(upbeat intro music) >> Hello everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm your host, John Furrier, here in Palo Alto, California. Got a special remote guest coming in. Teresa Carlson, President and Chief Commercial Officer at Flexport, theCUBE alumni, one of the first, let me go back to 2013, Teresa, former AWS. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Oh my gosh, almost 10 years. That is unbelievable. It's hard to believe so many years of theCUBE. I love it. >> It's been such a great honor to interview you and follow your career. You've had quite the impressive run, executive level woman in tech. You've done such an amazing job, not only in your career, but also helping other women. So I want to give you props to that before we get started. Thank you. >> Thank you, John. I, it's my, it's been my honor and privilege. >> Let's talk about Flexport. Tell us about your new role there and what it's all about. >> Well, I love it. I'm back working with another Amazonian, Dave Clark, who is our CEO of Flexport, and we are about 3,000 people strong globally in over 90 countries. We actually even have, we're represented in over 160 cities and with local governments and places around the world, which I think is super exciting. We have over 100 network partners and growing, and we are about empowering the global supply chain and trade and doing it in a very disruptive way with the use of platform technology that allows our customers to really have visibility and insight to what's going on. And it's a lot of fun. I'm learning new things, but there's a lot of technology in this as well, so I feel right at home. >> You quite have a knack from mastering growth, technology, and building out companies. So congratulations, and scaling them up too with the systems and processes. So I want to get into that. Let's get into your personal background. Then I want to get into the work you've done and are doing for empowering women in tech. What was your journey about, how did it all start? Like, I know you had a, you know, bumped into it, you went Microsoft, AWS. Take us through your career, how you got into tech, how it all happened. >> Well, I do like to give a shout out, John, to my roots and heritage, which was a speech and language pathologist. So I did start out in healthcare right out of, you know, university. I had an undergraduate and a master's degree. And I do tell everyone now, looking back at my career, I think it was super helpful for me because I learned a lot about human communication, and it has done me very well over the years to really try to understand what environments I'm in and what kind of individuals around the world culturally. So I'm really blessed that I had that opportunity to work in healthcare, and by the way, a shout out to all of our healthcare workers that has helped us get through almost three years of COVID and flu and neurovirus and everything else. So started out there and then kind of almost accidentally got into technology. My first small company I worked for was a company called Keyfile Corporation, which did workflow and document management out of Nashua, New Hampshire. And they were a Microsoft goal partner. And that is actually how I got into big tech world. We ran on exchange, for everybody who knows that term exchange, and we were a large small partner, but large in the world of exchange. And those were the days when you would, the late nineties, you would go and be in the same room with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. And I really fell in love with Microsoft back then. I thought to myself, wow, if I could work for a big tech company, I got to hear Bill on stage about saving, he would talk about saving the world. And guess what my next step was? I actually got a job at Microsoft, took a pay cut and a job downgrade. I tell this story all the time. Took like three downgrades in my role. I had been a SVP and went to a manager, and it's one of the best moves I ever made. And I shared that because I really didn't know the world of big tech, and I had to start from the ground up and relearn it. I did that, I just really loved that job. I was at Microsoft from 2000 to 2010, where I eventually ran all of the U.S. federal government business, which was a multi-billion dollar business. And then I had the great privilege of meeting an amazing man, Andy Jassy, who I thought was just unbelievable in his insights and knowledge and openness to understanding new markets. And we talked about government and how government needed the same great technology as every startup. And that led to me going to work for Andy in 2010 and starting up our worldwide public sector business. And I pinch myself some days because we went from two people, no offices, to the time I left we had over 10,000 people, billions in revenue, and 172 countries and had done really amazing work. I think changing the way public sector and government globally really thought about their use of technology and Cloud computing in general. And that kind of has been my career. You know, I was there till 2020, 21 and then did a small stint at Splunk, a small stint back at Microsoft doing a couple projects for Microsoft with CEO, Satya Nadella, who is also an another amazing CEO and leader. And then Dave called me, and I'm at Flexport, so I couldn't be more honored, John. I've just had such an amazing career working with amazing individuals. >> Yeah, I got to say the Amazon One well-documented, certainly by theCUBE and our coverage. We watched you rise and scale that thing. And like I said at a time, this will when we look back as a historic run because of the build out. I mean as a zero to massive billions at a historic time where government was transforming, I would say Microsoft had a good run there with Fed, but it was already established stuff. Federal business was like, you know, blocking and tackling. The Amazon was pure build out. So I have to ask you, what was your big learnings? Because one, you're a Seattle big tech company kind of entrepreneurial in the sense of you got, here's some working capital seed finance and go build that thing, and you're in DC and you're a woman. What did you learn? >> I learned that you really have to have a lot of grit. You, my mom and dad, these are kind of more southern roots words, but stick with itness, you know. you can't give up and no's not in your vocabulary. I found no is just another way to get to yes. That you have to figure out what are all the questions people are going to ask you. I learned to be very patient, and I think one of the things John, for us was our secret sauce was we said to ourselves, if we're going to do something super transformative and truly disruptive, like Cloud computing, which the government really had not utilized, we had to be patient. We had to answer all their questions, and we could not judge in any way what they were thinking because if we couldn't answer all those questions and prove out the capabilities of Cloud computing, we were not going to accomplish our goals. And I do give so much credit to all my colleagues there from everybody like Steve Schmidt who was there, who's still there, who's the CISO, and Charlie Bell and Peter DeSantis and the entire team there that just really helped build that business out. Without them, you know, we would've just, it was a team effort. And I think that's the thing I loved about it was it was not just sales, it was product, it was development, it was data center operations, it was legal, finance. Everybody really worked as a team and we were on board that we had to make a lot of changes in the government relations team. We had to go into Capitol Hill. We had to talk to them about the changes that were required and really get them to understand why Cloud computing could be such a transformative game changer for the way government operates globally. >> Well, I think the whole world and the tech world can appreciate your work and thank you later because you broke down those walls asking those questions. So great stuff. Now I got to say, you're in kind of a similar role at Flexport. Again, transformative supply chain, not new. Computing wasn't new when before Cloud came. Supply chain, not a new concept, is undergoing radical change and transformation. Online, software supply chain, hardware supply chain, supply chain in general, shipping. This is a big part of our economy and how life is working. Similar kind of thing going on, build out, growth, scale. >> It is, it's very much like that, John, I would say, it's, it's kind of a, the model with freight forwarding and supply chain is fairly, it's not as, there's a lot of technology utilized in this global supply chain world, but it's not integrated. You don't have a common operating picture of what you're doing in your global supply chain. You don't have easy access to the information and visibility. And that's really, you know, I was at a conference last week in LA, and it was, the themes were so similar about transparency, access to data and information, being able to act quickly, drive change, know what was happening. I was like, wow, this sounds familiar. Data, AI, machine learning, visibility, common operating picture. So it is very much the same kind of themes that you heard even with government. I do believe it's an industry that is going through transformation and Flexport has been a group that's come in and said, look, we have this amazing idea, number one to give access to everyone. We want every small business to every large business to every government around the world to be able to trade their goods, think about supply chain logistics in a very different way with information they need and want at their fingertips. So that's kind of thing one, but to apply that technology in a way that's very usable across all systems from an integration perspective. So it's kind of exciting. I used to tell this story years ago, John, and I don't think Michael Dell would mind that I tell this story. One of our first customers when I was at Keyfile Corporation was we did workflow and document management, and Dell was one of our customers. And I remember going out to visit them, and they had runners and they would run around, you know, they would run around the floor and do their orders, right, to get all those computers out the door. And when I think of global trade, in my mind I still see runners, you know, running around and I think that's moved to a very digital, right, world that all this stuff, you don't need people doing this. You have machines doing this now, and you have access to the information, and you know, we still have issues resulting from COVID where we have either an under-abundance or an over-abundance of our supply chain. We still have clogs in our shipping, in the shipping yards around the world. So we, and the ports, so we need to also, we still have some clearing to do. And that's the reason technology is important and will continue to be very important in this world of global trade. >> Yeah, great, great impact for change. I got to ask you about Flexport's inclusion, diversity, and equity programs. What do you got going on there? That's been a big conversation in the industry around keeping a focus on not making one way more than the other, but clearly every company, if they don't have a strong program, will be at a disadvantage. That's well reported by McKinsey and other top consultants, diverse workforces, inclusive, equitable, all perform better. What's Flexport's strategy and how are you guys supporting that in the workplace? >> Well, let me just start by saying really at the core of who I am, since the day I've started understanding that as an individual and a female leader, that I could have an impact. That the words I used, the actions I took, the information that I pulled together and had knowledge of could be meaningful. And I think each and every one of us is responsible to do what we can to make our workplace and the world a more diverse and inclusive place to live and work. And I've always enjoyed kind of the thought that, that I could help empower women around the world in the tech industry. Now I'm hoping to do my little part, John, in that in the supply chain and global trade business. And I would tell you at Flexport we have some amazing women. I'm so excited to get to know all. I've not been there that long yet, but I'm getting to know we have some, we have a very diverse leadership team between men and women at Dave's level. I have some unbelievable women on my team directly that I'm getting to know more, and I'm so impressed with what they're doing. And this is a very, you know, while this industry is different than the world I live in day to day, it's also has a lot of common themes to it. So, you know, for us, we're trying to approach every day by saying, let's make sure both our interviewing cycles, the jobs we feel, how we recruit people, how we put people out there on the platforms, that we have diversity and inclusion and all of that every day. And I can tell you from the top, from Dave and all of our leaders, we just had an offsite and we had a big conversation about this is something. It's a drum beat that we have to think about and live by every day and really check ourselves on a regular basis. But I do think there's so much more room for women in the world to do great things. And one of the, one of the areas, as you know very well, we lost a lot of women during COVID, who just left the workforce again. So we kind of went back unfortunately. So we have to now move forward and make sure that we are giving women the opportunity to have great jobs, have the flexibility they need as they build a family, and have a workplace environment that is trusted for them to come into every day. >> There's now clear visibility, at least in today's world, not withstanding some of the setbacks from COVID, that a young girl can look out in a company and see a path from entry level to the boardroom. That's a big change. A lot than even going back 10, 15, 20 years ago. What's your advice to the folks out there that are paying it forward? You see a lot of executive leaderships have a seat at the table. The board still underrepresented by most numbers, but at least you have now kind of this solidarity at the top, but a lot of people doing a lot more now than I've seen at the next levels down. So now you have this leveled approach. Is that something that you're seeing more of? And credit compare and contrast that to 20 years ago when you were, you know, rising through the ranks? What's different? >> Well, one of the main things, and I honestly do not think about it too much, but there were really no women. There were none. When I showed up in the meetings, I literally, it was me or not me at the table, but at the seat behind the table. The women just weren't in the room, and there were so many more barriers that we had to push through, and that has changed a lot. I mean globally that has changed a lot in the U.S. You know, if you look at just our U.S. House of Representatives and our U.S. Senate, we now have the increasing number of women. Even at leadership levels, you're seeing that change. You have a lot more women on boards than we ever thought we would ever represent. While we are not there, more female CEOs that I get an opportunity to see and talk to. Women starting companies, they do not see the barriers. And I will share, John, globally in the U.S. one of the things that I still see that we have that many other countries don't have, which I'm very proud of, women in the U.S. have a spirit about them that they just don't see the barriers in the same way. They believe that they can accomplish anything. I have two sons, I don't have daughters. I have nieces, and I'm hoping someday to have granddaughters. But I know that a lot of my friends who have granddaughters today talk about the boldness, the fortitude, that they believe that there's nothing they can't accomplish. And I think that's what what we have to instill in every little girl out there, that they can accomplish anything they want to. The world is theirs, and we need to not just do that in the U.S., but around the world. And it was always the thing that struck me when I did all my travels at AWS and now with Flexport, I'm traveling again quite a bit, is just the differences you see in the cultures around the world. And I remember even in the Middle East, how I started seeing it change. You've heard me talk a lot on this program about the fact in both Saudi and Bahrain, over 60% of the tech workers were females and most of them held the the hardest jobs, the security, the architecture, the engineering. But many of them did not hold leadership roles. And that is what we've got to change too. To your point, the middle, we want it to get bigger, but the top, we need to get bigger. We need to make sure women globally have opportunities to hold the most precious leadership roles and demonstrate their capabilities at the very top. But that's changed. And I would say the biggest difference is when we show up, we're actually evaluated properly for those kind of roles. We have a ways to go. But again, that part is really changing. >> Can you share, Teresa, first of all, that's great work you've done and I wan to give you props of that as well and all the work you do. I know you champion a lot of, you know, causes in in this area. One question that comes up a lot, I would love to get your opinion 'cause I think you can contribute heavily here is mentoring and sponsorship is huge, comes up all the time. What advice would you share to folks out there who were, I won't say apprehensive, but maybe nervous about how to do the networking and sponsorship and mentoring? It's not just mentoring, it's sponsorship too. What's your best practice? What advice would you give for the best way to handle that? >> Well yeah, and for the women out there, I would say on the mentorship side, I still see mentorship. Like, I don't think you can ever stop having mentorship. And I like to look at my mentors in different parts of my life because if you want to be a well-rounded person, you may have parts of your life every day that you think I'm doing a great job here and I definitely would like to do better there. Whether it's your spiritual life, your physical life, your work life, you know, your leisure life. But I mean there's, and there's parts of my leadership world that I still seek advice from as I try to do new things even in this world. And I tried some new things in between roles. I went out and asked the people that I respected the most. So I just would say for sure have different mentorships and don't be afraid to have that diversity. But if you have mentorships, the second important thing is show up with a real agenda and questions. Don't waste people's time. I'm very sensitive today. If you're, if you want a mentor, you show up and you use your time super effectively and be prepared for that. Sponsorship is a very different thing. And I don't believe we actually do that still in companies. We worked, thank goodness for my great HR team. When I was at AWS, we worked on a few sponsorship programs where for diversity in general, where we would nominate individuals in the company that we felt that weren't, that had a lot of opportunity for growth, but they just weren't getting a seat at the table. And we brought 'em to the table. And we actually kind of had a Chatham House rules where when they came into the meetings, they had a sponsor, not a mentor. They had a sponsor that was with them the full 18 months of this program. We would bring 'em into executive meetings. They would read docs, they could ask questions. We wanted them to be able to open up and ask crazy questions without, you know, feeling wow, I just couldn't answer this question in a normal environment or setting. And then we tried to make sure once they got through the program that we found jobs and support and other special projects that they could go do. But they still had that sponsor and that group of individuals that they'd gone through the program with, John, that they could keep going back to. And I remember sitting there and they asked me what I wanted to get out of the program, and I said two things. I want you to leave this program and say to yourself, I would've never had that experience if I hadn't gone through this program. I learned so much in 18 months. It would probably taken me five years to learn. And that it helped them in their career. The second thing I told them is I wanted them to go out and recruit individuals that look like them. I said, we need diversity, and unless you all feel that we are in an inclusive environment sponsoring all types of individuals to be part of this company, we're not going to get the job done. And they said, okay. And you know, but it was really one, it was very much about them. That we took a group of individuals that had high potential and a very diverse with diverse backgrounds, held 'em up, taught 'em things that gave them access. And two, selfishly I said, I want more of you in my business. Please help me. And I think those kind of things are helpful, and you have to be thoughtful about these kind of programs. And to me that's more sponsorship. I still have people reach out to me from years ago, you know, Microsoft saying, you were so good with me, can you give me a reference now? Can you talk to me about what I should be doing? And I try to, I'm not pray 100%, some things pray fall through the cracks, but I always try to make the time to talk to those individuals because for me, I am where I am today because I got some of the best advice from people like Don Byrne and Linda Zecker and Andy Jassy, who were very honest and upfront with me about my career. >> Awesome. Well, you got a passion for empowering women in tech, paying it forward, but you're quite accomplished and that's why we're so glad to have you on the program here. President and Chief Commercial Officer at Flexport. Obviously storied career and your other jobs, specifically Amazon I think, is historic in my mind. This next chapter looks like it's looking good right now. Final question for you, for the few minutes you have left. Tell us what you're up to at Flexport. What's your goals as President, Chief Commercial Officer? What are you trying to accomplish? Share a little bit, what's on your mind with your current job? >> Well, you kind of said it earlier. I think if I look at my own superpowers, I love customers, I love partners. I get my energy, John, from those interactions. So one is to come in and really help us build even a better world class enterprise global sales and marketing team. Really listen to our customers, think about how we interact with them, build the best executive programs we can, think about new ways that we can offer services to them and create new services. One of my favorite things about my career is I think if you're a business leader, it's your job to come back around and tell your product group and your services org what you're hearing from customers. That's how you can be so much more impactful, that you listen, you learn, and you deliver. So that's one big job. The second job for me, which I am so excited about, is that I have an amazing group called flexport.org under me. And flexport.org is doing amazing things around the world to help those in need. We just announced this new funding program for Tech for Refugees, which brings assistance to millions of people in Ukraine, Pakistan, the horn of Africa, and those who are affected by earthquakes. We just took supplies into Turkey and Syria, and Flexport, recently in fact, just did sent three air shipments to Turkey and Syria for these. And I think we did over a hundred trekking shipments to get earthquake relief. And as you can imagine, it was not easy to get into Syria. But you know, we're very active in the Ukraine, and we are, our goal for flexport.org, John, is to continue to work with our commercial customers and team up with them when they're trying to get supplies in to do that in a very cost effective, easy way, as quickly as we can. So that not-for-profit side of me that I'm so, I'm so happy. And you know, Ryan Peterson, who was our founder, this was his brainchild, and he's really taken this to the next level. So I'm honored to be able to pick that up and look for new ways to have impact around the world. And you know, I've always found that I think if you do things right with a company, you can have a beautiful combination of commercial-ity and giving. And I think Flexport does it in such an amazing and unique way. >> Well, the impact that they have with their system and their technology with logistics and shipping and supply chain is a channel for societal change. And I think that's a huge gift that you have that under your purview. So looking forward to finding out more about flexport.org. I can only imagine all the exciting things around sustainability, and we just had Mobile World Congress for Big Cube Broadcast, 5Gs right around the corner. I'm sure that's going to have a huge impact to your business. >> Well, for sure. And just on gas emissions, that's another thing that we are tracking gas, greenhouse gas emissions. And in fact we've already reduced more than 300,000 tons and supported over 600 organizations doing that. So that's a thing we're also trying to make sure that we're being climate aware and ensuring that we are doing the best job we can at that as well. And that was another thing I was honored to be able to do when we were at AWS, is to really cut out greenhouse gas emissions and really go global with our climate initiatives. >> Well Teresa, it's great to have you on. Security, data, 5G, sustainability, business transformation, AI all coming together to change the game. You're in another hot seat, hot roll, big wave. >> Well, John, it's an honor, and just thank you again for doing this and having women on and really representing us in a big way as we celebrate International Women's Day. >> I really appreciate it, it's super important. And these videos have impact, so we're going to do a lot more. And I appreciate your leadership to the industry and thank you so much for taking the time to contribute to our effort. Thank you, Teresa. >> Thank you. Thanks everybody. >> Teresa Carlson, the President and Chief Commercial Officer of Flexport. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. This is International Women's Day broadcast. Thanks for watching. (upbeat outro music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome to the Cube's coverage of International Women's Day 2023. I'm John Furrier, host of the CUBE series of profiles around leaders in the tech industry sharing their stories, advice, best practices, what they're doing in their jobs their vision of the future, and more importantly, passing it on and encouraging more and more networking and telling the stories that matter. Our next guest is a great executive leader talking about how to lead in challenging times. Krista Satterthwaite, who is Senior Vice President and GM of Mainstream Compute. Krista great to see you're Cube alumni. We've had you on before talking about compute power. And by the way, congratulations on your BPT and Black Professional Tech Network 2023 Black Tech Exec of the Year Award. >> Thank you very much. Appreciate it. And thanks for having me. >> I knew I liked you the first time we were doing interviews together. You were so smart and so on top of it. Thanks for coming on. >> No problem. >> All kidding aside, let's get into it. You know, one of the things that's coming out on these interviews is leadership is being showcased and there's a network effect happening in the industry and you're starting to see people look and hear stories that they may or may not have heard before or news stories are coming out. So, one of the things that's interesting is that also in the backdrop of post pandemic, there's been a turn in the industry a little bit, there's a little bit of headwind in certain areas, some tailwinds in cloud and other areas. Compute, your area is doing very well. It could be challenging. And as a leader, has the conversation changed? And where are you at right now in the network of folks you're working with? What's the mood? >> Yeah, so actually I, things are much better. Obviously we had a chip shortage last year. Things are much, much better. But I learned a lot when it came to going through challenging times and leadership. And I think when we talk to customers, a lot of 'em are in challenging situations. Sometimes it's budget, sometimes it's attracting and retaining talent and sometimes it's just demands because, it's really exciting that technology is behind everything. But that means the demands on IT are bigger than ever before. So what I find when it comes to challenging times is that there's really three qualities that are game changers when it comes to leading and challenging times. And the first one is positivity. People have to feel like there's a light at the end of the tunnel to make sure that, their attitudes stay up, that they stay working really really hard and they look to the leader for that. The second one is communication. And I read somewhere that communication is leadership. And we had a great example from our CEO Antonio Neri when the pandemic hit and everything shut down. He had an all employee meeting every week for a month and we have tens of thousands of employees. And then even after that month, we had 'em very regularly. But he wanted to make sure that everybody heard from, him his thoughts had all the updates, knew how their peers were doing, how we were helping customers. And I really learned a lot from that in terms of communicating and communicating more during tough times. And then I would say the third one is making sure that they are informed and they feel empowered. So I would say a leader who is able to do that really, really stands out in a challenging time. >> So how do you get yourself together? Obviously you the chip shortage everyone knows in the industry and for the folks not in the tech industry, it was an economic potential disaster, because you don't get the chips you need. You guys make servers and technology, chips power everything. If you miss a shipment, it could cause a lot of backlash. So Cisco had an earnings impact. It has impact to the business. When do you have that code red moment where it's like, okay, we have to kind of put the pause and go into emergency mode. And how do you handle that? >> Well, you know, it is funny 'cause when it, when we have challenges, I come to learn that people can look at challenges and hard work as a burden or a mission and they behave totally different. If they see it as a burden, then they're doing the bare minimum and they're pointing fingers and they're complaining and they're probably not getting a whole lot done. If they see it as a mission, then all of a sudden they're going above and beyond. They're working really hard, they're really partnering. And if it affects customers for HPE, obviously we, HPE is a very customer centric company, so everyone pays attention and tries to pitch in. But when it comes to a mission, I started thinking, what are the real ingredients for a mission? And I think it's important. I think it's, people feel like they can make an impact. And then I think the third one is that the goal is clear, even if the path isn't, 'cause you may have to pivot a lot if it's a challenge. And so when it came to the chip shortage, it was a mission. We wanted to make sure that we could ship to customers as quickly as possible. And it was a mission. Everybody pulled together. I learned how much our team could pull off and pull together through that challenge. >> And the consequences can be quantified in economics. So it's like the burn the boats example, you got to burn the boats, you're stuck. You got to figure out a solution. How does that change the demands on people? Because this is, okay, there's a mission it they're not, it's not normal. What are some of those new demands that arise during those times and how do you manage that? How do you be a leader? >> Yeah, so it's funny, I was reading this statement from James White who used to be the CEO of Jamba Juice. And he was talking about how he got that job. He said, "I think it was one thing I said that really convinced them that I was the right person." And what he said was something like, "I will get more out of people than nine out of 10 leaders on the planet." He said, "Because I will look at their strengths and their capabilities and I will play to their passions." and their capabilities and I will play their passions. and getting the most out people in difficult times, it is all about how much you can get out of people for their own sake and for the company's sake. >> That's great feedback. And to people watching who are early in their careers, leading is getting the best out of your team, attitude. Some of the things you mentioned. What advice would you give folks that are starting to get into the workforce, that are starting to get into that leadership track or might have a trajectory or even might have an innate ability that they know they have and they want to pursue that dream? >> Yeah so. >> What advice would you give them? >> Yeah, what I would say, I say this all the time that, for the first half of my career I was very job conscious, but I wasn't very career conscious. So I'd get in a role and I'd stay in that role for long periods of time and I'd do a good job, but I wasn't really very career conscious. And what I would say is, everybody says how important risk taking is. Well, risk taking can be a little bit of a scary word, right? Or term. And the way I see it is give it a shot and see what happens. You're interested in something, give it a shot and see what happens. It's kind of a less intimidating way of looking at risk because even though I was job conscious, and not career conscious, one thing I did when people asked me to take something on, hey Krista, would you like to take on more responsibility here? The answer was always yes, yes, yes, yes. So I said yes because I said, hey I'll give it a shot and see what happens. And that helped me tremendously because I felt like I am giving it a try. And the more you do that, the the better it is. >> It's great. >> And actually the the less scary it is because you do that, a few times and it goes well. It's like a muscle that builds. >> It's funny, a woman executive was on the program. I said, the word balance comes up a lot. And she stopped and said, "Let's just talk about balance for a second." And then she went contrarian and said, "It's about not being unbalanced. It's about being, taking a chance and being a little bit off balance to put yourself outside your comfort zone to try new things." And then she also came up and followed and said, "If you do that alone, you increase your risk. But if you do it with people, a team that you trust and you're authentic and you're vulnerable and you're communicating, that is the chemistry." And that was a really good point. What's your reaction? 'Cause you were talking about authentic conversations good communications with Antonio. How does someone get, feel, find that team and do you agree with it? And what was your, how would you react to that? >> Yes, I agree with that. And when it comes to being authentic, that's the magic and when someone isn't, if someone's not really being themselves, it's really funny because you can feel it, you can sense it. There's kind of a wall between you and them. And over time people won't be able to put their finger on it, but they'll feel a distance from you. But when you're authentic and you share who you are, what you find is you find things in common with other people. 'Cause you're sharing more of who you are and it's like, oh, I do that too. Oh, I'm interested in that too. And build the bonds between people and the authenticity. And that's what people crave. They want people to be authentic and people can tell when you're authentic and when you're not. >> Is managing and leading through a crisis a born talent or can you learn it? >> Oh, definitely learned. I think that we're born knowing nothing and I once read people are nurtured into greatness and I think that's true. So yeah, definitely learned. >> What are some examples that can come out of a tough time as folks may look at a crisis and be shy away from it? How do they lean into it? What advice would you give folks? How do you handle it? I mean, everyone's got different personality. Okay, they get to a position but stepping through that door. >> Yeah, well, I do this presentation called, "10 things I Wish I Knew Earlier in my Career." And one of those things is about the growth mindset and the growth mindset. There's a book called "Mindset" by Carol Dweck and the growth mindset is all about learning and not always having to know everything, but really the winning is in the learning. And so if you have a growth mindset it makes you feel better about everything because you can't lose. You're winning because you're learning. So when I've learned that, I started looking at things much differently. And when it comes to going through tough times, what I find is you're exercising muscles that you didn't even know you had, which makes you stronger when the crisis is over, obviously. And I also feel like you become a lot a much more creative when you're in challenging times. You're forced to do things that you hadn't had to do before. And it also bonds the team. It's almost like going through bootcamp together. When you go through a challenge together it bonds you for life. >> I mean, you could have bonding, could be trauma bonding or success bonding. People love to be on the success side because that's positive and that's really the key mindset. You're always winning if you have that attitude. And learnings is also positive. So it's not, it's never a failure unless you make it. >> That's right, exactly. As long as you learn from it. And that's the name of the game. So, learning is the goal. >> So I have to ask you, on your job now, you have a really big responsibility HPE compute and big division. What's the current mindset that you have right now in your career, where you're at? What are some of the things on your mind that you think about? We had other, other seniors leaders say, hey, you know I got the software as my brain and the hardware's my body. I like to keep software and hardware working together. What is your current state of your career and how you looking at it, what's next and what's going on in your mind right now? >> Yeah, so for me, I really want to make sure that for my team we're nurturing the next generation of leadership and that we're helping with career development and career growth. And people feel like they can grow their careers here. Luckily at HPE, we have a lot of people stay at HPE a long time, and even people who leave HPE a lot of times they come back because the culture's fantastic. So I just want to make sure I'm contributing to that culture and I'm bringing up the next generation of leaders. >> What's next for you? What are you looking at from a career personal standpoint? >> You know, it's funny, I, I love what I'm doing right now. I'm actually on a joint venture board with H3C, which is HPE Joint Venture Company. And so I'm really enjoying that and exploring more board service opportunities. >> You have a focus of good growth mindset, challenging through, managing through tough times. How do you stay focused on that North star? How do you keep the reinforcement of the mission? How do you nurture the team to greatness? >> Yeah, so I think it's a lot of clarity, providing a lot of clarity about what's important right now. And it goes back to some of the communication that I mentioned earlier, making sure that everybody knows where the North Star is, so everybody's focused on the same thing, because I feel like with the, I always felt like throughout my career I was set up for success if I had the right information, the right guidance and the right goals. And I try to make sure that I do that with my team. >> What are some of the things that you could share as we wrap up here for the folks watching, as the networks increase, as the stories start to unfold more and more on digital like we're doing here, what do you hope people walk away with? What's working, what needs work, and what is some things that people aren't talking about that should be discussed publicly? >> Do you mean from a career standpoint or? >> For career? For growing into tech and into leadership positions. >> Okay. >> Big migration tech is now a wide field. I mean, when I grew up, broke into the eighties, it was computer science, software engineering, and three degrees in engineering, right? >> I see huge swath of AI coming. So many technical careers. There's a lot more women. >> Yeah. And that's what's so exciting about being in a technical career, technical company, is that everything's always changing. There's always opportunity to learn something new. And frankly, you know, every company is in the business of technology right now, because they want to closer to their customers. Typically, they're using technology to do that. Everyone's digitally transforming. And so what I would say is that there's so much opportunity, keep your mind open, explore what interests you and keep learning because it's changing all the time. >> You know I was talking with Sue, former HP, she's on a lot of boards. The balance at the board level still needs a lot of work and the leaderships are getting better, but the board at the seats at the table needs work. Where do you see that transition for you in the future? Is that something on your mind? Maybe a board seat? You mentioned you're on a board with HPE, but maybe sitting on some other boards? Any, any? >> Yes, actually, actually, we actually have a program here at HPE called the Board Ready Now program that I'm a part of. And so HPE is very supportive of me exploring an independent board seat. And so they have some education and programming around that. And I know Sue well, she's awesome. And so yes, I'm looking into those opportunities right now. >> She advises do one no more than two. The day job. >> Yeah, I would only be doing one current job that I have. >> Well, kris, it was great to chat with you about these topics and leadership and challenging times. Great masterclass, great advice. As SVP and GM of mainstream compute for HPE, what's going on in your job these days? What's the most exciting thing happening? Share some of your work situations. >> Sure, so the most exciting thing happening right now is HPE Gen 11, which we just announced and started shipping, brings tremendous performance benefit, has an intuitive operating experience, a trusted security by design, and it's optimized to run workloads so much faster. So if anybody is interested, they should go check it out on hpe.com. >> And of course the CUBE will be at HPE Discover. We'll see you there. Any final wisdom you'd like to share as we wrap up the last minute here? >> Yeah, so I think the last thing I'll say is that when it comes to setting your sights, I think, expecting it, good things to happen usually happens when you believe you deserve it. So what happens is you believe you deserve it, then you expect it and you get it. And so sometimes that's about making sure you raise your thermostat to expect more. And I always talk about you don't have to raise it all up at once. You could do that incrementally and other people can set your thermostat too when they say, hey, you should be, you should get a level this high or that high, but raise your thermostat because what you expect is what you get. >> Krista, thank you so much for contributing to this program. We're going to do it quarterly. We're going to do getting more stories out there, so we'll have you back and if you know anyone with good stories, send them our way. And congratulations on your BPTN Tech Executive of the Year award for 2023. Congratulations, great prize there and great recognition for your hard work. >> Thank you so much, John, I appreciate it. >> Okay, this is the Cube's coverage of National Woodman's Day. I'm John Furrier, stories from the front lines, management ranks, developers, all there, global coverage of international events with theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (soft music)

>> Narrator: TheCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. >> All right, welcome back to the Fira in Barcelona. This is Dave Vellante with Dave Nicholson. Day 4 of coverage MWC 23. We've been talking all week about the disaggregation of the telco networks, how telcos need to increase revenue how they're not going to let the over the top providers do it again. They want to charge Netflix, right? And Netflix is punching back. There maybe are better ways to do revenue acceleration. We're going to talk to that topic with Dave Trigg who's the Global Vice President of Telecom systems business at Dell Technologies. And Ken Burns, who's a global telecom partner, sales lead. Guys, good to see you. >> Good to see you. Great to be here. >> Dave, you heard my, you're welcome. You heard my intro. It's got to be better ways to, for the telcos to make money. How can they accelerate revenue beyond taxing Netflix? >> Yeah, well, well first of all, sort of the promise of 5G, and a lot of people talk about 5G as the enterprise G. Right? So the promise of 5G is to really help drive revenue enterprise use cases. And so, it's sort of the promise of the next generation of technology, but it's not easy to figure out how we monetize that. And so we think Dell has a pretty significant role to play. It's a CEO conversation for every telco and how they accelerate. And so it's an area we're investing heavily into three different areas for telcos. One is the IT space. Dell's done that forever. 90% of the companies leaning in on that. The other places network, network's more about cost takeout. And the third area where we're investing in is working with what we call their line of businesses, but it's really their business units, right? How can we sit down with them and really understand what services do they take to market? Where do they go? So, we're making significant investments. So one way they can do it is working with Dell and and we're making big investments 'cause in most Geos we have a fairly significant sales force. We've brought in an industry leader to help us put it together. And we're getting very focused on this space and, you know, looking forward to talking more about it. >> So Ken, you know, the space inside and out, we just had at AT&T on... >> Dave Trigg: Yep. >> And they were saying we have to be hypersensitive because of our platinum brand to the use of personal information. >> Ken: Yeah. >> So we're not going to go there yet. We're not going to go directly monetize, but yet I'm thinking well, Netflix knows what I'm watching and they're making recommendations and they're, and and that's how they make money. And so the, the telcos are, are shy about doing that for right reasons, but they want to make better offers. They want to put, put forth better bundles. You know, they don't, they don't want to spend all their time trying to figure that out and not being able to change when they need to change. So, so what is the answer? If they're not going to go toward that direct monetization of data? >> Ken: Yeah. >> How do they get there? >> So I, I joined Dell in- at the end of June and brought on, as David said, to, to build and lead this what we call the line of business strategy, right? And ultimately what it is is tying together Dell technology solutions and the best of breed of what the telecoms bring to bear to solve the business outcomes of our joint customers. And there's a few jewels inside of Dell. One of it is that we have 35,000 sellers out there all touching enterprise business customers. And we have a really good understanding of what those customer needs are and you know what their outcomes needs to be. The other jewel is we have a really good understanding of how to solve those business outcomes. Dell is an open company. We work with thousands of integrators, and we have a really good insight in terms of how to solve those business outcomes, right? And so in my conversations with the telecom companies when you talk about, you know combining the best assets of Dell with their capabilities and we're all talking to the same customers, right? And if we're giving them the same story on these solutions solving business outcomes it's a beautiful thing. It's a time to market. >> What's an example of a, of a, of a situation where you'll partner with telcos that's going to drive revenue for, for both of you and value for the customer? >> Yeah, great question. So we've been laser focused on four key areas, cyber, well, let me start off with connected laptops, cyber, private mobility, and edge. Right? Now, the last two are a little bit squishy, but I'll I'll get to that in a bit, right? Because ultimately I feel like with this 5G market, we could actually make the market. And the way that we've been positioning this is almost, almost on a journey for IOT. When we talk about laptops, right? Dell is the, is the number one company in the world to sell business laptops. Well, if we start selling connected laptops the telcos are starting to say, well, you know what? If all of those laptops get connected to my network, that's a ton of 5G activations, right? We have the used cases on why having a connected workforce makes sense, right? So we're sharing that with the telcos to not simply sell a laptop, but to sell the company on why it makes sense to have that connected workforce. >> Dave Vellante: Why does it make sense? It could change the end customer. >> Ken: Yeah. So, you know, I'm probably not the best to answer that one right? But, but ultimately, you know Dell is selling millions and millions of laptops out there. And, and again, the Verizon's, the AT&T's, the T-mobile's, they're seeing the opportunity that, you know, connecting those laptops, give those the 5G activations right? But Dave, you know, the way that we've been positioning this is it's not simply a laptop could be really a Trojan horse into this IOT journey. Because ultimately, if you sell a thousand laptops to an enterprise company and you're connecting a thousand of their employees, you're connecting people, right? And we can give the analytics around that, what they're using it for, you know, making sure that the security, the bios, all of that is up to date. So now that you're connecting their people you could open up the conversation to why don't we we connect your place and, you know, allowing the telecom companies to come in and educate customers and the Dell sales force on why a private 5G mobility network makes sense to connecting places. That's a great opportunity. When you connect the place, the next part of that journey is connecting things in that place. Robotics, sensors, et cetera, right? And, and so really, so we're on the journey of people, places, things. >> So they got the cyber angle angle in there, Dave. That, that's clear benefit. If you, you know, if you got all these bespoke laptops and they're all at different levels you're going to get, you know, you're going to get hacked anyway. >> Ken: That's right. >> You're going to get hacked worse. >> Yeah. I'm curious, as you go to market, do you see significant differences? You don't have to name any names, but I imagine that there are behemoths that could be laggards because essentially they feel like they're the toll booth and all they have to do is collect, keep collecting the tolls. Whereas some of the smaller, more nimble, more agile entities that you might deal with might be more receptive to this message. That seems to be the sort of way the circle of life are. Are you seeing that? Are you seeing the big ones? Are you seeing the, you know, the aircraft carriers realizing that we got to turn into the wind guys and if we don't start turning into the wind now we're going to be in trouble. >> So this conference has been absolutely fantastic allowing us to speak with, you know, probably 30 plus telecom operators around this strategy, right? And all of the big guys, they've invested hundreds of billions of dollars in their 5G network and they haven't really seen the ROI. So when we're coming into them with a story about how Dell can help monetize their 5G network I got to tell you they're pretty excited >> Dave Nicholson: So they're receptive? >> Oh my God. They are very receptive >> So that's the big question, right? I mean is, who's, is anybody ever going to make any money off of 5G? And Ken, you were saying that private mobility and edge are a little fuzzy but I think from a strategy standpoint I mean that is a potential gold mine. >> Yeah, but it, for, for lot of the telcos and most telcos it's a pretty significant shift in mentality, right? Cause they are used to selling sim cards to some degree and how many sim cards are they selling and how many, what other used cases? And really to get to the point where they understand the use case, 'cause to get into the enterprise to really get into what can they do to help power a enterprise business more wholly. They've got to understand the use case. They got to understand the more complete solution. You know, Dell's been doing that for years. And that's where we can bring our Salesforce, our capabilities, our understanding of the customer. 'cause even your original question around AT&T and trying to understand the data, that's just really a how do you get better understanding of your customer, right? >> Right. Absolutely. >> And, and combined we're better together 'cause we bring a more complete picture of understanding our customers and then how can we help them understand what the edge is. Cause nobody's ever bought an Edge, right? They're buying an Edge to get a business outcome. You know, back in the day, nobody ever bought a data lake, right? Like, you know, they're buying an outcome. They want to use, use that data lake or they want to use the edge to deliver something. They want to use 5G. And 5G has very real capabilities. It's got intrinsic security, which, you know a lot of the wifi doesn't. It's got guaranteed on time, you know, for areas where you can't lose connectivity: autonomous vehicles, et cetera. So it's got very real capabilities that helps deliver that outcome. But you got to be able to translate that into the en- enterprise language to help them solve a problem. And that's where we think we need the help of the telcos. I think the telcos we can help them as well and, and really go drive that outcome. >> So Dell's bringing its go to market expertise and its technology. The telcos obviously have the the connectivity piece and what they do. There's no overlap in terms of the... >> Yeah. >> The, the equipment and the software that you're selling. I mean, they're going to, they're going to take your equipment and create new networks. Beautiful. And, and it's interesting you, like, you think about how Dell has transformed prior to EMC, Dell was, you know, PC maker with a subpar enterprise business, right? Kind of a wannabe enterprise business. Sorry Dell, it's the truth. And then EMC was largely, you know, a company sold storage boxes, but you owned VMware and then brought those two together. Now all of a sudden you had Dell powerhouse leader and Michael Dell, you had VMware incredibly strategic and important and it got EMC with amazing go to market. All of a sudden this Dell, Dell technologies became incredibly attractive to CIOs, C-level executives, board level. And you've come out of that transition VMware's now a separate company, right? And now, but now you have these relationships and you got the shops to be able to go into these edge locations at companies And actually go partner with the telcos. And you got a very compelling value proposition. >> Well, it's been interesting as in, in this show, again most telcos think of Dell as a server provider, you know? Important, but not overly strategic in their journey. But as we've started to invest in this business we've started to invest in things like automation. We've brought together things in our Infra Blocks and then we help them develop revenue. We're not only helping 'em take costs out of their network we're not helping 'em take risk out of deploying that network. We're helping them accelerate the deployment of that network. And then we're helping 'em drive revenue. We are having, you know, they're starting to see us in a new light. Not done yet, but, you know, you can start to see, one, how they're looking at Dell and two, and then how we can go to market. And you know, a big part of that is helping 'em drive and generate revenue. >> Yeah. Well, as, as a, as a former EMC person myself, >> Yeah? >> I will assert that that strategic DNA was injected into Dell by the acquisition of, of EMC. And I'm sticking... >> I won't say that. Okay I'll believe you on that. >> I'm sticking with the story. And it makes sense when you think about moving up market, that's the natural thing. What's, what's what's nearly impossible is to say, we sell semi-trucks but we want to get into the personal pickup truck market. That's that, that doesn't work. Going the other way works. >> Dave Trigg: Yeah. >> Now, now back to the conversation that you had with, with, with AT&T. I'm not buying this whole, no offense to AT&T, but I'm not buying this whole story that, you know, oh we're concerned about our branded customer data. That sounds like someone who's a little bit too comfortable with their existing revenue stream. If I'm out there, I want to be out partnering with folks who are truly aggressive about, about coming up with the next cool thing. You guys are talking about being connected in a laptop. Someone would say, well I got wifi. No, no, no. I'm thinking I want to sim in my laptop cause I don't want to screw around with wifi. Okay, fine. If I know I'm going to be somewhere with excellent wifi connectivity, great. But most of the time it's not excellent. >> That's right. >> So the idea that I could maybe hit F2 and have it switch over to my sim and know that anywhere that I've got coverage, I have high speed connections. Just the convenience of that. >> Ken: Absolutely. >> I'd pay extra for that as an end user consumer. >> Absolutely. >> And I pay for the service. >> Like I tell you, if it interests AT&T I think it's more not, they ask, they're comfortable. They don't know how to monetize that data. Now, of course, AT&T has a media >> Dave Nicholson: Business necessity is the mother of invention. If they don't see the necessity then they're not going to think about it. >> It's a mentality shift. Yes, but, but when you start talking about private mobility and edge, there's there's no concern about personal information there. You're going in with basically a business transformation. Hey, your, your business is, is not, not digital. It's not automated. Now we're going to automate that and digitize that. It's like the, the Dell booth with the beer guys. >> Right. >> You saw that, right? >> I mean that's, I mean that's a simple application. Yeah, a perfect example of how you network and use this technology. >> I mean, how many non-digital businesses are that that need to go digital? >> Dave Nicholson: Like, hundred percent of them. >> Everyone. >> Dave Nicholson: Pretty much. >> Yeah. And this, and this jewel that we have inside of Dell our global industries group, right, where we're investing really heavily in terms of what is the manufacturing industry looking for retail, finance, et cetera. So we have a CTO that came in, that it would be the CTO of manufacturing that gives us a really good opportunity to go to at AT&T or to Verizon or any telco out there, right? To, to say, these are the outcomes. There's Dell technology already in place. How do we connect it to your network? How do we leverage your assets, your manager professional services to provide a richer experience? So it's, there's, you said before Dave, there's really no overlap between Dell and, and our telecom partners. >> You guys making some serious investments here. I mean I, I've been, I was been critical over the years of, hey, you can't just take an X86 block, put a name on it that says edge something and throw it over the fence because that's what you were doing. >> Dave Trigg: And we would agree. >> Yeah. Right. But, of course, but that's all you had at the time. And so you put some... >> We may not have agreed then, but we would agree. >> You bought, brought some people in, you know, like Ken, who really know the business. You brought people into the technical side and you can really see it happening. It's not going to happen overnight. You know, I mean, you know if I were an investor in Dell, I'd be like, okay when are you going to start making money at this business? I'd be like, be patient. You know, it's going to take some time but look at the TAM. >> Yep. >> You know, you guys do a good, good TAM. Tennis is a pro at this stuff. >> We've been at, we've been at this two, three years and we're just now coming with some real material products. You've seen our server line really start to get more purpose-built, really start to get in there as we've started to put out some software that allows for quicker automation, quicker deployments. We have some telcos that are using it to deploy at 10,000 locations. They're literally turning up thousands of locations a week. And so yeah, we're starting to put out some real capability. Got a long way to go. A lot of exciting things on the roadmap. But to your point, it doesn't, you know the ship doesn't turn overnight, you know. >> It could be a really meaningful portion of Dell's business. I'm, I'm excited for the day that Tom Sweet starts reporting on it. Here's our telco business. Yeah. The telco business. But that's not going to happen overnight. But you know, Dell's pretty good at things like ROI. And so you guys do a lot of planning a lot of TAM analysis, a lot of technical analysis, bringing the ecosystem together. That's what this business needs. I, I just don't, it's, it feels unstoppable. You know, you're at this show everybody recognizes the need to open up. Some telcos are moving faster than others. The ones that move faster are going to disrupt. They're going to probably make some mistakes, you know but they're going to get there first. >> Well we've, we've seen the disruptors are making some mistakes and are kind of re- they're already at the phase where they're reevaluating, you know, their approach. Which is great. You know, you, you learn and adjust. You know, you run into a wall, you, you make a turn. And the interesting thing, one of the biggest learnings I've taken out of the show is talking to a bunch of the telcos that are a little bit more of the laggards. They're like, Nope, we, we don't believe in open. We don't think we can do it. We don't have the skillset. They're maybe in a geo that it's hard to find the skillset. As they've been talking to us, and we've been talking about, there's almost a glimmer of hope. They're not convinced yet, but they're like, well wait, maybe we can do this. Maybe open, you know, does give us choice. Maybe it can help us accelerate revenue. So it's been interesting to see a little bit of the, just a little bit, but a little bit of that shift. >> We all remember at 2010, 2011, you talked to banks and financial services companies about, the heck, the Cloud is happening, the Cloud's going to take over the world. We're never going to go into the Cloud. Now they're the biggest, you know Capital One's launching Cloud businesses, Western Union, I mean, they're all in the cloud, right? I mean, it's the same thing's going to happen here. Might, it might take a different pattern. Maybe it takes a little longer, but it's, it's it's a fate are completely >> I was in high school then, so I don't remember all that. >> Sorry, Dave. >> Wow, that was a low blow, like you know? >> But, but the, but the one thing that is for sure there's money to be made convincing people to get off of the backs of the dinosaurs they're riding. >> Dave Vellante: That's right. >> And also, the other thing that's a certainty is that it's not easy. And because it's not easy, there's opportunity there. So I know, I know it's, it, it, it, it, it all sounds great to talk about the the wonderful vision of the future, but I know how hard the the road is that you have to go down to get people, especially if you're comfortable with the revenue stream, if you're comfortable running the plumbing. If you're so comfortable that you can get up on stage and say, I want more money from you to pump your con- your content across my network. I love the Netflix retort, right Dave? >> Yeah, totally Dave. And, but the, the other thing is, telco's a great business. It's, they got monopolies that print money. So... >> Dave Nicholson: It's rational. It's rational. I understand. >> There's less of an incentive to move but what's going to be the incentive is guys like Dish Network coming in saying, we're going to, we're going to disrupt, we're going to build new apps. >> That's right. >> Yeah. >> Well and it's, you know, revenue acceleration, the board level, the CEO level know that they have to, you know, do things different. But to your point, it's just hard, and there's so much gravity there. There's hundreds of years literally of gravity of how they've operated their business. To your point, a lot of them, you know, lot- most of 'em were regulated and most Geos around the world at one point, right? They were government owned or government regulated entities. It's, it's a big ship to turn and it's really hard. We're not claiming we can help them turn the ship overnight but we think we can help evolve them. We think we can go along with the journey and we do think we are better together. >> IT the network and the line of business. Love the strategy. Guys, thanks so much for coming in theCUBE. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you. >> All right, for Dave, Nicholson, Dave Vellante here, John Furrier is in our Palo Alto studio banging out all the news, keep it right there. TheCUBE's coverage of MWC 23. We'll be right back.

>> (Narrator) The CUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding by Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Fira Barcelona. It's theCUBE live at MWC23 our third day of coverage of this great, huge event continues. Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson here. We've got Dell and Dish here, we are going to be talking about what they're doing together. Andy Sheahen joins as global director of Telecom Cloud Core and Next Gen Ops at Dell. And Marc Rouanne, one of our alumni is back, EVP and Chief Network Officer at Dish Wireless. Welcome guys. >> Great to be here. >> (Both) Thank you. >> (Lisa) Great to have you. Mark, talk to us about what's going on at Dish wireless. Give us the update. >> Yeah so we've built a network from scratch in the US, that covered the US, we use a cloud base Cloud native, so from the bottom of the tower all the way to the internet uses cloud distributed cloud, emits it, so there are a lot of things about that. But it's unique, and now it's working, so we're starting to play with it and that's pretty cool. >> What's some of the proof points, proof in the pudding? >> Well, for us, first of all it was to do basic voice and data on a smartphone and for me the success would that you won't see the difference for a smartphone. That's base line. the next step is bringing this to the enterprise for their use case. So we've covered- now we have services for smartphones. We use our brand, Boost brand, and we are distributing that across the US. But as I said, the real good stuff is when you start to making you know the machines and all the data and the applications for the enterprise. >> Andy, how is Dell a facilitator of what Marc just described and the use cases and what their able to deliver? >> We're providing a number of the servers that are being used out in their radio access network. The virtual DU servers, we're also providing some bare metal orchestration capabilities to help automate the process of deploying all these hundreds and thousands of nodes out in the field. Both of these, the servers and the bare metal orchestra product are things that we developed in concert with Dish, working together to understand the way, the best way to automate, based on the tooling their using in other parts of their network, and we've been with you guys since day one, really. >> (Marc) Absolutely, yeah. >> Making each others solutions better the whole way. >> Marc, why Dell? >> So, the way the networks work is you have a cloud, and you have a distributed edge you need someone who understands the diversity of the edge in order to bring the cloud software to the edge, and Dell is the best there, you know, you can, we can ask them to mix and match accelerators, processors memory, it's very diverse distributed edge. We are building twenty thousands sides so you imagine the size and the complexity and Dell was the right partner for that. >> (Andy) Thank you. >> So you mentioned addressing enterprise leads, which is interesting because there's nothing that would prevent you from going after consumer wireless technically, right but it sounds like you have taken a look at the market and said "we're going to go after this segment of the market." >> (Marc) Yeah. >> At least for now. Are there significant differences between what an enterprise expects from a 5G network than, verses a consumer? >> Yeah. >> (Dave) They have higher expectations, maybe, number one I guess is, if my bill is 150 dollars a month I can have certain levels of expectations whereas a large enterprise the may be making a much more significant investment, are their expectations greater? >> (Marc) Yeah. >> Do you have a higher bar to get over? >> So first, I mean first we use our network for consumers, but for us it's an enterprise. That's the consumer segment, an enterprise. So we expose the network like we would to a car manufacturer, or to a distributor of goods of food and beverage. But what you expect when you are an enterprise, you expect, manage your services. You expect to control the goodness of your services, and for this you need to observe what's happening. Are you delivering the right service? What is the feedback from the enterprise users, and that's what we call the observability. We have a data centric network, so our enterprises are saying "Yeah connecting is enough, but show us how it works, and show us how we can learn from the data, improve, improve, and become more competitive." That's the big difference. >> So what you say Marc, are some of the outcomes you achieved working with Dell? TCO, ROI, CapX, OpX, what are some of the outcomes so far, that you've been able to accomplish? >> Yeah, so obviously we don't share our numbers, but we're very competitive. Both on the CapX and the OpX. And the second thing is that we are much faster in terms of innovation, you know one of the things that Telecorp would not do, was to tap into the IT industry. So we access to the silicon and we have access to the software and at a scale that none of the Telecorp could ever do and for us it's like "wow" and it's a very powerful industry and we've been driving the consist- it's a bit technical but all the silicone, the accelerators, the processors, the GPU, the TPUs and it's like wow. It's really a transformation. >> Andy, is there anything anagallis that you've dealt with in the past to the situation where you have this true core edge, environment where you have to instrument the devices that you provide to give that level of observation or observability, whatever the new word is, that we've invented for that. >> Yeah, yeah. >> I mean has there, is there anything- >> Yeah absolutely. >> Is this unprecedented? >> No, no not at all. I mean Dell's been really working at the edge since before the edge was called the edge right, we've been selling, our hardware and infrastructure out to retail shops, branch office locations, you know just smaller form factors outside of data centers for a very long time and so that's sort of the consistency from what we've been doing for 30 years to now the difference is the volume, the different number of permutations as Marc was saying. The different type of accelerator cards, the different SKUS of different server types, the sheer volume of nodes that you have in a nationwide wireless network. So the volumes are much different, the amount of data is much different, but the process is really the same. It's about having the infrastructure in the right place at the right time and being able to understand if it's working well or if it's not and it's not just about a red light or a green light but healthy and unhealthy conditions and predicting when the red lights going to come on. And we've been doing that for a while it's just a different scale, and a different level of complexity when you're trying to piece together all these different components from different vendors. >> So we talk a lot about ecosystem, and sometimes because of the desire to talk about the outcomes and what the end users, customers, really care about sometimes we will stop at the layer where say a Dell lives, and we'll see that as the sum total of the component when really, when you talk about a server that Dish is using that in and of itself is an ecosystem >> Yep, yeah >> (Dave) or there's an ecosystem behind it you just mentioned it, the kinds of components and the choices that you make when you optimize these devices determine how much value Dish, >> (Andy) Absolutely. >> Can get out of that. How deep are you on that hardware? I'm a knuckle dragging hardware guy. >> Deep, very deep, I mean just the number of permutations that were working through with Dish and other operators as well, different accelerator cards that we talked about, different techniques for timing obviously there's different SKUs with the silicon itself, different chip sets, different chips from different providers, all those things have to come together, and we build the basic foundation and then we also started working with our cloud partners Red Hat, Wind River, all these guys, VM Ware, of course and that's the next layer up, so you've got all the different hardware components, you've got the extraction layer, with your virtualization layer and or ubernetise layer and all of that stuff together has to be managed compatibility matrices that get very deep and very big, very quickly and that's really the foundational challenge we think of open ran is thinking all these different pieces are going to fit together and not just work today but work everyday as everything gets updated much more frequently than in the legacy world. >> So you care about those things, so we don't have to. >> That's right. >> That's the beauty of it. >> Yes. >> Well thank you. (laughter) >> You're welcome. >> I want to understand, you know some of the things that we've been talking about, every company is a data company, regardless of whether it's telco, it's a retailer, if it's my bank, it's my grocery store and they have to be able to use data as quickly as possible to make decisions. One of the things they've been talking here is the monetization of data, the monetization of the network. How do you, how does Dell help, like a Dish be able to achieve the monetization of their data. >> Well as Marc was saying before the enterprise use cases are what we are all kind of betting on for 5G, right? And enterprises expect to have access to data and to telemetry to do whatever use cases they want to execute in their particular industry, so you know, if it's a health care provider, if it's a factory, an agricultural provider that's leveraging this network, they need to get the data from the network, from the devices, they need to correlate it, in order to do things like automatically turn on a watering system at a certain time, right, they need to know the weather around make sure it's not too windy and you're going to waste a lot of water. All that has data, it's going to leverage data from the network, it's going to leverage data from devices, it's going to leverage data from applications and that's data that can be monetized. When you have all that data and it's all correlated there's value, inherit to it and you can even go onto a forward looking state where you can intelligently move workloads around, based on the data. Based on the clarity of the traffic of the network, where is the right place to put it, and even based on current pricing for things like on demand insists from cloud providers. So having all that data correlated allows any enterprise to make an intelligent decision about how to move a workload around a network and get the most efficient placing of that workload. >> Marc, Andy mentions things like data and networks and moving data across the networks. You have on your business card, Chief Network Officer, what potentially either keeps you up at night in terror or gets you very excited about the future of your network? What's out there in the frontier and what are those key obstacles that have to be overcome that you work with? >> Yeah, I think we have the network, we have the baseline, but we don't yet have the consumption that is easy by the enterprise, you know an enterprise likes to say "I have 4K camera, I connect it to my software." Click, click, right? And that's where we need to be so we're talking about it APIs that are so simple that they become a click and we engineers we have a tendency to want to explain but we should not, it should become a click. You know, and the phone revolution with the apps became those clicks, we have to do the same for the enterprise, for video, for surveillance, for analytics, it has to be clicks. >> While balancing flexibility, and agility of course because you know the folks who were fans of CLIs come in light interfaces, who hate gooeys it's because they feel they have the ability to go down to another level, so obviously that's a balancing act. >> But that's our job. >> Yeah. >> Our job is to hide the complexity, but of course there is complexity. It's like in the cloud, an emprise scaler, they manage complex things but it's successful if they hide it. >> (Dave) Yeah. >> It's the same. You know we have to be emprise scaler of connectivity but hide it. >> Yeah. >> So that people connect everything, right? >> Well it's Andy's servers, we're all magicians hiding it all. >> Yeah. >> It really is. >> It's like don't worry about it, just know, >> Let us do it. >> Sit down, we will serve you the meal. Don't worry how it's cooked. >> That's right, the enterprises want the outcome. >> (Dave) Yeah. >> They don't want to deal with that bottom layer. But it is tremendously complex and we want to take that on and make it better for the industry. >> That's critical. Marc I'd love to go back to you and just I know that you've been in telco for such a long time and here we are day three of MWC the name changed this year, from Mobile World Congress, reflecting mobilism isn't the only thing, obviously it was the catalyst, but what some of the things that you've heard at the event, maybe seen at the event that give you the confidence that the right players are here to help move Dish wireless forward, for example. >> You know this is the first, I've been here for decades it's the first time, and I'm a Chief Network Officer, first time we don't talk about the network. >> (Andy) Yeah. >> Isn't that surprising? People don't tell me about speed, or latency, they talk about consumption. Apps, you know videos surveillance, or analytics or it's, so I love that, because now we're starting to talk about how we can consume and monetize but that's the first time. We use to talk about gigabytes and this and that, none of that not once. >> What does that signify to you, in terms of the evolution? >> Well you know, we've seen that the demand for the healthcare, for the smart cities, has been here for a decade, proof of concepts for a decade but the consumption has been behind and for me this is the oldest team is waking up to we are going to make it easy, so that the consumption can take off. The demand is there, we have to serve it. And the fact that people are starting to say we hide the complexity that's our problem, but don't even mention it, I love it. >> Yep. Drop the mic. >> (Andy and Marc) Yeah, yeah. >> Andy last question for you, some of the things we know Dell has a big and verging presents in telco, we've had a chance to see the booth, see the cool things you guys are featuring there, Dave did a great tour of it, talk about some of the things you've heard and maybe even from customers at this event that demonstrate to you that Dell is going in the right direction with it's telco strategy. >> Yeah, I mean personally for me this has been an unbelievable event for Dell we've had tons and tons of customer meetings of course and the feedback we're getting is that the things we're bring to market whether it's infrablocks, or purposeful servers that are designed for the telecom network are what our customers need and have always wanted. We get a lot of wows, right? >> (Lisa) That's nice. >> "Wow we didn't know Dell was doing this, we had no idea." And the other part of it is that not everybody was sure that we were going to move as fast as we have so the speed in which we've been able to bring some of these things to market and part of that was working with Dish, you know a pioneer, to make sure we were building the right things and I think a lot of the customers that we talked to really appreciate the fact that we're doing it with the industry, >> (Lisa) Yeah. >> You know, not at the industry and that comes across in the way they are responding and what their talking to us about now. >> And that came across in the interview that you just did. Thank you both for joining Dave and me. >> Thank you >> Talking about what Dell and Dish are doing together the proof is in the pudding, and you did a great job at explaining that, thanks guys, we appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> All right, our pleasure. For our guest and for Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live from MWC 23 day three. We will be back with our next guest, so don't go anywhere. (upbeat music)

>> theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (ambient music) >> Lisa: Hey everyone, welcome back to Barcelona, Spain. It's theCUBE Live at MWC 23. Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. This is day two of four days of cube coverage but you know that, because you've already been watching yesterday and today. We're going to have a great conversation next with EnterpriseWeb and Red Hat. We've had great conversations the last day and a half about the Telco industry, the challenges, the opportunities. We're going to unpack that from this lens. Please welcome Dave Duggal, founder and CEO of EnterpriseWeb and Azhar Sayeed is here, Senior Director Solution Architecture at Red Hat. >> Guys, it's great to have you on the program. >> Yes. >> Thank you Lisa, >> Great being here with you. >> Dave let's go ahead and start with you. Give the audience an overview of EnterpriseWeb. What kind of business is it? What's the business model? What do you guys do? >> Okay so, EnterpriseWeb is reinventing middleware, right? So the historic middleware was to build vertically integrated stacks, right? And those stacks are now such becoming the rate limiters for interoperability for so the end-to-end solutions that everybody's looking for, right? Red Hat's talking about the unified platform. You guys are talking about Supercloud, EnterpriseWeb addresses that we've built middleware based on serverless architecture, so lightweight, low latency, high performance middleware. And we're working with the world's biggest, we sell through channels and we work through partners like Red Hat Intel, Fortnet, Keysight, Tech Mahindra. So working with some of the biggest players that have recognized the value of our innovation, to deliver transformation to the Telecom industry. >> So what are you guys doing together? Is this, is this an OpenShift play? >> Is it? >> Yeah. >> Yeah, so we've got two projects right her on the floor at MWC throughout the various partners, where EnterpriseWeb is actually providing an application layer, sorry application middleware over Red Hat's, OpenShift and we're essentially generating operators so Red Hat operators, so that all our vendors, and, sorry vendors that we onboard into our catalog can be deployed easily through the OpenShift platform. And we allow those, those vendors to be flexibly composed into network services. So the real challenge for operators historically is that they, they have challenges onboarding the vendors. It takes a long time. Each one of them is a snowflake. They, you know, even though there's standards they don't all observe or follow the same standards. So we make it easier using models, right? For, in a model driven process to on boards or streamline that onboarding process, compose functions into services deploy those services seamlessly through Red Hat's OpenShift, and then manage the, the lifecycle, like the quality of service and the SLAs for those services. >> So Red Hat obviously has pretty prominent Telco business has for a while. Red Hat OpenStack actually is is pretty popular within the Telco business. People thought, "Oh, OpenStack, that's dead." Actually, no, it's actually doing quite well. We see it all over the place where for whatever reason people want to build their own cloud. And, and so, so what's happening in the industry because you have the traditional Telcos we heard in the keynotes that kind of typical narrative about, you know, we can't let the over the top vendors do this again. We're, we're going to be Apifi everything, we're going to monetize this time around, not just with connectivity but the, but the fact is they really don't have a developer community. >> Yes. >> Yet anyway. >> Then you have these disruptors over here that are saying "Yeah, we're going to enable ISVs." How do you see it? What's the landscape look like? Help us understand, you know, what the horses on the track are doing. >> Sure. I think what has happened, Dave, is that the conversation has moved a little bit from where they were just looking at IS infrastructure service with virtual machines and OpenStack, as you mentioned, to how do we move up the value chain and look at different applications. And therein comes the rub, right? You have applications with different requirements, IT network that have various different requirements that are there. So as you start to build those cloud platform, as you start to modernize those set of applications, you then start to look at microservices and how you build them. You need the ability to orchestrate them. So some of those problem statements have moved from not just refactoring those applications, but actually now to how do you reliably deploy, manage in a multicloud multi cluster way. So this conversation around Supercloud or this conversation around multicloud is very >> You could say Supercloud. That's okay >> (Dave Duggal and Azhar laughs) >> It's absolutely very real though. The reason why it's very real is, if you look at transformations around Telco, there are two things that are happening. One, Telco IT, they're looking at partnerships with hybrid cloud, I mean with public cloud players to build a hybrid environment. They're also building their own Telco Cloud environment for their network functions. Now, in both of those spaces, they end up operating two to three different environments themselves. Now how do you create a level of abstraction across those? How do you manage that particular infrastructure? And then how do you orchestrate all of those different workloads? Those are the type of problems that they're actually beginning to solve. So they've moved on from really just putting that virtualizing their application, putting it on OpenStack to now really seriously looking at "How do I build a service?" "How do I leverage the catalog that's available both in my private and public and build an overall service process?" >> And by the way what you just described as hybrid cloud and multicloud is, you know Supercloud is what multicloud should have been. And what, what it originally became is "I run on this cloud and I run on this cloud" and "I run on this cloud and I have a hybrid." And, and Supercloud is meant to create a common experience across those clouds. >> Dave Duggal: Right? >> Thanks to, you know, Supercloud middleware. >> Yeah. >> Right? And, and so that's what you guys do. >> Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Dave, I mean, even the name EnterpriseWeb, you know we started from looking from the application layer down. If you look at it, the last 10 years we've looked from the infrastructure up, right? And now everybody's looking northbound saying "You know what, actually, if I look from the infrastructure up the only thing I'll ever build is silos, right?" And those silos get in the way of the interoperability and the agility the businesses want. So we take the perspective as high level abstractions, common tools, so that if I'm a CXO, I can look down on my environments, right? When I'm really not, I honestly, if I'm an, if I'm a CEO I don't really care or CXO, I don't really care so much about my infrastructure to be honest. I care about my applications and their behavior. I care about my SLAs and my quality of service, right? Those are the things I care about. So I really want an EnterpriseWeb, right? Something that helps me connect all my distributed applications all across all of the environments. So I can have one place a consistency layer that speaks a common language. We know that there's a lot of heterogeneity down all those layers and a lot of complexity down those layers. But the business doesn't care. They don't want to care, right? They want to actually take their applications deploy them where they're the most performant where they're getting the best cost, right? The lowest and maybe sustainability concerns, all those. They want to address those problems, meet their SLAs meet their quality service. And you know what, if it's running on Amazon, great. If it's running on Google Cloud platform, great. If it, you know, we're doing one project right here that we're demonstrating here is with with Amazon Tech Mahindra and OpenShift, where we took a disaggregated 5G core, right? So this is like sort of latest telecom, you know net networking software, right? We're deploying pulling elements of that network across core, across Amazon EKS, OpenShift on Red Hat ROSA, as well as just OpenShift for cloud. And we, through a single pane of deployment and management, we deployed the elements of the 5G core across them and then connected them in an end-to-end process. That's Telco Supercloud. >> Dave Vellante: So that's an O-RAN deployment. >> Yeah that's >> So, the big advantage of that, pardon me, Dave but the big advantage of that is the customer really doesn't care where the components are being served from for them. It's a 5G capability. It happens to sit in different locations. And that's, it's, it's about how do you abstract and how do you manage all those different workloads in a cohesive way? And that's exactly what EnterpriseWeb is bringing to the table. And what we do is we abstract the underlying infrastructure which is the cloud layer. So if, because AWS operating environment is different then private cloud operating environment then Azure environment, you have the networking is set up is different in each one of them. If there is a way you can abstract all of that and present it in a common operating model it becomes a lot easier than for anybody to be able to consume. >> And what a lot of customers tell me is the way they deal with multicloud complexity is they go with mono cloud, right? And so they'll lose out on some of the best services >> Absolutely >> If best of, so that's not >> that's not ideal, but at the end of the day, agree, developers don't want to muck with all the plumbing >> Dave Duggal: Yep. >> They want to write code. >> Azhar: Correct. >> So like I come back to are the traditional Telcos leaning in on a way that they're going to enable ISVs and developers to write on top of those platforms? Or are there sort of new entrance and disruptors? And I know, I know the answer is both >> Dave Duggal: Yep. >> but I feel as though the Telcos still haven't, traditional Telcos haven't tuned in to that developer affinity, but you guys sell to them. >> What, what are you seeing? >> Yeah, so >> What we have seen is there are Telcos fall into several categories there. If you look at the most mature ones, you know they are very eager to move up the value chain. There are some smaller very nimble ones that have actually doing, they're actually doing something really interesting. For example, they've provided sandbox environments to developers to say "Go develop your applications to the sandbox environment." We'll use that to build an net service with you. I can give you some interesting examples across the globe that, where that is happening, right? In AsiaPac, particularly in Australia, ANZ region. There are a couple of providers who have who have done this, but in, in, in a very interesting way. But the challenges to them, why it's not completely open or public yet is primarily because they haven't figured out how to exactly monetize that. And, and that's the reason why. So in the absence of that, what will happen is they they have to rely on the ISV ecosystem to be able to build those capabilities which they can then bring it on as part of the catalog. But in Latin America, I was talking to one of the providers and they said, "Well look we have a public cloud, we have our own public cloud, right?" What we want do is use that to offer localized services not just bring everything in from the top >> But, but we heard from Ericson's CEO they're basically going to monetize it by what I call "gouge", the developers >> (Azhar laughs) >> access to the network telemetry as opposed to saying, "Hey, here's an open platform development on top of it and it will maybe create something like an app store and we'll take a piece of the action." >> So ours, >> to be is a better model. >> Yeah. So that's perfect. Our second project that we're showing here is with Intel, right? So Intel came to us cause they are a reputation for doing advanced automation solutions. They gave us carte blanche in their labs. So this is Intel Network Builders they said pick your partners. And we went with the Red Hat, Fort Net, Keysite this company KX doing AIML. But to address your DevX, here's Intel explicitly wants to get closer to the developers by exposing their APIs, open APIs over their infrastructure. Just like Red Hat has APIs, right? And so they can expose them northbound to developers so developers can leverage and tune their applications, right? But the challenge there is what Intel is doing at the low level network infrastructure, right? Is fundamentally complex, right? What you want is an abstraction layer where develop and this gets to, to your point Dave where you just said like "The developers just want to get their job done." or really they want to focus on the business logic and accelerate that service delivery, right? So the idea here is an EnterpriseWeb they can literally declaratively compose their services, express their intent. "I want this to run optimized for low latency. I want this to run optimized for energy consumption." Right? And that's all they say, right? That's a very high level statement. And then the run time translates it between all the elements that are participating in that service to realize the developer's intent, right? No hands, right? Zero touch, right? So that's now a movement in telecom. So you're right, it's taking a while because these are pretty fundamental shifts, right? But it's intent based networking, right? So it's almost two parts, right? One is you have to have the open APIs, right? So that the infrastructure has to expose its capabilities. Then you need abstractions over the top that make it simple for developers to take, you know, make use of them. >> See, one of the demonstrations we are doing is around AIOps. And I've had literally here on this floor, two conversations around what I call as network as a platform. Although it sounds like a cliche term, that's exactly what Dave was describing in terms of exposing APIs from the infrastructure and utilizing them. So once you get that data, then now you can do analytics and do machine learning to be able to build models and figure out how you can orchestrate better how you can monetize better, how can how you can utilize better, right? So all of those things become important. It's just not about internal optimization but it's also about how do you expose it to third party ecosystem to translate that into better delivery mechanisms or IOT capability and so on. >> But if they're going to charge me for every API call in the network I'm going to go broke (team laughs) >> And I'm going to get really pissed. I mean, I feel like, I'm just running down, Oracle. IBM tried it. Oracle, okay, they got Java, but they don't they don't have developer jobs. VMware, okay? They got Aria. EMC used to have a thing called code. IBM had to buy Red Hat to get to the developer community. (Lisa laughs) >> So I feel like the telcos don't today have those developer shops. So, so they have to partner. [Azhar] Yes. >> With guys like you and then be more open and and let a zillion flowers bloom or else they're going to get disrupted in a big way and they're going to it's going to be a repeat of the over, over the top in, in in a different model that I can't predict. >> Yeah. >> Absolutely true. I mean, look, they cannot be in the connectivity business. Telcos cannot be just in the connectivity business. It's, I think so, you know, >> Dave Vellante: You had a fry a frozen hand (Dave Daggul laughs) >> off that, you know. >> Well, you know, think about they almost have to go become over the top on themselves, right? That's what the cloud guys are doing, right? >> Yeah. >> They're riding over their backbone that by taking a creating a high level abstraction, they in turn abstract away the infrastructure underneath them, right? And that's really the end game >> Right? >> Dave Vellante: Yeah. >> Is because now, >> they're over the top it's their network, it's their infrastructure, right? They don't want to become bid pipes. >> Yep. >> Now you, they can take OpenShift, run that in any cloud. >> Yep. >> Right? >> You can run that in hybrid cloud, enterprise web can do the application layer configuration and management. And together we're running, you know, OSI layers one through seven, east to west, north to south. We're running across the the RAN, the core and the transport. And that is telco super cloud, my friend. >> Yeah. Well, >> (Dave Duggal laughs) >> I'm dominating the conversation cause I love talking super cloud. >> I knew you would. >> So speaking of super superpowers, when you're in customer or prospective customer conversations with providers and they've got, obviously they're they're in this transformative state right now. How, what do you describe as the superpower between Red Hat and EnterpriseWeb in terms of really helping these Telcos transforms. But at the end of the day, the connectivity's there the end user gets what they want, which is I want this to work wherever I am. >> Yeah, yeah. That's a great question, Lisa. So I think the way you could look at it is most software has, has been evolved to be specialized, right? So in Telcos' no different, right? We have this in the enterprise, right? All these specialized stacks, all these components that they wire together in the, in you think of Telco as a sort of a super set of enterprise problems, right? They have all those problems like magnified manyfold, right? And so you have specialized, let's say orchestrators and other tools for every Telco domain for every Telco layer. Now you have a zoo of orchestrators, right? None of them were designed to work together, right? They all speak a specific language, let's say quote unquote for doing a specific purpose. But everything that's interesting in the 21st century is across layers and across domains, right? If a siloed static application, those are dead, right? Nobody's doing those anymore. Even developers don't do those developers are doing composition today. They're not doing, nobody wants to hear about a 6 million lines of code, right? They want to hear, "How did you take these five things and bring 'em together for productive use?" >> Lisa: Right. How did you deliver faster for my enterprise? How did you save me money? How did you create business value? And that's what we're doing together. >> I mean, just to add on to Dave, I was talking to one of the providers, they have more than 30,000 nodes in their infrastructure. When I say no to your servers running, you know, Kubernetes,running open stack, running different components. If try managing that in one single entity, if you will. Not possible. You got to fragment, you got to segment in some way. Now the question is, if you are not exposing that particular infrastructure and the appropriate KPIs and appropriate things, you will not be able to efficiently utilize that across the board. So you need almost a construct that creates like a manager of managers, a hierarchical structure, which would allow you to be more intelligent in terms of how you place those, how you manage that. And so when you ask the question about what's the secret sauce between the two, well this is exactly where EnterpriseWeb brings in that capability to analyze information, be more intelligent about it. And what we do is provide an abstraction of the cloud layer so that they can, you know, then do the right job in terms of making sure that it's appropriate and it's consistent. >> Consistency is key. Guys, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure really digging through EnterpriseWeb. >> Thank you. >> What you're doing >> with Red Hat. How you're helping the organization transform and Supercloud, we can't forget Supercloud. (Dave Vellante laughs) >> Fight Supercloud. Guys, thank you so much for your time. >> Thank you so much Lisa. >> Thank you. >> Thank you guys. >> Very nice. >> Lisa: We really appreciate it. >> For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage coming to you live from MWC 23. We'll be back after a short break.

(soft corporate jingle) >> Announcer: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat jingle intro) >> Welcome back to Barcelona. We're here live at the Fira. (laughs) Just amazing day two of MWC23. It's packed today. It was packed yesterday. It's even more packed today. All the news is flowing. Check out siliconangle.com. John Furrier is in the studio in Palo Alto breaking all the news. And, we are here live. Really excited to have Udayan Mukherjee who's the Senior Fellow and Chief Architect of wireless product at Network and Edge for Intel. And, Manish Singh is back. He's the CTO of Telecom Systems Business at Dell Jets. Welcome. >> Thank you. >> Thank you >> We're going to talk about greening the network. I wonder, Udayan, if you could just set up why that's so important. I mean, it's obvious that it's an important thing, great for the environment, but why is it extra important in Telco? >> Yeah, thank you. Actually, I'll tell you, this morning I had a discussion with an operator. The first thing he said, that the electricity consumption is more expensive nowadays that total real estate that he's spending money on. So, it's like that is the number one thing that if you can change that, bring that power consumption down. And, if you talk about sustainability, look what is happening in Europe, what's happening in all the electricity areas. That's the critical element that we need to address. Whether we are defining chip, platforms, storage systems, that's the number one mantra right now. You know, reduce the power. Electricity consumption, because it's a sustainable planet that we are living in. >> So, you got CapEx and OpEx. We're talking about the big piece of OpEx is now power consumption? >> Power Consumption >> That's the point. Okay, so in my experience, servers are the big culprit for power consumption, which is powered by core semiconductors and microprocessors. So, what's the strategy to reduce the power consumption? You're probably not going to reduce the bill overall. You maybe just can keep pace, but from a technical standpoint, how do you attack that? >> Yeah, there are multiple defined ways of adding. Obviously the process technology, that micro (indistinct) itself is evolving to make it more low-power systems. But, even within the silicon, the server that we develop, if you look in a CPU, there is a lot of power states. So, if you have a 32 code platform, as an example, every code you can vary the frequency and the C-states, power states. So, if you look into any traffic, whether it's a radio access network, packet code. At any given time the load is not peak. So, your power consumption, actual what we are drawing from the wall, it also needs to vary with that. So, that's how if you look into this there's a huge savings. If you go to Intel booth or Ericson booth or anyone, you will see right now every possible, the packet code, radio access network, everything network. They're talking about our energy consumption, how they're lowering this. These states, as we call it power states, C-state P-state they've built in intel chip for a long time. The cloud providers are taking advantage of it. But Telcos, with even two generation before they used to actually switch it off in the bios. I say no, we need peak. Now, that thing is changing. Now, it's all like, how do I take advantage of the built in technologies? >> I remember the enterprise virtualization, Manish, was a big play. I remember PG&E used to give rebates to customers that would install virtualized software, VMware. >> And SSDs. >> Yeah. And SSDs, you know, yes. Because, the spinning disc was, but, nowhere near with a server consumption. So, how virtualized is the telco network? And then, what I'm saying is there other things, other knobs, you can of course turn. So, what's your perspective on this as a server player? >> Yeah, absolutely. Let me just back up a little bit and start at the big picture to share what Udayan said. Here, day two, every conversation I've had yesterday and today morning with every operator, every CTO, they're coming in and first topic they're talking about is energy. And, the reason is, A, it's the right thing to do, sustainability, but, it's also becoming a P&L issue. And, the reason it's becoming a P&L issue is because we are in this energy inflationary environment where the energy costs are constantly going up. So, it's becoming really important for the service providers to really drive more efficiency onto their networks, onto their infrastructure. Number one. Two, then to your question on what all knobs need to be turned on, and what are the knobs? So, Udayan talked about within the intel, silicon, the C-states, P-states and all these capabilities that are being brought up, absolutely important. But again, if we take a macro view of it. First of all, there are opportunities to do infrastructure audit. What's on, why is it on, does it need to be on right now? Number two, there are opportunities to do infrastructure upgrade. And, what I mean by that is as you go from previous generation servers to next generation servers, better cooling, better performance. And through all of that you start to gain power usage efficiency inside a data center. And, you take that out more into the networks you start to achieve same outcomes on the network site. Think about from a cooling perspective, air cooling but for that matter, even liquid cooling, especially inside the data centers. All opportunities around PUE, because PUE, power usage efficiency and improvement on PUE is an opportunity. But, I'll take it even further. Workloads that are coming onto it, core, RAN, these workloads based on the dynamic traffic. Look, if you look at the traffic inside a network, it's not constant, it's varied. As the traffic patterns change, can you reduce the amount of infrastructure you're using? I.e. reduce the amount of power that you're using and when the traffic loads are going up. So, the workloads themselves need to become more smarter about that. And last, but not the least. From an orchestration layer if you think about it, where you are placing these workloads, and depending on what's available, you can start to again, drive better energy outcomes. And, not to forget acceleration. Where you need acceleration, can you have the right hardware infrastructures delivering the right kind of accelerations to again, improve those energy efficiency outcomes. So, it's a complex problem. But, there are a lot of levers, lot of tools that are in place that the service providers, the technology builders like us, are building the infrastructure, and then the workload providers all come together to really solve this problem. >> Yeah, Udayan, Manish mentioned this idea of moving from one generation to a new generation and gaining benefits. Out there on the street, if you will. Most of the time it's an N plus 2 migration. It's not just moving from last generation to this next generation, but it's really a generation ago. So, those significant changes in the dynamics around power density and cooling are meaningful? You talk about where performance should be? We start talking about the edge. It's hard to have a full-blown raised data center floor edge everywhere. Do these advances fundamentally change the kinds of things that you can do at the base of a tower? >> Yeah, absolutely. Manish talked about that, the dynamic nature of the workload. So, we are using a lot of this AIML to actually predict. Like for example, your multiple force in a systems. So, why is the 32 core as a system, why is all running? So, your traffic profile in the night times. So, you are in the office areas, in the night has gone home and nowadays everybody's working from remote anyway. So, why is this thing a full blown, spending the TDP, the total power and extreme powers. You bring it down, different power states, C-states. We talked about it. Deeper C-states or P-states, you bring the frequency down. So, lot of those automation, even at the base of the tower. Lot of our deployment right now, we are doing a whole bunch of massive MIMO deployment. Virtual RAN in Verizon network. All actually cell-site deployment. Those eight centers are very close to the cell-site. And, they're doing aggressive power management. So, you don't have to go to a huge data centers, even there's a small rack of systems, four to five, 10 systems, you can do aggressive power management. And, you built it up that way. >> Okay. >> If I may just build on what Udayan said. I mean if you look at the radio access network, right? And, let's start at the bottom of the tower itself. The infrastructure that's going in there, especially with Open RAN, if you think about it, there are opportunities now to do a centralized RAN where you could do more BBU pooling. And, with that, not only on a given tower but across a given given coverage area, depending on what the traffics are, you can again get the infrastructure to become more efficient in terms of what traffic, what needs are, and really start to benefit. The pooling gains which is obviously going to give you benefit on the CapEx side, but from an energy standpoint going to give you benefits on the OpEx side of things. So that's important. The second thing I will say is we cannot forget, especially on the radio access side of things, that it's not just the bottom of the tower what's happening there. What's happening on the top of the tower especially with the radio, that's super important. And, that goes into how do you drive better PA efficiency, how do you drive better DPD in there? This is where again, applying AI machine learning there is a significant amount of opportunity there to improve the PA performance itself. But then, not only that, looking at traffic patterns. Can you do sleep modes, micro sleep modes to deep sleep modes. Turning down the cells itself, depending on the traffic patterns. So, these are all areas that are now becoming more and more important. And, clearly with our ecosystem of partners we are continuing to work on these. >> So we hear from the operators, it's an OpEx issue. It's hitting the P&L. They're in search of PUE of one. And, they've historically been wasteful, they go full throttle. And now, you're saying with intelligence you can optimize that consumption. So, where does the intelligence live? Is it in the rig. Where is it all throughout the network? Is it in the silicon? Maybe you could paint a picture as to where those smarts exist. >> I can start. It's across the stack. It starts, we talked about the C-states, P-states. If you want to take advantage of that, that intelligence is in the workload, which has to understand when can I really start to clock things down or turn off the cores. If you really look at it from a traffic pattern perspective you start to really look at a rig level where you can have power. And, we are working with the ecosystem partners who are looking at applying machine learning on that to see what can we really start to turn on, turn off, throttle things down, depending on what the, so yes, it's across the stack. And lastly, again, I'll go back to cannot forget orchestration, where you again have the ability to move some of these workloads and look at where your workload placements are happening depending on what infrastructure is and what the traffic needs are at that point in time. So it's, again, there's no silver bullet. It has to be looked across the stack. >> And, this is where actually if I may, last two years a sea change has happened. People used to say, okay there are C-states and P-states, there's silicon every code. OS operating system has a governor built in. We rely on that. So, that used to be the way. Now that applications are getting smarter, if you look at a radio access network or the packet core on the control plane signaling application, they're more aware of the what is the underlying silicon power state sleep states are available. So, every time they find some of these areas there's no enough traffic there, they immediately goes to a transition. So, the workload has become more intelligent. The rig application we talked about. Every possible rig application right now are apps on xApps. Most of them are on energy efficiency. How are they using it? So, I think lot more even the last two years. >> Can I just say one more thing there right? >> Yeah. >> We cannot forget the infrastructure as well, right? I mean, that's the most important thing. That's where the energy is really getting drawn in. And, constant improvement on the infrastructure. And, I'll give you some data points, right? If you really look at the power at servers, right? From 2013 to 2023, like a decade. 85% energy intensity improvement, right? So, these gains are coming from performance with better cooling, better technology applications. So, that's super critical, that's important. And, also to just give you another data point. Apart from the infrastructure what cache layers we are running and how much CPU and compute requirements are there, that's also important. So, looking at it from a cache perspective are we optimizing the required infrastructure blocks for radio access versus core? And again, really taking that back to energy efficiency outcomes. So, some of the work we've been doing with Wind River and Red Hat and some of our ecosystem partners around that for radio access network versus core. Really again, optimizing for those different use cases and the outcomes of those start to come in from an energy utilization perspective >> So, 85% improvement in power consumption. Of course you're doing, I don't know, 2, 300% more work, right? So, let's say, and I'm just sort of spit balling numbers but, let's say that historically powers on the P&L has been, I don't know, single digits, maybe 10%. Now, it's popping up the much higher. >> Udayan: Huge >> Right? >> I mean, I don't know what the number is. Is it over 20% in some cases or is it, do you have a sense of that? Or let's say it is. The objective I presume is you're probably not going to lower the power bill overall, but you're going to be able to lower the percent of cost on the OpEx as you grow, right? I mean, we're talking about 5G networks. So much more data >> Capacity increasing. >> Yeah, and so is it, am I right about that the carriers, the best they can hope for is to sort of stay even on that percentage or maybe somewhat lower that percentage? Or, do you think they can actually cut the bill? What's the goal? What are they trying to do? >> The goal is to cut the bill. >> It is! >> And the way you get started to cut the bill is, as I said, first of all on the radio side. Start to see where the improvements are and look, there's not a whole lot there to be done. I mean, the PS are as efficient as they can be, but as I said, there are things in DPD and all that still can be improved. But then, sleep modes and all, yes there are efficiencies in there. But, I'll give you one important, another interesting data point. We did a work with ACG Research on our 16G platform. The power edge service that we have recently launched based on Intel's Sapphire Rapids. And, if you look at the study there. 30% TCR reduction, 10% in CapEx gains, 30% in OpEx gains from moving away from these legacy monolithic architectures to cloud native architectures. And, a large part of that OpEx gain really starts to come from energy to the point of 800 metric tonnes of carbon reduction to the point of you could have, and if you really translate that to around 160 homes electric use per year, right? So yes, I mean the opportunity there is to reduce the bill. >> Wow, that's big, big goal guys. We got to run. But, thank you for informing the audience on the importance and how you get there. So, appreciate that. >> One thing that bears mentioning really quickly before we wrap, a lot of these things we're talking about are happening in remote locations. >> Oh, back to that point of distributed nature of telecom. >> Yes, we talked about a BBU being at the base of a tower that could be up on a mountain somewhere. >> No, you made the point. You can't just say, oh, hey we're going to go find ambient air or going to go... >> They don't necessarily... >> Go next to a waterfall. >> We don't necessarily have the greatest hydro tower. >> All right, we got to go. Thanks you guys. Alright, keep it right there. Wall to wall coverage is day two of theCUBE's coverage of MWC 23. Stay right there, we'll be right back. (corporate outro jingle)

>> theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, guys and gals, good to see you. It's theCUBE live in Barcelona at MWC23. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante on day one of four days of wall to wall CUBE coverage. Dave, today is ecosystem day. We've had some great conversations about why the open ecosystem is so important and some of the key players in it. >> Well and I'm in search of disruptors, so I'm looking for, okay, who are the network operators that are going to actually lean into the future and drive it and challenge the existing incumbents. We'll talk about that today. >> And we're going to be talking about that next. We've got one of our alumni back with us. Satish Iyer is here, the Vice President of Emerging Services at Dell. Great to have you back on the program. >> Thank you. >> Richard Leitao is with us as well, the Vice President of National Development at DISH Network. Welcome. >> Pleasure to be here. >> So, lots of, this is day one, the theme is velocity. I feel like the day has gone by so quickly. But Dell and DISH have partnered together on a multi-year initiative to build your nationwide cloud-native 5G network that's going to cover a lot of the US. Talk a little bit about that partnership, we'll get both of your perspectives. Richard, we'll start with you. >> Sure. So thank you again for having me. So DISH had the opportunity of, of going through this experience, of innovating once more. For the ones that know DISH, DISH is a company that was founded in 1980 by an innovator, a disruptor. Of course, in the course of the next 40 years, we had the opportunities of even disrupting ourselves. We launched our first satellite TV service. We then launched the first streaming, video streaming platform, disrupting our own satellite business. And since 2008, we have been acquiring Spectrum and, you know, Spectrum, the most valuable asset of a wireless operator. We felt that this was the right opportunity, having 5G , having O-RAN, and we decided to go full in in a greenfield project building national network, 5G O-RAN cloud-based network, one of a kind network in in the US and, and most of all, using O-RAN, it's very important to us, what, what it can bring and it can bring to DISH but to the entire ecosystem of, of this sector in the US. >> Satish, talk a little bit about the partnership from Dell's perspective and some of the unique advantages that Dell is delivering to DISH. >> Oh absolutely. Again, like Richard was saying, I mean the telecom network is being desegregated as we speak. You know, companies like DISH and everybody else is looking at what are the best-in-class technologies we can bring to the table. I would like to say that, you know, the cloud is coming to the telco world, right? A lot of us have seen the tremendous transformation in the cloud world in the last few years. Now, you know, DISH is a big enterprise company. As you know, you know, we are pretty strong within the cloud space and enterprise space. So what we try to work with DISH is Dell, is to bring to DISH is, you know, that notion of cloud scale and the cloud ecosystem into telecom, right? By means best-in-class infrastructure products, best-in-class software products, to allow somebody like DISH to innovate and incre, you know, basically expand and build their O-RAN network. So it's absolutely important for us as we build and get into the telecom space to work with somebody like DISH who's also disrupting as a carrier in that space. >> So it's early days for Open RAN but you've decided, "okay, we're all in". >> Yeah. >> Right? So (chuckling) you burn the bridge, as they say, "go for it". (Lisa chuckles) So when you talk to most people, they say, "okay, it's, it's, it's, it's immature." It's got to be able to get to the levels of, of the, the the hardened stack reliability. But of course it brings the advantage of flexibility and speed. Are you optimizing for one or the other right now? How are you dealing with that balance? >> Well, it, it's, it's not mature in the sense that most of operators that think about it, they have a legacy network. And in order to go full in on the O-RAN side, they need to scrap a lot of things that they have and honestly, they don't want, and it doesn't make sense. So being a greenfield operator, give us that advantage. Give us the advantage and, and desegregation, it's all about chip sets, boxes and software and the chip sets part and what I like the most in desegregation is the time of innovation. The time that we can use new chip sets coming into the market, the size of the boxes that we are using. Obviously our footprint onsite is much smaller than traditional carriers or proprietary systems. So all of that Dell has been critical in supporting us. Supporting us having the best chip sets, having the smallest footprint and, you know, the software, the cycle of innovation is much faster than in proprietary systems. So ma-, it's maturing. I'm glad to say that probably two years ago here O-RAN was more like a, a pilot type of technology. It is not, we are live, we are live for more than 30 million customers in the US and, you know, the performance levels are very similar to traditional networks. >> So you don't just buy a nationwide cloud-native 5G network out of the box, you got to- >> No, you don't. >> You got to build it. So I'm curious as to what Dell's role is in that, in that build out. >> Right? >> How and how, I'm really curious how to, how you would grade Dell but we'll get there. >> Yeah, I mean, look, yes, you don't. So I think the, the, the first and foremost is again, as, as we, Dell, comes into the telco space, one of the things we have to look at is to understand what makes Dell better in the enterprise space, right? It is the best-in-class infrastructure. It is the software ties together. As you talk about desegregated networks, it's important to understand lot of these piece parts have to still be touched together, right? So I think the integration and integration aspects becomes really key which is really Dell is very good at. So one of the things we are working really closely with DISH Tech, you know Richard was alluding to, is bringing all, not just bringing all the software and hardware assets together, but how do you continuously innovate and keep fixing things faster, right? So in the old days, traditional ways, you have a software stack, it takes you 18 months, 20 months to actually get an upgrade done. Here we have continuously CI/CD pipelines where if you want to a change done within, within a week's or within a few days, where we can actually go and test and make sure these things work. So I think a lot of the best enterprise software practices, cloud practices, combined with whatever needs for telco, actually is what makes it very unique. >> I, I saw that this started out as an FCC compliance initiative that turned into a partnership, obviously a very successful one. Richard, talk about what DISH saw in Dell that really made it the right choice, knowing you have choices, you have options. >> You know, we saw the capability to execute, but we also saw the capability to innovate. From an execution level, at the end of the day, like we were talking, we started the project in the middle of COVID, and we had the first mandate to cover 20% of the US population by June, 2022. And now we have a second one, 70% of US population by June 2023. At the beginning of the project, it was all about availability of materials, logistics, how to distribute, how to transport material. So Dell has a world-class supply chain, we felt that working with Dell through all these challenges made things easier. So from an execution perspective, whenever you need to build a network and you, you are building thousands of sites, you need to have materials, you need to distribute them and you need to install them. Dell helped us across the board. Our expectations obviously will change. We have a network, we want to cooperate with Dell in many other areas. We want to, you know, leverage on Dell ability to reach the enterprise market, to have private 5G offers. So hopefully this collaboration will endure in time and, and, you know, will change and evolve in time. >> And it's a big bet. I mean, it's not like a single, it's not like a little transaction that you guys are doing. I feel like, you know Michael Dell and Eric Carlson had dinner and they said, "okay, we're going to, we're going to partner up and this is going to be a multi-decade partnership. You had to be transparent, "Hey, we're new at this, even though we're really good at enterprise tech and so you're going to, obviously if you take a chance on us, here's what we promise you." >> Absolutely. >> And vice versa, you guys had to say, "all right, hey, we're willing to roll the dice because we're trying to change the world." So what was that dynamic like? I mean, how did, I'm curious as to this has to be a lot of different levels, engineering, senior management, board level discussions. >> You know, we felt a huge buy-in from Dell on the Open RAN concept. >> Right. >> Yeah, okay. >> And, you know, edge computing and, and the ability to get us the best product and evolve the best product, Intel is is critical in all these offerings. Intel has a great relationship with Dell. Dell helped us. Dell sponsored the DISH program and some of these suppliers, So it was definitely good to have their support and the buy-in on the O-RAN concept. We felt it from day one and we felt secure on that. >> Yeah, I mean, I, to add to that, I mean, you know DISH was very instrumental in driving, dictating and executing to our roadmap, right? They're one of the key, I mean, since they are out there and they're really turning in a way, it's important that a customer who's actually at the out front of innovation, helps us drive our own roadmap. So to Richard's point, a lot of our product roadmaps, in terms of what have you built and all that, was based on what DISH thinks as going to be market-based requirements. They also helped us a lot in the integration aspects. Like I said, one of the things about open desegregation of these networks is there is a lot of integration because, you know, there is, it's not a one, one monolithic pipe smokestack anymore. You are picking up best-in-class pieces, bits and pieces and tying it together. And it's important to understand when you tie it together things will go wrong, right? So there is a lot of learnings from an integration standpoint. Supportability, deployment, one of the things Richard talked about was supply chain, you know. Other Dell's ability to, lot of these deployments, a lot of these configs in the factory, right, in the second part. So especially a lot of these partnerships started during COVID time and as you all know, you know what we went through two years ago. So we had to make sure that lot of these things are done in one place and a factory, and not done in the field because we couldn't do a lot of these things. So there's a lot of, lot of experimentation, lot of, lot, lot of innovation on that. >> So it's 2030, what's this look like? What's the vision if we can work backwards from there? Well, a, a great network coverage to the entire country, bringing new services to enterprises, to verticals, bringing value add to customers and, you know, technology cycles, they are lasting much less than they were. I cannot even say what will happen in three years. 2030, I mean, I know, I know somebody has a vision for 2030. That's another thing. (everyone laughs) >> A lot of it is "build it and they will come", right? >> Yeah. >> I mean it really is right? You put that network in place and then innovation happens on top. That's the best thing. >> Yeah. And look and and I think the biggest people think about Open RAN in terms of cost, which, you know, you, you have some things in cost that you appreciate in Open RAN. The footprint, the the possibility to diversify suppliers and and have more competition. But for me, Open RAN is about innovation and cycles of innovation. I used to work for Nokia, I used to work for Alcatel. I knew from the generation of an idea to an execution and having a feature delivered to a certain customer, it, it took months. We want innovation to take weeks. We are innovating at the speed, speed of the cloud. We are cooperating with new players, players on the cloud and, and we expect things to happen much faster than they traditionally happen on the telecom sector. >> Move fast and break things. >> Well, we also expect that speed- >> Break and fix. (everyone laughs) >> Yeah, thank you for that. >> But speaking of speed, your customers expect that, right? They expect the service to be up 24/7. They expect to be able to access whatever content they want, whenever they want from wherever they are. So comment, Richard, in our last few minutes here of, of how the, the Dell partnership is helping DISH to really deliver the excellent customer experience that your customers just expect that you're going to deliver. >> Well by setting up the system, number one, we are leveraging on a number of services. And I mentioned the supply chain, but in reality Dell made much more than that for our 20% milestone and is supporting our 70% milestone by installing, testing, verifying most of our data center equipment. We found that this offering from Dell was really addressing some of our needs because, you know, we, we believe they know a lot in this area and they, they can provide the best advice and the best speed to market in, in terms of having this equipment. Because we are working on a time clock, we need to have this done as soon as possible. You know for the future, I hope that they can help us in driving more services. I hope they can bring all the infrastructure that we need to offer to our customers. And, you know, we keep committed to O-RAN. O-RAN is really important. We are not compromising that. And I think the future is bright for both of us. >> Yeah, and Dell learns from the experience. >> Exactly. >> Absolutely. >> There's got to be a catalyst for expanding your roadmap and vision in telecom. >> Yeah, I mean, like you said, I mean, you asked a 2030 question and I think that, you know, know six, seven years from now I think people should look at what DISH and Dell and say they were the trailblazers of make, bringing Open RAN to the market and making 5G a reality. I mean, you talk about 5G, but every 5G is on a different stages. I do think that this combination, this partnership has the best chance to be the first ones to actually have a truly Open RAN network to be successful in commercial. >> Awesome guys. Trailblazers, Dell and DISH. Well, we look forward to watching this story unfold. Thank you- >> Thank you. >> for joining Dave and me on the program today talking about what you're doing together. We appreciate it. >> Thanks for having us. >> Our pleasure. >> Thank you, bye. >> For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Barcelona at MWC23. We'll be back after a short break, so we'll see you soon.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back everyone to Supercloud 2, live here in Palo Alto, our studio, where we're doing a live stage performance and virtually syndicating out around the world. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, my co-host with the The Cube here. We've got Kit Colbert, the CTO of VM. We're doing a keynote on Cloud Chaos, the evolution of SuperCloud Architecture Kit. Great to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, thanks for having me back. It's great to be here for Supercloud 2. >> And so we're going to dig into it. We're going to do a Q&A. We're going to let you present. You got some slides. I really want to get this out there, it's really compelling story. Do the presentation and then we'll come back and discuss. Take it away. >> Yeah, well thank you. So, we had a great time at the original Supercloud event, since then, been talking to a lot of customers, and started to better formulate some of the thinking that we talked about last time So, let's jump into it. Just a few quick slides to sort of set the tone here. So, if we go to the the next slide, what that shows is the journey that we see customers on today, going from what we call Cloud First into this phase that many customers are stuck in, called Cloud Chaos, and where they want to get to, and this is the term customers actually use, we didn't make this up, we heard it from customers. This notion of Cloud Smart, right? How do they use cloud more effectively, more intelligently? Now, if you walk through this journey, customers start with Cloud First. They usually select a single cloud that they're going to standardize on, and when they do that, they have to build out a whole bunch of functionality around that cloud. Things you can see there on the screen, disaster recovery, security, how do they monitor it or govern it? Like, these are things that are non-negotiable, you've got to figure it out, and typically what they do is, they leverage solutions that are specific for that cloud, and that's fine when you have just one cloud. But if we build out here, what we see is that most customers are using more than just one, they're actually using multiple, not necessarily 10 or however many on the screen, but this is just as an example. And so what happens is, they have to essentially duplicate or replicate that stack they've built for each different cloud, and they do so in a kind of a siloed manner. This results in the Cloud Chaos term that that we talked about before. And this is where most businesses out there are, they're using two, maybe three public clouds. They've got some stuff on-prem and they've also got some stuff out at the edge. This is apps, data, et cetera. So, this is the situation, this is sort of that Cloud Chaos. So, the question is, how do we move from this phase to Cloud Smart? And this is where the architecture comes in. This is why architecture, I think, is so important. It's really about moving away from these single cloud services that just solve a problem for one cloud, to something we call a Cross-Cloud service. Something that can support a set of functionality across all clouds, and that means not just public clouds, but also private clouds, edge, et cetera, and when you evolve that across the board, what you get is this sort of Supercloud. This notion that we're talking about here, where you combine these cross-cloud services in many different categories. You can see some examples there on the screen. This is not meant to be a complete set of things, but just examples of what can be done. So, this is sort of the transition and transformation that we're talking about here, and I think the architecture piece comes in both for the individual cloud services as well as that Supercloud concept of how all those services come together. >> Great presentation., thanks for sharing. If you could pop back to that slide, on the Cloud Chaos one. I just want to get your thoughts on something there. This is like the layout of the stack. So, this slide here that I'm showing on the screen, that you presented, okay, take us through that complexity. This is the one where I wanted though, that looks like a spaghetti code mix. >> Yes. >> So, do you turn this into a Supercloud stack, right? Is that? >> well, I think it's, it's an evolving state that like, let's take one of these examples, like security. So, instead of implementing security individually in different ways, using different technologies, different tooling for each cloud, what you would do is say, "Hey, I want a single security solution that works across all clouds", right? A concrete example of this would be secure software supply chain. This is probably one of the top ones that I hear when I talk to customers. How do I know that the software I'm building is truly what I expect it to be, and not something that some hacker has gotten into, and polluted with malicious code? And what they do is that, typically today, their teams have gone off and created individual secure software supply chain solutions for each cloud. So, now they could say, "Hey, I can take a single implementation and just have different endpoints." It could go to Google, or AWS, or on-prem, or wherever have you, right? So, that's the sort of architectural evolution that we're talking about. >> You know, one of the things we hear, Dave, you've been on theCUBE all the time, and we, when we talk privately with customers who are asking us like, what's, what's going on? They have the same complaint, "I don't want to build a team, a dev team, for that stack." So, if you go back to that slide again, you'll see that, that illustrates the tech stack for the clouds and the clouds at the bottom. So, the number one complaint we hear, and I want to get your reaction to that, "I don't want to have a team to have to work on that. So, I'm going to pick one and then have a hedge secondary one, as a backup." Here, that's one, that's four, five, eight, ten, ten environments. >> Yeah, I got a lot. >> That's going to be the reality, so, what's the technical answer to that? >> Yeah, well first of all, let me just say, this picture is again not totally representative of reality oftentimes, because while that picture shows a solution for every cloud, oftentimes that's not the case. Oftentimes it's a line of business going off, starting to use a new cloud. They might solve one or two things, but usually not security, usually not some of these other things, right? So, I think from a technical standpoint, where you want to get to is, yes, that sort of common service, with a common operational team behind it, that is trained on that, that can work across clouds. And that's really I think the important evolution here, is that you don't need to replicate these operational teams, one for each cloud. You can actually have them more focused across all those clouds. >> Yeah, in fact, we were commenting on the opening today. Dave and I were talking about the benefits of the cloud. It's heterogeneous, which is a good thing, but it's complex. There's skill gaps and skill required, but at the end of the day, self-service of the cloud, and the elastic nature of it makes it the benefit. So, if you try to create too many common services, you lose the value of the cloud. So, what's the trade off, in your mind right now as customers start to look at okay, identity, maybe I'll have one single sign on, that's an obvious one. Other ones? What are the areas people are looking at from a combination, common set of services? Where do they start? What's the choices? What are some of the trade offs? 'Cause you can't do it everything. >> No, it's a great question. So, that's actually a really good point and as I answer your question, before I answer your question, the important point about that, as you saw here, you know, across cloud services or these set of Cross-Cloud services, the things that comprise the Supercloud, at least in my view, the point is not necessarily to completely abstract the underlying cloud. The point is to give a business optionality and choice, in terms of what it wants to abstract, and I think that gets to your question, is how much do you actually want to abstract from the underlying cloud? Now, what I find, is that typically speaking, cloud choice is driven at least from a developer or app team perspective, by the best of breed services. What higher level application type services do you need? A database or AI, you know, ML systems, for your application, and that's going to drive your choice of the cloud. So oftentimes, businesses I talk to, want to allow those services to shine through, but for other things that are not necessarily highly differentiated and yet are absolutely critical to creating a successful application, those are things that you want to standardize. Again, like things like security, the supply chain piece, cost management, like these things you need to, and you know, things like cogs become really, really important when you start operating at scale. So, those are the things in it that I see people wanting to focus on. >> So, there's a majority model. >> Yes. >> All right, and we heard of earlier from Walmart, who's fairly, you know, advanced, but at the same time their supercloud is pretty immature. So, what are you seeing in terms of supercloud momentum, crosscloud momentum? What's the starting point for customers? >> Yeah, so it's interesting, right, on that that three-tiered journey that I talked about, this Cloud Smart notion is, that is adoption of what you might call a supercloud or architecture, and most folks aren't there yet. Even the really advanced ones, even the really large ones, and I think it's because of the fact that, we as an industry are still figuring this out. We as an industry did not realize this sort of Cloud Chaos state could happen, right? We didn't, I think most folks thought they could standardize on one cloud and that'd be it, but as time has shown, that's simply not the case. As much as one might try to do that, that's not where you end up. So, I think there's two, there's two things here. Number one, for folks that are early in to the cloud, and are in this Cloud Chaos phase, we see the path out through standardization of these cross-cloud services through adoption of this sort of supercloud architecture, but the other thing I think is particularly exciting, 'cause I talked to a number of of businesses who are not yet in the Cloud Chaos phase. They're earlier on in the cloud journey, and I think the opportunity there is that they don't have to go through Cloud Chaos. They can actually skip that whole phase if they adopt this supercloud architecture from the beginning, and I think being thoughtful around that is really the key here. >> It's interesting, 'cause we're going to hear from Ionis Pharmaceuticals later, and they, yes there are multiple clouds, but the multiple clouds are largely separate, and so it's a business unit using that. So, they're not in Cloud Chaos, but they're not tapping the advantages that you could get for best of breed across those business units. So, to your point, they have an opportunity to actually build that architecture or take advantage of those cross-cloud services, prior to reaching cloud chaos. >> Well, I, actually, you know, I'd love to hear from them if, 'cause you say they're not in Cloud Chaos, but are they, I mean oftentimes I find that each BU, each line of business may feel like they're fine, in of themselves. >> Yes, exactly right, yes. >> But when you look at it from an overall company perspective, they're like, okay, things are pretty chaotic here. We don't have standardization, I don't, you know, like, again, security compliance, these things, especially in many regulated industries, become huge problems when you're trying to run applications across multiple clouds, but you don't have any of those company-wide standardizations. >> Well, this is a point. So, they have a big deal with AstraZeneca, who's got this huge ecosystem, they want to start sharing data across those ecosystem, and that's when they will, you know, that Cloud Chaos will, you know, come, come to fore, you would think. I want to get your take on something that Bob Muglia said earlier, which is, he kind of said, "Hey Dave, you guys got to tighten up your definition a little bit." So, he said a supercloud is a platform that provides programmatically consistent services hosted on heterogeneous cloud providers. So, you know, thank you, that was nice and simple. However others in the community, we're going to hear from Dr. Nelu Mihai later, says, no, no, wait a minute, it's got to be an architecture, not a platform. Where do you land on this architecture v. platform thing? >> I look at it as, I dunno if it's, you call it maturity or just kind of a time horizon thing, but for me when I hear the word platform, I typically think of a single vendor. A single vendor provides this platform. That's kind of the beauty of a platform, is that there is a simplicity usually consistency to it. >> They did the architecture. (laughing) >> Yeah, exactly but I mean, well, there's obviously architecture behind it, has to be, but you as a customer don't necessarily need to deal with that. Now, I think one of the opportunities with Supercloud is that it's not going to be, or there is no single vendor that can solve all these problems. It's got to be the industry coming together as a community, inter-operating, working together, and so, that's why, for me, I think about it as an architecture, that there's got to be these sort of, well-defined categories of functionality. There's got to be well-defined interfaces between those categories of functionality to enable modularity, to enable businesses to be able to pick and choose the right sorts of services, and then weave those together into an overall supercloud. >> Okay, so you're not pitching, necessarily the platform, you're saying, hey, we have an architecture that's open. I go back to something that Vittorio said on August 9th, with the first Supercloud, because as well, remember we talked about abstracting, but at the same time giving developers access to those primitives. So he said, and this, I think your answer sort of confirms this. "I want to have my cake eat it too and not gain weight." >> (laughing) Right. Well and I think that's where the platform aspect can eventually come, after we've gotten aligned architecture, you're going to start to naturally see some vendors step up to take on some of the remaining complexity there. So, I do see platforms eventually emerging here, but I think where we have to start as an industry is around aligning, okay, what does this definition mean? What does that architecture look like? How do we enable interoperability? And then we can take the next step. >> Because it depends too, 'cause I would say Snowflake has a platform, and they've just defined the architecture, but we're not talking about infrastructure here, obviously, we're talking about something else. >> Well, I think that the Snowflake talks about, what he talks about, security and data, you're going to start to see the early movement around areas that are very spanning oriented, and I think that's the beginning of the trend and I think there's going to be a lot more, I think on the infrastructure side. And to your point about the platform architecture, that's actually a really good thought exercise because it actually makes you think about what you're designing in the first place, and that's why I want to get your reaction. >> Quote from- >> Well I just have to interrupt since, later on, you're going to hear from near Nir Zuk of Palo Alto Network. He says architecture and security historically, they don't go hand in hand, 'cause it's a big mess. >> It depends if you're whacking the mole or you actually proactively building something. Well Kit, I want to get your reaction from a quote from someone in our community who said about Supercloud, you know, "The Supercloud's great, there are issues around computer science rigors, and customer requirements." So, there's some issues around the science itself as well as not just listen to the customer, 'cause if that's the case, we'd have a better database, a better Oracle, right, so, but there's other, this tech involved, new tech. We need an open architecture with universal data modeling interconnecting among them, connectivity is a part of security, and then, once we get through that gate, figuring out the technical, the data, and the customer requirements, they say "Supercloud should be a loosely coupled platform with open architecture, plug and play, specialized services, ready for optimization, automation that can stand the test of time." What's your reaction to that sentiment? You like it, is that, does that sound good? >> Yeah, no, broadly aligns with my thinking, I think, and what I see from talking with customers as well. I mean, I like the, again, the, you know, listening to customer needs, prioritizing those things, focusing on some of the connective tissue networking, and data and some of these aspects talking about the open architecture, the interoperability, those are all things I think are absolutely critical. And then, yeah, like I think at the end. >> On the computer science side, do you see some science and engineering things that need to be engineered differently? We heard databases are radically going to change and that are inadequate for the new architecture. What are some of the things like that, from a science standpoint? >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. Some of the more academic research type things. >> More tech, or more better tech or is it? >> Yeah, look, absolutely. I mean I think that there's a bunch around, certainly around the data piece, around, you know, there's issues of data gravity, data mobility. How do you want to do that in a way that's performant? There's definitely issues around security as well. Like how do you enable like trust in these environments, there's got to be some sort of hardware rooted trusts, and you know, a whole bunch of various types of aspects there. >> So, a lot of work still be done. >> Yes, I think so. And that's why I look at this as, this is not a one year thing, or you know, it's going to be multi-years, and I think again, it's about all of us in the industry working together to come to an aligned picture of what that looks like. >> So, as the world's moved from private cloud to public cloud and now Cross-cloud services, supercloud, metacloud, whatever you want to call it, how have you sort of changed the way engineering's organized, developers sort of approached the problem? Has it changed and how? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, it's funny, we at VMware, going through the same challenges as our customers and you know, any business, right? We use multiple clouds, we got a big, of course, on-prem footprint. You know, what we're doing is similar to what I see in many other customers, which, you see the evolution of a platform team, and so the platform team is really in charge of trying to develop a lot of these underlying services to allow our lines of business, our product teams, to be able to move as quickly as possible, to focus on the building, while we help with a lot of the operational overheads, right? We maintain security, compliance, all these other things. We also deal with, yeah, just making the developer's life as simple as possible. So, they do need to know some stuff about, you know, each public cloud they're using, those public cloud services, but at the same, time we can abstract a lot of the details they don't need to be in. So, I think this sort of delineation or separation, I should say, between the underlying platform team and the product teams is a very, very common pattern. >> You know, I noticed the four layers you talked about were observability, infrastructure, security and developers, on that slide, the last slide you had at the top, that was kind of the abstraction key areas that you guys at VMware are working? >> Those were just some groupings that we've come up with, but we like to debate them. >> I noticed data's in every one of them. >> Yeah, yep, data is key. >> It's not like, so, back to the data questions that security is called out as a pillar. Observability is just kind of watching everything, but it's all pretty much data driven. Of the four layers that you see, I take that as areas that you can. >> Standardize. >> Consistently rely on to have standard services. >> Yes. >> Which one do you start with? What's the, is there order of operations? >> Well, that's, I mean. >> 'Cause I think infrastructure's number one, but you had observability, you need to know what's going on. >> Yeah, well it really, it's highly dependent. Again, it depends on the business that we talk to and what, I mean, it really goes back to, what are your business priorities, right? And we have some customers who may want to get out of a data center, they want to evacuate the data center, and so what they want is then, consistent infrastructure, so they can just move those applications up to the cloud. They don't want to have to refactor them and we'll do it later, but there's an immediate and sort of urgent problem that they have. Other customers I talk to, you know, security becomes top of mind, or maybe compliance, because they're in a regulated industry. So, those are the sort of services they want to prioritize. So, I would say there is no single right answer, no one size fits all. The point about this architecture is really around the optionality of it, as it allows you as a business to decide what's most important and where you want to prioritize. >> How about the deployment models kit? Do, does a customer have that flexibility from a deployment model standpoint or do I have to, you know, approach it a specific way? Can you address that? >> Yeah, I mean deployment models, you're talking about how they how they consume? >> So, for instance, yeah, running a control plane in the cloud. >> Got it, got it. >> And communicating elsewhere or having a single global instance or instantiating that instance, and? >> So, that's a good point actually, and you know, the white paper that we released back in August, around this sort of concept, the Cross-cloud service. This is some of the stuff we need to figure out as an industry. So, you know when we talk about a Cross-cloud service, we can mean actually any of the things you just talked about. It could be a single instance that runs, let's say in one public cloud, but it supports all of 'em. Or it could be one that's multi-instance and that runs in each of the clouds, and that customers can take dependencies on whichever one, depending on what their use cases are or the, even going further than that, there's a type of Cross-cloud service that could actually be instantiated even in an air gapped or offline environment, and we have many, many businesses, especially heavily regulated ones that have that requirement, so I think, you know. >> Global don't forget global, regions, locales. >> Yeah, there's all sorts of performance latency issues that can be concerned about. So, most services today are the former, there are single sort of instance or set of instances within a single cloud that support multiple clouds, but I think what we're doing and where we're going with, you know, things like what we see with Kubernetes and service meshes and all these things, will better enable folks to hit these different types of cross-cloud service architectures. So, today, you as a customer probably wouldn't have too much choice, but where we're going, you'll see a lot more choice in the future. >> If you had to summarize for folks watching the importance of Supercloud movement, multi-cloud, cross-cloud services, as an industry in flexible, 'cause I'm always riffing on the whole old school network protocol stacks that got disrupted by TCP/IP, that's a little bit dated, we got people on the chat that are like, you know, 20 years old that weren't even born then. So, but this is a, one of those inflection points that's once in a generation inflection point, I'm sure you agree. What scoped the order of magnitude of the change and the opportunity around the marketplace, the business models, the technology, and ultimately benefits the society. >> Yeah. Wow. Getting bigger. >> You have 10 seconds, go. >> I know. Yeah. (laughing) No, look, so I think it is what we're seeing is really the next phase of what you might call cloud, right? This notion of delivering services, the way they've been packaged together, traditionally by the hyperscalers is now being challenged. and what we're seeing is really opening that up to new levels of innovation, and I think that will be huge for businesses because it'll help meet them where they are. Instead of needing to contort the businesses to, you know, make it work with the technology, the technology will support the business and where it's going. Give people more optionality, more flexibility in order to get there, and I think in the end, for us as individuals, it will just make for better experiences, right? You can get better performance, better interactivity, given that devices are so much of what we do, and so much of what we interact with all the time. This sort of flexibility and optionality will fundamentally better for us as individuals in our experiences. >> And we're seeing that with ChatGPT, everyone's talking about, just early days. There'll be more and more of things like that, that are next gen, like obviously like, wow, that's a fall out of your chair moment. >> It'll be the next wave of innovation that's unleashed. >> All right, Kit Colbert, thanks for coming on and sharing and exploring the Supercloud architecture, Cloud Chaos, the Cloud Smart, there's a transition progression happening and it's happening fast. This is the supercloud wave. If you're not on this wave, you'll be driftwood. That's a Pat Gelsinger quote on theCUBE. This is theCUBE Be right back with more Supercloud coverage, here in Palo Alto after this break. (upbeat music) (upbeat music continues)

(rousing music) >> Hello everyone. Welcome back to "theCUBE's" day one coverage of Cloud Native Security Con 23. This is going to be an exciting panel. I've got three great guests. I'm Lisa Martin, you know our esteemed analysts, John Furrier, and Dave Vellante well. And we're excited to welcome to "theCUBE" for the first time, Yves Sandfort, the CEO of Comdivision Group, who's coming to us from Germany. As you know, Cloud Native Security Con is a global event. Everyone welcome Yves, great to have you in particular. Welcome to "theCUBE." >> Great to be here. >> Thank you for inviting me. >> Yves, tell us a little bit, before we dig into really wanting to understand your perspectives on the event and get Dave and John's feedback as well, tell us a little bit about you. >> So yeah, talking about me, or talking about Comdivision real quick. We are in the business for over 27 years already. We started as a SaaS company, then became more like an architecture and, and Cloud Native company over the last few years. But what's interesting is, and I think that's, that's, that's really interesting when we look at our industry. It hasn't really, the requirements haven't really changed over the years. It's still security. We still have to figure out how we deal with security. We still have to figure out how we deal with compliance and everything else. And I think therefore, it's more and more important that we take these items more seriously. Also, based on the fact that when we look at it, how development and other things happen nowadays, it's, it's, everybody says it's like open source. It's great because everybody can look into the code. We, I think the last few years have shown us enough example that that's not necessarily solving all the issues, but it's also code and development has changed rapidly when we look at the Cloud Native approach, where it's far more about gluing the pieces together, versus the development pieces. When I was actually doing software development 25 years ago, and had to basically build my code because I didn't have that much internet access for it. So it has evolved, but even back then we had to deal with security and everything. >> Right. The focus on security is, is incredibly important, and the focus keeps growing as you mentioned. This is, guys, and I want to get your perspectives on this. We're going to start with John. This is the first time Cloud Native Security Con is its own event being extracted from, and amplified from KubeCon. John, I want to understand from your perspective, break down the event, what you see, what you've heard, and Cloud Native Security in general. What does this mean to companies? What does it mean to customers? Is this a reality? >> Well, I think that's the topic we want to discuss, and I think Yves background, you see the VMware certification, I love that. Because what VMware did with virtualization, was abstract that from server virtualization, kind of really changed the game on things, and you start to see Cloud Native kind of go that next level of how companies will be operating their business, not just digital transformation, as digital transformation goes to completion, it's total business transformation where IT is everywhere. And so you're starting to see the trends where, "Okay, that's happening." Now you're starting to see, that's Cloud Native Con, or KubeCon, AWS re:Invent, or whatever show, or whatever way you want to look at it. But in, in the past decade, past five years, security has always been front and center as almost a separate thing, and, in and of itself, but the same thing. So you're starting to see the breakout of security conversations around how to make things work. So a lot of operational conversations around what used to be DevOps makes infrastructure as code, and that was great, that fueled that. Then DevSecOps came. So the Cloud Native next level, is more application development at scale, developers driving the standards with developer first thinking, shifting left, I get all that. But down in the lower ends of the stack, you got real operational issues. DNS we've heard in the keynote, we heard about the Colonel, the Lennox Colonel. Things that need to be managed and taken care of at a security level. These are like, seem like in the weeds, but you're starting to see that happen. And the other thing that I think's real about Cloud Native Security Con that's going to be interesting to watch, is Amazon has pretty much canceled all their re:Invent like shows except for two; Re:Invent, which is their annual conference, and Re:Inforce, which is dedicated to securities. So Cloud Native, Linux, the Linux Foundation has now breaking out Cloud Native Con and KubeCon, and now Cloud Native Security Con. They can't call it KubeCon because it's not Kubernetes, but it's like security focus. I think this is the beginning of starting to see this new developer driving, developers driving the standards, and it has it implications, what used to be called IT ops, and that's like the VMwares of the world. You saw all the stuff that was not at developer focus, but more ops, becoming much more in the application. So I think, I think it's real. The question is where does it go? How fast does it develop? So to me, I think it's a real trend, and it's worthy of a breakout, but it's not yet clear of where the landing zone is for people to start doing it, how they get started, what are the best practices. Machine learning's going to be a big part of this. So to me it's totally cool, but I'm not yet seeing the beachhead. So that's kind of my take. >> Dave, our inventor and host of breaking analysis, what's your take? >> So when you, I think when you zoom out, there's some, there's a big macro change that's been going on. I think when you look back, let's say 10, 12 years ago, the, the need for speed far trumped the, the, the security aspect, the governance, the data privacy. It was like, "Yeah, the risks, they're not that great compared to our opportunity." That has completely changed because the risks are now so much higher. And so what's happening, I think there's a, there's a major effort amongst CIOs and CISOs to try to make security not a blocker because it use to be, it still is. "Okay, I got this great initiative." Eh, give it to the SecOps pros, and let them take it for a while before we can go to market. And so a huge challenge now is to simplify, automate, AI comes in, the whole supply chain security, so the, so the companies can not be facing so much friction. And that is non-trivial. I don't think we're anywhere close there, but I think the goal is by, within the next several years, we're going to be in a position, that security, we heard today, is, wasn't designed in to the initial internet protocols. It was bolted on. And so increasingly, the fundamental architecture of the internet, the Cloud, et cetera, is, is seeing designed in security, and, and that is an imperative, or else business is going to come to a grinding halt. >> Right. It's no longer, the bolt no longer works. Yves, what's your perspective on Cloud Native Security, where it stands today? What's in it for customers, whether we're talking about banks, or hospitals, or retailers, what do you think? >> I think when we, when we look at security in the, in the modern world, is we need to as, as Dave mentioned, we need to rethink how we apply it. Very often, security in the past has been always bolted on in the end. If we continue to do that, it'll become more and more difficult, because as companies evolve, and as companies want to bring products and software to market in a much faster and faster way, it's getting more and more difficult if we bolt on the security process at the end. It's like, developers build something and then someone checks security. That's not going to work any longer. Especially if we also consider now the changes in the industry. We had Stack Overflow over the last 10 years. If I would've had Stack Overflow 15, 20, what, 25 years ago when I was a developer, it would've changed a hell lot. Looking at it now, and looking at it what we had in the last few weeks, it's like where nearly all of my team members say is like finally I don't need any script kiddies anymore because I can't go to (indistinct) who writes the code for me. Which is on one end great, because it enables us to solve certain problems in a much higher pace. But the challenge with that is, if the people who just copy and past that code, don't understand the implications of that code, we have a much higher risk continuously. And what people thought was, is challenging with Stack Overflow. Imagine that something in one of these AI engines, is actually going ballistic, and it creates holes in nearly every one of these applications. And trust me, there will be enough developers who are going to use these tools to develop codes, the same as students in university are going to take this to write their essays and everything else. And so it's really important that every developer team basically has a security person within their team, and not a security at the end. So we build something, we check it, go through QA, and then it goes to security. Security needs to be at the forefront. And I think that's where we see Cloud Native Security Con, where we see AWS. I saw it during re:Invent already where they said is like, we have reinforced next year. I think this becomes more and more of a topic, and I think companies, as much as it is become a norm that you have a firewall and everything else, it needs to become a norm that when you are doing software development, and every development team needs to have a security person on that needs to be trained. >> I love that chat comment Dave, 'cause you and I were talking about this. And I think that is going to be the issue. Do we need security chat for the chat bot? And there's like a, like a recursive model there. The biases are built in. I think, and I think our interview with the Palo Alto Network's co-founder, Dave, when he talked about zero trust as a structured way to start things, but he was referencing that with Cloud, there's a chance to rethink or do a do-over in security. So, I think this is kind of to me, where this is all going. And I think you asked Pat Gelsinger what, year 2013, 2014, can, is security a do over? I think we're in that do over time. >> He said yes. >> He said yes. (laughing) He was right. But yeah, eight years later... But this is, how do you, zero trust gives you some structure, but how do you organize and redo security? Because to me, I think that's what's happening here. >> And John you heard, Zuk at Palo Alto Network said, "Yeah, the, the words security and architecture, they don't go together historically." And so it is a total, total retake. >> Well is that because there's too many tools out there and- >> Yeah. For sure. >> Yeah, well, first of all, a lot of hardware. And then yeah, a lot of tools. You even see IIOT and industry 40, you see IOT security coming up as another stove pipe, and that's not the right approach. And, and so- >> Well let me, let me ask you a question Dave, and Yves, if you don't mind. 'Cause I was just riffing on this yesterday about this. In the ML space, you're seeing the ML models, you're seeing proprietary models versus open source. Is security going to go down this proprietary security methods and open source? Because that's interesting, because the CNCF is run by the the Linux Foundation. So you can almost maybe see a model where there's more proprietary security methods than open source. Or is it, is that a non-issue? >> I would, I would, let me, if I, if I jump in here first, I think the last, especially last five or 10 years have clearly shown the, the whole and, and I invested early on in the, in the end 90s in several open source startups in the Bay area. So, I'm well behind the whole open source idea and, and mid (indistinct) and others back then several times. But the point is, I think what we have seen is open source is not in general, more secure or less secure, because code is too complex nowadays. You have millions of lines of code, and it's not that either one way or the other is going to solve it. The ways I think we are going to look at it is more is what's the role to market, because only because something is open source doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be available for everyone. And the same for proprietary source from that perspective, even though everybody mixes licensing and payments and all that all the time, but it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with it. But I think as we are going through it, and when we also look at the industry, security industry over the last 10 plus years has been primarily hardware focused. And a lot of these vendors have done a good business out of selling hardware boxes, putting software on top of it. Whereas in reality, those were still X86 standard boxes in the end. So it was not that we had specific security ethics or anything like that in there anymore. And so overall, the question of the market is going to change. And as we are looking into Cloud Native, think about someone like an AWS, do you really envision them to have a hardware box of every supplier in their data center, and that in every availability zone in every region? Same for Microsoft, same for Google, etc? So we need to have new ways on how we can apply security. And that applies both on the backend services, but also on the front end side. >> And if I, and if I could chime in, I think the, the good, I think the answer is, is, is no and yes. And what I mean by that is if you take, antivirus and known malware, I mean pretty much anybody today can, can solve that problem, it's the unknown malware. So I think the yes part of the answer is yes, it's, it's going to be proprietary, but in the sense we're going to use open source tooling, and then apply that in a proprietary way with, with specific algorithms and unique architectures that are going to solve problems. For example, XDR with, with unknown malware. So, and that's the, that's the hard part. As somebody said, I think this morning at the keynote, it's, it's all the stuff that, that the SecOps team couldn't find. That's the really hard part. >> (laughs) Well the question will be will, is the new IP, the ability to feed ChatGPT some magical spelled insertion query string that does the job, that's unique, that might be the new IP, the the question to ask. >> Well, that's what the hackers are going to do. And I, they're on offense. (John laughs) And the offense knows what play is coming. So, they're going to start. >> So guys, let's take this conversation up a level. I want to get your perspectives on what's in this for me as a customer? We know security is a board level conversation. We talk about this all the time. We also know that they're based on, I think David, was the conversations that you and I had, with Palo Alto Networks at Ignite in December. There's a, there's a lack of alignment between the executives and the board from a security perspective. When we talk about Cloud Native Security, we all talked about the value in that, what's in it for customers? I want to get your perspectives on should this be a board level conversation, and if so, how do you advise organizations, whether it is a hospital, or a bank, or an organization that is really affected by things like ransomware? How should they be thinking about this from an organizational perspective? >> Well, I'll start first, because we had this conversation during our Super Cloud event last month, and this comes up a lot. And this is, the CEO board level. Yes it is a board level conversation for security, as is application development as in terms of transforming their business to be competitive, not to be on the wrong side of history with this wave coming. So I think that's more of a management. But the issue is, they tell their people, "Go do it." And they're like, 'cause they get sold on the idea of, "Hey, won't you transform your business, and everything's going to be data driven, and machine learning's going to power your apps, get new customers, be profitable." "Oh, sign me up for that." When you have to implement this, it's really hard. And I think the core issue is, where are companies in their life cycle of the ability to execute and architect this thing properly as Dave said, Nick Zuk said, "You can't have architecture and security, you need platforms." So, I think the re-platforming, and the re-factoring of business is a big factor, and that's got to get down into the, the organizational shifts and the people to do it. So are there skills? Do I do a managed service? How do I architect it? Are there more services? Are there developers doing applications that are going to be more agile? So, this is not an easy thing. And to move a business from IT operations that is proven, to be positioned for this enablement, is just really difficult. And it's expensive. And if you screw it up, you could be, could be on the wrong side of things. So, to me, that's the big issue is, you sell the dream and then you got to implement it. And that's really difficult. >> Yves, give us your perspective on, based on John's comments, how do organizations shift so dramatically? There's a cultural element there as well, but there's also organizations that are, have competitive competitors in the rear view mirror, and there's time to waste. What are your thoughts on that? >> I think that's exactly the point. It's like, as an organization, you need to take the decision between the time, the risk, and all the other elements we have into this game. Because you can try to achieve 100% security, but that's exactly the same as trying to, to protect gold or anything else 100%. It's most likely not going to be from a risk perspective anyway sensible. And that's the same from a corporational perspective. When you look at building new internet services, or IOT services, or any kind of new shopping experience or whatever else, you need to balance out between the risks and the advantages out of it. And you also need to be accepting that you potentially on the way make mistakes, but then it's more important than ever that you are able to quickly fix any mistakes, and to adjust to anything what's happening in the market. Because as we are building all these new Cloud Native applications, and build up all these skill sets, one of the big scenarios is we are far more depending on individual building blocks. These building blocks come out of open source communities, which have a much different way. When we look back in software development, back then we had application servers from Oracle, Web Logic, whatsoever, they had a release cycles of every three to six months. As now we have to deal with open source, where sometimes release cycles are on a four week schedule, in between security patches. So you need to be much faster in adopting that, checking that, implementing that, getting things to work. So there is a security stretch from that perspective. There is a speech stretch on the other thing companies have to deal with, and on the other side it's always a measurement between the risk, and the security you can afford. Because reality is, you will not be 100% protected no matter what you do. So, you need to balance out what you as an organization can actually build on. But I think, coming back also to the point, it's on the bot level nowadays. It's like nearly every discussion we have with companies nowadays as they move into the Cloud, especially also here in Europe where for the last five years, it was always, it's like "It's data privacy." Data privacy is no longer, I mean, yes, for certain people, it's still the point, but for many more people it's like, "How protected is my data?" "What do we do in case of ransomware attack?" "What do we do in case of a denial of service?" All of these things become more vulnerable, where in the past you were discussing these things with a becking page, or, or like a stock exchange. They were, it's like, "What the hell is going to happen if we have a denial of service?" Now all of the sudden, this now affects nearly everyone in their storefronts and everything else, because everything is depending on it. >> Yeah, I think you're right on. You think about how cultural change occurs, it's bottom ups or, bottom up, top down or middle out. And what, what's happened with security is the people in the security team cared about it, they were the, everybody said, "Oh, it's their problem." And then it just did an end run to the board, kind of mid, early last decade. And then the board sort of pushed that down. And the line of business is realizing, "Holy cow. My business, my EBIT can be dramatically affected by this, so I care." Now it's this whole house, cultural team sport. I know it's sort of a, a cliche, but it, it's true. Everybody actually is beginning to care about security because the risks are now so high, and it's going to affect not only the bottom line of the company, the bottom line of the business, their job, it's, it's, it's virtually everywhere. It's a huge cultural shift that we're seeing. >> And that's a big challenge for organizations in any industry. And Yves, you talked about ransomware service. Every industry across the globe is vulnerable to this. But how can, maybe John, we'll start with you. How can Cloud Native Security help organizations if they're able to embrace it, operationally, culturally, dial down some of the vulnerabilities that just seem to keep growing? >> Well, I mean that's the big question. The breaches are, are critical. The governances also could be a way that anchors down growth. So I think the balance between the governance compliance piece of it is key, but making the developers faster and more productive is the key to me. And I think having the security paradigm where they're not blockers, as Dave said, is critical. So I love the whole shift left, but now that we have more data focused initiatives around how that, you can use data to understand the security issues, I think data and security are together, and I think there's a going to be a data operating system model emerging, where data and security will be almost one thing. And that will be set up by the security teams, and the data teams together. And that will feed guardrails into the developer environment. So the developer should feel no pain at all in doing this. So I think the best practice will end up being what we're seeing with supply chain, security, with making sure code's verified. And you're going to see the container, security side completely address has been, and KubeCon, we just, I asked Scott Johnson, the CEO of Docker, and I asked him directly, "Are you guys all tight on container security?" He said, yes, but other people are suggesting that's not true. There's a lot of issues with the container security. So, there's all kinds of areas where there's holes. So Cloud Native is cool on one hand, and very relevant, but if it's not shored up, it's going to be a problem. But I, so I think that's where the action will be, at the developer pipeline, in the containers, and the data. So, that will be very relevant, and if companies nail that, they'll be faster, they'll have better apps, and that'll be the differentiator. And again, if they don't on this next wave, they're going to be driftwood. >> Dave, how do they prevent becoming driftwood? >> Well, I think Cloud has had a huge impact. And a Cloud's by no means a panacea, but let's face it, it's dramatically improved a lot of companies security posture. Now there's still that shared responsibility. Even though an S3 bucket is encrypted, it's still your responsibility to make sure that it doesn't get decrypted by somebody who has access to it. So there are things like that, but to Yve's earlier point, that can be, that's done through software now, it's done through best practices. Those best practices can be shared. So the way you, you don't become driftwood, is you start to, you step back, rethink that security architecture as we were talking about earlier, take advantage of the Cloud, take advantage of Cloud Native, and all the, the rapid pace of innovation that's occurring there, and you don't use, it's called before, The audit is the last line of defense. That's no longer a check box item. "Oh yeah, we're in compliance." It's, this is a business imperative, and because we're going to reduce our expected loss and reduce our business risk. That's part of the business case today. >> Yeah. >> It's a huge, critically important part of the business case. Yves, question for you. If you're in an elevator with a CEO, a CFO, and a CISO, and they're talking about security and Cloud Native Security, what's your value proposition to them on a, on a say a 32nd elevator ride? >> Difficult story. I think at the moment, the most important part is, we need to get people to work together, and we need to train people to work more much better together. I think that's the overall most important part for all of these solutions, because in the end, security is always a person issue. If, we can have the best tools in the industry, as long as we don't get all of these teams to work together, then we have a problem. If the security team is always seen as the end of the solution to fix everything, that's not going to work because they always are the bad guys in the game. And so we need to bring the teams together. And once we have the teams work together, I think we have a far better track on, on maintaining security. >> John and Dave, I want to get your perspectives on what Yves just said. In all the experience that the two of you have as industry analysts here on "theCUBE," Wikibon, Siliconangle Media. How do you advise organizations to get those teams together? As Eve said, that alignment is critical, but John, we'll start with you, then Dave go to you. What's your advice for organizations that need to align those teams and really don't have a lot of time to wait to do it? >> (chuckling) That's a great question. I think, I think that's everyone pays hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars to get that advice from these consultants, organizations out there doing the transformations. But I think it comes down to personnel and commitment. I think if there's a C-level commitment to the effort, you'll see the institutional structure change. So you can see really getting behind it with their, with their wallet and their, and their support of either getting more personnel to support and assist, or manage services, or giving the power to the teams to execute and doing it in a way that, that's, that's well known and best practices. Start small, build out the pilots, build the platform, and then start getting it right. And I think that's the key. Not the magic wand, the old model of rolling out stuff in, in six month cycles. It's really, get the proof points, double down and change the culture, but also execute and have real metrics. And changing the architecture, like having more penetration tests as a service. Doing pen tests is like a joke now. So that doesn't make any sense. You got to have that built in almost every day, and every minute. So, these kinds of new techniques have to be implemented and have to be tried. So that's why these communities are growing. That's why I like what open source has been doing, and I like the open source as the place to have these conversations, because that's where the action will be for new stuff. And I think people will implement open source like they did before, but with different ways, better testing, better supply chain on the software side, verifying code. So, I see open source actually getting a tailwind from this, not a headwind. So, I'm bullish on the open source piece here on, on all levels, machine learning- >> Lisa, my answer is intramural sports. And it's 'cause I think it's cultural. And what I mean by that, is you take your your best and brightest security, and this is what frankly, a lot of CISOs do, an examples is Lena Smart, MongoDB. Take your best and brightest security pros, make them captains of the intramural teams, and pair them up with pods of individuals across the organization, which is most people who don't know anything about security, and put them together, so that they can, they, so that the folks that understand security can, can realize how little people know, what, what, what, how, what the worst practices that are out there in the reverse, how they can cross pollinate. And they do that on a regular basis, I know at Mongo and other companies. And that kind of cultural assimilation is a starting point for how you get security awareness up to your question around making it a team sport. >> Absolutely critical. Yves, I want to kind of wrap things with you. We've got a couple of minutes left. When you're really looking at the Cloud Native community, the growth of it, we talked about earlier in the program, Cloud Native Security Con being now extracted and elevated out of KubeCon, what are your thoughts on the groundswell that this community is generating around Cloud Native Security, the benefits that organizations will achieve from it? >> I think overall, when we have these securities conferences, or these security arms a bit spread out and separated out of the main conference, it helps to a certain degree, because especially in the security space, when you look at at other like black hat or white hat conferences and things like that in the past, although they were not focused on Cloud Native, a lot of these security folks didn't feel well taken care of in any of the other conferences because they were always these, it's like they are always blocking us, they're always making us problems, and all these kinds of things. Now that we really take the Cloud Native piece and the security piece together, or like AWS does it with re:Inforce, I think we will see more and more that people understand is that security is a permanent topic we need to cover, but we need to bring different people together, because security also has compliance and a lot of other components in there. So we will see at these conferences moving forward, also a different audience. It's not going to be only the Cloud Native developers. And if I see some of these security audiences, I can't really imagine them to really be at KubeCon because there is too much other things going on. And you couldn't really see much of that at re:Invent because re:Invent by itself has become a complete monster of a conference. It covers too many topics. And so having this very, very important security piece separated, also gives the opportunity, I think, that we can bring in the security people, but also have the type of board level discussions potentially, between the leaders of the industry, to also discuss on how we can evolve, how we can make things better, and how, how we can actually, yeah, evolve our industry for it. Because let's face it, that threat is not going to go away. It's, it's a business. And one of the last security conferences I was on, on the ransomware part, it was one of the topics someone said is like, "Look, currently on average, it takes a hacker group roughly around they said 15 to 20 K to break into a company, and they on average make 100K. It's a business, let's face it. And it's a business we don't like. And ethically, it's no discussion that this is not good, but that's something which is happening. People are making money with it. And as long as that's going to go on, and we have enough countries where these people can hide, it's going to stay and survive. And so, with that being said, it's important for us to really build an industry around this. But I also think it's good that we have separate conferences. In the past we had more the RSA conference, which tried to cover all of these areas. But that is not really fitting Cloud Native and everything else. So I think it's good that we have these new opportunities, the Cloud Native one, but also what AWS brings up for someone. >> Yves, you just nailed it. It just comes down to simple math. It's a fraction. Revenue over cost. And if you could increase the hacker's cost, increase the denominator, their ROI will go down. And that is the game. >> Great point, Dave. What I'm hearing guys, and we can talk about technology for days and days. I know all of you. But there's, there's a big component that, that the elevation of Cloud Native Security, on its own as standalone is critical, as is the people component. You guys all talked about that. We talked about the cultural change necessary for that. Hopefully what we're seeing with Cloud Native Security Con 23, this first event is going to give us more insight over the next couple of days, and the next months or so, as to how this elevation, and how the people can come together to really help organizations from a math perspective as, as Dave talked about, really dial down the risks there, understand more of the vulnerabilities so that ransomware as a service is not as lucrative as it is today. Guys, so much appreciate your time, really breaking down Cloud Native Security, the value in it from different perspectives, and what your thoughts are on where it's going. Thanks so much for your time. >> All right. Thanks. >> Thanks, Lisa. >> Thank you. >> Thanks, Yves. >> All right. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's day one coverage of Cloud Native Security Con 23. Thanks for watching. (rousing music)

(upbeat music) (upbeat music) >> Hi everybody, welcome back to our coverage of the Cloud Native Security Con. I'm Dave Vellante, here in our Boston studio. We're connecting today with Palo Alto, with John Furrier and Lisa Martin. We're also live from the show floor in Seattle. But right now, I'm here with Andy Thurai who's from Constellation Research, friend of theCUBE, and we're going to discuss the intersection of AI and security, the potential of AI, the risks and the future. Andy, welcome, good to see you again. >> Good to be here again. >> Hey, so let's get into it, can you talk a little bit about, I know this is a passion of yours, the ethical considerations surrounding AI. I mean, it's front and center in the news, and you've got accountability, privacy, security, biases. Should we be worried about AI from a security perspective? >> Absolutely, man, you should be worried. See the problem is, people don't realize this, right? I mean, the ChatGPT being a new shiny object, it's all the craze that's about. But the problem is, most of the content that's produced either by ChatGPT or even by others, it's an access, no warranties, no accountability, no whatsoever. Particularly, if it is content, it's okay. But if it is something like a code that you use for example, one of their site projects that GitHub's co-pilot, which is actually, open AI + Microsoft + GitHub's combo, they allow you to produce code, AI writes code basically, right? But when you write code, problem with that is, it's not exactly stolen, but the models are created by using the GitHub code. Actually, they're getting sued for that, saying that, "You can't use our code". Actually there's a guy, Tim Davidson, I think he's named the professor, he actually demonstrated how AI produces exact copy of the code that he has written. So right now, it's a lot of security, accountability, privacy issues. Use it either to train or to learn. But in my view, it's not ready for enterprise grade yet. >> So, Brian Behlendorf today in his keynotes said he's really worried about ChatGPT being used to automate spearfishing. So I'm like, okay, so let's unpack that a little bit. Is the concern there that it just, the ChatGPT writes such compelling phishing content, it's going to increase the probability of somebody clicking on it, or are there other dimensions? >> It could, it's not necessarily just ChatGPT for that matter, right? AI can, actually, the hackers are using it to an extent already, can use to individualize content. For example, one of the things that you are able to easily identify when you're looking at the emails that are coming in, the phishing attack is, you look at some of the key elements in it, whether it's a human or even if it's an automated AI based system. They look at certain things and they say, "Okay, this is phishing". But if you were to read an email that looks exact copy of what I would've sent to you saying that, "Hey Dave, are you on for tomorrow? Or click on this link to do whatever. It could individualize the message. That's where the volume at scale to individual to masses, that can be done using AI, which is what scares me. >> Is there a flip side to AI? How is it being utilized to help cybersecurity? And maybe you could talk about some of the more successful examples of AI in security. Like, are there use cases or are there companies out there, Andy, that you find, I know you're close to a lot of firms that are leading in this area. You and I have talked about CrowdStrike, I know Palo Alto Network, so is there a positive side to this story? >> Yeah, I mean, absolutely right. Those are some of the good companies you mentioned, CrowdStrike, Palo Alto, Darktrace is another one that I closely follow, which is a good company as well, that they're using AI for security purposes. So, here's the thing, right, when people say, when they're using malware detection systems, most of the malware detection systems that are in today's security and malware systems, use some sort of a signature and pattern scanning in the malware. You know how many identified malwares are there today in the repository, in the library? More than a billion, a billion. So, if you are to check for every malware in your repository, that's not going to work. The pattern based recognition is not going to work. So, you got to figure out a different way of identification of pattern of usage, not just a signature in a malware, right? Or there are other areas you could use, things like the usage patterns. For example, if Andy is coming in to work at a certain time, you could combine a facial recognition saying, that should he be in here at that time, and should he be doing things, what he is supposed to be doing. There are a lot of things you could do using that, right? And the AIOps use cases, which is one of my favorite areas that I work, do a lot of work, right? That it has use cases for detecting things that are anomaly, that are not supposed to be done in a way that's supposed to be, reducing the noise so it can escalate only the things what you're supposed to. So, AIOps is a great use case to use in security areas which they're not using it to an extent yet. Incident management is another area. >> So, in your malware example, you're saying, okay, known malware, pretty much anybody can deal with that now. That's sort of yesterday's problem. >> The unknown is the problem. >> It's the unknown malware really trying to understand the patterns, and the patterns are going to change. It's not like you're saying a common signature 'cause they're going to use AI to change things up at scale. >> So, here's the problem, right? The malware writers are also using AI now, right? So, they're not going to write the old malware, send it to you. They are actually creating malware on the fly. It is possible entirely in today's world that they can create a malware, drop in your systems and it'll it look for the, let me get that name right. It's called, what are we using here? It's called the TTPs, Tactics, Techniques and procedures. It'll look for that to figure out, okay, am I doing the right pattern? And then malware can sense it saying that, okay, that's the one they're detecting. I'm going to change it on the fly. So, AI can code itself on the fly, rather malware can code itself on the fly, which is going to be hard to detect. >> Well, and when you talk about TTP, when you talk to folks like Kevin Mandia of Mandiant, recently purchased by Google or other of those, the ones that have the big observation space, they'll talk about the most malicious hacks that they see, involve lateral movement. So, that's obviously something that people are looking for, AI's looking for that. And of course, the hackers are going to try to mask that lateral movement, living off the land and other things. How do you see AI impacting the future of cyber? We talked about the risks and the good. One of the things that Brian Behlendorf also mentioned is that, he pointed out that in the early days of the internet, the protocols had an inherent element of trust involved. So, things like SMTP, they didn't have security built in. So, they built up a lot of technical debt. Do you see AI being able to help with that? What steps do you see being taken to ensure that AI based systems are secure? >> So, the major difference between the older systems and the newer systems is the older systems, sadly even today, a lot of them are rules-based. If it's a rules-based systems, you are dead in the water and not able, right? So, the AI-based systems can somewhat learn from the patterns as I was talking about, for example... >> When you say rules-based systems, you mean here's the policy, here's the rule, if it's not followed but then you're saying, AI will blow that away, >> AI will blow that away, you don't have to necessarily codify things saying that, okay, if this, then do this. You don't have to necessarily do that. AI can somewhat to an extent self-learn saying that, okay, if that doesn't happen, if this is not a pattern that I know which is supposed to happen, who should I escalate this to? Who does this system belong to? And the other thing, the AIOps use case we talked about, right, the anomalies. When an anomaly happens, then the system can closely look at, saying that, okay, this is not normal behavior or usage. Is that because system's being overused or is it because somebody's trying to access something, could look at the anomaly detection, anomaly prevention or even prediction to an extent. And that's where AI could be very useful. >> So, how about the developer angle? 'Cause CNCF, the event in Seattle is all around developers, how can AI be integrated? We did a lot of talk at the conference about shift-left, we talked about shift-left and protect right. Meaning, protect the run time. So, both are important, so what steps should be taken to ensure that the AI systems are being developed in a secure and ethically sound way? What's the role of developers in that regard? >> How long do you got? (Both laughing) I think it could go for base on that. So, here's the problem, right? Lot of these companies are trying to see, I mean, you might have seen that in the news that Buzzfeed is trying to hire all of the writers to create the thing that ChatGPT is creating, a lot of enterprises... >> How, they're going to fire their writers? >> Yeah, they replace the writers. >> It's like automated automated vehicles and automated Uber drivers. >> So, the problem is a lot of enterprises still haven't done that, at least the ones I'm speaking to, are thinking about saying, "Hey, you know what, can I replace my developers because they are so expensive? Can I replace them with AI generated code?" There are a few issues with that. One, AI generated code is based on some sort of a snippet of a code that has been already available. So, you get into copyright issues, that's issue number one, right? Issue number two, if AI creates code and if something were to go wrong, who's responsible for that? There's no accountability right now. Or you as a company that's creating a system that's responsible, or is it ChatGPT, Microsoft is responsible. >> Or is the developer? >> Or the developer. >> The individual developer might be. So, they're going to be cautious about that liability. >> Well, so one of the areas where I'm seeing a lot of enterprises using this is they are using it to teach developers to learn things. You know what, if you're to code, this is a good way to code. That area, it's okay because you are just teaching them. But if you are to put an actual production code, this is what I advise companies, look, if somebody's using even to create a code, whether with or without your permission, make sure that once the code is committed, you validate that the 100%, whether it's a code or a model, or even make sure that the data what you're feeding in it is completely out of bias or no bias, right? Because at the end of the day, it doesn't matter who, what, when did that, if you put out a service or a system out there, it is involving your company liability and system, and code in place. You're going to be screwed regardless of what, if something were to go wrong, you are the first person who's liable for it. >> Andy, when you think about the dangers of AI, and what keeps you up at night if you're a security professional AI and security professional. We talked about ChatGPT doing things, we don't even, the hackers are going to get creative. But what worries you the most when you think about this topic? >> A lot, a lot, right? Let's start off with an example, actually, I don't know if you had a chance to see that or not. The hackers used a bank of Hong Kong, used a defect mechanism to fool Bank of Hong Kong to transfer $35 million to a fake account, the money is gone, right? And the problem that is, what they did was, they interacted with a manager and they learned this executive who can control a big account and cloned his voice, and clone his patterns on how he calls and what he talks and the whole name he has, after learning that, they call the branch manager or bank manager and say, "Hey, you know what, hey, move this much money to whatever." So, that's one way of kind of phishing, kind of deep fake that can come. So, that's just one example. Imagine whether business is conducted by just using voice or phone calls itself. That's an area of concern if you were to do that. And imagine this became an uproar a few years back when deepfakes put out the video of Tom Cruise and others we talked about in the past, right? And Tom Cruise looked at the video, he said that he couldn't distinguish that he didn't do it. It is so close, that close, right? And they are doing things like they're using gems... >> Awesome Instagram account by the way, the guy's hilarious, right? >> So, they they're using a lot of this fake videos and fake stuff. As long as it's only for entertainment purposes, good. But imagine doing... >> That's right there but... >> But during the election season when people were to put out saying that, okay, this current president or ex-president, he said what? And the masses believe right now whatever they're seeing in TV, that's unfortunate thing. I mean, there's no fact checking involved, and you could change governments and elections using that, which is scary shit, right? >> When you think about 2016, that was when we really first saw, the weaponization of social, the heavy use of social and then 2020 was like, wow. >> To the next level. >> It was crazy. The polarization, 2024, would deepfakes... >> Could be the next level, yeah. >> I mean, it's just going to escalate. What about public policy? I want to pick your brain on this because I I've seen situations where the EU, for example, is going to restrict the ability to ship certain code if it's involved with critical infrastructure. So, let's say, example, you're running a nuclear facility and you've got the code that protects that facility, and it can be useful against some other malware that's outside of that country, but you're restricted from sending that for whatever reason, data sovereignty. Is public policy, is it aligned with the objectives in this new world? Or, I mean, normally they have to catch up. Is that going to be a problem in your view? >> It is because, when it comes to laws it's always miles behind when a new innovation happens. It's not just for AI, right? I mean, the same thing happened with IOT. Same thing happened with whatever else new emerging tech you have. The laws have to understand if there's an issue and they have to see a continued pattern of misuse of the technology, then they'll come up with that. Use in ways they are ahead of things. So, they put a lot of restrictions in place and about what AI can or cannot do, US is way behind on that, right? But California has done some things, for example, if you are talking to a chat bot, then you have to basically disclose that to the customer, saying that you're talking to a chat bot, not to a human. And that's just a very basic rule that they have in place. I mean, there are times that when a decision is made by the, problem is, AI is a black box now. The decision making is also a black box now, and we don't tell people. And the problem is if you tell people, you'll get sued immediately because every single time, we talked about that last time, there are cases involving AI making decisions, it gets thrown out the window all the time. If you can't substantiate that. So, the bottom line is that, yes, AI can assist and help you in making decisions but just use that as a assistant mechanism. A human has to be always in all the loop, right? >> Will AI help with, in your view, with supply chain, the software supply chain security or is it, it's always a balance, right? I mean, I feel like the attackers are more advanced in some ways, it's like they're on offense, let's say, right? So, when you're calling the plays, you know where you're going, the defense has to respond to it. So in that sense, the hackers have an advantage. So, what's the balance with software supply chain? Are the hackers have the advantage because they can use AI to accelerate their penetration of the software supply chain? Or will AI in your view be a good defensive mechanism? >> It could be but the problem is, the velocity and veracity of things can be done using AI, whether it's fishing, or malware, or other security and the vulnerability scanning the whole nine yards. It's scary because the hackers have a full advantage right now. And actually, I think ChatGPT recently put out two things. One is, it's able to direct the code if it is generated by ChatGPT. So basically, if you're trying to fake because a lot of schools were complaining about it, that's why they came up with the mechanism. So, if you're trying to create a fake, there's a mechanism for them to identify. But that's a step behind still, right? And the hackers are using things to their advantage. Actually ChatGPT made a rule, if you go there and read the terms and conditions, it's basically honor rule suggesting, you can't use this for certain purposes, to create a model where it creates a security threat, as that people are going to listen. So, if there's a way or mechanism to restrict hackers from using these technologies, that would be great. But I don't see that happening. So, know that these guys have an advantage, know that they're using AI, and you have to do things to be prepared. One thing I was mentioning about is, if somebody writes a code, if somebody commits a code right now, the problem is with the agile methodologies. If somebody writes a code, if they commit a code, you assume that's right and legit, you immediately push it out into production because need for speed is there, right? But if you continue to do that with the AI produced code, you're screwed. >> So, bottom line is, AI's going to speed us up in a security context or is it going to slow us down? >> Well, in the current version, the AI systems are flawed because even the ChatGPT, if you look at the the large language models, you look at the core piece of data that's available in the world as of today and then train them using that model, using the data, right? But people are forgetting that's based on today's data. The data changes on a second basis or on a minute basis. So, if I want to do something based on tomorrow or a day after, you have to retrain the models. So, the data already have a stale. So, that in itself is stale and the cost for retraining is going to be a problem too. So overall, AI is a good first step. Use that with a caution, is what I want to say. The system is flawed now, if you use it as is, you'll be screwed, it's dangerous. >> Andy, you got to go, thanks so much for coming in, appreciate it. >> Thanks for having me. >> You're very welcome, so we're going wall to wall with our coverage of the Cloud Native Security Con. I'm Dave Vellante in the Boston Studio, John Furrier, Lisa Martin and Palo Alto. We're going to be live on the show floor as well, bringing in keynote speakers and others on the ground. Keep it right there for more coverage on theCUBE. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, this is Dave Vellante, and we're here to talk about the massive $61 billion planned acquisition of VMware by Broadcom. And I'm here with Phil Brotherton of NetApp to discuss the implications for customers, for the industry, and NetApp's particular point of view. Phil, welcome. Good to see you again. >> It's great to see you, Dave. >> So this topic has garnered a lot of conversation. What's your take on this epic event? What does it mean for the industry generally, and customers specifically? >> You know, I think time will tell a little bit, Dave. We're in the early days. We've, you know, so we heard the original announcements and then it's evolved a little bit, as we're going now. I think overall it'll be good for the ecosystem in the end. There's a lot you can do when you start combining what VMware can do with compute and some of the hardware assets of Broadcom. There's a lot of security things that can be brought, for example, to the infrastructure, that are very high-end and cool, and then integrated, so it's easy to do. So I think there's a lot of upside for it. There's obviously a lot of concern about what it means for vendor consolidation and pricing and things like that. So time will tell. >> You know, when this announcement first came out, I wrote a piece, you know, how "Broadcom will tame the VMware beast," I called it. And, you know, looked at Broadcom's history and said they're going to cut, they're going to raise prices, et cetera, et cetera. But I've seen a different tone, certainly, as Broadcom has got into the details. And I'm sure I and others maybe scared a lot of customers, but I think everybody's kind of calming down now. What are you hearing from customers about this acquisition? How are they thinking about it? >> You know, I think it varies. There's, I'd say generally we have like half our installed base, Dave, runs ESX Server, so the bulk of our customers use VMware, and generally they love VMware. And I'm talking mainly on-prem. We're just extending to the cloud now, really, at scale. And there's a lot of interest in continuing to do that, and that's really strong. The piece that's careful is this vendor, the cost issues that have come up. The things that were in your piece, actually. And what does that mean to me, and how do I balance that out? Those are the questions people are dealing with right now. >> Yeah, so there's obviously a lot of talk about the macro, the macro headwinds. Everybody's being a little cautious. The CIOs are tapping the brakes. We all sort of know that story. But we have some data from our partner ETR that ask, they go out every quarter and they survey, you know, 1500 or so IT practitioners, and they ask the ones that are planning to spend less, that are cutting, "How are you going to approach that? What's your primary methodology in terms of achieving, you know, cost optimization?" The number one, by far, answer was to consolidate redundant vendors. It was like, it's now up to about 40%. The second, distant second, was, "We're going to, you know, optimize cloud costs." You know, still significant, but it was really that consolidating the redundant vendors. Do you see that? How does NetApp fit into that? >> Yeah, that is an interesting, that's a very interesting bit of research, Dave. I think it's very right. One thing I would say is, because I've been in the infrastructure business in Silicon Valley now for 30 years. So these ups and downs are, that's a consistent thing in our industry, and I always think people should think of their infrastructure and cost management. That's always an issue, with infrastructure as cost management. What I've told customers forever is that when you look at cost management, our best customers at cost management are typically service providers. There's another aspect to cost management, is you want to automate as much as possible. And automation goes along with vendor consolidation, because how you automate different products, you don't want to have too many vendors in your layers. And what I mean by the layers of ecosystem, there's a storage layer, the network layer, the compute layer, like, the security layer, database layer, et cetera. When you think like that, everybody should pick their partners very carefully, per layer. And one last thought on this is, it's not like people are dumb, and not trying to do this. It's, when you look at what happens in the real world, acquisitions happen, things change as you go. And in these big customers, that's just normal, that things change. But you always have to have this push towards consolidating and picking your vendors very carefully. >> Also, just to follow up on that, I mean, you know, when you think about multi-cloud, and you mentioned, you know, you've got some big customers, they do a lot of M & A, it's kind of been multi-cloud by accident. "Oh, we got all these other tools and storage platforms and whatever it is." So where does NetApp fit in that whole consolidation equation? I'm thinking about, you know, cross-cloud services, which is a big VMware theme, thinking about a consistent experience, on-prem, hybrid, across the three big clouds, out to the edge. Where do you fit? >> So our view has been, and it was this view, and we extend it to the cloud, is that the data layer, so in our software, is called ONTAP, the data layer is a really important layer that provides a lot of efficiency. It only gets bigger, how you do compliance, how you do backup, DR, blah blah blah. All that data layer services needs to operate on-prem and on the clouds. So when you look at what we've done over the years, we've extended to all the clouds, our data layer. We've put controls, management tools, over the top, so that you can manage the entire data layer, on-prem and cloud, as one layer. And we're continuing to head down that path, 'cause we think that data layer is obviously the path to maximum ability to do compliance, maximum cost advantages, et cetera. So we've really been the company that set our sights on managing the data layer. Now, if you look at VMware, go up into the network layer, the compute layer, VMware is a great partner, and that's why we work with them so closely, is they're so perfect a fit for us, and they've been a great partner for 20 years for us, connecting those infrastructural data layers: compute, network, and storage. >> Well, just to stay on that for a second. I've seen recently, you kind of doubled down on your VMware alliance. You've got stuff at re:Invent I saw, with AWS, you're close to Azure, and I'm really talking about ONTAP, which is sort of an extension of what you were just talking about, Phil, which is, you know, it's kind of NetApp's storage operating system, if you will. It's a world class. But so, maybe talk about that relationship a little bit, and how you see it evolving. >> Well, so what we've been seeing consistently is, customers want to use the advantages of the cloud. So, point one. And when you have to completely refactor apps and all this stuff, it limits, it's friction. It limits what you can do, it raises costs. And what we did with VMware, VMware is this great platform for being able to run basically client-server apps on-prem and cloud, the exact same way. The problem is, when you have large data sets in the VMs, there's some cost issues and things, especially on the cloud. That drove us to work together, and do what we did. We GA-ed, we're the, so NetApp is the only independent storage, independent storage, say this right, independent storage platform certified to run with VMware cloud on Amazon. We GA-ed that last summer. We GA-ed with Azure, the Azure VMware service, a couple months ago. And you'll see news coming with GCP soon. And so the idea was, make it easy for customers to basically run in a hybrid model. And then if you back out and go, "What does that mean for you as a customer?", it's not saying you should go to the cloud, necessarily, or stay on-prem, or whatever. But it's giving you the flexibility to cost-optimize where you want to be. And from a data management point of view, ONTAP gives you the consistent data management, whichever way you decide to go. >> Yeah, so I've been following NetApp for decades, when you were Network Appliance, and I saw you go from kind of the workstation space into the enterprise. I saw you lean into virtualization really early on, and you've been a great VMware partner ever since. And you were early in cloud, so, sort of talking about, you know, that cross-cloud, what we call supercloud. I'm interested in what you're seeing in terms of specific actions that customers are taking. Like, I think about ELAs, and I think it's a two-edged sword. You know, should customers, you know, lean into ELAs right now? You know, what are you seeing there? You talked about, you know, sort of modernizing apps with things like Kubernetes, you know, cloud migration. What are some of the techniques that you're advising customers to take in the context of this acquisition? >> You know, so the basics of this are pretty easy. One is, and I think even Raghu, the CEO of VMware, has talked about this. Extending your ELA is probably a good idea. Like I said, customers love VMware, so having a commitment for a time, consistent cost management for a time is a good strategy. And I think that's why you're hearing ELA extensions being discussed. It's a good idea. The second part, and I think it goes to your surveys, that cost optimization point on the cloud is, moving to the cloud has huge advantages, but if you just kind of lift and shift, oftentimes the costs aren't realized the way you'd want. And the term "modernization," changing your app to use more Kubernetes, more cloud-native services, is often a consideration that goes into that. But that requires time. And you know, most companies have hundreds of apps, or thousands of apps, they have to consider modernizing. So you want to then think through the journey, what apps are going to move, what gets modernized, what gets lifted-shifted, how many data centers are you compressing? There's a lot of data center, the term I've been hearing is "data center evacuations," but data center consolidation. So that there's some even energy savings advantages sometimes with that. But the whole point, I mean, back up to my whole point, the whole point is having the infrastructure that gives you the flexibility to make the journey on your cost advantages and your business requirements. Not being forced to it. Like, it's not really a philosophy, it's more of a business optimization strategy. >> When you think about application modernization and Kubernetes, how does NetApp, you know, fit into that, as a data layer? >> Well, so if you kind of think, you said, like our journey, Dave, was, when we started our life, we were doing basically virtualization of volumes and things for technical customers. And the servers were always bare metal servers that we got involved with back then. This is, like, going back 20 years. Then everyone moved to VMs, and, like, it's probably, today, I mean, getting to your question in a second, but today, loosely, 20% bare metal servers, 80% virtual machines today. And containers is growing, now a big growing piece. So, if you will, sort of another level of virtual machines in containers. And containers were historically stateless, meaning the storage didn't have anything to do. Storage is always the stateful area in the architectures. But as containers are getting used more, stateful containers have become a big deal. So we've put a lot of emphasis into a product line we call Astra that is the world's best data management for containers. And that's both a cloud service and used on-prem in a lot of my customers. It's a big growth area. So that's what, when I say, like, one partner that can do data management, just, that's what we have to do. We have to keep moving with our customers to the type of data they want to store, and how do you store it most efficiently? Hey, one last thought on this is, where I really see this happening, there's a booming business right now in artificial intelligence, and we call it modern data analytics, but people combining big data lakes with AI, and that's where some of this, a lot of the container work comes in. We've extended objects, we have a thing we call file-object duality, to make it easy to bridge the old world of files to the new world of objects. Those all go hand in hand with app modernization. >> Yeah, it's a great thing about this industry. It never sits still. And you're right, it's- >> It's why I'm in it. >> Me too. Yeah, it's so much fun. There's always something. >> It is an abstraction layer. There's always going to be another abstraction layer. Serverless is another example. It's, you know, primarily stateless, that's probably going to, you know, change over time. All right, last question. In thinking about this Broadcom acquisition of VMware, in the macro climate, put a sort of bow on where NetApp fits into this equation. What's the value you bring in this context? >> Oh yeah, well it's like I said earlier, I think it's the data layer of, it's being the data layer that gives you what you guys call the supercloud, that gives you the ability to choose which cloud. Another thing, all customers are running at least two clouds, and you want to be able to pick and choose, and do it your way. So being the data layer, VMware is going to be in our infrastructures for at least as long as I'm in the computer business, Dave. I'm getting a little old. So maybe, you know, but "decades" I think is an easy prediction, and we plan to work with VMware very closely, along with our customers, as they extend from on-prem to hybrid cloud operations. That's where I think this will go. >> Yeah, and I think you're absolutely right. Look at the business case for migrating off of VMware. It just doesn't make sense. It works, it's world class, it recover... They've done so much amazing, you know, they used to be called, Moritz called it the software mainframe, right? And that's kind of what it is. I mean, it means it doesn't go down, right? And it supports virtually any application, you know, around the world, so. >> And I think getting back to your original point about your article, from the very beginning, is, I think Broadcom's really getting a sense of what they've bought, and it's going to be, hopefully, I think it'll be really a fun, another fun era in our business. >> Well, and you can drive EBIT a couple of ways. You can cut, okay, fine. And I'm sure there's some redundancies that they'll find. But there's also, you can drive top-line revenue. And you know, we've seen how, you know, EMC and then Dell used that growth from VMware to throw off free cash flow, and it was just, you know, funded so much, you know, innovation. So innovation is the key. Hock Tan has talked about that a lot. I think there's a perception that Broadcom, you know, doesn't invest in R & D. That's not true. I think they just get very focused with that investment. So, Phil, I really appreciate your time. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks a lot, Dave. It's fun being here. >> Yeah, our pleasure. And thank you for watching theCUBE, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>> Welcome back everyone to the closing remarks here before we kick off our ecosystem portion of the program. We're live in Palo Alto for theCUBE special presentation of Supercloud 2. It's the second edition, the first one was in August. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Here to wrap up with our special guest analyst George Gilbert, investor and industry legend former colleague of ours, analyst at Wikibon. George great to see you. Dave, you know, wrapping up this day what in a phenomenal program. We had a contribution from industry vendors, industry experts, practitioners and customers building and redefining their company's business model. Rolling out technology for Supercloud and multicloud and ultimately changing how they do data. And data was the theme today. So very, very great program. Before we jump into our favorite parts let's give a shout out to the folks who make this possible. Free contents our mission. We'll always stay true to that mission. We want to thank VMware, alkira, ChaosSearch, prosimo for being sponsors of this great program. We will have Supercloud 3 coming up in a month or so, or two months. We'll see. Or sooner, we don't know. But it'll be more about security, but a lot more momentum. Okay, so that's... >> And don't forget too that this program not going to end now. We've got a whole ecosystem speaks track so stay tuned for that. >> John: Yeah, we got another 20 interviews. Feels like it. >> Well, you're going to hear from Saks, Veronika Durgin. You're going to hear from Western Union, Harveer Singh. You're going to hear from Ionis Pharmaceuticals, Nick Taylor. Brian Gracely chimes in on Supecloud. So he's the man behind the cloud cast. >> Yeah, and you know, the practitioners again, pay attention to also to the cloud networking interviews. Lot of change going on there that's going to be disruptive and actually change the landscape as well. Again, as Supercloud progresses to be the next big thing. If you're not on this next wave, you'll drift what, as Pat Gelsinger says. >> Yep. >> To kick off the closing segments, George, Dave, this is a wave that's been identified. Again, people debate the word all you want Supercloud. It is a gateway to multicloud eventually it is the standard for new applications, new ways to do data. There's new computer science being generated and customer requirements being addressed. So it's the confluence of, you know, tectonic plates shifting in the industry, new computer science seeing things like AI and machine learning and data at the center of it and new infrastructure all kind of coming together. So, to me, that's my takeaway so far. That is the big story and it's going to change society and ultimately the business models of these companies. >> Well, we've had 10, you know, you think about it we came out of the financial crisis. We've had 10, 12 years despite the Covid of tech success, right? And just now CIOs are starting to hit the brakes. And so my point is you've had all this innovation building up for a decade and you've got this massive ecosystem that is running on the cloud and the ecosystem is saying, hey, we can have even more value by tapping best of of breed across clouds. And you've got customers saying, hey, we need help. We want to do more and we want to point our business and our intellectual property, our software tooling at our customers and monetize our data. So you have all these forces coming together and it's sort of entering a new era. >> George, I want to go to you for a second because you are big contributor to this event. Your interview with Bob Moglia with Dave was I thought a watershed moment for me to hear that the data apps, how databases are being rethought because we've been seeing a diversity of databases with Amazon Web services, you know, promoting no one database rules of the world. Now it's not one database kind of architecture that's puling these new apps. What's your takeaway from this event? >> So if you keep your eye on this North Star where instead of building apps that are based on code you're building apps that are defined by data coming off of things that are linked to the real world like people, places, things and activities. Then the idea is, and the example we use is, you know, Uber but it could be, you know, amazon.com is defined by stuff coming off data in the Amazon ecosystem or marketplace. And then the question is, and everyone was talking at different angles on this, which was, where's the data live? How much do you hide from the developer? You know, and when can you offer that? You know, and you started with Walmart which was describing apps, traditional apps that are just code. And frankly that's easier to make that cross cloud and you know, essentially location independent. As soon as you have data you need data management technology that a customer does not have the sophistication to build. And then the argument was like, so how much can you hide from the developer who's building data apps? Tristan's version was you take the modern data stack and you start adding these APIs that define business concepts like bookings, billings and revenue, you know, or in the Uber example like drivers and riders, you know, and ETA's and prices. But those things execute still on the data warehouse or data lakehouse. Then Bob Muglia was saying you're not really hiding enough from the developer because you still got to say how to do all that. And his vision is not only do you hide where the data is but you hide how to sort of get at all that code by just saying what you want. You define how a car and how a driver and how a rider works. And then those things automatically figure out underneath the cover. >> So huge challenges, right? There's governance, there's security, they could be big blockers to, you know, the Supercloud but the industry's going to be attacking that problem. >> Well, what's your take? What's your favorite segment? Zhamak Dehghani came on, she's starting in that company, exclusive news. That was big notable moment for theCUBE. She launched her company. She pioneered the data mesh concept. And I think what George is saying and what data mesh points to is something that we've been saying for a long time. That data is now going to flip the script on how apps behave. And the Uber example I think is illustrated 'cause people can relate to Uber. But imagine that for every business whether it's a manufacturing business or retail or oil and gas or FinTech, they can look at their business like a game almost gamify it with data, riders, cars you know, moving data around the value of data. This is something that Adam Selipsky teased out at AWS, Dave. So what's your takeaway from this Supercloud? Where are we in your mind? Well big thing is data products and decentralizing your data architecture, but putting data in the hands of domain experts who can actually monetize the data. And I think that's, to me that's really exciting. Because look, data products financial industry has always been doing building data products. Mortgage backed securities is a data product. But why should the financial industry have all the fun? I mean virtually every organization can tap its ecosystem build data products, take its internal IP and processes and software and point it to the world and actually begin to make money out of it. >> Okay, so let's go around the horn. I'll start, I'll get you guys some time to think. Next question, what did you learn today? I learned that I think it's an infrastructure game and talking to Kit Colbert at VMware, I think it's all about infrastructure refactoring and I think the data's going to be an ingredient that's going to be operating system like. I think you're going to see the infrastructure influencing operations that will enable Superclouds to be real. And developers won't even know what a Supercloud is because they'll be using it. It's the operations focus is going to be very critical. Just like DevOps movements started Cloud native I think you're going to see a data native movement and I think infrastructure is critical as people go to the next level. That's my big takeaway today. And I'll say the data conversation is at the center. I think security, data are going to be always active horizontally scalable concepts, but every company's going to reset their infrastructure, how it looks and if it's not set up for data and or things that there need to be agile on, it's going to be a non-starter. So I think that's the cloud NextGen, distributed computing. >> I mean, what came into focus for me was I think the hyperscaler is going to continue to do their thing, you know, and be very, very successful and they're each coming at it from different approaches. We talk about this all the time in theCUBE. Amazon the best infrastructure, you know, Google's got its you know, data and AI thing and it's playing catch up and Microsoft's got this massive estate. Okay, cool. Check. The next wave of innovation which is coming from data, I've always said follow the data. That's where the where the money's going to be is going to come from other places. People want to be able to, organizations want to be able to share data across clouds across their organization, outside of their ecosystem and make money with that data sharing. They don't want to FTP it anymore. I got it. You take it. They want to work with live data in real time and I think the edge, we didn't talk much about the edge today is going to even take that to a new level real time inferencing at the edge, AI and and being able to do new things with data that we haven't even seen. But playing around with ChatGPT, it's blowing our mind. And I think you're right, it's like when we first saw the browser, holy crap, this is going to change the world. >> Yeah. And the ChatGPT by the way is going to create a wave of machine learning and data refactoring for sure. But also Howie Liu had an interesting comment, he was asked by a VC how much to replicate that and he said it's in the hundreds of millions, not billions. Now if you asked that same question how much does it cost to replicate AWS? The CapEx alone is unstoppable, they're already done. So, you know, the hyperscalers are going to continue to boom. I think they're going to drive the infrastructure. I think Amazon's going to be really strong at silicon and physics and squeeze every ounce atom out of every physical thing and then get latency as your bottleneck and the rest is all going to be... >> That never blew me away, a hundred million to create kind of an open AI, you know, competitor. Look at companies like Lacework. >> John: Some people have that much cash on the balance sheet. >> These are security companies that have raised a billion dollars, right? To compete. You know, so... >> If you're not shifting left what do you do with data, shift up? >> But, you know. >> What did you learn, George? >> I'm listening to you and I think you're helping me crystallize something which is the software infrastructure to enable the data apps is wide open. The way Zhamak described it is like if you want a data product like a sales and operation plan, that is built on other data products, like a sales plan which has a forecast in it, it has a production plan, it has a procurement plan and then a sales and operation plan is actually a composition of all those and they call each other. Now in her current platform, you need to expose to the developer a certain amount of mechanics on how to move all that data, when to move it. Like what happens if something fails. Now Muglia is saying I can hide that completely. So all you have to say is what you want and the underlying machinery takes care of everything. The problem is Muglia stuff is still a few years off. And Tristan is saying, I can give you much of that today but it's got to run in the data warehouse. So this trade offs all different ways. But again, I agree with you that the Cloud platform vendors or the ecosystem participants who can run across Cloud platforms and private infrastructure will be the next platform. And then the cloud platform is sort of where you run the big honking centralized stuff where someone else manages the operations. >> Sounds like middleware to me, Dave >> And key is, I'll just end with this. The key is being able to get to the data, whether it's in a data warehouse or a data lake or a S3 bucket or an object store, Oracle database, whatever. It's got to be inclusive that is critical to execute on the vision that you just talked about 'cause that data's in different systems and you're not going to put it all into some new system. >> So creating middleware in the cloud that sounds what it sounds like to me. >> It's like, you discovered PaaS >> It's a super PaaS. >> But it's platform services 'cause PaaS connotes like a tightly integrated platform. >> Well this is the real thing that's going on. We're going to see how this evolves. George, great to have you on, Dave. Thanks for the summary. I enjoyed this segment a lot today. This ends our stage performance live here in Palo Alto. As you know, we're live stage performance and syndicate out virtually. Our afternoon program's going to kick in now you're going to hear some great interviews. We got ChaosSearch. Defining the network Supercloud from prosimo. Future of Cloud Network, alkira. We got Saks, a retail company here, Veronika Durgin. We got Dave with Western Union. So a lot of customers, a pharmaceutical company Warner Brothers, Discovery, media company. And then you know, what is really needed for Supercloud, good panels. So stay with us for the afternoon program. That's part two of Supercloud 2. This is a wrap up for our stage live performance. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante and George Gilbert here wrapping up. Thanks for watching and enjoy the program. (bright music)

the cube presents ignite 22. brought to you by Palo Alto Networks hey guys and girls welcome back to Las Vegas it's thecube we are live at Palo Alto networks ignite 22. this is day one of two days of cube coverage Lisa Martin here with Dave vellante Dave we've had great conversations today talking with Executives the partner ecosystem is evolving it's growing at Palo Alto networks going to be digging into that next well we heard a lot of talk about you know Palo Alto you know the goal 100 billion dollar you know market cap company and to me a way and I think a critical way in which you get there is partner with the ecosystem because you can't do it alone the power of many versus the resources of one agree completely agree we've got Carl Sutherland with us SVP of North America ecosystem sales at Palo Alto networks welcome to the cube thanks so much for having me it's great being here so here we are the first full day of the conference actually started yesterday with the partner Summit give the audience a flavor of the partner Summit who was there what was talked about what's the current voice of the partner these days yeah great questions so we had a 150 Partners from around the globe representing all of our different routes to Market and for us our partner Community is expanding we work with system integrators we work with gsis we work with service providers Distributors traditional value-added resellers so it was a whole host of partners that were there it was a c-level audience and we really talked about the direction of where we're going as a company how they can continue to invest with us and have greater success long term and so from a voice of the partner standpoint what they're here to do is share with us where they want to engage more how we can enable them to be successful you talked about the Power of One Versus a community we're really looking at a segment of the marketplace right now for us to scale and hit our aspirational goals we can't do it with Palo Alto Network employees we have an employee base of 12 000 people if you take our ecosystem it's over a hundred thousand employees so if we can get them aligned and selling and motivated it's going to be a good day for all of us what so what are they telling you where do they want to spend their time where do they want to add value where are they winning yeah that's a great question so there's a transformation that's going on right now in the partner Community what's happening is a lot of Partners going that are transitioning from what would be traditional transactional Partners or resale Partners to being services-led and the Market's driving them there and what I mean by that is that customers are in a desperate dire State needing assistance figuring out and solving these very complex security problems so if there is a subset of Partners out there that have the skill set and capabilities that can come in from a consultative standpoint help them to develop the structure through deployment a full-blown management and do life cycle management that's a tremendous value I mean the numbers you hear thrown around in the industry right now is up to seven million uh security I.T jobs right now that are out there the open head count is tremendous people can't hire people fast enough all of us in the industry are going through and trying to find early in career or college graduates so we can train quickly or cross-train from other segments to get them into cyber security so if our part of the community can continue to get skilled and expand it's only going to help and the cloud is obviously where does the cloud fit in Carl because you know a lot of the partners when the clouds really start on the Steep part of the s-curve are like we have an opportunity here and by the way if we don't transition our business we could get commoditized yes so that you know that but you were talking about the transactional we can help people move to the cloud and a big part of that has got to be we can secure them in the cloud because it's a more in a lot of ways you know Cloud security is great but in a lot of ways it adds complexity what are you hearing from the party yeah so we are fortunate at Palo Alto networks when you look across the three loud largest cloud service provider from a Google AWS and Microsoft Azure we're either their number one isv or absolutely their number one security ISP so we've got a great uh relationships with them now our partners are coming along and saying how do we transact how do we add value a lot of times that value to your question is wrapping services around it to make sure it's a successful deployment because exactly what you stated the complexity is an all-time high so how do we make sure that we can solve a complex problem in a short term while increasing their security posture and that's really the goal and so where there there's sometimes complexity and mystery there's opportunity and partners can be profitable in doing that I wrote a piece once chaos is cash I have a security you know the criminals and vendors as well yes yes where there is is challenge and complexity there is great opportunity yeah talk about some of the partner program Evolution and some of the things that were announced with respect to the next wave program just yesterday yeah so at next wave um the program's been around for 12 years we constantly are looking to make enhancements and how we make those enhancements are by going out and speaking with these partners and listening to what they need so I have the honor to get to represent what their needs are and how we bring it to market for them so a couple interesting announcements that we made yesterday first of all we announced a new structural format for the program which is really going to allow our different route to markets to have a program that's fit for them because in the past when we were just traditionally a firewall company when the ecosystem just meant resale it was an easy model to have it's complex right now sometimes it's resale sometimes it's influence sometimes its services only we really need to be flexible and credible so we announced a Services only path so if you are a consulting company if you are a insurance company and you want to bring opportunities and leads to Palo Alto Network and you want to provide the services if you're not interested in the transaction you don't want to get involved in that we now have a pathway for you to support you to enable you and Kennedy to give you recognition within Palo Alto networks from an alignment standpoint so we're super excited about that uh as I know you guys speak quite a bit about the managed Services industry so it's a red hot area within Palo Alto networks one of the needs out there was that all not all managed Service Partners are created equally and so some have fantastic capabilities some have gaps we were calling it a P2P part of the partner program within managed services so our two managed Services Partners can actually work together to solve the problem that the end user has and give them a better outcome and fill each other's gaps so candidly it's been going on for a while the partnering but we've never really recognized it so we really built a program around it and now are sponsoring and supporting it versus people doing it on a sidebar so those guys were here in force yesterday yes sir right and and so obviously a lot of energy I'm sure do you see a day where they're here in force on the show floor yeah and and how do you see that evolving so they are here enforcement just right here you see a few of them I'm looking at AWS who's our you know we are their largest isv I'm looking at CDW we had them on the floor is our if not largest second largest partner globally right now and continuing to grow at a rate well they will probably be our first billion dollar partner to think about the size and scale of that relationship and where we've come from um their name CDW don't they never really thought of CDW right as a as a security firm wow what a transformation but please carry on and think about that let's talk about CDW saying think about reach that CDW has it's a 23 billion dollar organization and in a way an inside out sales model meaning there's a tremendous reach they have from their inside sales team and the relationships that they have traditionally historically they were procurement relationships in a way and I said this to the CDW team they were the easy button in the past now what they're doing is they made Seven Acquisitions over the last two years all of them Services oriented so now they're coming in as a consultative Viewpoint and solving a lot of complex problems and I see Google Cloud right here another great partner for us that we continue to invest in we have a great amount of integration and Technology integration with them and so and those are the three that I'm seeing just looking over my left shoulder right if I turn around I'll probably name five more so the majority of this room are the partners that fall within our ecosystem today fantastic so okay so what's your vision for where you want to take this ecosystem because as I said at the top I mean ecosystems are sort of the Hallmark of a I guess you're not a cloud company see I think you of you as a cloud company and so okay good so and I know you don't own your own public cloud and you know your history is you had your own data centers but yeah but you're the security Cloud yeah and so a security Cloud any Cloud needs a great ecosystem so what's your vision for the ecosystem let's go you know five plus years out sure you we start with the end in mind and what I mean by that is we always start with the end user what's the end user's needs the end user today needs flexibility with how they consume the technology they need help in how they support and deploy the technology they need guidance in how they plan out for their future and what their growth is so what we're doing is building a very diverse set of Partners in our ecosystem that all have special skills that they bring to the table so when nikesh sits up here and talks about being a 10 billion or a 20 billion or a 50 billion dollar company we absolutely cannot do it without our ecosystem and without having a very diverse ecosystem that all has different skills that can help us scale because again Palo Alto does not want to be a services company right let's work with the people who are the best at that when we think about the deloittees and accentures and the value they have within the end user base and our joint customer base what a fantastic time to to partner together and solve those boardroom challenges and that's where I really see the vision is that at the boardroom we're building out a plan that's three to five years that's going to continue to increase their security posture because we're not thinking if we're not forward thinking like that will be left behind because the Bad actors are thinking about how they find the different areas to penetrate they're getting so sophisticated the badocracy adversaries they are well funded they're motivated Grant the ransomware attack numbers in terms of the Velocity the complexity yes no longer are we going to get if it's when yeah uh big challenge for organizations Acro across I mean really across an organization regardless of Industry are you guys having any conversations with boards in the partner organization to help align the board with the executive level and really not just have security as a board level initiative but actually being able to execute a strategy yeah and you you nailed it it's not an initiative the initiative to me means there's a beginning and an end right a strategy means there's going to be a comprehensive approach how you continue to improve and we are very fortunate that a lot of our largest Partners around the globe have that position within the boards where they are the trusted advisor so what we're doing now is enabling them and giving them the skills so they can have a more comprehensive conversation around our platform approach around the challenges you know BJ I knew who was with you earlier today likes to say that the average customer he goes and sees has 50 to 70 disparate Technologies within their environment how do you manage that how do you maintain it how do you do renewals oh and by the way most likely the people who actually initially procured that aren't with you anymore they're in a different company so the need for a platform approach is there more so than ever but the decision for the platform quite often has to come from the most senior levels within the organization because again I'm going to go back to your what was your chaos line that you said chaos is Cash chaos is Cash well also chaos is job security so if you're at at the lower level within an organization that chaos and that magic gives you a little job security but that's a short term long term you really need to think about how you're protecting the environment holistically so it is a boardroom decision down that we need to have and you know that chaos the the motivation for that piece that I wrote was from the criminals standpoint right and then I was like okay but there's great opportunities for the technology industry but but I think that you know where we're headed I wonder if I get your thoughts on thoughts on this Carlos we always talk about the Board Room I think we're going now Beyond it here I am you know I'm hypersensitive about my security I got password managers two-factor authentication I don't want SMS based two-factor authentication I want my own authenticator and that's still not enough yeah I got air gaps yeah you know for my crypto you know and I'm super paranoid my point is I think the the individuals are getting much more Savvy about security why because we've all been hacked you know it's like when you lost your data in the because you weren't backed up you know that never happens anymore it's in the cloud or you know some people have multiple backups so it's it's becoming a cultural Trend beyond the board and it's because of the board lord said hey this is really important and so I think it's not only top down I think you're going to see bottom up and middle out and the exciting part for Palo Alto networks is and maybe for you as well is there any more exciting environment to talk about that's rapidly changing and constantly changing you could come back next week and our conversation is going to change as far as what we're doing we constantly need to be thinking three steps ahead of where we're going to move and be flexible and dynamic enough to change and that's what's going to keep us ahead of the economy yeah there's no segment as Dynamic I mean data is dynamic but not as fast changing as cyber I mean because of the adversary as you mentioned I mean so smart so now now they have open adversary ecosystems I mean the adversaries are building ecosystems right absolutely insane I've got peers that are bad guys yeah right right chaos is Cash what's your favorite partner story that you think really demonstrates the value of the ecosystem that Palo Alto networks has built yeah so without sharing names I'll talk about a large U.S national partner that was very uh that was founded on a networking business and partnered with a very large networking company and built that business and was successful doing that they wanted to Pivot into the security space and very early on they made a commitment to Paulo and Ulta networks to say we're going to learn we're going to invest we're going to align with your sales force and we're going to work together and right now they are our largest partner globally and they grew 70 year over year wow so think about that this is not on a small base we're talking about a half a billion dollars in Revenue growing at 70 year over year because to your point earlier it wasn't an initiative it was a strategy and they're executing on the strategy so I tell a lot of we call War Stories like that to other partners that are looking to invest from different markets it could be a large service provider that's you know trying to transform themselves into a security player and talk about the potential of what it could be in for their Marketplace and by the way I say publicly quite often Palo Alto networks will be your most profitable relationship that you have because of the total addressable Market that we're going after because of the solutions that we bring to Market and because of the opportunity within the end users right now and we're excited I want to come back to the mssp in that in its context so we've seen the rise of the mssp and particularly you know we were talking earlier I think it was with Wendy that uh no it was with CDW like 50 of the organizations in North America don't even have a sock yeah right so they need a service provider to come out so you said we you don't want to be in the services business right you're a product company right and that's from a financial standpoint that's phenomenal you're roughly 50 billion dollar market cap company let's let's call it six billion in Revenue so that's a nice Revenue multiple 8X you know and and and the Market's down so you're a 10x Revenue multiple company typically services companies are a 1x or a 2X are you seeing a change there where technology is giving these service providers operating leverage where they're able to scale whether it's because of the cloud because of the Partnerships the Eco would you call it before the the peer-to-peer ecosystem yes like the Gap fillers yes are you do you see the economics of services changing yeah from a baseline economic standpoint not looking at the valuations but let's look at it from a an opportunity to be profitable with Palo Alto networks we know if you are just doing the transaction you have a certain range of margin that you're going to make in the opportunity we know if you wrap services around it you're going to get 3x to 4X that margin we know that if it's managed services and there's life cycle management you're talking 5x to 8X that initial transaction and by the way it's recurring revenue for them so when you think about it if you just do a transaction you're only recurring revenue is a renewal that's predictable but it's not extremely profitable now we're saying the operating leverage you get is if you wrap that services and you're going to have an increased opportunity for a greater margin and it's sticky it's hard to replace a partner who's adding value to your team and A lot of times you walk in the end user you can't tell who the partner is and who the end user is because they are one team that's value yes and that's going to drive ebit yep for your partners and that's going to drive valuation you know you know I want to come back to valuation not that I'm not you can do that okay but because I was I predicted I do my prediction post every year and I predicted last year that we're going to see you know a Spate of MSS mssps I predicted you're going to see someone go public nobody's going public these days but I still think it's a great business yeah that's an untapped opportunity it's not an 8X or it's not a software marginal economics or but it's really sticky super high value yeah and I think it has you know long-term potential yeah to your point if you want to talk valuations for a second let's look at what's happened to the marketplace over the last 12 to 18 months the large majority of the non-public partners that we work with have taken on Capital from private Equity the private Equity that has come in has challenged them to go through a transformation that transformation is you we need you to be Services LED and that service is value because they believe there's going to is going to be a great greater evaluation from that end and they'll be able to scale and grow and stay ahead of the market doing that so when we have conversations when I have conversations yes I'm talking about the technology and the direction of the company but I'm also in there as a consultant saying where's the direction of your company and how do we have this great platform and how do we build it into your business and you wrap services around it and those are the conversations that CEOs want to have when I'm sitting down with our partner CEOs I bet they don't want to talk about our product being better than someone else's product they want to talk about the direction and health of their business yeah it's their business that's a business discussion business decision and they're thinking about okay what's my five-year strategic plan because they got to make bets yeah they're going to bet on a platform that they can add value to that creates that flywheel effect and they get a bet on your ecosystem as well correct oh correct absolutely good to be the leader it's good to be a leader and you know I'm sure as you've heard a few times we believe that economic headwinds are going to favor the market leaders and economic headwinds are going to favor the platform approach so we're going in more aggressive with our partner Community than ever before and there's just so much energy and excitement I feel like I keep on using that term over and over again but that's really what we walk away with last question for you is we have about 30 seconds left a lot of momentum in the partner ecosystem as you've described eloquently what's next what's next what's next yeah so when I I rolled out the strategy for what's next and what it is is a foundational platform that is going to allow flexibility for the partners and for them to decide where they want to invest and it can be in new areas it can be I went online closer with the cloud service providers it could be I want to build a managed Services business can you help us do this it could be I want to go through and I want to drive greater penetration into geographical areas we haven't been before so again we're almost acting as a consultant looking at what they're going from the direction and building a program and a platform where we can grow and work with them it's exciting it's fun it's great highly collaborative highly collaborative highly collaborative thank you for joining us on the program on the partner program the ecosystem Better Together what you guys are doing and ultimately how it benefits the end user customer we really appreciate your insights excellent thank you thank you so much appreciate it all right our pleasure for our guests and Dave vellante I'm Lisa Martin you're watching the cube the leader in live Enterprise and emerging Tech coverage [Music]

>> Narrator: TheCUBE presents Ignite '22, brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. >> Greetings from the MGM Grand Hotel in beautiful Las Vegas. It's theCUBE Live Day two of our coverage of Palo Alto Networks, ignite 22. Lisa Martin, Dave Vellante. Dave, what can I say? This has been a great couple of days. The amount of content we have created and shared with our viewers on theCUBE is second to none. >> Well, the cloud has completely changed the way that people think about security. >> Yeah. You know at first it was like, oh, the cloud, how can that be secure? And they realized, wow actually cloud is pretty secure if we do it right. And so shared responsibility model and partnerships are critical. >> Partnerships are critical, especially as more and more organizations are multicloud by default. Right? These days we're going to be bring Google into the conversation. Josh Haslet joins us. Strategic Partnership Manager at Google. Welcome. Great to have you Josh. >> Hi Lisa, thanks for having me here. >> So you are a secret squirrel from Palo Alto Networks. Talk to me a little bit about your background and about your role at Google in terms of partnership management. >> Sure, I feel like we need to add that to my title. [Lisa] You should, secret squirrel. >> Great. Yeah, so as a matter of fact, I've been at Google for two and a half years. Prior to that, I was at Palo Alto Networks. I was managing the business development relationship with Google, and I was kind of at the inception of when the cash came in and, and decided that we needed to think about how to do security in a new way from a platform standpoint, right? And so it was exciting because when I started with the partnership, we were focusing on still securing you know, workloads in the cloud with next generation firewall. And then as we went through acquisitions the Palo Alto added it expanded the capabilities of what we could do from cloud security. And so it was very exciting, you know, to, to make sure that we could onboard with Google Cloud, take a look at how not only Palo Alto was enhancing their solutions as they built those and delivered those from Google Cloud. But then how did we help customers adopt cloud in a more easy fashion by making things, you know more tightly integrated? And so that's really been a lot of what I've been involved in, which has been exciting to see the growth of both organizations as we see customers shifting to cloud transformation. And then how do they deploy these new methodologies and tools from a security perspective to embrace this new way of working and this new way of, you know creating applications and doing digital transformation. >> Important, since work is no longer a place, it's an activity. Organizations have have to be able to cater to the distributed workforce. Of course, the, the, the workforce has to be able to access everything that they need to, but it has to be done in a secure way regardless of what kind of company you are. >> Yeah, you're right, Lisa. It's interesting. I mean, the pandemic has really changed and accelerated that transformation. I think, you know really remote working has started previous to that. And I think Nikesh called that out in the keynote too right? He, he really said that this has been ongoing for a while, but I think, you know organizations had to figure out how to scale and that was something that they weren't as prepared for. And a lot of the technology that was deployed for VPN connectivity or supporting remote work that was fixed hardware. And so cloud deployment and cloud architecture specifically with Prisma access really enabled this transformation to happen in a much faster, you know, manner. And where we've come together is how do we make sure that customers, no matter what device, what user what application you're accessing. As we take a look at ZTNA, Zero Trust Network Access 2.0, how can we come together to partner to make sure the customers have that wide range of coverage and capability? >> How, how do you how would you describe Josh Google's partner strategy generally and specifically, you know, in the world of cyber and what makes it unique and different? >> Yeah, so that's a great question. I think, you know, from Google Cloud perspective we heard TK mention this in the keynote with Nikesh. You know, we focus on on building a secure platform first and foremost, right? We want to be a trusted cloud for customers to deploy on. And so, you know, we find that as customers do one of two things, they're looking at, you know, reducing cost as they move to cloud and consolidate workloads or as they embrace innovation and look at, you know leveraging things like BigQuery for analytics and you know machine learning for the way that they want to innovate and stay ahead of the competition. They have to think about how do they secure in a new way. And so, not only do we work on how do we secure our own platform, we work with trusted partners to make sure that customers have you mentioned it earlier, Dave the shared security model, right? How do they take a look at their applications and their workloads and this new way of working as they go to CI/CD pipelines, they start thinking about DevSecOps. How do they integrate tooling that is frictionless and seamless for their, for their teams to deploy but allows them to quickly embrace that cloud transformation journey. And so, yes, partners are critical to that. The other thing is, you know we find that, you mentioned earlier, Lisa that customers are multicloud, right? That's kind of the the new normal as we look at enterprises today. And so Google Cloud's going to do a great job at securing our platform, but we need partners that can help customers deploy policy that embraces not only the things that they put in Google Cloud but as they're in their transformation journey. How that embraces the estates that are in data centers the things that are still on-prem. And really this is about making sure that the applications no matter where they are, the databases no matter where they are, and the users no matter where they are are all secure in that new framework of deploying and embracing innovation on public cloud. >> One of the things that almost everybody from Palo Alto Networks talks about is their partnering strategy their acquisition strategy integrations. And I was doing some research. There's over 50 joint integrations that Google Cloud and Palo Alto Networks. Have you talked about Zero Trust Network Access 2.0 that was announced yesterday. >> Correct. >> Give us a flavor of what that is and what does it deliver that 1.0 did not? >> Well, great. And what I'd like to do is touch a little bit on those 50 integrations because it's been, you know, a a building rolling thunder, shall we say as far as how have we taken a look at customers embracing the cloud. The first thing was we took a look at at how do we make sure that Palo Alto solutions are easier for customers to deploy and to orchestrate in Google Cloud making their journey to embracing cloud seamless and easy. The second thing was how could we make that deployment and the infrastructure even more easy to adopt by doing first party integrations? So earlier this year we announced cloud IDS intrusion detection system where we actually have first party directly in our console of customers being able to simply select, they want to turn on inspection of the traffic that's running on Google Cloud and it leverages the threat detection capability from Palo Alto Networks. So we've gone from third party integration alone to first party integration. And that really takes us to, you know, the direction of what we're seeing customers need to embrace now which is, this is your Zero Trusts strategy and Zero Trust 2.0 helps customers do a number of things. The first is, you know, we don't want to just verify a user and their access into the environment once. It needs to be continuous inspection, right? Cause their state could change. I think, you know, the, the teams we're talking about some really good ways of addressing, you know for instance, TSA checkpoints, right? And how does that experience look? We need to make sure that we're constantly evaluating that user's access into the environment and then we need to make sure that the content that's being accessed or, you know, loaded into the environment is inspected. So we need continuous content inspection. And that's where our partnership really comes together very well, is not only can we take care of any app any device, any user, and especially as we take a look at you know, embracing contractor like use cases for instance where we have managed devices and unmanaged devices we bring together beyond Corp and Prisma access to take a look at how can we make sure any device, any user any application is secure throughout. And then we've got content inspection of how that ZTNA 2.0 experience looks like. >> Josh, that threat data that you just talked about. >> Yeah. >> Who has access to that? Is it available to any partner, any customer, how... it seems like there's gold in them, NAR hills, so. >> There is. But, this could be gold going both ways. So how, how do you adjudicate and, how do you make sure that first of all that that data's accessible for, for good and not in how do you protect it against, you know, wrong use? >> Well, this is one of the great things about partnering with Palo Alto because technically the the threat intelligence is coming from their ingestion of malware, known threats, and unknown threats right into their technology. Wildfire, for instance, is a tremendous example of this where unit 42 does, you know, analysis on unknown threats based upon what Nikesh said on stage. They've taken their I think he said 27 days to identification and remediation down to less than a minute, right? So they've been able to take the intelligence of what they ingest from all of their existing customers the unknown vulnerabilities that are identified quickly assessing what those look like, and then pushing out information to the rest of their customers so that they can remediate and protect against those threats. So we get this shared intelligence from the way that Palo Alto leverages that capability and we've brought that natively into Google Cloud with cloud intrusion detection. >> So, okay, so I'm, I'm I dunno why I have high frequency trading in my mind cause it used to be, you know, like the norm was, oh it's going to take a year to identify an intrusion. And, and, and now it's down to, you know take was down to 27 days. Now it's down to a minute. Now it's not. That's best practice. And I'm, again, I'm thinking high frequency trading how do I beat the speed of light? And that's kind of where we're headed, right? >> Right. >> And so that's why he said one minute's not enough. We have to keep going. >> That's right. >> So guys got your best people working on that? >> Well, as a matter of fact, so Palo Alto Networks, you know when we take a look at what Nikesh said from stage, he talked about using machine learning and AI to get ahead of what we what they look at as far as predictability not only about behaviors in the environment so things that are not necessarily known threats but things that aren't behaving properly in the environment. And you can start to detect based on that. The second piece of it then is a lot of that technology is built on Google Cloud. So we're leveraging, their leveraging the capabilities that come together with you know, aggregation of, of logs the file stitching across the entire environment from the endpoint through to cloud operations the things that they detect for network content inspection putting all those files together to understand, you know where has the threat vector entered how has it gone lateral inside the environment? And then how do you make sure that you remediate all of those points of intrusion. And so yeah it's been exciting to see how our product teams have worked together to continue to advance the capabilities for speed for customers. >> And secure speed is critical. We had the opportunity this morning to speak with Lee Claridge, the chief product officer, and you know one of the things that I had heard about Lee is that despite all of the challenges in cybersecurity and the amorphous expansion of the threat network and the sophistication of the adversaries he's really optimistic about what it's going to enable organizations to do. I see you smiling. Do you share that optimism? >> I, I do. I think, you know, when you bring, when you bring leaders together to tackle big problems, I think, you know we've got the right teams working on the right things and we understand the problems that the customers are facing. And so, you know, from a a Google cloud perspective we understand that partnering with Palo Alto Networks helps to make sure that that optimism continues. You know, we work on continuous innovation when it comes to Google Cloud security framework, but then partnering with Palo Alto brings additional capabilities to the table. >> Vision for the, for the partnership. Where do you want to see it go? What's... we're two to five years down the road, what's it look like? Maybe two to three years. Let's go. >> Well, it was interesting. I, I think neer was the one that mentioned on stage about, you know how AI is going to start replacing us in our main jobs, right? I I think there's a lot of truth to that. I think as we look forward, we see that our teams are going to continue to help with automation remediation and we're going to have the humans working on things that are more interesting and important. And so that's an exciting place to go because today the reality is that we are understaffed in cybersecurity across the industry and we just can't hire enough people to make sure that we can detect, remediate and secure, you know every user endpoint and environment out there. So it's exciting to see that we've got a capability to move in a direction to where we can make sure that we get ahead of the threat actors. >> Yeah. So he said within five years your SOC will be AI based and and basically he elaborated saying there's a lot of stuff that you're doing today that you're not going to be doing tomorrow. >> That's true. >> And that's going to continue to be a moving target I would think Google is probably ahead in that game and ahead of most, right? I mean, you guys were there early. I mean, I remember when Hadoop was all the rage like just at the beginning you guys like, yeah, you know Google's like, no, no, no, we're not doing Hadoop anymore. That's like old news. So you tended to be, I don't know, at least five maybe seven years ahead of the industry. So I imagine you using a lot of those AI techniques in your own business today. >> Absolutely. I mean, I think you see it in our consumer products, and you certainly see it in the the capabilities we make available to enterprise as far as how they can innovate on our cloud. And we want to make sure that we continue to provide those capabilities, you know not only for the tools that we build but the tools that customers use. >> What's the, as we kind of get towards the end of our conversation here, we we talk about zero trust as, as a journey, as an approach. It's not a product, it's not a tool. What is the, who's involved in the zero trust journey from the customers perspective? Is this solely with the CSO, CSO, CIOs or is this at the CEO level going, we have to be a data company but we have to be a secure data company 24/7. >> It's interesting as you've seen malware, phishing, ransomware attacks. >> Yeah. >> This is not only just a CSO CIO conversation it's a board level conversation. And so, you know the way to address this new way of working where we have very distributed environments where you can't create a perimeter anymore. You need to strategize with zero trust. And so continuously, when we're talking to customers we're hearing that as a main initiative, you know from the CIO's office and from the board level. >> Got it, last question. The upgrade path for existing customers from 1., ZTNA 1.0 to 2.0. How simple is that? >> It's easy. You know, when we take- >> Is there an easy button? >> So here's the great thing [Dave] If you're feeling lucky. [Lisa] Yeah. (group laughs) >> Well, Palo Alto, right? Billing prisma access has really taken what was traditional security that was an on-prem or a data center deployed strategy to cloud-based. And so we've worked with customers like Princeton University who had to quickly transition from in-person learning to distance learning find a way to ramp their staff their faculty and their students. And we were able to, you know Palo Alto deploy it on Google Cloud's, you know network that solution in very quick order and had those, you know, everybody back up and running. So deployment and upgrade path is, is simple when you look at cloud deployed architectures to address zero trusts network. >> That's awesome. Some of those, some of those use cases that came out of the pandemic were mind blowing but also really set the table for other organizations to go, yes, this can be done. And it doesn't have to take forever because frankly where security is concerned, we don't have time. >> That's right. And it's so much faster than traditional architectures where you had to procure hardware. >> Yeah. >> Deploy it, configure it, and then, you know push agents out to all the endpoints and and get your users provisioned. In this case, we're talking about cloud delivered, right? So I've seen, you know, with Palo Alto deploying for customers that run on Google Cloud they've deployed tens of thousands of users in a very short order. You know, we're talking It was, it's not months anymore. It's not weeks anymore. It's days >> Has to be days. Josh, it's been such a pleasure having you on the program. Thank you for stopping by and talking with Dave and me about Google Cloud, Palo Alto Networks in in addition to secret squirrel. I feel like when you were describing your background that you're like the love child of Palo Alto Networks and Google Cloud, you might put that on your cartoon. >> That is a huge compliment. I really appreciate that, Lisa, thank you so much. >> Thanks so much, Josh. [Josh] It's been a pleasure being here with you. [Dave] Thank you >> Oh, likewise. For Josh Haslett and Dave, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live coverage for emerging and enterprise tech. (upbeat outro music)

>>The Cube presents Ignite 22, brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. >>Welcome back everyone. Happy afternoon. It's Lisa Martin and Dave Valante of the Cube. We are live at MGM Grand. This is Palo Alto Ignite 22, our second day of coverage. Dave, we've had some amazing conversations, as we always do on the queue, but cybersecurity one of my favorite topics. So interesting to hear what Palo Alto Networks is doing, how it's differentiating itself and how it's ecosystem is >>Growing. Yeah, well one of the things I always, I often use ServiceNow as a reference example. I go back to 2013, had a kind of a tiny ecosystem and then sort of watched it grow. And one of those key signs was when the global system integrators actually began to lean in Accenture, obviously world class, one of the, you know, definitely in the top, you know, they talk about top five QBs, Accenture, you know, top five GSI easily. >>Yep. So, and in fact, Accenture, we've got Rex Stex in here, senior managing director at Accenture Security. You guys have been the GSI partner of the year for Palo Alto Networks for four years in a row, six years plus strong partnership. Give us a little flavor and history of the pan of the Palo Alto partnership with et cetera. >>I think, you know, we started early, right? And I think as they've evolved, we've evolved our partnership with them and as they've gone, you know, to more of a software footprint with, you know, around cloud security and network security and sassy, we've, we've seen a lot of growth and we're super excited about the opportunity that's ahead of us and the meaningful outcomes that we've been providing our clients as it relates to, you know, vendor consolidation, toll consolidation, tech debt reduction. You know, there's a lot of opportunity here to simplify our clients' lives with them. And that's something we're super excited about. >>Simplification, consolidation, been a theme of the last couple of days. Talk about some of the joint accomplishments that you guys have achieved. I know that you developed a lot of offers across all of Palo Alto Network's, GTMs, what are some of the highlights that come to mind? I >>Think one of the things that we're most excited about, you know, that being client specific is what we've been able to do on, on, on the network side with sasi and, and zero trust, network access. You know, as when Covid hit, there was a lot of change that happened with remote workforce and, you know, clients couldn't log in because their VPNs were crashing left and right. And so we were able to, you know, go in and help stand up, you know, this, you know, zero trust network infrastructure and help our clients get back online and get their employees back to work in a productive manner. And then it's evolved with the hybrid work model over time. And so it's, it's been a, that's probably the most gratifying cause there was a real crisis at, at a certain point in time, you know, a couple years ago were >>There Rex, were there unintended consequences of that, you know, rapid, we were forced, you know, the forced march to digital in terms of just multiple tools, plugging holes, and then sort of stepping back, you know, post isolation economy saying, okay, hey, we got through this, but now we need to take a new direction, new >>Strategy. I think that there, there isn't an intended consequence if you look at, most clients have, I saw a number 76, we counted as around 80 different security vendors and tools that they managed because a lot of people went and went after best of breed type capabilities. And, and so what we've seen now is, is the need to, you know, rationalize that, you know, their, their infrastructure and their, and their capability and, and consolidate and reduce that and, and move to, you know, more of what I would call platform providers. Cause if you may have, when you have 80 products, you have 80 integrations, 80 points of failure, and it gets very complex and, you know, there's a lot of finger pointing. And so as we're starting to see clients take a step back and say, Hey, look, if I, you know, spend the time to, you know, I call it modernization, but you know, modernize my security infrastructure and footprint focused around, you know, automation, orchestration, leveraging, you know, true ml and I know there's are buzzwords, but, you know, but you know, using 'em in, in, in the proper fashion, right? >>They, they can, you know, reduce that footprint, save a bunch of money, right? And, and, and drive that cost savings and then help scale their business. Cuz you have all these different vendors and what security is typically in the digital footprint is the slowdown, right? We, we've typically been the bottleneck in the past. And what we're seeing with, with, with what, you know, we've been very focused on is helping our clients scale their security footprints and their infrastructure and, you know, through automation orchestration, I i, I always say some folks do it your mess for less with labor arbitrage and bodies, but they're not enough security people in the world to do this. And so we're very focused on automation and orchestration and driving that into, into the market. >>Yeah. So you don't want to be in the business of, of filling those holes with labor. >>Exactly. You >>Want to actually get paid for outcomes. >>A hundred percent. And everything we've done is we've tried to simplify things not only for, you know, big Accenture, but even for our clients so that, you know, we can be focused on business outcomes, not necessarily technology outcomes. Cuz doing technology for the sake of technology. Is that unintended consequence that you described earlier, >>Speaking of transformation and outcomes I should say, what are you hearing most from CIOs and CISOs in terms of what they need now to be able to transform, to deliver the business outcomes so that they can become secure data companies regardless of industry? Yep. >>I think the, the biggest thing we're seeing right now is the need to, you know, leverage true automation and orchestration. We have to break the headcount model. There's not enough security professionals in the world to do, you know, to solve the world's problems. In order to scale that, you know, it's one of the reasons we're, you know, partnering with Palo Alto is because of, you know, the capabilities and the investments they've made in innovation to help drive that automation and orchestration through, you know, numerous capabilities from stock transformation to to to sassy cloud security, et cetera. But our clients need scale. They need to be able to go fast and net pace and they need to, they need to do it with confidence securely. And that, that's one of the big focuses. But the other focus is, is we're starting to see a need to, you know, vendor consolidation in the market. You've seen the acquisitions, I'm sure you've talked to people in over the last couple days. You know, there's, there's a, a tremendous amount of consolidation going around. And what our clients, you know, are asking for is, Hey, I need to reduce the number of vendors I interact with. I need to simplify my infrastructure, I need to focus on automation and, and orchestration from that perspective, >>What's happening with multi-cloud? What are you hearing from from customers? You know, we hear a lot of the, the, the conversations about, oh it's, you know, it's, and I agree by the way, multi-cloud is kind of a symptom of multi-vendor, you know, Chuck Whittens thing about multi-cloud by default versus design, you know, it's good, good line and I think rings true, but, but what a customer's telling you in terms of the real challenges generally and then specifically around security. >>I think it's, you know, each cloud service product has their own security capabilities and security models and, and, and being able to train the people to be able to manage those different models. I think that's where, you know, tools like, you know, Prisma Cloud for instance come in and help clients be able to manage the security and compliance of those infrastructures in, in a way to do that. And then to be able to manage applications security consistently, right? It's not just the cloud itself, but it's actually the applications that may, you know, cross, you know, be for, for resiliency but you know, be in, you know, multi-cloud, you know, multiple clouds and being able to make sure you have consistent security across those. And I think, you know, one of the things that it's permeated is, is just the, with data and identity and, and you know, cloud infrastructure and tolerance management, it's been a big problem cuz it's like the wild, wild west. I always look, when I look at identity and the cloud and how it's done, it, it looks like 1995 identity. It's, it's, it's ridiculously backwards. And so, you know, we've seen things like, you know, keem that have come into play to help manage those relationships and, and simplify it across multiple clouds consistently, if that makes sense. >>Yep. >>You, you mentioned Prisma Cloud most recently Accenture and Palo Alto developed the Secure Cloud Express. Correct. Can you talk to us a little bit about what that is and what outcomes is it gonna enable? Yeah, >>So great question and we're pretty excited about this cuz what we did with that was we manage cloud, you know, our cloud environments for numerous customers. So we've developed hundreds of policies that, you know, we implemented in Prisma Cloud to manage, you know, multiple clients, our internal infrastructure. And what we did was we said, well, most of our clients have to build those from scratch. So what we said is we will come in, in the best of week of time and come in and, and do a data-driven exercise to show our clients, you know, where where they sit from a, from a security perspective as it relates leveraging Prisma cloud and, and those policies that we've created. And what, what that has led to is another step, which is where we're focused on auto remediation. So, you know, when you, when you get, when you get the findings, then what do you do with them, right? If you have hundreds or thousands in some cases we've had clients with 1100 findings and they just sit there and they go, whoa, you know, so to speak. And so what we've done is we try to take those highest, most frequent findings and build securities code to auto remediate those for clients so they can choose to implement that and work down those, you know, findings very quickly, which helps, you know, drive more value out of, out of their prisma cloud >>Purchases. Accenture obviously has deep industry expertise around the globe. What are you seeing in terms of industries actually? So as they digitize not just their IT transformation but a business transformation, there are starting to see companies, financial services in particular bring their business to their cloud, sify their business. And specifically I'm interested in what's happening at the edge with operations technology. We just talked about healthcare and and medical devices. What's happening there? How connected or disconnected is that to the rest of the estate, the multi-cloud on-prem, et cetera? I >>Mean, I think OT is, is fairly disconnected, right? Sure. From, from that perspective, obviously, but I, I, I think what we're starting to see is an uptick, you know, on, I think secure edge and Sassy will come to OT cause it's a better way. Because what happens is if someone, you know, gets into the network, they can traverse it, right? And if they can apply those zero trust principles to ot, which is you're talking to people that have been, you know, wearing hard hats Yeah. And engineers, that's a big shift for them. And so, but I think that you'll start to see that play more prevalence, you know, with the industries like, you know, financial services, we're seeing a huge uptick in cloud adoption, right? They were, they were slow to do it, but now they're, they're going at pace and faster than most, right? Yeah, sure. And I think, you know, healthcare is a, is another big one where we've seen a lot of migration and a lot of need for multi-cloud. Cuz you know, some, they may be running their analytics on, you know, Google and, and their workloads on Azure, right? Or aws. And so you're starting to see a lot of people leveraging the best of what each cloud provider does well >>From that. And, and just an aside on that Palo Alto survey, we saw construction was one of the hardest hit industries. Yeah. Which I, I was like, what? And then of course it's because they're not really focused on security. They're focused on building stuff. No, >>It's really interesting. We're working with a large builder, I can't say the name, but one of the things that they're looking to do is, you know, they're moving to the cloud and they're building the capability to manage some of the, you know, largest skyscrapers in the world, but also manage the OT sensors and also do selling that creating another business, not only just managing those buildings, but managing other people's buildings for them and ha and selling security as a service for that because they built that capability around their devices and, and, and switches, hvac, et cetera. Do, >>Do you think that because I mean, you know, the operations technology, they're engineers and they're hardcore, like, don't touch my stuff. Exactly. And so do you feel like as, I mean I know that business has kind of done a reach around everything, you know, be becoming connected, but do you feel like they're gonna be more on top of it then, then, then sort of the, the broad commercial market has been? Or is it gonna be wild West all over again? >>My hope is that, you know, us as gsi, you know, my fellow GSIs, that we will help our clients make the better decisions this time around and, and not go to the wild, wild west. And you know, we see a lot of it in manufacturing, you know, if you saw, you know, with the, you know, the invasion Ukraine, you know, one of the big groups that was hit was manufacturing, right? There was factory shut down all over the world, you know, and, and so, you know, and that is an OT environment, but I, you know, what we've seen is them are, you know, those clients take more serious steps to protect those environments cuz they're on, you know, windows 10 servers running, you know, large machines. So we're starting to see a lot more care and feeding in into those environments as well. >>Can I ask you a question about the conversations that you're having? That survey that Dave mentioned, it's was released yesterday. There's a board behind us, what's next in cyber? That was the survey and amazing data that came from it. Like 96% of organizations have been hit by at least one attack in the last year. They were surprised that the number was that high, but we know that no industry, no company is safe. But one of the things that the survey found that, that surprised me was that we always say, oh, security is a board level conversation. We know that to some degree. But what they found was lack of alignment between the board and the executive level. In your Accenture's relationships, I know you guys have deep relationships across organizations and their boards. Can you help bring the board together with the executives and, and really not just talk about cybersecurity, but really develop a cybersecurity transformation strategy that actually delivers resilience? >>Yeah, no ab absolutely. And we've, we, we actually took a step back and, and reorganized our business this last year. And one of those areas that we focused on was within strategy and the C-suite agenda, right? And we actually published looking at gia, it was either the CEO handbook, I think it's what we called it, but they helped them and board be able to, you know, drive more meaningful conversations that relates to risk and and whatnot. And so we're very focused on that right now. And it's, we need to up-level our conversations within the organization. Cause even the buyers in these large, you know, two years ago was mainly the cso, now we're dealing with the cio, CTOs, cfo because these are, you know, meaningful business conversations, right? That are driving business outcomes and security needs to be a business enabler, not, not a a, a bottleneck >>Is the chief data officer starting to emerge as, as we see, you know, Nikesh said yesterday in his keynote and we talked about it with him when he was here, security is a data problem. >>Yep. It is. It's a huge data problem. And we're starting to, you know, I think we've talked a lot about zero trust, but zero trust data is, is a, is a significant problem, right? Because that you talk about the wild, wild west is we see clients that have people that have in, you know, they, they have access to, you know, what we call dev development environment data, right? But then you find out that they can hop four levels over into production data and this been exposed to, you know, the wrong people, you know, not focused on that least privileged aspect. I think data's a real problem, you know, per na kesha's statement in the cloud. It's something that really needs to be addressed. And I think we're starting to see a lot of innovation around that area. Cuz what typical data security has always been, I have all these problems, it creates, I call it noise, right? I got thousands of findings and then just, you know, need just sit there and they go, what do I do? Right? It's too much. And so I think there, there's gonna be more intelligence around that and more, you know, what I call auto remediation, right? Being able to remediate those findings quickly from from that >>Perspective. I've been watching this board behind us. Yeah. It's this what's next in cyber. And people come in and they write, it's just been growing, you know, all week and somebody just wrote sock transformation. Yeah. We were just sort of talking about earlier what, what, in your estimation, what percent of organizations that you target. I understand that you're not going after the, you know, mom and pop organizations, but what percent of that, you know, fat middle and the tip of the pyramid, that a euro, that's your sweet spot. What percent of those organizations don't have a sock? >>I mean, most every organization has a sock. You know, I talked to, you know, CISOs of large financial service organization, they said, do we even need a sock anymore? It could be a virtual sock so to speak, but I think, you know, am was SOC transformation. I think we could potentially head to something like that. But you know, but what's really been strange is there's been, you know, what we call soar, right? Security, you know, orchestration, automation, whatever. And what another, >>Another acronym, their >>Acronym that I security that I might brain is >>Hold apologize. >>But you know, they've, people have never really driven the value out of it because they build these automation playbooks and, and for one company to do it and build 20 of 'em or 30 of 'em to ha it doesn't pay off in the long run. And what we're starting to see is people, you know, bring to the table more crowdsource these capabilities so that they can scale those sock transformations. Cause it's really about, you know, orchestration and automation. That's where, you know, nirvana comes in because it's not about people with headsets on looking at, you know, 20 screens. It's not helpful, right? The humans, we make mistakes. And so if we can automate as much of that as possible, get rid of the false positives, leverage AI and and ML to do that. And I think we're starting to see, you know, what I would call more advanced AI and ml. I think in the early days in security, AI and ML was very nascent and, and, and now you're starting to see, you know, more powerful concepts come in better learning, better outcomes out of that. >>Well, it was a lot of modeling in the cloud still is, but it's increasingly going toward real time inference and that's, you know, game changing. >>Agreed. >>Last question for you. What's are some of the things that are next on the plate for Accenture and Palo Networks? What's next up? >>I think, you know, we're very focused on, on Sassy right now in, in the market. And I think we think that is, you know, I think both of us think that's the next big wave, right? Because I think what we learned out of, you know, these last two and a half, three years is that these concepts work, but they can actually scale out to drive significant cost savings. I mean, if you look at Accenture, you know, we don't have a a network backbone anymore. We're pure cloud wan, right? We're leveraging the internet for that. And I think that and what we're trying to do with Palo Alto and driving, you know, cloud WAN and Sassy as a service, I think will be super, super meaningful. And, and, and, and >>Well that's interesting. That has implications for a number of companies out >>There. Yeah. Well I think, you know, it's obviously the, you know, it, it's a, it is a big implication for a lot of, a lot of, you know, our customers even, right? Yeah. And so we have to be very careful and thoughtful about how we work to make that happen over time. >>Right. A lot of opportunity. Rex, thank you so much for joining us on the program and really dissecting what Accenture and Palo Alto are doing, all the value in it for organizations across industries. We appreciate your insights. Yep. >>Thank you >>For Rex Dexon and Dave Valante. I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching the Cubes stick around. Dave and I will be right back with our next guest. This is the Cube, the leader in live, emerging and enterprise tech coverage.

(upbeat music playing) >> Narrator: theCUBE presents Ignite 22, brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. >> Hey guys, girls, welcome back. It's theCUBE Live in Las Vegas at the MGM Grand for Palo Alto Networks Ignite 22. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. Dave, We've had some great conversations. This is day one of two days of cube coverage. We're talking with Palo Alto executives, their partner network, their customers, going to be learning a lot about what they've been doing to really be that golden nugget. >> Yeah. We've talked, Lisa, about how Palo Alto Networks is affecting a TAM expansion strategy through acquisitions and integration and company CDW, that I remember, you know, been around a long time. I remember back in the Comdex days talk about transformation of a company. Really excited to have them on. >> We're going to talk about that. Stephanie Hagopian is here, the VP of Security at CDW. >> Stephanie, >> Hey it's great to have you on the program. >> It's so nice to be here. Thank you. >> So lots going on. CDW has made several acquisitions in the past couple of quarters alone as it relates to security. Talk to us about what's going on. >> Yes. So we are way more than the computer warehouse that you used to know. The computer catalog days, we've moved beyond that. We've made a lot of strategic acquisitions in the past several quarters. The reason for that is we're trying to change our image and our brand and how, more importantly, we engage with our customers in security. We used to traditionally be, you know, kind of at the end of the procurement cycle with our customers, and we want to be an advisor. We want to really sell solutions and help influence the outcomes that our clients are trying to achieve when it comes to, not just security, but also risk, governance, threatened vulnerability management, how are they dealing with major issues around zero trust and building a zero trust framework for a company. >> Lisa: And I imagine these acquisitions, that really from a catalyst perspective was really driven >> Yeah. by the customers and what they were >> absolutely wanting to see and feel and hear and be able to do. >> Absolutely. So the acquisitions have given us over 400 delivery resources, consultants, advisors people who can actually engage with our clients who have real life experience, have worked with global organizations, some of the biggest companies in the world in order to solve their problems. And using that experience to be able to to really create higher value, you know as we interact and engage. >> Dave: You were telling us, Stephanie, that you actually came into CDW through an acquisition. >> I did. >> And I think if you go back 10 years ago when the cloud was just sort of hitting its steep steep ramp, and it looked, it was pretty obvious. And at the same time you had what we affectionately called you know, box sellers. And it was very clear that if they didn't transform their businesses and you know, the, they a lot of 'em were small, regional companies. They had the owners had big houses and big boats but the companies were going to go away if they didn't transform. So it's interesting to me that you've chosen security and governance in some of the really most difficult areas to as part of that transformation. Where did that come from, from your perspective and you know, why security and why such challenging areas? >> Well, I've been part of security in the security industry for over 20 years, and I've loved the fact it is challenging. It's what, it's what makes us so important and critical to our clients. Security's not an easy problem to solve. And it, it's because the landscape keeps changing. The advent of cloud and now hybrid infrastructure creates endless challenges for our customers. Threat actors change. We have insider threats, we have external threats. There's all sorts of risk when you talk about third parties and how third parties interact with organizations. We have supply chain management. And now that we've moved into this hybrid work environment of virtual, not virtual. You know, we have people kind of engaging within organizations in different ways. There's just a lot of risk associated with that. It's not easy and you have to engage with stakeholders across the entire organization. You have to understand how legal thinks of this and compliance and HR. It's not just an IT issue, it's a business issue. And we understand that and it's just, it's so interesting for us to engage with our customers on critical initiatives and security is at the top of the list. It's not just a, a CISO or even a CIO problem anymore. Boards care about this, >> Lisa: Right? >> We make or break companies with cybersecurity and risk strategies. That's why it's so critical. So we consider ourselves to be a high priority for every single organization, big or small. >> Lisa: From a security perspective, what's the common denominator among industries that you're seeing? >> Oh, I mean, we see, in terms of common denominator, I think every single organization's contending with ransomware. >> Ah >> That's probably number one. Breaches. You know, how do you prevent bad actors from doing something, you know, that's threatening to information sensitive data, especially consumer data. Third party risk is a big topic, and how to secure hybrid cloud infrastructures which is a key part of, you know, Palo's strategy as well. And we realize that. >> Why do they buy from CDW? Pitch me. I'm a customer, what can you do for me? >> Yeah. Because we want to partner. So we, we provide true advisory and consulting services to our customers. We aren't there just to make a sale and walk away. We want long-term commitments and long-term partnerships with our customer base. We're there to, to give them outcomes, right? And to align to their priorities and their challenges. It's, it's not a one and done for us. This is about a long-term partnership and that's what makes us so different. And we're now through the acquisition strategies. We're the largest security integrator in North America in terms of our revenue and our size just our sheer size and capability and the amount of full-time employees we have dedicated to this part of our business. So they know they can trust us and that we can scale. >> Dave: Do you? Is is it a, a teach me how to fish strategy? Or is it also if >> Yeah, >> if you want to have, if I, if I as a customer want to have you continue to manage or at least provide some kind of managed services, where's the the line? >> Stephanie: Yeah. So we are incredibly unique in the way we've built out our security practice in that we, we do both. And we want our clients to understand that there are going to be elements of what they do that they want to keep in house from a security perspective. That is why, and it also came from an acquisition, we have a workforce development team for security. We actually are a Palo authorized training partner. And we're incredibly proud of that fact because we don't just want to configure technology. We want to enable our customers to enhance and maintain their investments with Palo and with all technologies, with all of security. At the same time, we know they can't do everything in-house, and it just might make more sense to do manage through us. So we have end-to-end managed capabilities as well and we continue to enhance that part of our business. >> So a lot, a lot of opportunities for customers there. Talk a little bit about the Palo Alto Network's extension of the value prop that you just talked about. >> Oh yes. We love, you know, Palo is taking a platform approach and really focusing on helping customers rationalize their IT infrastructure around security. We're doing the same exact thing and focusing on zero trust is huge. We're, we're having those conversations with our customers as well. We want them to take their Palo investment and try to create a platform approach because there's simplicity and cost savings in that. The security conversations becoming a CFO conversation, right? We love rationalizing those technology investments in a way that makes sense. And we're right in line with Palo in that we want to provide those capabilities end to end and we want to ensure they integrate and use that all of the capabilities within your platform to the extent of that investment, right? We want them to use everything and not just parts of the technology or just do a partial deployment. We want them to use everything that it functionally is available to them through that investment. >> Dakesh, in his keynote this morning, said the answer is not just more people. I know there's this, this, this gap between the number of required number of cyber professionals that we need and >> Stephanie: Oh yeah. >> And how many employees we have, et cetera, et cetera. However, you just can't get there overnight. So that's where service providers, you know, come in. >> Stephanie: It's huge. >> I saw a stat recently, I think it said 50% of organizations in North America don't have a SOC. >> That's true. >> Okay. So they, they need managed services. So, >> Stephanie: They do. >> What are you seeing with some of the small and mid-size companies >> Stephanie: Managed >> and, and and how does, how is that, how is that going? We're entering a new era with, >> Stephanie: Yeah with, you know, cloud can can be a, a great help and and reduce the IT load internally. >> Yeah. >> Dave: What, what's the dynamic like in the customer base? >> Smaller customers especially they just can't attract the cyber talent. It's a high demand field because there just aren't many people who have that capability, right? For us, providing managed a managed SOC is huge. One of our key acquisitions, Sirius, was our largest acquisition recently, brought us a 24 7 managed SOC capability. And that's exactly what our mid-size customers want and demand and what they need, and it's more cost effective. And now they don't have to worry about being a security business. That's not what they are. They need to run their businesses and that's what we provide through managed capabilities especially for that customer base in particular. >> Lisa: And and >> Dave: How about the really small customers, right? Who, who, you know, they're in some ways the most vulnerable. >> Yeah >> Right? >> In many ways >> They don't have the budgets they're kind of working hand to mouth. How, how do you help them? >> Stephanie: Yeah. Yeah. So we, we provide cost effective managed capabilities. So there's managed for enterprise, there's managed for mid-market, but then for small medium businesses they want something that is at the right price point. And that's what we're doing actually in co-development with Palos. That's why we're expanding, not just our professional services capabilities with the Palo platform, but also providing managed support for every aspect of the platform so that customers don't need to invest in full-time employees to do that. They can, they have a predictable cost model that's affordable, that they can leverage over time. So we're very intent on making sure we're fulfilling that not just for our big customers but also for SMB and our, and small businesses as well. >> So you really have that whole suite taken care of >> The whole suite, yeah. I want to talk about some of the the large enterprises for a second. I saw a survey recently that, you know, you talked about security is a board level conversation. It is. >> Stephanie: Very much so. >> We talk about that all the time, CFO conversation but the survey that I saw recently was that there's not there's lack of alignment on boards with the executive suite where security is concerned. Are you seeing that and how can CDW and the Palo Alto partnership help gain that important alignment? >> Stephanie: Yeah So we, we face this all the time. What's on the CISO whiteboard might not be on the CFO's whiteboard or the, the board's whiteboard right? We love, and this is the whole part of our strategy and our strategy partnering with Palo, is that we want to engage further up on the, on the cycle. The, you know, we don't want to to talk to them at the end of the purchasing cycle because we're not providing value. >> Lisa: Yeah. >> We want to help advise them and build the business case. And by them, I mean our CISOs are, you know the heads of network security. You know, their are various stakeholders that we want to engage with to help them build the business case and the justification so that they are speaking the same language as the board member, the CFO. And we do that in many ways. I think the biggest is that we've we've built a global security strategy office that encompasses practitioners. So these are former CISOs, CIOs CTOs who have sat in their shoes and done what they've done. And we bring that experience to bear, coincidentally but not so coincidentally, Palo has the same capability. So Palo's also has a team of field CISOs and former practitioners. So we're partnering together to make sure that we're enabling our customers in, in providing the right value statements and the the right ROI within the the board meetings so that they get that investment right. And they're able to do what they need to do to secure the infrastructure. >> Dave: I mean, historically the business case has been we're going to help you not get breached, and you're going to reduce your, your, your loss >> Stephanie: (indistinct) still relevant. >> And, and I'm, and it's still very relevant. Is there any sort of on the other side of the algebra algebraic equation where actually having this kind of security practice can actually drive productivity >> Absolutely. >> Or or even drive revenue and can you talk about that part of the equation? >> Stephanie: Yeah, security as an industry, we're we've gotten a lot smarter. We understand it's not just about the compliance aspect or the data privacy aspect. It's very important to your point, you know breach prevention is certainly, you know, a a great justification. It's also about automation. So you think of SOAR, right? Providing automation and visibility and dashboard views into who's doing what actually really reduces administrative overhead. We, you know, we want to re-allow our clients to repurpose individuals because there are a finite amount of people in the security industry to focus on higher value tasks. So we're enabling just a lot of cost savings through that. Self-service is a big piece of this. You know, when you think about security we bring along a lot of automation, self-service automation of business logic, and business process. There's a huge value in cost savings attached to that. So that's huge. That's a huge part of the security conversation. >> I was reading, you talked about the cybersecurity skills gap and I was reading some interesting numbers that there's 26 million developers in the world less than 3 million cybersecurity professionals. >> Stephanie: Yeah. >> Talk to us about one of your favorite customer stories where you think CDW and Palo really nailed it in terms of helping organization drive that value the top line value, the bottom line value while enabling them with your expertise. >> Oh my gosh, I don't even want to focus on one because since we became a Palo authorized training partner we have worked with over a hundred clients. We just started this this year and we've helped over a hundred clients and thousands of people get enabled on on Palo firewall configuration and training and development. So we've co, we've partnered together as and we've impacted over a hundred organizations this year in making sure their people are enabled and they're, they're going from that I'm a developer generic to I'm a security professional. So we're helping to close that cybersecurity workforce gap. And we're just so excited at the scale we've been able to do that in such a short amount of time that, I mean, if you think about next year and the year following I mean it's going to be thousands of different clients. But you think about each client, we're impact we're, we're holding classes with 30 plus people. So we've already impacted thousands of people which is amazing. >> Right? So the idea to scale the program in in calendar year 2023 >> Absolutely. We're going to, we, we tried it. This was a trial run and it was amazingly successful trial run. So we're incredibly excited to scale this even more and continue to provide, you know, that element, that workforce development element, that training element for the entire Palo's stack, not just elements of it. >> Lisa: Excellent. Stephanie, thank you so much for joining us on the program. >> Stephanie: Thank you. >> Sharing what CDW and Palo Alto Networks are doing together. The what's in it for me from a customer perspective, big impact there. We appreciate your insights. >> Thank you so much. >> Dave: Great to have you >> Lisa: Our pleasure. >> It's great to have, great to be here. >> Yeah. For our guest and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live and emerging tech coverage.