>> Narrator: TheCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (light airy music) >> Hi, everybody, welcome back to the Fira in Barcelona. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my co-host Dave Nicholson. Lisa Martin is in the house. John Furrier is pounding the news from our Palo Alto studio. We are super excited to be talking about cloud at the edge, what that means. Charles Tsai is here. He's the Senior Director of product management at Dell Technologies and Peter Fetterolf is the Chief Technology Officer at ACG Business Analytics, a firm that goes deep into the TCO and the telco space, among other things. Gents, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. Thank you. >> Good to be here. >> Yeah, good to be here. >> So I've been in search all week of the elusive next wave of monetization for the telcos. We know they make great money on connectivity, they're really good at that. But they're all talking about how they can't let this happen again. Meaning we can't let the over the top vendors yet again, basically steal our cookies. So we're going to not mess it up this time. We're going to win in the monetization. Charles, where are those monetization opportunities? Obviously at the edge, the telco cloud at the edge. What is that all about and where's the money? >> Well, Dave, I think from a Dell's perspective, what we want to be able to enable operators is a solution that enable them to roll out services much quicker, right? We know there's a lot of innovation around IoT, MEG and so on and so forth, but they continue to rely on traditional technology and way of operations is going to take them years to enable new services. So what Dell is doing is now, creating the entire vertical stack from the hardware through CAST and automation that enable them, not only to push out services very quickly, but operating them using cloud principles. >> So it's when you say the entire vertical stack, it's the integrated hardware components with like, for example, Red Hat on top- >> Right. >> Or a Wind River? >> That's correct. >> Okay, and then open API, so the developers can create workloads, I presume data companies. We just had a data conversation 'cause that was part of the original stack- >> That's correct. >> So through an open ecosystem, you can actually sort of recreate that value, correct? >> That's correct. >> Okay. >> So one thing Dell is doing, is we are offering an infrastructure block where we are taking over the overhead of certifying every release coming from the Red Hat or the Wind River of the world, right? We want telcos to spend their resources on what is going to generate them revenue. Not the overhead of creating this cloud stack. >> Dave, I remember when we went through this in the enterprise and you had companies like, you know, IBM with the AS400 and the mainframe saying it's easier to manage, which it was, but it's still, you know, it was subsumed by the open systems trend. >> Yeah, yeah. And I think that's an important thing to probe on, is this idea of what is, what exactly does it mean to be cloud at the edge in the telecom space? Because it's a much used term. >> Yeah. >> When we talk about cloud and edge, in sort of generalized IT, but what specifically does it mean? >> Yeah, so when we talk about telco cloud, first of all it's kind of different from what you're thinking about public cloud today. And there's a couple differences. One, if you look at the big hyperscaler public cloud today, they tend to be centralized in huge data centers. Okay, telco cloud, there are big data centers, but then there's also regional data centers. There are edge data centers, which are your typical like access central offices that have turned data centers, and then now even cell sites are becoming mini data centers. So it's distributed. I mean like you could have like, even in a country like say Germany, you'd have 30,000 soul sites, each one of them being a data center. So it's a very different model. Now the other thing I want to go back to the question of monetization, okay? So how do you do monetization? The only way to do that, is to be able to offer new services, like Charles said. How do you offer new services? You have to have an open ecosystem that's going to be very, very flexible. And if we look at where telcos are coming from today, they tend to be very inflexible 'cause they're all kind of single vendor solutions. And even as we've moved to virtualization, you know, if you look at packet core for instance, a lot of them are these vertical stacks of say a Nokia or Ericson or Huawei where you know, you can't really put any other vendors or any other solutions into that. So basically the idea is this kind of horizontal architecture, right? Where now across, not just my central data centers, but across my edge data centers, which would be traditionally my access COs, as well as my cell sites. I have an open environment. And we're kind of starting with, you know, packet core obviously with, and UPFs being distributed, but now open ran or virtual ran, where I can have CUs and DUs and I can split CUs, they could be at the soul site, they could be in edge data centers. But then moving forward, we're going to have like MEG, which are, you know, which are new kinds of services, you know, could be, you know, remote cars it could be gaming, it could be the Metaverse. And these are going to be a multi-vendor environment. So one of the things you need to do is you need to have you know, this cloud layer, and that's what Charles was talking about with the infrastructure blocks is helping the service providers do that, but they still own their infrastructure. >> Yeah, so it's still not clear to me how the service providers win that game but we can maybe come back to that because I want to dig into TCO a little bit. >> Sure. >> Because I have a lot of friends at Dell. I don't have a lot of friends at HPE. I've always been critical when they take an X86 server put a name on it that implies edge and they throw it over the fence to the edge, that's not going to work, okay? We're now seeing, you know we were just at the Dell booth yesterday, you did the booth crawl, which was awesome. Purpose-built servers for this environment. >> Charles: That's right. >> So there's two factors here that I want to explore in TCO. One is, how those next gen servers compare to the previous gen, especially in terms of power consumption but other factors and then how these sort of open ran, open ecosystem stacks compared to proprietary stacks. Peter, can you help us understand those? >> Yeah, sure. And Charles can comment on this as well. But I mean there, there's a couple areas. One is just moving the next generation. So especially on the Intel side, moving from Ice Lake to the Sapphire Rapids is a big deal, especially when it comes to the DU. And you know, with the radios, right? There's the radio unit, the RU, and then there's the DU the distributed unit, and the CU. The DU is really like part of the radio, but it's virtualized. When we moved from Ice lake to Sapphire Rapids, which is third generation intel to fourth generation intel, we're literally almost doubling the performance in the DU. And that's really important 'cause it means like almost half the number of servers and we're talking like 30, 40, 50,000 servers in some cases. So, you know, being able to divide that by two, that's really big, right? In terms of not only the the cost but all the TCO and the OpEx. Now another area that's really important, when I was talking moving from these vertical silos to the horizontal, the issue with the vertical silos is, you can't place any other workloads into those silos. So it's kind of inefficient, right? Whereas when we have the horizontal architecture, now you can place workloads wherever you want, which basically also means less servers but also more flexibility, more service agility. And then, you know, I think Charles can comment more, specifically on the XR8000, some things Dell's doing, 'cause it's really exciting relative to- >> Sure. >> What's happening in there. >> So, you know, when we start looking at putting compute at the edge, right? We recognize the first thing we have to do is understand the environment we are going into. So we spend with a lot of time with telcos going to the south side, going to the edge data center, looking at operation, how do the engineer today deal with maintenance replacement at those locations? Then based on understanding the operation constraints at those sites, we create innovation and take a traditional server, remodel it to make sure that we minimize the disruption to the operations, right? Just because we are helping them going from appliances to open compute, we do not want to disrupt what is have been a very efficient operation on the remote sites. So we created a lot of new ideas and develop them on general compute, where we believe we can save a lot of headache and disruptions and still provide the same level of availability, resiliency, and redundancy on an open compute platform. >> So when we talk about open, we don't mean generic? Fair? See what I mean? >> Open is more from the software workload perspective, right? A Dell server can run any type of workload that customer intend. >> But it's engineered for this? >> Environment. >> Environment. >> That's correct. >> And so what are some of the environmental issues that are dealt with in the telecom space that are different than the average data center? >> The most basic one, is in most of the traditional cell tower, they are deployed within cabinets instead of racks. So they are depth constraints that you just have no access to the rear of the chassis. So that means on a server, is everything you need to access, need to be in the front, nothing should be in the back. Then you need to consider how labor union come into play, right? There's a lot of constraint on who can go to a cell tower and touch power, who can go there and touch compute, right? So we minimize all that disruption through a modular design and make it very efficient. >> So when we took a look at XR8000, literally right here, sitting on the desk. >> Uh-huh. >> Took it apart, don't panic, just pulled out some sleds and things. >> Right, right. >> One of the interesting demonstrations was how it compared to the size of a shoe. Now apparently you hired someone at Dell specifically because they wear a size 14 shoe, (Charles laughs) so it was even more dramatic. >> That's right. >> But when you see it, and I would suggest that viewers go back and take a look at that segment, specifically on the hardware. You can see exactly what you just referenced. This idea that everything is accessible from the front. Yeah. >> So I want to dig in a couple things. So I want to push back a little bit on what you were saying about the horizontal 'cause there's the benefit, if you've got the horizontal infrastructure, you can run a lot more workloads. But I compare it to the enterprise 'cause I, that was the argument, I've made that argument with converged infrastructure versus say an Oracle vertical stack, but it turned out that actually Oracle ran Oracle better, okay? Is there an analog in telco or is this new open architecture going to be able to not only service the wide range of emerging apps but also be as resilient as the proprietary infrastructure? >> Yeah and you know, before I answer that, I also want to say that we've been writing a number of white papers. So we have actually three white papers we've just done with Dell looking at infrastructure blocks and looking at vertical versus horizontal and also looking at moving from the previous generation hardware to the next generation hardware. So all those details, you can find the white papers, and you can find them either in the Dell website or at the ACG research website >> ACGresearch.com? >> ACG research. Yeah, if you just search ACG research, you'll find- >> Yeah. >> Lots of white papers on TCO. So you know, what I want to say, relative to the vertical versus horizontal. Yeah, obviously in the vertical side, some of those things will run well, I mean it won't have issues. However, that being said, as we move to cloud native, you know, it's very high performance, okay? In terms of the stack, whether it be a Red Hat or a VMware or other cloud layers, that's really become much more mature. It now it's all CNF base, which is really containerized, very high performance. And so I don't think really performance is an issue. However, my feeling is that, if you want to offer new services and generate new revenue, you're not going to do it in vertical stacks, period. You're going to be able to do a packet core, you'll be able to do a ran over here. But now what if I want to offer a gaming service? What if I want to do metaverse? What if I want to do, you have to have an environment that's a multi-vendor environment that supports an ecosystem. Even in the RAN, when we look at the RIC, and the xApps and the rApps, these are multi-vendor environments that's going to create a lot of flexibility and you can't do that if you're restricted to, I can only have one vendor running on this hardware. >> Yeah, we're seeing these vendors work together and create RICs. That's obviously a key point, but what I'm hearing is that there may be trade offs, but the incremental value is going to overwhelm that. Second question I have, Peter is, TCO, I've been hearing a lot about 30%, you know, where's that 30% come from? Is it Op, is it from an OpEx standpoint? Is it labor, is it power? Is it, you mentioned, you know, cutting the number of servers in half. If I can unpack the granularity of that TCO, where's the benefit coming from? >> Yeah, the answer is yes. (Peter and Charles laugh) >> Okay, we'll do. >> Yeah, so- >> One side that, in terms of, where is the big bang for the bucks? >> So I mean, so you really need to look at the white paper to see details, but definitely power, definitely labor, definitely reducing the number of servers, you know, reducing the CapEx. The other thing is, is as you move to this really next generation horizontal telco cloud, there's the whole automation and orchestration, that is a key component as well. And it's enabled by what Dell is doing. It's enabled by the, because the thing is you're not going to have end-to-end automation if you have all this legacy stuff there or if you have these vertical stacks where you can't integrate. I mean you can automate that part and then you have separate automation here, you separate. you need to have integrated automation and orchestration across the whole thing. >> One other point I would add also, right, on the hardware perspective, right? With the customized hardware, what we allow operator to do is, take out the existing appliance and push a edge optimized server without reworking the entire infrastructure. There is a significant saving where you don't have to rethink about what is my power infrastructure, right? What is my security infrastructure? The server is designed to leverage the existing, what is already there. >> How should telco, Charles, plan for this transformation? Are there specific best practices that you would recommend in terms of the operational model? >> Great question. I think first thing is do an inventory of what you have. Understand what your constraints are and then come to Dell, we will love to consult with you, based on our experience on the best practices. We know how to minimize additional changes. We know how to help your support engineer, understand how to shift appliance based operation to a cloud-based operation. >> Is that a service you offer? Is that a pre-sales freebie? What is maybe both? >> It's both. >> Yeah. >> It's both. >> Yeah. >> Guys- >> Just really quickly. >> We're going to wrap. >> The, yeah. Dave loves the TCO discussion. I'm always thinking in terms of, well how do you measure TCO when you're comparing something where you can't do something to an environment where you're going to be able to do something new? And I know that that's always the challenge in any kind of emerging market where things are changing, any? >> Well, I mean we also look at, not only TCO, but we look at overall business case. So there's basically service at GLD and revenue and then there's faster time to revenues. Well, and actually ACG, we actually have a platform called the BAE or Business Analytics Engine that's a very sophisticated simulation cloud-based platform, where we can actually look at revenue month by month. And we look at what's the impact of accelerating revenue by three months. By four months. >> So you're looking into- >> By six months- >> So you're forward looking. You're just not consistently- >> So we're not just looking at TCO, we're looking at the overall business case benefit. >> Yeah, exactly right. There's the TCO, which is the hard dollars. >> Right. >> CFO wants to see that, he or she needs to see that. But you got to, you can convince that individual, that there's a business case around it. >> Peter: Yeah. >> And then you're going to sign up for that number. >> Peter: Yeah. >> And they're going to be held to it. That's the story the world wants. >> At the end of the day, telcos have to be offered new services 'cause look at all the money that's been spent. >> Dave: Yeah, that's right. >> On investment on 5G and everything else. >> 0.5 trillion over the next seven years. All right, guys, we got to go. Sorry to cut you off. >> Okay, thank you very much. >> But we're wall to wall here. All right, thanks so much for coming on. >> Dave: Fantastic. >> All right, Dave Vellante, for Dave Nicholson. Lisa Martin's in the house. John Furrier in Palo Alto Studios. Keep it right there. MWC 23 live from the Fira in Barcelona. (light airy music)

>>In late 2009 when the industry was just beginning to offer so-called converged infrastructure, CI Nutanix was skating to the puck, so to speak, meaning unlike conversion infrastructure, which essentially bolted together compute and networking and storage into a single skew that was very hardware centric. Nutanix was focused on creating HCI hyperconverged infrastructure, which was a software led architecture that unified the key elements of data center infrastructure. Now, while both approaches saved time and money, HCI took the concept to new heights of cost savings and simplicity. Hyperconverged infrastructure became a staple of private clouds creating a cloudlike experience. OnPrem. As the public cloud evolved and grew, more and more customers are now taking a cloud first approach to it. So the challenge becomes how do you remodel your IT house so that you can connect your on-prem workloads to the cloud, to both simplify cloud migration, while at the same time creating an identical experience across your estate? >>Hello, and welcome to this special program, Accelerate Hybrid Cloud with Nutanix and Microsoft Made Possible by By Nutanix and produced by the Cube. I'm Dave Ante, one of your hosts today. Now, in this session, we'll hear how Nutanix is evolving its initial vision of simplifying infrastructure, deployment and management to support modern applications by partnering with Microsoft to enable that consistent experience that we talked about earlier, to extend hybrid cloud to Microsoft Azure and take advantage of cloud native tooling. Now, what's really important to stress here, and you'll hear this in our second segment, substantive engineering work has gone into this partnership. A lot of partnerships are sealed with a press release. We sometimes call it a Barney deal. You know, I love you, you love me. Like Barney, the once popular children's dinosaur character. We dig into the critical engineering aspects that enable that seamless connection between on-prem infrastructure and the public cloud. >>Now, in our first segment, Lisa Martin talks to Alro Salise, who is the vice president of Global ISD Commercial Solutions at Microsoft, and Michael Les Chica, who is the vice president of business development for the cloud and database partner ecosystem at Nutanix. Now, after that, Lisa will kick it back to me in our Boston studios to speak with Eric Lockard, who is the corporate vice president of Microsoft Azure specialized, along with Thomas Cornell, who is the senior vice president of products at Nutanix. And Indu Carey, who's the senior vice president of of engineering for NCI and NNC two at Nutanix. And we'll dig deeper into the announcement and it's salient features. Thanks for being with us. We hope you enjoy the program. Over to Lisa. >>Hi everyone. Welcome to our event Accelerate Hybrid Cloud with Nutanix and Microsoft. I'm your host Lisa Martin, and I've got two great guests here with me to give you some exciting news. Please welcome Alva Salise, the Vice President of Global ISD Commercial Solutions at Microsoft, and Michael Les Chika, VP of Business Development Cloud and database partner ecosystem at Nutanix. Guys, it's great to have you on the program. Thanks so much for joining me today. Great to be here. >>Thank you, Lisa. Looking forward, >>Yeah, so let's go ahead and start with you. Talk to me from your lens, what are you seeing in terms of the importance of the role of the the ISV ecosystem and really helping customers make their business outcomes successful? >>Oh, absolutely. Well, first of all, thank you for the invitation and thank you Michael and the Nutanix team for the partnership. The the ISV ecosystem plays a critical role as we support our customers and enable them in their data transformation journeys to create value, to move at their own pace, and more important to be sure that every one of them, as they transform themselves, have the right set of solutions for the long term with high differentiation, cost effectiveness and resiliency, especially given the times that we're living. >>Yeah, that resiliency is getting more and more critical as each day goes on. Ava was sticking with you. We got Microsoft Ignite going on today. What are some of the key themes that we should expect this year and how do they align to Microsoft's vision and strategy? >>Ah, great question. Thank you. When you think about it, we wanna talk about the topics that are very relevant and our customers have asked us to go deeper and, and share with them. One of them, as you may imagine, is how can we do more with less using Azure, especially given the current times that we're living in the, the business context has changed so much, they have different imperative, different different amount of pressure and priorities. How can we help? How can we combine the platform, the value that Microsoft can bring and our Microsoft ISV partner ecosystem to deliver more value and enable them to have their own journey? Actually, in that frame, if I may, we are making this announcement today with Nutanix. I, the Nutanix cloud clusters are often the fastest way on which customers will be able to do that journey into the cloud because it's very consistent with environments that they already know and use on premise. And once they go into the cloud, then they have all the benefit of scale, agility, resiliency, security, and cost benefits that they're looking for. So that topic and this type of announcements will be a big part of what we doing. Ignite, >>Exciting. Michael, let's bring you into the conversation now. Big milestone of our RDTs that the general availability of Nutanix Cloud clusters on Azure. Talk to us about that from Nutanix's perspective and also gimme a little bit of color, Michael, on the partnership, the relationship. >>Yeah, sure, absolutely. So we actually entered a partnership couple years ago, so we've been working on this solution quite a while, but really our ultimate goal from day one was really to make our customers journeys to hybrid cloud simpler and faster. So really for both companies, I think our goal is really being that trusted partner for our customers in their innovation journey. And as mentioned, you know, in the current macroeconomic conditions, really our customers really care about, but they have to be mindful of their bottom line as well. So they're really looking to leverage their existing investments in technology skill sets and leverage the most out of that. So the things like, for example, cost to operations and keeping those things consistent, cost on premises and the cloud are really important as customers are thinking about growth initiatives that they wanna implement. And of course, going to Azure public cloud is an important one as they think about flexibility, scale and modernizing their apps. >>And of course, as we look at the customer landscape, a lot of customers have an on on footprint, right? Whether that's for regulatory reasons for business or other technical reasons. So hybrid cloud has really become an ideal operating model for a lot of the customers that we see today. So really our partnership with Microsoft is critical because together, I really do see our US together simplifying that journey to the public cloud and making sure that it's not only easy but secure and really seamless. And really, I see our partnership as bringing the strengths of each company together, right? So Nutanix, of course, is known in the past versus hyperconverge infrastructure and really breaking down those silos between networking, compute, storage, and simplifying that infrastructure and operations. And our customers love that for the products and our, our NPS score of 90 over the last seven years. And if you look at Azure, at Microsoft, they're truly best in class cloud infrastructure with cutting edge services and innovation and really global scale. So when you think about those two combinations, right, that's really powerful for customers to be able to take their applications and whether they're on or even, and really combining all those various hybrid scenarios. And I think that's something that's pretty unique that we're to offer customers. >>Let's dig into that uniqueness of our, bringing you back into the conversation. You guys are meeting customers where they are helping them to accelerate their cloud transformations, delivering that consistency, you know, whether they're on-prem in Azure, in in the cloud. Talk to me about, from Microsoft's perspective about the significance of this announcement. I understand that the, the preview was oversubscribed, so the demand from your joint customers is clear. >>Thank you, Lisa. Michael, personally, I'm very proud and at the company we're very proud of the world that we did together with Nutanix. When you see two companies coming together with the mission of empowering customers and with the customer at the center and trying to solve real problems in this case, how to drive hybrid cloud and what is the best approach for them, opening more opportunities is, is, is extremely inspiring. And of course the welcome reception that we have from customer reiterates that we generating that value. Now, when you combine the power of Azure, that is very well known by resiliency, the scale, the performance, the elasticity, and the range of services with the reality of companies that might have hundreds or even thousands of different applications and data sources, those cloud journeys are very different for each and every one of them. So how do we combine our capabilities between Nutanix and Microsoft to be sure that that hybrid cloud journey that every one is gonna take can be simplified, you can take away the risk, the complexity on that transformation creates tones of value. >>And that's what a customers are asking us today. Either because they're trying to move and modernize their environment to Azure, or they're bringing their, you know, a enable ordinate services and cluster and data services on premise to a Nutanix platform, we together can combine and solve for that adding more value for any scenario that customers may have. And this is not once and done, this is not that we building, we forget it. It's a partnership that keeps evolving and also includes work that we do with our solution sales alliances that go to market seems to be sure that the customers have diverse service and support to make, to create the outcomes that they're asking us to deliver. >>Talk to me a little bit about the customers that were in the beta, as we mentioned, Alva, the, the preview was oversubscribed. So as I talked about earlier, the demand is clearly there. Talk to me about some of the customers in beta, you can even anonymize them or maybe talk about them by industry, but what, what were some of the, the key things they came to these two companies looking to, to solve, get to the cloud faster, be able to deliver the same sets of services with familiarity so that from a, they're able to do more with less? >>Maybe I could take that one out of our abital lines. It did. It means, but yeah, so like, like we, like you mentioned Lisa, you know, we've had a great preview oversubscribe, we had lots of, of cu not only customers, but also partners battle testing the solution. And you know, we're obviously very pleased now to have GN offered to everyone else, but one of our customers, Camper J was really looking forward to seeing how do they leverage Ncq and Azure to, like I mentioned, reduce that work workload, my, my migration and a risk for that and making sure, hey, some of the applications, maybe we are going to go and rewrite them, refactor them to take them natively to Azure. But there's others where we wanna lift and shift them to Azure. But like I mentioned, it's not just customers, right? We've been working with partners like PCs and Citrix where they share the same goal as Microsoft and Nutanix provides that superior customer experience where whatever the operating model might be for that customer. So they're going to be leveraging NC two on Azure to really provide those hybrid cloud experiences for their solutions on top of building on top of the, the work that we've done together. >>So this really kind of highlights the power of that Alva, the power of the ISV ecosystem and what you're all able to do together to really help customers achieve the outcomes that they individually need. >>A absolutely, look, I mean, we strongly believe that when you partner properly with an V you get to the, to the magical framework, one plus one equals three or more because you are combining superpowers and you are solving the problem on behalf of the customer so they can focus on their business. And this is a wonderful example, a very inspiring one where when you see the risk, the complexity that all these projects normally have, and Michael did a great job framing some of them, and the difference that they have now by having NC to on Azure, it's night and day. And we are fully committed to keep driving this innovation, this partnership on service of our customers and our partner ecosystem because at the same time, making our partners more successful, generating more value for customers and for all of us. >>Abar, can you comment a little bit on the go to market? Like how, how do your joint customers engage? What does that look like from their perspective? >>You know, when you think about the go to market, a lot of that is we have, you know, teams all over the world that will be aligned and working together in service of the customer. There is marketing and demand generation that will be done, that will be also work on enjoying opportunities that we will manage as well as a very tight connection on projects to be sure that the support experience for customers is well aligned. I don't wanna go into too much detail, but I will like to guarantee that our intent is not only to create an incredible technological experience, which the, the development teams are done, but also a great experience for the customers that are going through these projects, interacting with both teams that will work as one in service to empower the customer to achieve the outcomes that they need. >>Yeah, and just to comment maybe a little bit more on what Albar said, you know, it's not just about the product integration or it's really the full end to end experience for our customers. So when we embarked on this partnership with Microsoft, we really thought about what is the right product integration and with our engineering teams, but also how do we go and talk to customers with value prop together and all the way down through to support. So we actually been worked on how do we have a single joint support for our customers. So it doesn't really matter how the customer engages, they really see this as an end to end single solution across two companies. >>And that's so critical given just the, the natural challenges that that organizations face and the dynamics of the macro economic environment that we're living in. For them, for customers to be able to have that really seamless single point of interaction, they want that consistent experience on-prem to the cloud. But from an engagement perspective that you're, what sounds like what you're doing, Michael and Avaro is, is goes a long way to really giving customers a much more streamlined approach so that they can be laser focused on solving the business problems that they have, being competitive, getting products to market faster and all that good stuff. Michael, I wonder if you could comment on maybe the cultural alignment that Nutanix and Microsoft have. I know Microsoft's partner program has been around for decades and decades. Michael, what does that cultural alignment look like from, you know, the sales and marketing folks down to engineering, down to support? >>Yeah, I think honestly that was, that was something that kind of fit really well and we saw really a long alignment from day one. Of course, you know, Nutanix cares a lot about our customer experience, not just within the products, but again, through the entire life cycle to support and so forth. And Microsoft's no different, right? There's a huge emphasis on making sure that we provide the best customer experience and that we're also focusing on solving real world customer problems, right? And really focusing on the biggest problems that customers have. So really culturally it felt, it felt really natural. It felt like we were a single team, although it's, you know, two bar organizations working together, but I really felt like a single team working day in, day out on, on solving customer problems together. >>Yeah, >>Let, go ahead. >>No, I would say, well say Michael, the, the one element that we complement, the, I think the answer was super complete, is the, the fact that we work together from the outside in, look at it from the customer lenses is extremely powerful and inspire, as I mentioned, because that's what it's all about. And when you put the customer at the center, everything else falls in part on its its own place very, very quickly. And then it's hard work and innovation and, you know, doing what we do best, which is combining over superpowers in service of that customer. So that was the piece that, you know, I, I cannot emphasize enough how inspiring he's been. And again, the, the response for the previous is a great example of the opportunity that we have in there. >>And you've taken a lot of complexity out of the customer environment and I can imagine that the GA of Nutanix cloud clusters on Azure is gonna be a huge benefit for customers in every industry. Last question guys, I wanna get both your perspectives on Michael, we'll start with you and then Lvra will wrap with you. What's next? Obviously a lot of exciting stuff. What's next for the partnership of these, these two superheroes together, Michael? >>Yeah, so I think our goal doesn't change, right? I think our North star is to continue to make it easy for our customers to adopt, migrate and modernize their applications, leveraging Nutanix and Microsoft Azure, right? And I think NC two and Azure is just the start of that. So kind of maybe more immediate, like, you know, we mentioned obviously we have, we announced the ga that's J in Americas, but kind of the next more immediate step over the next few months look for us to continue expanding beyond Americas and making sure that we have support across all the global regions. And then beyond that, you know, again, as of our mentioned, it's working from kind of the s backwards. So we're, we're not, no, we're not waiting for ega. We're already working on the next set of solutions saying what are other problems that customer facing, especially across, they're running their workload cross on premises and public cloud, and what are the next set of solutions that we can deliver to the market to solve those real challenges for. >>It sounds really strongly that, that the partnership here, we're talking about Nutanix and Microsoft, it's really Nutanix and Microsoft with the customer at this center. I think you've both done a great job of articulating that there's laser focus there. Our last word to you, what excites you about the momentum that Microsoft and Nutanix have for the customers? >>Well, thank you Lisa. Michael, I will tell you, when you hear the customer feedback on the impact that you're having, that's the most inspiring part because you know you're generating value, you know, you're making a difference, especially in these complex times when the, the partnership gets tested where the, the right, you know, relationship gets built. We're being there for customers is extremely inspiring. Now, as Michael mentioned, this is all about what customer needs and how do we go even ahead of the game, being sure that we're ready not for what is the problem today, but the opportunities that we have tomorrow to keep working on this. We have a huge TA task ahead to be sure that we bring this value globally in the right way with the right quality. Every word, which is a, is never as small fist as you may imagine. You know, the, the world is a big place, but also the next wave of innovations that will be customer driven to keep and, and raise the bar on how, how much more value can we unlock and how much empowerment can we make for the customer to keep in innovating at their own pace, in their own terms. >>Absolutely that customer empowerment's key. Guys, it's been a pleasure talking to you about the announcement Nutanix cloud clusters on Azure of our Michael, thank you for your time, your inputs and helping us understand the impact that this powerhouse relationship is making. >>Thank you for having Lisa and thank you AAR for joining >>Me. Thank you Lisa, Michael, it's been fantastic. I looking forward and thank you to the audience for being here with us. Yeah, stay >>Tuned. Thanks to the audience. Exactly. And stay tuned. There's more to come. We have coming up next, a deeper conversation on the announcement with Dave and product execs from both Microsoft. You won't wanna.

>>Hi everyone. Welcome to our event Accelerate Hybrid Cloud with Nutanix and Microsoft. I'm your host Lisa Martin, and I've got two great guests here with me to give you some exciting news. Please welcome Alva Salise, the Vice President of Global ISV Commercial Solutions at Microsoft. And Michael Luka, VP of Business Development Cloud and database partner ecosystem at Nutanix. Guys, it's great to have you on the program. Thanks so much for joining me today. Great to be here. >>Thank you, Lisa. Looking forward, >>Yeah, so a, let's go ahead and start with you. Talk to me from your lens, what are you seeing in terms of the importance of the role of the the ISV ecosystem and really helping customers make their business outcomes successful? >>Well, absolutely. Well, first of all, thank you for the invitation and thank you Michael and the Nutanix team for the partnership. So the, the ISV ecosystem plays a critical role as we support our customers and enable them in their data transformation journeys to create value, to move at the own pace, and more important to ensure that every one of them as they transform themselves, have the right set of solutions for the long term with high differentiation, cost effectiveness and resiliency, especially given the times that we're living in. >>Yeah, that resiliency is getting more and more critical as each day goes on. Ava was sticking with you. We got Microsoft Ignite going on today. What are some of the key themes that we should expect this year and how do they align to Microsoft's vision and strategy? >>Ah, great question. Thank you. When you think about it, we wanna talk about the topics that are very relevant and our customers have asked us to go deeper and, and share with them. One of them, as you may imagine, is how can we do more with less using Azure, especially given the current times that we're living in the, the business context has changed so much. They have different imperative, different different amount of pressure and priorities. How can we help, how can we combine the platform, the value that Microsoft can bring and or Microsoft ISV power ecosystem to deliver more value and enable them to have their own journey? Actually, in that frame, if I may, we are making this announcement today with Nutanix. The Nutanix cloud clusters are often the fastest way on which customers will be able to do that journey into the cloud because it's very consistent with environments that they already know and use on premise. And once they go into the cloud, then they have all the benefit of scale, agility, resiliency, security and cost benefits that they're looking for. So that topic and this type of announcements will be a big part of what we doing. Ignite >>Then exciting. Michael, let's bring you into the conversation now. Sure. Big milestone of our RDTs that the general availability of Nutanix Cloud clusters on Azure. Talk to us about that from Nutanix's perspective and also gimme a little bit of color, Michael, on the partnership, the relationship. >>Yeah, sure. Absolutely. So we actually entered a partnership couple years ago, so we've been working on this quite a while. But really our ultimate goal from day one was really to make our customers journeys to hybrid cloud simpler and faster. So really for both companies, I think our goal is really being that trusted partner for our customers in their innovation journey. And as I mentioned, you know, in the current macroeconomic conditions, really our customers really care about growing their top line, but they have to be mindful of their bottom line as well. So they're really looking to leverage their existing investments in technology skill and leverage the most that, So the things like, for example, cost to operations and keeping those things cost on premises and are really important as customers are thinking about growth initiatives that they wanna implement. And of course going to Azure public cloud is an important one as they think about flexibility, scale and modernizing in their apps. >>And of course as we look at the customer landscape, a lot of customers have an footprint, right? Whether that's for regulatory reasons for business or other technic for reasons. So hybrid cloud has really become an ideal operating model for a lot of the customers that we see today. So really our partnership with Microsoft is critical because together, I really do see our US together simplifying that journey to the public cloud and making sure that it's not only easy but secure and really seamless. And really, I see our partnership as bringing the strengths of each company together, right? So Nutanix, of course, is known in the past versus hyperconverge infrastructure and really breaking down those silos between networking, compute, storage, and simplifying that infrastructure and operations. And our customers love that for the products and our, our NPS score of 90 over the last seven years. And if you look at Azure, at Microsoft, they're truly best in class cloud infrastructure with cutting edge services and innovation and really global scale. So when you think about those two combinations, right, that's really powerful for customers to be able to take their applications and whether they're on pre the cloud or even the edge and really combining all those various hybrid scenarios. And I think that's something that's pretty unique that we're able to offer our joint customers. >>Let's into that uniqueness of our, bringing you back into the conversation, you guys are meeting customers where they are helping them to accelerate their cloud transformations, delivering that consistency, you know, whether they're on-prem in Azure, in in the cloud. Talk to me about, from Microsoft's perspective about the significance of this announcement. I understand that the, the preview was oversubscribed, so the demand from your joint customers is clear. >>Thank you, Lisa. Michael, personally, I'm very proud and at the company we're very proud of the world that we did together with Nutanix. When you see two companies coming together with the mission of empowering customers and with the customer at the center and trying to solve real problems in this case, how to drive hybrid cloud and what is the best approach for them, opening more opportunities is, is is extremely inspiring. And of course the welcome reception that we have from customer reiterates that we generating that value. Now, when you combine the power of Azure, that is very well known by resiliency, the scale, the performance, the elasticity, and the range of services with the reality of companies that might have hundreds of even thousands of different applications and data sources, those cloud journeys are very different for each and every one of them. So how do we combine our capabilities between Nutanix and Microsoft to be sure that that hybrid cloud journey that every one is gonna take can be simplified, you can take away the risk, the complexity on that transformation creates tons of value. >>And that's what a customers are asking us today. Either because they're trying to move and modernize their environment to Azure, or they're bringing their, you know, a enable services and cluster and data services on premise to the Nutanix platform, we together can combine and solve for that adding more value for any scenario that customers may have. And this is not once and done, this is not that we building, we forget it, it's a partnership that keeps evolving and also includes work that we do with our solution sales alliances that go to market seems to be sure that the customers have diverse service and support to make, to, to create the outcomes that they're asking us to deliver. >>And can you comment a little bit further, maybe both of you, of our, starting with you and then Michael, what are some of those business outcomes that customers are coming to Microsoft and Nutanix saying, help us, we've gotta be more competitive, we've gotta get, we've gotta be able to get solutions to market faster, et cetera. What are those key outcomes that these two powerhouse companies are helping customers to unlock? >>Yeah, I will say, look, the range of imperative of customers varies greatly depending on the industry, depending on the positioning. I think that the fundamental question is given your imperative, do we have the ability to empower you to achieve the outcome that you want? And these days, of course, the tons of companies, given the the business context that are being very conscious on cost and efficiency, how do you do more with less? How do I keep innovating? Because innovation will be at the heart of the solutions, but I do that on my own pace with my own priorities. That higher level answer is the one that we're enabling through partnership, like the one we're we're sharing today to the market with Nutanix. >>Yeah, I think >>From you, >>Go ahead. I was just gonna comment ON'S pump as well is that absolutely really depends on the customer and what they're trying to achieve, right? As they think about the next set of innovation that they're trying to develop. But for example, we take a, a web, a use case that we've seen with some of the customers is like migration to the cloud, right? And you know, a lot of companies, they embark on that migration. We see there's a lot of data that says basically, you know, it's much harder than it looks, right? And a lot of these projects become years behind schedule and millions and millions of dollars over budget, right? So reducing that risk and saying, Hey, how do I, can I land in Azure? And then bit by bit start thinking, how do I continue to innovate to get, since now I have easy and secure access while I'm in Azure with, and seek with Nutanix Nutanix clusters on Azure to continue my innovation by taking advantage of Azure native services, right? But again, like Aaro said, it's, it really depends on what the customer goals are. >>Talk to me a little bit about the customers that were in the beta, as we mentioned, Alva, the, the preview was oversubscribed. So as I talked about earlier, the demand is clearly there. Talk to me about some of the customers and beta, you can even anonymize them or maybe talk about them by industry, but what, what were some of the, the key things they came to these two companies looking to, to solve, get to the cloud faster, be able to deliver the same sets of services with familiarity so that from a, they're able to do more with less? >>Maybe I could take that one out of our rebuttal lines. It does means, but yeah, so like, like, like you mentioned, Lisa, you know, we've had a great preview oversubscribe, we had lots of CU not only s but also partners battle solution. And you know, we're obviously very pleased now to have offered to everyone else, but one of our customers Camp Day was really looking forward to seeing how do they leverage Nstitute and Azure to, like I mentioned, reduce that work workload, migration and risk for that and making sure, hey, some of the applications maybe we are going to go and rewrite them, refactor them to take them natively to Azure. But there's others where we wanna lift and shift them to Azure. But like I mentioned, it's not just customers, right? We've been working with partners like PCs and Citrix where they share the same goal as Microsoft and Nutanix provides that superior customer experience where whatever the operating model might be for that customer. So they're going to be leveraging NC two on Azure to really provide those hybrid cloud experiences for their solutions on top of building on top of the, the work that we've done together. >>So this really kind of highlights the power of that Ava, the power of the ISB ecosystem and what you're all able to do together to really help customers achieve the outcomes that they individually need. >>A absolutely, look, I mean, we strongly believe that when you partner properly with an isv, you get to the, to the magical framework, one plus one equals three or more because you are combining superpowers and you are solving the problem on behalf of the customer so they can focus on their business. And this is a wonderful example, a very inspiring one where when you see the risk, the complexity that all these projects normally have, and Michael did a great job framing some of them, and the difference that they have now by having NC to on Azure, it's night and day. And we are fully committed to keep driving this innovation, this partnership on service of our customers and our power ecosystem. Because at the same time, making our powers more successful, generating more value for customers and for all of us >>Of, Can you comment a little bit on the go to market? Like how, how do your joint customers engage? What does that look like from their perspective? >>You know, when you think about the go to market, a lot of that is we have, you know, teams all over the world that will be aligned and working together in service of the customer. There's marketing and demand generation that will be done, that will be also work on joy opportunities that we will manage as well as a very tight connection on projects to be sure that the support experience for customers is well aligned. I don't wanna talk, go into too much detail, but I would like to guarantee that our intent is not only to create an incredible technological experience, which the, the development teams are done, but also a great experience for the customers that are going through these projects, interacting with both teams that will work as one in service to empower the customer to achieve the outcomes that they need. >>Yeah, and just to comment maybe a little bit more on what all Borrow said, you know, it's not just about the product integration area, it's really the full end to end experience for our customers. So when we embarked on this partnership with Microsoft, we really thought about what is the right product integration and with our engineering teams, but also how do we go and talk to customers with value prop together and all the way down through to support. So we actually even worked on how do we have a single joint support for our customer. So it doesn't really matter how the customer engages, they really see this as an end to end single solution across two companies. >>And that's so critical given just the, the natural challenges that that organizations face and the dynamics of the macro economic environment that we're living in. For them, for customers to be able to have that really seamless single point of interaction, they want that consistent experience on-prem to the cloud. But from an engagement perspective that you're, what sounds like what you're doing, Michael and Avaro is, is goes a long way to really giving customers a much more streamlined approach so that they can be laser focused on solving the business problems that they have, being competitive, getting products to market faster and all that good stuff. Michael, I wonder if you could comment on maybe the cultural alignment that Nutanix and Microsoft have. I know Microsoft's partner program has been around for decades and decades. Michael, what does that cultural alignment look like from, you know, the sales and marketing folks down to engineering, down to support? >>Yeah, I think honestly that was, that was something that kind of fit really well and we saw really a lot alignment from day one. Of course, you know, Nutanix cares a lot about our customer experience, not just within the products, but again, through the entire life cycle to support and so forth. And Microsoft's no different, right? There's a huge emphasis on making sure that we provide the best customer experience and that we're also focusing on solving real world customer problems, right? And really focus on the biggest problems the customers have. So really culturally it felt, it felt really natural. It felt like we were a single team, although it's, you know, two bar drug organizations working together, but I really felt like a single team working day in, day out on, on solving customer problems together. >>Yeah. >>Let me, Go ahead. >>No, I will say, well say Michael, I think that the, the one element that we complement, I think the answer was super complete, is the, the fact that we work together from the outside in, look at it from the customer lenses is extremely powerful and far as I mentioned, because that's what it's all about. And when you put the customer at the center, everything else falls in part on its its own place very, very quickly. And then it's hard work and innovation and, you know, doing what we do best, which is combining over superpowers in service of that customer. So that was the piece that, you know, I i, I cannot emphasize enough how inspiring he's been. And again, the, the response for the previous is a great example of the opportunity that we have in there. >>Yeah. And, and you know, with every hard problem there's challenges along the way, right? And so I'm actually really proud of both of the teams that stepped up and, you know, figure it out. How do we go solve some of these technical problems? How do we go solve, making sure we continue to provide world class support for sports organizations? And, you know, these weren't easy things to solve and, and you know, everyone really stepped up the challenge >>And you've taken a lot of complexity out of the customer environment and I can imagine that the GA of Nutanix cloud clusters on Azure is gonna be a huge benefit for customers and every industry. Last question guys, I wanna get both your perspectives on Michael, we'll start with you and then Lvra will wrap with you. What's next? Obviously a lot of exciting stuff. What's next for the partnership of these, these two superheroes together, Michael? >>Yeah, so I think our goal doesn't change, right? I think our North star is to continue to make it easy for our customers to adopt, migrate and modernize their applications, leveraging Nutanix and Microsoft Azure, right? And I think NC two and Azure is just the start of that. So kind of maybe more immediate, like, you know, we mentioned obviously we have, we announced the GA that's J in Americas kind of the next more immediate step over the next few months. Look for us to continue expanding beyond Americas and making sure that we have support across all the global regions. And then beyond that, you know, again, as of our mentioned is working from kind of the customers backwards. So we're, we're not, no, we're not waiting for the ga, we're already working on the next set of solutions saying what are other problems that customer facing, especially across as they're running their workloads cross on premises and public cloud, and what are the next set of solutions that we can deliver to the market to solve those real challenges for them. >>It sounds really strongly that, that the partnership here, we're talking about Nutanix and Microsoft. It's really Nutanix and Microsoft with the customer at this center. I think you've do both, done a great job of articulating that there's laser focus there. Of our last word to you, what excites you about the momentum that Microsoft and Nutanix have for the customers? >>Well, thank you Lisa. Michael, I will tell you, when you hear the customer feedback on the impact that you're having, that's the most inspiring part because you know, you're generating value, you know, you're making a difference, especially in this complex times when the, the partnership gets tested where the, the right, you know, relationship gets built. We're being there for customers is extremely inspired. Now, as Michael mentioned, this is all about what customer needs and how do we go even ahead of the game so that we're ready not for what is the problem today, but the opportunities that we have tomorrow to keep working on this. We have a huge task ahead to be sure that we bring this value globally in the right way with the right quality. Every word, which is a, is never a small fist as you may imagine. You know, the, the world is a big place, but also the next wave of innovations that will be customer driven to keep and, and raise the bar on how, how much more value can we unlock and how much empowerment can we make for the customer to keep in innovating at their own pace, in their own terms. >>Absolutely that customer empowerment's key. Guys, it's been a pleasure talking to you about the announcement, Nutanix cloud clusters on Azure of our Michael, thank you for your time, your inputs and helping us understand the impact that this powerhouse relationship is making. >>Thank you for having Lisa and thank you Avara for joining me. >>Thank you, Lisa, Michael, it's been fantastic and looking forward and thank you to the audience for being here with us. Yeah, stay >>Tuned. Exactly. Thanks to the audience. >>Exactly. >>And stay tuned. There's more to come. We have coming up next, a deeper conversation on the announcement with Dave Valante and product execs from both and Microsoft. You won't wanna miss it.

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

>>Hey guys, and gals. Welcome back to Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here at Coupa inspire 2022 with about 2,500 folks. Very excited to be back in person. I can assure you that is the vibe that is here to be. You joins me next to the managing director at KPMG Toby. It's great to have you on the program. >>Thanks. It's great to be here. >>Isn't it great to be back? I know it feels so normal. We were talking before we went live, that it feels normal. >>It does. It does. And it feels great. And after a great kickoff with, uh, with Rob >>Fantastic, Rob Bernstein has, and Barbara Corcoran, Rob has probably the highest energy of a CEO that I've ever gotten to work with. So you always know you're in for a good high energy conversation. Then Barbara Corcoran coming in, Jon Taffer with bar rescue is it's a, been a great morning so far. So you let's talk about you, you specialize in digital transformation within the procurement and the contract management spaces. Talk to me a little bit about that. >>Yeah, absolutely. You know, I, uh, I love helping folks to re-imagine their, uh, operating models to solve today's challenges. And there are so many challenges coming out in this post COVID world, um, that many of our clients are dealing with. And, and I'm never short on phone calls and, you know, uh, from, from my clients reaching out for help, um, to really figure out how to retool, um, and, and, and really help themselves to transform, to be able to address the, the, the changes to come. >>I heard a really smart description of the last two years today, compressed transformation. We've been talking about digital transformation for years, and then we've also been talking about it's acceleration during the COVID era, but the compressed transformation, I thought that's probably something that's here to stay. Nobody's going to want access to older, less data slower. >>Yep. >>They're just not >>A hundred percent. What >>Are some of the trends that you've observed in your role in the last couple of years? >>Yeah, I, I absolutely believe that folks that took advantage of that digital transformation pre pandemic have actually been able to fare much better than those that have held off on those investments. Um, for whatever reasons, you know, there are always different priorities, but those that have actually gotten that journey started, um, pre pandemic have definitely fared, uh, for, well, I think the trends that I'm seeing today, the CPO's challenge, um, and there are many challenges, um, but you know, the, you know, coming out of the, uh, post COVID era, you are now recovering and ramping up production as a result, your buying activities increasing, right. Um, and, and other ways other than increasing, um, activity. There's also the changing of requirements. So, you know, the folks in the front office are looking at new technologies to innovate new products and services, and that's going to change what the, the mix of the skills and resources that you need in the back office. >>Um, in addition to that, um, there are other requirements like ESG. And so as you're thinking about retooling and being able to, um, buy more sustainably or drive diversity, um, with the spend that you have, that's also changing the skill mix that you have. And I think on top of speak, uh, on top of that, um, the skills and the talent, we are dealing with the, a unfortunate situation that many companies are with the, uh, you know, the great resignation where the talent is, has as quickly exited the workforce. Um, and, uh, and, and with the demand increasing and changing, that puts everyone in a tough spot. And so those are really the big challenges that I've seen with the clients. Most recently, as we're coming out of COVID >>Of your customer conversations, escalated up the C-suite you talk, you mentioned the chief procurement officer. If we think of every company, these days has to be a data company to be successful. If they're not, they're probably not going to be around. Are you noticing that from a supply chain perspective within procurement and contract management, is that escalating the C-suite to be much more of a C-suite or board level initiative? >>Absolutely. Absolutely. I think what folks have realized in many of their, even the earlier digital transformation efforts, it was very geared around automating and streamlining transactions and processes, not so much putting data at the core. Yes, you would get intelligence out of that, but we hadn't architected your entire organization around data and good quality data and what is needed, um, to be able to actually translate that data to meaningful insights, to make the decisions or drive, um, visibility within to your, into your supply chain. Um, so when you think about things that are, um, such as ESG, where you really need to know, um, your tier one, tier two tier three suppliers, and all the impacts that that has, um, in order to drive to those, um, ESG objectives that you're telling your investors, you're telling your customers, and you're telling your, um, your employees about it's very important. You have to be centered around data and be able to be able to see their entire supply chain. And if you weren't, if you weren't architected to do so, doing it as an afterthought is very costly because you've already made those investments >>Very costly. And also, I mean, from a business perspective, I think, you know, we, we talk so often Toby and you probably do as well about it, business alignment. It's one of those, it's like digital transformation. It's almost a buzzword if you will, but it's critical because I'm seeing a lot of data and research from, from folks like Gardner that are showing that massive percentages of businesses believe that the technology is really the driver and the fuel of the business going forward. So no longer can it and lines of business be separated. >>Yeah, I, I totally agree. I actually think that when I mentioned about new skills, if you think about the next generation and the new operating models, um, uh, you know, the, the, the new folks coming out of college have to have that skill set because process and technology are, are, are completely linked. Um, and I think that the organizations, the future and the sick, the most successful ones will know how to actually be more human centric and be able to harness the data through the technologies. So I'll actually allow you and I to do what we do best, right, which is collaborate and negotiate deals work on our relationship versus focused on the technology or entering data into forms and all the administrative components that, uh, many of my clients are plagued with today, >>Collaboration, I think has maybe become even more important in the last two years that we've been so limited about how to collaborate. Thankfully, we have a lot of technologies to do that, but when I think of Coupa collaboration, community are two words that jump out. Talk to me a little bit about from an, a partnership perspective alignment there with the collaborative spirit at KPMG. >>Yeah, absolutely. Um, you know, for, for us, uh, I recently just presented on a very similar topic that nothing great in business is done by a single person. And it takes partners to be able to drive the innovation needed to solve the new challenges of tomorrow. And, and I see our relationship with that. You know, they offer a platform, they offer a method to get access to the data and simplify it in a way for our clients so that they can focus on the relationships and driving the collaboration with their suppliers. And, and I think that that's, that's the thought leadership, uh, in partnership with, uh, with them that we'd like to bring to the table. >>Speaking of alignment between KPMG and Qubit. Talk to me a little bit about ESG as, as sort of a new initiative within KPMG. Talk to me a little bit about that. And what's some of the high level objectives are >>Absolutely. Um, I wouldn't say that it's, it's, it's new. I think it's always been there and there's always been a focus, but I think the recent events and with the regulatory environment changing as well, and as with consumers, consumer behavior, driving and investor community driving towards, um, uh, ESG, I think that is quickly changing how companies are prioritizing that within the Mo amongst everything else that they have. And as a result, I think the CPO's role in that equation is ever so important when it comes to delivering and operationalizing ESG. >>I imagine it, the CPS role must be a lot more strategic these >>Days >>Because they really have to be kind of a transformation change agent. >>Yeah. And actually in most cases, the CPO is perfect for that because that's been their role, um, in, uh, in, in, uh, in many cases before. Um, and I think, yeah, this is just yet another dimension that they didn't have to attack and, and incorporate into the, uh, into the process of selecting the right partner or the right supplier within their, um, within the, uh, with, with who they want to onboard for, for the company. >>Got it. Okay. Let's talk about advice now for companies that are either in the early stages of the supply chain transformation really digitizing, how do they get started? Is it too late for some? >>No, I don't think it's ever too late. I don't think, I, I think, um, I don't think it's too late, you know, and especially with the very big focus on digital and tech these days, sometimes being the late, being late to the game allows folks to actually work out the kinks for, you know, the bleeding edge technologies. And so that makes it even less risky for them to adopt in, in many cases. Um, that's, that's, uh, that, that's what we've seen, but, you know, I think the advice is get educated, uh, really just understand as much as you can around what other people are doing. Are there other, um, uh, peer group, uh, companies like yours, you know, like themselves that are actually going through the transformation or have gone before and just kind of understand what were the drivers of that strategy and what were the outcomes that you can learn from them, get help from externals. >>Um, and whether they be technology partners, consultants, and actually hiring new skills and bringing in new perspectives to help you to own and drive that strategy important. This is super important and you can't outsource these things, right. This needs to come from within, especially when you think about things as purposeful and impactful as ESG. Um, those, those cannot be outsourced. Um, and I think those would be the, uh, the kind of the two key things. Um, but I always also say, um, take an outward in approach, as you're thinking about your new strategy, focus on what your employees are saying about, you know, your supply chain and how easy it is to actually understand and, and work within your supply chain. Talk to your suppliers, talk to your internal business partners, to really reflect and understand how do you make this process as easy as possible for them to comply with. >>I think one of the things I was reading, uh, in preparation for coming here is that some, some survey, a survey that that Cooper did of about 800 decision makers. And one of the things that was overwhelming as a theme is that a lot of organizations don't feel that they have the right data visibility to drive an ESG strategic initiative. So what Coupa does providing that visibility and the ability to collaborate and share across the community is, seems to be something that's going to be a business critical must have going forward. >>Yeah, a hundred percent, you know, many, uh, many of our clients operate under, you know, uh, not under like mandates or compliance, driven, um, kind of policies in the commercial world, many cases you have to influence the buying behavior. And so you can't do that without data. I'd like to think in this day and age presented with the right supplier options with them at the right point in time, you're able to influence and drive the spend to diverse candidates, sustainable options, you know, and there's, you know, not just savings, not just the lowest cost option, but there's so many other things to consider in this day and age. And I think that's where it's so important to be able to have a platform like Hoopa, to be able to gather that data acquire external sources of data, such as ESG related data and make that to, um, to, to all parties, um, and be that source of truth so that you can drive the >>Here's some truth. And also even something that was talked about this morning during the keynote is accountability. And have you heard Jon Taffer from bar rescue talking this morning, but he was talking about an 120 bar rescues. He goes, I've never met one person that has admitted from day one of the four days. They shoot that I'm responsible for the reason that my business is not successful. He goes, everybody has an excuse. There's no accountability until you really force someone to take probably that hard look in the mirror that they don't want to take, but that accountability within organizations within an overall business is critical. >>Yeah, I think, uh, I absolutely believe that went away to solve that is providing the data and making it available. And, um, and really once again, I think it goes back to driving that behavior that you want. And I think it starts with, uh, with, with leadership and I think the accountability, accountability of leadership, and to be able to drive that type of culture within your organization. Um, but absolutely you need data to be able to do that and, and be able to monitor that as well, you know, as a leader to make sure that that accountability is appropriately distributed. >>Right. But one of the things, I mean, I think patients has been in short supply the last two years have been, we've learned that. I think also that another thing we've learned is that access to real-time data is no longer, oh, then that would be great. It's you've got to have that for your business to be differentiated because the, you know, if we think about the consumer side, the consumers are so vocal on things like social media, if the experience isn't tailored, personalized and instantaneous, We have a very short Rob talked about the very short attention span that his kids have. I'm like three minutes. We don't even have that in business or on the consumer side. I don't think. >>Yeah, I, yeah, I see that in my kids and what he said today was, was spot on. Um, so, you know, when I think about my career and where I'm at, and he said the same thing, I mean, our kids are coming into the, there'll be in procurement organizations very soon, sooner than, you know, then, then I like to admit. Um, and as a result, I think that, um, we talked a bit about talent shortage and the challenge with keeping talent. And I think that what you had just expressed is very important is that that experience for the employee, but you come into a workforce and they expect you to have these quick turnarounds, but you've, you offered them tools that require spreadsheets and old archaic systems to be able to solve today's challenges. I think that you're not going to be able to retain your talent right along. Right. >>That's a great point. That's an absolutely fantastic point. Last question for you before we wrap here is so the changes that organizations need to make with respect to being prepared for ESG reporting requirements that are coming down the pike, obviously being, having a data strategy has got to be one of us. >>Yeah, absolutely. I think, um, I think we, many procurement organizations were really geared around savings and a very compliance, driven manner. And when you think about ESG, I think you gotta be very data-driven. Um, and so that should be a priority focus of how do you retool yourself to be able to acquire mass amounts of data, figuring out where you need to go, um, to get that data, whether they be third parties, whether they be directly from the supplier, um, and be able to aggregate it and provide the insight into those reporting standards that are required. Um, and then to be able to actually measure progress along those sustainability or diversity goals that it might be established at, at, at the leadership level. So I think it's coming down the pike. It's a matter of time. I think it's, I think it's, uh, you know, it's something that I've been waiting for to see. Um, and it's interesting to see how, uh, how quickly that it's, it's come down. Um, but I think with the regulatory compliance coming down, um, this is going to be moving very quick and people need to get ready. >>That's good. They need to be ready. Excellent to be thank you for joining me on the program today, talking about what you were doing at KPMG, what it's doing with Kupa and how organizations really should be thinking about and approaching supply chain, digital transformation. We appreciate your insights. >>Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much. All >>Right. For Toby, you I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube in Las Vegas at Cooper inspire 2022 stick around. My next guest will join me shortly.

(soft upbeat music) (crowd chattering) >> Over the past 18 to 24 months, chief information security officers have dramatically changed their priorities. They had to, to support the remote work trend. So things like endpoint security, cloud security, and in particular identity and access management became top of mind. And a whole shift occurred. And we're going to talk about that today. Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE. We're here at AWS re:Invent 2021. Katie Curtin-Mestre is here. She's the vice president of marketing at CyberArk and Bar Lavie senior product manager at Cloud Identity and Security. Bar, sorry for botching your name, but folks welcome to theCUBE, great to see you. >> Glad to be here. >> Great to hear. >> So Katie, upfront I talked about some of those trends. It's been a hugely dramatic shift away from this kind of traditional approaches to cyber. What are some of the trends that CyberArk has seen? >> Well, Bar is going to take the first part of this. >> Great, just go on. (Bar laughing) >> Yeah, so one trait that we are seeing is that cloud migration projects accelerate as organization turbocharged digital transformation. Is they're a looking to take advantage off the agility and operational efficiency of the cloud providers. Some of the concerns that I can think about one of those is the reducing the potential loss of data that is caused due to the excessive access to resources. And the other one is provision secure and scalable access to resources. And the third one would be implementing least privilege for all type of identity whether if it's a human identity or non-human identity. >> And on that end Dave, we recently commissioned a survey with the Cloud Security Alliance. We co-sponsored a survey and found that 94% of respondents said that securing human permissions was a top security challenge and machine identities weren't far behind at 77%. Another challenge that we're hearing from our customers is the need to secure the secrets used by applications. So we're really excited by today's news from AWS. They announced some new capabilities with a code guru called Secret Detector that helps to find unsecured secrets in applications. And the other concern that we're hearing from our customers is the need to monitor and audit the activity of all of their cloud identities. This is really important to help their security operation teams with their investigations and also to meet audit and compliance requirements. >> So the definition of identity is now more encompassing and includes like you say machines, right? It's not just people anymore. Of course we've seen, you know, phishing has always been problematic. It's escalated daily, right? We get phished. I mean, are we going to see the day where we finally get rid of passwords? Is that even possible? But maybe we could talk a little bit about sort of identity, how identity is evolving, this notion of zero trust. Zero trust used to be a Password. So, maybe Bar you could talk a little bit about what you're seeing in terms of identity access management. Maybe privileged access management are those things coming together? How does CyberArk think about those things? >> You going to take this one Katie >> Well, what CyberArk sees is we definitely see a trend where access management and privileged access management are coming together. Security teams are struggling too many security tools and they're really looking to standardize on a small handful of vendors and get more bank for their buck from their security investment. So we're definitely seeing that trends of unified platforms across access and privileged access management to secure any identity, whether human or machine from kind of like your standard workforce identity, to those who have highly privileged access. >> I don't know if you've ever, ever seen that chart. I think Optiv puts it out. It's consultancy. And it's this eye chart. It's a taxonomy of all the different security I have published at a number of times. it's mind boggling. So CSOs, SecOps teams they have to manage all this complexity, all these different tools and you ask CSOs what's your biggest challenge? They'll tell you lack of skills. We just can't find people. We can't train them fast enough. So what's CyberArk working on? What are some of the key initiatives that you guys are focused on that people should know about? >> Well, one of the things that we're working on is actually, and we see a greater adoption of it is something that was actually started as an initiative within our innovation lab. It's a CyberArk Clouding Titles Manager, which help to detect and remediate excessive permissions to cloud resources for any type of identity. I mentioned before the both human and non-human. Which are the something that you were looking to to secure. Another solution that we see a great adoption is our circuit ranger which helps organization to re remove the necessity of having a hard-coded credentials within application. It can be either traditional applications for their own premise or even cloud native applications. And peg this also into your CI CD pipeline. And we are actually innovating in these type of area with AWS as well. So this is one of the great things that we were doing. Also we're investing on a new solution for just-in-time access for cloud VMs and cloud consoles. And all of these solutions that I've mentioned and more to that are part of our identity security platform which came to provide you with the suite of solution to apply least privilege and secure access to any type of resource from any device for any type of identity. >> So is that best practice? I mean, if you had to, you know, advise a customer on best practice in identity, how should they think about that? Where should they start? >> Well, on the best practices front we recently published an ebook with AWS. And it's focused on the shared responsibility model and foundational best practices for securing cloud access. And it's all part of an initiative that CyberArk has, which is our identity security blueprint. Which guides customers on how best to move forward with their identity security initiatives. >> So where do they start? First of all how do they get that is it a security website or? >> It's available on our website and we detailed some of the steps that that customers can take. For example, one of the steps that we recommend to our customers is to limit the use of the root account and also to very much lock down the root account to use federated identities whenever possible. And Bar already alluded to some of the other best practices that we recommend. Such as removing hard-coded credentials from secrets. Another best practice that we really recommend to our customers is to have a consistent set of controls across their entire estate. Both from on-premises to the cloud. And this really helps to reduce complexity by having a unified and consistent set of security controls. And in fact one of our customers who is one of the world's largest convenience chains. They're using CyberArk to secure the credentials both for their on-premise servers and their AWS EC2 instances. And they're also using us as well to secure the credentials used by applications in the CI CD pipeline. So getting to those consistent controls is another best practice we highly recommend. >> So, consistent identity across your state, whether it's on-prem or in the cloud. And then also you've referenced CI CD a couple of times. So it's it's developer friendly? Are you're designing security in as opposed to a bolt on after the fact? And then you mentioned root accounts access. Is that where privilege access management comes in? Are we going to treat everybody as privileged access? Or how do you deal with machines? You mentioned hard-coded? Like some machines are hard-coded. Like I would imagine a lot of these internet cameras are exposures. How do you deal with all that? I mean, do you just have to cycle through and modernize your fleet of machines? Are there ways in which CyberArk can help sort of anticipate that or defend against that? >> Well, CyberArk can help on, on multiple fronts. Of course you need to secure the root account but that's just only one example of needing to secure a privilege access. And one thing that customers need to understand is that now going forward, any identity can have privilege access at any point in time, because at any point and time, you yourself could have access to a highly sensitive system or have access to highly sensitive data. So with CyberArk we help our customers understand which of their applications and infrastructure have the most sensitive data and then work with them to secure the access to that data whether that access be a human access or machine or programmatic access. >> So what are the customer implications of all this? I mean pre pandemic, you know, this whole zero trust thing with password. Now it's like fundamental premise. You don't trust to verify. What are the customer implications as we enter this new era ransomware through the roof, the adversaries are well funded highly capable. They're living off the land, they're island hopping. They're, doing self forming malware. It's a new world, right? So what are the customer implications? What should they be thinking about? You know, they don't have unlimited budget. So what's the advice? >> Well, eventually at the end of the day, there are all kinds of best practices of how to applies security. I think that both AWS have their own best practices and CyberArk has also our own best practices calling the blueprint which help organization to focus on to crown jewel on the most important stuff. And then going deeper and lower within each and every initiative. And on each and every level, try to investigate what you're trying to protect and what kind of security mechanisms can be applied in order to protect both access and maintaining that no one whether if it's internal or external attacker can gain access to it. >> Yup, I think the other implication for customers and you already alluded to it is really to continue to move forward with their zero trust initiatives. I think that that is a foundational going forward. Now that remote work is kind of the defacto norm and we can no longer rely on the traditional network perimeter. And so in this new environment securing your identities is the new perimeter. So that's an important implication for customers. And then another one that I would mention is that security teams need to work more closely with their dev and dev ops counterparts to bacon security earlier. It really can't be that security is brought in after the fact. Security very much needs to shift left and be included in the very early stages of application development before an application comes to production. >> I mean, I think it's that last point but all good points. The last point was a huge theme at CubeCon this year. That notion of shift left developers, you've mentioned the CI CD pipeline several times. I mean I think that is, you know, especially when you think about machines and the edge and IoT. I used to say all the time, you know that you used to put a moat around the castle, build a wall, protect the queen. Well, the queen has left the castle. But now with the pandemic, we've seen the effects of that. And as I say, the adversaries are seeing huge opportunities. Well-funded super sophisticated. It's like it makes Stuxnet look like a kindergarten. I know that was still >> That's scary. still pretty sophisticated. But I mean, look at what we saw with the government hack and solar winds, you know huge huge. But if we can talk to CSOs about that, they're like, you know, that's, we have to move fast. But they don't have unlimited budget, right? Cybersecurity is their number one initiative in terms of priorities. But then they have all these other things to fund. They have to fund a forced march to digital transformation, machine learning and AI, they're migrating to the cloud. They're driving automation. They're modernizing their application portfolio. So, security is still number one, isn't it? So it's a good business that you're in. >> Yes, and we really want to work with our CSOs so they can get the most investment out of what they're putting into CyberArk and the rest of their strategic security vendors. Because as you mentioned there's a talent shortage. So anything that we can do as vendors to make it easier for them to use our products and get more value from our solutions, is something that's really important. >> And automation is part of the answer but it's not the only answer, right? You got to follow the NIST framework and follow these best practices and keep fighting the fight. Guys. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It was great to have you. I'd love to have you back. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you for having us. >> All right. Our pleasure. All right, this is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. You're watching our coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. (gentle upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to the special CUBE presentation of the AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards Program. I'm here with the leader of the partner program, Sandy Carter, Vice President, AWS, Amazon Web Services @Sandy_Carter on Twitter, prolific on social and great leader. Sandy, great to see you again. And congratulations on this great program we're having here. In fact, thanks for coming out for this keynote. Well, thank you, John, for having me. You guys always talk about the coolest thing. So we had to be part of it. >> Well, one of the things that I've been really loving about this success of public sector we talked to us before is that as we start coming out of the pandemic, is becoming very clear that the cloud has helped a lot of people and your team has done amazing work, just want to give you props for that and say, congratulations, and what a great time to talk about the winners. Because everyone's been working really hard in public sector, because of the pandemic. The internet didn't break. And everyone stepped up with cloud scale and solve some problems. So take us through the award winners and talk about them. Give us an overview of what it is. The criteria and all the specifics. >> Yeah, you got it. So we've been doing this annually, and it's for our public sector partners overall, to really recognize the very best of the best. Now, we love all of our partners, John, as you know, but every year we'd like to really hone in on a couple who really leverage their skills and their ability to deliver a great customer solution. They demonstrate those Amazon leadership principles like working backwards from the customer, having a bias for action, they've engaged with AWS and very unique ways. And as well, they've contributed to our customer success, which is so very important to us and to our customers as well. >> That's awesome. Hey, can we put up a slide, I know we have slide on the winners, I want to look at them, with the tiles here. So here's a list of some of the winners. I see a nice little stars on there. Look at the gold star. I knows IronNet, CrowdStrike. That's General Keith Alexander's company, I mean, super relevant. Presidio, we've interviewed them before many times, got Palantir in there. And is there another one, I want to take a look at some of the other names here. >> In overall we had 21 categories. You know, we have over 1900 public sector partners today. So you'll notice that the awards we did, a big focus on mission. So things like government, education, health care, we spotlighted some of the brand new technologies like Containers, Artificial Intelligence, Amazon Connect. And we also this year added in awards for innovative use of our programs, like think big for small business and PTP as well. >> Yeah, well, great roundup, they're looking forward to hearing more about those companies. I have to ask you, because this always comes up, we're seeing more and more ecosystem discussions when we talk about the future of cloud. And obviously, we're going to, you know, be at Mobile World Congress, theCUBE, back in physical form, again, (indistinct) will continue to go on. The notion of ecosystem is becoming a key competitive advantage for companies and missions. So I have to ask you, why are partners so important to your public sector team? Talk about the importance of partners in context to your mission? >> Yeah, you know, our partners are critical. We drive most of our business and public sector through partners. They have great relationships, they've got great skills, and they have, you know, that really unique ability to meet the customer needs. If I just highlighted a couple of things, even using some of our partners who won awards, the first is, you know, migrations are so critical. Andy talked at Reinvent about still 96% of applications still sitting on premises. So anybody who can help us with the velocity of migrations is really critical. And I don't know if you knew John, but 80% of our migrations are led by partners. So for example, we gave awards to Collibra and Databricks as best lead migration for data as well as Datacom for best data lead migration as well. And that's because they increase the velocity of migrations, which increases customer satisfaction. They also bring great subject matter expertise, in particular around that mission that you're talking about. So for instance, GDIT won best Mission Solution For Federal, and they had just an amazing solution that was a secure virtual desktop that reduced a federal agencies deployment process, from months to days. And then finally, you know, our partners drive new opportunities and innovate on behalf of our customers. So we did award this year for P to P, Partnering to Partner which is a really big element of ecosystems, but it was won by four points and in quizon, and they were able to work together to implement a data, implement a data lake and an AI, ML solution, and then you just did the startup showcase, we have a best startup delivering innovation too, and that was EduTech (indistinct) Central America. And they won for implementing an amazing student registration and early warning system to alert and risks that may impact a student's educational achievement. So those are just some of the reasons why partners are important. I could go on and on. As you know, I'm so passionate about my partners, >> I know you're going to talk for an hour, we have to cut you off a little there. (indistinct) love your partners so much. You have to focus on this mission thing. It was a strong mission focus in the awards this year. Why are customers requiring much more of a mission focused? Is it because, is it a part of the criteria? I mean, we're seeing a mission being big. Why is that the case? >> Well, you know, IDC, said that IT spend for a mission or something with a purpose or line of business was five times greater than IT. We also recently did our CTO study where we surveyed thousands of CTOs. And the biggest and most changing elements today is really not around the technology. But it's around the industry, healthcare, space that we talked about earlier, or government. So those are really important. So for instance, New Reburial, they won Best Emission for Healthcare. And they did that because of their new smart diagnostic system. And then we had a partner when PA consulting for Best Amazon Connect solution around a mission for providing support for those most at risk, the elderly population, those who already had pre existing conditions, and really making sure they were doing what they called risk shielding during COVID. Really exciting and big, strong focus on mission. >> Yeah, and it's also, you know, we've been covering a lot on this, people want to work for a company that has purpose, and that has missions. I think that's going to be part of the table stakes going forward. I got to ask you on the secrets of success when this came up, I love asking this question, because, you know, we're starting to see the playbooks of what I call post COVID and cloud scale 2.0, whatever you want to call it, as you're starting to see this new modern era of success formulas, obviously, large scale value creation mission. These are points we're hearing and keep conversations across the board. What do you see as the secret of success for these parties? I mean, obviously, it's indirect for Amazon, I get that, but they're also have their customers, they're your customers, customers. That's been around for a while. But there's a new model emerging. What are the secrets from your standpoint of success? you know, it's so interesting, John, that you asked me this, because this is the number one question that I get from partners too. I would say the first secret is being able to work backwards from your customer, not just technology. So take one of our award winners Cognizant. They won for their digital tolling solution. And they work backwards from the customer and how to modernize that, or Pariveda, who is one of our best energy solution winners. And again, they looked at some of these major capital projects that oil companies were doing, working backwards from what the customer needed. I think that's number one, working backwards from the customer. Two, is having that mission expertise. So given that you have to have technology, but you also got to have that expertise in the area. We see that as a big secret of our public sector partners. So education cloud, (indistinct) one for education, effectual one for government and not for profit, Accenture won, really leveraging and showcasing their global expansion around public safety and disaster response. Very important as well. And then I would say the last secret of success is building repeatable solutions using those strong skills. So Deloitte, they have a great solution for migration, including mainframes. And then you mentioned early on, CloudStrike and IronNet, just think about the skill sets that they have there for repeatable solutions around security. So I think it's really around working backwards from the customer, having that mission expertise, and then building a repeatable solution, leveraging your skill sets. >> That's a great formula for success. I got you mentioned IronNet, and cybersecurity. One of things that's coming up is, in addition to having those best practices, there's also like real problems to solve, like, ransomware is now becoming a government and commercial problem, right. So (indistinct) seeing that happen a lot in DC, that's a front burner. That's a societal impact issue. That's like a cybersecurity kind of national security defense issue, but also, it's a technical one. And also public sector, through my interviews, I can tell you the past year and a half, there's been a lot of creativity of new solutions, new problems or new opportunities that are not yet identified as problems and I'd love to get your thoughts on my concern is with Jeff Bar yesterday from AWS, who's been blogging all the the news and he is a leader in the community. He was saying that he sees like 5G in the edge as new opportunities where it's creative. It's like he compared to the going to the home improvement store where he just goes to buy one thing. He does other things. And so there's a builder culture. And I think this is something that's coming out of your group more, because the pandemic forced these problems, and they forced new opportunities to be creative, and to build. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah, so I see that too. So if you think about builders, you know, we had a partner, Executive Council yesterday, we had 900, executives sign up from all of our partners. And we asked some survey questions like, what are you building with today? And the number one thing was artificial intelligence and machine learning. And I think that's such a new builders tool today, John, and, you know, one of our partners who won an award for the most innovative AI&ML was Kablamo And what they did was they use AI&ML to do a risk assessment on bushfires or wildfires in Australia. But I think it goes beyond that. I think it's building for that need. And this goes back to, we always talk about #techforgood. Presidio, I love this award that they won for best nonprofit, the Cherokee Nation, which is one of our, you know, Native American heritage, they were worried about their language going out, like completely out like no one being able to speak yet. And so they came to Presidio, and they asked how could we have a virtual classroom platform for the Cherokee Nation? And they created this game that's available on your phone, so innovative, so much of a builder's culture to capture that young generation, so they don't you lose their language. So I do agree. I mean, we're seeing builders everywhere, we're seeing them use artificial intelligence, Container, security. And we're even starting with quantum, so it is pretty powerful of what you can do as a public sector partner. >> I think the partner equation is just so wide open, because it's always been based on value, adding value, right? So adding value is just what they do. And by the way, you make money doing it if you do a good job of adding value. And, again, I just love riffing on this, because Dave and I talked about this on theCUBE all the time, and it comes up all the time in cloud conversations. The lock in isn't proprietary technology anymore, its value, and scale. So you starting to see builders thrive in that environment. So really good points. Great best practice. And I think I'm very bullish on the partner ecosystems in general, and people do it right, flat upside. I got to ask you, though, going forward, because this is the big post COVID kind of conversation. And last time we talked on theCUBE about this, you know, people want to have a growth strategy coming out of COVID. They want to be, they want to have a tail win, they want to be on the right side of history. No one wants to be in the losing end of all this. So last year in 2021 your goals were very clear, mission, migrations, modernization. What's the focus for the partners beyond 2021? What are you guys thinking to enable them, 21 is going to be a nice on ramp to this post COVID growth strategy? What's the focus beyond 2021 for you and your partners? >> Yeah, it's really interesting, we're going to actually continue to focus on those three M's mission, migration and modernization. But we'll bring in different elements of it. So for example, on mission, we see a couple of new areas that are really rising to the top, Smart Cities now that everybody's going back to work and (indistinct) down, operations and maintenance and global defense and using gaming and simulation. I mean, think about that digital twin strategy and how you're doing that. For migration, one of the big ones we see emerging today is data-lead migration. You know, we have been focused on applications and mainframes, but data has gravity. And so we are seeing so many partners and our customers demanding to get their data from on premises to the cloud so that now they can make real time business decisions. And then on modernization. You know, we talked a lot about artificial intelligence and machine learning. Containers are wicked hot right now, provides you portability and performance. I was with a startup last night that just moved everything they're doing to ECS our Container strategy. And then we're also seeing, you know, crippin, quantum blockchain, no code, low code. So the same big focus, mission migration, modernization, but the underpinnings are going to shift a little bit beyond 2021. >> That's great stuff. And you know, you have first of all people don't might not know that your group partners and Amazon Web Services public sector, has a big surface area. You talking about government, health care, space. So I have to ask you, you guys announced in March the space accelerator and you recently announced that you selected 10 companies to participate in the accelerated program. So, I mean, this is this is a space centric, you know, targeting, you know, low earth orbiting satellites to exploring the surface of the Moon and Mars, which people love. And because the space is cool, let's say the tech and space, they kind of go together, right? So take us through, what's this all about? How's that going? What's the selection, give us a quick update, while you're here on this space accelerated selection, because (indistinct) will have had a big blog post that went out (indistinct). >> Yeah, I would be thrilled to do that. So I don't know if you know this. But when I was young, I wanted to be an astronaut. We just helped through (indistinct), one of our partners reach Mars. So Clint, who is a retired general and myself got together, and we decided we needed to do something to help startups accelerate in their space mission. And so we decided to announce a competition for 10 startups to get extra help both from us, as well as a partner Sarafem on space. And so we announced it, everybody expected the companies to come from the US, John, they came from 44 different countries. We had hundreds of startups enter, and we took them through this six week, classroom education. So we had our General Clint, you know, helping and teaching them in space, which he's done his whole life, we provided them with AWS credits, they had mentoring by our partner, Sarafem. And we just down selected to 10 startups, that was what Vernors blog post was. If you haven't read it, you should look at some of the amazing things that they're going to do, from, you know, farming asteroids to, you know, helping with some of the, you know, using small vehicles to connect to larger vehicles, when we all get to space. It's very exciting. Very exciting, indeed, >> You have so much good content areas and partners, exploring, it's a very wide vertical or sector that you're managing. Is there any pattern? Well, I want to get your thoughts on post COVID success again, is there any patterns that you're seeing in terms of the partner ecosystem? You know, whether its business model, or team makeup, or more mindset, or just how they're organizing that that's been successful? Is there like a, do you see a trend? Is there a certain thing, then I've got the working backwards thing, I get that. But like, is there any other observations? Because I think people really want to know, am I doing it right? Am I being a good manager, when you know, people are going to be working remotely more? We're seeing more of that. And there's going to be now virtual events, hybrid events, physical events, the world's coming back to normal, but it's never going to be the same. Do you see any patterns? >> Yeah, you know, we're seeing a lot of small partners that are making an entrance and solving some really difficult problems. And because they're so focused on a niche, it's really having an impact. So I really believe that that's going to be one of the things that we see, I focus on individual creators and companies who are really tightly aligned and not trying to do everything, if you will. I think that's one of the big trends. I think the second we talked about it a little bit, John, I think you're going to see a lot of focus on mission. Because of that purpose. You know, we've talked about #techforgood, with everything going on in the world. As people have been working from home, they've been reevaluating who they are, and what do they stand for, and people want to work for a company that cares about people. I just posted my human footer on LinkedIn. And I got my first over a million hits on LinkedIn, just by posting this human footer, saying, you know what, reply to me at a time that's convenient for you, not necessarily for me. So I think we're going to see a lot of this purpose driven mission, that's going to come out as well. >> Yeah, and I also noticed that, and I was on LinkedIn, I got a similar reaction when I started trying to create more of a community model, not so much have people attend our events, and we need butts in the seats. It was much more personal, like we wanted you to join us, not attend and be like a number. You know, people want to be part of something. This seem to be the new mission. >> Yeah, I completely agree with that. I think that, you know, people do want to be part of something and they want, they want to be part of the meaning of something too, right. Not just be part of something overall, but to have an impact themselves, personally and individually, not just as a company. And I think, you know, one of the other trends that we saw coming up too, was the focus on technology. And I think low code, no code is giving a lot of people entry into doing things I never thought they could do. So I do think that technology, artificial intelligence Containers, low code, no code blockchain, those are going to enable us to even do greater mission-based solutions. >> Low code, no code reduces the friction to create more value, again, back to the value proposition. Adding value is the key to success, your partners are doing it. And of course, being part of something great, like the Global Public Sector Partner Awards list is a good one. And that's what we're talking about here. Sandy, great to see you. Thank you for coming on and sharing your insights and an update and talking more about the 2021, Global Public Sector partner Awards. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, John, always a pleasure. >> Okay, the Global Leaders here presented on theCUBE, again, award winners doing great work in mission, modernization, again, adding value. That's what it's all about. That's the new competitive advantage. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>Yeah, yeah. >>Welcome back to our final session in cultivating a data fluent culture track earlier today, we heard from experts like Valerie from the Data Lodge who shared best practices that you can apply to build that data flew into culture in your organization and tips on how to become the next analyst of the future from Yasmin at Comcast and Steve at all Terex. Then we heard from a captivating session with Cindy Hausen and Ruhollah Benjamin, professor at Princeton, on how now is our chance to change the patterns of injustice that we see have been woven into the fabric of society. If you do not have a chance to see today's content, I highly recommend that you check it out on demand. There's a lot of great information that you could start applying today. Now I'm excited to introduce our next session, which will take a look at how the democratization of data is powering digital transformation in the insurance industry. We have two prestigious guests joining us today. First Jim Bramblett, managing director of North America insurance practice, lead at its center. Throughout Jim's career, he's been focused on large scale transformation from large to midsize insurance carriers. His direct experience with clients has traditionally been in the intersection of technology, platform transformation and operating remodel redesign. We also have Michael cast Onus, executive VP and chief operating officer at DNA. He's responsible for all information technology, analytics and operating functions across the organization. Michael has led major initiatives to launch digital programs and incorporating modern AP I architectures ER, which was primarily deployed in the cloud. Jim, please take it away. >>Great. Thanks, Paula E thought we'd cover a few things today around around data. This is some of the trends we see in data within the insurance sector. And then I'll hand it over to Michael Teoh, take you through his story. You know, I think at the macro level, as we think about data and we think about data in the context of the insurance sector, it's interesting because the entire history of the insurance sector has been built on data and yet, at the same time, the entire future of it relies on that same data or similar similar themes for data. But but different. Right? So we think about the history, what has existed in an insurance companies. Four walls was often very enough, very enough to compete, right? So if you think about your customer data, claims, data, CRM, data, digital data, all all the data that was yeah, contained within the four walls of your company was enough to compete on. And you're able to do that for hundreds of years. But as we we think about now as we think about the future and the ability to kind of compete on data, this data comes from many more places just than inside your four walls. It comes from every device, every human, every vehicle, every property, every every digital interaction. Um in upon this data is what we believe insurers need to pivot to. To compete right. They need to be able to consume this data at scale. They need to be able to turn through this data to drive analytics, and they serve up insights based on those analytics really at the desktop of insurance professionals. And by the way, that has to be in the natural transition of national transaction. Of that employees work day. So an underwriter at a desktop claim him on the desktop, the sales associate of desktop. Those insights need to be served up at that point in time when most relevant. And you know. So if we think about how insurance companies are leveraging data, we see this really on kind of three horizons and starting from the left hand side of the page here, this is really brilliant basics. So how my leveraging core core data and core applied intelligence to monetize your existing strategy? And I think this brilliant based, brilliant basics concept is where most of most of my clients, at least within insurance are are today. You know, how are we leveraging data in the most effective way and putting it in the hands of business decision makers to make decisions largely through reporting and some applied intelligence? Um, Horizon two. We see, you know, definitely other industries blazing a trail here, and this is really about How do we integrate ecosystems and partners Now? I think within insurance, you know, we've had data providers forever, right? Whether it's NPR data, credit data risk data, you know, data aggregators and data providers have been a critical part of the insurance sector for for decades. I think what's different about this this ecosystem and partnership model is that it's much more Oneto one and it's much more, you know, kind of. How do we integrate more tightly and how do we become more embedded in each other's transactions? I think that we see some emergence of this, um, in insurance with automotive manufacturers with building management systems. But I think in the grand scheme of things, this is really very, very nascent for us as a sector. And I think the third horizon is is, you know, how do we fundamentally think about data differently to drive new business models? And I, you know, I don't know that we haven't ensure here in North America that's really doing this at any sort of scale. We certainly see pilots and proofs of concepts. We see some carriers in Europe farther down this path, but it's really it's really very new for us. A Z Think about these three horizons for insurance. So you know what's what's behind all this and what's behind. You know, the next powering of digital transformation and and we think at the end of the exercise, its data data will be the next engine that powers digital transformation. So in this exhibit, you know we see the three horizons across the top. You know, data is activated and activating digital transformation. And this, you know, this purple 3rd, 3rd road here is we think some of the foundational building blocks required to kind of get this right. But I think what's most important about about this this purple third bar here is the far right box, which is business adoption. Because you can build this infrastructure, you can have. You know, this great scalable cloud capability. Um, you can create a bunch of applications and intelligence, but unless it's adopted by the business, unless it's democratized, unless those insights and decisions air served up in the natural course of business, you're gonna have trouble really driving value. So that way, I think this is a really interesting time for data. We think this is kind of the next horizon to power the next age of digital transformation for insurance companies. With that brief prelude, I am, I'm honored. Thio, turn it over to Michael Stone Is the Cielo at CNN Insurance? >>Thanks, Jim, for that intro and very exciting Thio be here is part of part of beyond when I think a digital transformation within the context of insurance, actually look at it through the lens of competing in an era of near perfect information. So in order to be able to deliver all of the potential value that we talked about with regard to data and changing ecosystem and changing demands, the question becomes, How do you actually harness the information that's available to everybody to fundamentally change the business? So if you'll indulge me a bit here, let me tell you just a little bit more for those that don't know about insurance, what it really is. And I use a very long run on sentence to do that. It's a business model where capital is placed against risk in the form of products and associated services sold the customers through channels two companies to generate a return. Now, this sounds like a lot of other businesses in across multiple industries that were there watching today. But the difference within insurance is that every major word in that long run on sentence is changing sources of capital that we could draw on to be able to underwrite risk of going away. The nature of risk itself is changing from the perspective of policies that live six months to a year, the policies that could last six minutes. The products that we're creating are changing every day for our ability to actually put a satellite up in the air or ensure against the next pandemic. Our customers are not just companies or individuals, but they could be governments completely different entities than we would have been in sharing in the past and channels were changing. We sell direct, we sell through brokers and products are actually being embedded in other products. So you may buy something and not even know that insurance is a part of it. And what's most interesting here is the last word which is around return In the old world. Insurance was a cash flow business in which we could bring the premium in and get a level of interest income and being able to use that money to be able thio buffer the underwriting results that we would have. But those returns or dramatically reduced because of the interest income scenario, So we have to generate a higher rate of return. So what do we need to do? Is an insurance company in through this digital transformation to be able to get there? Well, fundamentally, we need to rethink how we're using information, and this is where thought spot and the cloud coming for us. We have two basic problems that we're looking to solve with information. The first one is information veracity. Do we believe it? When we get it? Can we actually trust it? Do we know what it means when we say that this is a policy in force or this is a new customer where this is the amount of attention or rate that we're going to get? Do we actually believe in that piece of data? The second is information velocity. Can we get it fast enough to be able to capitalize upon it? So in other words, we're We're working in a situation where the feedback loop is closing quickly and it's operating at a speed that we've never worked in before. So if we can't solve veracity and velocity, then we're never going to be able to get to where we need to go. So when we think of something like hot spot, what do we use it for? We use it to be able to put it in the hands of our business years so that they could ask the key questions about how the business is running. How much profit of my generating this month? What brokers do I need to talk? Thio. What is my rate retention? Look like what? The trends that I'm seeing. And we're using that mechanism not just to present nice visualizations, but to enable that really quick, dynamic question and answer and social, socially enabled search, which completely puts us in a different position of being able to respond to the market conditions. In addition, we're using it for pattern recognition. Were using it for artificial intelligence. We're gonna be capitalizing on the social aspect of of search that's that's enabled through thought spot and also connecting it into our advanced machine learning models and other capabilities that we currently have. But without it solving the two fundamental problems of veracity and velocity, we would be handicapped. So let me give you some advice about if I were in your position and you don't need to be in sleepy old industry like insurance to be able to do this, I'll leave you with three things. The first one is picking water holes so What are the things that you really want to be good at? What are the pieces of information that you really need to know more about? I mean, in insurance, its customers, it's businesses, locations, it's behavior. There are only a few water also really understand and pick those water holes that you're going to be really good at. The second is stand on the shoulders of giants. You know, in the world of technology, there's often a philosophy that says, Well, I can build it something better than somebody else create if I have it in house. But I'm happy to stand on the shoulders of giants like Thought Spot and Google and others to be able to create this capability because guess what? They're gonna out innovate any of the internal shops all day and every day. So don't be afraid. Thio. Stand side by side on the shoulders of giants as part of your journey. Unless you've got to build these organizations not just the technology for rapid experimentation and learning, because guess what? The moment you deliver insight, it begs another question, which also could change the business process, which could change the business model and If your organization the broader organization of business technology, analytics, customer service operations, etcetera is not built in a way that could be dynamic and flexible based on where the market is or is going, then you're gonna miss out on the opportunity. So again, I'm proud to be part of the fast black community. Really love the technology. And if if you look too, have the same kind of issues with your given industry about how you can actually speed up decision making, deliver insights and deliver this kind of search and recommended to use it. And with that, let's go to some questions. >>Awesome. Thank you so much, Michael and Jim for that in depth perspective and those tangible takeaways for our audience. We have a few minutes left and would love to ask a few questions. So here's the first one for Michael Michael. What are some of the most important things that you know now that you didn't know before you started this process? I think one of >>the things that's a great question. I think one of the things that really struck me is that, you know, traditional thinking would be very use case centric or pain point centric Show me, uh, this particular model or a particular question you want me to answer that can build your own analytics to do that or show me a deficiency in the system and I can go and develop a quick head that will do well, then you know, wallpaper over that particular issue. But what we've really learned is the foundation matters. So when we think about building things is building the things that are below the waterline, the pipes and plumbing about how you move data around how the engines work and how it all connects together gives you the above the waterline features that you could deliver to. You know, your employees into your customers much faster chasing use cases across the top above the waterline and ignoring what's below the water line to me. Is it really, uh, easy recipe too quick? Get your way to nothing. So again, focus on the foundation bill below the water line and then iterated above the water line that z what the lessons we've learned. It has been very effective for us. >>I think that's a very great advice for all those watching today on. But Here's one for Jim. Jim. What skills would you say are required for teams to truly adopt this digital transformation process? >>Yeah, well, I think that's a really good question, and I think I'd start with it's It's never one. Well, our experience has shown us number a one person show, right? So So we think to kind of drive some of the value that that that Michael spoke about. We really looked across disciplinary teams, which is a an amalgamation of skills and and team members, right? So if you think about the data science skills required, just kinda under under understand how toe toe work with data and drive insights, Sometimes that's high end analytic skills. Um, where you gonna find value? So some value architectural skills Thio really articulate, you know, Is this gonna move the needle for my business? I think there's a couple of critical critical components of this team. One is, you know, the operation. Whatever. That operation maybe has to be embedded, right, because they designed this is gonna look at a piece of data that seems interesting in the business Leader is going to say that that actually means nothing to me in my operation. So and then I think the last the last type of skill would be would be a data translator. Um, sitting between sometimes the technology in the business so that this amalgamation of skills is important. You know, something that Michael talked about briefly that I think is critical is You know, once you deliver insight, it leads to 10 more questions. So just in a intellectual curiosity and an understanding of, you know, if I find something here, here, the implications downstream from my business are really important. So in an environment of experimenting and learning thes thes cross discipline teams, we have found to be most effective. And I think we thought spot, you know, the platform is wired to support that type of analysis and wired to support that type of teaming. >>Definitely. I think that's though there's some really great skills. That's for people to keep in mind while they are going through this process. Okay, Michael, we have another question for you. What are some of the key changes you've had to make in your environment to make this digital transformation happen? >>That's a great question. I think if you look at our environment. We've got a mixture of, you know, space agent Stone age. We've got old legacy systems. We have all sorts of different storage. We have, you know, smatterings of things that were in cloud. The first thing that we needed to do was make a strong commitment to the cloud. So Google is our partner for for the cloud platform on unabashedly. The second thing that we needed to dio was really rethink the interplay between analytics systems in operational systems. So traditionally, you've got a large data warehouses that sit out over here that, you know, we've got some kind of extract and low that occurs, and we've got transactional operational systems that run the business, and we're thinking about them very differently from the perspective of bringing them together. How Doe I actually take advantage of data emotion that's in the cloud. So then I can actually serve up analytics, and I can also change business process as it's happening for the people that are transacting business. And in the meantime, I can also serve the multiple masters of total cost and consumption. So again, I didn't applications are two ships that pass in the night and never be in the world of Sienna. When you look at them is very much interrelated, especially as we want to get our analytics right. We want to get our A i m all right, and we want to get operational systems right By capturing that dated motion force across that architecture er that was an important point. Commit to the cloud, rethink the way we think analytics systems, work and operational systems work and then move them in tandem, as opposed to doing one without the other one in the vacuum. >>That's that's great advice, Michael. I think it's very important those key elements you just hit one question that we have final question we have for Jim. Jim, how do you see your client sustain the benefits that they've gained through this process? >>Yeah, it's a really good question. Um, you know, I think about some of the major themes around around beyond right, data fluency is one of them, right? And as I think about fluency, you only attain fluency through using the language every single day. They were day, week, over week, month over month. So you know, I think that applies to this. This problem too. You know, we see a lot of clients have to change probably two things at the same time. Number one is mindset, and number two is is structure. So if you want to turn these data projects from projects into processes, right, so so move away from spinning up teams, getting getting results and winding down. You wanna move away from that Teoh process, which is this is just the way working for these teams. Um, you have to change the mindset and often times you have to marry that with orb structure change. So So I'm gonna spin up these teams, but this team is going to deliver a set of insights on day. Then we're gonna be continuous improvement teams that that persist over time. So I think this shifting from project teams to persistent teams coupled with mindset coupled with with or structure changed, you know, a lot of times has to be in place for a period of time to get to get the fluency and achieve the fluency that that most organizations need. >>Thanks, Jim, for that well thought out answer. It really goes to show that the transformation process really varies when it comes to organizations, but I think this is a great way to close out today's track. I like to think Jim, Michael, as well as all the experts that you heard earlier today for sharing. There's best practice as to how you all can start transforming your organization's by building a data fluent culture, Um, and really empowering your employees to understand what data means and how to take actions with it. As we wrap up and get ready for the next session, I'd like to leave you all with just a couple of things. Number one if you miss anything or would like to watch any of the other tracks. Don't worry. We have everything available after this event on demand number two. If you want to ask more questions from the experts that you heard earlier today, you have a chance to do so. At the Meet The Experts Roundtable, make sure to attend the one for track four in cultivating a data fluent culture. Now, as we get ready for the product roadmap, go take a sip of water. This is something you do not want to miss. If you love what you heard yesterday, you're gonna like what you hear today. I hear there's some type of Indiana Jones theme to it all, so I won't say anything else, but I'll see you there.

>>Yeah, yeah. Welcome back to the third session in our building, A vibrant data ecosystem track. This session is unleash the power of your cloud data warehouse. So what comes after you've moved your data to the cloud in this session will explore White Enterprise Analytics is finally ready for the cloud, and we'll discuss how you can consume Enterprise Analytics in the very same way he would cloud services. We'll also explore where analytics meets cloud and see firsthand how thought spot is open for everyone. Let's get going. I'm happy to say we'll be hearing from two folks from thought spot today, Michael said Cassie, VP of strategic partnerships, and Vika Valentina, senior product marketing manager. And I'm very excited to welcome from our partner at AWS Gal Bar MIA, product engineering manager with Red Shift. We'll also be sharing a live demo of thought spot for BTC Marketing Analytics directly on Red Shift data. Gal, please kick us off. >>Thank you, Military. And thanks. The talks about team and everyone attending today for joining us. When we talk about data driven organizations, we hear that 85% of businesses want to be data driven. However, on Lee. 37% have been successful in We ask ourselves, Why is that and believe it or not, Ah, lot of customers tell us that they struggled with live in defining what being data driven it even means, and in particular aligning that definition between the business and the technology stakeholders. Let's talk a little bit. Let's look at our own definition. A data driven organization is an organization that harnesses data is an asset. The drive sustained innovation and create actionable insights. The super charge, the experience of their customers so they demand more. Let's focus on a few things here. One is data is an asset. Data is very much like a product needs to evolve sustained innovation. It's not just innovation innovation, it's sustained. We need to continuously innovate when it comes to data actionable insights. It's not just interesting insights these air actionable that the business can take and act upon, and obviously the actual experience we. Whether whether the customers are internal or external, we want them to request Mawr insights and as such, drive mawr innovation, and we call this the for the flywheel. We use the flywheel metaphor here where we created that data set. Okay, Our first product. Any focused on a specific use case? We build an initial NDP around that we provided with that with our customers, internal or external. They provide feedback, the request, more features. They want mawr insights that enables us to learn bringing more data and reach that actual data. And again we create MAWR insights. And as the flywheel spins faster, we improve on operational efficiencies, supporting greater data richness, and we reduce the cost of experimentation and legacy environments were never built for this kind of agility. In many cases, customers have struggled to keep momentum in their fleet, flywheel in particular around operational efficiency and experimentation. This is where Richie fits in and helps customer make the transition to a true data driven organization. Red Shift is the most widely used data warehouse with tens of thousands of customers. It allows you to analyze all your data. It is the only cloud data warehouse that sits, allows you to analyze data that sits in your data lake on Amazon, a street with no loading duplication or CTL required. It is also allows you to scale with the business with its hybrid architectures it also accelerates performance. It's a shared storage that provides the ability to scale toe unlimited concurrency. While the UN instant storage provides low late and say access to data it also provides three. Key asks that customers consistently tell us that matter the most when it comes to cost. One is usage based pricing Instead of license based pricing. Great value as you scale your data warehouse using, for example, reserved instances they can save up to 75% compared to on the mind demand prices. And as your data grows, infrequently accessed data can be stored. Cost effectively in S three encouraged through Amazon spectrum, and the third aspect is predictable. Month to month spend with no hitting charges and surprises. Unlike and unlike other cloud data warehouses, where you need premium versions for additional enterprise capabilities. Wretched spicing include building security compression and data transfer. >>Great Thanks. Scout um, eso. As you can see, everybody wins with the cloud data warehouses. Um, there's this evolution of movement of users and data and organizations to get value with these cloud data warehouses. And the key is the data has to be accessible by the users, and this data and the ability to make business decisions on the data. It ranges from users on the front line all the way up to the boardroom. So while we've seen this evolution to the Cloud Data Warehouse, as you can see from the statistic from Forrester, we're still struggling with how much of that data actually gets used for analytics. And so what is holding us back? One of the main reasons is old technology really trying to work with today's modern cloud data warehouses? They weren't built for it. So you run into issues of trying to do data replication, getting the data out of the cloud data warehouse. You can do analysis and then maintaining these middle layers of data so that you can access it quickly and get the answers you need. Another issue that's holding us back is this idea that you have to have your data in perfect shape with the perfect pipeline based on the exact dashboard unique. Um, this isn't true. Now, with Cloud data warehouse and the speed of important business data getting into those cloud data warehouses, you need a solution that allows you to access it right away without having everything to be perfect from the start, and I think this is a great opportunity for GAL and I have a little further discussion on what we're seeing in the marketplace. Um, one of the primary ones is like, What are the limiting factors, your Siegel of legacy technologies in the market when it comes to this cloud transformation we're talking about >>here? It's a great question, Michael and the variety of aspect when it comes to legacy, the other warehouses that are slowing down innovation for companies and businesses. I'll focus on 21 is performance right? We want faster insights. Companies want the ability to analyze MAWR data faster. And when it comes to on prem or legacy data warehouses, that's hard to achieve because the second aspect comes into display, which is the lack of flexibility, right. If you want to increase your capacity of your warehouse, you need to ensure request someone needs to go and bring an actual machine and install it and expand your data warehouse. When it comes to the cloud, it's literally a click of a button, which allows you to increase the capacity of your data warehouse and enable your internal and external users to perform analytics at scale and much faster. >>It falls right into the explanation you provided there, right as the speed of the data warehouses and the data gets faster and faster as it scales, older solutions aren't built toe leverage that, um, you know, they're either they're having to make technical, you know, technical cuts there, either looking at smaller amounts of data so that they can get to the data quicker. Um, or it's taking longer to get to the data when the data warehouse is ready, when it could just be live career to get the answers you need. And that's definitely an issue that we're seeing in the marketplace. I think the other one that you're looking at is things like governance, lineage, regulatory requirements. How is the cloud you know, making it easier? >>That's That's again an area where I think the cloud shines. Because AWS AWS scale allows significantly more investment in securing security policies and compliance, it allows customers. So, for example, Amazon redshift comes by default with suck 1 to 3 p. C. I. Aiso fared rampant HIPPA compliance, all of them out of the box and at our scale. We have the capacity to implement those by default for all of our customers and allow them to focus. Their very expensive, valuable ICTY resource is on actual applications that differentiate their business and transform the customer experience. >>That's a great point, gal. So we've talked about the, you know, limiting factors. Technology wise, we've mentioned things like governance. But what about the cultural aspect? Right? So what do you see? What do you see in team struggling in meeting? You know, their cloud data warehouse strategy today. >>And and that's true. One of the biggest challenges for large large organizations when they moved to the cloud is not about the technology. It's about people, process and culture, and we see differences between organizations that talk about moving to the cloud and ones that actually do it. And first of all, you wanna have senior leadership, drive and be aligned and committed to making the move to the cloud. But it's not just that you want. We see organizations sometimes Carol get paralyzed. If they can't figure out how to move each and every last work clothes, there's no need to boil the ocean, so we often work with organizations to find that iterative motion that relative process off identifying the use cases are date identifying workloads in migrating them one at a time and and through that allowed organization to grow its knowledge from a cloud perspective as well as adopt its tooling and learn about the new capabilities. >>And from an analytics perspective, we see the same right. You don't need a pixel perfect dashboard every single time to get value from your data. You don't need to wait until the data warehouse is perfect or the pipeline to the data warehouse is perfect. With today's technology, you should be able to look at the data in your cloud data warehouse immediately and get value from it. And that's the you know, that's that change that we're pushing and starting to see today. Thanks. God, that was That was really interesting. Um, you know, as we look through that, you know, this transformation we're seeing in analytics, um, isn't really that old? 20 years ago, data warehouses were primarily on Prem and the applications the B I tools used for analytics around them were on premise well, and so you saw things like applications like Salesforce. That live in the cloud. You start having to pull data from the cloud on Prem in order to do analytics with it. Um, you know, then we saw the shift about 10 years ago in the explosion of Cloud Data Warehouse Because of their scale, cost reduced, reduce shin reduction and speed. You know, we're seeing cloud data. Warehouses like Amazon Red Shift really take place, take hold of the marketplace and are the predominant ways of storing data moving forward. What we haven't seen is the B I tools catch up. And so when you have this new cloud data warehouse technology, you really need tools that were custom built for it to take advantage of it, to be able to query the cloud data warehouse directly and get results very quickly without having to worry about creating, you know, a middle layer of data or pipelines in order to manage it. And, you know, one company captures that really Well, um, chick fil A. I'm sure everybody has heard of is one of the largest food chains in America. And, you know, they made a huge investment in red shift and one of the purposes of that investment is they wanted to get access to the data mawr quickly, and they really wanted to give their business users, um, the ability to do some ad hoc analysis on the data that they were capturing. They found that with their older tools, the problems that they were finding was that all the data when they're trying to do this analysis was staying at the analyst level. So somebody needed to create a dashboard in order to share that data with a user. And if the user's requirements changed, the analysts were starting to become burdened with requests for changes and the time it took to reflect those changes. So they wanted to move to fought spot with embrace to connect to Red Shift so they could start giving business users that capability. Query the database right away. And with this, um, they were able to find, you know, very common things in in the supply chain analysis around the ability to figure out what store should get, what product that was selling better. The other part was they didn't have to wait for the data to get settled into some sort of repository or second level database. They were able to query it quickly. And then with that, they're able to make changes right in the red shift database that were then reflected to customers and the business users right away. So what they found from this is by adopting thought spot, they were actually able to arm business users with the ability to make decisions very quickly. And they cleared up the backlog that they were having and the delay with their analysts. And they're also putting their analysts toe work on different projects where they could get better value from. So when you look at the way we work with a cloud data warehouse, um, you have to think of thoughts about embrace as the tool that access that layer. The perfect analytic partner for the Cloud Data Warehouse. We will do the live query for the business user. You don't need to know how to script and sequel, um Thio access, you know, red shift. You can type the question that you want the answer to and thought spot will take care of that query. We will do the indexing so that the results come back faster for you and we will also do the analysis on. This is one of the things I wanted to cover, which is our spot i. Q. This is new for our ability to use this with embrace and our partners at Red Shift is now. We can give you the ability to do auto analysis to look at things like leading indicators, trends and anomalies. So to put this in perspective amount imagine somebody was doing forecasting for you know Q three in the western region. And they looked at how their stores were doing. And they saw that, you know, one store was performing well, Spot like, you might be able to look at that analysis and see if there's a leading product that is underperforming based on perhaps the last few quarters of data. And bring that up to the business user for analysis right away. They don't need to have to figure that out. And, um, you know, slice and dice to find that issue on their own. And then finally, all the work you do in data management and governance in your cloud data warehouse gets reflected in the results in embrace right away. So I've done a lot of talking about embrace, and I could do more, but I think it would be far better toe. Have Vika actually show you how the product works, Vika. >>Thanks, Michael. We learned a lot today about the power of leveraging your red shift data and thought spot. But now let me show you how it works. The coronavirus pandemic has presented extraordinary challenges for many businesses, and some industries have fared better than others. One industry that seems to weather the storm pretty well actually is streaming media. So companies like Netflix and who Lou. And in this demo, we're going to be looking at data from B to C marketing efforts. First streaming media company in 2020 lately, we've been running campaigns for comedy, drama, kids and family and reality content. Each of our campaigns last four weeks, and they're staggered on a weekly basis. Therefore, we always have four campaigns running, and we can focus on one campaign launch per >>week, >>and today we'll be digging into how our campaigns are performing. We'll be looking at things like impressions, conversions and users demographic data. So let's go ahead and look at that data. We'll see what we can learn from what's happened this year so far, and how we can apply those learnings to future decision making. As you can already see on the thoughts about homepage, I've created a few pin boards that I use for reporting purposes. The homepage also includes what others on my team and I have been looking at most recently. Now, before we dive into a search, will first take a look at how to make a direct connection to the customer database and red shift to save time. I've already pre built the connection Red Shift, but I'll show you how easy it is to make that connection in just three steps. So first we give the connection name and we select our connection type and was on red Shift. Then we enter our red shift credentials, and finally, we select the tables that we want to use Great now ready to start searching. So let's start in this data to get a better idea of how our marketing efforts have been affected either positively or negatively by this really challenging situation. When we think of ad based online marketing campaigns, we think of impressions, clicks and conversions. Let's >>look at those >>on a daily basis for our purposes. So all this data is available to us in Thought spot, and we can easily you search to create a nice line chart like this that shows US trends over the last few months and based on experience. We understand that we're going to have more clicks than impressions and more impressions and conversions. If we started the chart for a minute, we could see that while impressions appear to be pretty steady over the course of the year, clicks and especially conversions both get a nice boost in mid to late March, right around the time that pandemic related policies were being implemented. So right off the bat, we found something interesting, and we can come back to this now. There are few metrics that we're gonna focus on as we analyze our marketing data. Our overall goal is obviously to drive conversions, meaning that we bring new users into our streaming service. And in order to get a visitor to sign up in the first place, we need them to get into our sign up page. A compelling campaign is going to generate clicks, so if someone is interested in our ad, they're more likely to click on it, so we'll search for Click through Rape 5% and we'll look this up by campaign name. Now even compare all the campaigns that we've launched this year to see which have been most effective and bring visitors star site. And I mentioned earlier that we have four different types of campaign content, each one aligned with one of our most popular genres. So by adding campaign content, yeah, >>and I >>just want to see the top 10. I could limit my church. Just these top 10 campaigns automatically sorted by click through rate and assigned a color for each category so we could see right away that comedy and drama each of three of the top 10 campaigns by click through rate reality is, too, including the top spot and kids and family makes one appearance as well. Without spot. We know that any non technical user can ask a question and get an answer. They can explore the answer and ask another question. When you get an answer that you want to share, keep an eye on moving forward, you pin the answer to pin board. So the BBC Marketing Campaign Statistics PIN board gives us a solid overview of our campaign related activities and metrics throughout 2020. The visuals here keep us up to date on click through rate and cost per click, but also another really important metrics that conversions or cost proposition. Now it's important to our business that we evaluate the effectiveness of our spending. Let's do another search. We're going to look at how many new customers were getting so conversions and the price cost per acquisition that we're spending to get each of these by the campaign contact category. So >>this is a >>really telling chart. We can basically see how much each new users costing us, based on the content that they see prior to signing up to the service. Drama and reality users are actually relatively expensive compared to those who joined based on comedy and kids and family content that they saw. And if all the genres kids and family is actually giving us the best bang for our marketing >>buck. >>And that's good news because the genres providing the best value are also providing the most customers. We mentioned earlier that we actually saw a sizable uptick in conversions as stay at home policies were implemented across much of the country. So we're gonna remove cost per acquisition, and we're gonna take a daily look how our campaign content has trended over the years so far. Eso By doing this now, we can see a comparison of the different genres daily. Some campaigns have been more successful than others. Obviously, for example, kids and family contact has always fared pretty well Azaz comedy. But as we moved into the stay at home area of the line chart, we really saw these two genres begin to separate from the rest. And even here in June, as some states started to reopen, we're seeing that they're still trending up, and we're also seeing reality start to catch up around that time. And while the first pin board that we looked at included all sorts of campaign metrics, this is another PIN board that we've created so solely to focus on conversions. So not only can we see which campaigns drug significant conversions, we could also dig into the demographics of new users, like which campaigns and what content brought users from different parts of the country or from different age groups. And all this is just a quick search away without spot search directly on a red shift. Data Mhm. All right, Thank you. And back to you, Michael. >>Great. Thanks, Vika. That was excellent. Um, so as you can see, you can very quickly go from zero to search with thought Spot, um, connected to any cloud data warehouse. And I think it's important to understand that we mentioned it before. Not everything has to be perfect. In your doubt, in your cloud data warehouse, um, you can use thought spot as your initial for your initial tool. It's for investigatory purposes, A Z you can see here with star, Gento, imax and anthem. And a lot of these cases we were looking at billions of rows of data within minutes. And as you as your data warehouse maturity grows, you can start to add more and more thoughts about users to leverage the data and get better analysis from it. So we hope that you've enjoyed what you see today and take the step to either do one of two things. We have a free trial of thoughts about cloud. If you go to the website that you see below and register, we can get you access the thought spots so you can start searching today. Another option, by contacting our team, is to do a zero to search workshop where 90 minutes will work with you to connect your data source and start to build some insights and exactly what you're trying to find for your business. Um thanks, everybody. I would especially like to thank golf from AWS for joining us on this today. We appreciate your participation, and I hope everybody enjoyed what they saw. I think we have a few questions now. >>Thank you, Vika, Gal and Michael. It's always exciting to see a live demo. I know that I'm one of those comedy numbers. We have just a few minutes left, but I would love to ask a couple of last questions Before we go. Michael will give you the first question. Do I need to have all of my data cleaned and ready in my cloud data warehouse before I begin with thought spot? >>That's a great question, Mallory. No, you don't. You can really start using thought spot for search right away and start getting analysis and start understanding the data through the automatic search analysis and the way that we query the data and we've seen customers do that. Chick fil a example that we talked about earlier is where they were able to use thoughts bought to notice an anomaly in the Cloud Data Warehouse linking between product and store. They were able to fix that very quickly. Then that gets reflected across all of the users because our product queries the Cloud Data Warehouse directly so you can get started right away without it having to be perfect. And >>that's awesome. And gal will leave a fun one for you. What can we look forward to from Amazon Red Shift next year? >>That's a great question. And you know, the team has been innovating extremely fast. We released more than 200 features in the last year and a half, and we continue innovating. Um, one thing that stands out is aqua, which is a innovative new technology. Um, in fact, lovely stands for Advanced Square Accelerator, and it allows customers to achieve performance that up to 10 times faster, uh, than what they've seen really outstanding and and the way we've achieved that is through a shift in paradigm in the actual technological implementation section. Uh, aqua is a new distributed and hardware accelerated processing layer, which effectively allows us to push down operations analytics operations like compression, encryption, filtering and aggregations to the storage there layer and allow the aqua nodes that are built with custom. AWS designed analytics processors to perform these operations faster than traditional soup use. And we no longer need to bring, you know, scan the data and bring it all the way to the computational notes were able to apply these these predicates filtering and encourage encryption and compression and aggregations at the storage level. And likewise is going to be available for every are a three, um, customer out of the box with no changes to come. So I apologize for being getting out a little bit, but this is really exciting. >>No, that's why we invited you. Call. Thank you on. Thank you. Also to Michael and Vika. That was excellent. We really appreciate it. For all of you tuning in at home. The final session of this track is coming up shortly. You aren't gonna want to miss it. We're gonna end strong, come back and hear directly from our customer a T mobile on how T Mobile is building a data driven organization with thought spot in which >>pro, It's >>up next, see you then.

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> As we reported last week, we believe that in the next decade, there will be changes in public policy that are going to restrict the way in which big internet companies are able to appropriate user data. Big tech came under fire again this week with the CEOs of Facebook, Twitter, and Google going toe to toe with several U.S. senators. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, however, was not one of those CEOs in the firing line. Microsoft doesn't heavily rely on ad revenues, rather, the company's momentum is steadily building around Azure, which by my estimates is now roughly 19% of Microsoft's overall revenues. It's surpassed, maybe nearly got to $7 billion for the first time on a quarterly basis. I'll come back to you on that. Hello everyone, and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE insights powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we'll respond to the many requests we've had to dig into the business of Microsoft a little bit deeper and provide a snapshot of how the company is faring in the ETR dataset. Let's take a quick look at Microsoft's financials, and the scope of Microsoft's business is actually mind-boggling. The company has roughly $150 billion in revenue, and it grew its top line 12% last quarter. It has more than $136 billion in cash on the balance sheet. Microsoft generates over $60 billion annually in operating cashflow. And last quarter alone threw off more than 19 billion in operating cash. Its gross margins are expanding across virtually all of its major business lines. So let's look at those business sectors. Microsoft, it doesn't suffer from the nagging problems that we've talked about with a lot of older tech companies. Companies like IBM and Dell and Cisco and Oracle and SAP, they struggle with growth sometimes because their growth businesses are not yet large enough to offset the declines in their traditional on-premises business segments. Now at the highest level, Microsoft breaks its business into three broad categories, and they're all growing quite nicely. Let me add some color here. Let's start with the productivity and business process line of business. LinkedIn, which is growing at 16%, is in this category as is Office. This business is shifting from one of on-prem licenses, which are really headwinds right now from Microsoft, to the cloud, in the form of SaaS with Office 365, which is growing at a 20% clip within its commercial market base. Even the consumer side of O365 is growing in the double digits. Dynamics is Microsoft's ERP and CRM business, and that falls into this slice of the pie, that's growing at 18%. And then the newer Dynamics 365, that's growing at 37%. So you can see, Microsoft is easily able to show growth despite the transitions from its legacy business. Intelligent cloud is the next segment. It's kind of the kitchen sink category, meaning there's stuff in there that includes a bit of cloud washing in my opinion, but Microsoft is not nearly as egregious as IBM with the liberties that it takes around its cloud categorization. For Microsoft it's a $13 billion quarterly business. And it's growing at 19%, as we show in the pie chart. Azure is an increasingly large portion of this segment. Azure is the most direct comparison with AWS. And I have said in the past quarter, I'd say it's around 50% of the intelligent cloud, and that it's approaching by my estimates around $7 billion a quarter. Azure grew at 47% annually this past quarter, the same growth rate as last quarter. Ironically, both AWS and Google Cloud grew at the same year over year rate this quarter as they did last quarter. AWS is 29% GCP in the high 50s by at my estimates. AWS revenue was 11.6 billion this past quarter, and I have GCP still well under 2 billion. We'll be updating our cloud numbers and digging deeper next week into this topic. So consider these estimates preliminary for Azure and GCP, which the respective companies don't break out for as Amazon, as you know, breaks out AWS explicitly. Now, back to Microsoft's intelligent cloud business. It includes on-prem server software, which is a managed decline business from Microsoft. They also include enterprise services in this category. So as you can see, it's not a clean cloud number for comparison purposes. Now finally, the third big slice of the pie is more personal computing. I know, it's kind of a dorky name, but nonetheless it's nearly a $12 billion business that's growing at 6% annually. The Windows OEM business is in here, as is Windows 10 and some security offerings. Surface is also in here as well and it's growing in the mid-thirties. Search revenue is in this category as well. It's declining per my earlier statements that it's not a main piece of Microsoft's business. Now, one of the most interesting areas of this sector is gaming. Microsoft's gaming business is growing at 21% and they just acquired ZeniMax Media for seven and a half billion dollars. Let me land on gaming for a minute. The gaming experts at theCUBE are really excited about Microsoft's XBox content services, which grew at about 30% this past quarter. Game Pass is essentially Microsoft's Netflix, or you can think of it as maybe like a Spotify model. You can get in for as low as $5 a month. I think you can pay as much as $15 a month and get access to a huge catalog of games that you can download. In November of last year, Microsoft launched its xCloud beta service, which allows you to download to a PC or a game box. Now eventually with 5G, the box goes away. All you'll need is a screen and you know, controller with the joysticks, no download. In fact, this is how it works today for Android. Now, interestingly, Apple is blocking Microsoft and some others like Google's Stadia, saying that they don't allow streaming game apps like Microsoft's xCloud service, because they don't follow the company's guidelines. What Apple's not telling you is that its adjacent offering, Apple Arcade, is considered subpar by hardcore gamers. And while Apple allows the streaming of movies and music from any service on the iPhone, it's decided not to allow streaming games. Now, the last thing I want to stress about Microsoft is its leverage point around developers. Developers is a big one here, we all remember the sweaty Steve Ballmer running around the stage like a mad man, screaming, "Developers, developers, developers!" Well, despite his obsession with Windows, he sure got that one right. The GitHub acquisition was Microsoft's way of buying more developer love. It does concentrate power with a tech giant, but you know what, if it wasn't Microsoft that bought GitHub, it would have been Facebook or Amazon or Google or one of the other tech giants. Now, despite some angst in the developer community over this, GitHub, it really is a linchpin for Microsoft to more tightly integrate GitHub with its pretty vast developer tool set. All right. Let's look deeper into the Microsoft data and focus on the enterprise. We'll bring in the ETR as we always do. We said last week that Google needed to look to the cloud and edge and get its head out of its ads. Well, Microsoft recovered from its Windows myopia after Satya Nadella took over in 2014, and by all accounts from the ETR survey data, Microsoft is killing it across the board. Let me start by putting Microsoft in context with some of the most prominent companies that both compete with, and sometimes partner with Microsoft. So this xy graph, it's one of our favorites. I show it all the time and it shows net score on the vertical axis, which is a measure of spending momentum from ETR, and the horizontal axis shows what we call market share, which is a measure of pervasiveness in the survey. Now in the upper right hand table, you can see the data for each of the companies. There's an ETR survey taken in October and it had more than 1400 completes. Several points stand out here. Microsoft is by far the most pervasive in the dataset, and yet its net score or spending velocity is right there with AWS, ServiceNow, Salesforce, and Workday. Only Snowflake, which I put in there for context, because of its consistently strong net scores, shows a meaningfully higher net score, of course from a much smaller base. Now what makes this so impressive is it represents a pan-Microsoft view across its entire portfolio. And you can see where companies like IBM and Oracle struggle from a momentum standpoint compared to Microsoft, which is a much, much larger company. It's that problem that I referred to earlier regarding the smaller size of their respective growth businesses. Also called Cisco and SAP, which despite some earnings challenges lately, are able to maintain net scores that while not in the green, they're not in the red, either. Green essentially means your overall install base is expanding. Red indicates contraction. Now let's look at the spending patterns for Microsoft customers. This chart shows the granularity of ETR's net score for Microsoft. The green represents increased spend and the red decreased spend. What's impressive is that Microsoft's red zone, I mean it's essentially negligible at 6%, when you add two reds up, the pink and the bright red. Their customers, they're all spending more, or the same, and very few are leaving the platform. Now I made the case last week that Google should double or triple its efforts and focus on cloud and the edge. Microsoft has already made that transition in its business and is the, that's the premise really of my discussion today. Specifically, Microsoft Azure is powering the company across all of its products and services. It's giving Microsoft tremendous operating leverage and steadily improving marginal economics. You can see that in the gross margin lines this quarter, across all of its businesses. And here's a graphic showing its position within cloud computing in terms of net score. Microsoft Azure functions, which is the first bar on this chart, and Azure overall, which is the third set of bars, shows momentum that's as strong as any cloud category, including AWS Lambda, which as we've talked about many times is killing it. Now five over from the left, count them over, one, two, three, four, five, you can see AWS overall. So that's a really important reference point. And while its levels are still elevated, Azure overall, which again is number three from the left, has meaningfully more momentum with 65% net score versus 52% for AWS overall. Now reasonable people can debate the quality of these respective clouds and you could argue over feature sets, who's got the most features, who's got the most regions, which regions are most reliable, who's got the most data centers and all that stuff, but it's really hard to argue against Microsoft's "Good enough" strategy. It's working in the cloud, and it has been working for the company for decades. Now another Microsoft strategy has been to be a late comer to a category and then bundle multiple capabilities into one suite. We saw this at first, really in the late 1980s with Office, and it's continued in a number of areas. The latest example, Microsoft Teams. Teams combines features like meetings, phone, chat, collaboration, as well as business process workflows that leverage tools like SharePoint and PowerPoint. I mean, it's a killer strategy, and you can see the results in this chart. I mean, it's essentially competing with Zoom, it's competing with Slack and all the sort of productivity plays there in that space. And this graphic compares net scores from the year ago October survey for reference, the July survey from this year, and the most recent October survey, as I said, 1400 respondents. Look at the lead that Teams has relative to the competition. There's a story across Microsoft's portfolio. Look at Microsoft's products in the ETR taxonomy. Video conferencing with Teams, productivity apps, RPA, cloud, cloud functions, machine learning, artificial intelligence, containers, security, end point, analytics, mobile, even database. The only signs of softness are really seen in the company's legacy businesses like Skype or on-prem licenses business, which I said were a headwind for them. And while PCs and tablets are weaker, that's what you'd expect from this mature industry relative to some of these other categories. Now, again, the premise here today is that by pivoting to the cloud and going all in competing with infrastructure as a service, Microsoft has created a platform for innovation for its business, and its developer chops are really credible, so it's evolving its install base very successfully to Azure. It's got a very solid hybrid and multi-cloud strategy and story with Microsoft Arc, which eventually it can take to the edge. You know, we think its edge strategy needs some work, but nonetheless, the company is really, really well positioned. Microsoft has a huge partner ecosystem, heck, it even partners with Oracle and database, as well as using Azure to enter new markets, including vertical clouds like healthcare, which it talked about on its earnings call. I mean, there's really not much on which you can criticize Microsoft. You know, sure, they've had some high profile failures in the past. The Nokia acquisition, the Windows phone, you remember Zune? Mixer, you know, Bing. Is Bing a fail? I don't know. Maybe not really. I guess the fail is, you know, what I was talking about last week with antitrust, Microsoft was distracted by the DOJ and maybe that caused it to miss search, give it to Google, and in that sense, maybe it was a failure, but overall, pretty good track record from Microsoft. Yeah, maybe you can say Microsoft is somewhat of a copycat, you know, the graphical user interface that they copied from the Mac, but hey, even Steve Jobs stole that. Surface, okay. The cloud? But so what, ideas, they're plentiful, execution is the key, really. No matter how you slice it, the data doesn't lie. Microsoft's financial performance, its pivot to the cloud, and the success of its adjacent businesses, make it one of the most remarkable rebirths in the history of technology industry. Now I didn't use the word turnaround because the company was never really in trouble. It just became irrelevant and kind of boring. Today, Microsoft is far from immaterial. Okay. That's it for this week. Remember all these episodes are available as podcasts wherever you listen. So please subscribe. I publish weekly on Wikibon.com and Siliconangle.com. And don't forget to check out ETR.plus for all the survey data and analytics. I appreciate always the comments on my LinkedIn posts or you can DM me @DVellante, or email me at David.Vellante@SiliconAngle.com. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching everybody, be well, and we'll see you next time. 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>> Well, thank you, Gary. Well, you know, reasonable people could debate when the so-called big data era started. But for me it was in the fall of 2010 when I was sleepwalking through this conference in Dallas. And the conference was focused on data being a liability. And the whole conversation was about, how do you mitigate the risks of things like work in process and smoking-gun emails. I got a call from my business partner, John Fard, he said to me, "get to New York and come and see the future of data. We're doing theCUBE at Hadoop World tomorrow." I subsequently I canceled about a dozen meetings that I had scheduled for the week. And with only one exception, every one of the folks I was scheduled to meet said, "what's a Hadoop?" Well, I flew through an ice storm across country. I got to the New York Hilton around 3:00 AM, and I met John in the Dark Bar. If any of you remember that little facility. And I caught a little shut eye. And then the next day I met some of the most interesting people in tech during that time. They were thinking a lot differently than we were used to. They looked at data through a prism of value. And they were finding new ways to do things like deal with fraud, they were building out social networks, they were finding novel marketing vectors and identifying new investment strategies. The other thing they were doing is, they were taking these little tiny bits of code and bring it to really large sets of data. And they were doing things that I hadn't really heard of like no schema-on-write. And they were transforming their organizations by looking at data not as a liability, but as a monetization opportunity. And that opened my eyes and theCUBE, like a lot of others bet its business on data. Now over the past decade, customers have built up infrastructure and have been accommodating a lot of different use cases. Things like offloading ETL, data protection, mining data, analyzing data, visualizing. And as you know, you no doubt realize this was at a time when the cloud was, you know, really kind of nascent. And it was really about startups and experimentation. But today, we've evolved from the wild west of 2010, and many of these customers they're leveraging the cloud for of course, ease of use and flexibility it brings, but also they're finding out it brings complexity and risk. I want to tell you a quick story. Recently it was interviewing a CIO in theCUBE and he said to me, "if you just shove all your workloads into the cloud, you might get some benefit, but you're also going to miss the forest to the trees. You have to change your operating model and expand your mind as to what is cloud and create a cloud light experience that spans your on premises, workloads, multiple public clouds, and even the edge. And you have to re-imagine your business and the possibilities that this new architecture this new platform can bring." So we're going to talk about some of this today in a little bit more detail and specifically how we can better navigate the data storm. And what's the role of hybrid cloud. I'm really excited to have two great guests. Manish Dasaur is the managing director in the North America lead for analytics and artificial intelligence at Accenture. Anupam Singh is the chief customer officer for Cloudera. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE, great to see you. >> Hi Dave good to see you again. >> All right, guys, Anupam and Manish, you heard my little monologue upfront Anupam we'll start with you. What would you? Anything you'd add, amend, emphasize? You know, share a quick story. >> Yeah, Dave thank you for that introduction. It takes me back to the days when I was an article employee and went to this 14 people meet up. Just a couple of pizza talking about this thing called Hadoop. And I'm just amazed to see that today we are now at 2000 customers, who are using petabytes of data to make extremely critical decisions. Reminds me of the fact that this week, a lot of our customers are busy thinking about elections and what effect it would have on their data pipeline. Will it be more data? Will it be more stressful? So, totally agree with you. And also agree that cloud, is almost still in early days in times of the culture of IT on how to use the cloud. And I'm sure we'll talk about that today in greater detail. >> Yeah most definitely Manish I wonder if we could get your perspective on this. I mean, back when Anupam was at Oracle you'd shove a bunch of, you know, data, maybe you could attach a big honking disc drive, you'd buy some Oracle licenses, you know, it was a Unix box. Everything went into this, you know, this God box and then things changed quite dramatically, which was awesome, but also complex. And you guys have been there from the beginning. What's your perspective on all this? >> Yeah, it's been fascinating just to watch the market and the technology evolve. And I think the urgency to innovate is really just getting started. We're seeing companies drive growth from 20% in cloud today, to 80% cloud in the next few years. And I think the emergence of capabilities like hybrid cloud, we really get upfront a lot of flexibility for companies who need the ability to keep some data in a private setting, but be able to share the rest of the data in a public setting. I think we're just starting to scratch the surface of it. >> So let's talk a little bit about what is a hybrid cloud Anupam I wonder if you could take this one let's start with you and then Manish we come back to you and to get the customer perspective as well. I mean, it is a lot of things to a lot of people, but what is it? Why do we need it? And you know, what's the value? >> Yeah, I could speak poetic about Kubernetes and containers et cetera. But given that, you know, we talk to customers a lot, all three of us from the customer's perspective, hybrid cloud is a lot about collaboration and ease of procurement. A lot of our customers, whether they're in healthcare, banking or telco, are being asked to make the data available to regulatory authority, to subsidiaries outside of their geography. When you need that data to be available in other settings, taking a from on-prem and making it available in public cloud, enables extreme collaboration, extreme shared data experience if you will, inside the company. So we think about hybrid like that. >> Manish anything you'd add? How are your customers thinking about it? >> I mean, in a very simple way, it's a structure that where we are allowing mixed computing storage and service environments that's made of on-prem structures, private cloud structures, and public cloud structures. We're often calling it multicloud or mixcloud. And I think the really big advantage is, this model of cloud computing is enabling our clients to gain the benefits of public cloud setting, while maintaining your own private cloud for sensitive and mission critical and highly regulated computing services. That's also allowing our clients and organizations to leverage the pay-as-you-go model, which is really quite impressive and attractive to them because then they can scale their investments accordingly. Clients can combine one or more public cloud providers together in a private cloud, multicloud platform. The cloud can operate independently of each other, communicate over an encrypted connection. This dynamic solution offers a lot of flexibility and scalability which I think is really important to our clients. >> So Manish I wonder if we would stay there. How do they, how do your customers decide? How do you help them decide, you know, what the right mix is? What the equilibrium is? How much should it be in on-prem? How much should be in public or across clouds? Or, you know, eventually, well the edge will I guess decide for us. But, how do you go through, what are the decision points there? >> Yeah, I think that's a great question Dave. I would say there's several factors to consider when developing a cloud strategy that's the right strategy for you. Some of the factors that come to my mind when contemplating it, one would be security. Are there data sets that are highly sensitive that you don't want leaving the premise, versus data sets that need to be in a more shareable solution. Another factor I'd consider is speed and flexibility. Is there a need to stand up and stand down capabilities based on the seasonality of the business or some short-term demands? Is there a need to add and remove scale from the infrastructure and that quick pivot and that quick reaction is another factor they should consider. The third one I'd probably put out there is cost. Large data sets and large computing capacities often much more scalable and cost effective than a cloud infrastructure so there's lots of advantages to think through there. And maybe lastly I'd share is the native services. A lot of the cloud providers enable a set of native services for ingestion, for processing, of modeling, for machine learning, that organizations can really take advantage of. I would say if you're contemplating your strategy right now, my coaching would be, get help. It's a team sport. So definitely leverage your partners and think through the pros and cons of the strategy. Establish a primary hyperscaler, I think that's going to be super key and maximize your value through optimizing the workload, the data placement and really scaling the running operations. And lastly, maybe Dave move quickly right? Each day that you wait, you're incurring technical debt in your legacy environment, that's going to increase the cost and barrier to entry when moving to the new cloud hybrid driver. >> Thank you for that. Anupam I wonder if we could talk a little bit about the business impact. I mean, in the early days of big data, yes, it was a heavy lift, but it was really transformative. When you go to hybrid cloud, is it really about governance and compliance and security and getting the right mix in terms of latency? Are there other, you know, business impacts that are potentially as transformative as we saw in the early days? What are your thoughts on that? >> Absolutely. It's the other business impacts that are interesting. And you know, Dave, let's say you're in the line of business and I come to you and say, oh, there's cost, there's all these other security governance benefits. It doesn't ring the bell for you. But if I say, Dave used to wait 32 weeks, 32 weeks to procure hardware and install software, but I can give you the same thing in 30 minutes. It's literally that transformative, right? Even on-prem, if I use cloud native technology, I can give something today within days versus weeks. So we have banks, we have a bank in Ohio that would take 32 weeks to rack up a 42 node server. Yes, it's very powerful, you have 42 nodes on it, 42 things stacked on it, but still it's taking too much time. So when you get cloud native technologies in your data center, you start behaving like the cloud and you're responsive to the business. The responsiveness is very important. >> That's a great point. I mean, in fact, you know, there's always this debate about is the cloud public cloud probably cost more expensive? Is it more expensive to rent than it is to own? And you get debates back and forth based on your perspective. But I think at the end of the day, what, Anupam you just talked about, it may oftentimes could dwarf, you know, any cost factors, if you can actually, you know, move that fast. Now cost is always a consideration. But I want to talk about the migration path if we can Manish. Where do, how should customers think about migrating to the cloud migration's a, an evil word. How should they think about migrating to the cloud? What's the strategy there? Where should they start? >> No I think you should start with kind of a use case in mind. I think you should start with a particular data set in mind as well. I think starting with what you're really seeking to achieve from a business value perspective is always the right lens in my mind. This is the decade of time technology and cloud to the fitness value, right? So if you start with, I'm seeking to make a dramatic upsell or dramatic change to my top line or bottom line, start with the use case in mind and migrate the data sets and elements that are relevant to that use case, relevant to that value, relevant to that unlock that you're trying to create, that I think is the way to prioritize it. Most of our clients are going to have tons and tons of data in their legacy environment. I don't think the right way to start is to start with a strategy that's going to be focused on migrating all of that. I think the strategy is start with the prioritized items that are tied to the specific value or the use case you're seeking to drive and focus your transformation and your migration on that. >> So guys I've been around a long time in this business and been an observer for awhile. And back in the mainframe days, we used to have a joke called CTAM. When we talk about moving data, it was called the Chevy truck access method. So I want to ask you Anupam, how do you move the data? Do you, it's like an Einstein saying, right? Move as much data as you need to, but no more. So what's going on in that front? what's happening with data movement, and, you know, do you have to make changes to the applications when you move data to the cloud? >> So there's two design patterns, but I love your service story because you know, when you have a 30 petabyte system and you tell the customer, hey, just make a copy of the data and everything will be fine. That will take you one and a half years to make the copies aligned with each other. Instead, what we are seeing is the biggest magic is workload analysis. You analyze the workload, you analyze the behavior of the users, and say so let's say Dave runs dashboards that are very complicated and Manish waits for compute when Dave is running his dashboard. If you're able to gather that information, you can actually take some of the noise out of the system. So you take selected sets of hot data, and you move it to public cloud, process it in public cloud maybe even bring it back. Sounds like science fiction, but the good news is you don't need a Chevy to take all that data into public cloud. It's a small amount of data. That's one reason the other pattern that we have seen is, let's say Manish needs something as a data scientist. And he needs some really specific type of GPUs that are only available in the cloud. So you pull the data sets out that Manish needs so that he can get the new silicone, the new library in the cloud. Those are the two patterns that if you have a new type of compute requirement, you go to public cloud, or if you have a really noisy tenant, you take the hot data out into public cloud and process it there. Does that make sense? >> Yeah it does and it sort of sets up this notion I was sort of describing upfront that the cloud is not just, you know, the public cloud, it's the spans on-prem and multicloud and even the edge. And it seems to me that you've got a metadata opportunity I'll call it and a challenge as well. I mean, there's got to be a lot of R and D going on right now. You hear people talking about cloud native and I wonder on Anupam if you could stay on that, I mean, what's your sense as to how, what the journey is going to look like? I mean, we're not going to get there overnight. People have laid out a vision of this sort of expanding cloud and I'm saying it's a metadata opportunity, but I, you know, how do you, the system has to know what workload to put where based on a lot of those factors that you guys were talking about. The governance, the laws of the land, the latency issues, the cost issues is, you know, how is the industry Anupam sort of approaching this problem and solving this problem? >> I think the biggest thing is to reflect all your security governance across every cloud, as well as on-prem. So let's say, you know, a particular user named Manish cannot access financial data, revenue data. It's important that that data as it goes around the cloud, if it gets copied from on-prem to the cloud, it should carry that quality with it. A big danger is you copy it into some optic storage, and you're absolutely right Dave metadata is the goal there. If you copy the data into an object storage and you lose all metadata, you lose all security, you lose all authorization. So we have invested heavily in something called shared data experience. Which reflects policies from on-prem all the way to the cloud and back. We've seen customers needing to invest in that, but some customers went all hog on the cloud and they realize that putting data just in these buckets of optic storage, you lose all the metadata, and then you're exposing yourself to some breach and security issues. >> Manish I wonder if we could talk about, thank you for that Anupam. Manish I wonder if we could talk about, you know, I've imagined a project, okay? Wherever I am in my journey, maybe you can pick your sort of sweet spot in the market today. You know, what's the fat middle if you will. What does a project look like when I'm migrating to the cloud? I mean, what are some of the, who are the stakeholders? What are some of the outer scope maybe expectations that I better be thinking about? What kind of timeframe? How should I tackle this and so it's not like a, you know, a big, giant expensive? Can I take it in pieces? What's the state-of-the-art of a project look like today? >> Yeah, lots of thoughts come to mind, Dave, when you ask that question. So there's lots to pack. As far as who the buyer is or what the project is for, this is out of migration is directly relevant to every officer in the C-suite in my mind. It's very relevant for the CIO and CTO obviously it's going to be their infrastructure of the future, and certainly something that they're going to need to migrate to. It's very important for the CFO as well. These things require a significant migration and a significant investment from enterprises, different kind of position there. And it's very relevant all the way up to the CEO. Because if you get it right, the truly the power it unlocks is illuminates parts of your business that allow you to capture more value, capture a higher share of wallet, allows you to pivot. A lot of our clients right now are making a pivot from going from a products organization to an as a service organization and really using the capabilities of the cloud to make that pivot happen. So it's really relevant kind of across the C-suite. As far as what a typical program looks like, I always coach my clients just like I said, to start with the value case in mind. So typically, what I'll ask them to do is kind of prioritize their top three or five use cases that they really want to drive, and then we'll land a project team that will help them make that migration and really scale out data and analytics on the cloud that are focused on those use cases. >> Great, thank you for that. I'm glad you mentioned the shift in the mindset from product to as a service. We're seeing that across the board now, even infrastructure players are jumping on the bandwagon and borrowing some sort of best practices from the SaaS vendors. And I wanted to ask you guys about, I mean, as you move to the cloud, one of the other things that strikes me is that you actually get greater scale, but there's a broader ecosystem as well. So we're kind of moving from a product centric world and with SaaS we've got this sort of platform centric, and now it seems like ecosystems are really where the innovation is coming from. I wonder if you guys could comment on that, maybe Anupam you could start. >> Yeah, many of our customers as I said right? Are all about sharing data with more and more lines of businesses. So whenever we talk to our CXO partners, our CRO partners, they are being asked to open up the big data system to more tenants. The fear is, of course, if you add more tenants to a system, it could get, you know, the operational actually might get violated. So I think that's a very important part as more and more collaboration across the company, more and more collaboration across industries. So we have customers who create sandboxes. These are healthcare customers who create sandbox environments for other pharma companies to come in and look at clinical trial data. In that case, you need to be able to create these fenced environments that can be run in public cloud, but with the same security that you expect up. >> Yeah thank you. So Manish this is your wheelhouse as Accenture. You guys are one of the top, you know, two or three or four organizations in the world in terms of dealing with complexity, you've got deep industry expertise, and it seems like some of these ecosystems as Anupam was just sort of describing it in a form are around industries, whether it's healthcare, government, financial services and the like. Maybe your thoughts on the power of ecosystems versus the, you know, the power of many versus the resources of one. >> Yeah, listen, I always talk about this is a team sport right? And it's not about doing it alone. It's about developing as ecosystem partners and really leveraging the power of that collective group. And I've been for as my clients to start thinking about, you know, the key thing you want to think about is how you migrate to becoming a data driven enterprise. And in order for you to get there, you're going to need ecosystem partners to go along the journey with you, to help you drive that innovation. You're going to need to adopt a pervasive mindset to data and democratization of that data everywhere in your enterprise. And you're going to need to refocus your decision-making based on that data, right? So I think partner ecosystem partnerships are here to stay. I think what we're going to see Dave is, you know, at the beginning of the maturity cycle, you're going to see the ecosystem expand with lots of different players and technologies kind of focused on industry. And then I think you'll get to a point where it starts to mature and starts to consolidate as ecosystem partners start to join together through acquisitions and mergers and things like that. So I think ecosystem is just starting to change. I think the key message that I would give to our clients is take advantage of that. There's too much complexity for any one person to kind of navigate through on your own. It's a team sport, so take advantage of all the partnerships you can create. >> Well, Manish one of the things you just said that it kind of reminds me, you said data data-driven, you know, organizations and, you know, if you look at the pre-COVID narrative around digital transformation, certainly there was a lot of digital transformation going on, but there was a lot of complacency too. I talked to a lot of folks, companies that say, "you know, we're doing pretty well, our banks kicking butt right now, we're making a ton of money." Or you know, all that stuff that's kind of not on my watch. I'll be retired before then. And then it was the old, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." And then COVID breaks everything. And now if you're not digital, you're out of business. And so Anupam I'll start with you. I mean, to build a data-driven culture, what does that mean? That means putting data at the center of your organization, as opposed to around in stove pipes. And this, again, we talked about this, it sort of started in there before even the early parts of last decade. And so it seems that there's cultural aspects there's obviously technology, but there's skillsets, there's processes, you've got a data lifecycle and a data, what I sometimes call a data pipeline, meaning an end to end cycle. And organizations are having to rethink really putting data at the core. What are you seeing? And specifically as it relates to this notion of data-driven organization and data culture, what's working? >> Yeah three favorite stories, and you're a 100% right. Digital transformation has been hyperaccelerated with COVID right? So our telco customers for example, you know, Manish had some technical problems with bandwidth just 10 minutes ago. Most likely is going to call his ISP. The ISP will most likely load up a dashboard in his zip code and the reason it gives me stress, this entire story is because most likely it's starting on a big data system that has to collect data every 15 minutes, and make it available. Because you'll have a very angry Manish on the other end, if you can't explain when is the internet coming back, right? So, as you said this is accelerated. Our telco providers, our telco customers ability to ingest data, because they have to get it in 15 minute increments, not in 24 hour increments. So that's one. On the banking sector what we have seen is uncertainty has created more needs for data. So next week is going to be very uncertain all of us know elections are upcoming. We have customers who are preparing for that additional variable capacity, elastic capacity, so that if investment bankers start running hundreds and thousands of reports, they better be ready. So it's changing the culture at a very fundamental level, right? And my last story is healthcare. You're running clinical trials, but everybody wants access to the data. Your partners, the government wants access to the data, manufacturers wants access to the data. So again, you have to actualize digital transformation on how do you share very sensitive, private healthcare data without violating any policy. But you have to do it quick. That's what COVID has started. >> Thank you for that. So I want to come back to hybrid cloud. I know a lot of people in the audience are, want to learn more about that. And they have a mandate really to go to cloud generally but hybrid specifically. So Manish I wonder if you could share with us, maybe there's some challenges, I mean what's the dark side of hybrid. What should people be thinking about that they, you know, they don't want to venture into, you know, this way, they want to go that way. What are some of the challenges that you're seeing with customers? And how are they mitigating them? >> Yeah, Dave it's a great question. I think there's a few items that I would coach my clients to prioritize and really get right when thinking about making the migration happen. First of all, I would say integration. Between your private and public components that can be complex, it can be challenging. It can be complicated based on the data itself, the organizational structure of the company, the number of touches and authors we have on that data and several other factors. So I think it's really important to get this integration right, with some clear accountabilities build automation where you can and really establish some consistent governance that allows you to maintain these assets. The second one I would say is security. When it comes to hybrid cloud management, any transfers of data you need to handle the strict policies and procedures, especially in industries where that's really relevant like healthcare and financial services. So using these policies in a way that's consistent across your environment and really well understood with anyone who's touching your environment is really important. And the third I would say is cost management. All the executives that I talk about have to have a cost management angle to it. Cloud migration provides ample opportunities for cost reduction. However many migration projects can go over budget when all the costs aren't factored in, right? So your cloud vendors. You've got to be mindful of kind of the charges on accessing on premise applications and scaling costs that maybe need to be budgeted for and where if possible anticipated and really plan for. >> Excellent. So Anupam I wonder if we could go a little deeper on, we talked a little bit about this, but kind of what you put where, which workloads. What are you seeing? I mean, how are people making the choice? Are they saying, okay, this cloud is good for analytics. This cloud is good. Well, I'm a customer of their software so I'm going to use this cloud or this one is the best infrastructure and they got, you know, the most features. How are people deciding really what to put where? Or is it, "hey, I don't want to be locked in to one cloud. I want to spread my risk around. What are you seeing specifically? >> I think the biggest thing is just to echo what Manish said. Is business comes in and as a complaint. So most projects that we see on digital transformation and on public cloud adoption is because businesses complaining about something. It's not architectural goodness, it is not for just innovation for innovation's sake. So, the biggest thing that we see is what we call noisy neighbors. A lot of dashboards, you know, because business has become so intense, click, click, click, click, you're actually putting a lot of load on the system. So isolating noisy neighbors into a cloud is one of the biggest patterns that you've seen. It takes the noisiest tenant on your cluster, noisiest workload and you take them to public cloud. The other one is data scientists. They want new libraries, they want to work with GPU's. And to your point Dave, that's where you select a particular cloud. Let's say there's a particular type silicone that is available only in that cloud. That GPU is available only in that cloud or that particular artificial intelligence library is available only in a particular cloud. That's when customers say, Hey miss, they decided, why don't you go to this cloud while the main workload might still be running on them, right? That's the two patterns that we are seeing. >> Right thank you. And I wonder if we can end on a little bit of looking to the future. Maybe how this is all going to evolve over the next several years. I mean, I like to look at it at a spectrum at a journey. It's not going to all come at once. I do think the edge is part of that. But it feels like today we've got, you know, multi clouds are loosely coupled and hybrid is also loosely coupled, but we're moving very quickly to a much more integrated, I think we Manish you talked about integration. Where you've got state, you've got the control plane, you've got the data plane. And all this stuff is really becoming native to the respective clouds and even bring that on-prem and you've got now hybrid applications and much much tighter integration and build this, build out of this massively distributed, maybe going from it's a hyper-converged to hyper-distributed again including the edge. So I wonder Manish we could start with you. How are your customers thinking about the future? How are they thinking about, you know, making sure that they're not going down a path where that's going to, they're going to incur a lot of technical debt? I know there's sort of infrastructure is code and containers and that seems it seems necessary, but insufficient there's a lot of talk about, well maybe we start with a functions based or a serverless architecture. There's some bets that have to be made to make sure that you can future proof yourself. What are you recommending there Manish? >> Yeah, I, listen I think we're just getting started in this journey. And like I said, it's really exciting time and I think there's a lot of evolution in front of us that we're going to see. I, you know, I think for example, I think we're going to see hybrid technologies evolve from public and private thinking to dedicated and shared thinking instead. And I think we're going to see advances in capabilities around automation and computer federation and evolution of consumption models of that data. But I think we've got a lot of kind of technology modifications and enhancements ahead of us. As far as companies and how they future proof themselves. I would offer the following. First of all, I think it's a time for action, right? So I would encourage all my class to take action now. Every day spent in legacy adds to the technical debt that you're going to incur, and it increases your barrier to entry. The second one would be move with agility and flexibility. That's the underlying value of hybrid cloud structures. So organizations really need to learn how to operate in that way and take advantage of that agility and that flexibility. We've talked about creating partnerships in ecosystems I think that's going to be really important. Gathering partners and thought leaders to help you navigate through that complexity. And lastly I would say monetizing your data. Making a value led approach to how you viewed your data assets and force a function where each decision in your enterprise is tied to the value that it creates and is backed by the data that supports it. And I think if you get those things right, the technology and the infrastructure will serve. >> Excellent and Anupam why don't you bring us home, I mean you've got a unique combination of technical acumen and business knowledge. How do you see this evolving over the next three to five years? >> Oh, thank you Dave. So technically speaking, adoption of containers is going to steadily make sure that you're not aware even of what cloud you're running on that day. So the multicloud will not be a requirement even, it will just be obviated when you have that abstraction there. Contrarily, it's going to be a bigger challenge. I would echo what Manish said start today, especially on the cultural side. It is great that you don't have to procure hardware anymore, but that also means that many of us don't know what our cloud bill is going to be next month. It is a very scary feeling for your CIO and your CFO that you don't know how much you're going to to spend next month forget next year, right? So you have to be agile in your financial planning as much you have to be agile in your technical planning. And finally I think you hit on it. Ecosystems are what makes data great. And so you have to start from day one that if I am going on this cloud solution, is the data shareable? Am I able to create an ecosystem around that data? Because without that, it's just somebody running a report may or may not have value to the business. >> That's awesome, guys. Thanks so much for a great conversation. We're at a time and I want to wish everybody a terrific event. Let me now hand it back to Vanita. She's going to take you through the rest of the day. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, thanks. (smooth calm music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Dell Technologies. World Digital Experience Brought to You by Dell Technologies. >>Welcome to the Cubes coverage of Dell Technologies World. The Digital Experience in 2020 I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm pleased to welcome back one of our alumni on the Cube. Joining me is Gil Shorts in the SPP and the Edge Portfolio Strategy at Execution for Dell Technologies. Gil, it's great to see you, even virtually. >>It's great to see you again, Lisa. >>It wouldn't be a Dell Technologies world if I didn't get a chance to talk to you. We didn't have you on the Cube, so we appreciate it. And you are very socially distant from me. I am in California. You're in Israel, so we're following guidelines. But one of the one of the other things that's changed since I've lasting you is you're now in this new role with respect to edge. Tell me a little bit about that. >>Well, a few months ago, the Dell Technologies Management asked me to look after our, um, its strategy and execution. Um, they put me in this role to execute on a strategy that has been developed for a while. Look at the market looking, looking at the opportunity. Onda also, you know, based on where I came from with VX rail looking at similar concept, that would be implemented across the board. And so here I am today in the process of setting up 18 that would help the company to capture that future opportunity. >>Well, congratulations on that. So we've been talking about the edge for a while. It isn't anything new, but talk to us about what's going on from Dell Technologies Perspective. What are some of the things that you're seeing with respect to the value that the Edge will provide two businesses in any industry? >>Um, you're right and he's not new. We have bean at the edge, all of us, the industry, definitely Dell Technologies forever. What's different is that for the last few years, a lot of the applications that are there to capture information and make real time decisions have bean in data centers or in the cloud, and we used to connect all sorts of sensors directly to those of data centers or clouds. Well, now we have too much information. That information is very costly. to move. It takes time to move it. I'm sometimes you don't want to move into a cloud or even your own data center. And so the industry is starting to move more and more. Compute storage, networking towards the edge. Eso It's nothing new, but you know there's use cases. Some of them are all use cases that need to migrate towards where the data is created to be a manufacturing plant or a retail store or or a minor or utility company. And there are a new use cases that are just being enabled by technology by, uh, better connectivity. Um, computer vision. You know, it used to be there in a store. There was a point of sale. Well, now there's a self check out, sometimes with the front detection capability. So all of those presents a fairly drastic change, where some expectation as 75% of the world's data, is created outside of the traditional data center cloud by 2025. And that's why we need to be working towards being the best choice for our customers for the edge applications. >>So, yeah, you quoted Gartner saying that 75% of that cloud enterprised it or the enterprise data is going to be processed outside formal data center or the cloud by 2025 is, you said That's in five short years, hopefully short years when we return to normal, so tremendous amount of change going on. But you also talk about some new use cases. I'm just curious, since the world has so dramatically changed our since we last saw you in person, are any of those use cases driven by the pandemic and how many businesses have had to Tibbett so quickly and change their way of operating? >>Well, that that's a very good example of how edge applications are being being leveraged. Obviously, computer vision, thermal imaging. Um, in some places, though, that's, you know, a very loaded term. You know, some social distancing applications are being created around the world. The the the world is a new way to respond to this, uh, this pandemic. But this pandemic, you know, will come will hopefully go soon. Go away soon when we get the vaccine. Um, but even day to day has changed the we doom or in a digital manner, we leverage more sensors and all sorts of electronic feelers out there. Um, you know, I talked to in agriculture Company recently that they have a robot that looks at their plans every day and decides which one are healthy and which one are sick and what to do about it. Um, they have a robot that follows that one and take section, and I suggested that they should have another robot to just eat the fruits. And, you know, none of us will be required anymore. But the point is, on a mission e no applications are being created because we can, and that that requires real time decision making. And that's why compute and storage and networking are moving towards where the data is created, and hence the growth in edge applications as we see them, >>that really time implication is absolutely critical. And that's something that businesses, whether it's agricultural or construction or retail, for example, or manufacturing that needs that real time insight. We talk about that all the time. We also talk about the term, you know, businesses need to get actionable insights from data, and that's one of those terms, like data driven. That could mean multiple different things. What from Dell technologies perspective, enabling a business to get actionable insights from data. What does that mean from Dell? Text perspective. And how is the edge of facilitator of that? >>Well, I think we need to look at, you know, our value, it our focus, which is in the infrastructure. I'm there. And so if somebody has information created at the edge, they would have their own way to analyze that data. Sometimes it's gonna be people data scientists with another latest application. Many times more and more, it's gonna be machines through machine learning that will analyze the situation and make recommendations. Either way, this environment needs to be up and running. It needs to be resilient. It needs to be outside of the data center, which presents a lot of challenges. Um, it's, you know, fragmented technology that is moving from different places to the edge in multiple multiple physical and environmental constraints. Um, those environments are remote and distributed. It's not in your data center, which means that you need to make sure that you have reliable service and support. You also need to secure it better. Suddenly, there is more entry points of things that people could touch and on great problems for the organization. So our job, in my opinion, is to solve those problems is to say, Look, you know, you need to move towards the edge to analyze your data, to make decisions. We're here to solve that problem and and allow you to do this without making a significant significant trade off, you know, versus doing it in your own data center or in the cloud. >>Yeah, I was talking to one of Dell Technologies customers the other day who has tens of thousands of sensors and cameras all over the world, or maybe great work there. And I'm thinking all of the challenges with respect to the environmental implications or right physical implications. And I was thinking, you know, the business is doing edge in California. The last month would have been very challenged with things like the smoke. How do you help organizations to enable that infrastructure to be reliable under different physical and environmental conditions? >>That's a great question, and I will just say before before I have said specifically that while the physical constraints are something that we usually talk about when we talk about EJ, I actually think that the bigger problem is management. Um, but we're not unaware for the physical requirements. So we are busy delivering recognized short depth. You know, servers we just launched recently. The extra to a platform, Highly ragged eyes, short depth will speak server that can go from minus, you know, sells you some to 55 cents you saw in temperature. Um, or you know, the ability to connect those through, you know, software defined networking. Or if I talk about a little bit of my heritage taking the same extra, too, with the VM or Visa V X range stack and said, you know, putting it out there as a ruggedized but also remotely managed in full stack solution. Um, So you will see us putting out and have bean different form factors front and serviceability, different temperature ranges, a different kind of CPS, all of those. But I will also tell you that we're gonna focus heavily on the way to manage those and secure them and update them because I think that's where the simplification comes, not just from the form factor of themselves. >>Yeah, that has been the heterogeneous and and very widely distributed nature of the H has been a barrier for businesses for quite a while. Can you unpack that a little bit? Mawr In terms of the simplification of the management, How is Dele? Technology is going to enable a business to achieve that. >>Well, let's start with what? What? What we have out there in the market today. Somebody could have a cloud native application developed, you know, maybe even all containerized. And they could run it on tansy t k g on the VX rail, and they could run it in thousands of locations around the world. I'm centrally managing all of those Andre the phone factors being, you know, regular server or ragged, A server. Um, the ability to run your edge application as an extension off your cloud model is also very important getting to consistent operation. So, for example, somebody is using VM, or Cloud Foundation in their data center. Could leverage that recently large capability off multiple multi classroom manager. So now you have a central VM or club foundation managing multiple classes out there on DSO, we bring together the physical attributes and the management attributes on at the same time. Um, if you expand on it I also think the Dell will have to meet customers where they are with, you know, the the ability to get simplifying and automate solutions for their choice off applications where they are today. And so that's what we're going to be working towards. >>So when you're talking with customers who are either looking to expand their edge operations, simplify them like you were just talking about, or even those businesses that are looking to explore and exploit the edge for operational improvement and maybe being able to deliver a better customer experience. I'd love to know how you approach those different customers. For example, I know that Dell says Don't consider the edge of separate problem. >>That's true the and I don't think customers look at the edges a separate problem either. In other words, the most conversations today would would look at in architecture that has some cloud and some edge. That cloud could be in their own hybrid cloud solution in the data center or a hyper scaler solution that they're running on. Um, if you think about the most generic problem at the edge, it's an analytics problem, right? So we know. So we know the data is created at the edge, it's going to be analyzed by definition. If you talk about machine learning, for example, parts would happen at the edge. What would happen in the data center or in the cloud? Um, if you look at any other type of analytics, you'll make some real time decisions. But save some of the information back in the cloud. So it's not a separate decision anymore. It's got to be somehow connected to your infrastructure. And I think that also learns toe. More and more organizations are putting together the O. T. What we call it operational technology in the i t. Um, when they're trying to leverage I t best practices in the OT space, and I think that's how they're coming together, right, you have to transform. You need to do something with the data. You look at a new architectures. I t brings that cloud or hybrid cloud or distributed computer architectures er into those more traditional environments. >>A little bit about that we've tried and we've talked about the I T. O T. Convergence and relationships in the past many times on the queue. But that's an essential component here, so that not only can a business really face those barriers, confront them and eliminate them, but it's also sometimes a bit culturally challenging. What do you see when you talk with customers and you recognize that's one of the things that they need to do with the line? I t n ot what? Your recommendations there, >>Um, first of all is I always wonder if ot people now we're calling them ot people. I certainly know that I t people are identified as I d. I think multi people are head of engineering head of production. You know, they run their businesses and and they've been doing things they you know, it's not like they haven't been doing even the analysis. Even nothing really is New Year. But they would use the, you know, the machine manufacturer on prem solution or a cloud solution to many specific so solutions worm or bespoke or specific specific machine specific problems. Oh, the advent off edge computing and those environments moving closer to the edge and the architecture unable to consolidate, by the way one of the strength until technology has. And so instead of just solving a you know, a A I don't know. Machine maintenance schedule or improvement in a plan. We can have an environment that's all that and possibly the video surveillance and maybe the plan. TRP. There is no need anymore to solve any problems specifically with a specific solution. That's where I t comes in, because that's what I T has been doing for a long time. So that conversation that bridge between solving specific problem and putting together an architectural ER that could consolidate multiple use cases and be part of an overall cloud our data center to its strategy. It's very, very helpful for both sides because because it's it's very effective. Um, I think more and more customers are realizing that that was conversations are happening and I t is being put into recommend a solution. So Andi, I think in fact, there's some research that shows that that is happening, Andi, that sets us up to have the right conversation with right, um, owners in those accounts. >>That's excellent. That brings up another question. I had you mentioned the word bespoke a minute or so ago, and I thought, you know so many of the of the edge deployments. There's complexity there. There might be unique requirements depending on business, depending on vertical. What's Dell Technologies approach to tackling the edge? Consistently like like the top three things that you go to with every opportunity every day appointment that you know, these three things fundamentally must be and part of the foundation. >>I think we touched on those. I think the recognition that it's part of a larger strategy is one. And so it's gonna be playing along in that you know that strategy, that data center to edge or cloud strategy. Um, the other one is the management that you put in place. And so, by the way, even even a few things that we we are gap today, which is why we are investing in the edge. Um, like the ability to provision with zero touch simplifying that experience, though we are very good at life cycle management, for example, which is the next thing. So it's that consistent operation between core and edge, which is very important. It's the physical constraints that have to be addressed in, I think, more important than anything is the ability to get support because you can't be everywhere that is considered for us and that you need somebody to be there in Tel. Um, you know, his people almost everywhere around the world that can be there on on a short notice to take care of problems. Moreover, many of our technologies dial home, and so we know when things happen even before they do. Um so I think sometimes people mention enterprise. Great. You know, it's It's a very important consideration to look at those edge. Sometimes people think that edge is small and possibly not as, um um, requiring as a Davis and replication. In my opinion, the workloads that are now going to the head require enterprise grade treatment and to end. And so you know, it's it's the management. It's the physical environment in the support that you may require that are very common. >>Excellent. Thank you. So last question for you. Since we don't get to do a physical Dell Technologies world this year, hopefully we will again one day soon. I want to know in this new role what are you you're excited about with respect to edge when you're engaging with customers, presumably over video conferencing. What are some of the things that you see that you're really excited about safe for the next sector. 12 months? >>Well, look, from a business perspective. Clearly, um, the the pendulum is swinging our way in a sense of customer need. What we have, which is very nice, because you can solve customer problems with a lot of experience and a amazing portfolio, though it has some gaps that we're gonna work on, Which is why you know what we're investing from a personal standpoint, it's It's kind of a rare opportunity to touch real life things. If that makes any sense, Every conversation is about tangible things that people do. They manufacturer, they save lives. They are growing plants. Um, it is. It has a very physical element that makes makes it so much more interesting. It also the edges. You know, it's the one area that we deal with. It has a paan almost in every sentence, so you can go for a conversation without anybody or anybody can >>Ugo. Now let's let's end it with a great panel for the edge. >>I know So what? No, I'm just saying, maybe I'm living on the edge. Who knows? >>Oh, nice living on the edge. I think that's what we're all doing during this coven. 19. Well, Gil, it's been so great to have you back on the Cube. Thank you for your time. I look forward to seeing you. Hopefully the next event in person. >>I hope so too. Lisa. Good to see you. >>Likewise. Bar Guillotine Arnson. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes. Coverage of Dell Technologies, World 2020. A digital experience.

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is theCUBE conversation. >> Hello everyone, David Vellante here and welcome to the special CUBE conversation with a colleague and friend of mine, Randy Seidl is a accomplished CEO, he's an executive, sales pro, and he's a founder of the Sales Community, this newly formed social network, Randy, good to see you again, welcome. >> Hey, great to see you, it's been a lot of great years, great relationship with you and congratulations with all your success with SiliconANGLE and theCUBE. I was remembering back, I think it's been probably since 1985, so 35 years ago when we were both Cub Scouts, I was at EMC, and you were at IDC. >> Yeah, I mean, first of all, I love where you are, your man-cave there, we heard you held a great little networking event that you do periodically with some of our joint colleagues. And yeah, wow, we were both in our twenties, I was a young pop and Dicky Eagan, and Jack and Mike, and they would have me talk to you guys, you know, sort of brief you on the market, what little I knew now looking back. But wow, Randy, I mean. >> We knew! >> Right, I mean, and then just the whole thing just took off, but we had a good instinct, that storage was going to matter, everything back then was mainframe and IBM was the king of the world, and then you guys just crushed it. Wow, what a run, amazing. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> So tell me about Sales Community. What are you trying to accomplish with this new social network? >> Well, it was kind of really my COVID moment. I was talking to Peter Bell I know, you know well as well, and it was right in the beginning of COVID we were kind of comparing notes and long story short, he said, hey Randy, you do all this work with these technology companies, and channel partners, and use your customers, CIO, CTO, CSOs, but you're really not doing much for those that you know the best, which are really technology sales professionals, CROs, STRs kind of up and down the food chain. And that really got me thinking, then he introduced me to one of his companies that sells to CROs and I was going through with them and they were kind of calling me on the carpet saying, okay, do I really know these people? I'm like, oh my gosh! They basically just said, I'm a dope, I haven't really done anything here. So, one thing led to another and ended up developing a Sales Community, a big thing and big help for me was talking to probably 150 or so during the course of the summer, CROs, VPs of sales, Reps STRs to really kind of help get some feedback from them in terms of I caught now they call product-market fit, but kind of what they think it's missing, what's needed, what are their teams need, what do they want? So, it's kind of all a perfect storm, which to be honest without COVID probably wouldn't have created Sales Community. >> Well, I joined and it was a great onboarding experience and love participating with colleagues. I mean, sales is hard, I mean, you've got your ups and your downs and you just got to keep pressing on, but who's participating in Sales Community. >> We're targeting STRs on up to CROs and the kind of the tagline is learn more so you can sell more. We have a lot of great different kind of content areas and we're going to kind of bob and weave based on the feedback that we get, but we've got some great virtual events and interviews. We have an executive coach, Tony Jerry, who's doing nine sessions on designing your life. We did a recording, a live session last week on personal goal setting. We did one yesterday, it was a live session that'll be posted shortly on strategic health. Next one's on branding, so that's not necessarily specific to tech sales, but kind of adding value. We also have Dave Knorr, another executive coach doing a weekly interview series that we're calling tech sales insights with some of the leading CROs, CEOs, Jim Sullivan, who I know you know well, he's going to be the first one, it's going to be next Wednesday, he runs a NWN and he's done a lot of great things and a lot of other great leaders from there. Also still on the interview virtual events side, Michael Cotoia from Tech Target he's going to do a CMO insights series. His Tech Target International editors are also going to do regional ones. So CIO interviews from AMEA, Asia Pac, Latin America, Australia, also on the CSO side, we have somebody focused on doing a CSO interviews, Paul Salamanca of channel interviews, I think this channel, by and large gets missed a lot. CEO's and then Steve Duplessie, I know you know well as well is going to do and focus on CIO, sub-CIO insights, but basically creating virtual events and interview series that are really targeted at people that we sell to. So that covers the kind of virtual event and interview side. And I maybe more quickly go through some of the other key segments. So another one is a content library. There's the guy who's a STR at ServiceNow went through, send me note the other day that said, hey, I found out you have some great feedback on prospecting cold calling, I shared it with my team helped me a lot. So a lot of good things in terms of content library, also opportunity to network. So you could be say selling to Fidelity, you could send a note to the community and members and say anybody else trying to sell the Fidelity, let's network, let's compare notes, also great opportunities for channel partners. So channel partner could raise their hand and say, hey, I know Fidelity, let me help with you. A lot of sharing of best practices. And also just in terms of communication, slack channels, and then opportunities to create round tables. So you might have CROs from startups that want to have maybe six to 10 of them get together. So they can kind of commiserate, ask questions, you could have CROs, companies that are maybe transforming going from on-prem to kind of SAS model. So a lot of different great things, ultimately really to serve the folks in the tech Sales Community. >> Yeah, it sounds like, I mean, first of all tons of content, the other thing I like about it is we all read books on sales, some of them are so like gimmicky, some of them are inspirational. Some of them have really great suggestions. Some of them can be life changing, but what's always been missing in my opinion, is this notion of a network, a social network, if you will, where people can help each other, you just gave a ton of good examples. So you're really trying to differentiate from a lot of the things that have worked over the years, but have really sort of one way communication, some sales guru either training or you're reading his or her book. >> Yes, and we're also fortunate on the content side, we have some of the best kind of consulting sales methodology companies that love what we're doing. So they're likewise providing a lot of content and as you said, it's crazy. You think of any other industry, restaurant, hotel, lawyers, landscape, they have these big, kind of user groups, even technology companies user groups within the larger field of technology sales enterprise B2B sales, there's really nothing that looks like this that exists. So far the feedback's been great. >> Well, so just to what you're describing, I mean, I've known you for a long, long time, and one of the principles of great salespeople is, you help others, right? You make as many friends as you can, and you're the master of that. But essentially you're bringing a lot of the things that have worked, a lot of the principles that have worked in your career to this community. Maybe talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah, I mean, especially I think some of the younger sales folks, it's not kind of off the cuff as we know, but it's really kind of training, being disciplined, being prepared, what are you going to do, how are you going to do it in this COVID moment? You know, I'm seeing lots of friends where the companies that have great relationships, they can do really well and kind of lean in a lot. If you're kind of cold calling and this environment, and it's tough, so kind of, how can you be best prepared, how can you do the best homework? How can you have the kind of right agenda, when you're going to do the sales calls? And then it's not really as much follow up, but really follow through in terms of what you do afterwards. So kind of what is the training? What can you do, how can you do it? And, you know, it's crazy, a lot of companies spend lots of money on training, but if you think about it they're really tied in specifically to tech sales, hopefully this will be great. Plus being able to just kind of throw out questions here and there works out well as well. >> Well that's what I'm looking forward to, say, hey, I got some challenges, how do others deal with this? You know, one of the things that is, I think, paramount to being a great salesperson is the attitude you hear it all the time. How do you stay pumped up? (laughing) Like I said before, we've all been through ups and downs, and what do you tell people there? >> In terms of staying pumped up, interestingly enough, the session we did yesterday on strategic health, probably plays a key role. So yeah, there's the work aspects and how are you going to focus and wake up and get fired up. But ultimately, I think you really got to take several steps back and saying are you taking care of yourself? Are you sleeping, are you eating and drinking correctly? Are you drinking enough water, are you exercising? So, in this moment, I think that's probably something that gets missed a lot in terms of getting fired up. And then ultimately just being excited about kind of what you're doing, how are you doing it, taking care of the customers and serving those around you. And you had mentioned in terms of giving it back, but a lot of us that have been around, love the idea of kind of paying it forward, helping out others and seeing a lot of the great younger folks really rise up and become stars. >> I think that's one of the most exciting things is somebody has been around for awhile. Like (laughing) we all get cold calls and say, hey, how you doing today? You know, (laughing) you really had that dead air, and you actually want to reach out and help these individuals. A lot of times they'll call you, they have no idea what you do, well I've read your website, and I think we'd be a great fit for, you know, something that would not be a great fit. So, there's a level of preparation we always talk about in sales, you got to be prepared, but there's also sometimes... I was talking to a sales pro the other day, you know, sometimes you can over prepare he said, I've been on sales calls, I prepare for hours and hours and hours, and then they get there, and it was just a lot of wasted hours. I probably could have done it in 15 minutes. I mean, so there's a really a balance there. And it comes with experience, I guess. >> Yeah, I mean, I don't know how anybody could prepare hours and hours, so that's a whole different subject to think. >> Well, he said, my technique now is just 15 minutes before the call I'll jump on and just, you know, cram as much as I can. And it actually, it worked for him. So, different approaches, right? >> Yeah, absolutely. The other thing I'd like to mention is the advisory board I'm fortunate to have a work with, and be friends with several of the best in industry like you. So if anybody goes to the website, you can click on an advisory board and there's a 200 plus and haven't count them exactly. But you know, some of the best in technology, we've got them sorted on the sales side and the channel side, the consulting side, the coaching side, analyst side, but, really just such a tremendous each head of talent that can really help us continue to go and grow and pivot and you're making sure that we are serving our Sales Community and making sure everybody's learning more so they can sell more. And then I guess I should add onto that also, earning more and making more money. >> So I got to ask you where you land on this. I mean, you're a sports fan, I am too and for a while there once the "Moneyball" came out, you saw Billy Bean and it was this sort of formulaic approach. The guy, you know, we would joke the team with the best nerds would win. But it seems like there's an equilibrium. It used to be all gut feel and experience, and then it became the data nerds. And it seems like in our industry, it's following a similar pattern, the marketing ops, Martech, becoming very, very data driven. But it feels to me, Randy, especially in these COVID times that there really is this equilibrium, this balance between experience, and tribal knowledge, gut feel, network, which is something you're building and the data. How do you see that role, that CRO role, that sales role evolving, especially in the context of what I just talked about with the data nerds? (laughing) >> Yeah, absolutely, I think I heard two points there since you brought up Billy Bean, I forgot the guy's name, but in the movie is kind of nerd. I've got Jesse and Tucker who have been tremendously helpful for us putting together a Sales Community. But to answer the question on the CMOs side, the CMOs out there frankly not going to like this answer, but I think more and more, you see CMOs and CROs kind of separated and it's kind of different agendas, my belief is that eventually the CMO function or marketing is really going to come under sales and sales are really going to take a much more active role in driving and leveraging that marketing function in terms of what's the best bang for the buck, what are they doing, how are they doing it? And I've got a lot of friends, I won't name names, but they're not on the sales side and they're doing what they can, but they just see what I'd call it kind of wasted money or inefficiencies on the marketing side. So, if I maybe I spin that a different way, I think given kind of analytics and those companies that do have best practices, and I write things on the marketing side, you know, they're going to continue to go and grow, you know, on cert with the right sales team. So I think that you bring up a great point and that area is going to continue to evolve a lot. >> Does that principle apply to product marketing? In other words do you feel like product marketing should be more aligned with engineering or sales and maybe sales and finance, where do you land on that? >> Yeah, I mean, I'm kind of old school, so I go back to Dick and Jack and Roger and Mike Rutgers, and you all in terms of, hey, you have those silos, but you get everybody at the table, kind of what we're working well together. It is interesting though in today's world, the PLG, Product-Led Growth models, where a lot of companies now are trying to get in maybe almost like a VMware, maybe BMC did in the early days where you're kind of getting into the low level developers and then kind of things bubble up so that you think Product-Led Growth model, having a lower cost insight sales model, works when I'll say the kind of the product sells itself. But I would argue, that I think some of those PLG led companies really miss out on leveraging the high end enterprise relationships, to kind of turbocharge and supersize and expedite larger sales deals, larger (indistinct). >> Well, and you mentioned earlier a channel you said a lot of times that's overlooked and I couldn't agree more, channel increasingly important. That's where a lot of the relationships live, it gives you scale, it just gives you a lot of leverage, maybe you talk about the importance of channel and how it relates to Sales Community. >> Yeah, I mean, it's interesting they're really unto themselves, there's some things that are channel channel, but if you think about, you know, go to market tech sales, pick the company on average is probably half of the business goes through the channel. And it used to be way back when just kind of fulfillment, but now the best companies really are those that have the right relationships, that are adding value, that can help on the pre sales, that can help on the post sales, that can help kind of cross sale. You know, if I'm a customer, I don't want to deal with whatever five or 10 different vendors if I can have a one stop shop with one bar solution provider, partner, SI, or whatever you want to call them, you know, that certainly makes life a lot easier. And I think a lot of companies almost been kind of a second class citizen, but I think those companies that really bring them into the fold as really partners at the table, whether it be an account planning sessions, whether you're doing sales calls, but kind of leveraging that I call it a variable cost kind of off balance sheet, sales force really is where the future is going to continue to go. >> So you've been a successful individual sales contributor. You've been a CEO, you've run large sales organizations. I mean, you basically ran sales at HP for Donna Telly, and so you've seen it all, and you've been helping startups. When you look at hiring sales people, what are the attributes that you look for? Is it intelligence, is it hard work, is it coach ability? What are some of the things that are most important to you, and do you apply different attributes in different situations? What are your thoughts on that? >> Great question in a little plug, maybe for a recruiting business, top talent recruiting, (laughing) but one of the key things that we do, which I think is different from others in the recruiting side is the relationships. So a lot of people don't dig in, when we're talking to candidates, they say, well, nobody really asked me this before. And I would argue a key differentiator, and this is way before COVID, but especially now with COVID is okay, who do you have relationships with? So I could be talking to a candidate that maybe somebody is hiring, wants to cover financial services in New York. And then I'll say, okay, well, who do you know what City JPB Bay and I'll know more people than they know. And I'll probably say, just so you know, that's weird me up in Boston. I know more than the council you probably know the best. So really trying to unearth, really kind of who has the right relationships and then separate from that in terms of a reference check, being able to reference checks sooner in the process with somebody that know well firsthand, as opposed to second hand. And a lot of times I've seen even some of the larger, more expensive recruiting firms, you're kind of wait until somebody is the final say, when do an offer, then they do a reference check and they do the reference check with somebody that they don't know. And to me, I mean, that's totally useless which quite with LinkedIn today, I could be say if we're looking at you for candidate, maybe a bad example, but I don't know, we probably have a 1000 in common, and from those, we probably have 200 that we both know, well, that I could check. And when you do reference checking, it's not a maybe it's either, hey, the person is a yes, or the person's a no. So trying to do that early in the process, I think is a big differentiator. And then last and probably third piece I'd highlight is, if it's a startup company, you can't get somebody that's just from a big company. If it's a big company role, you can't get somebody that just from a small company, you got to really make sure you kind of peel back the onions and see where they're from. And you could have somebody from a big company, but they were kind of wearing a smaller division. So again, you have to kind of, you can't judge a book by the cover. You got to kind of peel back the onion. >> So Randy, how do people learn more about Sales Community? Where do they go to engage, sign up, et cetera? >> Absolutely, it's salescommunity.com. So it should be pretty straight forward. A lot of great information there. You can go subscribe, and if you like it spread the word and a lot of great content and you can ping me there. And if not I'm randy@salescommunity.com. So love to get any feedback, help out in any way we can. >> Well, I think it's critical that you're putting this network together and you are probably the best networker that I know I've seen you in action at gatherings and you really have been a great inspiration and a friend. So, Randy, thanks so much for doing the Sales Community and coming on theCUBE and sharing your experience with us. >> Great, thanks Dave, appreciate it. >> All right you're very welcome and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(bright music) >> Announcer: It's theCUBE. Covering the Virtual Vertica Big Data Conference 2020, brought to you by Vertica. Hello everybody, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Vertica Big Data Conference, the Virtual BDC. My name is Dave Volante, and you're watching theCUBE. And we're here with Joe Gonzalez, who is a Vertica DBA, at MassMutual Financial. Joe, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE I'm sorry that we can't be face to face in Boston, but at least we're being responsible. So thank you for coming on. >> (laughs) Thank you for having me. It's nice to be here. >> Yeah, so let's set it up. We'll talk about, you know, a little bit about MassMutual. Everybody knows it's a big financial firm, but what's your role there and kind of your mission? >> So my role is Vertica DBA. I was hired January of last year to come on and manage their Vertica cluster. They've been on Vertica for probably about a year and a half before that started out on on-prem cluster and then move to AWS Enterprise in the cloud, and brought me on just as they were considering transitioning over to Vertica's EON mode. And they didn't really have anybody dedicated to Vertica, nobody who really knew and understood the product. And I've been working with Vertica for about probably six, seven years, at that point. I was looking for something new and landed a really good opportunity here with a great company. >> Yeah, you have a lot of experience in Vertica. You had a role as a market research, so you're a data guy, right? I mean that's really what you've been doing your entire career. >> I am, I've worked with Pitney Bowes, in the postage industry, I worked with healthcare auditing, after seven years in market research. And then I've been with MassMutual for a little over a year now, yeah, quite a lot. >> So tell us a little bit about kind of what your objectives are at MassMutual, what you're kind of doing with the platform, what application just supporting, paint a picture for us if you would. >> Certainly, so my role is, MassMutual just decided to make Vertica its enterprise data warehouse. So they've really bought into Vertica. And we're moving all of our data there probably about to good 80, 90% of MassMutual's data is going to be on the Vertica platform, in EON mode. So, and we have a wide usage of that data across corporation. Right now we're about 50 terabytes and growing quickly. And a wide variety of users. So there's a lot of ETLs coming in overnight, loading a lot of data, transforming a lot of data. And a lot of reporting tools are using it. So currently, Tableau MicroStrategy. We have Alteryx using it, and we also have API's running against it throughout the day, 24/7 with people coming in, especially now these days with the, you know, some financial uncertainty going on. A lot of people coming and checking their 401k's, checking their insurance and status and what not. So we have to handle a lot of concurrent traffic on top of the normal big query. So it's a quite diverse cluster. And I'm glad they're really investing in using Vertica as their overall solution for this. >> Yeah, I mean, these days your 401k like this, right? (laughing) Afraid to look. So I wonder, Joe if you could share with our audience. I mean, for those who might not be as familiar with the history of just Vertica, and specifically, about MPP, you've had historically you have, you know, traditional RDBMS, whether it's Db2 or Oracle, and then you had a spate of companies that came out with this notion of MPP Vertica is the one that, I think it's probably one of the few if only brands that they've survived, but what did that bring to the industry and why is that important for people to understand, just in terms of whatever it is, scale, performance, cost. Can you explain that? >> To me, it actually brought scale at good cost. And that's why I've been a big proponent of Vertica ever since I started using it. There's a number, like you said of different platforms where you can load big data and store and house big data. But the purpose of having that big data is not just for it to sit there, but to be used, and used in a variety of ways. And that's from, you know, something small, like the first installation I was on was about 10 terabytes. And, you know, I work with the data warehouses up to 100 terabytes, and, you know, there's Vertica installations with, you know, hundreds of petabytes on them. You want to be able to use that data, so you need a platform that's going to be able to access that data and get it to the clients, get it to the customers as quickly as possible, and not paying an arm and a leg for the privilege to do so. And Vertica allows companies to do that, not only get their data to clients and you know, in company users quickly, but save money while doing so. >> So, but so, why couldn't I just use a traditional RDBMS? Why not just throw it all into Oracle? >> One, cost, Oracle is very expensive while Vertica's a lot more affordable than that. But the column-score structure of Vertica allows for a lot more optimized queries. Some of the queries that you can run in Vertica in 2, 3, 4 seconds, will take minutes and sometimes hours in an RDBMS, like Oracle, like SQL Server. They have the capability to store that amount of data, no question, but the usability really lacks when you start querying tables that are 180 billion column, 180 billion rows rather of tables in Vertica that are over 1000 columns. Those will take hours to run on a traditional RDBMS and then running them in Vertica, I get my queries back in a sec. >> You know what's interesting to me, Joe and I wonder if you could comment, it seems that Vertica has done a good job of embracing, you know, riding the waves, whether it was HDFS and the big data in our early part of the big data era, the machine learning, machine intelligence. Whether it's, you know, TensorFlow and other data science tools, it seems like Vertica somehow in the cloud is the other one, right? A lot of times cloud is super disruptive, particularly to companies that started on-prem, it seems like Vertica somehow has been able to adopt and embrace some of these trends. Why, from your standpoint, first of all, from your standpoint, as a customer, is that true? And why do you think that is? Is it architectural? Is it true mindset engineering? I wonder if you could comment on that. >> It's absolutely true, I've started out again, on an on-prem Vertica data warehouse, and we kind of, you know, rolled kind of along with them, you know, more and more people have been using data, they want to make it accessible to people on the web now. And you know, having that, the option to provide that data from an on-prem solution, from AWS is key, and now Vertica is offering even a hybrid solution, if you want to keep some of your data behind a firewall, on-prem, and put some in the cloud as well. So data at Vertica has absolutely evolved along with the industry in ways that no other company really has that I've seen. And I think the reason for it and the reason I've stayed with Vertica, and specifically have remained at Vertica DBA for the last seven years, is because of the way Vertica stays in touch with it's persons. I've been working with the same people for the seven, eight years, I've been using Vertica, they're family. I'm part of their family, and you know, I'm good friends with some of these people. And they really are in tune not only with the customer but what they're doing. They really sit down with you and have those conversations about, you know, what are your needs? How can we make Vertica better? And they listen to their clients. You know, just having access to the data engineers who develop Vertica to be arranged on a phone call or whatnot, I've never had that with any other company. Vertica makes that available to their customers when they need it. So the personal touch is a huge for them. >> That's good, it's always good to get the confirmation from the practitioners, just not hear from the vendor. I want to ask you about the EON transition. You mentioned that MassMutual brought you in to help with that. What were some of the challenges that you faced? And how did you get over them? And what did, what is, why EON? You know, what was the goal, the outcome and some of the challenges maybe that you had to overcome? >> Right. So MassMutual had an interesting setup when I first came in. They had three different Vertica clusters to accommodate three different portions of their business. The data scientists who use the data quite extensively in very large queries, very intense queries, their work with their predictive analytics and whatnot. It was a separate one for the API's, which needed, you know, sub-second query response times. And the enterprise solution, they weren't always able to get the performance they needed, because the fast queries were being overrun by the larger queries that needed more resources. And then they had a third for starting to develop this enterprise data platform and started, you know, looking into their future. The first challenge was, first of all, bringing all those three together, and back into a single cluster, and allowing our users to have both of the heavy queries and the API queries running at the same time, on the same platform without having to completely separate them out onto different clusters. EON really helps with that because it allows to store that data in the S3 communal storage, have the main cluster set up to run the heavy queries. And then you can set up sub clusters that still point to that S3 data, but separates out the compute so that the API's really have their own resources to run and not be interfered with by the other process. >> Okay, so that, I'm hearing a couple of things. One is you're sort of busting down data silos. So you're able to have a much more coherent view of your data, which I would imagine is critical, certainly. Companies like MassMutual, have been around for 100 years, and so you've got all kinds of data dispersed. So to the extent that you can break down those silos, that's important, but also being able to I guess have granular increments of compute and storage is what I'm hearing. What does that do for you? It make that more efficient? Well, they are other business benefits? Maybe you could elucidate. >> Well, one cost is again, a huge benefit, the cost of running three different clusters in even AWS, in the enterprise solution was a little costly, you know, you had to have your dedicated servers here and there. So you're paying for like, you know, 12, 15 different servers, for example. Whereas we bring them all back into EON, I can run everything on a six-node production cluster. And you know, when things are busy, I can spin up the three-node top cluster for the API's, only paid for when I need them, and then bring them back into the main cluster when things are slowed down a bit, and they can get that performance that they need. So that saves a ton on resource costs, you know, you're not paying for the storage, you're paying for one S3 bucket, you're only paying for the nodes, these are two instances, that are up and running when you need them., and that is huge. And again, like you said, it gives us the ability to silo our data without having to completely separate our data into different storage areas. Which is a big benefit, it gives us the ability to query everything from one single cluster without having to synchronize it to, you know, three different ones. So this one going to have there's, this one going to have there's, but everyone's still looking at the same data and replicate that in QA and Devs so that people can do it outside of production and do some testing as well. >> So EON, obviously a very important innovation. And of course, Vertica touts the difference between others who separate huge storage, and you know, they're not the only one that does that, but they are really I think the only one that does it for on-prem, and virtually across clouds. So my question is, and I think you're doing a breakout session on the Virtual BDC. We're going to be in Boston, now we're doing it online. If I'm in the audience, I'm imagining I'm a junior DBA at an organization that maybe doesn't have a Joe. I haven't been an expert for seven years. How hard is it for me to get, what do I need to do to get up to speed on EON? It sounds great, I want it. I'm going to save my company money, but I'm nervous 'cause I've only been at Vertica DBA for, you know, a year, and I'm sort of, you know, not as experienced as you. What are the things that I should be thinking about? Do I need to bring in? Do I need to hire somebody? Do I need to bring in a consultant? Can I learn it myself? What would you advise? >> It's definitely easy enough that if you have at least a little bit of work experience, you can learn it yourself, okay? 'Cause the concepts are still there. There's some you know, little bits of nuances where you do need to be aware of certain changes between the Enterprise and EON edition. But I would also say consult with your Vertica Account Manager, consult with your, you know, let them bring in the right people from Vertica to help you get up to speed and if you need to, there are also resources available as far as consultants go, that will help you get up to speed very quickly. And we did work together with Vertica and with one of their partners, Clarity, in helping us to understand EON better, set it up the right way, you know, how do we take our, the number of shards for our data warehouse? You know, they helped us evaluate all that and pick the right number of shards, the right number of nodes to get set up and going. And, you know, helped us figure out the best ways to get our data over from the Enterprise Edition into EON very quickly and very efficient. So different with yourself. >> I wanted to ask you about organizational, you know, issues because, you know, the guys like you practitioners always tell me, "Look, the tech, technology comes and goes, that's kind of the easy part, we're good at that. It's the people it's the processes, the skill sets." What does your, you know, team regime look like? And do you have any sort of ideal team makeup or, you know, ideal advice, is it two piece of teams? Is it what kind of skills? What kind of interaction and communications to senior leadership? I wonder if you could just give us some color on that. >> One of the things that makes me extremely proud to be working for MassMutual right now, is that they do what a lot of companies have not been doing and that is investing in IT. They have put a lot of thought, a lot of money, and a lot of support into setting up their enterprise data platform and putting Vertica at the center. And not only did they put the money into getting the software that they needed, like Vertica, you know, MicroStrategy, and all the other tools that we were using to use that, they put the money in the people. Our managers are extremely supportive of us. We hired about 40 to 45 different people within a four-month time frame, data engineers, data analysts, data modelers, a nice mix of people across who can help shape your data and bring the data in and help the users use the data properly, and allow me as the database administrator to make sure that they're doing what they're doing most efficiently and focus on my job. So you have to have that diversity among the different data skills in order to make your team successful. >> That's awesome. Kind of a side question, and it's really not Vertica's wheelhouse, but I'm curious, you know, in the early days of the big data, you know, movement, a lot of the data scientists would complain, and they still do that, "80% of my time is spent wrangling data." The tools for the data engineer, the data scientists, the database, you know, experts, they're all different. And is that changing? And to what degree is that changing? Kind of what ending are we in and just in terms of a more facile environment for all those roles? >> Again, I think it depends on company to company, you know, what resources they make available to the data scientists. And the data scientists, we have a lot of them at MassMutual. And they're very much into doing a lot of machine learning, model training, predictive analytics. And they are, you know, used to doing it outside of Vertica too, you know, pulling that data out into Python and Scalars Bar, and tools like that. And they're also now just getting into using Vertica's in-database analytics and machine learning, which is a skill that, you know, definitely nobody else out there has. So being able to have one somebody who understands Vertica like myself, and being able to train other people to use Vertica the way that is most efficient for them is key. But also just having people who understand not only the tools that you're using, but how to model data, how to architect your tables, your schemas, the interaction between your tables and schemas and whatnot, you need to have that diversity in order to make this work. And our data scientists have benefited immensely from the struct that MassMutual put in place by our data management delivery team. >> That's great, I think I saw, somewhere in your background, that you've trained about 100 people in Vertica. Did I get that right? >> Yes, I've, since I started here, I've gone to our Boston location, our Springfield location, and our New York City location and trained, probably about this point, about 120, 140 of our Vertica users. And I'm trying to do, you know, a couple of follow-up sessions per year. >> So adoption, obviously, is a big goal of yours. Getting people to adopt the platform, but then more importantly, I guess, deliver business value and outcomes. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah, I wanted to ask you about encryption. You know, in the perfect world, everything would be encrypted, but there are trade offs. Are you using encryption? What are you doing in that regard? >> We are actually just getting into that now due to the New York and the CCPA regulations that are now in place. We do have a lot of Person Identifiable Information in our data store that does require encryption. So we are going through a month's long process that started in December, I think, it's actually a bit earlier than that, to start identifying all the columns, not only in our Vertica database, but in, you know, the other databases that we do use, you know, we have Postgres database, SQL Server, Teradata for the time being, until that moves into Vertica. And identify where that data sits, what downstream applications, pull that data from the data sources and store it locally as well, and starts encrypting that data. And because of the tight relationship between Voltage and Vertica, we settled on Voltages as the major platform to start doing that encryption. So we're going to be implementing that in Vertica probably within the next month or two, and roll it out to all the teams that have data that requires encryption. We're going to start rolling it out to the downstream application owners to make sure that they are encrypting the data as they get it pulled over. And we're also using another product for several other applications that don't mesh well as well with both. >> Voltage being micro, focuses encryption solution, correct? >> Right, yes. >> Yes, of course, like a focus for the audience's is the, it owns Vertica and if Vertica is a separate brand. So I want to ask you kind of close on what success looks like. You've been at this for a number of years, coming into MassMutual which was great to hear. I've had some past experience with MassMutual, it's an awesome company, I've been to the Springfield facility and in Boston as well, and I have great respect for them, and they've really always been a leader. So it's great to hear that they're investing in technology as a differentiator. What does success look like for you? Let's say you're at MassMutual for a few years, you're looking back, what success look like? Go. >> A good question. It's changing every day just, you know, with more and more, you know, applications coming onboard, more and more data being pulled in, more uses being found for the data that we have. I think success for me is making sure that Vertica, first of all, is always up made, is always running at its most optimal to keep our users happy. I think when I started, you know, we had a lot of processes that were running, you know, six, seven hours, some of them were taking, you know, almost a day long, because they were so complicated, we've got those running in under an hour now, some of them running in a matter of minutes. I want to keep that optimization going for all of our processes. Like I said, there's a lot of users using this data. And it's been hard over the first year of me being here to get to all of them. And thankfully, you know, I'm getting a bit of help now, I have a couple of system DBAs, and I'm training up to help out with these optimizations, you know, fixing queries, fixing projections to make sure that queries do run as quickly as possible. So getting that to its optimal stage is one. Two, getting our data encrypted and protected so that even if for whatever reasons, somehow somebody breaks into our data, they're not going to be able to get anything at all, because our data is 100% protected. And I think more companies need to be focusing on that as well. And third, I want to see our data science teams using more and more of Vertica's in-database predictive analytics, in-database machine learning products, and really helping make their jobs more efficient by doing so. >> Joe, you're awesome guest I mean, we always like I said, love having the practitioners on and getting the straight, skinny and pros. You're welcome back anytime, and as I say, I wish we could have met in Boston, maybe next year at the BDC. But it's great to have you online, and thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> And thank you for having me and hopefully we'll meet next year. >> Yeah, I hope so. And thank you everybody for watching that. Remember theCUBE is running concurrent with the Vertica Virtual BDC, it's vertica.com/bdc2020. If you want to check out all the keynotes, and all the breakout sessions, I'm Dave Volante for theCUBE. We'll be going. More interviews, for people right there. Thanks for watching. (bright music)

>> From the SiliconAngle media office, in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hello everyone, and welcome to this Cube Conversation. You know, the auto industry was a, if not the dominant force in the 20th century economy, and clearly, you see it in the headlines today. I mean all you got to do is look at Tesla. The stock is absolutely on fire, Tesla's market value is actually greater than that of Ford and GM combined. Even though its revenues are about one 12th of those two combined. The macro discussion today is really heating up around ESG, which stands for environmental social governance. So, electric vehicles are really picking up momentum, and maybe that's the tailwind for Tesla, but consumers are pragmatic, the electric is still more expensive than internal combustion-powered vehicles, so we'll see how that plays out. One of the things we talk about a lot on theCUBE is the software content in automobiles. In many ways, these vehicles are code on wheels, so that's part of the hype factor, too. But you know, I've always argued that the incumbent auto makers are actually in a pretty reasonable position to compete. While autonomous vehicles, they may disrupt the incumbents, and even though right now Silicon Valley is ahead of Detroit and Japan and Germany and Korea, there's an ecosystem that is evolving to support traditional auto makers. Now, one of those players is Tactile Mobility. The vast majority of data created around autonomous vehicles today is visual-based with LIDAR as a key enabler. But a human driver, you think about it, they don't just rely on sight, they're able to feel the road, the bumps, the curves, and the impacts of things like weather. In fact, it's estimated that more than 20% of vehicle crashes in the US each year are weather-related. And intelligent cars, they really still can't predict road conditions ahead. Tactile offers software that uses sensors that already live in the vehicles to predict and feel road conditions like black ice and potholes to improve safety. And with me to talk about these trends and his company is Amit Nisenbaum, who's the CEO of Tactile Mobility, Amit, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you Dave very much for having me. >> Yeah, so really, it was a great opportunity, when I heard you were in town, invited you out, and really appreciate you coming out to our Marlborough studios, but let me start with, why your founders launched Tactile Mobility. >> Well, Dave, it's a very interesting story, I think, for our company, as well for other entrepreneurs to learn from it, because actually, the company's been around for about eight years, and it all started from a conundrum from a question that was posed to our founder, Boaz Mizrachi, which was about how do you take a vehicle from point A to point B at a set speed, with minimum gas consumption, using only the software and data coming off the vehicle sensors that are run of the mill sensors? And that question started this whole company, he believed that it's only an optimization question, meaning all of the data is out there, meaning data about the conditions of the road, the grates, the curvatures, the conditions and the health of the vehicle, meaning engine efficiency, tire health, et cetera et cetera. And what he found out was that actually neither this nor that has existed. So it was way more complicated than a mere optimization question, it's about how do you generate that data about the vehicle and the road? And he launched the company in order to go after those two data sets. He was able to solve that, or to address that question, and to take a vehicle and to show that you can take a vehicle from point A to point B at a set speed while minimizing fuel consumption, up to 10%. By the time that he has done that, gas prices dropped, and the question was what's next, and fortunately enough, the industry and the hype around autonomous vehicles has come around, and that has been the next frontier for our company, and that's what we been focusing on since then, but not only on that but on also other aspects, which I'll be happy to speak about. >> That is an awesome story of a pivot, you see this all the time with startups, it's kind of survive until you can thrive, and then something happens that's a tailwind, great technology that the visionary can see how to reapply it, and a little bit of luck involved, maybe, okay, so you-- >> Stamina. >> Stamina, right, you got to have a strong heart and stomach to be a startup. Okay, and you joined just a couple years ago, what attracted you to Tactile? >> Well I've been in this industry, actually in the cross section of the two industries of automotive and energy for about 12 years now, starting from a company called Better Place that you might have heard of, I was one of the first 10 employees there, and those two industries have been near and dear to my heart ever since. I like big questions, I like big challenges, I like big plays that have the potential to make a real difference, so the fact that the Tactile Mobility, at the time it was called MobiWize, it was in this industry was a big plus, but also the fact that the offering is not really the vanilla flavor offering, everybody's doing LIDAR and radar and cameras, all of a sudden there is someone else that is saying "Wait a minute, there is that "neglected segment, that additional set "of sensors, the sense of tactility that all of us "are using when we're driving, "and computers will need that as well. "How about that, this is something "that nobody pays attention to." And that really caught my attention. >> So I kind of hinted at this in my little narrative up front, the hype was all around autonomous, but let's face it, level five autonomous, it's, we're talking at least 2030, maybe further, but everybody drives some form of autonomous vehicle today, if you purchase a new vehicle, and that's really the space that you play in, so what are the big trends that you see, and what's the problem that you're solving? >> Yeah, so first of all, you're absolutely right, when people speak about autonomous vehicles, they imagine themself a car, a vehicle with big red button and that's it, that's what is called level five. However, there are four levels below that that lead to that, and today most of the vehicles leaving the assembly line are either level two or level three. That's why we're also saying that we're in the business of smart and autonomous vehicles, and the challenges there, if you're looking at the vehicles themself, are challenges of how do we make those vehicles both safer, as well as more enjoyable to ride? And the ability to address both of those together is actually not as simple as one might think, so that's what we're focusing on, and that's the trend, the trend of no compromises, that you go both for safety, as well as a user experience, that's on the vehicle side. Having said that, being a data company that has a proprietary software stack, that allows it to generate that data, the tactile data, the data about the dynamic between the vehicle and the road, allows us also to take that data to the cloud, and in the cloud to split that dynamic into two separate models. One we model independently the vehicle, the vehicle health, and the other one is we're turning each one of the vehicles to become like a probe that feels the road conditions and maps the location of bumps, cracks, oil spills, black ice, et cetera et cetera, and by that we are able to crowd source the data and create new layer of the map, road conditions there. Going back to the question that was posed about how do you take that vehicle from point A to point B, in minimum fuel, here you go, we have those two types of data, and now we can use it in other verticals as well. >> Well that's very interesting, so a lot of people say "Oh, autonomous vehicles, it's all about real time, "you can't do anything in the cloud," and you actually, you're refuting that, because you're building essentially a map of what's happening on the roads, whether it's a pothole or a bump or a curve, et cetera. And so essentially you're doing that in the cloud, modeling that in the cloud and then what, bringing it down in real time, right? >> Yeah, so first of all, the first use case is indeed to bring it back to the vehicles and so the vehicle, and the vehicles around it, will know what's ahead of them. Use cases, there are about preconditioning vehicle systems, for instance, you're approaching a pothole, probably you want, you meaning the vehicle, would like to tune the suspension to become harder or softer. You're approaching black ice, probably you want, you, the vehicle, would like to slow down, so that's one use case, but there are other use cases. Other use cases around, for instance, road authorities and municipalities, we do have customers around the globe, road authorities and municipalities, that are subscribed to our data services, the road condition data services, that allow them to better plan maintenance, as well as dispatch crews to locations of hazards in real time. >> Yeah, so I remember when I was a kid, we had a CB, that's how you communicated what was ahead. "Hey, watch out, there's a pothole up ahead." >> Great technology. >> Now we're doing that, and now does that essentially require some kind of peer to peer network, or? >> So we're agnostic of the technology, we're the data layer behind all of that. These days, everything, or most of the use cases, are still running on vehicle to cloud to vehicle, or to anybody else, but there are companies that are working on vehicle to vehicle. >> So you mentioned a stack, what does your stack look like, can you describe that a little bit? >> Two parts, one is embedded software, that sits on one of the vehicle computers, one of the ECUs, and the other one is the cloud component, the component, the embedded software that sits on one of the vehicle ECUs usually either the gateway, or one of the vehicle dynamics ECUs, or maybe ADAS ECU, et cetera, it takes in real time, mounds of data for multiple existing nonvisual sensors, such as wheel speed from all four wheels, wheel angle, position of the gas pedal, torque of the brake pedal and much much more, ingest all of that, create a unified signal that describes in real time the dynamic between the vehicle and the road, that signal is very very noisy, so we apply signal processing methodologies to clean it, and then we apply on top of it algorithms and AI and all of that in real time, in order to derive insights about the vehicle road dynamics. You probably ask yourself, "Give me a concrete example" or something like that, 'cause it's kind of amorphous. The killer app these days with OEMs, vehicle manufacturers, is what is called available grip level. It's basically a signal to the vehicle computer about how drastically can the vehicle accelerate, decelerate, or change direction, all different types of acceleration, before it will start to skid. Think about it as the performance envelope of the vehicle. Nobody but us can model this using software only in any condition, and this type of data has multiple use cases in the vehicle, happy to tell you more about those, question is if we have time. >> We do, but I want to make a point. The software only, the thing, if I understand it correctly, the OEM doesn't have to change any hardware that, you're using the existing sensors of the vehicle, of which there are certainly dozens if not hundreds, to actually take advantage of this, right, you don't have to do any kind of hardware changes, is that correct? >> We're a data and data analytics and AI company. >> Yeah, so if you wanted to add some color and double click on some examples, that would be great. >> Sure, so going back to the available grip level type of data, of insight, I call it, think about adaptive cruise control, the function that allows a vehicle to drive at a set speed, however, to avoid colliding into the front vehicle. So today, it seems like all of the data is there for ACC, adaptive cruise control, to be effective, you know the distance from the vehicle, probably using a radar, you know the relative velocity between the two vehicles, so you have all of the information, however you don't know, you, again, the vehicle computer, how hard the vehicle can brake given how slippery the road is, given how healthy or worn out the tires are, et cetera et cetera. That means that the vehicle computer needs to err on the safe side and keep the large distance in order to allow safe braking. What's wrong with that? Going back to the question about the trend before, first of all it's not natural to the driver. We keep a certain distance for a certain reason, and when the distance is too large, it just doesn't feel natural to us. That's one thing. However, on the other side, it's also not safe, how is that? You keep too large of a distance, someone at the end will cut you in. And ironically, you kept a large distance to stay safe, all of a sudden you're worse off. So being able to allow the vehicle to know really, what is the tight distance, safe distance to stay from the vehicle, allows that vehicle to be more enjoyable to ride, as well as safe. >> So take that example, because today, I can sort of personalize that adaptive cruise control and say "Okay, I want one bar, two bar, three bar," but that's it, and I sometimes say "Whoa, is three bar right, is two bar right?" And you're right, sometimes I go "Eh, it's too far, "I think I'll cut it down to two bar or one bar." You're saying with your software, the system is intelligent enough to optimize that, to keep me safe, but also keep me having comfortable driving. >> Absolutely true, actually those three bars is kind of a psychological exercise, right? Because the shortest bar is that large distance. When they tell you two bars or three bars, it's kind of like "Do you want to keep a large, "very large, or extra large distance," right? Because they will never allow you to keep shorter distance shorter than what is really really the bare minimum in order to brake at the worst case scenario. >> Even if it's safe. And that's really where your software comes in, okay. Now Porsche is an investor in the company, presumably it's a customer, right? >> No, they actually said publicly that they're a customer as well. >> Okay, great, so talk about how customers are using this, and what the adoption cycle looks like, and maybe give us some examples of how it's being applied. >> So customers, you mean OEMs, car manufacturers. So the way that they use it, I just described it now, the adoption cycle, we in this industry unfortunately cycles are long. We work years to create relationships with the car manufacturers to allow them to learn about our capabilities, to validate the integrity of our software. They also most commonly run RFPs or RFQs in order to choose the right technology, and I'm glad to say that we're winning again and again and again, and then there is the integration cycle, which by itself is a few years in length. So the cycle altogether is long, however, we found that our approach is quite effective, and the approach, not necessarily the technology, yes, but also the way that we approach those OEMs. We are quite, if I may say, humble. We know that we're not the car engineers, the typical car engineers. We actually know very little about cars, what we know, we know data very well and we know AI very well. And when we come to them, we say "We're not trying to replace your engineers, "we're not trying to do what you do, "we're trying to tackle the same problems "that you weren't able to tackle before "from a very different angle," and that works very well. >> So, you talked about the integration cycle of a couple, or maybe even longer, how long is the design cycle for these things, is it also years, or? >> So, the design cycle from our perspective is much much more agile, actually we are working in the Agile framework in terms of the development of the software itself, but you're asking about the design, much faster, but when I said a few years, a couple of years, I meant per OEM to design together, to allow them to feel that we're designing, meaning customizing the software to their needs, as well as implementing it, that's the length. >> But what they get is a competitive advantage, so Porsche as a leader, obviously, and an early adopter, is going to be able to now commercialize this technology, and of course it'll be embedded, but now it'll be a feature that the car salesperson will highlight, and maybe they market it, maybe they don't, but that gives them a competitive differentiation, right? So are you seeing that other OEMs are starting to really get this, and sort of leaning in, or what's your experience? >> Yes, it's the typical technology adoption curve, there are the early adopters, and there are the mainstream and the late adopters, I'm glad to say that these days we're not only working with the early adopters, but also more with the mainstream. I encourage you to stay tuned, I believe that in the coming month or two, we'll have a big announcement about another major OEM that has chosen us commercially for mass production, and we are in quite advanced stages with OEMs both in Europe and North America, starting also to spin out to Asia. >> And is the business model, is it a subscription model, is it a one time payment from the OEM, how's it work? >> That's another thing that made me excited about the company, going back to your question from before, it's quite diverse, I would say. For the OEMs, that's software that we embed in their vehicle, it's software licensing. However, the data that we generate and then upload to the cloud and repurpose it with the OEMs themself, but also as I said before, road authorities, municipalities, fleet managers, insurance companies, I didn't have a chance to touch on all of the verticals. That's a subscription model, so the two models working together, it's actually quite an attractive, valuable position for us and for our investors. >> So there's software license, and then there's data as a service. And so there's also adjacent industries that you can go after, you just mentioned a couple, so when you think about the total available market, which obviously, any CEO is going to do, TAM expansion is part of your job, but so what's that vision, what does that look like? >> So in terms of the size itself, it's measured in the trillions, it's very very big. In terms of the different verticals, the ones that I tapped on are the first ones, but even within those, these days we're really trying to stay razor focused on the OEMs and road authorities and municipalities. We have fleets and fleet managers that are coming to us with requests for the data that we call vehicle DNA, that's the data about the vehicle health, et cetera, and that's the third vertical that we're starting to address these days, but we're only 25 people, growing to 40, we're trying to be very very agile, that's from one end, and from the other end, now that we showed our value to the car manufacturers, we're going for the force multipliers, meaning partnerships with the channels, with the T1s, the suppliers to the OEMs themself. >> And let's see, you've been around eight years, you've been there two years, right, and then I think you did a raise of roughly, what, nine million to date? >> In October 2019, we announced the latest round of nine million dollars from Porsche, as well as some other investors, yes. >> Great, okay, so I mean not a ton of money, but you guys are small, and so, little bit more on the companies, 20, going to 40, you're well capitalized, but today, you see people raising 250 million, what do you sense as your capital needs, I mean you're obviously actively raising money, and doing what a CEO does, but can you share with us your milestones for the next 12, 18 months? >> First of all, we were fortunate, and fortune has something to do with it, I think that being disciplined is another thing, to have revenue already. So our capital needs, we're still not profitable, and we're growing fast, so we need to raise in order to support that growth, but we're quite diligent about that. Also, true, companies have raised tens and hundreds of millions of dollars. First of all, not all companies in this industry are created equal, we're not a hardware company, we're a software and data. We're also not trying to do a fully integrated offering like, let's say Zuks or something like that, which requires way way more money. And actually, I'm quite glad that we're raising as we need, but not more than that, because what you raise, you need to return tenfold, so we have enough in order to support the growth of the company in years to come. >> Well the OEM model is very sales efficient as well, so it's not like in software companies today, are hiring people to do inside sales, outside sales, enterprise sales, and so it's a different business. Well Amit, first of all, congratulations, a really interesting story, really appreciate you coming out to our studios here in Marlborough and sharing your story, and best of luck to you. >> Thank you very much, Dave, it's been a pleasure coming here, and I'm glad that you invited me. >> Great, and thank you everybody for watching, this is Dave Vellante with theCUBE, we'll see you next time. (techno music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hello everyone and welcome to this week's episode of theCUBE insights, powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we're going deep into AWS. In a couple of weeks, theCUBE is going to be at the eighth AWS Reinvent, which will be our seventh year of having theCUBE at that show. You know, reinvent has really become the Super Bowl for enterprise tech innovation. And, ahead of the event, what I want to do is talk about the revolution of cloud, and the impact that it's having on the industry. And of course, I want to dig in to some of the data using the ETR data set. Before I do that, let me first say that the cloud 2.0, which is a term that we've been using, is becoming a reality. This is something that John Furrier and I talk about a lot here at theCUBE and at SiliconANGLE. The cloud is not about an incremental transition, it's really about transformation. We're talking here about the end to end modernization of the enterprise. The game is changing, and the engine of innovation is really being driven by new architectures, and these architectures have built around a few items. Data, machine intelligence, and of course cloud, for scale. We feel like what we are witnessing is the build out of this massively scalable distributed system. And this system is transforming businesses, and really enabling entire new companies and business models to emerge. The cloud is the under pitting of this digital revolution, and virtually every industry is going to be disrupted, no industry is safe. All right, let's get right to it. So, the key questions that I want to explore in this session, let's start with the spending patterns. We're going to look at the ETR survey data, and what services are attracting the most action inside cloud, and which vendors are winning? I then want to look at the market share data from a couple of angles. I'll look at ETR data, I'll talk about some other market data. Then we're going to drill into some of the services that are critical to innovation, and I specifically want to look at databases in particular analytic data stores. And then I want to look at the data and analytic services at AI, machine intelligence, and then I want to look at the data around containers and functions, like Lambda, which are very hot right now. Then, we're going to share some data on how the cloud is impacting the so called, "old guard." This is a pejorative term that Andy Jassy coined to refer to the legacy enterprise tech providers. Then I want to make some comments about the AWS ecosystem, it's getting a lot of chatter lately. And then I want to share some thoughts on what you can expect this year at Reinvent, and then I'll wrap. So the first data point that I want to show you here really draws on ETR's latest survey of 1,336 respondents. So what this chart does is it cuts the data, and it's showing just the cloud sector ranked by net score. Now remember, net score is a measure of spending momentum. Okay? So you can see where the action is. So at the top, you see Azure Functions and AWS Lambda popping right up. Look at their net scores, they've got a net score of 74% and 71% respectively. You can see Azure overall, this is the overall Azure business that's right up there as well, and of course AWS overall, so people responded AWS is right there. Very, very high, but it's dropped a little bit below Azure. We'll talk about that more in a moment. Then you can see VMware Cloud on AWS, it's got strong momentum, which is a real positive. You've got Google Cloud Functions, again, Functions very hot right now. Open Shift from Red Hat, GCP is up there, VMware Cloud. Then you've got Alibaba. Alibaba's only got 18 mentions, whereas the others have much higher shared in, so I'm not going to really put too much weight on that. And you can see the other folks as well on that chart. But also you can you can point out the functions. The Azure functions, and services like Lander, Lambda, are gaining really a lot of momentum in the marketplace, and I think point to a new mode of compute. What I want to do now is I want to isolate in this chart, the big 3 in cloud, and put them into context with a legacy player, you know, namely IBM. I'm not trying to pick on the legacy guys, but I think it's good for context. So as you can see here, Azure and AWS, they've been neck and neck battling it out in the last 10 surveys or so. And you can see even Google, somewhat behind, but it's still got pretty strong spending momentum. Now, these figures overall are trending down relative to the expectations earlier in the year. This is something that we've talked about, that spending is reverting back to pre '18 levels, not falling off a cliff, still solid in the grand scheme of things. So you can see, you know, net scores here are well above 50% for AWS and Azure. Now take a look at IBM. The ETR data shows them in the red zone, with a net score of 16%. That is not a surprise, that they're behind the Big 3. And I've said many many times, here's the thing, IBM and Oracle, I'm not showing Oracle here, they're at least in the cloud game. Think about it, HP had the public cloud, they had to tap out. Cisco, they don't have a public cloud. Dell EMC, even VMware, they don't have a public cloud. So at least IBM and Oracle have a cloud play, where they can take their SaaS business and run it, and get vertically integrated and some operating leverage. Okay, I'm going to switch gears a little bit and talk about market share. And we want to focus here on the battle between Azure and AWS. We all know Microsoft is growing faster, but AWS is much larger. And this is something that AWS CEO Andy Jassy, he takes a lot of time to explain to the analyst, and to the crowd at Reinvent. Let's take a look at what Jassy said last year at Reinvent on this topic, and then we'll come back. >> So if you look at the provider who most people think is the second place provider in this space, in their last financials they grew 76% year over year. And you can look at that and say, "Oh, 76% is more than 46%." But if you look at it in reality, that 76% represents about a billion dollars of growth year over year. If you look at the 46% growth of AWS on that much larger base, that represents $2.1 billion of growth year over year. So more than double that. So AWS not only has a significant market segment leadership position in share, but also on an absolute revenue basis is growing meaningfully faster than anybody else. >> Okay so, think about what Jassy said. He was using Q3 data and he said that AWS had a $27 billion run rate business. And if you look at those charts that I showed, or he showed, it looked like the yellow bar, which was Microsoft, even though they didn't say, you know, "the company that shall not be named." It was about 1/3 the size of AWS, so where would that put Microsoft? Somewhere around 9 billion last year, on kind of an apples to apples run rate basis, using those extrapolated market data that Jassy showed. By the way, ironically, this is about what AWS did last quarter which you can see here on this chart that I'm showing you. You might remember, I showed you this chart in a previous episode of Breaking Analysis. And what it shows is AWS' quarterly revenue on the blue bars, and the growth rate on the right hand axis, that's the red line. And you can see Jassy talked about 46% growth.. And you can see that in Q3 last year, and then look how its moderated. It's 35% in Q3 in 2019, the last quarter that they announced. So Jassy is right. AWS is growing slower than Microsoft last year, which was growing in the mid-70's. But Microsoft was 59% last quarter so that trend is continued. If, you know, that's if you believe Microsoft numbers, which are really not clean. It's hard to say sometimes with all the SaaS in there, and Office 365, LinkedIn, I don't know what else is in there but we try to parse that out. Regardless, Jassy's point that size matters is still correct. But, Microsoft is closing the gap. I talked to the Wikibon team recently, and they think that AWS is going to come in at $35 billion dollars in revenue this year. And they have Microsoft's IS business at around $15 billion. So that's 43% of AWS's business versus 33% at this time last year. So you can see that Microsoft is closing that gap. AWS is still adding $8 billion a year in growth, but Microsoft is definitely catching up. So what is the spending data show? Let's take a look here at the ETR data, and see what they say about market share. Now, remember, in the ETR parlance market share is a measure of how pervasive a vendor is within the data set. And as you can see here, it maps pretty well to the market estimates that I was just talking about. Although it actually appears that in these lines that AWS is widening that lead. But you can see in the net scores, by the way, this is net scores across all sectors, not just cloud computing, so it pulls in the other segments. But none the less, you can see Azure has a somewhat higher net score which indicates stronger spending intentions. So that pretty much fits what we see in the market for the most part. Now it's not all rosy for Microsoft. You know, they are super strong in the ETR data set across the board, but specifically in cloud. So that's important, I don't want to lose sight of that, but I want to share something that Gartner said recently, and it's a 2019 magic quadrant on cloud computing. Microsoft Azure's reliability issues continue to be a challenge for customers, largely as a result of Azure's growing pains. Since September of 2018, Azure has had multiple service-impacting incidents, including significant outages involving Azure active directory. The nature of many of these outages is such that customers had no controls in order to mitigate the downtime. So, caution is what Gartner said. So despite the great numbers and the fact that Azure is gaining, it's having growing pains. For years I've talked about the economies of scale for AWS due to its automation. I talked about the companies marginal economics at volume, and you can see it in the firm's operating margins. The question to ask, is Microsoft running into dis-economies at scale, due to it's large install base, and does it have technical debt? Because it's jamming large software estate into Azure, and having to preserve the past while trying to innovate for the future. I don't know, and it's hard to tell because Microsoft is so big and so profitable, but it's something that CIO's definitely should keep an eye on. Now, I want to look at some key sectors here and evaluate how AWS is doing in some of the areas where we see really innovation. And I want to start in the all important data base area. Now I'm going to focus here on analytic databases, and data warehouses, and I think there's some interesting trends going on here. So this is a cut of the ETR data warehouse segment. Now I've talked about Snowflake in the previous episodes of Breaking Analysis, and you can see why. Snowflake has a net score of 71%. They're one of the highest and most interesting newer companies in this space and in the ETR data set. You can see AWS doing very well, and I want to make some comments on both Snowflake and AWS Redshift. But before I do that, look at Oracle and Teradata on this chart. What you see here is the classic innovator's dilemma. It's at play where AWS and Snowflake, you can see them, they're solidly in the green, and you got the two legacy players affirmly in the red. So I include them as reference points. But I want to come back to Redshift and Snowflake, because I feel like there's something new going on in cloud. Where cloud 1.0 was all about IS and compute and storage and throw in some data base, there's this new trend emerging that's really driving new workloads. And this data that now sits in the cloud, it's maybe stored in S3, and customers are using data stores like Redshift and Snowflake to get more insights out of that data. They're bringing tools like data bricks into the equation, and really driving a whole new set of work loads that are not just about provisioning infrastructure, but really extracting insights much more quickly from the data and applying it to your business. And for AWS, it's driving tons of compute sales and customers are getting more value out of their data. Now, here's the interesting thing. Redshift and Snowflake are both best in class modern data warehouses, they seem to be coexisting, they're both thriving, you know, why is that? They're both MPP columnar stores, so they've got many similar attributes, but I think what it comes down to really is what I call horses for courses. I don't have time to dig into it today, but when you peel back the onion, what you find is different approaches to things like architecture, security, scaling, different philosophies, pricing, different feature sets. So it really comes down to the best strategic fit, and for now it looks like to me, there's room for both platforms. They're both doing very well from a spending momentum perspective. We'll see how that plays out over time. Let's now take a look at the analytic sector. Now here, we're talking about things like Amazon's quarry services, elastic map reduce, search kinesis, quick site glue, streaming, those kinds of tooling. You can see in this chart that AWS is very strong and it leads Microsoft by a small margin in the ETR data set. Now for comparison, and again, I'm not trying to pick on the legacy players, but I think it's important to provide context, and when it comes to spending momentum, the data doesn't lie. You can see here, IBM they've had a sizeable and very impressive set of capabilities in the analytic space, but you can see where the buyers are placing their bets. Now, what I'm showing you now in this next chart is a similar view, but this time I'm showing ETR market share for both AI and the machine learning segment. So for context I've added IBM Watson. Remember, market share for ETR is a measure of pervasiveness, not only to AWS and Microsoft, though they're battling it out for the top spot, but they got stronger spending momentum as you can see by the net scores. Look at Watson, I mean, it's respectable in the ETR data, but it just doesn't have the scale of the top two players. Okay, finally, I want to look at the container space. It's hot and I want to focus on Lambda from AWS. So what we're showing here is the net scores for Lambda, and Amazon's elastic container service. And you can see Lambda, very very strong. ECS is tapering a little bit, it's showing less momentum overtime, but still well over 50% net score. But look at Pivotal Cloud Foundry, they've showed a steady down term over time. This underscores the work that VMware and Pat Gelsinger have to do with one of their newest acquisitions. As in aside, this is an opportunity for VMware, which in my opinion, I've said they really need to get their developer act together, really to drive new innovation. And by the way, Pivotal just had some layoffs, but my understanding that it was not in engineering but rather folks that VMware saw as redundant, rolls that they already had in place. The bottom line is, Pivotal has been steadily losing momentum in the ETR surveys. But look, a 27 net score is not a disaster by any means. I said on my last Breaking Analysis, that if I were Michael Dell, I'd dedicate a thousand engineers to open sources, using Pivotal to really appeal to developers, and make his hardware run better on the open source tooling and apps that these thousand build. And make his infrastructure programmable. This is how the edge is going to be won. It's not going to be by throwing boxes over the top of the fence, but really a bottoms up by devs. I digress. The last data point that I want to share here is really designed to address the question, how is the cloud impacting what Jassy calls the "old guard?" So this view shows market share, which again is defined by ETR, remember they do the math to measure the pervasiveness of a vendor in their data set. And they call that market share. And I've cut that data by just the cloud spenders. So those buyers spending heavily, and I've isolated on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. And how their spending on traditional vendors has changed overtime. And I'm picking out Cisco, HPE, Dell EMC, and Oracle. And the story you can see is clear. They came out of the downturn in 2010, and the big guys who were holding their breath, and they came up for air and they saw lots of pet up demands, so they did pretty well. But the cloud has continued to slowly eat away at their share, and their spending momentum as seen by the net scores in this table, has been affected. But look at Cisco. They actually have quite a strong net score, its 37%. So to me, by the way, this makes sense. And I think Cisco is in a good position to connect clouds and secure data moving across clouds. But the cloud, it's long steady march continues. And we are entering a new era that I think is only going to see greater share gains for the cloud in my view. By the way, I don't want to just, back to my rant about the edge in programmable infrastructure, and how developers are going to win the edge. Cisco with Devnet is actually in a pretty good position here, and done a good job. And I think they're one of the few, if not the only legacy player that is going to figure this out. Now before I close, I want to make a few comments on the ecosystem, and give a glimpse as to what to expect at Reinvent in 2019. All right first the ecosystem. There's a lot of sort of chatter, and griping, and concerns around AWS cannibalizing the ecosystem partners. And I think frankly, that concern has merit. You know when AWS has this insane customer focus, you can pretty much take that to the bank. If a customer wants something and expresses that to AWS, and they see a space to fill where it can leverage that flywheel that they always talk about at ad services, AWS is not going to sub optimize it's portfolio to protect it's partner. It's going to go hard after it. So as a partner of AWS, it's up to you to keep innovating and moving fast. And that's hard, because AWS is probably moving faster than you are. But you know, you can still specialize as a partner, and thrive as a best debride player. I mean, look at the Snowflake example. There's plenty of opportunities out there in security, backup, governess, machine intelligence, work flow, edge, and of course, there's the infamous multi cloud opportunity. And I saw infamous because AWS doesn't use that term, you're not going to see it on the floor of Reinvent this year because it's frankly not allowed. AWS is very controlling over the messaging that it puts out to it's customers, and that includes the rules of the ecosystem if you want to go to their show. But you'll hear plenty of side conversations about multi cloud, and we're certainly going to be talking about it on theCUBE. Is multi cloud a symptom of multi vendor? You know what I think on this topic. I think it's more than that than it is a strategy. But CIO's are now being asked to clean up the multi cloud mess, so it does have merit. But it creates complexity, and that means opportunity for partners. So multi cloud is white space for the ecosystem, as is hybrid, and on prim connectivity, so partners are hedging their bet, they're supporting multiple clouds, and they're partnering with Azure and Google, and that makes sense to do so. But here's the thing. Cloud 2.0 is getting more complex. AI, new workloads, edge, new use cases, machine learning, more API's, more services, more complicated pricing. These are confusing matters for customers, and partners can help simplify this. As well, thinking about competition with Microsoft, Microsoft is kind of an easy choice. If you're already a Microsoft software customer, (murmurs) So partners need AWS, and AWS need partners to help them deliver solutions to go to market, and keep it simple. John Furrier says this a lot, that winning in the enterprise requires salesmanship, and AWS partners, they're a powerful channel, so AWS has to lean on this channel to really create solutions for customers and simplify. Okay, let's talk about what to expect at Reinvent 2019, and I want to start with storage. Jeff Bar put out a blog post announcing a series of new storage offers around block store, new gateways, S3 replication, a new Windows file server capabilities, and stronger emphasis on file storage. Now, most of the world's data is stored on file, and AWS is expanding it's portfolio. It started with S3 object, back in 2006, and then EBS, block store, and now a big emphasis on file services. So I expect to hear a lot about that, and as well, we're going to hear about outpost. What progress has Amazon made with outpost? What's the status? What's the vision for outpost? How does it fit in at the edge? You know as I just said in my rant earlier, the edge is all about developers, and I like AWS' edge approach. I think AWS has the right perspective. It's very devs centric. It's bottoms up from devs, not over the top like many of the box sellers. Now at Reinvent, you're probably going to hear more about unplugging Oracle databases, certainly security is going to be a big focus, as will AI and machine learning. I also expect a lot on transformation of industries. As Microsoft continues to grow in IS, expect AWS to somehow try to change the game again. And I'm not sure AWS can win the battle head on with CIO's. Rather, I think AWS is really going to focus on this duel disruption agenda, both within the horizontal technology stack but also within industries. In other words, expect AWS to increasingly focus on enabling industry transformation in different segments, like media, health care, financial services, manufacturing, government, automobiles, telco, virtually every vertical. This dual disruption agenda, both in the tech stack and within industries, its in AWS's DNA because it's in Amazon's DNA. It's driven by Jeff Bezos at the top. Now in closing, I want to stress again, the cloud 2.0 is here, and it's getting more complex. The so called "old guard" is hanging on to it's install basis, but in many ways, it's working hard to get simpler. Now are these two domains going to collide together and create an equilibrium in the cloud native wannabes and the cloud native guys? Probably not functionally, but there are a lot of opportunities for the big whales to capitalize on this industry consolidation, and compete by simplifying their experience enough to keep customers hanging around. You know, don't forget, the enterprise business for years has relied on high touch specials, and unique requirements, and that's the wheelhouse for the legacy players, it's not AWS'. And maybe this approach is going to continue to pick away at those opportunities with repeatable and automatible solutions. So this should be really interesting to watch. Stop by theCUBE, come see us at Reinvent, we got two sets there. This is Dave Vellante, signing out from this episode of CUBE insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)