually tell, you know based on the hack who's behind it? >> So yeah, it starts off, you know motivation is a huge factor. China conducts espionage, they do it for diplomatic purposes. They do it for military and political purposes. And they do it for economic espionage. All of these things map to known policies that they put out, the Five Year Plan, the Made in China 2025, the Belt and Road Initiative, it's all part of their efforts to become a regional and ultimately a global hegemon. >> They're not stealing nickels and dimes. >> No they're stealing intellectual property. They're stealing trade secrets. They're stealing negotiation points. When there's, you know a high speed rail or something like that. And they use a set of tools and they have a set of behaviors and they have a set of infrastructure and a set of targets that as we look at all of these things together we can derive who they are by motivation and the longer we observe them, the more data we get, the more we can get that attribution. I could tell you that there's X number of Chinese threat groups that we track under Panda, right? And they're associated with the Ministry of State Security. There's a whole other set. That's too associated with the People's Liberation Army Strategic Support Force. So, I mean, these are big operations. They're intelligence agencies that are operating out of China. Iran has a different set of targets. They have a different set of motives. They go after North American and Israeli businesses right now that's kind of their main operation. And they're doing something called hack and lock and leak. With a lock and leak, what they're doing is they're deploying ransomware. They don't care about getting a ransom payment. They're just doing it to disrupt the target. And then they're leaking information that they steal during that operation that brings embarrassment. It brings compliance, regulatory, legal impact for that particular entity. So it's disruptive >> The chaos creators that's.. >> Well, you know I think they're trying to create a they're trying to really impact the legitimacy of some of these targets and the trust that their customers and their partners and people have in them. And that is psychological warfare in a certain way. And it, you know is really part of their broader initiative. Look at some of the other things that they've done they've hacked into like the missile defense system in Israel, and they've turned on the sirens, right? Those are all things that they're doing for a specific purpose, and that's not China, right? Like as you start to look at this stuff, you can start to really understand what they're up to. Russia very much been busy targeting NATO and NATO countries and Ukraine. Obviously the conflict that started in February has been a huge focus for these threat actors. And then as we look at North Korea, totally different. They're doing, there was a major crypto attack today. They're going after these crypto platforms, they're going after DeFi platforms. They're going after all of this stuff that most people don't even understand and they're stealing the crypto currency and they're using it for revenue generation. These nuclear weapons don't pay for themselves, their research and development don't pay for themselves. And so they're using that cyber operation to either steal money or steal intelligence. >> They need the cash. Yeah. >> Yeah. And they also do economic targeting because Kim Jong Un had said back in 2016 that they need to improve the lives of North Koreans. They have this national economic development strategy. And that means that they need, you know, I think only 30% of North Korea has access to reliable power. So having access to clean energy sources and renewable energy sources, that's important to keep the people happy and stop them from rising up against the regime. So that's the type of economic espionage that they're conducting. >> Well, those are the big four. If there were big five or six, I would presume US and some Western European countries would be on there. Do you track, I mean, where United States obviously has you know, people that are capable of this we're out doing our thing, and- >> So I think- >> That defense or offense, where do we sit in this matrix? >> Well, I think the big five would probably include eCrime. We also track India, Pakistan. We track actors out of Columbia, out of Turkey, out of Syria. So there's a whole, you know this problem is getting worse over time. It's proliferating. And I think COVID was also, you know a driver there because so many of these countries couldn't move human assets around because everything was getting locked down. As machine learning and artificial intelligence and all of this makes its way into the cameras at border and transfer points, it's hard to get a human asset through there. And so cyber is a very attractive, cheap and deniable form of espionage and gives them operational capabilities, not, you know and to your question about US and other kind of five I friendly type countries we have not seen them targeting our customers. So we focus on the threats that target our customers. >> Right. >> And so, you know, if we were to find them at a customer environment sure. But you know, when you look at some of the public reporting that's out there, the malware that's associated with them is focused on, you know, real bad people, and it's, it's physically like crypted to their hard drive. So unless you have sensor on, you know, an Iranian or some other laptop that might be target or something like that. >> Well, like Stuxnet did. >> Yeah. >> Right so. >> You won't see it. Right. See, so yeah. >> Well Symantec saw it but way back when right? Back in the day. >> Well, I mean, if you want to go down that route I think it actually came from a company in the region that was doing the IR and they were working with Symantec. >> Oh, okay. So, okay. So it was a local >> Yeah. I think Crisis, I think was the company that first identified it. And then they worked with Symantec. >> It Was, they found it, I guess, a logic controller. I forget what it was. >> It was a long time ago, so I might not have that completely right. >> But it was a seminal moment in the industry. >> Oh. And it was a seminal moment for Iran because you know, that I think caused them to get into cyber operations. Right. When they realized that something like that could happen that bolstered, you know there was a lot of underground hacking forums in Iran. And, you know, after Stuxnet, we started seeing that those hackers were dropping their hacker names and they were starting businesses. They were starting to try to go after government contracts. And they were starting to build training offensive programs, things like that because, you know they realized that this is an opportunity there. >> Yeah. We were talking earlier about this with Shawn and, you know, in the nuclear war, you know the Cold War days, you had the mutually assured destruction. It's not as black and white in the cyber world. Right. Cause as, as Robert Gates told me, you know a few years ago, we have a lot more to lose. So we have to be somewhat, as the United States, careful as to how much of an offensive posture we take. >> Well here's a secret. So I have a background on political science. So mutually assured destruction, I think is a deterrent strategy where you have two kind of two, two entities that like they will destroy each other if they so they're disinclined to go down that route. >> Right. >> With cyber I really don't like that mutually assured destruction >> That doesn't fit right. >> I think it's deterrents by denial. Right? So raising the cost, if they were to conduct a cyber operation, raising that cost that they don't want to do it, they don't want to incur the impact of that. Right. And think about this in terms of a lot of people are asking about would China invade Taiwan. And so as you look at the cost that that would have on the Chinese military, the POA, the POA Navy et cetera, you know, that's that deterrents by denial, trying to, trying to make the costs so high that they don't want to do it. And I think that's a better fit for cyber to try to figure out how can we raise the cost to the adversary if they operate against our customers against our enterprises and that they'll go someplace else and do something else. >> Well, that's a retaliatory strike, isn't it? I mean, is that what you're saying? >> No, definitely not. >> It's more of reducing their return on investment essentially. >> Yeah. >> And incenting them- disincening them to do X and sending them off somewhere else. >> Right. And threat actors, whether they be criminals or nation states, you know, Bruce Lee had this great quote that was "be like water", right? Like take the path of least resistance, like water will. Threat actors do that too. So, I mean, unless you're super high value target that they absolutely have to get into by any means necessary, then if you become too hard of a target, they're going to move on to somebody that's a little easier. >> Makes sense. Awesome. Really appreciate your, I could, we'd love to have you back. >> Anytime. >> Go deeper. Adam Myers. We're here at Fal.Con 22, Dave Vellante, Dave Nicholson. We'll be right back right after this short break. (bouncy music plays)

>>Good afternoon, everyone. And welcome back to the VMware Explorer. 2022 live from San Francisco. Lisa Martin, here with Dave. Valante good to be sitting next to you, sir. >>Yeah. Yeah. The big set >>And we're very excited to be welcoming buck. One of our esteemed alumni Sanja poin joins us, the CEO and president of cohesive. Nice to see >>You. Thank you, Lisa. Thank you, Dave. It's great to meet with you all the time and the new sort of setting here, but first >>Time, first time we've been in west, is that right? We've been in north. We've been in south. We've been in Las Vegas, right. But west, >>I mean, it's also good to be back with live shows with absolutely, you know, after sort of the two or three or hiatus. And it was a hard time for the whole world, but I'm kind of driving a little bit of adrenaline just being here with people. So >>You've also got some adrenaline, sorry, Dave. Yeah, you're good because you are new in the role at cohesive. You wrote a great blog that you are identified. The four reasons I came to cohesive. Tell the audience, just give 'em a little bit of a teaser about that. >>Yeah, I think you should all read it. You can Google and, and Google find that article. I talked about the people Mohi is a fantastic founder. You know, he was the, you know, the architect of the Google file system. And you know, one of the senior Google executives was on my board. Bill Corrin said one of the smartest engineers. He was the true father of hyperconverge infrastructure. A lot of the code of Nutanix. He wrote, I consider him really the father of that technology, which brought computer storage. And when he took that same idea of bringing compute to secondary storage, which is really what made the scale out architect unique. And we were at your super cloud event talking about that, Dave. Yeah. Right. So it's a people I really got to respect his smarts, his integrity and the genius, what he is done. I think the customer base, I called a couple of customers. One of them, a fortune 100 customer. I, I can't tell you who it was, but a very important customer. I've known him. He said, I haven't seen tech like this since VMware, 20 years ago, Amazon 10 years ago and now Ko. So that's special league. We're winning very much in the enterprise and that type of segment, the partners, you know, we have HPE, Cisco as investors. Amazon's an investors. So, you know, and then finally the opportunity, I think this whole area of data management and data security now with threats, like ransomware big opportunity. >>Okay. So when you were number two at VMware, you would come on and say, we'd love all our partners and of course, okay. So you know, a little bit about how to work with, with VMware. So, so when you now think about the partnership between cohesive and VMware, what are the things that you're gonna stress to your constituents on the VMware side to convince them that Hey, partnering with cohesive is gonna gonna drive more value for customers, you know, put your thumb on the scale a little bit. You know, you gotta, you gotta unfair advantage somewhat, but you should use it. So what's the narrative gonna be like? >>Yeah, I think listen with VMware and Amazon, that probably their top two partners, Dave, you know, like one of the first calls I made was to Raghu and he knew about this decision before. That's the level of trust I have in him. I even called Michael Dell, you know, before I made the decision, there's a little bit of overlap with Dell, but it's really small compared to the overlap, the potential with Dell hardware that we could compliment. And then I called four CEOs. I was, as I was making this decision, Andy Jassey at Amazon, he was formerly AWS CEO sat Nadela at Microsoft Thomas cor at Google and Arvin Christian, IBM to say, I'm thinking about this making decision. They are many of the mentors and friends to me. So I believe in an ecosystem. And you know, even Chuck Robbins, who the CEO of Cisco is an investor, I texted him and said, Hey, finally, we can be friends. >>It was harder to us to be friends with Cisco, given the overlap of NSX. So I have a big tent towards everybody in our ecosystem with VMware. I think the simple answer is there's no overlap okay. With, with the kind of the primary storage capabilities with VSAN. And by the same thing with Nutanix, we will be friends and, and extend that to be the best data protection solution. But given also what we could do with security, I think this is gonna go a lot further. And then it's all about meet the field. We have common partners. I think, you know, sort of the narrative I talked about in that blog is just like snowflake was replacing Terada and ServiceNow replace remedy and CrowdStrike, replacing Symantec, we're replacing legacy vendors. We are viewed as the modern solution cloud optimized for private and public cloud. We can help you and make VMware and vs a and VCF very relevant to that part of the data management and data security continuum, which I think could end VMware. And by the way, the same thing into the public cloud. So most of the places where we're being successful is clearly withs, but increasingly there's this discussion also about playing into the cloud. So I think both with VMware and Amazon, and of course the other partners in the hyperscaler service, storage, networking place and security, we have some big plans. >>How, how much do you see this? How do you see this multi-cloud narrative that we're hearing here from, from VMware evolving? How much of an opportunity is it? How are customers, you know, we heard about cloud chaos yesterday at the keynote, are customers, do they, do they admit that there's cloud chaos? Some probably do some probably don't how much of an opportunity is that for cohesive, >>It's tremendous opportunity. And I think that's why you need a Switzerland type player in this space to be successful. And you know, and you can't explicitly rule out the fact that the big guys get into this space, but I think it's, if you're gonna back up office 365 or what they call now, Microsoft 365 into AWS or Google workspace into Azure or Salesforce into one of those clouds, you need a Switzerland player. It's gonna be hard. And in many cases, if you're gonna back up data or you protect that data into AWS banks need a second copy of that either on premise or Azure. So it's very hard, even if they have their own native data protection for them to be dual cloud. So I think a multi-cloud story and the fact that there's at least three big vendors of cloud in, in the us, you know, one in China, if include Alibaba creates a Switzerland opportunity for us, that could be fairly big. >>And I think, you know, what we have to do is make sure while we'll be optimized, our preferred cloud is AWS. Our control plane runs there. We can't take an all in AWS stack with the control plane and the data planes at AWS to Walmart. So what I've explained to both Microsoft and AWS is that data plane will need to be multi-cloud. So I can go to an, a Walmart and say, I can back up your data into Azure if you choose to, but the control plane's still gonna be an AWS, same thing with Google. Maybe they have another account. That's very Google centric. So that's how we're gonna believe the, the control plane will be in AWS. We'll optimize it there, but the data plane will be multicloud. >>Yeah. And that's what Mo had explained at Supercloud. You know, and I talked to him, he really helped me hone in on the deployment models. Yes. Where, where, where the cohesive deployment model is instantiating that technology stack into each cloud region and each cloud, which gives you latency advantages and other advantages >>And single code based same platform. >>And then bringing it, tying it together with a unified, you know, interface. That was he, he was, he was key. In fact, I, I wrote about it recently and, and gave him and the other 29 >>Quite a bit in that session, he went deep with you. I >>Mean, with Mohi, when you get a guy who developed a Google file system, you know, who can technically say, okay, this is technically correct or no, Dave, your way off be. So I that's why I had to >>Go. I, I thought you did a great job in that interview because you probed him pretty deep. And I'm glad we could do that together with him next time. Well, maybe do that together here too, but it was really helpful. He's the, he's the, he's the key reason I'm here. >>So you say data management is ripe for disrupt disruption. Talk about that. You talked about this Switzerland effect. That sounds to me like a massive differentiator for cohesive. Why is data management right for disruption and why is cohesive the right partner to do it? >>Yeah, I think, listen, everyone in this sort of data protection backup from years ago have been saying the S Switzerland argument 18 years ago, I was a at Veras an executive there. We used the Switzerland argument, but what's changed is the cloud. And what's changed as a threat vector in security. That's, what's changed. And in that the proposition of a, a Switzerland player has just become more magnified because you didn't have a sales force or Workday service now then, but now you do, you didn't have multi-cloud. You had hardware vendors, you know, Dell, HPE sun at the time. IBM, it's now Lenovo. So that heterogeneity of, of on-premise service, storage, networking, HyperCloud, and, and the apps world has gotten more and more diverse. And I think you really need scale out architectures. Every one of the legacy players were not built with scale out architectures. >>If you take that fundamental notion of bringing compute to storage, you could almost paralyze. Imagine you could paralyze backup recovery and bring so much scale and speed that, and that's what Mo invented. So he took that idea of how he had invented and built Nutanix and applied that to secondary storage. So now everything gets faster and cheaper at scale. And that's a disruptive technology ally. What snowflake did to ator? I mean, the advantage of snowflake is when you took that same concept data, warehousing is not a new concept it's existed from since Ralph Kimball and bill Inman and the people who are fathers of data warehousing, they took that to Webscale. And in that came a disruptive force toter data, right on snowflake. And then of course now data bricks and big query, similar things. So we're doing the same thing. We just have to showcase the customers, which we do. And when large customers see that they're replacing the legacy solutions, I have a lot of respect for legacy solutions, but at some point in time of a solution was invented in 1995 or 2000, 2005. It's right. For change. >>So you use snowflake as an example, Frank SL doesn't like when I say playbook, cuz I says, Dave, I'm a situational CEO, no playbook, but there are patterns here. And one of the things he did is to your point go after, you know, Terra data with a better data warehouse, simplify scale, et cetera. And now he's, he's a constructing a Tam expansion strategy, same way he did at ServiceNow. And I see you guys following a similar pattern. Okay. You get your foot in the door. Let's face it. I mean, a lot of this started with, you know, just straight back. Okay, great. Now it's extending into data management now extending to multi-cloud that's like concentric circles in a Tam expansion strategy. How, how do you, as, as a CEO, that's part of your job is Tam expansion. >>So yeah, I think the way to think about the Tam is, I mean, people say it's 20, 30 billion, but let me tell you how you can piece it apart in size, Dave and Lisa number one, I estimate there's probably about 10 to 20 exabytes of data managed by these legacy players of on-prem stores that they back up to. Okay. So you add them all up in the market shares that they respectively are. And by the way, at the peak, the biggest of these companies got to 2 billion and then shrunk. That was Verto when I was there in 2004, 2 billion, every one of them is small and they stopped growing. You look at the IDC charts. Many of them are shrinking. We are the fastest growing in the last two years, but I estimate there's about 20 exabytes of data that collectively among the legacy players, that's either gonna stay on prem or move to the cloud. Okay. So the opportunity as they replace one of those legacy tools with us is first off to manage that 20 X by cheaper, faster with the Webscale glass offer the cloud guys, we could tip that into the cloud. Okay. >>But you can't stop there. >>Okay. No, we are not doing just backup recovery. We have a platform that can do files. We can do test dev analytics and now security. Okay. That data is potentially at a risk, not so much in the past, but for ransomware, right? How do we classify that? How do we govern that data? How do we run potential? You know, the same way you did antivirus some kind of XDR algorithms on the data to potentially not just catch the recovery process, which is after fact, but maybe the predictive act of before to know, Hey, there's somebody loitering around this data. So if I'm basically managing in the exabytes of data and I can proactively tell you what, this is, one CIO described this very simply to me a few weeks ago that I, and she said, I have 3000 applications, okay. I wanna be prepared for a black Swan event, except it's not a nine 11 planes getting the, the buildings. >>It is an extortion event. And I want to know when that happens, which of my 3000 apps I recover within one hour within one day within one week, no later than one month. Okay. And I don't wanna pay the bad guys at penny. That's what we do. So that's security discussions. We didn't have that discussion in 2004 when I was at another company, because we were talking about flood floods and earthquakes as a disaster recovery. Now you have a lot more security opportunity to be able to describe that. And that's a boardroom discussion. She needs to have that >>Digital risk. O O okay, go ahead please. I >>Was just gonna say, ransomware attack happens every what? One, every 11, 9, 11 seconds. >>And the dollar amount are going up, you know, dollar are going up. Yep. >>And, and when you pay the ransom, you don't always get your data back. So you that's not. >>And listen, there's always an ethical component. Should you do it or not do it? If you, if you don't do it and you're threatened, they may have left an Easter egg there. Listen, I, I feel very fortunate that I've been doing a lot in security, right? I mean, I built the business at, at, at VMware. We got it to over a billion I'm on the board of sneak. I've been doing security and then at SAP ran. So I know a lot about security. So what we do in security and the ecosystem that supports us in security, we will have a very carefully crafted stay tuned. Next three weeks months, you'll see us really rolling out a very kind of disciplined aspect, but we're not gonna pivot this company and become a cyber security company. Some others in our space have done that. I think that's not who we are. We are a data management and a data security company. We're not just a pure security company. We're doing both. And we do it well, intelligently, thoughtfully security is gonna be built into our platform, not voted on. Okay. And there'll be certain security things that we do organically. There's gonna be a lot that we do through partnerships, this >>Security market that's coming to you. You don't have to go claim that you're now a security vendor, right? The market very naturally saying, wow, a comprehensive security strategy has to incorporate a data protection strategy and a recovery, you know, and the things that we've talking about Mount ransomware, I want to ask you, you I've been around a long time, longer than you actually Sanjay. So, but you you've, you've seen a lot. You look, >>Thank you. That's all good. Oh, >>Shucks. So the market, I've never seen a market like this, right? I okay. After the.com crash, we said, and I know you can't talk about IPO. That's not what I'm talking about, but everything was bad after that. Right. 2008, 2000, everything was bad. I've never seen a market. That's half full, half empty, you know, snowflake beats and raises the stock, goes through the roof. Dev if it, if the area announced today, Mongo, DB, beat and Ray, that things getting crushed and, and after market never seen anything like this. It's so fed, driven and, and hard to protect. And, and of course, I know it's a marathon, you know, it's not a sprint, but have you ever seen anything like this? >>Listen, I walk worked through 18 quarters as COO of VMware. You've seen where I've seen public quarters there and you know, was very fortunate. Thanks to the team. I don't think I missed my numbers in 18 quarters except maybe once close. But we, it was, it's tough. Being a public company of the company is tough. I did that also at SAP. So the journey from 10 to 20 billion at SAP, the journey from six to 12 at VMware, that I was able to be fortunate. It's humbling because you, you really, you know, we used to have this, we do the earnings call and then we kind of ask ourselves, what, what do you think the stock price was gonna be a day and a half later? And we'd all take bets as to where this, I think you just basically, as a, as a sea level executive, you try to build a culture of beaten, raise, beaten, raise, beaten, raise, and you wanna set expectations in a way that you're not setting them up for failure. >>And you know, it's you, there's, Dave's a wonderful CEO as is Frank Salman. So it's hard for me to dissect. And sometimes the market are fickle on some small piece of it. But I think also the, when I, I encourage people say, take the long term view. When you take the long term view, you're not bothered about the ups and downs. If you're building a great company over the length of time, now it will be very clear over the arc of many, many quarters that you're business is trouble. If you're starting to see a decay in growth. And like, for example, when you start to see a growth, start to decay significantly by five, 10 percentage points, okay, there's something macro going on at this company. And that's what you won't avoid. But these, you know, ups and downs, my view is like, if you've got both Mongo D and snowflake are fantastic companies, they're CEOs of people I respect. They've actually kind of an, a, you know, advisor to us as a company, you knows moat very well. So we respect him, respect Frank, and you, there have been other quarters where Frank's, you know, the Snowflake's had a down result after that. So you build a long term and they are on the right side of history, snowflake, and both of them in terms of being a modern cloud relevant in the case of MongoDB, open source, two data technology, that's, you know, winning, I, I, we would like to be like them one day >>As, as the new CEO of cohesive, what are you most ask? What are you most anxious about and what are you most excited about? >>I think, listen, you know, you know, everything starts with the employee. You, I always believe I wrote my first memo to all employees. There was an article in Harvard business review called service profit chains that had a seminal impact on my leadership, which is when they studied companies who had been consistently profitable over a long period of time. They found that not just did those companies serve their customers well, but behind happy engaged customers were happy, engaged employees. So I always believe you start with the employee and you ensure that they're engaged, not just recruiting new employees. You know, I put on a tweet today, we're hiring reps and engineers. That's okay. But retaining. So I wanna start with ensuring that everybody, sometimes we have to make some unfortunate decisions with employees. We've, we've got a part company with, but if we can keep the best and brightest retained first, then of course, you know, recruiting machine, I'm trying to recruit the best and brightest to this company, people all over the place. >>I want to get them here. It's been, so I mean, heartwarming to come Tom world and just see people from all walks, kind of giving me hugs. I feel incredibly blessed. And then, you know, after employees, it's customers and partners, I feel like the tech is in really good hands. I don't have to worry about that. Cuz Mo it's in charge. He's got this thing. I can go to bed knowing that he's gonna keep innovating the future. Maybe in some of the companies I've worried about the tech innovation piece, but most doing a great job there. I can kind of leave that in his cap of hands, but employees, customers, partners, that's kind of what I'm focused on. None of them are for me, like a keep up at night, but there are are opportunities, right? And sometimes there's somebody you're trying to salvage to make sure or somebody you're trying to convince to join. >>But you know, customers, I love pursuing customers. I love the win. I hate to lose. So fortune 1000 global, 2000 companies, small companies, big companies, I wanna win every one of them. And it's not, it's not like, I mean, I know all these CEOs in my competitors. I texted him the day I joined and said, listen, I'll compete, honorably, whatever have you, but it's like Kobe and LeBron Kobe's passed away now. So maybe it's Steph Curry. LeBron, whoever your favorite athlete is you put your best on the court and you win. And that's how I am. That's nothing I've known no other gear than to put my best on the court and win, but do it honorably. It should not be the one that you're doing it. Unethically. You're doing it personally. You're not calling people's names. You're competing honorably. And when you win the team celebrates, it's not a victory for me. It's a victory for the team. >>I always think I'm glad that you brought up the employee experience and we're almost out of time, but I always think the employee experience and the customer experience are inextricably linked. This employees have to be empowered. They have to have the data that they need to do their job so that they can deliver to the customer. You can't do one without the other. >>That's so true. I mean, I, it's my belief. And I've talked also on this show and others about servant leadership. You know, one of my favorite poems is Brenda Naor. I went to bed in life. I dreamt that life was joy. I woke up and realized life was service. I acted in service was joy. So when you have a leadership model, which is it's about, I mean, there's lots of layers between me and the individual contributor, but I really care about that sales rep and the engineer. That's the leaf level of the organization. What can I get obstacle outta their way? I love skipping levels of going right. That sales rep let's go and crack this deal. You know? So you have that mindset. Yeah. I mean, you, you empower, you invert the pyramid and you realize the power is at the leaf level of an organization. >>So that's what I'm trying to do. It's a little easier to do it with 2000 people than I dunno, either 20, 20, 2000 people or 35,000 reported me at VMware. And I mean a similar number at SAP, which was even bigger, but you can shape this. Now we are, we're not a startup anymore. We're a midsize company. We'll see. Maybe along the way, there's an IP on the path. We'll wait for that. When it comes, it's a milestone. It's not the destination. So we do that and we are, we, I told people we are gonna build this green company. Cohesive is gonna be a great company like VMware one day, like Amazon. And there's always a day of early beginnings, but we have to work harder. This is kind of like the, you know, eight year old version of your kid, as opposed to the 18 year old version of the kid. And you gotta work a little harder. So I love it. Yeah. >>Good luck. Awesome. Thank you. Best of luck. Congratulations. On the role, it sounds like there's a tremendous amount of adrenaline, a momentum carrying you forward Sanjay. We always appreciate having you. Thank >>You for having in your show. >>Thank you. Our pleasure, Lisa. Thank you for Sanja poin and Dave ante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube live from VMware Explorer, 2022, stick around our next guest. Join us momentarily.

(upbeat music) >> Good morning, everyone. Welcome back to "theCUBE." Lisa Martin here with John Furrier. This is day three of our wall-to-wall coverage of VMware Explore. John and I are pleased to welcome back one of our alumni, Muddu Sudhakar, the CEO of AISERA. Welcome to the program, Muddu. It's great to meet you. >> Thank you, Lisa. Thanks for having me. Thank you, John. >> Great to see you again. You're like an industry analyst coming on "theCUBE". You should be like a guest analyst, breaking down. I know you got your own company to run, and by the way, the recent funding you had, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> In a market that's not getting a lot of funding. You get an up around. Congratulations on that. >> Thank you. >> Business is good? >> Very good, thank you. Look, Goldman Sachs Investing, along with Zoom and Thoma Bravo, it was great for us. >> Great stuff. Well, I'm glad we could get you in. This day three, Lisa and I and Dave Vellante and Dave Nicholson have all been talking to everyone for two days here at VMware Explore, formerly VMworld, our 12th year covering their annual conference, as you know, and we've been telling the executives, but day three is more of, we're going to mix it up. We're going to bring people in and get their opinions about Supercloud, does VMware go post-Broadcom? Obviously, that's going to happen. Looks like nothing's going to stop that from happening. What's next? What's the impact? Who wins? Who loses? VMware certainly not acting like they're going to get gutted. They're all full throttle ahead. They're laying down some announcements, vSphere 8, you got vSAN 8, they got cloud-native, they're talking multi-cloud. VMware's not looking like they're flinching. What's going on, in your view, outside of the bubble that we're here in San Francisco, out in the real world, in the trenches. What are people talking about? What do you see? >> Lot to unpack. (all laugh) >> Start at wherever you want. >> Yes. You know, I was a VMware alumni too. >> Yes >> You sold the company to VMware. You know the inside. Okay, So then, even then- >> I worked with Paul and Pat and Raghu. It's great to be back at VMware now. I think there's a lot going on in VMware. VMware is here to stay. The brand will stay. The VMware customers will stay for years to come. I think Broadcom and VMware, I think it's a great industry consolidation, the way in which I see it. And it is going to help all the customers too, right? Broadcom, having such a large foot play into both CA, the software business, the hardware business. I think what will happen is that Broadcom will try to create a hybrid cloud of their own with VMware. So there'll be a fourth player in the cloud industry. And then back to John, your Supercloud. The Supercloud by definition, there'll be private clouds, public clouds, hybrid clouds. I think Broadcom with VMware will help your vision of the Supercloud and what your customers are asking. >> Yeah, one of the things I want to get your thoughts on, Lisa and I were talking yesterday with the executives, AJ Patel in particular, he's a middleware guy. >> Right. >> So what he did was Oracle. He did a lot of the fusion stuff at Oracle. He now runs Modern Apps. And you came in at the time, I think, when they were just getting that app vision going, and Paul Moritz actually had it early with his 2010 vision, but too early on the app side. But that ended up happening too. So the question is, is Broadcom going to be this middleware layer, and treat the cloud like hardware. And then, apps or apps. Companies are apps. In a digital transformation, technology is the company. >> Right >> So the company is the app. >> That's right, >> Is an application. So apps and hardware, middle, a middleware model emerging. Do you think they're going for that? Or am I just making this up in my head? >> No, I think to me, I see Broadcom as much more, they're like a peer company at the high level. So they're funded by- >> Like a private equity company. >> Private equity company. >> You mean from a dollar standpoint. >> From a dollar standpoint. So Broadcom is going to fund companies. They're going to buy companies. They bought CA, they bought all the other assets. So Broadcom will have always hardware. The middle level could be VMware, but they also have CA, right? They have a bunch of apps here. So I see the Broadcom is also using VMware to run applications. So the consolidation will be they'll create a Supercloud using VMware. They're going to own their own apps. I don't think Broadcom's story is stopped. Its journey to come. They're going to buy more acquisitions, more apps companies. I won't be surprised, in the future, they buy Zendesk. I won't be surprised, in the future, they buy other apps companies, SaaS companies and cloud enterprise companies. Right? So that's where the P is coming. So the broad conversion is, I need a base middleware, like you're saying. There's no other middleware on top of hardware better than VMware. >> So do you think that they'll keep the stuff that's coming out of the other? 'Cause we've been speculating on "theCUBE" this week. They have the core business, but there's all this stuff that's kind of coming out of the oven that's not EBITDA-oriented yet. Do you think they keep that or they let it go? >> I think that's a great question to hang their CEO of Broadcom. But to me, I think, knowing them, they're going to keep, and if you look at Symantec, they kept parts of Symantec, this whole parts of it. So I think all options are on the table for them, right? They'll do whatever it is. But I think it has to be the ones that high growth companies they may give it. It all goes back to is it a profitability to it or not? But his vision is very good. I want to own the middleware, right? He will own the middleware using VMware to your vision, create a Supercloud and own the apps. So I think you'll see Broadcom is the fourth vendor in the cloud race. You have Microsoft, AWS, Google, and Broadcom is actually going to compete with this four. >> So you think there'll be a hyper scale? They'll be in the top three or four. >> There'll be top four. >> Okay. >> Along with Oracle. So now, we are talking about the five vendors will be Amazon, Azure, Google, Oracle, and Broadcom. >> We had Amazon guy on, Steve Jones. I should have asked him that question. I just don't see that happening yet. They have to have the full hardware side. How do you see that coming in? 'Cause Amazon's innovating at the atom level and they're working on stuff that's physical, transit, physics stuff, like down to the root level. >> I think Broadcom figure, look, they own the chips out right, at the end of the day. They also have a lot of chips such to supply to both mobile and this. So if there's anybody who can figure out the hardware, it will be Broadcom. That is their core of area. They didn't have the core in the software and the middleware. VMware is going to give them the OS, the Kubernetes, the VMs. Once you have that layer, I think you can innovate both up and below, right? So I think, John, I think Broadcom VMware will be a force to reckon with and I think these guys are going to get into healthcare space though. So if you see the way they battle, you and me are talking Lisa, like Microsoft bought new ones, Oracle bought Cerner. So they all paid 30 billion each. So the next battle ground will be, they'll start in the healthcare industry. Somebody's going to go look at the healthcare apps like Epic, right? They're going to look at how we can do the hospitals. They're going to look at hospital healthcare professionals. That area will be disrupted a lot in the same. >> What other industries do you think, besides healthcare, are ripe for disruption with Broadcom VMware? >> I think endpoint management, like remember VMware bought AirWatch when I was there back then, right? That whole area is called digital experience management. So that endpoint mainly will be disrupted. So Broadcom with VMware will go again into endpoint. I'm talking endpoint could be the servers, desktops, VMware Max, right? Virtual Desktop VDI. So that whole management of mobile devices to desktop, that whole industry will be disrupted. A lot of players are there trying to do more consulting services. I think VMware is a great assets and tools. If I'm Broadcom, my chip sets are going into the endpoint. So that area will be disrupted a lot with Broadcom in VMware. >> Yeah, one of the things that VMware, people have been talking about, is that the CA acquisition that Broadcom did was the playbooks public. Everyone saw what they did. They killed sales and market and they killed all the execs, metaphorically speaking. They fired them. VMware's got a different vibe here. I'm feeling like it could go one way or the other. I think they should keep them, personally. But you don't know. If they're a PE company, they EBIDA driven, maybe it's just simply numbers. >> Right. >> If that's the case, then I'm worried. But VMware's got pride, they got mojo, and they've got expertise in software. Maybe a little bit different circumstance? What's take on this? Or do you think it's going to be black and white to the numbers? >> I think, knowing Hank's playbook, if he knows what he's going to do, right? His playbook will be consistent with Symantec. >> You think he already knows what he wants to do? >> I think so. I think at that level, both with Simulink and Broadcom, they already know the playbook. At this stage the games, people already know their game. It's like a chess move. They already know. They'll look at VMware and see which assets to keep, which one not to keep, which organization, but I think Hank is a master at this one. To me, I'm personally excited with the VMware Broadcom combination. It's a great thing for the industry. It's great for VMware and VMware customers and partners. >> Well, John, you and Dave had a chance to sit down with Raghu. What were some of the things that he unpacked about the Broadcom acquisition? >> He was on talking points. He was on message. He was saying the things that any CEO was going to make a lot of cash on this deal. And he's proud. I think it wasn't about the money for him. I sensed that he's certainly going to make a lot of cash on this deal as an executive, but he's a long time VMware employee and a well loved and revered person. He's done a lot of great work, technically set the agenda. So I think their mindset is we're going to just continue to do an amazing job as VMware as we are and then let Broadcom, let the chips fall where they may, and hopefully, if they do a good job, maybe they'll either refactor some of their base plans or they laid it all out in the field, so to speak. So that's my vibe. Now specifically, he made some comments, like, "Yeah, we're really proud." And he staying technical. He's still like, "This is really happening." So I think he's going to, essentially, to the very end, be like, "Cross cloud and hybrid cloud. This is our third generation." So there he's hanging onto the VMware third act that they're saying, and he hopes that it comes home. And I think he's going to just deal with it. He didn't seem flustered and he didn't seem overly confident. >> Okay. >> I guess that's my opinion. What do you think? >> Personally worked with Raghu, worked for Raghu, so I think of him as the greatest CEO for VMware ever could have, right? It's a journey. It was Paul Maritz, then Pat Gelsinger, now Raghu. I think he's in the right place, right time to lead VMware, and Raghu's doing a fantastic job. And personally, getting these two companies married, I think Raghu did the right partnership with Broadcom. >> Well, I think if this event's any indication if they're just sitting back and waiting, they're not, and this event was well done, it was pulled off. The branding's amazing. I thought they did a good job with the name change. And then in light of all the Broadcom issues, the execution was great. It was not a bad show here. It was a good show. It wasn't terrible at all. People were excited. I think the ecosystem also felt that Broadcom, like an electronic shock to the system, like something's going to happen. Let's wait and see. I'm going to go to the event to see if it's going to be around and kind of getting a feel first party, in person, what's happening. Again, remember VMware didn't have an event since 2019. This is a community that thrives on physical, face to face camaraderie, community. And so, I think the show was a success. And I think that's a result of Raghu and his team. >> Because we have a booth there for AISERA, my company, we have a booth. We are offering coffee and donuts. You guys should come by and tell people. You'll get a free coffee and a donut, but it's one of the best shows I've seen. Well, I think people after pandemic are back, people are interacting. We have 500 people in one day at our booth. So for a startup company like us, getting that much crowd is unheard of. So it's great. We're very excited. >> The vibe from the partner community, I had a chance to talk with a lot of partners, AWS, NetApp, Rackspace, really seems like the partnerships side of VMware is very, very strong and the partners are excited about what's next for VMware. Did you have a chance to talk with any of the partners? >> Actually, look. I'm actually meeting with Karen. So Karen Egan is my contact at VMware too, and Sumit, (indistinct) a bunch of the customer success organization. We talk to people in their digital experience management team. We are very excited to be partner with both VMware's customer, partner, and all experts, right? I'll need the VMware ecosystem for my company to thrive. So for us, VMware customers are my customers and leveraging VMware APIs into VMware, that's that's important for us. >> Lisa, that's a great question because that brings us to the question of, okay, clearly this show also proves to us from our conversations and exploring the floor, the wave is coming. This next cloud wave is here. We're calling it Supercloud, whatever you want to call it, it's coming and it's real, and people know it. And also the lines of sight into economics around where people can fit in this next level ecosystem is becoming clear. So I think people kind of know what's the right side of the street to be on in this next shift. So that's coming. That's independent of Broadcom. So the floor represents to me the excitement for not only the VMware workload powering software, with or without Broadcom, but the next wave. So the question is if Broadcom goes down their path and Hank does what he does, who wins and who loses on where things flow? Because this energy is going to flow somewhere. Is it going to flow to AWS? Is it going to flow to Microsoft? Is it going to flow to HPE with Green Lake getting some great traction? NetApp's doing great. We just heard from them. So the partners aren't hurting. It's only going to get better. re:Invent's right around the corner. That's a packed house. Their ecosystem's growing like a weed. Who wins? 'Cause the customers at VMware are enterprise customers. They're used to being serviced. They have sales reps from Microsoft, they got sales reps from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, real senior enterprise stakeholders there. So someone's going to end up filling in as VMware settles into their broad composition. Who wins and who loses, in your mind? >> A Very good question. So my thing is, I think it's... Well, I put Microsoft and Amazon the winners. In that way, actually mean Microsoft will win because in a true Supercloud, your vision, back to hybrid cloud on-prem and public cloud, VMware disruption with Broadcom, as if there's any bridge in the market, Microsoft will take advantage of it. Azure, right? Amazon VMware is there. Then, you have Google and VMware. So I think Azure will probably try to take advantage of this, but very next will be Amazon, right away there. That leaves you with Google Cloud, right? Google Cloud is the one. So they're the people that are able to figure out what to do in this equation. And then, obviously, the other one is Oracle. Oracle has no hearts in this game. So to me, the people who are going to probably lose impact model will be Oracle if the Broadcom and VMware will happen. So it's Azure, Amazon winning the race, probably Google is right behind them. Oracle will be distinct. Other side is Dell. Actually, Dell has no game in this. Our Broadcom and VMware, Dell should be the one. >> Dell might have a little secret sauce on the table with Michael Dell. >> That's true. >> If he convert his shares, he might be the largest shareholder at Broadcom. >> That's true. >> He could end up owning all the back. >> So he may be the winner all the time. (all laugh) >> Don't count him out. Well, this is a good question. I want to just double click on this. So you get customer dynamic. Where do they go? You get the community, which is a big force multiplier in this world, and if you had to bet on community between Microsoft and Amazon Web Services, Amazon trumps Microsoft on force multiplier community. Ecosystem, AWS beats Microsoft on that one. So it's interesting because it's now multiple dimensions we're talking about here. It's customers. That's the top order, right? The customers. But also, you got community, the people who put on sessions, the people in the community that are the influencers that are leading the trends, and developers are very trending, relative to what kind of code they use, what's their environments? So the developers is changing that landscape and, ultimately, the ecosystem of partners, right? 'Cause there's a lot more overlap between AWS and VMware's ecosystem than there is between Microsoft and that. And HPE is just starting an ecosystem. So it's going to be very interesting. >> It is. It is. I think Broadcom and VMware cannot be any best time for the industry, right? As you said. HP is coming in. Oracle is coming in. And to your point, VMware and AWS are another best partners. Now, this going to create any gap for Microsoft to enter for Azure? I think that's where the market is saying that it's going to open up a hybrid cloud player for Microsoft to enter what is to be a tight relationship with VMware and Amazon. Right? So people will rethink through their apps. And more importantly, the end point to me. See, the key is, like you talk about with Supercloud, nobody's talking about Supercloud for the endpoint. >> You mean Edge or security? >> Not an Edge endpoint. Endpoint could be your devices, laptop, desktop. >> Or a building or a light bulb or whatever. >> Desktop or VDI desktop services servers, right? So we call it endpoint cloud. There's no endpoint Supercloud. John, that's an area that you should double click on. Super cloud for the servers is different from Supercloud for endpoint. >> Well, SuperCloud.World is the URL out there. If you're interested in Supercloud, we are adding tracks to that body of work. So we had our event on August 9th. It was virtual event, where Dave and I are going to add a data track, we're going to add a security track, and we should add, maybe, an endpoint workspace, work. >> That's a VMware brand, Workspace and Horizon. So that whole workspace endpoint for Supercloud is going to happen. >> Yes. >> Right. That kind of deviates from- >> Do you like Supercloud? Are you bullish on Supercloud? >> I'm very bullish on Supercloud because I, myself, is running on-prem in VPCs, public clouds, private clouds. Supercloud kind of composites it so app should be designed. 'Cause I don't want to design an app for one cloud. It's not going to work. So it's like how Java came and I can run it on any platform. The ideas you build it on Supercloud, run it, whatever you want. Right? >> That's exactly it. So what would you want to see in Supercloud as it evolves? And we were part of this open conversation. This is our point for today. We're going to have a great panel come up later today. We're going to have the influencers come on to debate what Supercloud should or shouldn't be. If you want to add to the contribution, we'll add this into the work, what should what's needed in Supercloud? What's table stakes. >> I think we need a Java compiler that will happen for Supercloud. I build it once, execute in any place I want, right? Using the Terraform, HashiCorp (indistinct) So what I don't want is keep building this thing for every cloud. I want to abstract that out. The whole idea of Supercloud is how Java gave me the abstraction for hardware 20 years back or 30 years back, we need the same abstraction for the cloud today. Otherwise, I'm customizing for VM Cloud, I'm customizing for AWS, Azure, Google Cloud. We, as an application vendor, it's too hard to keep doing it. I have now thousand tuners. I don't need thousand DevOps people. I need maybe 10 DevOps people. So there's a clear abstraction complexity that industry should develop, and your concept Supercloud with everybody thinking that, and it has to start from the grassroots with ecosystem. >> What do you think about the participants in this abstraction layer? Because someone said on "theCUBE" here this week, the people in the abstraction layer shouldn't be participants in the below or above the abstraction. >> I think it should be everybody, right? It's all inclusive. You need the apps guys to come in. You need the OS players to come in. You need the cloud vendors to come in, infrastructure. So you need everybody. >> Okay, let's just say that you were the spokesperson for the Supercloud organization, Supercloud.World. How would you sell AWS on why it's important for them? >> It's because they can build it and sell it in AWS and multiple AWS Gov Cloud, AWS On-prem, VPCs. It's even important for them, their expansion, their market time upfront. If I'm (indistinct), if I'm built on Supercloud, I can increase my time share. Otherwise I'm bringing only to public cloud. >> Okay, so I'll say, I'm Amazon and we have a concept called "One Way Doors." We don't want to go through a one way door. Is Supercloud a one way door for them? What's in it for them? Do they make more? Does it help their ecosystem? And the same question from Microsoft Azure and Google cloud. >> They're make more money. They're making their apps run in multiple places. It's a natural expansion. You are solving your customer problems for Amazon and DGC, right? My job is give people choices. I give choice to Lisa. Lisa can run it on public cloud. John, you can run it on VPC, AWS. >> So you're saying, so you think customers are asking for this right now? >> Everybody's asking. >> But don't really know how to say it? >> Customers are asking. Partners are asking. All of us are asking. >> Okay, what's the ask? >> Ask is give me a one place to build applications and run it anywhere without adding the complexity. >> Okay. Done. That's Supercloud. It'll ship tomorrow. (Lisa laughs) Well done. (John laughs) All right, well done. Final question for you. Lisa and I have been talking with folks here. What advice would you give the folks that are in here? 'Cause we have a lot of activity, people with marketing their solutions and products. They're trying to put a voice out there around thought leadership and trying to figure out what side of the street they should be on relative to the next 10 years as they're here at VMware Explore, as the next gen cloud comes around. What's the right narrative? What's the right positioning for companies to be on right now to be the most relevant and in the flow? >> I don't know about 10 years, but right now we are in difficult economic times, right? Markets are down. Inflation is up. So I think the fastest cost, people should focus on cost. How can it take cost? Automation is the key, right? Whether you use AI or automation , like you and me talking, John, last week, right? That's important. Every CEO I talk to is focused on cost. How do I cut my cost? How can I do with fewer resources? How can I do with fewer people, right? So the new budget right now is cut your budget in half. So every company, every exec should think about how can you be a good citizen? How can I get growth and scale? How can I do more with less? And that should be the next 12 months. >> That was a lot of the theme of conversations that I had with the VMware ecosystem, doing more with less. So that's definitely on everyone's minds. >> Right, and that's what my company is fully focused on. AISERA is all about AI automation. How can we solve your thing? We want to be solving customer problem. We are like your automation engine for your enterprise, right? We are a platform of platform. That's why I like the Supercloud. I can run AISERA as a platform on top of Supercloud. >> Excellent. >> Wow! If only we had more time! I know that you guys could really dig into Supercloud and take it even further. So you have to come back, Muddu. >> I will. >> He always wants to come back. >> I will be back. >> He's on the team. He's has contributed to the open source effort of Supercloud. Thank you. >> Yes. >> All right, thank you so much for joining John and me and kind of breaking down your vision on VMware Broadcom and the future. Next step, we've got to get some customers on here. I really want to understand what the customer experience is going to be like, but we'll have to another segment on that one. >> We will do that. Thank you, Lisa, for having me. >> My pleasure. >> John. >> Thank you very much. Thank you. >> For our guest and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching "theCUBE" live on day three of our coverage of VMware Explore. We'll be back after a short break. (upbeat corporate music)

>>Good afternoon, everyone. And welcome back to the Cube's day two coverage of VMware Explorer, 2022 live from San Francisco. Lisa Martin, here with Dave. Valante good to be sitting next to you, sir. >>Yeah, the big >>Set and we're very excited to be welcoming back. One of our esteemed alumni Sanja poin joins us, the CEO and president of cohesive. Nice to see >>You. Thank you, Lisa. Thank you, Dave. It's great to meet with you all the time and the new sort of setting here, but >>First time we've been in west, is that right? We've been in north. We've been in south. We've been in Las Vegas, right. But west >>Nice. Well, I mean, it's also good to be back with live shows with absolutely, you know, after sort of the two or three or high. And it was a hard time for the whole world, but I'm kind of driving a little bit of adrenaline just being here with people. So >>You've also got some adrenaline, sorry, Dave. Yeah, you're good because you are new in the role at cohesive. You wrote a great blog that you are identified. The four reasons I came to cohesive. Tell the audience, just give 'em a little bit of a teaser about that. >>Yeah, I think you should all read it. You can Google and, and Google find that article. I talked about the people Mohi is a fantastic founder. You know, he was the, you know, the architect of the Google file system. And you know, one of the senior Google executives who was on my board, bill Corrin said one of the smartest engineers. He was the true father of hyperconverge infrastructure. A lot of the code of Nutanix. He wrote, I consider him really the father of that technology, which brought computer storage. And when he took that same idea of bringing compute to secondary storage, which is really what made the scale out architect unique. And we were at your super cloud event talking about that, Dave. Yeah. Right. So it's a people I really got to respect his smarts, his integrity and the genius, what he is done. >>I think the customer base, I called a couple of customers. One of them, a fortune 100 customer. I, I can't tell you who it was, but a very important customer. I've known him. He said, I haven't seen tech like this since VMware, 20 years ago, Amazon 10 years ago. And now COER so that's special league. We're winning very much in the enterprise and that type of segment, the partners, you know, we have HPE, Cisco as investors, Amazon's an investors. So, you know, and then finally the opportunity, I think this whole area of data management and data security now with threats, like ransomware big opportunity. >>Sure. Okay. So when you were number two at VMware, you would come on and say, we'd love all our partners and of course, okay. So you know, a little bit about how to work with, with VMware. So, so when you now think about the partnership between cohesive and VMware, what are the things that you're gonna stress to your constituents on the VMware side to convince them that Hey, partnering with cohesive is gonna gonna drive more value for customers, you know, put your thumb on the scale a little bit. You know, you gotta, you gotta unfair advantage somewhat, but you should use it. So what's the narrative gonna be like? >>Yeah. I think listen with VMware and Amazon, that probably their top two partners, Dave, you know, like one of the first calls I made was to Raghu and he knew about this decision before. That's the level of trust I have in him. I even called Michael Dell, you know, before I made the decision, there's a little bit of an overlap with Dell, but it's really small compared to the overlap, the potential with Dell hardware that we could compliment. And then I called four CEOs. I was, as I was making this decision, Andy Jassy at Amazon, he was formerly AWS CEO sat Nadela at Microsoft Thomas cor at Google and Arvin Christian at IBM to say, I'm thinking about this making decision. They are many of the mentors and friends to me. So I believe in an ecosystem. And you know, even Chuck Robbins, who the CEO of Cisco is an investor, I texted him and said, Hey, finally, we can be friends. >>It was harder to us to be friends with Cisco, given the overlap of NEX. So I have a big tent towards everybody in our ecosystem with VMware. I think the simple answer is there's no overlap okay. With, with the kind of the primary storage capabilities with VSAN. And by the same thing with Nutanix, we will be friends and, and extend that to be the best data protection solution. But given also what we could do with security, I think this is gonna go a lot further. And then it's all about meet in the field. We have common partners. I think, you know, sort of the narrative I talked about in that blog is just like snowflake was replacing Terada and ServiceNow replace remedy and CrowdStrike, replacing Symantec, we're replacing legacy vendors. We are viewed as the modern solution cloud optimized for private and public cloud. We can help you and make VMware and VSAN and VCF very relevant to that part of the data management and data security continuum, which I think could enhance VMware. And by the way, the same thing into the public cloud. So most of the places where we're being successful is clearly withs, but increasingly there's this discussion also about playing into the cloud. So I think both with VMware and Amazon, and of course the other partners in the hyperscaler service, storage, networking place and security, we have some big plans. >>How, how much do you see this? How do you see this multi-cloud narrative that we're hearing here from, from VMware evolving? How much of an opportunity is it? How are customers, you know, we heard about cloud chaos yesterday at the keynote, are customers, do they, do they admit that there's cloud chaos? Some probably do some probably don't how much of an opportunity is that for cohesive, >>It's tremendous opportunity. And I think that's why you need a Switzerland type player in this space to be successful. And you know, and you can't explicitly rule out the fact that the big guys get into this space, but I think it's, if you're gonna back up office 365 or what they call now, Microsoft 365 into AWS or Google workspace into Azure or Salesforce into one of those clouds, you need a Switzerland player it's gonna be out. And in many cases, if you're gonna back up data or you protect that data into AWS banks need a second copy of that either on premise or Azure. So it's very hard, even if they have their own native data protection for them to be dual cloud. So I think a multi-cloud story and the fact that there's at least three big vendors of cloud in, in the us, you know, one in China, if include Alibaba creates a Switzerland opportunity for us, that could be fairly big. >>And I think, you know, what we have to do is make sure while we'll be optimized, our preferred cloud is AWS. Our control plane runs there. We can't take an all in AWS stack with the control plane and the data planes at AWS to Walmart. So what I've explained to both Microsoft and AWS is that data plane will need to be multicloud. So I can go to an a Walmart and say, I can back up your data into Azure if you choose to, but the control, plane's still gonna be an AWS, same thing with Google. Maybe they have another account. That's very Google centric. So that's how we're gonna play the, the control plane will be in AWS. We'll optimize it there, but the data plane will be multi-cloud. >>Yeah. And that's what Mo had explained at Supercloud. You know, and I talked to, he really helped me hone in on the deployment models. Yes. Where, where, where the cohesive deployment model is instantiating that technology stack into each cloud region and each cloud, which gives you latency advantages and other advantages >>And single code based same platform, >>And then bringing it, tying it together with a unified, you know, interface. That was he, he was, he was key. In fact, I, I wrote about it recently and, and gave him and the other 20, >>Quite a bit in that session. Yeah. So he went deep with you. I >>Mean, with Mohi, when you get a guy who developed a Google file system, you know, who can technically say, okay, this is technically correct or no, Dave, your way off be so I that's why I had to >>Go. I, I thought you did a great job in that interview because you probed him pretty deep and I'm glad we could do that together with him next time. Well, maybe do that together here too, but it was really helpful. He's the, he's the, he's the key reason I'm here. >>So you say data management is ripe for disrupt disruption. Talk about that. You talked about this Switzerland effect. That sounds to me like a massive differentiator for cohesive. Why is data management right. For disruption and why is cohesive the right partner to do it? >>Yeah, I think, listen, everyone in this sort of data protection backup from years ago have been saying the S Switzerland argument 18 years ago, I was a at Veras an executive there. We used the Switzerland argument, but what's changed is the cloud. And what's changed as a threat vector in security. That's, what's changed. And in that the proposition of a, a Switzerland player has just become more magnified because you didn't have a sales force or Workday service now then, but now you do, you didn't have multi-cloud. You had hardware vendors, you know, Dell, HPE sun at the time. IBM, it's now Lenovo. So that heterogeneity of, of on-premise service, storage, networking, HyperCloud, and, and the apps world has gotten more and more diverse. And I think you really need scale out architectures. Every one of the legacy players were not built with scale out architectures. >>If you take that fundamental notion of bringing compute to storage, you could almost paralyze. Imagine you could paralyze backup recovery and bring so much scale and speed that, and that's what Mo invented. So he took that idea of how he had invented and built Nutanix and applied that to secondary storage. So now everything gets faster and cheaper at scale. And that's a disruptive technology ally. What snowflake did to ator? I mean, the advantage of snowflake is when you took that same concept data, warehousing is not a new concept it's existed from since Ralph Kimble and bill Inman and the people who are fathers of data warehousing, they took that to Webscale. And in that came a disruptive force toter data, right? And snowflake. And then of course now data bricks and big query, similar things. So we're doing the same thing. We just have to showcase the customers, which we do. And when large customers see that they're replacing the legacy solutions, I have a lot of respect for legacy solutions, but at some point in time of a solution was invented in 1995 or 2000, 2005. It's right. For change. >>So you use snowflake as an example, Frank sluman doesn't like when I say playbook, cuz I says, Dave, I'm a situational. See you no playbook, but there are patterns here. And one of the things he did is to your point go after, you know, Terra data with a better data warehouse, simplify scale, et cetera. And now he's, he's a constructing a Tam expansion strategy, same way he did at ServiceNow. And I, you guys following a similar pattern. Okay. You get your foot in the door. Let's face it. I mean, a lot of this started with, you know, just straight back. Okay, great. Now it's extending into data management now extending to multi-cloud that's like concentric circles in a Tam expansion strategy. How, how do as, as a CEO, that's part of your job is Tam expansion. >>So yeah, I think the way to think about the Tam is, I mean, people say it's 20, 30 billion, but let me tell you how you can piece it apart in size, Dave and Lisa number one, I estimate there's probably about 10 to 20 exabytes of data managed by these legacy players of on-prem stores that they back up to. Okay. So you add them all up in the market shares that they respectively are. And by the way, at the peak, the biggest of these companies got to 2 billion and then shrunk. That was Verto when I was there in 2004, 2 billion, every one of them is small and they stopped growing. You look at the IDC charts. Many of them are shrinking. We are the fastest growing in the last two years, but I estimate there's about 20 exabytes of data that collectively among the legacy players, that's either gonna stay on prem or move to the cloud. Okay. So the opportunity as they replace one of those legacy tools with us is first off to manage that 20 X bike cheaper, faster with the Webscale, a glass or for the cloud guys, we could tip that into the cloud. Okay. >>But you can't stop there. >>Okay. No, we are not doing just back recovery. Right. We have a platform that can do files. We can do test dev analytics and now security. Okay. That data is potentially at a risk, not so much in the past, but for ransomware, right? How do we classify that? How do we govern that data? How do we run potential? You know, the same way you did antivirus some kind of XDR algorithms on the data to potentially not just catch the recovery process, which is after fact, but maybe the predictive act of before to know, Hey, there's somebody loitering around this data. So if I'm basically managing in the exabytes of data and I can proactively tell you what, this is, one CIO described this very simply to me a few weeks ago that I, and she said, I have 3000 applications, okay. I wanna be prepared for a black Swan event, except it's not a nine 11 planes hitting the, the buildings. >>It is an extortion event. And I want to know when that happens, which of my 3000 apps I recover within one hour within one day within one week, no lay than one month. Okay. And I don't wanna pay the bad guys of penny. That's what we do. So that's security discussions. We didn't have that discussion in 2004 when I was at another company, because we were talking about flood floods and earthquakes as a disaster recovery. Now you have a lot more security opportunity to be able to describe that. And that's a boardroom discussion. She needs to have that >>Digital risk. O O okay, go ahead please. I >>Was just gonna say, ransomware attack happens every what? One, every 11, 9, 11 seconds. >>And the dollar amount are going up, you know, dollar of what? >>Yep. And, and when you pay the ransom, you don't always get your data back. So you that's >>Not. And listen, there's always an ethical component. Should you do it or not do it? If you, if you don't do it and you're threatened, they may have left an Easter egg there. Listen, I, I feel very fortunate that I've been doing a lot in security, right? I mean, I built the business at, at, at VMware. We got it to over a billion I'm on the board of sneak. I've been doing security and then at SAP ran. So I know a lot about security. So what we do in security and the ecosystem that supports us in security, we will have a very carefully crafted stay tuned. Next three weeks months, you'll see us really rolling out a very kind of disciplined aspect, but we're not gonna pivot this company and become a cyber security company. Some others in our space have done that. I think that's not who we are. We are a data management and a data security company. We're not just a pure security company. We're doing both. And we do it well, intelligently, thoughtfully security is gonna be built into our platform, not bolted on, okay. And there'll be certain security things that we do organically. There's gonna be a lot that we do through partnerships, >>This security market that's coming to you. You don't have to go claim that you're now a security vendor, right? The market very naturally saying, wow, a comprehensive security strategy has to incorporate a data protection strategy and a recovery, you know, and the things we've talking about, Mount ransomware, I want to ask you, you know, I've been around a long time, longer than you actually Sanjay. So, but you you've, you've seen a lot. You look incredibly, >>Thank you. That's all good. Oh, >>Shocks. So the market, I've never seen a market like this, right? I okay. After the.com crash, we said, and I know you can't talk about IPO. That's not what I'm talking about, but everything was bad after that. Right. 2008, 2000, everything was bad. I've never seen a market. That's half full, half empty, you know, snowflake beats and raises the stock, goes through the roof. Dev if it, the area announced today, Mongo, DB, beat and Ray, that things getting crushed. And, and after market never seen anything like this. It's so fed, driven and, and hard to protect. And, and of course, I know it's a marathon, you know, it's not a sprint, but have you ever seen anything like this? >>Listen, I walk worked through 18 quarters as COO of VMware. You seen, I've seen public quarters there and you know, was very fortunate. Thanks to the team. I don't think I missed my numbers in 18 quarters except maybe once close. But we, it was, it's tough. Being a public company. Officer of the company is tough. I did that also at SAP. So the journey from 10 to 20 billion at SAP, the journey from six to 12 at VMware, that I was able to be fortunate. It's humbling because you, you really, you know, we used to have this, we do the earnings call and then we kind of ask ourselves, what, what do you think the stock price was gonna be a day and a half later? And we'd all take bets as to wear this. I think you just basically, as a, as a sea level executive, you try to build a culture of beaten, raise, beaten, raise, beaten, raise, and you wanna set expectations in a way that you're not setting them up for failure. >>And you know, it's you, there's, Dave's a wonderful CEO as is Frank movement. So it's hard for me to dissect. And sometimes the market are fickle on some small piece of it. But I think also the, when I, I encourage people say, take the long term view. When you take the long term view, you're not bothered about the ups and downs. If you're building a great company over the length of time, now it will be very clear over the arc of many, many quarters that you're business is trouble. If you're starting to see a decay in growth. And like, for example, when you start to see a growth, start to decay significantly by five, 10 percentage points, okay, there's something macro going on at this company. And that's what you won't avoid. But these, you know, ups and downs, my view is like, if you've got both Mongo, DIA and snowflake are fantastic companies, they're CEOs of people I respect. They've actually a kind of an, a, you know, advisor to us as a company, you knows mot very well. So we respect him, respect Frank, and you, there have been other quarters where Frank's, you know, the snowflakes had a down result after that. So you build a long term and they are on the right side of history, snowflake, and both of them in terms of being a modern cloud relevant in the case of MongoDB open source to data technology, that's, you know, winning, I, we would like to be like them one day >>As, as the new CEO of cohesive, what are you most, what are you most anxious about? And what are you most excited about? >>I think, listen, you know, you know, everything starts with the employee. You, I always believe I wrote my first memo to all employees. There was an article in Harvard business review called service profit chains that had a seminal impact on my leadership, which is when they studied companies who had been consistently profitable over a long period of time. They found that not just did those companies serve their customers well, but behind happy engaged customers were happy, engaged employees. So I always believe you start with the employee and you ensure that they're engaged, not just recruiting new employees. You know, I put on a tweet today, we're hiring reps and engineers. That's okay. But retaining. So I wanna start with ensuring that everybody, sometimes we have to make some unfortunate decisions with employees. We've, we've got a part company with, but if we can keep the best and brightest retained first, then of course, you know, recruiting machine, I'm trying to recruit the best and brightest to this company, people all over the place. >>I want to get them here. It's been, so I mean, heartwarming to come to world and just see people from all walks, kind of giving me hugs. I feel incredibly blessed. And then, you know, after employees, it's customers and partners, I feel like the tech is in really good hands. I don't have to worry about that. Cuz Mo it's in charge. He's got this thing. I can go to bed knowing that he's gonna keep innovating the future. Maybe in some of the companies, I would worried about the tech innovation piece, but most doing a great job there. I can kind of leave that in his cap of hands, but employees, customers, partners, that's kind of what I'm focused on. None of them are for me, like a keep up at night, but they're are opportunities, right? And sometimes there's somebody you're trying to salvage to make sure or somebody you're trying to convince to join. >>But you know, customers, I love pursuing customers. I love the win. I hate to lose. So fortune 1000 global, 2000 companies, small companies, big companies, I wanna win every one of 'em and it's not, it's not like, I mean, I know all these CEOs in my competitors. I texted him the day I joined and said, listen, I'll compete, honorably, whatever have you, but it's like Kobe and LeBron Kobe's passed away now. So maybe it's step Curry. LeBron, whoever your favorite athlete is you put your best on the court and you win. And that's how I am. That's nothing I've known no other gear than to put my best on the court and win, but do it honorably. It should not be the one that you're doing it. Unethically. You're doing it personally. You're not calling people's names. You're competing honorably. And when you win the team celebrates, it's not a victory for me, it's a victory for the team. >>I always think I'm glad that you brought out the employee experience and we're almost out of time, but I always think the employee experience and the customer experience are inextricably linked. This employees have to be empowered. They have to have the data that they need to do their job so that they can deliver to the customer. You can't do one without the other. >>That's so true. I mean, I, it's my belief. And I've talked also on this show and others about servant leadership. You know, one of my favorite poems is Brenda NA Tago. I went to bed in life. I dreamt that life was joy. I woke up and realized life was service. I acted in service was joy. So when you have a leadership model, which is it's about, I mean, there's lots of layers between me and the individual contributor, but I really care about that sales rep and the engineer. That's the leaf level of the organization. What can I get obstacle outta their way? I love skipping levels and going write that sales rep let's go and crack this deal. You know? So you have that mindset. Yeah. I mean, you, you empower, you invert the pyramid and you realize the power is at the leaf level of an organization. >>So that's what I'm trying to do. It's a little easier to do it with 2000 people than I dunno, either 20, 20, 2000 people or 35,000 reported me at VMware. And I mean a similar number at SAP, which was even bigger, but you can shape this. Now we are, we're not a startup anymore. We're a mid-size company. We'll see. Maybe along the way, there's an IP on the path. We'll wait for that. When it comes, it's a milestone. It's not the destination. So we do that and we are, we, I told people we are gonna build this green company. Cohesive is gonna be a great company like VMware one day, like Amazon. And there's always a day of early beginnings, but we have to work harder. This is kind of like the, you know, eight year old version of your kid, as opposed to the 18 year old version of the kid. And you gotta work a little harder. So I love it. Yeah. >>Good luck. Awesome. Thank you too. Best of luck. Congratulations on the role, it sounds like there's a tremendous amount of adrenaline, a momentum carrying you forward Sanja. We always appreciate having thank >>You for having in your show. >>Thank you. Our pleasure, Lisa. Thank you for Sanjay poin and Dave ante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube live from VMware Explorer, 2022, stick around our next guest. Join us momentarily.

(upbeat music) >> Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome back to the CUBE's day one coverage of VMware Explorer 22, live from San Francisco. I'm Lisa Martin. Dave Nicholson is back with me. Welcome back to the set. We're pleased to welcome William Bell as our next guest. The executive vice president of products at Phoenix NAP. William, welcome to the CUBE. Welcome back to the CUBE. >> Thank you, thank you so much. Happy to be here. >> Talk to us a little, and the audience a little bit about Phoenix NAP. What is it that you guys do? Your history, mission, value prop, all that good stuff. >> Absolutely, yeah. So we're global infrastructures as a service company, foundationally, we are trying to build pure play infrastructure as a service, so that customers that want to adopt cloud infrastructure but maybe don't want to adopt platform as a service and really just, you know, program themselves to a specific API can have that cloud adoption without that vendor lock in of a specific platform service. And we're doing this in 17 regions around the globe today. Yeah, so it's just flexible, easy. That's where we're at. >> I like flexible and easy. >> Flexible and easy. >> You guys started back in Phoenix. Hence the name. Talk to us a little bit about the evolution of the company in the last decade. >> Yeah, 100%. We built a data center in Phoenix expecting that we could build the centralized network access point of Phoenix, Arizona. And I am super proud to say that we've done that. 41 carriers, all three hyperscalers in the building today, getting ready to expand. However, that's not the whole story, right. And what a lot of people don't know is we founded an infrastructure as a service company, it's called Secured Servers no longer exists, but we founded that company the same time and we built it up kind of sidecar to Phoenix NAP and then we merged all of those together to form this kind of global infrastructure platform that customers can consume. >> Talk to us about the relationship with VMware. Obviously, here we are at VMware Explore. There's about seven... We're hearing 7,000 to 10,000 people here. People are ready to be back to hear from VMware and it's partner ecosystem. >> Yeah, I mean, I think that we have this huge history with VMware that maybe a lot of people don't know. We were one of the first six, the SPPs in 2011 at the end of the original kind of data center, whatever, vCloud data center infrastructure thing that they did. And so early on, there was only 10 of us, 11 of us. And most of those names don't exist anymore. We're talking, Terramark, Blue Lock, some of these guys. Good companies, but they've been bought or whatnot. And here's plucky Phoenix NAP, still, you know, offering great VMware cloud services for customers around the globe. >> What are some of the big trends that you're seeing in the market today where customers are in this multi-cloud world? You know this... I love the theme of this event. The center of the multi-cloud universe. Customers are in that by default. How do you help them navigate that and really unlock the value of it? >> Yeah, I think for us, it's about helping customers understand what applications belong where. We're very, very big believers both in the right home. But if you drill down on that right home for right applicator or right application, right home, it's more about the infrastructure choices that you're making for that application leads to just super exciting optimizations, right. If you, as an example, have a large media streaming business and you park it in a public called hyperscaler and you just eat those egress fees, like it's a big deal. Right? And there are other ways to do that, right. If you need a... If your application needs to scale from zero cores to 15,000 cores for an hour, you know, there are hyperscalers for that, right. And people need to learn how to make that choice. Right app, right home, right infrastructure. And that's kind of what we help them do. >> It's interesting that you mentioned the concept of being a pure play in infrastructure as a service. >> Yeah. >> At some point in the past, people would have argued that infrastructure as a service only exists because SaaS isn't good enough yet. In other words, if there's a good enough SaaS application then you don't want IaaS because who wants to mess around with IaaS, infrastructures as a service. Do you have customers who look at what they're developing as so much a core of what their value proposition is that they want to own it? I mean, is that a driving factor? >> I would challenge to say that we're seeing almost every enterprise become a SaaS company. And when that transition happens, SaaS companies actually care a lot about the cost basis, efficiency, uptime of their application. And ultimately, while they don't want to be in the data center business anymore, it doesn't mean that they want to pay someone else to do things that they feel wholly competent in doing. And we're seeing this exciting transition of open source technologies, open source platforms becoming good enough that they don't actually have to manage a lot of things. They can do it in software and the hardware's kind of abstracted. But that actually, I would say is a boon for infrastructure as a service, as an independent thing. It's been minimized over the years, right. People talk about hyperscalers as being cloud infrastructure companies and they're not. They're cloud platform companies, right. And the infrastructure is high quality. It is easy to access and scale, right, but it's ultimately, if you're just using one of those hyperscalers for that infrastructure, building VMs and doing a bunch of things yourself, you're not getting the value out of that hyperscaler. And ultimately that infrastructure's very expensive if you look at it that way. >> So it's interesting because if you look at what infrastructure consists of, which is hardware and software-- >> Yeah. >> People who said, eh, IaaS as is just a bridge to a bright SaaS future, people also will make the argument that the hardware doesn't matter anymore. I imagine that you are doing a lot of optimization with both hardware and stuff like the VMware cloud stack that you deploy as a VCPP partner. >> Absolutely, yeah. >> So to talk about that. >> Absolutely. >> I mean, you agree. I mean, if I were to just pose a question to you, does hardware still matter? Does infrastructure still matter? >> Way more than people think. >> Well, there you go. So what are you doing in that arena, specifically with VCPP? >> Yeah, absolutely. And so I think a good example of that, right, so last VMworld in person, 2019, we showcased a piece of technology that we had been working with Intel on for about two years at the time which was Intel persistent memory DC, persistent memory. Right? And we launched the first VMware cloud offering to have Intel DC persistent memory onboard. So that customers with the VMs that needed that technology could leverage it with the integrations in vSphere 6.7 and ultimately in seven more, right. Now I do think that was maybe a swing and a miss technology potentially but we're going to see it come back. And that specialized infrastructure deployment is a big part of our business, right. Helping people identify, you know, this application, if you'd have this accelerator, this piece of infrastructure, this quality of network can be better, faster, cheaper, right. That kind of mentality of optimization matters a lot. And VMware plays a critical role in that because it still gives the customer the operational excellence that they need without having to do everything themselves, right. And our customers rely on that a lot from VMware to get that whole story, operationally efficient, easy to manage, automated. All those things make a lot of difference to our VMware customers. >> Speaking of customers, what are you hearing, if anything, from customers, VMware customers that are your joint customers about the Broadcom acquisition? Are they excited about it? Are they concerned about it? And how do you talk about that? >> Yeah, I mean, I think that everyone that's in the infrastructure business is doing business with Broadcom, all right. And we've had so many businesses that we've been engaged with that have ultimately been a acquiree. I can say that this one feels different only in the size of the acquisition. VMware carries so much weight. VMware's brand exceeds Broadcom's brand, in my opinion. And I think ultimately, I don't know anything that's not public, right-- >> Well, they rebranded. By the way, on the point of brand, they rebranded their software business, VMware. >> Yeah. I mean, that's what I was going to say. That was the word on the street. I don't know if there's beneficial. Is that a-- >> Well, that's been-- >> But that's the word, right? >> That's what they've said. Well, but when a Avago acquired Broadcom they said, "we'll call ourselves Broadcom." >> Absolutely. Why wouldn't you? >> So yeah. So I imagine that what's been reported is likely-- >> Likely. Yeah, I 100% agree. I think that makes a ton of sense and we can start to see even more great intellectual property in software. That's where, you know, all of these businesses, CA, Symantec, VMware and all of the acquisitions that VMware has made, it's a great software intellectual property platform and they're going to be able to get so much more value out of the leadership team that VMware has here, is going to make a world of difference to the Broadcom software team. Yeah, so I'm very excited, you know. >> It's a lot of announcements this morning, a lot of technical product announcements. What did you hear in that excites you about the evolution of VMware as well as the partnership and the value in it for your customers? >> You know, one of our fastest growing parts of our business is this metal as a service infrastructure business and doing very, very... Using very specific technologies to do very interesting things, makes a big difference in our world and for our customers. So anything that's like smartNICs, disaggregated hypervisor, accelerators as a first class citizen in VMware, all that stuff makes the Phoenix NAP story better. So I'm super excited about that, right. Yeah. >> Well, it's interesting because VCPP is not a term that people who are not insiders know of. What they know is that there are services available in hyperscale cloud providers where you can deploy VMware. Well, you know, VMware cloud stack. Well, you can deploy those VMware cloud stacks with you. >> Absolutely. >> In exactly the same manner. However, to your point, all of this talk about disaggregation of CPU, GPU, DPU, I would argue with it, you're in a better position to deploy that in an agile way than a hyperscale cloud provider would be and foremost, I'm not trying to-- >> No, yeah. >> I'm not angling for a job in your PR department. >> Come on in. >> But the idea that when you start talking about something like metal as a service, as an adjunct or adjacent to a standard deployment of a VMware cloud, it makes a lot of sense. >> Yeah. >> Because there are people who can't do everything within the confines of what the STDC-- >> Yes. >> Consists of. >> Absolutely. >> So, I mean... Am I on the right track? >> No, you are 100% hitting it. I think that that point you made about agility to deliver new technology, right, is a key moment in our kind of delivery every single year, right. As a new chip comes out, Intel chip or Accelerator or something like that, we are likely going to be first to market by six months potentially and possibly ever. Persistent memory never launched in public cloud in any capacity but we have customers running on it today that is providing extreme value for their business, right. When, you know, the discreet GPUs coming from the just announced Flex series GPU from Intel, you're likely not going to see them in public cloud hyperscalers quickly, right. Over time, absolutely. We'll have them day one. Isolate came out, you could get it in our metal as a service platform the morning it launched on demand, right. Those types of agility points, they're not... Because they're hyperscale by nature. If they can't hyperscale it, they're not doing it, right. And I think that that is a very key point. Now, as it comes in towards VMware, we're driving this intersection of building that VCF or VMware cloud foundation which is going to be a key point of the VMware ecosystem. As you see this transition to core based licensing and some of the other things that have been talked about, VMware cloud foundation is going to be the stack that they expect their customers to adopt and deliver. And the fact that we can automate that, deliver it instantaneously in a couple of hours to hardware that you don't need to own, into networks you don't need to manage, but yet you are still in charge, keys to the kingdom, ready to go, just like you're doing it in your own data center, that's the message that we're driving for. >> Can you share a customer example that you think really just shines a big flashlight on the value that you guys are delivering? >> We definitely, you know, we had the pleasure of working with Make-A-Wish foundation for the last seven years. And ultimately, you know, we feel very compelled that every time we help them do something unique, different or what not, save money, that money's going into helping some child that's in need, right. And so we've done so many things together. VMware has stepped up as the plate over the years, done so many things with them. We've sponsored stuff. We've done grants, we've done all kinds of things. The other thing I would say is we are helping the City of Hope and Translational Genomics Research Institute on sequencing single cell RNA so that they can fight COVID, so that they can build cure, well, not cures but build therapies for colon cancer and things like that. And so I think that, you know, this is a driving light for us internally is helping people through efficiency and change. And that's what we're looking for. We're looking for more stories like that. We're looking... If you have a need, we're looking for people to come to us and say, "this is my problem. This is what this looks like. Let us see if we can find a solution that's a little bit different, a little bit out of the box and doesn't have to change your business dramatically." Yeah. >> And who are you talking to within customers? Is this a C level conversation? >> Yeah, I mean, I would say that we would love it to be... I think most companies would love to have that, you know, CFO conversation with every single customer. I would say VPs of engineering, increasingly, especially as we become more API centric, those guys are driving a lot of those purchasing decisions. Five years ago, I would've said director of IT, like director of IT. Now today, it's like VP of engineering, usually software oriented folks looking to deliver some type of application on top of a piece of hardware or in a cloud, right. And those guys are, you know, I guess, that's even another point, VMware's doing so much work on the API side that they don't get any credit for. Terraform, Ansible, all these integrations, VMware doing so much in this area and they just don't get any credit for it ever, right. It's just like, VMware's the dinosaur and they're just not, right. But that's the thing that people think of today because of the hype of the hyperscaler. I think that's... Yeah. >> When you're in customer conversations, maybe with prospects, are you seeing more customers that have gone all in on a hyperscaler and are having issues and coming to you guys saying help, this is getting way too expensive? >> Yeah, I think it's the unexpected growth problem or even the expected growth problem where they just thought it would be okay, but they've suffered some type of competitive pressure that they've had to optimize for and they just didn't really expect it. And so, I think that increasingly we are finding organizations that quickly adopted public cloud. If they did a full digital transformation of their business and then transformation of their applications, a lot of them now feel very locked in because every application is just reliant on x hyperscaler forever, or they didn't transform anything and they just migrated and parked it. And the bills that are coming in are just like, whoa like, how is that possible? We are typically never recommending get out of the public cloud. We are just... It's not... If I say the right home for the right application, it's by default saying that there are right applications for hyperscalers. Parking your VMware environment that you just migrated to a hyperscaler, not the right application. You know, I would love you to be with me but if you want to do that, at least go to VMC on AWS or go to OCVS or GCVE or any of those. If that's going to go with a Google or an Amazon and that's just the mandate and you're going to move your applications, don't just move them into native. Move them into a VMware solution and then if you still want to make that journey, that full transformation, go ahead and make it. I would still argue that that's not the most efficient way but, you know, if you're going to do anything, don't just dump it all into cloud, the native hyperscaler stuff. >> Good advice. >> So what do typical implementations look like with you guys when you're moving on premises environments into going back to the VCPP, STDC model? >> Absolutely. Do you have people moving and then transforming and re-platforming? What does that look like? What's the typical-- >> Yeah. I mean, I do not believe that anybody has fully made up their mind if exactly where they want to be. I'm only going to be in this cloud. It's an in the close story, right. And so even when we get customers, you know, we firmly believe that the right place to just pick up and migrate is to a VCPP cloud. Better cost effectiveness, typically better technology, you know service, right. Better service, right. We've been part of VMware for 12 years. We love the technology behind VMC's, now AWS is fantastic, but it's still just infrastructure without any help at all right, right. They're going to be there to support their technology but they're not going to help you with the other stuff. We can do some of those things. And if it's not us, it's another VCPP provider that has that expertise that you might need. So yes, we help you quickly, easily migrate everything to a VMware cloud. And then you have a decision point to make. You're happy where you are, you are leveraging public cloud for a certain applications. You're leveraging VMware cloud offerings for the standard applications that you've been running for years. Do you transform them? Do you keep them? What do you do? All those decisions can be made later. But I stress that repurchasing all your hardware again, staying inside your colo and doing everything yourself, it is for me, it's like a company telling me they're going to build a data center for themselves, single tenant data center. Like no one's doing that, right. But there are more options out there than just I'm going to go to Azure, right. Think about it. Take the time, assess the landscape. And VMware cloud providers as a whole, all 17,000 of us or whatever across the globe, people don't know that group of individuals of the companies is the third or fourth potentially largest cloud in the world. Right? That's the power of the VMware cloud provider ecosystem. >> Last question for you as we wrap up here. Where can the audience go to learn more about Phoenix NAP and really start test driving with you guys? >> Absolutely. Well, if you come to phoenixnap.com, I guarantee you that we will re-target you and you can click on a banner later if you don't want to stay there. (Lisa laughs) But yeah, phoenixnap.com has all the information that you need. We also put out tons of helpful content. So if you're looking for anything technology oriented and you're just, "I want to upgrade to Ubuntu," you're likely going to end up on a phoenixnap.com website looking for that. And then you can find out more about what we do. >> Awesome, phoenixnap.com. William, thank you very much for joining Dave and me, talking about what you guys are doing, what you're enabling customers to achieve as the world continues to evolve at a very dynamic pace. We appreciate your insights. >> Absolutely, thank you so much >> For our guest and Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching the CUBE live from VMware Explorer, 2022. Dave and I will be joined by a guest consultant for our keynote wrap at the end of the day in just a few minutes. So stick around. (upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston bringing you data driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> After a two year hiatus, AWS re:Inforce is back on as an in-person event in Boston next week. Like the All-Star break in baseball, re:Inforce gives us an opportunity to evaluate the cyber security market overall, the state of cloud security and cross cloud security and more specifically what AWS is up to in the sector. Welcome to this week's Wikibon cube insights powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis we'll share our view of what's changed since our last cyber update in May. We'll look at the macro environment, how it's impacting cyber security plays in the market, what the ETR data tells us and what to expect at next week's AWS re:Inforce. We start this week with a checkpoint from Breaking Analysis contributor and stock trader Chip Simonton. We asked for his assessment of the market generally in cyber stocks specifically. So we'll summarize right here. We've kind of moved on from a narrative of the sky is falling to one where the glass is half empty you know, and before today's big selloff it was looking more and more like glass half full. The SNAP miss has dragged down many of the big names that comprise the major indices. You know, earning season as always brings heightened interest and this time we're seeing many cross currents. It starts as usual with the banks and the money centers. With the exception of JP Morgan the numbers were pretty good according to Simonton. Investment banks were not so great with Morgan and Goldman missing estimates but in general, pretty positive outlooks. But the market also shrugged off IBM's growth. And of course, social media because of SNAP is getting hammered today. The question is no longer recession or not but rather how deep the recession will be. And today's PMI data was the weakest since the start of the pandemic. Bond yields continue to weaken and there's a growing consensus that Fed tightening may be over after September as commodity prices weaken. Now gas prices of course are still high but they've come down. Tesla, Nokia and AT&T all indicated that supply issues were getting better which is also going to help with inflation. So it's no shock that the NASDAQ has done pretty well as beaten down as tech stocks started to look oversold you know, despite today's sell off. But AT&T and Verizon, they blamed their misses in part on people not paying their bills on time. SNAP's huge miss even after guiding lower and then refusing to offer future guidance took that stock down nearly 40% today and other social media stocks are off on sympathy. Meta and Google were off, you know, over 7% at midday. I think at one point hit 14% down and Google, Meta and Twitter have all said they're freezing new hires. So we're starting to see according to Simonton for the first time in a long time, the lower income, younger generation really feeling the pinch of inflation. Along of course with struggling families that have to choose food and shelter over discretionary spend. Now back to the NASDAQ for a moment. As we've been reporting back in mid-June and NASDAQ was off nearly 33% year to date and has since rallied. It's now down about 25% year to date as of midday today. But as I say, it had been, you know much deeper back in early June. But it's broken that downward trend that we talked about where the highs are actually lower and the lows are lower. That's started to change for now anyway. We'll see if it holds. But chip stocks, software stocks, and of course the cyber names have broken those down trends and have been trading above their 50 day moving averages for the first time in around four months. And again, according to Simonton, we'll see if that holds. If it does, that's a positive sign. Now remember on June 24th, we recorded a Breaking Analysis and talked about Qualcomm trading at a 12 X multiple with an implied 15% growth rate. On that day the stock was 124 and it surpassed 155 earlier this month. That was a really good call by Simonton. So looking at some of the cyber players here SailPoint is of course the anomaly with the Thoma Bravo 7 billion acquisition of the company holding that stock up. But the Bug ETF of basket of cyber stocks has definitely improved. When we last reported on cyber in May, CrowdStrike was off 23% year to date. It's now off 4%. Palo Alto has held steadily. Okta is still underperforming its peers as it works through the fallout from the breach and the ingestion of its Auth0 acquisition. Meanwhile, Zscaler and SentinelOne, those high flyers are still well off year to date, with Ping Identity and CyberArk not getting hit as hard as their valuations hadn't run up as much. But virtually all these tech stocks generally in cyber issues specifically, they've been breaking their down trend. So it will now come down to earnings guidance in the coming months. But the SNAP reaction is quite stunning. I mean, the environment is slowing, we know that. Ad spending gets cut in that type of market, we know that too. So it shouldn't be a huge surprise to anyone but as Chip Simonton says, this shows that sellers are still in control here. So it's going to take a little while to work through that despite the positive signs that we're seeing. Okay. We also turned to our friend Eric Bradley from ETR who follows these markets quite closely. He frequently interviews CISOs on his program, on his round tables. So we asked to get his take and here's what ETR is saying. Again, as we've reported while CIOs and IT buyers have tempered spending expectations since December and early January when they called for an 8% plus spending growth, they're still expecting a six to seven percent uptick in spend this year. So that's pretty good. Security remains the number one priority and also is the highest ranked sector in the ETR data set when you measure in terms of pervasiveness in the study. Within security endpoint detection and extended detection and response along with identity and privileged account management are the sub-sectors with the most spending velocity. And when you exclude Microsoft which is just dominant across the board in so many sectors, CrowdStrike has taken over the number one spot in terms of spending momentum in ETR surveys with CyberArk and Tanium showing very strong as well. Okta has seen a big dropoff in net score from 54% last survey to 45% in July as customers maybe put a pause on new Okta adoptions. That clearly shows in the survey. We'll talk about that in a moment. Look Okta still elevated in terms of spending momentum, but it doesn't have the dominant leadership position it once held in spend velocity. Year on year, according to ETR, Tenable and Elastic are seeing the biggest jumps in spending momentum, with SailPoint, Tanium, Veronis, CrowdStrike and Zscaler seeing the biggest jump in new adoptions since the last survey. Now on the downside, SonicWall, Symantec, Trellic which is McAfee, Barracuda and TrendMicro are seeing the highest percentage of defections and replacements. Let's take a deeper look at what the ETR data tells us about the cybersecurity space. This is a popular view that we like to share with net score or spending momentum on the Y axis and overlap or pervasiveness in the data on the X axis. It's a measure of presence in the data set we used to call it market share. With the data, the dot positions, you see that little inserted table, that's how the dots are plotted. And it's important to note that this data is filtered for firms with at least 100 Ns in the survey. That's why some of the other ones that we mentioned might have dropped off. The red dotted line at 40% that indicates highly elevated spending momentum and there are several firms above that mark including of course, Microsoft, which is literally off the charts in both dimensions in the upper right. It's quite incredible actually. But for the rest of the pack, CrowdStrike has now taken back its number one net score position in the ETR survey. And CyberArk and Okta and Zscaler, CloudFlare and Auth0 now Okta through the acquisition, are all above the 40% mark. You can stare at the data at your leisure but I'll just point out, make three quick points. First Palo Alto continues to impress and as steady as she goes. Two, it's a very crowded market still and it's complicated space. And three there's lots of spending in different pockets. This market has too many tools and will continue to consolidate. Now I'd like to drill into a couple of firms net scores and pick out some of the pure plays that are leading the way. This series of charts shows the net score or spending velocity or granularity for Okta, CrowdStrike, Zscaler and CyberArk. Four of the top pure plays in the ETR survey that also have over a hundred responses. Now the colors represent the following. Bright red is defections. We're leaving the platform. The pink is we're spending less, meaning we're spending 6% or worse. The gray is flat spend plus or minus 5%. The forest green is spending more, i.e, 6% or more and the lime green is we're adding the platform new. That red dotted line at the 40% net score mark is the same elevated level that we like to talk about. All four are above that target. Now that blue line you see there is net score. The yellow line is pervasiveness in the data. The data shown in each bar goes back 10 surveys all the way back to January 2020. First I want to call out that all four again are seeing down trends in spending momentum with the whole market. That's that blue line. They're seeing that this quarter, again, the market is off overall. Everybody is kind of seeing that down trend for the most part. Very few exceptions. Okta is being hurt by fewer new additions which is why we highlighted in red, that red dotted area, that square that we put there in the upper right of that Okta bar. That lime green, new ads are off as well. And the gray for Okta, flat spending is noticeably up. So it feels like people are pausing a bit and taking a breather for Okta. And as we said earlier, perhaps with the breach earlier this year and the ingestion of Auth0 acquisition the company is seeing some friction in its business. Now, having said that, you can see Okta's yellow line or presence in the data set, continues to grow. So it's a good proxy from market presence. So Okta remains a leader in identity. So again, I'll let you stare at the data if you want at your leisure, but despite some concerns on declining momentum, notice this very little red at these companies when it comes to the ETR survey data. Now one more data slide which brings us to our four star cyber firms. We started a tradition a few years ago where we sorted the ETR data by net score. That's the left hand side of this graphic. And we sorted by shared end or presence in the data set. That's the right hand side. And again, we filtered by companies with at least 100 N and oh, by the way we've excluded Microsoft just to level the playing field. The red dotted line signifies the top 10. If a company cracks the top 10 in both spending momentum and presence, we give them four stars. So Palo Alto, CrowdStrike, Okta, Fortinet and Zscaler all made the cut this time. Now, as we pointed out in May if you combined Auth0 with Okta, they jumped to the number two on the right hand chart in terms of presence. And they would lead the pure plays there although it would bring down Okta's net score somewhat, as you can see, Auth0's net score is lower than Okta's. So when you combine them it would drag that down a little bit but it would give them bigger presence in the data set. Now, the other point we'll make is that Proofpoint and Splunk both dropped off the four star list this time as they both saw marked declines in net score or spending velocity. They both got four stars last quarter. Okay. We're going to close on what to expect at re:Inforce this coming week. Re:Inforce, if you don't know, is AWS's security event. They first held it in Boston back in 2019. It's dedicated to cloud security. The past two years has been virtual and they announced that reinvent that it would take place in Houston in June, which everybody said, that's crazy. Who wants to go to Houston in June and turns out nobody did so they postponed the event, thankfully. And so now they're back in Boston, starting on Monday. Not that it's going to be much cooler in Boston. Anyway, Steven Schmidt had been the face of AWS security at all these previous events as the Chief Information Security Officer. Now he's dropped the I from his title and is now the Chief Security Officer at Amazon. So he went with Jesse to the mothership. Presumably he dropped the I because he deals with physical security now too, like at the warehouses. Not that he didn't have to worry about physical security at the AWS data centers. I don't know. Anyway, he and CJ Moses who is now the new CISO at AWS will be keynoting along with some others including MongoDB's Chief Information Security Officer. So that should be interesting. Now, if you've been following AWS you'll know they like to break things down into, you know, a couple of security categories. Identity, detection and response, data protection slash privacy slash GRC which is governance, risk and compliance, and we would expect a lot more talk this year on container security. So you're going to hear also product updates and they like to talk about how they're adding value to services and try to help, they try to help customers understand how to apply services. Things like GuardDuty, which is their threat detection that has machine learning in it. They'll talk about Security Hub, which centralizes views and alerts and automates security checks. They have a service called Detective which does root cause analysis, and they have tools to mitigate denial of service attacks. And they'll talk about security in Nitro which isolates a lot of the hardware resources. This whole idea of, you know, confidential computing which is, you know, AWS will point out it's kind of become a buzzword. They take it really seriously. I think others do as well, like Arm. We've talked about that on previous Breaking Analysis. And again, you're going to hear something on container security because it's the hottest thing going right now and because AWS really still serves developers and really that's what they're trying to do. They're trying to enable developers to design security in but you're also going to hear a lot of best practice advice from AWS i.e, they'll share the AWS dogfooding playbooks with you for their own security practices. AWS like all good security practitioners, understand that the keys to a successful security strategy and implementation don't start with the technology, rather they're about the methods and practices that you apply to solve security threats and a top to bottom cultural approach to security awareness, designing security into systems, that's really where the developers come in, and training for continuous improvements. So you're going to get heavy doses of really strong best practices and guidance and you know, some good preaching. You're also going to hear and see a lot of partners. They'll be very visible at re:Inforce. AWS is all about ecosystem enablement and AWS is going to host close to a hundred security partners at the event. This is key because AWS doesn't do it all. Interestingly, they don't even show up in the ETR security taxonomy, right? They just sort of imply that it's built in there even though they have a lot of security tooling. So they have to apply the shared responsibility model not only with customers but partners as well. They need an ecosystem to fill gaps and provide deeper problem solving with more mature and deeper security tooling. And you're going to hear a lot of positivity around how great cloud security is and how it can be done well. But the truth is this stuff is still incredibly complicated and challenging for CISOs and practitioners who are understaffed when it comes to top talent. Now, finally, theCUBE will be at re:Inforce in force. John Furry and I will be hosting two days of broadcast so please do stop by if you're in Boston and say hello. We'll have a little chat, we'll share some data and we'll share our overall impressions of the event, the market, what we're seeing, what we're learning, what we're worried about in this dynamic space. Okay. That's it for today. Thanks for watching. Thanks to Alex Myerson, who is on production and manages the podcast. Kristin Martin and Cheryl Knight, they helped get the word out on social and in our newsletters and Rob Hoff is our Editor in Chief over at siliconangle.com. You did some great editing. Thank you all. Remember all these episodes they're available, this podcast. Wherever you listen, all you do is search Breaking Analysis podcast. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. You can get in touch with me by emailing avid.vellante@siliconangle.com or DM me @dvellante, or comment on my LinkedIn post and please do check out etr.ai for the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching and we'll see you in Boston next week if you're there or next time on Breaking Analysis (soft music)

>>The cube presents HPE discover 2022 brought to you by HPE. >>Welcome back to the Cube's coverage. We're wrapping up day two, John furrier and Dave ante. We got some friends and colleagues, longtime friends, Crawford Del Pret is the president of IDC. Matt Eastwood is the senior vice president of infrastructure and cloud guys. Thanks for coming on spending time. Great to you guys. >>That's fun to do it. Awesome. >>Cravin I want to ask you, I, I think this correct me if I'm wrong, but this was your first physical directions as, as president. Is that true or did you do one in 2019? >>Uh, no, we did one in 20. We did, we did one in 20. I was president at the time and then, and then everything started, >>Well, how was directions this year? You must have been stoked to get back together. Yeah, >>It was great. I mean, it was actually pretty emotional, you know, it's, it's a community, right? I mean, we have a lot of customers that have been coming to that event for a long, long time and to stand up on the stage and look out and see people, you know, getting a little bit emotional and a lot of hugs and a lot of bringing people together. And this year in Boston, we were the first event really of any size that kind of came back. And when I kind of didn't see that coming in terms of how people, how ready people were to be together. Cause >>When did you did it April >>In Boston? Yeah, we did it March in March. Yeah, it was, it was, it was, it was a game day decision. I mean, we were, we had negotiated it, we were going back and forth and then I kind of made the call at the last minute, say, let's go and do it. And in Santa Clara, I felt like we were kind of opening up the crypt at the convention center. I mean, all the production people said, you know what? You guys were really the first event to be back. And attendance was really strong. You know, we, we, we got over a thousand. It was, it was really good. >>Good. It's always a fun when I was there. It was, it's a big deal. You guys prepare for it. Yeah. Some new faces up on the stage. Yeah. So, so Matt, um, you've been doing the circuit. I take it like, like all top analysts, super busy. Right. This is kind of end of the spring. I mean, I know it's summer, right. That's right. But, um, how do you look at, at discover relative some, some of the other events you've been at? >>So I think if you go back to what Crawford was just talking about our event in March, I mean, March was sort of the, the reopening and there was, I think people just felt so happy to be, to be back out there. You still get a little bit at, at these events. I mean, cuz for each, each company it's their first time back at it, but I think we're starting to get down what these events are gonna feel like going forward. Um, and it, I mean, there's good energy here. There's been a good attendance. I think the, the interest in getting back live and having face to face meetings is clearly strong. >>Yeah. I mean, this definitely shows that hybrids, the steady state, both events cloud. Yeah. Virtualization remotes. So what are you guys seeing with that hybrid mode? Just from a workforce, certainly people excited to get back together, but it's gonna continue. You're starting to see that digital piece. How is that impacting some of the, some of the customers you're tracking, who's winning and who's losing, coming out of the pandemic. What's the big picture look like? >>Yeah. I mean, if you, if you take a look at hybrid work, um, people are testing many, many, many different models. And I think as we move from a pandemic to an em, we're gonna have just waves and waves and waves of people needing that flexibility for a lot of different reasons, whether they have, uh, you know, preexisting conditions, whether they're just not comfortable, whether they have people who can't be vaccinated at home. So I think we're gonna be in this hybrid work for a long, long time. I do think though that we are gonna transition back into some kind of a normal, um, and I, and I think the big difference is that I think leaders back in the day, a long time ago, when people weren't coming into work, it was kind of like, oh, I know nothing's going on there. People aren't getting worked. And I think we're over that stage. Yeah. I think we're now into a stage where we know people can be productive. We know people can effectively work from home and now we're into the reason to be in the office. And the reason to be in the office is that collaboration, it's that mentoring it's that, you know, think about your 25 year old self. Do you wanna be staring at a windshield all day long and not kind of building those relationships? People want face to face, it's difficult. They want face >>To face and I would, and you guys had a great culture and it's a young culture. How are you handling it as an executive in terms of, is there a policy for hybrid or >>Yeah, so, so, so at IDC, what we did is we're in a pilot period and we've kind of said that the summertime is gonna be a pilot period and we've asked people, we're actually serving shocker, we're >>Serving, >>But we're, but we're, but, but we're actually asking people to work with their manager on what works for them. And then we'll come up with, you know, whether you are in, out of the office worker, which will be less than two days a hybrid worker, which will be three days or, uh, in, in the office, which is more than three days a week. And you know, we all know there's, there's, there's limitation, there's, there's, there's variability in that, but that's kind of what we're shooting for. And we'd like to be able to have that in place in the fall. >>Are you pretty much there? >>Yeah, I am. I, I am there three days a week. I I, Mondays and Fridays, unless, >>Because you got the CEO radius, right? Yeah. >><laugh>, <laugh> >>The same way I'm in the office, the smaller, smaller office. But so, uh, let's talk a little bit about the, the numbers we were chatting earlier, trying to squint through you guys are, you know, obviously the gold standard for what the market does, what happened in, you know, during the pandemic, what happened in 2021 and what do you expect to happen in, in 2022 in terms of it spending growth? >>Yeah. So this is, this is a crazy time, right? We've never seen this. You and I have a long history of, uh, of tracking this. So we saw in, in, in, in 2020, the market decelerated dramatically, um, the GDP went down to a negative like it always does in these cases, it was, you know, probably negative six in that, in that, in that kind of range for the first time, since I've been tracking it, which goes back over 30 years, tech didn't go negative tech went to about just under 3%. And then as we went to 2021, we saw, you know, everything kind of snap back, we saw tech go up to about 11% growth. And then of course we saw, you know, GDP come back to about a 4%, you know, ki kind of range growth. Now what's I think the story there is that companies and you saw this anecdotally everywhere companies leaned into tech, uh, company. >>You know, I think, you know, Matt, you have a great statistic that, you know, 80% of companies used COVID as their point to pivot into digital transformation, right. And to invest in a different way. And so what we saw now is that tech is now where I think companies need to focus. They need to invest in tech. They need to make people more productive with tech and it played out in the numbers now. So this year what's fascinating is we're looking at two Fastly different markets. We've got gasoline at $7 a gallon. We've got that affecting food prices. Uh, interesting fun fact recently it now costs over $1,000 to fill an 18 Wheeler. All right. Based on, I mean this just kind of can't continue. So you think about it, don't put the boat >>In the wall. Yeah. Yeah. >>Good, good, good, good luck. It's good. Yeah, exactly. <laugh> so a family has kind of this bag of money, right? And that bag of money goes up by maybe three, 4% every year, depending upon earnings. So that is sort of sloshing around. So if food and fuel and rent is taking up more gadgets and consumer tech are not, you know, you're gonna use that iPhone a little longer. You're gonna use that Android phone a little longer. You're gonna use that TV a little longer. So consumer tech is getting crushed, you know, really it's very, very, and you saw it immediately and ad spending, you've seen it in meta. You've seen it in Facebook. Consumer tech is doing very, very it's tough enterprise tech. We haven't been in the office for two and a half years. We haven't upgraded whether that be campus wifi, whether that be, uh, servers, whether that be, uh, commercial PCs, as much as we would have. So enterprise tech, we're seeing double digit order rates. We're seeing strong, strong demand. Um, we have combined that with a component shortage and you're seeing some enterprise companies with a quarter of backlog. I mean, that's, you know, really unheard at higher >>Prices, which >>Also, and therefore that drives that >>Drives. It shouldn't be that way. If there's a shortage of chips, it shouldn't be that way, >>But it is, but it is, but it is. And then you look at software and we saw this, you know, we've seen this in previous cycles, but we really saw it in the COVID downturn where, uh, in software, the stickiness of SaaS means that you just, you're not gonna take that stuff out. So the, the second half of last year we saw double digit rates in software surprise. We're seeing high single digit revenue growth in software now, so that we think is gonna sustain, which means that overall it demand. We expect to be between five and 6% this year. Okay, fine. We have a war going on. We have, you know, potentially, uh, a recession. We think if we do, it'll be with a lower case, R maybe you see a banded down to maybe 4% growth, but it's gonna grow this. >>Is it, is it both the structural change of the disruption of COVID plus the digital transformation yeah. Together? Or is it, >>I, I think you make a great point. Um, I, I, I think that we are entering a new era for tech. I think that, you know, Andrew's famous wall street journal oped 10 years ago, software is even world was absolutely correct. And now we're finding that software is, is eing into every nook and cranny people have to invest. They, they know disruptors are coming around every single corner. And if I'm not leaning into digital transformation, I'm dead. So >>The number of players in tech is, is growing, >>Cuz there's well, the number of players in tech number >>Industry's coming >>In. Yeah. The industry's coming in. So I think the interesting dynamic you're gonna see there is now we have high interest rates. Yeah. Which means that the price of funding these companies and buying them and putting data on is gonna get higher and higher, which means that I think you could, you could see another wave of consolidation. Mm-hmm <affirmative> because tech large install based tech companies are saying, oh, you know what? I like that now >>4 0 9 S are being reset too. That's another point. >>Yeah. I mean, so if you think about this, this transformation, right. So it's all about apps, absent data and differentiating and absent data. What the, the big winner the last couple years was cloud. And I would just say that if this is the first potential recession that we're talking about, where the cloud service providers. So I think a cloud as an operating model, not necessarily a destination, but for these cloud service providers, they've actually never experienced a slowdown. So how, and, and if you think about the numbers, 30% of, of the typical it budget is now quote, unquote cloud and 30% of all expenditures are it related. So there's a lot of exposure there. And I think you're gonna see a lot of, a lot of focus on how we can rationalize some of those investments. >>Well, that's a great point. I want to just double click on that. So yeah, the cloud did well during the pandemic. We saw that with SAS, have you guys tracked like the Tams of what got pulled forward? So the bit, a big discussion about something that pulled forward because of the pandemic, um, like zoom, for instance, obviously everyone's using zoom. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Was there fake Tams? There was one, uh, couple analysts who were pointing out that some companies were hot during the pandemic will go away that that Tam doesn't really exist, but there's some that got pulled forward early. That's where the growth is. So is there a, is there a line between the, I call fake Tam or pulled forward TA that was only for the pandemic situationally, um, devices might be like virtual event, virtual event. Software was one, I know Hoppin got laid a lot of layoffs. And so that was kind of gone coming, coming and going. And you got SAS which got pulled forward. Yep. And it's not going away, but it's >>Sustaining. Yeah. Yeah. But it's, but, but it's sustaining, um, you know, I definitely think there was a, there was a lot of spending that absolutely got pulled forward. And I think it's really about CEO's ability to control expectations and to kind of message what it, what it looks like. Um, you know, I think I look, I, I, I think virtual event platforms probably have a role. I think you can, you can definitely, you know, raise your margins in the event, business, significantly using those platforms. There's a role for them. But if you were out there thinking that this thing was gonna continue, then you know, that that was unrealistic, you know, Dave, to, to your point on devices, I'm not necessarily, you know. Sure. I think, I think we definitely got ahead of our expectations and things like consumer PCs, those things will go back to historical growth >>Rates. Yeah. I mean, you got the install base is pretty young right now, but I think the one way to look at it too, is there was some technical debt brought in because people didn't necessarily expect that we'd be moving to a permanent hybrid state two years ago. So now we have to actually invest on both. We have to make, create a little bit more permanency around the hybrid world. And then also like Crawford's talking about the permanency of, of having an office and having people work in, in multiple modes. Yeah. It actually requires investment in both the office. And >>Also, so you're saying operationally, you gotta run the company and do the digital transformation to level up the hybrid. >>Yeah. Yeah. Just the way people work. Right. So, so, you know, you basically have to, I mean, even for like us internally, Crawford was saying, we're experimenting with what works for us. My team before the pandemic was like one third virtual. Now it's two third virtual, which means that all of our internal meetings are gonna be on, on teams or zoom. Right. Yeah. They're not gonna necessarily be, Hey, just coming to the office today, cuz two thirds of people aren't in the Boston area. >>Right. Matt, you said if you see cloud as an operating model, not necessarily a place. I remember when you were out, I was in the, on the, on the, on the zoom when, when first met Adam Celski yeah. Um, he said, you were asking him about, you know, the, the on-prem guys and he's like, nah, it's not cloud. And he kind of was very dismissive of it. Yeah. Yeah. I wanna get your take on, you know, what we're seeing with as Azure service GreenLake, apex, Cisco's got their version. IBM. Fewer is doing it. Is that cloud. >>I think if it's, I, I don't think all of it is by default. I think it is. If I actually think what HPE is doing is cloud, because it's really about how you present the services and how you allow customers to engage with the platform. So they're actually creating a cloud model. I think a lot of people get lost in the transition from, you know, CapEx to OPEX and the financing element of this. But the reality is what HPE is doing and they're sort of setting the standard. I think for the industry here is actually setting up what I would consider a cloud model. >>Well, in the early days of, of GreenLake, for sure it was more of a financial, you >>Know, it was kind of bespoke, right. But now you've got 70 services. And so you can, you can build that out. But >>You know, we were talking to Keith Townsend right after the keynote and we were sort of UN unpacking it a little bit. And I, I asked the question, you know, if you, if you had to pin this in terms of AWS's maturity, where are we? And the consensus was 2014 console filling, is that fair or unfair? >>Oh, that's a good question. I mean, um, I think it's, well, clouds come a long way, right? So it'd be, I, I, I think 20, fourteen's probably a little bit too far back because >>You have more modern tools I Kubernetes is. Yeah. >>And, but you also have, I would say the market still getting to a point of, of, of readiness and in terms of buying this way. So if you think about the HP's kind of strategy around edge, the core platform as a, as a service, you know, we're all big believers in edge and the apps follow the data and the data's being created in new locations and you gotta put the infrastructure there. And for an end user, there's a lot of risk there because they don't know how to actually plan for capacity at the edge. So they're gonna look to offload that, but this is a long term play to actually, uh, build out and deploy at the edge. It's not gonna happen tomorrow. It's a five, 10 year play. >>Yeah. I mean, I like the operating model. I'd agree with you, Matt, that if it's, if it's cloud operations, DevSecOps and all that, all that jazz it's cloud it's cloud operating and, and, and public cloud is a public cloud hyperscaler on premise. And the storage folks were presented. That's a single pane of glass. That's old school concepts, but cloud based. Yep. Shipping hardwares, auto figures. Yeah. That's the kind of consumption they're going for now. I like it. Then I, then they got the partner led thing is the partner piece. How do you guys see that? Because if I'm a partner, there's two things, wait a minute, am I at bottleneck to the direct self-service? Or is that an enabler to get more cash, to make more money? If I'm a partner. Cause you see what Essentia's doing with what they do with Amazon and Deloitte and et C. Yeah. You know, it's interesting, right? Like they've a channel partner, I'm making more cash. >>Yeah. I mean, well, and those channel partners are all in transition too. They're trying to yeah. Right. Figure out. Right, right. Are they, you know, what are their managed services gonna look like? You know, what kind of applications are they gonna stand up? They're they're not gonna just be >>Reselling, bought a big house in a boat. The box is not selling. I wanna ask you guys about growth because you know, the big three cloud, big four growing pick a number, I dunno, 30, 35% revenue big. And like you said, it's 30% of the business now. I think Dell's growing double digits. I don't know how much of that is sustainable. A lot of that is PCs, but still strong growth. Yep. I think Cisco has promised 9% >>In, in that. Right, right. >>About that. Something like that. I think IBM Arvin is at 6%. Yep. And I think HPE has said, Hey, we're gonna do three to 4%. Right. Which is so really sort of lagging and which I think a lot of people in wall street is like, okay, well that's not necessarily so compelling. Right. What does HPE have to do to double that growth? Or even triple that growth. >>Yeah. So they're gonna need, so, so obviously you're right. I mean, being able to show growth is Tanem out to this company getting, you know, more attention, more heat from, from investors. I think that they're rightly pointing to the triple digit growth that they've seen on green lake. I think if you look at the trailing, you know, 12 month bookings, you got over, you know, 7 billion, which means that in a year, you're gonna have a significant portion of the company is as a service. And you're gonna see that revenue that's rat being, you know, recognized over a series of months. So I think that this is sort of the classic SAS trough that we've seen applied to an infrastructure company where you're basically have to kind of be in the desert for a long time. But if they can, I think the most important number for HPE right now is that GreenLake booking snow. >>And if you look at that number and you see that number, you know, rapidly come down, which it hasn't, I mean off a very large number, you're still in triple digits. They will ultimately start to show revenue growth, um, in the business. And I think the one thing people are missing about HPE is there aren't, there are a lot of companies that want to build a platform, but they're small and nobody cares. And nobody let's say they throw a party and nobody comes. HP has such a significant installed base that if they do build a platform, they can attract partners to that platform. What I mean by that is partners that deliver services on GreenLake that they're not delivering. They have the girth to really start to change an industry and change the way stuff is being built. And that's the be they're making. And frankly, they are showing progress in that direction. >>So I buy that. But the one thing that concerns me is they kind of hide the ball on services. Right. And I, and I worry about that is like, is this a services kind of just, you know, same wine, new bottle or, >>Or, yeah. So, so I, I, I would argue that it's not about hiding the ball. It's about eliminating confusion of the marketplace. This is the company that bought EDS only to spin it off <laugh>. Okay. And so you don't wanna have a situation where you're getting back into services. >>Yeah. They're the only one >>They're product, not the only ones who does, I mean, look at the way IBM used to count and still >>I get it. I get it. But I think it's, it's really about clarity of mission. Well, I point next they are in the Ts business, absolutely. Point of it. It's important prop >>Drive for them at the top. Right. The global 50 say there's still a lot of uniqueness in what they want to buy. So there's definitely a lot of bespoke kind of delivery. That's still happening there. The real promise here is when you get into the global 2000 and yeah. And can start them to getting them to consume very standardized offers. And then the margins are, are healthy >>And they got they're what? Below 30, 33, 30 3%. I think 34% last quarter gross margin. Yeah. That that's solid. Just compare that with Dell is, I don't know. They're happy with 20, 21% of correct. You get that, which is, you know, I I'll come back. Go ahead. I want, I wanna ask >>Guys. No, I wanna, I wanna just, he said one thing I like, which was, I think he nailed it. They have such, um, big install base. They have a great channel. They know how to use it. Right. That's a real asset. Yeah. And Microsoft, I remember when their stock was trading at 26 when Baltimore was CEO. Yep. What they did with no, they had office and windows, so a little bit different. Yep. But similar strategy, leverage our install base, bring something up to them. That's what you're kind of connecting the >>Absolutely. You have this velocity, uh, machine with a significant girth that you can now move to a new model. They move that to a new model. To Matt's point. They lead the industry, they change the way large swath the customers buy and you will see it in steady revenue growth over time. Okay. So I just in that, well, >>So your point is the focus and there the right it's the right focus. And I would agree what's >>What's the other move. What's their other move, >>The problem. Triple digit booking growth off a number that gets bigger >>Inspired. Okay. >>Whats what's the scoreboard. Okay. Now they're go at the growth. That's the scoreboard. What are the signals? Are you looking at on the scoreboard Crawford and Matt in terms of success? What are the benchmarks? Is it ecosystem growth, number of services, triple growth. Yeah. What's the, what are some of the metrics that you guys are gonna be watching and we should be watching? >>Yeah. I mean, I dunno if >>You wanna jump in, I mean, I think ecosystem's really critical. Yeah. You want to, you want to have well and, and you need to sell both ways like HPE needs to be selling their technology on other cloud providers and vice versa. You need to have the VMs of the world on, you know, offering services on your platform and, and kind of capturing some, some motion off that. I think that's pretty critical. The channel definitely. I mean, you have to help and what you're gonna see happen there is there will be channel partners that succeed in transforming and succeeding and there'll be a lot that go away and that some, some of that's, uh, generational there'll be people that just kind of age outta the system and, and just go home. >>Yeah. Yeah. So I would argue it's, it's, it's, it's gonna be, uh, bookings growth rate. It's gonna be retention rate of the, of, of, of the customers, uh, that they have. And then it's gonna be that, that, um, you know, ultimately you're gonna see revenue, um, growth, and which is that revenue growth is gonna have to be correlated to the booking's growth for green lake cross. >>What's the Achilles heel on, on HPE. If you had to do the SWAT, what's the, what's the w for HPE that they really need to pay >>Attention to. I mean, they, they need to continue their relentless focus on cost, particularly in the, in the core compute, you know, segment they need to be, they need to be able to be as cost effective as possible while the higher profit dollars associated with GreenLake and other services come in and then increase the overall operating margin and gross margin >>Picture for the, I mean, I think the biggest thing is they just have, they have to continue the motion that they've been on. Right. And they've been consistent about that. Mm-hmm, <affirmative> what you see where others have, have kind of slipped up is when you go to, to customers and you present the, the OPEX as a service and the traditional CapEx side by side, and the customers put in this position of trying to detangle what's in that OPEX service, you don't wanna do that obviously. And, and HP has not done that, but we've seen others kind of slip up. And, but >>A lot of companies still wanna buy CapEx. Right. Absolutely liquid. And, and I think, >>But you shouldn't do a, you shouldn't do that bake off by putting those two offers out. You should basically ascertain what they want to do. >>What's kind of what Dell does. Right. Hey, how, what do you want? We got this, we got >>This on one hand, we got this, the, we got that, right. Uh, the two hand sales rep, no, this CapEx. Thing's interesting. And if you're Amazon and Azure and, and GCP, what are they thinking right now? Cause remember what, four years ago outpost was launched, which essentially hardware. Yeah. This is cloud operating model. Yep. Yeah. They're essentially bringing outpost. This is what they got basically is Amazon and Azure, like, is this ABL on the radar for them? How would you, what, what are they thinking in your mind if we're on, if we're in their office, in their brain trust, are they laughing? Are they like saying, oh, they're scared. Is this real threat >>Opportunity? I, I, I mean, I wouldn't say they're laughing at all. I, I would say they're probably discounting a little bit and saying, okay, fine. You know, that's a strategy that a traditional hardware company is moving to. But I think if you look underneath the covers, you know, two years ago it was, you know, pretty basic stuff they were offering. But now when you start getting into some, you know, HPC is a service, you start getting into data fabric, you start getting into some of the more, um, sophisticated services that they're offering. And, and I think what's interesting about HP. What my, my take is that they're not gonna go after the 250 services the Amazon's offering, they're gonna basically have a portfolio of services that really focus on the core use cases of their infrastructure set. And, and I think one of the danger things, one, one of the, one of the red flags would be, if they start going way up the stack and wanting to offer the entire application stack, that would be like a big flashing warning sign, cuz it's not their sweet spot. It's not, not what they have. >>So machine learning, machine learning and quantum, okay. One you can argue might be up the stack machine learning quantum should be in their wheelhouse. >>I would argue machine learning is not up the stack because what they would focus on is inference. They'd focus on learning. If they came out and said, machine learning all the way up to the, you know, what a, what, what a drug discovery company needs to do. >>So they're bringing it down. >>Yeah. Yeah. Well, no, I think they're focusing on that middle layer, right? That, that, that data layer. And I think that helping companies manage their data make more sense outta their data structure, their data that's core to what they wanna do. >>I, I feel as though what they're doing now is table stakes. Honestly, I do. I do feel like, okay, Hey finally, you know, I say the same thing about apex, you >>Know, we finally got, >>It's like, okay guys, the >>Party. Great. Welcome to the, >>But the one thing I would just say about, about AWS and the other big clouds is whether they might be a little dismissive of what's truly gonna happen at the edge. I think the traditional OEMs that are transforming are really betting on that edge, being a huge play and a huge differentiator for them where the public cloud obviously have their own bets there. But I think they were pretty dismissive initially about how big that went. >>I don't, and I don't think anybody's really figured out the edge yet. >>Well, that's an, it's a battleground. That's what he's saying. I think you're >>Saying, but on the ecosystem, I wanna say up the stack, I think it's the ecosystem. That's gotta fill that out. You gotta see more governance tools and catalogs and AI tools and, and >>It immediately goes more, it goes more vertical when you go edge, you're gonna have different conversations and >>They're >>Lacking. Yeah. And they, but they're in there though. They're in the verticals. HP's in the, yeah, >>For sure. But they gotta build out an ego. Like you walk around here, the data, the number of data companies here. I mean, Starburst is here. I'm actually impressed that Starburst is here. Cause I think they're a forward thinking company. I wanna see that times a hundred. Right. I mean, that's >>You see HP's in all the verticals. That's I think the point here, >>So they should be able to attract that ecosystem and build that, that flywheel that's the, that's the hallmark of a cloud that marketplace. >>Yeah, it is. But I think there's a, again, I go back to, they really gotta stay focused on that infrastructure and data management. Yeah. >>But they'll be focused on that, but, but their ecosystem, >>Their ecosystem will then take it up from there. And I think that's the next stage >>And that ecosystem's gotta include OT players and communications technologies players as well. Right. Because that stuff gets kind of sucked up in that, in that edge play. Do >>You feel like HPE has a, has a leg up on that or like a little, a little bit of a lead or is it pretty much, you know, even raced right now? >>I think they've, I think the big infrastructure companies have all had OEM businesses and they've all played there. It's it's, it's also helping those OT players actually convert their own needs into more of a software play and, and not so much of >>Physical. You've been, you've been following and you guys both have been following HP and HPE for years. They've been on the edge for a long time. I've been focused on this edge. Yeah. Now they might not have the product traction that's right. Or they might not develop as fast, but industrial OT and IOT they've been talking about it, focused on it. I think Amazon was mostly like, okay, we gotta get to the edge and like the enterprise. And, and I think HP's got a leg up in my opinion on that. Well, I question is can they execute? >>Yeah. I mean, PTC was here years ago on stage talking >>About, but I mean, you think about, if you think about the edge, right. I mean, I would argue one of the best acquisitions this company ever did was Aruba. Right. I mean, it basically changed the whole conversation of the edge changed the whole conversation. >>If >>Became GreenLake, it was GreenLake. >>Well, it became a big department. They gave a big, but, but, but I mean, you know, I mean they, they, they went after going selling edge line servers and frankly it's very difficult to gain traction there. Yeah. Aruba, huge area. And I think the March announcement was when they brought Aruba management into. Yeah. Yeah. >>Totally. >>Last question. Love >>That. >>What are you guys saying about the, the Broadcom VMware acquisition? What's the, what are the implications for the ecosystem for companies like HPE and just generally for the it business? >>Yeah. So >>You start. Yeah, sure. I'll start, I'll start there. So look, you know, we've, you know, spent some time, uh, going through it spent some time, you know, speaking, uh, to the, to the, to the folks involved and, and, and I gotta tell you, I think this is a really interesting moment for Broadcom. This is Broadcom's opportunity to basically build a different kind of a conversation with developers to, uh, try to invest in. I mean, just for perspective, right? These numbers may not be exact. And I know a dollar is not a dollar, but in 2001, anybody, remember what HP paid for? Compact >>8,000,000,020, >>So 25 billion, 25 billion. Wow. VMware just got sold for 61 billion. Wow. Okay. Unbill dollars. Okay. That gives you a perspective. No, again, I know a dollar is not a dollar 2000. >>It's still big numbers, >>2022. So having said that, if you just did it to, to, to basically build your DCF model and say, okay, over this amount of time, I'll pay you this. And I'll take the money out of this period of time, which is what people have criticized them for. I think that's a little shortsighted. I, yeah, I think this is Broadcom's opportunity to invest in that product and really try to figure out how to get a seat at the table in software and pivot their company to enterprise software in a different way. They have to prove that they're willing to do that. And then frankly, that they can develop the skills to do that over time. But I do believe this is a, a different, this is a pivot point. This is not >>CA this is not CA >>It's not CA >>In my, in my mind, it can't be CA they would, they would destroy too much. Now you and I, Dave had some, had some conversations on Twitter. I, I don't think it's the step up to them sort of thinking differently about semiconductor, dying, doing some custom semi I, I don't think that's. Yeah. I agree with that. Yeah. I think I, I think this is really about, I got two aspiration for them pivoting the company. They could >>Justify the >>Price to the, getting a seat at the adults table in software is, >>Well, if, if Broadcom has been squeezing their supplies, we all hear the scutle butt. Yeah. If they're squeezing, they can use VMware to justify the prices. Yeah. Maybe use that hostage. And that installed base. That's kind of Mike conspiracy. >>I think they've told us what they're gonna do. >><laugh> I do. >>Maybe it's not like C what's your conspiracy theory like Symantec, but what >>Do you think? Well, I mean, there's still, I mean, so VMware there's really nobody that can do all the things that VMware does say. So really impossible for an enterprise to just rip 'em out. But obviously you can, you can sour people's taste and you can very much influence the direction they head in with the collection of, of providers. One thing, interesting thing here is, was the 37% of VMware's revenues sold through Dell. So there's, there's lots of dependencies. It's not, it's not as simple as I think John, you you're right. You can't just pull the CA playbook out and rerun it here. This is a lot more complex. Yeah. It's a lot more volume of, of, of distribution, but a fair amount of VMware's install >>Base Dell's influence is still there basically >>Is in the mid-market. It's not, it's not something that they're gonna touch directly. >>You think about what VMware did. I mean, they kept adding new businesses, buying new businesses. I mean, is security business gonna stay >>Networking security, I think are interesting. >>Same >>Customers >>Over and over. Haven't done anything. VMware has the same customers. What new >>Customers. So imagine simplifying VMware. Right, right. Becomes a different equation. It's really interesting. And to your point, yeah. I mean, I think Broadcom is, I mean, Tom Crouse knows how to run a business. >>Yeah. He knows how to run a business. He's gonna, I, I think it's gonna be, you know, it's gonna be an efficient business. It's gonna be a well run business, but I think it's a pivot point for >>Broadcom. It's amazing to me, Broadcom sells to HPE. They sell it to Dell and they've got a market cap. That's 10 X, you know? Yes. Yeah. All we gotta go guys. Awesome. Great conversation guys. >>A lot. Thanks for having us on. >>Okay. Listen, uh, day two is a, is a wrap. We'll be here tomorrow, all day. Dave ante, John furrier, Lisa Martin, Lisa. Hope you're feeling okay. We'll see you tomorrow. Thanks for watching the cube, your leader in enterprise tech, live coverage.

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> In the words of my colleague CTO David Nicholson, Broadcom buys old cars, not to restore them to their original luster and beauty. Nope. They buy classic cars to extract the platinum that's inside the catalytic converter and monetize that. Broadcom's planned 61 billion acquisition of VMware will mark yet another new era and chapter for the virtualization pioneer, a mere seven months after finally getting spun out as an independent company by Dell. For VMware, this means a dramatically different operating model with financial performance and shareholder value creation as the dominant and perhaps the sole agenda item. For customers, it will mean a more focused portfolio, less aspirational vision pitches, and most certainly higher prices. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we'll share data, opinions and customer insights about this blockbuster deal and forecast the future of VMware, Broadcom and the broader ecosystem. Let's first look at the key deal points, it's been well covered in the press. But just for the record, $61 billion in a 50/50 cash and stock deal, resulting in a blended price of $138 per share, which is a 44% premium to the unaffected price, i.e. prior to the news breaking. Broadcom will assume 8 billion of VMware debt and promises that the acquisition will be immediately accretive and will generate 8.5 billion in EBITDA by year three. That's more than 4 billion in EBITDA relative to VMware's current performance today. In a classic Broadcom M&A approach, the company promises to dilever debt and maintain investment grade ratings. They will rebrand their software business as VMware, which will now comprise about 50% of revenues. There's a 40 day go shop and importantly, Broadcom promises to continue to return 60% of its free cash flow to shareholders in the form of dividends and buybacks. Okay, with that out of the way, we're going to get to the money slide literally in a moment that Broadcom shared on its investor call. Broadcom has more than 20 business units. It's CEO Hock Tan makes it really easy for his business unit managers to understand. Rule number one, you agreed to an operating plan with targets for revenue, growth, EBITDA, et cetera, hit your numbers consistently and we're good. You'll be very well compensated and life will be wonderful for you and your family. Miss the number, and we're going to have a frank and uncomfortable bottom line discussion. You'll four, perhaps five quarters to turn your business around, if you don't, we'll kill it or sell it if we can. Rule number two, refer to rule number one. Hello, VMware, here's the money slide. I'll interpret the bullet points on the left for clarity. Your fiscal year 2022 EBITDA was 4.7 billion. By year three, it will be 8.5 billion. And we Broadcom have four knobs to turn with you, VMware to help you get there. First knob, if it ain't recurring revenue with rubber stamp renewals, we're going to convert that revenue or kill it. Knob number two, we're going to focus R&D in the most profitable areas of the business. AKA expect the R&D budget to be cut. Number three, we're going to spend less on sales and marketing by focusing on existing customers. We're not going to lose money today and try to make it up many years down the road. And number four, we run Broadcom with 1% GNA. You will too. Any questions? Good. Now, just to give you a little sense of how Broadcom runs its business and how well run a company it is, let's do a little simple comparison with this financial snapshot. All we're doing here is taking the most recent quarterly earnings reports from Broadcom and VMware respectively. We take the quarterly revenue and multiply by four X to get the revenue run rate and then we calculate the ratios off of the most recent quarters revenue. It's worth spending some time on this to get a sense of how profitable the Broadcom business actually is and what the spreadsheet gurus at Broadcom are seeing with respect to the possibilities for VMware. So combined, we're talking about a 40 plus billion dollar company. Broadcom is growing at more than 20% per year. Whereas VMware's latest quarter showed a very disappointing 3% growth. Broadcom is mostly a hardware company, but its gross margin is in the high seventies. As a software company of course VMware has higher gross margins, but FYI, Broadcom's software business, the remains of Symantec and what they purchased as CA has 90% gross margin. But the I popper is operating margin. This is all non gap. So it excludes things like stock based compensation, but Broadcom had 61% operating margin last quarter. This is insanely off the charts compared to VMware's 25%. Oracle's non gap operating margin is 47% and Oracle is an incredibly profitable company. Now the red box is where the cuts are going to take place. Broadcom doesn't spend much on marketing. It doesn't have to. It's SG&A is 3% of revenue versus 18% for VMware and R&D spend is almost certainly going to get cut. The other eye popper is free cash flow as a percentage of revenue at 51% for Broadcom and 29% for VMware. 51%. That's incredible. And that my dear friends is why Broadcom a company with just under 30 billion in revenue has a market cap of 230 billion. Let's dig into the VMware portfolio a bit more and identify the possible areas that will be placed under the microscope by Hock Tan and his managers. The data from ETR's latest survey shows the net score or spending momentum across VMware's portfolio in this chart, net score essentially measures the net percent of customers that are spending more on a specific product or vendor. The yellow bar is the most recent survey and compares the April 22 survey data to April 21 and January of 22. Everything is down in the yellow from January, not surprising given the economic outlook and the change in spending patterns that we've reported. VMware Cloud on AWS remains the product in the ETR survey with the most momentum. It's the only offering in the portfolio with spending momentum above the 40% line, a level that we consider highly elevated. Unified Endpoint Management looks more than respectable, but that business is a rock fight with Microsoft. VMware Cloud is things like VMware Cloud foundation, VCF and VMware's cross cloud offerings. NSX came from the Nicira acquisition. Tanzu is not yet pervasive and one wonders if VMware is making any money there. Server is ESX and vSphere and is the bread and butter. That is where Broadcom is going to focus. It's going to look at VSAN and NSX, which is software probably profitable. And of course the other products and see if the investments are paying off, if they are Broadcom will keep, if they are not, you can bet your socks, they will be sold off or killed. Carbon Black is at the far right. VMware paid $2.1 billion for Carbon Black. And it's the lowest performer on this list in terms of net score or spending momentum. And that doesn't mean it's not profitable. It just doesn't have the momentum you'd like to see, so you can bet that is going to get scrutiny. Remember VMware's growth has been under pressure for the last several years. So it's been buying companies, dozens of them. It bought AirWatch, bought Heptio, Carbon Black, Nicira, SaltStack, Datrium, Versedo, Bitnami, and on and on and on. Many of these were to pick up engineering teams. Some of them were to drive new revenue. Now this is definitely going to be scrutinized by Broadcom. So that helps explain why Michael Dell would sell VMware. And where does VMware go from here? It's got great core product. It's an iconic name. It's got an awesome ecosystem, fantastic distribution channel, but its growth is slowing. It's got limited developer chops in a world that developers and cloud native is all the rage. It's got a far flung R&D agenda going at war with a lot of different places. And it's increasingly fighting this multi front war with cloud companies, companies like Cisco, IBM Red Hat, et cetera. VMware's kind of becoming a heavy lift. It's a perfect acquisition target for Broadcom and why the street loves this deal. And we titled this Breaking Analysis taming the VMware beast because VMware is a beast. It's ubiquitous. It's an epic software platform. EMC couldn't control it. Dell used it as a piggy bank, but really didn't change its operating model. Broadcom 100% will. Now one of the things that we get excited about is the future of systems architectures. We published a breaking analysis about a year ago, talking about AWS's secret weapon with Nitro and it's Annapurna custom Silicon efforts. Remember it acquired Annapurna for a measly $350 million. And we talked about how there's a new architecture and a new price performance curve emerging in the enterprise, driven by AWS and being followed by Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, a trend toward custom Silicon with the arm based Nitro and which is AWS's hypervisor and Nick strategy, enabling processor diversity with things like Graviton and Trainium and other diverse processors, really diversifying away from x86 and how this leads to much faster product cycles, faster tape out, lower costs. And our premise was that everyone in the data center is going to competes, is going to need a Nitro to be competitive long term. And customers are going to gravitate toward the most economically favorable platform. And as we describe the landscape with this chart, we've updated this for this Breaking Analysis and we'll come back to nitro in a moment. This is a two dimensional graphic with net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis and overlap formally known as market share or presence within the survey, pervasiveness that's on the horizontal axis. And we plot various companies and products and we've inserted VMware's net score breakdown. The granularity in those colored bars on the bottom right. Net score is essentially the green minus the red and a couple points on that. VMware in the latest survey has 6% new adoption. That's that lime green. It's interesting. The question Broadcom is going to ask is, how much does it cost you to acquire that 6% new. 32% of VMware customers in the survey are increasing spending, meaning they're increasing spending by 6% or more. That's the forest green. And the question Broadcom will dig into is what percent of that increased spend (chuckles) you're capturing is profitable spend? Whatever isn't profitable is going to be cut. Now that 52% gray area flat spending that is ripe for the Broadcom picking, that is the fat middle, and those customers are locked and loaded for future rent extraction via perpetual renewals and price increases. Only 8% of customers are spending less, that's the pinkish color and only 3% are defecting, that's the bright red. So very, very sticky profile. Perfect for Broadcom. Now the rest of the chart lays out some of the other competitor names and we've plotted many of the VMware products so you can see where they fit. They're all pretty respectable on the vertical axis, that's spending momentum. But what Broadcom wants is that core ESX vSphere base where we've superimposed the Broadcom logo. Broadcom doesn't care so much about spending momentum. It cares about profitability potential and then momentum. AWS and Azure, they're setting the pace in this business, in the upper right corner. Cisco very huge presence in the data center, as does Intel, they're not in the ETR survey, but we've superimposed them. Now, Intel of course, is in a dog fight within Nvidia, the Arm ecosystem, AMD, don't forget China. You see a Google cloud platform is in there. Oracle is also on the chart as well, somewhat lower on the vertical axis, but it doesn't have that spending momentum, but it has a big presence. And it owns a cloud as we've talked about many times and it's highly differentiated. It's got a strategy that allows it to differentiate from the pack. It's very financially driven. It knows how to extract lifetime value. Safra Catz operates in many ways, similar to what we're seeing from Hock Tan and company, different from a portfolio standpoint. Oracle's got the full stack, et cetera. So it's a different strategy. But very, very financially savvy. You could see IBM and IBM Red Hat in the mix and then Dell and HP. I want to come back to that momentarily to talk about where value is flowing. And then we plotted Nutanix, which with Acropolis could suck up some V tax avoidance business. Now notice Symantec and CA, relatively speaking in the ETR survey, they have horrible spending momentum. As we said, Broadcom doesn't care. Hock Tan is not going for growth at the expense of profitability. So we fully expect VMware to come down on the vertical axis over time and go up on the profit scale. Of course, ETR doesn't measure the profitability here. Now back to Nitro, VMware has this thing called Project Monterey. It's essentially their version of Nitro and will serve as their future architecture diversifying off x86 and accommodating alternative processors. And a much more efficient performance, price in energy consumption curve. Now, one of the things that we've advocated for, we said this about Dell and others, including VMware to take a page out of AWS and start developing custom Silicon to better integrate hardware and software and accelerate multi-cloud or what we call supercloud. That layer above the cloud, not just running on individual clouds. So this is all about efficiency and simplicity to own this space. And we've challenged organizations to do that because otherwise we feel like the cloud guys are just going to have consistently better costs, not necessarily price, but better cost structures, but it begs the question. What happens to Project Monterey? Hock Tan and Broadcom, they don't invest in something that is unproven and doesn't throw off free cash flow. If it's not going to pay off for years to come, they're probably not going to invest in it. And yet Project Monterey could help secure VMware's future in not only the data center, but at the edge and compete more effectively with cloud economics. So we think either Project Monterey is toast or the VMware team will knock on the door of one of Broadcom's 20 plus business units and say, guys, what if we work together with you to develop a version of Monterey that we can use and sell to everyone, it'd be the arms dealer to everyone and be competitive with the cloud and other players out there and create the de facto standard for data center performance and supercloud. I mean, it's not outrageously expensive to develop custom Silicon. Tesla is doing it for example. And Broadcom obviously is capable of doing it. It's got good relationships with semiconductor fabs. But I think this is going to be a tough sell to Broadcom, unless VMware can hide this in plain site and make it profitable fast, like AWS most likely has with Nitro and Graviton. Then Project Monterey and our pipe dream of alternatives to Nitro in the data center could happen but if it can't, it's going to be toast. Or maybe Intel or Nvidia will take it over or maybe the Monterey team will spin out a VMware and do a Pensando like deal and demonstrate the viability of this concept and then Broadcom will buy it back in 10 years. Here's a double click on that previous data that we put in tabular form. It's how the data on that previous slide was plotted. I just want to give you the background data here. So net score spending momentum is the sorted on the left. So it's sorted by net score in the left hand chart, that was the y-axis in the previous data set and then shared and or presence in the data set is the right hand chart. In other words, it's sorted on the right hand chart, right hand table. That right most column is shared and you can see it's sorted top to bottom, and that was the x-axis on the previous chart. The point is not many on the left hand side are above the 40% line. VMware Cloud on AWS is, it's expensive, so it's probably profitable and it's probably a keeper. We'll see about the rest of VMware's portfolio. Like what happens to Tanzu for example. On the right, we drew a red line, just arbitrarily at those companies and products with more than a hundred mentions in the survey, everything but Tanzu from VMware makes that cut. Again, this is no indication of profitability here, and that's what's going to matter to Broadcom. Now let's take a moment to address the question of Broadcom as a software company. What the heck do they know about software, right. Well, they're not dumb over there and they know how to run a business, but there is a strategic rationale to this move beyond just doing portfolios and extracting rents and cutting R&D, et cetera, et cetera. Why, for example, isn't Broadcom going after coming back to Dell or HPE, it could pick up for a lot less than VMware, and they got way more revenue than VMware. Well, it's obvious, software's more profitable of course, and Broadcom wants to move up the stack, but there's a trend going on, which Broadcom is very much in touch with. First, it sells to Dell and HPE and Cisco and all the OEM. so it's not going to disrupt that. But this chart shows that the value is flowing away from traditional servers and storage and networking to two places, merchant Silicon, which itself is morphing. Broadcom... We focus on the left hand side of this chart. Broadcom correctly believes that the world is shifting from a CPU centric center of gravity to a connectivity centric world. We've talked about this on theCUBE a lot. You should listen to Broadcom COO Charlie Kawwas speak about this. It's all that supporting infrastructure around the CPU where value is flowing, including of course, alternative GPUs and XPUs, and NPUs et cetera, that are sucking the value out of the traditional x86 architecture, offloading some of the security and networking and storage functions that traditionally have been done in x86 which are part of the waste right now in the data center. This is that shifting dynamic of Moore's law. Moore's law, not keeping pace. It's slowing down. It's slower relative to some of the combinatorial factors. When you add up in all the CPU and GPU and NPU and accelerators, et cetera. So we've talked about this a lot in Breaking Analysis episodes. So the value is shifting left within that middle circle. And it's shifting left within that left circle toward components, other than CPU, many of which Broadcom supplies. And then you go back to the middle, value is shifting from that middle section, that traditional data center up into hyperscale clouds, and then to the right toward infrastructure software to manage all that equipment in the data center and across clouds. And look Broadcom is an arms dealer. They simply sell to everyone, locking up key vectors of the value chain, cutting costs and raising prices. It's a pretty straightforward strategy, but not for the fate of heart. And Broadcom has become pretty good at it. Let's close with the customer feedback. I spoke with ETRs Eric Bradley this morning. He and I both reached out to VMware customers that we know and got their input. And here's a little snapshot of what they said. I'll just read this. Broadcom will be looking to invest in the core and divest of any underperforming assets, right on. It's just what we were saying. This doesn't bode well for future innovation, this is a CTO at a large travel company. Next comment, we're a Carbon Black customer. VMware didn't seem to interfere with Carbon Black, but now that we're concerned about short term disruption to their tech roadmap and long term, are they going to split and be sold off like Symantec was, this is a CISO at a large hospitality organization. Third comment, I got directly from a VMware practitioner, an IT director at a manufacturing firm. This individual said, moving off VMware would be very difficult for us. We have over 500 applications running on VMware, and it's really easy to manage. We're not going to move those into the cloud and we're worried Broadcom will raise prices and just extract rents. Last comment, we'll share as, Broadcom sees the cloud data center and IoT is their next revenue source. The VMware acquisition provides them immediate virtualization capabilities to support a lightweight IoT offering. Big concern for customers is what technology they will invest in and innovate, and which will be stripped off and sold. Interesting. I asked David Floyer to give me a back of napkin estimate for the following question. I said, David, if you're running mission critical applications on VMware, how much would it increase your operating cost moving those applications into the cloud? Or how much would it save? And he said, Dave, VMware's really easy to run. It can run any application pretty much anywhere, and you don't need an army of people to manage it. All your processes are tied to VMware, you're locked and loaded. Move that into the cloud and your operating cost would double by his estimates. Well, there you have it. Broadcom will pinpoint the optimal profit maximization strategy and raise prices to the point where customers say, you know what, we're still better off staying with VMware. And sadly, for many practitioners there aren't a lot of choices. You could move to the cloud and increase your cost for a lot of your applications. You could do it yourself with say Zen or OpenStack. Good luck with that. You could tap Nutanix. That will definitely work for some applications, but are you going to move your entire estate, your application portfolio to Nutanix? It's not likely. So you're going to pay more for VMware and that's the price you're going to pay for two decades of better IT. So our advice is get out ahead of this, do an application portfolio assessment. If you can move apps to the cloud for less, and you haven't yet, do it, start immediately. Definitely give Nutanix a call, but going to have to be selective as to what you actually can move, forget porting to OpenStack, or do it yourself Hypervisor, don't even go there. And start building new cloud native apps where it makes sense and let the VMware stuff go into manage decline. Let certain apps just die through attrition, shift your development resources to innovation in the cloud and build a brick wall around the stable apps with VMware. As Paul Maritz, the former CEO of VMware said, "We are building the software mainframe". Now marketing guys got a hold of that and said, Paul, stop saying that, but it's true. And with Broadcom's help that day we'll soon be here. That's it for today. Thanks to Stephanie Chan who helps research our topics for Breaking Analysis. Alex Myerson does the production and he also manages the Breaking Analysis podcast. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight help get the word out on social and thanks to Rob Hof, who was our editor in chief at siliconangle.com. Remember, these episodes are all available as podcast, wherever you listen, just search Breaking Analysis podcast. Check out ETRs website at etr.ai for all the survey action. We publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. You can email me directly at david.vellante@siliconangle.com. You can DM me at DVellante or comment on our LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Have a great week, stay safe, be well. And we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>Hello. Welcome back to the cubes coverage here live in San Francisco, California. I'm John furrier, host of the cubes cube coverage of AWS summit 2022 here in San Francisco, where all the developers are the bay air at Silicon valley. And of course, eights summit in New York city is coming up in this summer. We'll be there as well. SF and NYC cube coverage. Look for us, of course, reinforcing Boston and re Mars with the whole robotics AI thing, all coming together. Lots of coverage. Stay with us. Say we've got a great guest from Deibel VC. John Skoda, founding partner, entrepreneurial venture is a venture firm. Your next act, welcome to the cube. Good to see you. >>Good to see you, Matt. I feel like it's been forever since we've been able to do something in person. Well, >>I'm glad you're here because we run into each other all the time. We've known each other for over a decade. Um, >>It's been at least 10 years, at >>Least 10 years more, and we don't wanna actually go back as freeze back the old school web 1.0 days. But anyway, we're in web three now. So we'll get to that in >>It's a little bit of a throwback to the path though, in my opinion, >>It's all the same. It's all distributed computing and software. We ran each other in Cuban. You're investing in a lot of tech startup founders. Okay. This next level, next gen entrepreneurs have a new makeup and it's software. It's hardcore tech in some cases, not hardcore tech, but using software, take old something old and make it better new, faster. So tell us about decibel. What's the firm. I know you're the founder, uh, which is cool. What's going on. Explain >>What you're doing. I mean, you remember I'm a recovering entrepreneur, right? So of course I, I, >>No, you're never recovering. You're always entrepreneur >>Always, but we are also always recovering. So I, um, sort of my was company when I was 24, if you remember before there was Facebook and friends, there was instant messaging. People were using that product at work every day, they were creating a security vulnerability between their network and the outside world. So I plugged that hole and built an instant messaging firewall. It was my first company. The company was called IM logic and we were required by Symantec. Uh, then spent 12 years investing in the next generation of software companies, uh, early investor in open source companies and cloud companies and spent a really wonderful 12 years, uh, at a firm called NEA. So I, I feel like my whole life I've been either starting enterprise software companies or helping founders start enterprise software C is, and I'll tell you, there's never been a better time than right now to start an enterprise software company. >>So, uh, the passion for starting a new firm was really a recognition that founders today that are starting an enterprise software company, they, they tend to be, as you said, a more technical founder, right? Usually it's a software engineer or builder. Uh, they are building products that are serving a slightly different market than what we've traditionally seen in enterprise software. Right? I think traditionally we've seen it buyers or CIOs that have agendas and strategies, which, you know, purchase software that is traditionally bought and sold tops down. But you know, today I think the most successful enterprise software companies are the ones that are built more bottoms up and have more technical early adopters. And generally speaking, they're free to use. They're free to try. They're very commonly community. So source or open source companies where you have a large technical cook community that's supporting them. So there's a, there's kind of a new normal now I think in great enterprise software. And it starts with great technical founders with great products and great bottoms of motions. And I think there's no better place to, uh, service those people than in the cloud and uh, in, in your community. >>Well, first of all, congratulations, and by the way, you got a great pedigree and great grow, super smart admire of your work and your, and, and your founding, but let's face it. Enterprise is hot because digital transformation is all companies there's no, I mean, consumer is enterprise now everything is what was once a niche. No, I won't say niche category, but you know, not for the faint of heart, you, you know, investors, >>You know, it's so funny that you say that enterprise is hot because you, and I feel that way now. But remember, like right now, there's also a giant tech and VC conference in Miami <laugh> and it's covering cryptocurrencies and FCS and web three. So I think beauty is definitely in the eye of the beholder <laugh> but no, I, I will tell you, >>Ts is one big enterprise, cuz you gotta have imutability you got performance issues. You have, I IOPS issues. Well, >>And, and I think all of us here that are, uh, may maybe students of history and have been involved in open source in the cloud would say that we're, you know, much of what we're doing is, uh, the predecessors of the web web three movement. And many of us I think are contributors to the web three. >>The hype is definitely one, three. You >>Yeah, but, >>But you know, for >>Sure. Yeah, no, but now you're taking us further east to Miami. So, uh, you know, look, I think, I, I think, um, what is unquestioned with the case now? And maybe it's, it's more obvious the more time you spend in this world is this is the fastest growing part of enterprise software. And if you include cloud infrastructure and caught infrastructure spend, you know, it is by many measures over, uh, 500 billion in growing, you know, 20 to 30% a year. So it it's a, it's a just incredibly fast, >>Well, let's getting, let's get into some of the cultural and the, the shifts that are happening, cuz again, you, you have the luxury of being in enterprise when it was hard, it's getting easier and more cooler. I get at it and more relevant <laugh> but there's also the hype of like the web three, for instance, but you know, for, uh, um, um, the CEO snowflake, okay. Has wrote a book and Dave Valenti and I were talking about it and uh, Frank Luman has says, there's no playbooks. We always ask the CEOs, what's your playbook. And he's like, there's no playbook, situational awareness, always Trump's playbooks. So in the enterprise playbook, oh, higher, a direct sales force and SAS kind of crushed that now SAS is being redefined, right. So what is SAS? Is snowflake a SaaS or is that a platform? So again, new unit economics are emerging, whole new situation, you got web three. So to me there's a cultural shift, the young entrepreneurs, the, uh, user experience, they look at Facebook and say, ah, you know, they own all my data. And you know, we know that that cliche, um, they, you know, the product. So as this next gen, the gen Z and the millennials come in and our customers and the founders, they're looking at things a little bit differently and the Tech's better. >>Yeah. I mean, I mean, I think we can, we can see a lot of commonalities across all successful startups and the overall adoption of technology. Uh, and, and I would tell you, this is all one big, giant revolution. I call it the user driven revolution, right? It's the rise of the user. And you might say product like growth is currently the hottest trend in enterprise software. It's actually user like growth, right. They're one and the same. So sometimes people think the product, uh, is what is driving. >>You just pull the >>Product through. Exactly, exactly. And so that's that I, that I think is really this revolution that you see and it, and it does extend into things like crypto or currencies and web three and, you know, sort of like the control that is taken back by the user. Um, but you know, many would say that, that the origins of this movement maybe started with open source where users were contributors, you know, contributors were users and looking back decades and seeing how, how it fast forward to today. I think that's really the trend that we're all writing and it's enabling these end users. These end users in our world are developers, data engineers, cybersecurity practitioners, right. They're really the users. And they're really the, the beneficiaries and the most, you know, kind of valued people in this. >>I wanna come back to the data engineers in a second, but I wanna make a comment and get your reaction to, I have a, I'm a gen Xer technically. So for not a boomer, but I have some boomer friends who are a little bit older than me who have, you know, experienced the sixties. And I've been saying on the cube for probably about eight years now that we are gonna hit a digital hippie revolution, meaning a rebellion against the sixties was rebellion against the fifties and the man and, you know, summer of love. That was a cultural differentiation from the other one other group, the predecessors. So we're kind of having that digital moment now where it's like, Hey boomers, Hey people, we're not gonna do that anymore. We hate how you organize shit. >>Right. But isn't this just technology. I mean, isn't it, isn't it like there used to be the old adage, like, you know, you would never get fired for buying IBM, but now it's like, you obviously probably would get fired if you bought IBM. And I mean, it, it it's just like the, the, I think >>During the mainframe days, those renegades were breaking into Stanford, starting the home brew club. So what I'm trying to get at is that, do you see the young cultural revolution also, culturally, just, this is my identity NFTs to me speak volumes about my, I wanna associate with NFTs, not single sign. >>Absolutely. And, and I think like, I think you're hitting on something, which is like this convergence of, of, you know, societal trends with technology trends and how that manifests in our world is yes. I think like there is unquestionably almost a religion yeah. Around the way in which a product is built. Right. And we can use open source, one example of that religion. Some people will say, look, I'll just never try a product in the cloud if it's not open source. Yeah. I think cloud, native's another example of that, right? It's either, it's, you know, it either is cloud native or it's not. And I think a lot of people will look at a product and say, look, you know, you were not designed in the cloud era. Therefore I just won't try. I you, and sometimes, um, like it or not, it's a religious decision, right? Yeah. It's some, it's something that people just believe to be true almost without, uh, necessarily caring >>About I data, data drives all decision making. Let me ask you this next question. As a VC. Now you look at pitch, well, you've been a VC for many years, but you also have the founder entrepreneurial mindset, but you can empathize with the founders. You know, hustle is a big part of the, that first founder check, right? You gotta convince someone to part with their ch their money and the first money in which you do a lot of is about believing in the person. So faking it till you make it is hard. Now you, the data's there, you either have it cloud native, you either have the adaption or traction. So honesty is a big part of that pitch. You can't think, oh, >>AB absolutely. You know, there used to be this concept of like the persona of an entrepreneur, right. And the persona of the entrepreneur would be, you know, somebody who was a great salesperson or somebody who tell a great story. And I still think that that's important, right. It still is a human need for people to believe in narratives and stories. Yeah. But having said that you're right. The proof is in the pudding, right. At some point you click download and you try the product and does it, is it gonna, it's gonna do, or it doesn't, or it either stands out to the load test or it doesn't. And so I, I feel like in this new economy that we live in really, it's a shift from maybe the storytellers and the creators to, to the builders, right. The people that know how to build great product. And in some ways the people that can build great product stand out for on the crowd. And they're the ones that can build communities around their products. And, you know, in some ways can, um, you know, kind of own more of the narrative because their products exactly >>The volume back to the user led >>Growth. Exactly. And it's the religion of, I just love your product. Right. And I, I, I, um, Doug song is the founder of Joe security used to say, Hey, like, you know, the, the really like today's world of like consumption based software, like the user is only gonna give you 90 seconds to figure out whether or not you're a company that's easy to do business with. Right. And so you can say, and do all the things that you want about how easy you are to work with. But if the product isn't easy to install, if it's not easy to try, if it's, if the, you know, it's gotta speak >>To the, to the user. But let me ask you a question for the people watching, who are maybe entrepreneurial entre entrepreneurs, um, masterclass here is in session. So I have to ask you, do you prefer, um, an entrepreneur come in and say, look at John. Here's where I'm at. Okay. First of all, storytelling's fine. Whether you're an extrovert or introvert, have your style, sell the story in a way that's authentic, but do you, what do you prefer? Just say, here's where I'm at. Look, I have an idea. Here's my traction. I think here's my MVP prototype. I need help. Or do you wanna just see more stats? What's the, what's the preferred way that you like to see entrepreneurs come in and engage? >>There's tons of different styles, man. I think the single most important thing that every founder should know is that we, we don't invest in what things are today. We invest in what we think something will become. Right. And I think that's why we all get up in the morning and try to build something different, right? It's that we see the world a different way. We want it to be a different way, and we wanna work every single moment of the day to try to make bad vision of reality. So I think the more that you can show people where you want to be, the more likely somebody is gonna align with your vision and, and want to invest in you wanna be along for the ride. So I, I wholeheartedly believe in showing off what you got today, because eventually we all get down to like, where are we and what are we gonna do together? But, um, no, I, you gotta show the path. I think the single most important thing for any founder and VC relationship is that they have the same vision. Uh, if you have the same vision, you can, you can get through bumps in the road, you can get through short term spills. You can all sorts of things in the middle. The journey can happen. Yeah. But it doesn't matter as much. If you share the long term vision, >>Don't flake out and, and be fashionable with the, the latest trends. Cause it's over before you even get >>There. Exactly. I think many people that, that do what we do for a living will say, you know, ultimately the future is relatively easy to predict, but it's the timing that's impossible to predict. So you, you know, you sort of have to balance the, you know, we, we, we know that the world is going this way and therefore we're gonna invest a lot of money to try to make this a reality. Uh, but sometimes it happens in six months. Sometimes it takes six years. Sometimes it takes 16 years. Uh, >>What's the hottest thing in enterprise that you see the biggest wave that people should pay attention to that you're looking at right now with Desel partners, Tebel dot your site. What's the big wave. What's your big >>Wave. There, there's three big trends that we invest in. And they're the, they're the only things we do day in, day out. One is the explosion and open source software. So I think many people think that all software is unquestionably moving to an open source model in some form or another yeah. Tons of reasons to debate whether or not that is gonna happen on AMWA timeline >>Happening forever. >>But, uh, it is, it is accelerating faster than we've ever seen. So I, I think it's, it's one big, massive wave that we continue to ride. Um, second is the rise of data engineering. Uh, I think data engineering is in and of itself now a category of software. It's not just that we store data. It's now we move data and we develop applications. And, uh, I think data is in and of itself as big of a market as any of the other markets that we invest in. Uh, and finally, it's the gift that keeps on giving. I've spent my entire career in it. We still feel that security is a market that is underinvested. It is, it continues to be the place where people need to continue to invest and spend more, more. Yeah. Uh, and those are the three major trends that we >>Run and security, you think we all need a dessert do over, right? I mean, do we need a do over in security or is what's the core problem? I, >>I, I keep using this word underinvested because I think it's the right way to think about the problem. I think if you, I think people generally speaking, look at cybersecurity as an add-on. Yeah. But if you think about it, the whole economy is moving online. And so in, in some ways like security is core to protecting the digital economy. And so it's, it shouldn't be an afterthought, right? It should be core to what everyone is doing. And that's why I think relat to the trillions of dollars that are at stake, uh, I believe the market size for cybersecurity is around 150 billion and it still is a fraction of what >>We're, what we're national security even boom is booming now. So you get the convergence of national security, geopolitics, internet digital that's >>Right. You mean arguably, right. Arguably again, it's the area of the world that people should be spending more time and more money given what to stake. >>I love your thesis. I gotta outta say, I gotta love your firm. Love what you're doing. We're big supporters of your mission. Congratulations on your entrepreneurial venture. And, uh, we'll be, we'll be talking we'll maybe see a Coon. Uh, absolutely certainly EU maybe even north Americans in Detroit this year. >>Huge fan of what you guys are doing here. Thank you so much for helping me on the >>Show. Guess a bell V see Johnson here on the cube. Check him out. Founder for founders here on the cube, more coverage from San Francisco, California. After this short break, stay with us.

from the cube studios in palo alto in boston bringing you data-driven insights from the cube and etr this is breaking analysis with dave vellante the convenience of online access to bank accounts payment apps crypto exchanges and other transaction systems has created enormous risks which the vast majority of individuals either choose to ignore or simply don't understand the internet has become the new private network and unfortunately it's not so private apis scripts spoofing insider crime sloppy security hygiene by users and much more all increase our risks the convenience of cloud-based services in many respects exacerbates the problem but software built in the cloud is a big part of the solution hello everyone and welcome to this week's wikibon cube insights powered by etr in this breaking analysis we'll try to raise awareness about a growing threat to your liquid assets and hopefully inspire you to do some research and take actions to lower the probability of you losing thousands hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars let's go back to 2019 in an event that should have forced us to act but for most of us didn't in september of that year jack dorsey's twitter twitter account was hacked the hackers took over his account and posted racial slurs and other bizarre comments before twitter could regain control of the account and assure us that this wasn't a system-wide attack most concerning however was the manner in which the attackers got a hold of dorsey's twitter account they used an increasingly common and relatively easy to execute technique referred to as a sim hijack or a sim swap the approach allows cyber thieves to take control of a victim's phone number now they often will target high-profile individuals like ceos and celebrities to embarrass or harass them but increasingly they're going after people's money of course now just in the past month we've seen a spate of attacks where individuals have lost cash it's a serious problem of increasing frequency so let's talk a little bit about how it works now some of you are familiar with this technique but most people that we talk to either aren't aware of it or aren't concerned you should be in a sim hack like this one documented on medium in may of 2019 four months prior to the dorsey attack the hackers who have many of your credentials that have likely been posted on the dark web they have your email they have your frequently used passwords your phone number your address your mother's maiden name name of your favorite pet and so forth they go in and they spoof a mobile phone carrier rep into thinking that it's you and they convince the agent that they've switched phones or have some other ruse to get a new sim card sent to them or they pay insiders at the phone carrier to steal sim card details hey 100 bucks a card big money now once in possession of the sim card info the attacker now can receive sms messages as part of two-factor authentication systems that are often used to verify identity they can't use face id on mobile but what they can do is go into your web account and change the password or other information the website then sends an sms and now the attacker has the code and is in then the individual can lock you out and steal your money before you even know what hit you all right so what can you do about it first there's no system that is hack proof if the bad guys want to get you and the value is high enough they will get you but that's the key roi what's roi simply put it's a measure of return derived from dividing the value stolen by the cost of getting that value it's benefit divided by cost so a good way to dissuade a criminal is to increase the denominator if you make it harder to steal the value goes down the roi is less here's a layered system shared by jason floyer the son of our very own david floyer smart dna there so we appreciate his contribution to the cube the system involves three layers of protection first you got to think about all the high value online systems that you have here are just a few you got bank accounts you have investment accounts you might have betting sites that has cash in it e-commerce sites and so forth now many of these sites if not most will use sms-based two-factor authentication to identify you now that exposes you to the sim hack the system that jason proposes let's start in the middle of this chart the first thing is you got to acknowledge that the logins that you're using to access your critical systems are already public so the first thing you do is to get a in quotes secure email in other words one that no one knows about and isn't on the dark web find a provider that you trust maybe the one maybe one that doesn't sell ads but that look that's your call or maybe go out and buy a domain and create a private email address now the second step is to use a password manager now for those who don't know what that is you're probably already using one that comes with your chrome browser for example and it remembers your passwords and autofills them now if you on your iphone if you're an iphone user go to settings passwords and security recommendations or if you're on an android phone open your chrome app and go to settings passwords check passwords you're likely to see a number of recommendations as in dozens or maybe even hundreds that have been compromised reuse passwords and or or are the subject of a data breach so a password manager is a single cloud-based layer that works on your laptop and your mobile phone and allows you to largely automate the creation management and maintenance of your online credentials now the third layer here involves an external cloud-based or sometimes app-based two-factor authentication system that doesn't use sms one that essentially turns your phone into a hardware authentication device much like an external device that you would use like a yubikey now that's also a really good idea to use as that third layer that hardware fob so the system basically brings together all your passwords under one roof under one system with some layers that lower the probability of your money getting stolen again it doesn't go to zero percent but it's dramatically better than the protection that most people have here's another view of that system and this venn the password manager in the middle manages everything and yes there's a concern that all your passwords are in one place but once set up it's more secure than what you're likely doing today we'll explain that and it'll make your life a lot easier the key to this system is there's there's a single password that you have to remember for the password manager and it takes care of everything else now for many password managers you can also add a non-sms based third-party two-factor authentication capability we'll come back and talk about that in a moment so the mobile phone here uses facial recognition if it's enabled so it would require somebody they had either have you at gunpoint to use your phone and to stick it in front of your face to get into your accounts or you know eventually they'll become experts at deep fakes that's probably something we're going to have to contend with down the road so it's the desktop or laptop via web access that is of the greatest concern in this use case this is where the non-sms-based third-party two-factor authentication comes into play it's installed on your phone and if somebody comes into your account from an unauthorized device it forces a two-factor authentication not using sms but using a third-party app as you guessed it is running in the cloud this is where the cloud creates this problem but it's also here to help solve this problem but the key is this app it generates a verification code that changes on your phone every 20 seconds and you can't get into the website without entering that auto generated code well normal people can't get in there's probably some other back door if they really want to get you but i think you see that this is a better system than what 99 of the people have today but there's more to the story so just as with enterprise tech and dealing with the problem of ransomware air gaps are an essential tool in com combating our personal cyber crime so we've added a couple of items to jason's slide so the this air gap and the secure password notion what you want to do is make sure that that password manager is strong and it's easy for you to remember it's never used anywhere except for the password manager which also uses the secure email now if you've set up a non s if you've set up a two factor authentication sms or otherwise you're even more protected non-sms is better for the reasons we've described now for your crypto if you got a lot first of all get out of coinbase not only does coinbase gouge you on transaction costs but we'd recommend storing a good chunk of your crypto in an air-gapped vault now what you want to do is you want to make a few copies of this critical information you want to keep your secure password on you in one spot or memorize it but maybe keep a copy in your wallet your physical wallet and put the rest in a fireproof filing cabinet and a safety deposit box and or fire proof lock a lock box or a book in your library but but have multiple copies that somebody has to get to in order to hack you and you want to put also all your recovery codes so when you set all this up you're going to get recovery codes for the password manager in your crypto wallets that you own yeah it gets complicated and it's a pain but imagine having 30 percent or more of your liquid assets stolen now look we've really just scratched the surface here and you you're going to have to do some research and talk to people who have set this stuff up to get it right so figure out your secure email provider and then focus on the password manager now just google it and take your time deciding which one is the best for you here's a sample there are many some are free you know the better ones are for pay but carve out a full day to do research and set up your system take your time and think about how you use it before pulling the trigger on these tools and document everything offline air gap it now the other tooling that you want to use is the non-sms based third-party authentication app so in case you get sim hacked you've got further protection this turns your phone into a secure token generator without using sms unfortunately it's even more complicated because not only are there a lot of tools but not all your financial systems and apps we will support the same two-factor authentication app your password manager for example might only support duo your crypto exchange might support authy but your bank might only support symantec vip or it forces you to have a key fob or use sms so it's it's a mishmash so you may need to use multiple authentication apps to protect your liquid assets yeah i'm sorry but the consequences of not protecting your money and identity are worth the effort okay well i know there's a deviation from our normal enterprise tech discussions but look we're all the cios of our respective home i.t we're the network admin the storage admin the tech support help desk and we're the chief information security officer so as individuals we can only imagine the challenges of securing the enterprise and one of the things we talk about a lot in the cyber security space is complexity and fragmentation it's just the way it is now here's a chart from etr that we use frequently which lays out the security players in the etr data set on two dimensions net score or spending velocity in the vertical axis and market share or pervasiveness within the data set on the horizontal now for change i'm not going to elaborate on any of the specific vendors today you've seen a lot of this before but the chart underscores the complexity and fragmentation of this market and this is just really literally one tiny subset but the cloud which i said at the outset is a big reason that we got into this problem holds a key to solving it now here's one example listen to this clip of dave hatfield the longtime industry exec he's formerly an executive with pure storage he's now the ceo of laceworks lace work a very well-funded cloud-based security company that in our view is attacking one of the biggest problems in security and that's the fragmentation issue that we've often discussed take a listen so at the core of what we do you know you know it's um it's really trying to merge when we look at we look at security as a data problem security and compliance is the data problem and when you apply that to the cloud it's a massive data problem you know you literally have trillions of data points you know across shared infrastructure that we you need to be able to ingest and capture uh and then you need to be able to process efficiently and provide context back to the end user and so we approached it very differently than how legacy approaches have been uh in place you know largely rules-based engines that are written to be able to try and stop the bad guys and they miss a lot of things and so our data-driven approach uh that we patented is called uh polygraph it's it's a security architecture and there are three primary benefits it does a lot of things but the three things that we think are most profound first is it eliminates the need for you know dozens of point solutions um i was shocked when i you know kind of learned about security i was at symantec back in the day and just to see how fragmented this market is it's one of the biggest markets in tech 124 billion dollars in annual spend growing at 300 billion dollars in the next three years and it's massively fragmented and the average number of point solutions that customers have to deal with is dozens like literally 75 is the average number and so we wanted to take a platform approach to solve this problem where the larger the attack service that you put in the more data that you put into our machine learning algorithms the smarter that it gets and the higher the efficacies look hatfield nailed it in our view i mean the cloud and edge explodes the threat surface and this becomes a data problem at massive scale now is lace work going to solve all these problems no of course not but having researched this it's common for individuals to be managing dozens of tools and enterprises as hatfield said 75 on average with many hundreds being common the number one challenge we hear from csos and they'll tell you this is a lack of talent lack of human skills and bandwidth to solve the problem and a big part of that problem is fragmentation multiple apis scripts different standards that are constantly being updated and evolved so if the cloud can help us reduce tooling creep and simplify and automate at scale as the network continues to expand like the universe we can keep up with the adversaries they're never going to get ahead of them so look i know this topic is a bit off our normal swim lane but we think this is so important and no people that have been victimized so we wanted to call your attention to the exposure and try to get you to take some action even if it's baby steps so let's summarize you really want to begin by understanding where your credentials have been compromised because i promise they have been just look at your phone or look into your browser and see those recommendations and you're going to go whoa i got to get on this at least i hope you do that now you want to block out an entire day to focus on this and dig into it in order to protect you or your and your family's assets there's a lot of stake here and look one day is not going to kill you it's worth it then you want to begin building those three layers that we showed you choose a private email that is secure quote-unquote quote-unquote research the password manager that's find the one that's going to work for you do you want one that's web-based or an app that you download how does the password manager authenticate what do the reviews say how much does it cost don't rush into this you may want to test this out on a couple of low risk systems before fully committing because if you screw it up it's really a pain to unwind so don't rush into it then you want to figure out how to use your non-sms based two-factor authentication apps and identify which assets you want to protect you don't want to protect everything do you really care about your credentials on a site where you signed up years ago and never use it anymore it doesn't have any credit cards in it just delete it from your digital life and focus on your financial accounts your crypto and your sites where your credit card or other sensitive information lives and can be stolen also it's important to understand which institutions utilize which authentication methods really important that you make sure to document everything and air gap the most sensitive credentials and finally you're going to have to keep iterating and improving your security because this is a moving target you will never be 100 protected unfortunately this isn't a one-shot deal you're going to do a bunch of work it's hard but it's important work you're going to maintain your password you're going to change them every now and then maybe every few months six months maybe once a year whatever whatever is right for you and then a couple years down the road maybe two or three years down the road you might have to implement an entirely new system using the most modern tooling which we believe is going to be cloud-based or you could just ignore it and see what happens okay that's it for now thanks to the community for your comments and input and thanks again to jason floyer whose analysis around this topic was extremely useful remember i publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com these episodes are all available as podcasts all you can do is research breaking analysis podcasts or you can always connect on twitter i'm at d vallante or email me at david.velante siliconangle.com of course i always appreciate the comments on linkedin and clubhouse follow me so you're notified when we start a room and riff on these topics don't forget to check out etr.plus for all the survey data this is dave vellante for the cube insights powered by etr be well and we'll see you next time

(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier your host of theCUBE here in our Palo Alto studio. We got a great conversation with the CEO of Lacework, David Hatfield. Who's in on theCUBE remote. David great to see you guys, a security platform at Lacework, you're at the helm as CEO. Welcome to theCUBE conversation. >> Thank you, John. Great to see you congrats to you and the team and all the success. I think what you guys are doing is really important so happy to be part of it. >> Great to have you in the community and you guys are doing great work. I know about Lacework I've done some due diligence on you guys. I love your business model, but for the folks who don't know what you guys do, take a minute to explain who is Lacework? What do you guys do? What's your positioning? And what's your focus? >> Yeah, well, we're a modern data security platform for the cloud. And so I think data science meets cloud security ultimately. The company has been around since 2015. We received one of the largest financing rounds that we're aware of I think in history in security business, $525 million in January. Led by Sutter Hill Ventures which many people may know about they founded PureStorage with the notion that we're going to go fundamentally change and revamp the ownership model for a high speed data storage using flash versus using spinning disc drives. I spent eight years with that company. Love with what we built there. Then Mike Speiser considered an investment in a company called Snowflake computing. I think you're aware of what Snowflake does which is bringing data warehousing into the cloud. And the third big investment that Sutter Hill made is really to help disrupt security, and that's in Lacework. So north of a billion dollar valuation a 300% year over year growth and have a ton of momentum. So at the core of what we do, it's really trying to merge, when we look at we look at security as a data problem, security and compliance the data problem. And when you apply that to the cloud, it's a massive data problem. you literally have trillions of data points across shared infrastructure that we need to be able to ingest and capture and then you need to be able to process efficiently and provide context back to the end-user. And so we approached it very differently than how legacy approaches have been in place, you know largely rules-based engines that are written to be able to try and stop the bad guys. And they miss a lot of things. And so our data-driven approach that we patented is called a polygraph. It's a, it's a security architecture and there are three primary benefits. It does a lot of things, but the three things that we think are most profound first is it eliminates the need for, you know dozens of point solutions. I was shocked when I, you know kind of learned about security. I was at Symantec back in the day. And just to see how fragmented this market is, it's one of the biggest markets in tech. $124 billion in annual spend growing at, to $300 billion in the next three years. And it's massively fragmented. And the average number of point solutions that customers have to deal with is dozens. Like literally 75 is the average number. And so we wanted to take a platform approach to solve this problem where the larger the attack surface that you put in the more data that you put into our machine learning algorithms the smarter it gets and the higher, the efficacy. So eliminating point solutions is his value proposition one. Point two is that we have to be 10 X better than everybody else in the business. Otherwise the merchant companies don't get a breakout and become long and during companies. And so there's a number of different dimensions. The first dimension that I think is probably the most important is efficacy, you know in anomaly detection or in, you know threat detection where you're trying to identify what risks we have in the business. It's, it's generally a very noisy activity. And so rules-based approaches on average will produce a hundred alerts to our one or two. Those, the signal to noise ratio, is, is, you know is a massive a 100x, but call it 10x a reduction. And so we're actually delivering the needle versus the haystack for security administrators and dev developers to actually solve the problem. So it's 10x, higher efficacy it's 10x faster to be able to resolve the problems. And obviously the ROI is, is a no-brainer because you're eliminating all these points which is in having to manage it. And the third, and probably the thing that I'm most excited about what we're doing and what our customers are already realizing is that we're transforming security and compliance teams from kind of compliance into business enablers. when you automate all these processes and you build it into, you know the CICD platforms for the developers you actually enable the developers to write code to differentiate their business, you know to create new customer experiences to get competitive advantage and drive revenue for their businesses. And, and you know that's not what security has done up to this point. We oftentimes, they're the ones we're the ones having to say, no, you know we're slow down or it's too risky, etc. But when you automate that and you increase the efficacy you can enable the developers to do their thing. And it allows the CSOs and allows the security professionals to up level their responsibility into selling and driving revenue. And that is increasingly going to become more and more important for supply chains and partners of these cloud native businesses of how secure am I working with you, etc. And so we think that that transformation of the role of security is going to be as, as meaningful as the technology that we're providing the business. So we're super excited about it. >> I could tell you have so much going on this investment team Sutter Hill, you mentioned big time players huge success track record. Just saw them written up in the wall street journal as one of the best venture capital firms and returns. It's just that the bets are all coming home, but their bet strategy is simple. Disrupting the market that's growing and changing PureStorage, you mentioned company you've worked for, you know people were saying, oh, they'll never get escape velocity. They disrupted an existing, boring storage market changed the game there, security, right for change. A lot of tools, a lot of people have buying tools off the shelf, you know and everyone fighting for the platform. That seems to be the conversation. So I have to ask you, you guys want to be the player that that platform you are, that platform what's different in this platform where everyone's trying to be a security platform, what's makes you different. >> Yeah. So I mean, I think the platform wars are, are clearly, upon us, you know I think what's different about our approach is that we were built on the cloud, for the cloud so we're a cloud native business that, you know runs our business on AWS and everything that we do. We don't have hardware, we don't own data centers. we don't have any of the legacy elements that are there. we use software run on the cloud to enable this. So that's point number one point number two is we did the hard work of mapping the data elements that are out there and adjusting them in and then have this polygraph, you know behavioral anomaly detection, that is it can be applied to today. It's being applied to vulnerability and discovery management and containers and Kubernetes. But over time we believe it extends very naturally to a larger part of the attack server. So we don't have to rewrite the data engine to develop solutions across broader attack services. We already have that, you know so I think our time to develop and innovate will be profound. And I think the third thing that we're seeing companies do and largely the legacy bigger companies is that they're just acquiring their way there. And, it's very, very difficult to acquire 8 to 10 to 20, 30 companies, 30 different CTOs 30 different code bases and try and integrate them to provide a delightful customer experience. And, the parallels, you know in the storage business are, are are pretty similar actually, Dell bought EMC, EMC bought a hundred companies. And, we went after a platform approach to be able to go attack them with a unified file system in a in a unified customer experience that was native for the media that we're working with. We're doing the same playbook here, you know which is you have to have the hard work of the foundation elements in place to be cloud native to deliver great outcomes, great efficacy and and a really great customer experience. So when we get head to head with any of these points coming out and trying to solve something for containers or Kubernetes, or just vulnerability discovery and management, etc, or we're competing with the legacy companies that have, a hodgepodge of acquisitions that they're trying to pull together we went North of 95% of the time. our POC win rates are phenomenal better than anything I've ever seen. We had a pretty good one to appear too. And the, the product and the experience and the efficacy kind of stand on their own once we're in those fights. So part of why we enjoy working with AWS and are really focused on building the partnership together is that it creates awareness of what could be and what possibilities all we want is a shot. And, our approach is such that you can be up and running in minutes, you know and every single one of our customers does a POC. So we'll stand behind our technology as our real differentiator compared to anybody else that's out there. >> Great. You guys had great traction going on with the company certainly saw the investment news that you mentioned earlier at the top. Why did you come on as CEO? And when did you come on and join the team? And what was the reason? What, what, what attracted you to join as the CEO of Lacework? >> Well, I've been involved in the company for since the beginning actually I invested in the early rounds participated on the board and I've always bought into this. The thesis that security is fundamentally a data problem. And if we can get the data problem and the data processing right, you know you can fundamentally change the industry but you need to have a major inflection. And that inflection is people moving to the cloud. And we all have seen it during the pandemic. things are accelerating. AWS just did their earnings yesterday. I think they increased their top-line guidance from 46 billion to 56 billion this year. I mean, it's a machine that is continuing to move forward. They have 30% market share. Azure's investing at 20% GCP still investing people are moving their businesses online aggressively. And as they shift to the cloud the rules-based approach just doesn't work. It doesn't scale. And so a new approach needs to be done. And so by being cloud native and best of breed and solving the thorny problem of this data processing problem first, you know it gives us an opportunity to use that to then extend and build a business, you know at an enduring level over the next 10 to 20 years. And that's Sutter's model, that's their playbook. They don't invest in 400 companies and kind of spray and pray, which is what most venture funds do. And I love them. They're great. And we appreciate the investment in tech, but Sutter's focus is find a really big market find a catalyst for change. In our case, it's moving to the cloud and then build a modern approach. that is 10x better in every dimension. And that attracted to me. I mean, it's, it's a, it's one of the biggest markets in tech and it's one of the most important things that we can do is a digital business is to ensure that we're secure and we're safe and the threats are becoming much more skilled much more deliberate, much better funded. And so the importance for us to ensure that company's security is really tight is, is increasingly critical. So the combination of those factors, and then as I dove back into it and talked to a bunch of customers and talk to partners and seeing the outcomes and enthusiasm that they had and the, the team is phenomenal. And so talking to them, and I just kind of got energized by the opportunity to go build a really important company that really delivers great outcomes. So I'm having a ball great to be back into it. >> Yeah. It's great to have leadership that has experienced that you have and go to the next level because this is classic next level. When you talk about Amazon's earnings and cloud scale and hybrid and edge right around the corner at scale as well. So you start to see that transformation really hit the tipping point, which is changing the landscape on the developer side, which I think is super valuable. I think you hit that. You mentioned core problem. You guys look at that through the lens of data problem. How does this trend of everything going hybrid and soon to be, you know edge core to edge impact your businesses of tailwind? How do you see you capturing that next level of scale from a business perspective for lease work? >> Well, I think that the trend, you know from core to edge, you know, hybrid and, you know ultimately cloud a hundred percent, there we've started with the cloud native businesses. Like, we've been focusing on those companies that are already there, you know and so now we're we just had finished a phenomenal record-breaking Q1 and multiple seven figure deals, you know with very complex global environments where they do have a hybrid environment and they are leveraging the edge. And we're perfect for that. I mean, as you think about what we deliver in its most simplistic context, you know we're effectively delivering a security solution from the container to control plane, right. You know we want to be able to have a granular understanding of operated trillions of data points coming in and those can be collected in the core. They can be collected on-prem. They can be collected in the cloud. Ultimately they need to be collected and then contextualized so, you know and this is where our behavioral polygraph technology transitions data into information that's useful via the polygraph. And so we think that, the complexity that's added with environments that are hybrid environments that are leveraging the edge environments that are leveraging the cloud native all need a control plane to run across that to deliver efficacy, you know, for our customers. And, we work with, you know AWS has their own security tools. Azure has some security tools UCPs security tools, but ultimately, our, our challenge and opportunity is to be best of breed to deliver incremental value on top of that and that horizontal value across it. so customers have choice but they know that their security posture is, is, is secure. And so we, we see it as a tailwind for our businesses as we go forward. >> I always said the companies that have the horizontal scalability with cloud and then have that vertical AI kind of vibe where you can get in the context of the data is there to win it all. And I think that you guys have a great solution potentially there. I want to get more information if you don't mind double clicking on that with me, this is kind of a different take on cloud security because you've got the scalability, which gives you the observation space. And then you got to get the context to get the right patterns or whatever magic you guys have in the, in the secret sauce. But you doing that on top of massive exponential velocity. >> Yeah. >> Where's that secret sauce? Is it in the compute? Is it in the software? What's different about what you guys have in security to give us a- >> It's all in the, it's all in the software. Ultimately, it's the intelligence of how you capture it how you ingest it, how you, you process it but then ultimately how you, how you contextualize it and then how you apply it to different problems. and so the attack surface area and security is a very broad, that's why there's so many point solutions that are out there. And so the breadth of solutions, you know we just want to continue to add solutions and capabilities on top of this polygraph security architecture that allows for the same kind of simple experience, the same kind of 10x value proposition, but, but, but wider. And so we can eliminate more and more of those of those point solutions. So, our, our thinking on it is that, you know we can participate once we have a customer the land and expand motion of what we have. We want to make it really really frictionless for customers to try our technology. And so that's why we do POC. That's why it only takes a couple of minutes and you can do it for just Kubernetes or just containers or just vulnerability discovery and managed like wherever your specific pain point is. We want to help identify what that is, you know give you a chance to try it. And then once we prove ourselves it's very easy to extend that across the board. So we get natural growth in velocity from people moving to cloud and just, you know more usage of, of compute and storage and sort of etc, but breadth of actually the security or posture or a tax service that they have as well. So, you know so I think we have an opportunity to benefit from, from both the depth and the breadth, you know but the value that we're delivering is ultimately the software that we're running on top of the infrastructure. And you mentioned observability, there's a number of companies that are leveraging the data and insights collected in different ways to converge security and observability over time. And, we see that, you know that ultimately there's a very very big security company that needs to be built. That really is best of breed, but the data and the insights that we're providing to our primary customer, which is really DevOps. I mean, it's really the development communities and the builders or who we're changing security for and enabling, in addition to the security teams, you know we think that we're going to continue to drive software that adds value on that data set and it can be applied to multiple problems in the future. So today security is a massive market. We're going to focus there, but it does. It does extend pretty naturally to other markets >> It's a hot market security. Everyone needs to have the latest and greatest and also has to be effective. I got to ask you specifically around startup transition to a rapidly growing company to now you're going to the next level where you're starting to having to get into some serious, big complex enterprise go to market sales motions. So what's in it for the customer. What's the, what's the pain point? What's the customer orientation. What do you marketing into as a solution? Is it the developer? Is it the CSO? Is it the CXO, what's in it for the enterprise? Why Lacework, why are they engaging? You guys get record numbers. What's the, what's in it for them. What's the, if I'm the customer what's in it for me? >> Ultimately efficacy, which is your security posture is it goes up significantly, simplicity, which is makes it easier for you to do your other jobs, you know and I'll have to look for those needles in a haystack and ROI, you know which is it's just compelling, and much, much more efficient than what, what you're doing today. So that that's a pretty universal value proposition and applies to cloud native businesses that are high growth that applies to government agencies. It applies to a large complex enterprises. We have a wonderful kind of go to market motion right now. I think Andy Byron and the team who've been here have really done a wonderful job of really making the customer buying experience and the journey really efficient, you know and help them quantify the impact and the risks and then deliver value. And I think, that that applies in sort of the commercial mid-market and cloud native space. And like I mentioned, we had, a number of deals in the quarter that were seven figure deals, you know in very complex organizations with massive demands. And, you know it ultimately selling is a team sport and, you know and still having the process and the rigor, that's there fine tuning that to make sure you have the people and the partnerships, you know, that deliver solutions in the way that customers want to buy them and then ultimately deliver a value proposition that is just unquestionably better. And I think we have all of those elements, you know we'll be entering the, the large enterprise very aggressively in the quarters to come. I that's where I've come from, you know running a multi-tool, you know, kind of go to market engines where you've got mid-market commercial enterprise large enterprise government across all geographies is, is really fun to expand. And, we're we're hiring as fast as we can maintain quality, you know? And so we're out of that startup phase now and entering into real scale. And, I think that, you know in the AWS marketplace I think we're the number one startup vendor. If I, if I got my facts, right. for, for private offers, we're one of the top security players and top 50 ISBs in the marketplace overall. And so in order for us to get the motion we need to make sure that we're delivering our value in the context of how companies want to buy it. And people want to use AWS credits, you know to apply to their solutions. And so it's really important for us to make that frictionless buying experience occur. And so we're excited about it. I think we've got a really nice start and it's the fun part of building companies, which is how do you attune things to make sure you're making it really really easy for the market to absorb your technology. And then once you're there, delight the hell out of them and just make sure that, that there's that they're excited in our, our net retention rates are the best I've seen in the marketplace. Our net promoter scores, you know, are in the high fifties low sixties, which, which is fantastic in this space. I think it's best in class by order of magnitude some players, big SIM players that are out there, you know have a customer in net promoter score of four. You know that means 96% of the people or 96 boats that says they wouldn't recommend the solution to their, to their peers. So, at pure, we've got this at scale. So from 70 to, in the, in the low eighties I think we have the opportunity to do the same thing here. So, combination of tailoring the motion that we have making it really easy for the buyer to buy what they want with whom they want from whom they want, you know and then just spreading a value proposition. That is a no brainer is, is I think the secret recipe >> If anything, it's interesting, you know you're so much experience in the enterprise and tech with cloud native you're basically laying out the success formula, which is if you have a value proposition you should be able to get it in quickly. You don't need the top down. win everything you can have a value proposition that can be enabled for usage and then grow rapidly when it's successful and that's cloud, that's the cloud business model. So it's not so much about organic versus this. It's really what the preferred motion is. >> It's speed, and I think developers in particular it's why the cloud happened, right? I.T wasn't delivering services in, in the speed and the efficacy that, that, that the developers wanted. And so in order to appeal to the developer community you need to deliver something that's frictionless and easy and fits into JIRA and fits into their workflow processes and speaks their language. And so we built our platform and our solutions for builders because that's where the money is. That's where the pain point is and that's and they want to build secure code. They just don't want to be told no. And so, we want to automate that process and make code secure and do that, you know in the build phase and then do it in the runtime. And then across the CICD pipeline we want to continuously be adding value across that. And, and the developers, candidly when pure bought the solution, many years ago and I introduced him to the company, it was it was the general manager of our software business unit that bought it not the security team. And I think that's a trend that is continuing that we're going to focus on. >> A lot of people realize that security and compliance and automation kind of all go together where you don't want to disrupt developers to kind of engineer something just to do an integration, for instance. So there's a real business model impact that you're hitting on here. That's not just a technical solution. It's really how the business is operating. And I think that to me is super interesting use case. What's your reaction to that? Do you see this as a, as a- >> No it's, that's that's that third part that I was talking about, you know which is that's most exciting is that, you know people are calling shift left, right. so moving, you know security into the development pipeline as it's happening and in integrating security architects as value added into the development organizations themselves and leveraging automated machine learning tools like ours to be able to simplify and automate the process versus slowing it down. So we think that shift left is, is super exciting and, and will continue. And we actually think we're the leaders in that space. We want to continue to be the leaders in that. >> Congratulations, great insight. Awesome to have you on and to hear from your experience and also the great venture that your scaling up and to the next level. Lacework, David thanks for coming on, but I'll give you the last minute to close us out. Give us a quick plug for the company vitals, what you're working on now, what you're looking for, you're obviously hiring give a quick plug for Lacework. What you, what are you working on? >> So, number one, we love our partnership with AWS. And so we're going to continue to invest, invest there. Two the businesses growing North of 300% year over year. That means that we've got record breaking growth and lots of hiring. So we're hiring across all functions. And three give us an opportunity. I, I think that, you know, you can fundamentally we want to be the bar of what you define all other security companies and all the technology companies. So it's a high bar. We want to make it frictionless, frictionless to try give us a shot, give us some feedback. And I'm grateful and privileged to be part of this, this wonderful team. So look forward to spending more time with you, John, in the future. >> Man, looking forward to a lot lots of talk about David Hatfield CEO of Lacework great company scaling up again. Another success story in cloud, cloud native as Po, COVID comes to a close, if you will for this phase and people get back to real life. The scale of cloud is going to be leading it and a new technology is going to be powering it. This is theCube conversation. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. (soft music playing) (music fades)

>>Hello, and welcome to this special presentation. This is the cube on cloud startups, our special event of Amazon web services, startup showcase. I'm John furrier, host of the cube, and excited to be here to talk about the hottest startups around cloud cloud computing data and the future of the enterprise. We've got Rob Harris, vice president of solutions consulting for star dog. Great company, Rob. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. So this is a showcase presentation with AWS showcase startup showcase. You guys are a fast growing startup knowledge graph. We did a video explaining kind of what we did in the cube conversation. Um, really interesting category this, uh, eight hubs cloud startups with you guys. Talk about what you got. Take a minute to explain star dog and what you got. >>Sure. Yeah, here at startup, we are really a knowledge graph platform company. So we help build a knowledge graph for our customers tying together the data inside the organization and with data on the cloud in order for them to be able to find search and understand the context and relationship of all that data within their own organization. So that's really what we try to facilitate and make successful for our customers. >>Awesome. What market are you guys targeting? What's the market opportunity. Can you explain the market space that you're building product value in and what's your focus? >>Sure. Yeah, it's, it's pretty exciting. We do a lot from an industry perspective, we target a lot, uh, life sciences or financial the services, and it just tends to be, those are the ones that are most excited and getting started with this, but we certainly have a much broader set of customers in government or in manufacturing. What we really look for is the horizontal type solution, where you have a lot of systems that you want to tie together, or you want to have that understanding of your data all within context throughout your organization. So anybody struggling with that kind of tying of your data together, whether it's on the cloud or on prem, that's what we really go after >>Disruption. Who are you disrupting as you come into the marketplace? I love Amazon so hot startups because they got an eye clean take on something, but someone usually is being impacted. Who is, who are you guys disrupting as you come into? >>Yeah, a lot of times we find we're disrupting traditional ETL, right? So centralizing of all your data into one big platform, a lot of people have gone down this path of trying to create these large repositories data lakes, data warehouses. Yeah. We try to provide the additional value on top of them by not forcing you to continue to invest in moving and centralizing all your data together, but connecting it and providing context, um, while leaving and leveraging the mid worries. >>Awesome. Cause there's a big market opportunity as data warehouses becomes modernized and horizontal control planes and cloud computing is data is the key competitive advantage. Uh, great disruption. Great opportunity. So let's talk about the business star dog. What do you guys, uh, talk about the company, uh, where the headquarters is? The, how many employees what's the business model? How do you guys make money? Yeah, >>Well, a headquarters is always a little bit tricky nowadays is we were also distributed, but officially it is in Arlington Virginia. Uh, although we are all over the globe, uh, mostly in the United States and Europe, certainly as we look at, uh, how, how do we go to market and what do we do related to that? We have a subscription-based model where we help our customers get started usually small, um, by leveraging a package that they can run either on prem or in the cloud or directly from the AWS marketplace and letting them connect to the data and then growing out as they grow within their organization, larger, more interplay enterprise wide type of installations. So that's how we kind of go after it, uh, from, from our company perspective. >>So your go to market then for the company, is it bottoms up organic growth, kind of a freemium get in there? Or is it kind of a mid, mid tier or how do you guys look at that, that entry? >>It's a great question. That's exactly right. A lot of times we do start with a freemium type of model. We do have free trials and use usability to get started very quickly without having to talk to a salesperson or without having to pay up front in order to see the value, because we want you to be able to understand the value you're going to get out of our platform right off the bat and get started. Then after you've really tried it out and you see where it could apply within your organization, we help make it enterprise. >>I have to ask you how the business model of SAS, obviously clouds. Great. Are you guys leveraging Amazon web services marketplace at all? >>We are we're on the marketplace today, um, with the, both the free trial, as well as the ability through, you know, private offers to do whole production instances. So we're really excited about being a part of the marketplace. What we found is that sometimes customers want to run on the cloud. Sometimes they want to run on prem, wherever they want to run. We want to be sure that we're there. >>Yeah. Alex, let's pull up that slide on the hybrid, uh, architecture for these guys. So I want to bring this up since you brought up the business model and you talk about hybrid. This is interesting. This gets into the business model and this is kind of transitions into kind of the technology architecture. Could you walk me through this slide, the knowledge graph and the hybrid cloud. Why is this important for you guys and why is it important for customers? >>This is great. Thank you for, uh, for pulling this up. What this is really showing is as we look toward the future, as we really look at how people are deploying knowledge, graphs, and managing their data, we see that one of the big problems they're trying to address is what about cloud, uh, data that's on the cloud would a bit dated it's on prem. Maybe it's in multiple VPCs that you have within the Amazon environment. How do you tie all this together? And we all know that moving data around between all of these zones can be expensive and time consuming and difficult. And so we've come up with an architecture that allows you to run the knowledge, graph an agent of the knowledge graph in each of these zones. And they can all talk to each other and coordinate with each other. So they can see data that exists within that zone and pass it on to the other pieces as required or as needed to minimize your kind of in and out fees. And to leverage that all that data in one, in one place >>I asked you because this comes up a lot in our coverage, um, data mobility, uh, moving data is expensive. Um, how does that impact you guys in customers? A lot of people have been looking at, Hey, you know, the economics of the cloud are phenomenal, but at some point, if you've got a lot of data, you move compute to the data or you kind of think differently, how do you guys look at that? That trend? >>Yeah, that's, that's really our key value prop is people struggle with this. As people try to figure out how do I handle this large amount of data without having to generate all this additional costs about moving it around. We really look about how do I push that compute down to the storage layers, where the data already exists. And so if you think about our product architecture and you know, we, I know we have a slide on how our product is really built and how it's pulled together. When you look at our core core architecture, we have the graph that represents that connected data, but the exciting part of our architecture, what we do differently than everyone else is by allowing you to keep the data in its existing data silos, whether it's applications or repositories documents that you already have out there, we allow you to connect to that data where it is cross zone, whether it's on prem or on the cloud. >>And by leveraging the power of start on the virtualization engine, you can connect that data and be able to represent it from one source without having to move it around. But because we also have a persistence layer that's built into our product, you can really determine where's the best home. Is it data that you're going to use a lot and thereby should be really close to where the query engine is? Or is it something where you want to federate it out and leverage that compute at that storage layer itself? That flexibility is really why our customers come to us and are excited to use, start off. >>That's awesome. Great, great stuff. Love, love. The slides. Love to look at some pictures that describe the architecture both as well as the product. I love how you got the enterprise high-grade applications and then you're integrating with other partners. I think that's a really key, uh, value. And I think if you're not integrating well in this modern era, you probably won't be surviving much longer. It's pretty much a game changer at this point when knows that a question on the technology and product. Now keeping it on this theme. What's your secret sauce. Every company's got a secret sauce. What is star dog's secret sauce? >>Our secret sauce is really how do we coordinate across all of those applications? So if you can imagine you have, you know, Oracle database or Redshift repository, and you're trying to be able to unify that data in real time across those applications. There's a lot of thought and needs to go about how to do that efficiently. You don't want to take all the database from both repositories, move them, all that data into one place and then figure it out. And so our query planner, how do we coordinate across the multiple applications is really what makes us different and special >>On the Symantec modeling that you're doing? Because I see there's a lot of data there. You got to kind of get an understanding context. Um, how do you guys look at reusability metadata on data? This has become a very key point on not just data warehouse, but it's becoming much more about addressability and discoverability in as fast as possible, low latency, uh, with intelligence, this has been a big discussion. How do you guys look at that aspect of the reusability of the data? >>Yeah, it's, it's one of the exciting parts about starting with a semantic graph and then extending into these capabilities around virtualization and reasoning and inference by starting with the semantic graph, we allow you to, you know, incrementally invest in building out your model and then being able to reuse that model as you, as you go through your implementations. Yeah. That's been a, a big failing as people have looked at the analytical movements recently is so many times people spin up a repository, they answer a particular question and they do an absolutely fine job, but then we have your next question. You have to spin up another repository, build more views, re ETL the data. And then the semantic technology is what allows you to create that common understanding and reuse it over and over and over again. And I think it's time for that to hit mainstream. You know, it's been around a while. It's something that has taken some time to get some adoption around, but now that we really have build up awareness around it and we've shelled, the technology can scale the large volumes. Uh, I think it's time to be able to leverage the value that reasonability brings. Yeah. >>One final question on the product and the technology and kind of the architecture is how do you guys connect the dots going forward as more and more edge nodes become available in the network as that architecture of hybrid that we talked earlier about becomes so complex and so connected. I mean, you could have more connectedness than ever before. Um, it's very complex networks graph theory, right? You're talking about a lot of edges and a lot of traversal it's billions and billions of edges. I mean, this is it's complicated. How do you guys create, how do you guys see that unfolding and how and why the star dog remained relevant in that configuration? >>Yeah. And the simple fact is that people need help, right? It can't be that you're going to define all those edges and connections by hand yourself through some systems or keys. It's a great way to get started, but it's not sufficient in order to really get the value out of that graph that you expect. And the ways we do that is twofold. The first bit is really an influencing or reasoning capability. Being able to look at this structure of the data, how it's composed and create connections between that data based on, you know, logical, logical rules. The second is machine learning, right? Machine learning is high. We use things like linear regression algorithms or other types of community detection algorithms in order to build more connections in the data so that you can get really unlock that value that you're looking for. When you're leveraging graph technology, >>A lot of secret sauce here, a lot of technology graph, super exciting. Let's get into the final segment around customer traction and what you guys have seen with customers. Um, what are some of the use cases that are popular and what happens if customers aren't going down this road? What are they missing out on? Um, I mean, it's the classic fear of missing out and fear of getting screwed over right. Are going out of business. I mean, that's, that's motivational at some level, but you know, there are the, do I wait and people who waited on cloud computing by the way were left behind and some never survived. So we're almost in this same dynamic with customers. At some point you got to put the toe in the water, so to speak or get going to take us through some customer examples and use cases where, >>Or this is working. Yeah. I think both of those areas are, are, uh, great ones to hit on. So when you think about what are we missing out on one of our largest customer bases really in pharmaceuticals. Yeah. And they're using this technology in order to find more connections in the data so that they can really decrease the amount of time for getting a drug to market on the research and development. They can look more at leveraging the data they've already connected using related items to be able to accelerate their investments and waiting costs them hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars. So there are certainly ones where being able to adopt this technology early and get value out of early, really pays off in. And they're not the only ones. That's the only, that's the only the life sciences space. But there's also the idea to use it, as you said, really about what else am I missing out on? >>And the data fabric movement, this movement around, how do I lower the cost in my organization about moving data around creating more ETL jobs, leveraging all these data assets already have that the data fabric movement is the idea of how do we really automate that? How do we accelerate that? How do we make that an easier process so that it just doesn't cost as much to manage all this data in an organization. And I've observed that more and more. We have customers coming to us, really interested in this type of use cases that relates to our technology and they are getting ahead of their competitors by really lowering their, it costs in line to focus on these higher value activities. >>Life of the customers is what for you with, with startup? Why, how do they win? What's the reason why they buy and take the freemium. And when do they convert over? Well, take me through the progression of value. When do they see something and why do they increase their sure. >>Assumption? Yeah. That, I mean, the bottom line is you want to try to get more value out of your data at a lower cost and make it easier and faster to do. And so getting started in a single use case, trying out our free version, representing your data and taking a look at what it could look like under a common model, connecting it up with our virtualization services is a great way to try out the technology and really, you know, put your toe in the water to see is this something that would be a value to organization as you see that value unlock is you really understand that you can leverage these days assets with this lower time to value, you know, days in order to unlock a whole repository and connected to another repository. That's where we love to engage with you and help show you how you can make that successful in a more production environment. >>I like about some of the things you're talking about star dog has kind of that aspirin aspect, but also a growth, um, uh, vitamin E as well, in terms of the value proposition, a lot of companies are overwhelmed with the data, but yet you have this path towards more creation of value through the knowledge graph and reasoning and other other value. When does a customer, and this is kind of comes back to the customers who are out there potentially watching prospects or future customers. When do they know they need to call you guys up? Is it because they have too many sources? Could you take me through what it, what it looks like in a prospect's environment where they would really win with start a what's it look like? What are some of the signs that they need to engage, start out? >>Yeah. The two big things that we've seen repeated in our customer base over and over again, is if you have a large number of systems out there that aren't connected, that you don't see how all the data it can be pulled together between those systems, because the different data formats or different languages or different ways that the data is created in those systems start off, can certainly help. The second is if you have a large data warehouse or a data Lake, and you don't see the value being generated out of that, because people don't understand where the data is or what context it has with other data within those repositories, both of those situations are one where we think you'd get a lot of value out of start off. And we'd love to talk to you. >>So would, so just secondly, understand this. So if you have a lot of systems that either are not connected or connected, whatever, that's great, a lot of sources sitting around, you know, whether it's spreadsheets or Oracle or >>Red shift, whatever it is, we've loved it that's right. >>Ingest as much as possible from sources >>That's right. Ingest or connect. I mean, that's really the value that we bring is you don't have to pull it all in. You can just map and leverage the data where it lives. We have customers that have petabyte repositories that just mapped that data in to start off, and we can really facilitate pulling out the value of those systems without you having to move it around again, to another request, >>Ingest, connect, and visually see value. That's right. It sounds, it sounds like a tagline, um, great stuff. So just give some examples of who's using it. What big names? Um, obviously you guys, aren't hot startup coming out of the Amazon cloud showcase. Uh, congratulations. What are some names that have worked with you guys that can give an indicator of the company that you're keeping right now in terms of, >>Yeah, I mean our largest customer by far right now, our longest customer has been NASA. Um, so they've been a really exciting user of the platform we've been really to see them leverage the platform. Schneider electric has been a long time user, uh, Bayer FINRA in the U S which is a financial services watchdog organization. These are customers that are getting a lot of value out of our platform today, and we're excited to work with them. >>Awesome, Rob, great to see you. Congratulations. Uh, take a minute to just give the plug for the commercial. How do we engage? What's the culture like, um, you guys hiring, what's the, what's the state of that? What's the state of the company. >>Yeah, no, it's a, it's a great thank you for, uh, for bringing that up where, you know, we're an exciting growing company. Um, as we really reach out more and more to connect more people's data, we find that we're always looking at more resources on building out more conductivity between the individual data sources. So more understanding on that front, as well as more, a professional services type folks to help people through the process. We've really been trying to minimize the amount of effort that you have to have in order to get started, but we know that people like a helping hands. So we're always looking for people we're always growing and we're excited to have the chance to, you know, bring this technology out beyond just the semantic group that is historically been here. >>You know, you've got a great job. Vice-president solutions consulting, essentially you're in a product role, but more like a solution architect meets products, uh, customer facing, and also product century. You're kind of the center of all the action. So what's the coolest thing you've seen, um, from a customer standpoint or an architecture or, um, a deployment or an engagement that you've been involved with. That's been kind of like, Oh, wow, that's cool. That's game. That's something new that we've been, we wouldn't have seen a few years ago. Take us through just an example, anecdotal, you don't have to share the company name or you. >>That's a great question. Um, there is a company that is working on self-driving cars and being able to leverage the knowledge graph to pull together all of the videos and material they get from the vehicles themselves, as well as static information about the sensors. Uh, that's been pretty exciting to see. I, I, I just recently purchased the festival myself. So I'm excited about the whole self-driving car world and to be able to help them participate with these companies is, is pretty exciting. Um, we, we just help one of the large drug manufacturers come to market with one of their drugs earlier than expected. You know, that's a, that's a pretty exciting feeling to know that you can really help people, um, by just connecting the data they already have and letting them leverage those resources, uh, that that really is something that we're going to be very calm >>And the bridge to the future that the customers have to cross with you is also pretty compelling. You got industrial IOT and more and more data to take a quick minute to describe what that future looks like. >>Yeah. You know, as we see more and more automation in this process, we see a couple of different really, you know, exploding areas. The first off, you know, you hit the nail on the head is data being able to bring in more edge devices, being able to really process that data on the fly and be able to help answer questions as these changes in data are occur within these sources. Um, that's certainly part of the future. And the other thing that we're really excited about is this more automatic data discovery with an organization. How can we have an agent that goes out and kind of can infer really even what your data is about in the structure of your data without a lot of input for you. And so we've been working a lot with building up these models automatically and letting you have the foundation for integrating your data, um, and just the push of a button. So we're excited about walking, Alexa, our customers in this journey as well. >>It's, it's a fun area. You talk about reasoning. That's one of the key value propositions that you guys have. You talk about AI, you talk about bots and soon it's going to be thinking machines for us. They're going to be doing all the work. >>I hope they're not too soon, but I am excited about that idea as well. I can go. I do think that, uh, you know, if you look at organizations today, it's fascinating how it's not, that the problems are different, but we're trying to automate as much of it as possible so that we can work on that, the real value clumps of our organizations. And it's not that kind of drudgery work. I started as a DBA back in my career, um, just trying to keep the database up and running, you know, nowadays, you know, all these autonomous databases and self indexing, and self-correcting, it's just not a passive lead as much anymore. You know, we hope we can bring that to the data infrastructure automation. >>It's a double-edged sword gun, right. It's amazing, done wrong. It could cause some damage and flipped some, some pain and hurt. And so you got to figure it out, got to have the right data sets, gotta have the right software, um, and a great future. Rob Harris, congratulations for being a cannabis startup showcase here on the cube on cloud startups, uh, with AWS, uh, led partnership. Thank you for coming on and being part of this event. Thank you again. Okay. Rob Harris, vice president solutions consulting at star dog here for the coupon cloud. I'm John furrier. Thanks for watching. >>Yeah.