(upbeat music) >> We're back. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2022 here in the Seaport in Boston. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host, Paul Gillin. Justin Boitano is here. He's the Vice President of Enterprise and Edge Computing at NVIDIA. Maybe you've heard of him. And Tushar Katarki who's the Director of Product Management at Red Hat. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Thank you. >> Great to be here, thanks >> Justin, you are a keynote this morning. You got interviewed and shared your thoughts on AI. You encourage people to got to think bigger on AI. I know it's kind of self-serving but why? Why should we think bigger? >> When you think of AI, I mean, it's a monumental change. It's going to affect every industry. And so when we think of AI, you step back, you're challenging companies to build intelligence and AI factories, and factories that can produce intelligence. And so it, you know, forces you to rethink how you build data centers, how you build applications. It's a very data centric process where you're bringing in, you know, an exponential amount of data. You have to label that data. You got to train a model. You got to test the model to make sure that it's accurate and delivers business value. Then you push it into production, it's going to generate more data, and you kind of work through that cycle over and over and over. So, you know, just as Red Hat talks about, you know, CI/CD of applications, we're talking about CI/CD of the AI model itself, right? So it becomes a continuous improvement of AI models in production which is a big, big business transformation. >> Yeah, Chris Wright was talking about basically take your typical application development, you know, pipeline, and life cycle, and apply that type of thinking to AI. I was saying those two worlds have to come together. Actually, you know, the application stack and the data stack including AI need to come together. What's the role of Red Hat? What's your sort of posture on AI? Where do you fit with OpenShift? >> Yeah, so we're really excited about AI. I mean, a lot of our customers obviously are looking to take that data and make meaning out of it using AI is definitely a big important tool. And OpenShift, and our approach to Open Hybrid Cloud really forms a successful platform to base all your AI journey on with the partners such as NVIDIA whom we are working very closely with. And so the idea really is as Justin was saying, you know, the end to end, when you think about life of a model, you've got data, you mine that data, you create models, you deploy it into production. That whole thing, what we call CI/CD, as he was saying DevOps, DevSecOps, and the hybrid cloud that Red Hat has been talking about, although with OpenShift as the center forms a good basis for that. >> So somebody said the other day, I'm going to ask you, is INVIDIA a hardware company or a software company? >> We are a company that people know for our hardware but, you know, predominantly now we're a software company. And that's what we were on stage talking about. I mean, ultimately, a lot of these customers know that they've got to embark on this journey to apply AI, to transform their business with it. It's such a big competitive advantage going into, you know, the next decade. And so the faster they get ahead of it, the more they're going to win, right? But some of them, they're just not really sure how to get going. And so a lot of this is we want to lower the barrier to entry. We built this program, we call it Launchpad to basically make it so they get instant access to the servers, the AI servers, with OpenShift, with the MLOps tooling, with example applications. And then we walk them through examples like how do you build a chatbot? How do you build a vision system for quality control? How do you build a price recommendation model? And they can do hands on labs and walk out of, you know, Launchpad with all the software they need, I'll say the blueprint for building their application. They've got a way to have the software and containers supported in production, and they know the blueprint for the infrastructure and operating that a scale with OpenShift. So more and more, you know, to come back to your question is we're focused on the software layers and making that easy to help, you know, either enterprises build their apps or work with our ecosystem and developers to buy, you know, solutions off the shelf. >> On the harbor side though, I mean, clearly NVIDIA has prospered on the backs of GPUs, as the engines of AI development. Is that how it's going to be for the foreseeable future? Will GPUs continue to be core to building and training AI models or do you see something more specific to AI workloads? >> Yeah, I mean, it's a good question. So I think for the next decade, well, plus, I mean not forever, we're going to always monetize hardware. It's a big, you know, market opportunity. I mean, Jensen talks about a $100 billion, you know, market opportunity for NVIDIA just on hardware. It's probably another a $100 billion opportunity on the software. So the reality is we're getting going on the software side, so it's still kind of early days, but that's, you know, a big area of growth for us in the future and we're making big investments in that area. On the hardware side, and in the data center, you know, the reality is since Moore's law has ended, acceleration is really the thing that's going to advance all data centers. So I think in the future, every server will have GPUs, every server will have DPUs, and we can talk a bit about what DPUs are. And so there's really kind of three primary processors that have to be there to form the foundation of the enterprise data center in the future. >> Did you bring up an interesting point about DPUs and MPUs, and sort of the variations of GPUs that are coming about? Do you see those different PU types continuing to proliferate? >> Oh, absolutely. I mean, we've done a bunch of work with Red Hat, and we've got a, I'll say a beta of OpenShift 4.10 that now supports DPUs as the, I'll call it the control plane like software defined networking offload in the data center. So it takes all the software defined networking off of CPUs. When everybody talks about, I'll call it software defined, you know, networking and core data centers, you can think of that as just a CPU tax up to this point. So what's nice is it's all moving over to DPU to, you know, offload and isolate it from the x86 cores. It increases security of data center. It improves the throughput of your data center. And so, yeah, DPUs, we see everybody copying that model. And, you know to give credit where credit is due, I think, you know, companies like AWS, you know, they bought Annapurna, they turned it into Nitro which is the foundation of their data centers. And everybody wants the, I'll call it democratized version of that to run their data centers. And so every financial institution and bank around the world sees the value of this technology, but running in their data centers. >> Hey, everybody needs a Nitro. I've written about it. It's Annapurna acquisition, 350 million. I mean, peanuts in the grand scheme of things. It's interesting, you said Moore's law is dead. You know, we have that conversation all the time. Pat Gelsinger promised that Moore's law is alive and well. But the interesting thing is when you look at the numbers, that's, you know, Moore's law, we all know it, doubling of the transistor densities every 18 to 24 months. Let's say that, that promise that he made is true. What I think the industry maybe doesn't appreciate, I'm sure you do, being in NVIDIA, when you combine what you were just saying, the CPU, the GPU, Paul, the MPU, accelerators, all the XPUs, you're talking about, I mean, look at Apple with the M1, I mean 6X in 15 months versus doubling every 18 to 24. The A15 is probably averaging over the last five years, a 110% performance improvement each year versus the historical Moore's law which is 40%. It's probably down to the low 30s now. So it's a completely different world that we're entering now. And the new applications are going to be developed on these capabilities. It's just not your general purpose market anymore. From an application development standpoint, what does that mean to the world? >> Yeah, I mean, yeah, it is a great point. I mean, from an application, I mean first of all, I mean, just talk about AI. I mean, they are all very compute intensive. They're data intensive. And I mean to move data focus so much in to compute and crunch those numbers. I mean, I'd say you need all the PUs that you mentioned in the world. And also there are other concerns that will augment that, right? Like we want to, you know, security is so important so we want to secure everything. Cryptography is going to take off to new levels, you know, that we are talking about, for example, in the case of DPUs, we are talking about, you know, can that be used to offload your encryption and firewalling, and so on and so forth. So I think there are a lot of opportunities even from an application point of view to take of this capacity. So I'd say we've never run out of the need for PUs if you will. >> So is OpenShift the layer that's going to simplify all that for the developer. >> That's right. You know, so one of the things that we worked with NVIDIA, and in fact was we developed this concept of an operator for GPUs, but you can use that pattern for any of the PUs. And so the idea really is that, how do you, yeah-- (all giggle) >> That's a new term. >> Yeah, it's a new term. (all giggle) >> XPUs. >> XPUs, yeah. And so that pattern becomes very easy for GPUs or any other such accelerators to be easily added as a capacity. And for the Kubernetes scaler to understand that there is that capacity so that an application which says that I want to run on a GPU then it becomes very easy for it to run on that GPU. And so that's the abstraction to your point about how we are making that happen. >> And to add to this. So the operator model, it's this, you know, open source model that does the orchestration. So Kubernetes will say, oh, there's a GPU in that node, let me run the operator, and it installs our entire run time. And our run time now, you know, it's got a MIG configuration utility. It's got the driver. It's got, you know, telemetry and metering of the actual GPU and the workload, you know, along with a bunch of other components, right? They get installed in that Kubernetes cluster. So instead of somebody trying to chase down all the little pieces and parts, it just happens automatically in seconds. We've extended the operator model to DPUs and networking cards as well, and we have all of those in the operator hub. So for somebody that's running OpenShift in their data centers, it's really simple to, you know, turn on Node Feature Discovery, you point to the operators. And when you see new accelerated nodes, the entire run time is automatically installed for you. So it really makes, you know, GPUs and our networking, our advanced networking capabilities really first class citizens in the data center. >> So you can kind of connect the dots and see how NVIDIA and the Red Hat partnership are sort of aiming at the enterprise. I mean, NVIDIA, obviously, they got the AI piece. I always thought maybe 25% of the compute cycles in the data center were wasted doing storage offloads or networking offload, security. I think Jensen says it's 30%, probably a better number than I have. But so now you're seeing a lot of new innovation in new hardware devices that are attacking that with alternative processors. And then my question is, what about the edge? Is that a blue field out at the edge? What does that look like to NVIDIA and where does OpenShift play? >> Yeah, so when we talk about the edge, we always going to start talking about like which edge are we talking about 'cause it's everything outside the core data center. I mean, some of the trends that we see with regard to the edges is, you know, when you get to the far edge, it's single nodes. You don't have the guards, gates, and guns protection of the data center. So you start having to worry about physical security of the hardware. So you can imagine there's really stringent requirements on protecting the intellectual property of the AI model itself. You spend millions of dollars to build it. If I push that out to an edge data center, how do I make sure that that's fully protected? And that's the area that we just announced a new processor that we call Hopper H100. It supports confidential computing so that you can basically ensure that model is always encrypted in system memory across the bus, of the PCI bus to the GPU, and it's run in a confidential way on the GPU. So you're protecting your data which is your model plus the data flowing through it, you know, in transit, wallet stored, and then in use. So that really adds to that edge security model. >> I wanted to ask you about the cloud, correct me if I'm wrong. But it seems to me that that AI workloads have been slower than most to make their way to the cloud. There are a lot of concerns about data transfer capacity and even cost. Do you see that? First of all, do you agree with that? And secondly, is that going to change in the short-term? >> Yeah, so I think there's different classes of problems. So we'll take, there's some companies where their data's generated in the cloud and we see a ton of, I'll say, adoption of AI by cloud service providers, right? Recommendation engines, translation engines, conversational AI services, that all the clouds are building. That's all, you know, our processors. There's also problems that enterprises have where now I'm trying to take some of these automation capabilities but I'm trying to create an intelligent factory where I want to, you know, merge kind of AI with the physical world. And that really has to run at the edge 'cause there's too much data being generated by cameras to bring that all the way back into the cloud. So, you know, I think we're seeing mass adoption in the cloud today. I think at the edge a lot of businesses are trying to understand how do I deploy that reliably and securely and scale it. So I do think, you know, there's different problems that are going to run in different places, and ultimately we want to help anybody apply AI where the business is generating the data. >> So obviously very memory intensive applications as well. We've seen you, NVIDIA, architecturally kind of move away from the traditional, you know, x86 approach, take better advantage of memories where obviously you have relationships with Arm. So you've got a very diverse set of capabilities. And then all these other components that come into use, to just be a kind of x86 centric world. And now it's all these other supporting components to support these new applications and it's... How should we think about the future? >> Yeah, I mean, it's very exciting for sure, right? Like, you know, the future, the data is out there at the edge, the data can be in the data center. And so we are trying to weave a hybrid cloud footprint that spans that. I mean, you heard Paul come here, talk about it. But, you know, we've talked about it for some time now. And so the paradigm really that is, that be it an application, and when I say application, it could be even an AI model as a service. It can think about that as an application. How does an application span that entire paradigm from the core to the edge and beyond is where the future is. And, of course, there's a lot of technical challenges, you know, for us to get there. And I think partnerships like this are going to help us and our customers to get there. So the world is very exciting. You know, I'm very bullish on how this will play out, right? >> Justin, we'll give you the last word, closing thoughts. >> Well, you know, I think a lot of this is like I said, it's how do we reduce the complexity for enterprises to get started which is why Launchpad is so fundamental. It gives, you know, access to the entire stack instantly with like hands on curated labs for both IT and data scientists. So they can, again, walk out with the blueprints they need to set this up and, you know, start on a successful AI journey. >> Just a position, is Launchpad more of a Sandbox, more of a school, or more of an actual development environment. >> Yeah, think of it as it's, again, it's really for trial, like hands on labs to help people learn all the foundational skills they need to like build an AI practice and get it into production. And again, it's like, you don't need to go champion to your executive team that you need access to expensive infrastructure and, you know, and bring in Red Hat to set up OpenShift. Everything's there for you so you can instantly get started. Do kind of a pilot project and then use that to explain to your executive team everything that you need to then go do to get this into production and drive business value for the company. >> All right, great stuff, guys. Thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. >> Yeah, thanks. >> Thank you for having us. >> All right, thank you for watching. Keep it right there, Dave Vellante and Paul Gillin. We'll be back right after this short break at the Red Hat Summit 2022. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS Executive Summit at re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. This segment is about surviving and thriving with the digital revolution that's happening in the digital transformation that's turning into and changing businesses. We've got two great guests here with Guardian Life, Nick Volpe, CIO of Individual Markets at Guardian Life and Kim Gully, CTO of Life and Annuities at Accenture. Accenture obviously doing a lot of cutting-edge work, Guardian changing the game. Nick, thanks for coming on. Kim, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks John, good to be here. >> So, well, before I get into the question, I want to just set the table a little bit. The pandemic has given everyone a mandate. The good projects are exposed. The bad projects are exposed. Everyone can see what's happening because the pandemic forced everyone to identify what's working, what's not working, what the double-down on. Innovation for customers is a big focus, but now with the pandemic relieving and coming out of it, the world's changed. This is an opportunity for businesses. Nick, this is something that you guys are focused on. Can you take us through what Guardian Life's doing in this post pandemic changeover as cloud goes next level? >> Yeah, thanks John. So the immediate need in the pandemic situation was about the new business capability. So those familiar with insurance, traditionally life insurance underwriting, disability underwriting is very in-person, fluids, labs, attending physician statements. And when March of 2020 broke, that all came to an abrupt halt. Doctor's office were either closed. Testing centers were either closed or inundated with COVID testing. So we had to come up with some creative ways to digitize our new business, adopt the application, and adopt our medical questionnaires, and also get creative on some of our underwriting standards that put us at certain limits and certain levels and when we needed the fluids. So we are pretty quickly, we're agile about decisions there. And we moved from about 40 to 50% adoption rate of our electronic applications to the north of 98% across the board. In addition, we saw some opportunities for products and more capabilities beyond new business. So after we weathered the storm, we started to take a step back. And like you said, look at what we were doing, that have a start, stop, continue conversation internally to say, this digitization is a new norm. How do we meet it from every angle, not just a new business. And that's where we started to look at our policy administration systems, moving more to the cloud and leveraging the cloud to its fullest extent versus just a lifted shift. >> Kim, I want to get your perspective at Accenture. I've done a lot of interviews with the past, I think 18 months. A lot of use cases with Accenture, almost in every vertical where you guys are almost like the firefighters, get called in to like help out 'cause the cloud actually now is an enabler. How do you see the impact of the pandemic reverbing through? I mean, obviously you guys come to the table, you guys bring in, I mean, what's your perspective on this? >> So, yeah, it's really interesting. I think the most interesting fact is we talk about, Nick raise such a strong area in our business of underwriting and how can we expedite that, is being talked on the table for a number of years, but the industry has been very slow or reluctant to embrace. And the pandemic became an enforcer in it to be honest. And a lot of the companies were thinking about it prior, but that's it, they'll think about it. I mean, even Accenture, we launched a huge three-year investment to get clients into cloud and digital transformation, but the pandemic just expedited everything. Now the upside is clients that were in a well-advanced stage of planning, they were easily able to adopt, but clients that weren't, were really left behind. So we became very, very busy just supporting the clients that didn't have as much forethought as likes of Guardian, et cetera. >> Nick, it brings up a good point. I want to get your reaction to see if you agree. I mean, people who didn't put their toe in the cloud or just jump in the deep end, really got flat-footed when the pandemic hit, because they weren't prepared. People who were either ingratiated in with the cloud or having active projects or even being full deployments in there did well. What's your take on that? >> Yeah, the enablement we had and the gift we were given by starting our cloud journey, in I want to say 2016, 17 was we really started moving to the cloud. And I think we were the only insurer that moved production load to the cloud. At that point, most of insurers were putting their development environments, maybe even their SIT environments, but Guardian had the strategy of getting out of the data center or moving to a much more flexible, scalable environment architecture using the AWS cloud. So we completed our journey into the cloud by 2018, 19, and we were at the point of really capitalizing versus moving. So we were able to move very quickly, very nimbly. When the pandemic hit or in any digital situation, we have that flexibility and capacity that AWS provides us to really respond to our customers, our customers need. So we were one of the more fortunate insurers that were well into our cloud journey. And at the point of optimization versus the point of moving. >> Let's talk about the connection with Accenture's life insurance and annuity platform also known ALIP, I think the acronym is. What was that? Why was that relevant? What was that all about? >> Yeah, so I'll go first and then Kim, you can jump in and see if you agree with me. >> He essentially help that, love it. (laughs) >> Yeah, you would suspect you would, right John? >> Yeah. (laughs) >> Like I said, our new business focus was the original, like the emergency situation when the pandemic hit. But as we went further into it and realized the mortality and morbidity and the needs and wants of our customers, which is a major focus of Guardian, really being, having the client at the center of every conversation we have, we realized that there was a real opportunity for product and it's product continues to change and you had regulations like 7702 coming out where you had to reprice the entire portfolio to be able to sell it by January 1, 2022. We realized our current systems are for policy admin. We're not matching our digital capabilities that we had moved to the cloud. So we embarked on a very extensive RFP to Accenture and a few other vendors that would come to the table and work with us. And we just really got to a place where combination of our desire to be on the cloud, be flexible, and be capable for our customers, married really well with the knowledge, the industry knowledge and the capabilities that Accenture brought to the table with the ALIP platform. Their book of business, their current infrastructure, their configuration versus development, really all aligned with our need for flexible, fast time to market. We're looking to cut development times significantly. We're looking to cut test in times significantly. And as of right now, it's all proving true between the cloud capability and the ALIP capability. We are reaping the benefits of having this new platform coming up in live very soon here. >> Before I get to Accenture's perspective, I want to just ask you a quick follow-up on that, Nick, if you don't mind. You basically talk us through, okay, I can see what's happening here. You get with Accenture, take advantage of what they got going on. You get into the cloud, you start getting the efficiencies, get the cultural change. What refactoring have you seen? What's your vision, I should say. What's your vision around what's next? Because clearly there's a playbook. You get in the cloud, re-platform, you get the cultural fit, you understand the personnel issues, how to tap the resources, then you've got to look for innovation where you can start changing, how you do things to refactor the business model. >> Yeah, so I think that, specifically to this conversation, that's around the product capability. So for all too long, the insurance companies have had three specific sleeves of insurance products. We've had individual life. We have an individual disability and we'd have individual annuities. Each of them serving a specific purpose in the customer's lives. What this platform and this cloud platform allows us to do is start to think about, can we create the concept of a single wrapper? Can we bring some of these products together? Can we centralize the buying process? And with ALIP behind the scenes, you don't have that, I kind of equate it to building a Ferrari and attaching a trailer to it, and that's what we were doing today. Our digital front-ends, our new business capabilities are all being anchored down or slowed down by our traditional mainframe back-ends. By introducing Accenture on the cloud in AWS, we now have our Ferrari fully free to run as fast as it can versus anchoring this massive trailer to it. So it really was a matter of bringing our product innovation to our digital front-end innovation that we've been working on for two or three years prior. >> I mean, this is the kind of the Amazon way. You decouple things, you decompose, you don't want to have a drag. And with containers, we're seeing companies look at existing legacy in a way that's different. Could you talk about how you guys look at that Nick internally because a lot of CIO's are saying, Hey, you know what? I can have the best of both worlds. I don't have to kill the old to bring in the new, but I can certainly modernize everything. What's your reaction to that? >> Yeah. And I think that's our exact path forward. We don't feel like we need to blow the ocean. We're going after this surgically for the things that we think are going to be most impactful to our customers. So legacy blocks of business that are sitting out there, that are for completely closed, they're not our concern. It's really hitching this new ALIP capability to the next generation of products, the next generation of customer needs, understanding data. Data capture is very important. So if you look at the mainframes and what we're living on now, it's all about the owner of the policy. You lose connection with the beneficiary or the insured. What these new platforms allowed us to do is really understand the household around the products that they're buying. I know it sounds simple, but that data architecture, that data infrastructure on these newer platforms and in the cloud, you can churn it faster, you have scale to do more analysis, but you're also able to capture in a much cleaner way. On the traditional systems, you're talking about what we call intimately the blob on the mainframe that has your name, your first name, your last name, your address, all in one free form field sitting in some database. It's very hard to discern. On these new platforms, given our need and our desire to be deeper into the client's lives, understanding their needs, ALIP coupled with AWS, with our new business capabilities on the front-end really puts together that true customer value chain. That's going to differentiate us. >> Kim, okay, CTO of ALIP as he calls it, the acronym for the service you have. This is a great example. I hate to use the word on-ramp cause that sounds so old. But in a way, in vertical markets, you're seeing the power of the cloud because the data and the AI could be freed up and you can take advantage of all the heavy lifting by providing some platform or some support with Amazon, your expertise. This is a great use case of that, I think. And this is I think a future trend where the developments can be faster, that value can be faster, and your customers don't have to build all the lower level abstractions, if you will. Can you describe the essential relationship to your customers as you guys? Because this is a real great use case. >> Yeah, it is. Our philosophy is simple. Let's not reinvent the wheel. And with cloud and native services that AWS provide, we want to focus on the business of what the system needs to do and not all the little side bits. We can get a great service that's fully managed, that has security patches updates. We want to focus on the real deal. Like Nick wants to focus on the business and not so much what's underneath it. That's my problem, I'm focusing on that. And we will work together in a nice little gel. You've had the relatively new term, no code/low code. It's strange. A modern system like ALIP has been that way for a number of years. Basically it means, I don't want to make code changes. I just want to be able to configure it. So now more people can have access to make change, and we can even get it to the point where it's the people that are sitting there, dealing with the clients. That would be the ultimate, where they can innovate and come up with ideas and try things because we've got it so simple. We're not there yet, let's be realistic, but that's the ultimate goal. So ALIP, the no code/low code has been around for quite some time. And maybe we should take advantage of that, but I think we're missing one thing. So as good as the platform is, the cloud moving in, calculating native services using the built-in security that comes with all that and extending the function and then be able to tap into the InsurTech, FinTech, internet of things, and quickly adapt. I think the partnership is big. Okay, it's very strong part of the exercise. So you can add the product, but without the people that work well together, I think it's also a big challenge. All programs have their idiosyncrasies and there's a lot of challenges along the way. There's one really small simple example I can use. I'd say Guardian is one of our industries market leaders when they approach the security. They really do lead the way out there. They're very strict, very responsible, which is such a pleasure to say, but at the end of the day, you still need to run a business. So, 'cause we're a partnership because we all have the same challenges, we want to get to success. We were able to work together quite quickly. We planned out the right approach that maximize the security, but it also progressed the business and we applied that into the overall program. So I think it is a product definitely. I think it is everything Nick said, you actually elaborated on, but I'd like to point out, there's a big part of the partnership to make it a success as well. >> Yeah, great, great call out there. Nick, let's get your reaction on that because I want to get it to the customer side of it. This enablement platform is the new, I mean, platform has been around for awhile, but the notion of buying tools and having platforms are now interesting 'cause you have to take this low code/no code capability. I mean, you still got a code. I mean, there's some coding going on, but what it means is ease of use composing and being fast. Platforms are super important. That requires real architecture and partnership. What's your reaction? >> Yeah, so I think I'll tie it all together between AWS and ALIP, and here's the beauty of it. So we have something called LaunchPad where we're able to quickly stand up in ALIP instance for development capabilities because of our Amazon relationship. And then to Kim's point, we have been successful with 85% or more, of all the work we've done with an ALIP is configuration versus code and I'd actually I'd venture to say 90%. So that's extremely powerful when you think about the speed to market and our need to be product innovative. So if our developers and even our analysts that sit on the business side could come in and quickly stand up a development environment, start to play with actuarial calculations, new product features and function and then spin that to a more higher-end development environment. You now have the perfect coupling of a new policy administration system that has a flexibility and configuration with a cloud provider like Amazon and AWS that allows us to move quickly with environments, whereas in days past, you'd have to have an architecture team come in and stand up the servers. And I'm going way back, but like buy the boxes, put the boxes in place and wire them down. This combination of ALIP and AWS has really brought a new capability to Guardian and we're really excited about. >> I love that little comparison. Let me just quickly ask you, compared to the old way, give us an order of magnitude of pain and timing involved versus what you just described as standing up something very quickly and getting value and having people shift their intellectual capital into value activities versus undifferentiated heavy lifting. >> Yes, I'll give you real dates. So we really engaged with Accenture on the ALIP program right before Thanksgiving of last year. We had our environment stood up and running, all of our DEV, SIT, UAT up by February, March timeframe on AWS and we are about to launch our first product configuration into the ALIP platform coming November. So within a year, we've taken arguably decades of product innovation from our mainframes and built it onto the ALIP platform on the Amazon cloud. So I don't know that you can do that in any other type of environment or partnership. >> That's amazing. That's just great example to me where cloud scale and real refactoring and business agility is plays out. So congratulations. I got to ask you now, on the customer side you mentioned, you guys love providing value to the customers. What is the impact to the customer? Okay, now you're a customer, Guardian Life's customer. What's the impact to them? Can you share how you see that rendering itself in the marketplace? >> Yeah, so clearly AWS has rendered tons of value to the customer across the value stream whether it be our new business capability, our underwriting capability, our ability to process data and use their scale. I mean, it just goes on and on about the AWS, but specifically around ALIP, the new API environment that we have, the connectivity that we can now make with the new back-end policy admin systems has really brought us to a new level, whether it be repricing, product innovation, responding to claims capabilities, responding to servicing capabilities that the customer might need. We're able to introduce more self-service. So if you think about it from the back-end policy admin going forward to our client portal, we're able to expose more transactions to self-serve. So minimize calls to the call center, minimize frustration of hold times and allow them to come onto the portal and do more and interact more with their policies because we're on this new, more modern cloud environment and a new more modern policy admin. So we're delivering new capabilities to the customer from beginning to end being on the cloud with ALIP. >> Okay, final question. What's next for Guardian Life's journey year with Accenture? What's your plans? What do you want to knock down for the next year? What's on your mind? What's next? >> So that's an easy question. We've had this roadmap plan since we first started talking to Accenture, at least I've had it in my head. We want off all of our policy admin systems for new business come end of 2025. So we've got about four policy admin systems maintaining our different lines of business, our individual disability, our life insurance, and our annuities, for systems that are weighing us down a little bit. We have a glide path and a roadmap with Accenture as a partner to get off of all of these for new business capability by end of 2024. And I'm being gracious to my teams when I say that I'd like to go a little bit sooner. And then we begin to migrate the most important blocks of business that caused the most angst and most concerned with the executive leadership team and then complete the product. But along the way, given regulation, given new customer needs, meeting the needs of the customer's changing life, we're going to have parallel tracks. So I envision we continue to have this flywheel turning of moving, but then we begin another flywheel right next to it that says we're going to innovate now on the new platform as well. So ultimately John, next year, if I could have my entire whole life block, as it stands today on the new admin platform, and one or two new product innovations on the platform as well by the 3rd quarter, 4th quarter of next year, that would be a success as far as I'm concerned. >> Awesome, you guys had all planned out. I love, and I have such a passion for how technology powers business. And this is such a great story for next gen where the modernization trend is today and where it's going. So Nick appreciate it. Kim, thanks for coming out with Accenture. Nick, so just an easy question for you. I have to ask you another one. This is I got you here. You guys are doing a lot of great work. For other CIOs out there that are going through this right now, whatever they are on the spectrum, missed the CloudWave, getting in now, this notion of refactoring and then re-platforming and then refactoring business is a playbook we're seeing emerge. People can get the benefits of going to the cloud, certainly for efficiency, but now it opens up the aperture for different kinds of business models. With more data access, with machine learning. This refactoring seems to be the new hot thing where the best minds are saying, wow, we could do more, even more. What's your vision? How would you share those folks out there of the CIOs? What should they be thinking? What's their approach? What advice would you give? >> Yeah, so a lot of the mistakes we make as CIOs, we go for the white hot core first. We went the other way. We went for the newer digital assets. We went for the stuff that wasn't as concerning to the business. Should we fall over? Should there be an outage? Should there be anything? So if you avoid the white hot core, improve it with your peripherals, easier moves to the cloud portals, broker portals, beneficiary portals, simple AIX frames, moving to the cloud and making them cloud native, new builds. So we started with all those peripheral pieces of the architecture and we avoided the white hot core because that's where you start to get those very difficult conversations about, I don't know if I'm ready to move. And I don't see the obvious benefit of moving a dividend generating policy admin system to the cloud, like why? When you prove it in the pudding and you put the other things out there and prove you can be successful, the conversation to move your core and your white hot core out to the platform out to leverage the cloud and to leverage new admin platforms, it becomes a much easier conversation because you've kind of cut your teeth on something much less detrimental to the business should it go alright. >> What's the old expression, put water through the pipes, get some reps in and get the team ready to bring training, whatever your metaphor you use, that's what you're essentially saying there. Get some, your sea legs, get practice. >> Exactly. >> Then go for the hard stuff. >> It's such a valid point, John. We see a lot of different approaches across a lot of different companies and the biggest challenges, the core is the biggest part. And if you start with that, it can be the scariest part. And I've seen companies trip up big time and it becomes such a bubble spend, which really knocks you on for years, lose confidence in your strategy and everything else. And you're only as strong as your weakest link. So whether you do the outside first or the inside first, from a weakest link until the journey is complete, you never going to maximize. So it was a very different and new and great approach that they took by doing a learning curve around the easiest stuff and then hit in the core. >> Yeah, well, that's a great point. One quick, quick followup on that is that, talk about the impact to the personnel, Kim and Nick, because there's a morale issue going on too. There's a training. I won't say training, but there's a not re-skilling, but there's the rigor, if you're refactoring, you are re-skilling, you're doing new things. The impact of morale and confidence you get certainly. you don't want to be in the white core unconfident. >> Maybe I should get first 'cause it's Nick's stuff. So he probably might want to say a lot, yeah. What we see with a lot of insurance companies, they grow through acquisition. Okay, they're very large companies, grown over time, buying companies with businesses and systems and bringing it in. They usually bring a tenure staff. So getting the staff to the next generation, that staff is extremely important because they know everything that you've got today and then not so aware with what's coming up in the future. And there is a transition and people shouldn't feel threatened, but there is change and people do need to adopt and evolve and it should be fun and interesting, but it is a challenge at that turnover point on who controlling what, and then you get the concerns and get paranoid. So it is a true HR issue that you need to manage through. >> Nick you're the final word here. Go for it. >> Yeah, John. I'll give you a story that I think will sum the whole thing up about the excitement versus contention we see here at Guardian. I have a 50-year veteran on my legacy platform team and this person is so excited, got themselves certified in Amazon and is now leading the charge to bring our mainframes onto ALIP and is one of the most essential, and I've actually had Accenture tell me, if I had a person like this on every one of my engagements who is not only knowledgeable of the legacy, but is so excited to move to the new, I don't think I'd have a failed implementation. So that's the kind of Guardian, the kind of backing Guardian's putting behind this. We are absolutely focusing on rescaling. We are not going to the market. We're giving everyone the opportunity and we have an amazing take-up rate. And again, like I said, 50-year veteran who probably could have retired 10 years ago is so excited, reeducated themselves and is now a key part of this implementation. >> And who wouldn't want to drive a Ferrari when you see it come in. I mean, back in the trailer. Great story, Nick. Thank you for coming on, great insight. Kim, great stuff for the Accenture, as always a great story here. We're here at the heart of the real focus where all companies are feeling right now. We're surviving and thriving and coming out of the pandemic with a growth strategy and a business model powered by technology. So thanks for sharing the story, appreciate it. >> Thanks John, appreciate it. >> Okay, it's CUBE coverage of AWS Executive Summit at re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (bright music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to this special CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here, remote in Washington, DC, not in Palo Alto, but we're all around the world with theCUBE as we are virtual. We're here recapping the Citrix Launchpad: Cloud (accelerating IT modernization) announcements with CUBE alumni Kevin Jackson, Kevin L. Jackson, CEO of GC Global Net. Kevin, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> No, thank you very much, John. It's always a pleasure to be on theCUBE. >> It's great to have. You always have great insights. But here, we're recapping the event, Citrix Launchpad: Cloud (accelerator IT modernization). And again, we're seeing this theme constantly now, IT modernization, application modernization. People are now seeing clearly what the pandemic has shown us all that there's a lot of projects that need to be up-leveled or kill. There's a lot of things happening and going on. What's your take of what you heard? >> Well, you know, from a general point of view, organizations can no longer put off this digitalization and the modernization of their IT. Many of these projects have been on a shelf waiting for the right time or, you know, the budget to get right. But when the pandemic hit, everyone found themselves in the virtual world. And one of the most difficult things was how do you make decisions in the virtual world when you can't physically be with someone? How do you have a meeting when you can't shake someone's hand? And they all sort of, you know, stared at each other and virtually, of course, to try to figure this out. And they dusted off all of the technologies they had on the shelf that they were, you know, they were told to use years ago, but just didn't feel that it was right. And now it became necessary. It became the way of life. And the thing that really jumped at me yesterday, well, jumped at me with Launchpad, the Launchpad of the cloud is that Citrix honed in on the key issues with this virtual world. I mean, delivering applications, knowing what the internet state is so that you could select the right sources for information and data. And making security holistic. So you didn't have to, it was no longer sort of this bolted on thing. So, I mean, we are in the virtual world to stay. >> You know, good call out there. Honing in was a good way to put it. One quote I heard from Tim (Minahan) was, you know, he said one thing that's become painfully evident is a lot of companies are going through the pandemic and they're experiencing the criticality of the application experience. And he says, "Application experience is the new currency." Okay, so the pandemic, we all kind of know what's going on there. It's highlighting all the needs. But this idea of an application experience is the new currency is a very interesting comment because, I mean, you nailed it. Everyone's working from home. The whole work is shifting. And the applications, they kind of weren't designed to be this way 100%. >> Right, right. You know, the thing about the old IT was that you would build something and you would deploy it and you would use it for a period of time. You know, a year, two years, three years, and then there would be an upgrade. You would upgrade your hardware, you would upgrade your applications, and then you go through the process again, you know? What was it referred to as, it wasn't modernization, but it was refresh. You know, you would refresh everything. Well today, refresh occurs every day. Sometimes two or three times a day. And you don't even know it's occurring. Especially in the application world, right? I think I was looking at something about Chrome, and I think we're at like Chrome 95. It's like Chrome is updated constantly as a regular course of business. So you have to deploy this, understand when it's going to be deployed, and the customers and users, you can't stop their work. So this whole application delivery and security aspect is completely different than before. That's why this, you know, this intent driven solution that Citrix has come up with is so revolutionary. I mean, by being able to know the real business needs and requirements, and then translating them to real policies that can be enforced, you can really, I guess, project the needs, requirement of the organization anywhere in the world immediately with the applications and with this security platform. >> I want to get your reactions to something because that's right on point there, because when we look at the security piece and the applications you see, okay, your mind goes okay, old IT, new IT. Now with cloud, with the pandemic showing that cloud scale matters, a couple themes have come from that used to be inside the ropes concepts. Virtualization, virtual, and automation. Those two concepts are going mainstream because now automation with data and virtual, virtual work, virtual CUBE, I mean, we're doing virtual interviews. Virtualization is coming here. So building on those things. New things are happening around those two concepts. Automation is becoming much more programmable, much more real time, not just repetitive tasks. Virtual is not just doing virtual work from home. It's integrating that virtual experience into other applications. This requires a whole new organizational structure mindset. What's your thoughts on that? >> Well, one of the things is the whole concept of automation. It used to be a nice to have. Something that you could do maybe to improve your particular process, not all of the processes. And then it became the only way of reacting to reality. Humans, it was no longer possible for humans to recognize a need to change and then execute on that change within the allotted time. So that's why automation became a critical element of every business process. And then it expanded that this automated process needed to be connect and interact with that automated process and the age of the API. And then the organization grew from only relying on itself to relying on its ecosystem. Now an organization had to automate their communications, their integration, the transfer of data and information. So automation is key to business and globalization creates that requirement, or magnifies that requirement. >> One of the things we heard in the event was, obviously Citrix has the experience with virtual apps, virtual desktop, all that stuff, we know that. But as the cloud grows in, they're making a direct statement around Citrix is going to add value on top of the cloud services. Because that's the reality of the hybrid, and now soon to be multi-cloud workflows or architectures. How do you see that evolve? Is that something that's being driven by the cloud or the app experience or both? What's your take on that focus of Citrix taking their concepts and leadership to add value on top of the cloud? >> To be honest, I don't like referring to the cloud. It gives an impression that there's only a single cloud and it's the same no matter what. That couldn't be further from the truth. A typical organization will consume services from three to five cloud service providers. And these providers aren't working with each other. Their services are unique, independent. And it's up to the enterprise to determine which applications and how those applications are presented to their employees. So it's the enterprise that's responsible for the employee experience. Integrating data from one cloud service provider to another cloud service provider within this automated business process or multiple business processes. So I see Citrix is really helping the enterprise to continually monitor performance from these independent cloud service provider and to optimize that experience. You know, the things like, where is the application being consumed for? What is the latency today on the internet? What type of throughput do I need from cloud service provider A versus cloud service provider B? All of this is continually changing. So the it's the enterprise that needs to constantly monitor the performance degradation and look at outages and all of that. So I think, you know, Citrix is on point by understanding that there's no single cloud. Hybrid and multi-cloud is the cloud. It's the real world. >> You know, that's a great call. And I think it's naive for enterprises to think that, you know, Microsoft is sitting there saying hmm, let's figure out a way to really work well with AWS. And vice versa, right? I mean, and you got Google, right? They all have their own specialties. I mean, Amazon web service has got great compliance action going on there. Much back stronger than Microsoft. Microsoft's got much deeper legacy and integration to their base, and Google's doing great with developers. So they're all kind of picking their lanes, but they all exist. So the question in the enterprise is what? Do I, how do I deal with that? And again, this is an opportunity for Citrix, right? So this kind of comes down to the single pane of glass (indistinct) always talks about, or how do I manage this new environment that I need to operate in? Because I will want to take advantage of some of the Google goodness and the Azure and the AWS. But now I got my own on premises. Bare metals grow. You're seeing more bare metal deals going down now because the cloud operations has come on premises. >> Yeah, and in fact, that's hybrid IT, right? I always see that there are an enterprise, when enterprise thinks about modernizing or digitally transforming a business process, you have three options, right? You could put it in your own data center. In fact, building a data center and optimizing a data center for a particular process is the cheapest and most efficient way of executing a business process. But it's only way cheaper and efficient if that process is also stable and consistent. I'll say, but some are like that. But you can also do a managed service provider. But that is a distinctly different approach. And the third option is a cloud service provider. So this is a hybrid IT environment. It's not just cloud. It's sort of, you know, it's not smart to think everything's going to go into the cloud. >> It's distributed computing. We see (indistinct). >> Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, in today's paperless world, don't you still use a pen and paper and pencil? Yes. The right tool for the right job. So it's hybrid IT. Cloud is not always a perfect thing. And that's something that I believe Citrix has looked at. That interface between the enterprise and all of these choices when it comes to delivering applications, delivering the data, integrating that data, and making it secure. >> And I think that's a winning positioning to have this app experience, the currency narrative, because that ultimately is an outcome that you need to win on. And with the cloud and the cloud scale that goes on with all the multiple services now available, the company's business model is app driven, right? That's their application. So I love that, and I love that narrative. Also like this idea of app delivering security. It's kind of in the weeds a little bit, but it highlights this hybrid IT concept you were saying. So I got to ask you as the expert in the industry in this area, you know, as you have intent, what do they call it? Intent driven solution for app delivering security. Self healing, continuous optimization, et cetera, et cetera. The KPIs are changing, right? So I want to get your thoughts on that. Because now, as IT shifts to be much faster, whether it's security teams or IT teams to service that DevOps speed, shifting left everyone talks about, what's the KPIs that are changing? What is the new KPIs that the managers and people can work through as a north star or just tactically? What's your thoughts? >> Well, actually, every KPI has to relate to either the customer experience or the employee experience, and sometimes even more important, your business partner experience. That's the integration of these business processes. And one of the most important aspects that people really don't think about is the API, the application programming interface. You know, you think about software applications and you think about hardware, but how is this hardware deployed? How do you deploy and expand the number of servers based upon more usage from your customer? It's via the API. You manage the customer experience via APIs. You manage your ability to interact with your business partners through the API, their experience. You manage how efficient and effective your employees are through their experience with the IT and the applications through the API. So it's all about that, you know, that experience. Everybody yells customer experience, but it's also your employee experience and your partner experience. So that depends upon this integrated holistic approach to applications and the API security. The web app, the management of bots, and the protection of your APIs. >> Yeah, that really nailed it. I think the position is good. You know, if you can get faster app delivery, keep the security in line, and not bolt it on after the fact and reduce costs, that's a winning formula. And obviously, stitching together the service layer of app and software for all the cloud services is really key. I got to ask you though, Kevin, since you and I have riffed on theCUBE about this before, more importantly now than ever with the pandemic, look at the work edge. People working at home and what's causing the office spaces changing. The entire network architecture. I mean, I was talking to a big enterprise that said, oh yeah, we had, you know, the network for the commercial and the network for dial up now 100% provisioned for everyone at home. The radical change to the structural interface has completely changed the game. What is your view on this? I mean, give us your, where does it go? What happens next? >> So it's not what's next, it's where we are right now. And you need to be able to be, work from anywhere at any time across multiple devices. And on top of that, you have to be able to adapt to constant change in both the devices, the applications, the environment, and a business model. I did a interview with Citrix, actually, from an RV in the middle of a park, right? And it's like, we did video, we did it live. I think it was through LinkedIn live. But I mean, you need to be able to do anything from anywhere. And the enterprise needs to support that business imperative. So I think that's key. It's it's not the future, it's the today. >> I mean, the final question I have for you is, okay, is the frog in the boiling water? At what point does the CIO and the IT leaders, I mean, their minds are probably blown. I can only imagine. The conversations I've been having, it's been, you know, be agile, do it in the cloud, do it at speed, fix the security, programmable infrastructure. What? How fast can I run? This is the management challenge. How are people dealing with this when you talk to them? >> First of all, the IT professional needs to focus on the business needs, the business requirements, the business key performance indicators, not technology, and a business ROI. The CIO has to be right there in the C sweep of understanding what's needed by the business. And there also has to be an expert in being able to translate these business KPIs into IT requirements, all right? And understanding that all of this is going to be within a realm of constant change. So the CIO, the CTO, and the IT professional needs to realize their key deliverable is business performance. >> Kevin, great insight. Loved having you on theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. I really appreciate your time highlighting and recapping the Citrix Launchpad: Cloud announcements. Accelerating IT modernization can't go fast enough. People, they want to go faster. >> Faster, faster, yes. >> So great stuff. Thanks for coming, I appreciate it. >> Thank you, John. I really enjoyed it. >> Okay, it's theCUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>Hi, welcome to this cube conversation. I'm Lisa Martin and pleased to welcome back. One of our cube alumni, Christian rowdy, the VP of technology strategy at Citrix Christian. Welcome back to the program. >>Thank you, Lisa. And thanks for having me. Great to see you again, and we'll be virtually at this time. >>Great to see you too. It's been a couple of years and quite a few things have changed since we got to sit down at synergy a couple of years together together. Citrix has an exciting new announcement. Let's unpack that. Talk me to me about what you're announcing and what it's going to deliver. >>Sure. You know, as you said, actually, I can't believe it's been a couple of years since we last saw each other. And I think, you know, time's kind of just disappeared within the pandemic. So it actually, as a result of some of those things that we've seen, you know, people get so tired of being stuck in the same place and tired of being on this constant stream of video. And one of the things that we wanted to do was, was actually a vital Citrix launch part, which is kind of our new announcement series that will be delivered via LinkedIn live. But he's really intended to be kind of a short burst approach to providing updates to some of them really important things that we're working on at Citrix. So, uh, hopefully, uh, people would love to say a reason and get some rich information from them. >>And there's going to be a series of three launchpad programs. Now we've seen so much change since the rapid pivot to work from home. Now this worked from anywhere hybrid environment. We've seen the, the massive adoption of cloud and SAS. We've also seen the threat landscape, the attack surface, just expand and expand. Talk to me about why Citrix is doing the launch pad series and then we'll go through each of the three series. >>Yeah, absolutely. So maybe I think just to set a little bit of context, you know, we, we were working on some pretty interesting things, uh, pre pandemic, you know, uh, as a result of the, kind of the, the evolution of Citrix as an organization, but perhaps more importantly, the journey that our customers were on globally, you know, every customer that we had in, in any industry across the world, we're all at various stages of their own digital transformation. And I think what the pandemic has done apart from all the really bad things, actually, if you look at it as a, perhaps one gleaming bit of light in the whole thing was that we've given organizations, whether we realize it or not the opportunity to try this huge remote work experiment. And I think what it has done above anything else has shown that remote work actually works. >>And so as a result of that, what we've seen coming out of the pandemic is that organizations are really going to use that as a springboard. So implement some new strategies, new technologies, and really drive the next generation of that business. So with one eye on that, I think if you were to categorize the three big things that we're looking at from a Citrix perspective, it's really about how to help, we'll continue to help our customers with that accelerated it modernization to really help them understand what it takes to have secure, flexible work in this new post pandemic world. And then also to think about productivity, what does productivity mean in a world of ever more distributed teams? And so the events that we're talking about and specifically the cloud one, we'll focus on some of the new offerings from Citrix, some of the new technologies and talk about the trends that we've seen within our customers. >>So, you know, one of the big things that Citrix has always been very proud of is our market leading position in virtual application and virtual desktop delivery. And even that itself has now begun to emerge into what we call desktop as a service. And there's a ton of new innovations that we've been working on in that space as well. But also if you think about what's happening in cloud, as you talked about, you know, the evolution of applications being from traditional on premises, wills to SAS applications, what we're also seeing is things like the network services that use to support those applications when they looked slightly different, which from a deployment perspective, and now all moving to cloud services, the security that you alluded to in terms of how complicated that is, but how important it is for it, organizations, those services also moving to cloud as the applications begin to look very differently in the future. So extremely excited about the cloud launch. Patino, we're going to talk a lot about those things that we're doing both in the public cloud, in the hybrid cloud. And I think it will resonate well with customers around the world. >>I think it will as well. And you mentioned there are glimmers of hope that we've seen in the last 18 months. And one of the things that this has proved is that work from home can be productive, can be successful. Employees need to be empowered to be able to do that. Let's go ahead and talk through the first, um, program accelerating it monetization. This is Tuesday, September 28th. Let's talk about some of the, of the Citrix innovations that you're going to be announcing. >>Yeah, so I mean, as I mentioned know, we, we, we think about sort of ecstatic. I see modernization in various parts. You know, we tend to start with the classic infrastructure and we've seen over the years that lots of infrastructure, you know, he's leaving the building. And by that we mean the traditional realms of on-premise data centers or co-location facilities, this constant evolution and migration of those services, uh, to, to infrastructure as a service providers from the huge cloud companies that are out there. And we can continue to see that as a, as a huge trend. Of course. Um, one of the things that off the back of that of course is our move from the traditional world of virtual desktops, which was a very on-premise concept into desktop as a service. So really the key around desktop as a service, it's a simplification, some cost optimization and the things that it are looking at in terms of how they can really bring things to the party for their organizations going forward. >>And of course, as we move into that world of everything being delivered as a service know, things like network services, security services, they almost follow. So some of the things that you'll hear about that is really around our application, delivering security and also our move from VDI to DAS. And, you know, you'll hear a lot about what we're doing with the world's leading cloud providers to really add more Citrix value or build on what we've already done with them, but lots, lots more, uh, and really support the, the, the notion of the, every customer is on a journey to cloud one way or the other. And of course, districts will be ready to help at any stage of that journey. >>Every customer is on the journey to cloud. And we've seen that accelerate so much in the last 18 months. Talk to me a little bit about if we, if we think of desktop as a service, as an evolution of VDI, is that what you're saying? >>Yeah. You know, you think about sort of the traditional VDI scenario was that your virtual desktops, where we were using instead of physical desktops, you know, in inside the usual office location, but during the pandemic, you know, we saw so many customers rely on moving to VDI, to cloud, for reasons of scalability and reasons of security, but then also needing to still in many cases, provide access to those sort of traditional physical PCs. And of course, Citrix has had solutions for that for fundamentally many, many years. Um, but what we're also seeing is that organizations are striving for simplicity. You know, the kind of the value of the desktop is being able to deliver it on demand to the end user securely from wherever they are in the world on whatever device they're on. And as we see this sort of establishment of these new working norms, and I'm not a great fan of the phrase, the new normal, I think we have a new now and that now will evolve. You know, they almost daily as we come through the other side of the pandemic. So the real key drivers for us there obviously flexibility, reliability, security, and also cost optimization, which of course is the bread and butter of most conversations we have with CIO and CTO is around the world. >>That's critical. And I'm going to borrow that, um, the new, now, if you don't mind, I'll cite you credit. But I like that. I agree that I hope this is not the new normal, but one of the things that we've seen in the new now on the security front is we've seen this massive increase in ransomware. Everybody went to work from home almost overnight. Suddenly you have millions of devices, IOT devices connecting to corporate networks. Security became the acceleration of security, became a huge challenge for customers in any organization globally. Let's talk about now the second announcement. This is going to be Tuesday, October 5th, empowering a secure distributed workforce. >>Yeah. And I, and I think you you've hit the nail on the head there. I think the one thing that was perhaps completely staggering to everybody was the speed in which organizations were forced to lock their employees out of the physical office locations and by force. I mean, for all the right reasons that are around the health and wellbeing. I mean, if I think back to my earlier career, you know, before I joined Citrix, I was in a large organization and we would, you know, perform these fire drills every so often where we would go through our disaster recovery business continuity plans and really play scenarios out. Like the office in London was unavailable or the office in LA was unavailable, but never once do I remember is doing every office. And every location is offline from tomorrow. And there's no negotiability. If you have a device at home, please use it. >>You know, we can't provide laptops quick enough, especially with the global chip shortage now as well. So whatever device you have, we'll do our best to, to make that secure. And I think there was, uh, an expectation that the employees would sort of play nicely in that scenario. But of course, you know, if you have your home device, you probably don't update it as much as a work device. So it really does require a new set of thinking. And of course, Citrix has been at the forefront of the zero trust evolution. Now the technologies that we have in place do permit remote work and have them for many years. But I think what we're seeing now is a slightly different type of remote work, you know, with different types of, of applications and devices, as you said, different locations, you know, needing to knit all of that together in a sort of a more contextual way so that we can understand, you know, combinations of the end user, their location, the types of applications that they're using the state of their devices, and sort of bring it all that together to really understand, you know, just exactly how much security needs to be applied. >>I think the traditional challenges are still there, you know, too much security and end users will find a way around it because it's not a good user experience. And, you know, perhaps too much user experience without the security leaves, big holes and big problems for organizations. So, yeah, I think this balancing act is really key. And of course, uh, as we go through the launch funnel security, we'll talk about some of the great innovations and solutions that are coming from central. >>You're right with the fact that, uh, you know, this rapid pivot security, the changes, the things that people are saying, the workforce needs to be empowered. You know, we saw this sudden dependence on all these SAS applications to communicate and to collaborate. We also saw with that rapid PennDOT to work from home ransomware, I was doing some research recently, Christian, and that's it, it's up almost 11 X just in the first half of 2021 DDoSs is massively up. People are, are working from home in environments that are just suddenly a bit chaotic. And it's challenging from a security perspective when you have so many distractions to be able to make sure that you're following all the right steps as an employee, um, that you're not clicking on nefarious links and that you're really doing your own due diligence. So having that zero trust and help from folks like Citrix is really key to this new. Now, as you say, >>It is, you know, the unfortunate thing is that wildlife, uh, no end user, or certainly I would hope that no one user would willingly cause a problem from a security perspective. I think just by the very nature of the way that end users thing, can they interact with links in emails or the, uh, you know, interact with attachments in emails? Unfortunately, relying on the human is always going to be the weakest link in the chain. And I think that's why we have to have new approaches to how we address the use of behavior. You know, can we actually, uh, you know, guide people in different ways. There are plenty of technologies that are out there now. And then many, many from Citrix that actually allow us to what we've lovingly said is, is to save the users from themselves. You know, we can't simply rely on every user to be diligent for every single email or every single link that they see. So, you know, being able to actually understand, you know, where the threats are as it relates to the end user and the likely interaction they have, and then being able to combat those threats in the technology at a seamless way is really part of the excited evolution of, of what we're doing with Citrix. And again, lots of great things to come as we go through the security. >>And the third announcement is around worker boosting worker productivity. That's been a challenge that we've all faced in the last 18 months of having, like I said, a minute ago, you know, people that have suddenly kids learning from home spouses, working people competing for bandwidth. Talk to me about some of the things that Citrix is doing to help those workers be more engaged, be plugged in and really be able to get their jobs done from anywhere. >>Yeah, well, you know, I mean, I can give you the benefit of my experience, you know, being, uh, in a, in a home office for, for, for almost 20 months has been completely the antithesis of the opposite of the rest of my career. You know, I've, I've always been very mobile, um, you know, kind of picking up different devices and using them for different things, just purely from a, you know, the perspective of what's most convenient to me. And I think, you know, if you take that and extrapolate it to, to every employee and every organization around the world who has had to invite work into their home, you know, and another soundbite that I use quite often now is that, you know, for the last 20 months, we really haven't been working from home. We've been living at work, you know, and, and, and it's, it's a fact, you know, we've probably done more hours than ever before. >>We've run the risk of burnout more than ever before. And, you know, prior to the pandemic, I know, talked to you and I talked about this very thing, uh, at synergy, you know, w we talked about the notion of needing to focus on employee experience and employee productivity. You know, we saw plenty of examples in customers with huge initiatives around employee experience and employee productivity. You know, CIO is partnering with HR leads and really trying to figure out a map, the employee journey, you know, what is it that they do every day? You know, how can we make their life easier? And perhaps interestingly, how can we reduce some of the mundane overhead, you know, approvals or requests or things that we see in our everyday life, but actually give the employees more time to be valuable and, and do great cognitive work, which is of course, what, what humans do best. >>And so, you know, you remember, we talked about the micro apps back then. We, we we'd completed the acquisition of Sappho, uh, as you and I talked last time when we unveiled micro apps and micro workflows, as a way to really help end users interact within Citrix workspace. So the systems that they use every day, but provide a new way to do that. And just earlier this year, we completed the acquisition and integration of Reich, which was a fantastic addition to the Citrix portfolio. And so we've really begun to think about, you know, how can we actually help employees to do their best work? You know, w w what are the new capabilities that we need within Citrix workspace? What are the new capabilities that we need in Reich? How do we bring all that together with some of the other solutions that we have Citrix Podio is a really interesting suite of productivity applications that we have really aimed at that number one problem, which is how can I get people to be productive, to stay engaged, to lower the burnout and help them do their best work. And I'm really, really excited because there's some fantastic things. So we announced that the work version of the launch pod, which is on October 12th, >>All of those are so critical. You know, I I've always said employee productivity employee is directly related to the customer experience. I've used Wrike myself before, um, for different projects and being able to have productivity tools that allow the employee to engage, to be able to empower them to move projects forward, especially in a time that is still somewhat chaotic is, is critical as is to your point, ensuring that there are the proper tools to facilitate folks so that they get what they need when they need it to help reduce burnout. That's been a big challenge. You're right. That the living at work thing is real, it's persisting, and we're going to be in this hybrid environment for some TBD amount of time longer. So having the ability to be empowered and productive in a secure way, leveraging cloud capabilities is really key. And it's exciting to hear what Citrix launchpad is going to announce over those three days and deliver. >>Yeah. You know, I, I would just say, you know, in, in, in sort of summary where we're, we're really excited about the three areas now, and they really do sort of all come together in some of those challenges that we talked about, you know, specifically around how we can help organizations to address that accelerated it modernization to drive secure, flexible work in the new now, and also to really reach that goal of having extremely productive, distributed teams as we come out the other side of the pandemic. So, you know, lots going on a fantastic time to, to be here and to talk to you and to be at Citrix, of course, with so many, you know, huge customer issues that we, that we have to solve. And we're really excited for the challenge. >>Excellent. And we all are looking forward to that, the Citrix launchpad series, Christian, where can folks go to register for these different programs? >>Yeah, sure. So it's pretty simple. So if we just go to HTTP bit dot Lee, bit dot L Y forward slash Citrix launchpad, and we can sign up through that. >>Excellent. I've already signed up. I'm looking forward to these series, this series, to learn more about what you guys are doing and kind of dig in double click on some of the things that you spoke about Christian. Thank you for joining me today, talking about the launch pad series and letting folks know where they can go to register. >>Thank you. Great to be on the great to see you again. >>Likewise, for Christian Riley, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching a cube conversation.

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with digital coverage at Mirantis Launchpad 2020, brought to you by Mirantis. >> Welcome back. And I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of Mirantis Launchpad 2020. Of course we're spending a lot of time talking about Kubernetes. We're going to be digging in talking about some of the important developer tooling that Mirantis is helping to proliferate in the market, solve some real important challenges in the space. So happy to welcome to the program Miska Kaipiainen. He is the senior director of engineering with Mirantis. Miska, thanks so much for joining us. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you so much. >> All right, so Miska, I notice you've got on the Kontena sweatshirt. You were the founder of the company, did some tools. One of the tools that you and your team helped create was Lens. You and your team joined Mirantis, and recently Lens was pulled in. So maybe if you could just give us a little bit about your background. You do some coding yourself, the team that you have there, and let's tee up the conversation, 'cause it's that Lens piece that we're going to spend a bunch of time talking about. >> Yeah, so the background of what we did, basically Kontena, we started back in 2015, and we a the focus on creating technologies around the container orchestration technologies to basically to make developer tooling that are very easy to use for the developers. So during the years at Kontena, we did many different types of products, and maybe the most interesting product that we created was Lens. And now really when we joined Mirantis in January this year, so we have been able to work on Lens, and actually, since the Lens was made open source, fully open source in March this year, so it's been really kind of picking up, and now Mirantis acquired the whole technology, so we can really start investing even more in the development. >> All right, so let's talk specifically about Lens. As I teed up at the beginning, we're talking about managing multiple clusters. Gosh, and I think back to 2015. It was early on. Most people were still learning about Docker, Docker swarms, Kubernetes, Mesos. There were a lot of fights over how orchestration would be done. A little bit different discussion about what developers were doing, how they scaled out configurations, how they manage those. So help us understand kind of that core, what Lens does, and how the product has matured and expanded over those last five years. >> Yeah, so over the last five years, so originally Lens was developed for our internal product. So like Mesosphere and Docker, and they all have their own orchestration technologies even before Kubernetes. And we also started working on our own orchestration technology. And I'm a huge believer in when we are dealing with very complex technologies, so if you can visualize it and make it kind of more interesting to look at, so it will kind of help with the adoption, and it's kind of more acceptable to the market. And that's why we started doing Lens. And over the years, we turned Lens to work with Kubernetes environments, and nowadays really Lens is very much loved by the Kubernetes developers, who are those people who need to deal with the Kubernetes clusters on a daily basis. So they are not necessarily those ops people who are creating those clusters , but they are the people who actually use those clusters. >> Well, of course that that general adoption is something that, you know, super important. You have some stats you can share on, you talk about the love of developers. You said it's open source, it's available on GitHub, but how many people are using it? What are some of those usage stats? >> Yeah, so it was interesting. So when we released Lens open source under MIT license in March, so since then we have been getting, in half a year, we have been getting 8,000 stargazers on GitHub. That is kind of mind-blowing because we try to create projects and trying to create anything that would get a lot of traction in the past, but truly, it totally happened just now after years of trying. So it has been since the last six months, it's been just amazing the adopts and we have more than 50,000 users using Lens and the retention is great. People keep on coming back. So yeah, the numbers look very, very good for Lens, and we are just getting started. >> Yeah, well, it's something that this community definitely is huge growth, and anybody in this space remembers just the huge adoption of Docker, which of course the enterprise piece of Docker is now part of Mirantis. Inside those developers, help us understand a little bit more, what is it that has them really not only looking at the GitHubs, starring it, as you said, they're the stargazers. It's like a favorite, for those that aren't in the system. I've had a chance to look at some of the demos, and it seems rather straightforward. But if you could, just in your words, explain what it is that it solves for developers that otherwise they either had to do themselves or they had to cobble together a lot of different tools. We know developers out there. The wonderful thing is there's no shortage of tools to choose from. It's about the right tool that can do the right thing. >> Absolutely, absolutely. So Lens, we are calling it IDE for a reason. So we are talking about IDE for Kubernetes developers. And what does it mean actually is that we are taking all those necessary tools and technologies and packaging them, integrating them seamlessly together for the purpose of making it more easy for developers to deploy, operate, observe, inspect their workloads that are running on Kubernetes clusters. And I think the main benefits that Lens will provide for these developers is that if you're a newcomer in the Kubernetes ecosystem, so Lens gives you a very easy way to learn Kubernetes because it's so visual. And for more experienced users, it just radically improves the, let's say the speed of business and the way how you can perform things with your clusters. >> So one of the pieces that that Lens does is that multi-cluster management. So first of all, I believe, as you said, it's open source and can work with, is it any certified Kubernetes out there, whether it be from the public cloud, companies like VMware and Red Hat that have Kubernetes, of course, Mirantis has Kubernetes, too. And secondly, I think you teased out a little bit, but help help us understand a little bit. Multi-cluster management is something that the big players, you hear Azure and Google Cloud talking about how they look at managing not only other environments, but oh yeah, we can have other clusters and we can help you manage it. I think that's more on the ops side of things, as opposed to, as you said, this is really a developer tool set. >> Yeah, so of course, all the organizations, they want to most likely have some sort of centralized system where they can manage multiple clusters, and some companies provide systems for on-premises, and some public cloud vendors, they provide systems for provisioning those clusters on their own own systems. And then we have also the kind of multicloud management systems. Most of these technologies, they are really designed for the operations side, so how the IT administrations can manage these multiple clusters. So now if you look at the situation from the developer's perspective, they are now given access to certain number of clusters from different environments. And by the way, some of these clusters are also running on their local development environments on their laptops. So what Lens is doing is basically provides a unified user experience across all these clusters no matter what is the flavor of the Kubernetes. It can be the Minikube. It can be from AKS. It can be Mirantis Enterprise, Docker Enterprise offering, or whatever. So it kind of brings them all together and makes it very easy to navigate and go around and do your work. >> Yeah, well, that's, the promise of Kubernetes isn't that it just levels the playing field amongst everything. As I've talked to the founders of Kubernetes, people like Joe Beda said it's not a silver bullet. It's a thin layer. But that skillset is what's so important because there is a lot of difference between every platform they deal with. So as a developer, it's nice to have some tools that I can work across those environments. From a developer standpoint, I think it's on Windows, Linux, Mac, works across those environment. What do you hear from your customers? How are they using it? Is this something that they're like, oh hey, I can go make an adjustment on my mobile when I'm not necessarily in the office? Are we not quite there yet? >> Actually, it's kind of funny, because sometimes we hear these type of requests that we would like to have a mobile app version of Lens. I don't know how that would actually work in practice. So we haven't been doing anything on that front yet. I think still the most common use case is that developers, they are given access to clusters from somewhere and they are just desperately trying to find a kind of convenient way how to navigate around these different clusters and how to manage their workloads. And I think Lens is hitting the sweet spot in there with the ease of use. >> All right, so let me understand. It's been open sourced, yet Mirantis owns it. Is there a service or support? Does this tie into other products in the Mirantis portfolio? How do people get it? What do they need to, if anything, pay for it? And help us understand how this fits into the broader Mirantis story. >> Yes, so it's still kind of early days, so we just kind of announced that Lens is now part of Mirantis, let's say portfolio. So I must say that still the kind of main focus for us is around improving Lens and making it better for developers. So that's much more important than trying to think about the ways how potentially we could monetize this. So, but there are plans going ahead, going around for different ways how we can better support bigger enterprises who want to start using Lens in a big scale. >> Well, yeah, that's so important. Of course, developers, we need to lower the friction, help them adopt things fast. Miska, just get your general viewpoint, though. One of the big value propositions that Mirantis has is of course allowing enterprises to take advantage of these new types of solutions, especially today around Kubernetes. So help us understand from your standpoint the philosophy of what your team's helping to build and the customer engagements that you're having. >> Yes, so Mirantis, of course, has a broad portfolio of products, and many of those products, of course, are related to Kubernetes. And so we have many products which I'm also one of the leading development efforts around those. So some of the products are related to how to manage image repositories and registries. Some of them are related to how to handle the helm charts, which has basically become the defacto packaging format for Kubernetes applications. And we are kind of trying to bring all these different products and technologies together in a way that make it even more easy for developers then to access through Lens. So it's still a little bit work in progress, of course, since the Lens ecosystem is quite new, but we are on track there trying to make a beautiful one kind of experience for our customers. >> All right, well, final question I have for you. As you said, it's new there, but it gives a little taste as to feedback you're getting from the community. Anything we should be looking at on kind of the near to mid-term road map when it comes to Lens. >> Oh yeah, so we are just barely scratching the surface of the potential on what we can do with Lens. So one of the big features that we will be releasing still during this year in a couple of months time is going to be the extension API, which will allow all these cloud-native technology ecosystem vendors to bring their own technologies easily available and accessible through Lens. So it is possible for third parties to extend the user interface with their own kind of unique features and visualizations. And we are already actively working with certain partners to integrate their technologies through this extension API. So that's going to be huge. It's going to be game-changer. >> Well, the great thing about an open source project is people can go out, they can grab it now, they can give feedback, participate in the community. Miska, thank you so much for joining us and great to chat. >> Thank you for having me. Thank you. >> All right, stay with us for more coverage of Mirantis Launchpad 2020. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (bright music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, its theCUBE with digital coverage of Mirantis Launchpad 2020 brought to you by Mirantis . >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE coverage of Mirantis Launchpad 2020, really looking at how Mirantis Docker Enterprise are coming together, changes happening in the field and to help us dig into that customer and product discussion. Happy to welcome to the program, Shaun O'Meara. He is the global Field Chief Technology Officer with Mirantis coming to us from Germany. Shaun thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> All right, so let's start with the customers. I always love talking to the Field CTOs you're out there. You're talking strategy, you're getting into some of the architecture, lots of customers, probably still, trying to figure out that whole cloud native containerization, Kubernetes and modernization piece. So when you talk to your customers, what are some of their biggest challenges they're facing and those main discussion points that bring them to talk to Mirantis. >> Very good question, I think you've just laid it out yourself in many ways. It's complexity our customers are dealing with more and more change, more and more options, and it's driving complexity in their environments, and they're looking for ways to deal with that complexity and to allow more and more access and reduce barriers to getting applications and getting tools to market. And if we look at it and we look at the way the world is going today, we have multiple cloud environments. We have every single developer on the face of the planet wants to use different tools, different ways to build applications that don't want to be dictated to. Now, if you turn that around and you look at what operators have to deal with, it's just more and more complexity. Ultimately, that complexity is growing and we're looking for ways to make it easier, simpler, and subsequently increase the speed of getting applications to market for our customers. >> Yeah, You know we talk a bit about some of the macro challenges that customers have. What talk you kind of teed up a little bit, the operators and the developers. I remember a couple of years ago, I had the opportunity to interview Solomon Hykes and of course the founder from Docker. And there was that talk of well, containerization, it's this wonderful thing for developers. And he's like, hold on Stu we actually, really started looking at this or the operators we want that unit of operation to be closer to the application. So it should be simpler, it used to be okay, how many different applications do they have on a server or VMs all over the place and containers I could really have this microservice or this application is a container. So there is some operational simplicity there, but how is that dynamic inside the customer? Of course, we've seen the growth and the importance and the embracing of developers, but there's still the DevOps adoption and we'd love to be able to say one of these years that, oh, we don't have silos anymore and everybody works together and we're all on the same page. >> Oh yeah, the reality is in the big enterprise companies and the companies that are building applications for market today, your big financial services companies, there's still a very clear separation between operators and developers. A lot of that is driven by legislation, a lot of that's driven by just old fashioned thinking in many ways, but developers are starting to have a lot more influence on what applications are used and the infrastructure. We just see with the rise of AWS, all the contenders to AWS in the form of Azure and Google. Developers are starting to have a lot more power over that decision, but they're still highly dependent on operators to deliver those platforms that they use, and to make sure that the platforms that they're running their applications on top of, are stable and run well in production situations. There's a big difference between building something on your laptop in one or two instances, and then trying to push it out to a massive scalable cloud platform. And I think those are the areas that we can have a lot of impact, and that's where we are building our tools for at the moment. >> Well, great. Let's dig into those tools a little bit, as I said, at the beginning, we're familiar, Mirantis had the Mirantis Cloud Platform for a few years, big embrace of Kubernetes and then Docker Enterprise, it comes into the mix. So help me understand a little bit, what is kind of the solution set to portfolio? How does Mirantis present that today? >> Yeah, well, it's been an interesting eight, nine months now of the whole process since with the Docker Enterprise business, a couple of key areas. So if we look at what MCP was, and MCP still here today apparently, it focuses on delivering all the components necessary to have an effective cloud platform. So lifecycle management, lifecycle management of all those underlying components, which in their own right is extremely complex set of software. What we focused on there was understanding in enterprise infrastructure, the right way to do that. As soon as you bring in from the Docker Enterprise business is that they have a scalable, large, well deployed container platform. And many thousands of users across the world in all sorts of different scales and production systems. We are merging that knowledge that we have around infrastructure, infrastructure management, and simplifying access to infrastructure with this platform that provides for all that application, hosting provides for all the control of containers, plus all the security components around the container lifecycle. And delivering in such a way that you can choose your underlying preference. So we're no longer looking to lock you in to say, you have to go on-prem, you have to go into cloud. We're saying, we'll give you the choice, but we'll also give you a standardized platform for your developers across all of those potential infrastructure environments, so I'll use it again, public cloud, private cloud, bare metal on-premise, or your options like the VMware of this world. By consolidating all of that into one platform, we're giving you that as a developer, the ability to write applications that'll run anyway and sorry, go on. >> No, please finish up, I've just got to follow, yeah. >> But that simplicity drives and like that's simple choice across all those platforms essentially drives speed. It takes away the typical barriers that we're seeing in our customers. We hear every reason, we love Docker Enterprise because it solves the problem of getting containers, it solves a problem of securing containers, but it takes four teams to deploy it. Same for the MCP, we're saying is we cannot do that in a day and provide other self sets. So you can deploy a brand new container cloud in minutes rather than days or weeks. And that's one of the biggest changes that we're bringing to the product. >> Yeah, so absolutely what we hear from customers that agility, that speed that you talk about is the imperative, especially talk about 2020, everybody has had to readjust often accelerating some of the plans they had to meet the realities of what we have today. What I want to understand is when you talk about that single platform being able to be in any environment, oftentimes there's a misnomer that it's about portability. Most customers we talked to, they're not moving things lots of places. They do want that operational consistency, wherever they go. At the same time, you mentioned the rise of AWS and the hyperscalers often when they're now going to have to manage multiple clusters, it's not that I choose one Kubernetes and I use it anywhere, but I might be using AKS Azure had an early version of it, of course, Amazon has a couple of options now for enterprises. So help us understand how the Mirantis solutions, fit with the clouds, leverage cloud services and if I have multiple clusters, you even mentioned VMware, I might have a VMware cluster, have something from Mirantis, have something from one of the hyperscalers. Is that what you're seeing from your customers today? And how do they and how do they want to manage that going forward? Because we understand this is still a maturing space. >> So I mean, that's exactly the point. What we're seeing from our customers is that they have policies to go cloud first. They still have a lot of infrastructure on-premise. The question is which cloud, which cloud suits their needs in which region. Now, all of a sudden you've got a risk management policy from an organization that says, well, I have to go to Azure and I have to go to AWS. That's using them as examples. The deployment and management of those two platforms is completely different. Just the learning curve for a developer who wants to focus on writing code, to build a platform on top of AWS is barely extensive. Yes, it's easy to get started, but if you really want to deal with the fine print of how to run some in production, it's not that simple. There are potentially a thousand different buttons, you can click when deploying an instance on Amazon. So what we're saying is, instead of you having to deal with that we're going to abstract that pain from you. We're going to say we'll deploy Docker Enterprise on top of Amazon, on top of Google, on top of Azure, on top of your VMware cluster, give you a consistent interface to that, consistent set of tools across all those platforms, still consuming those platforms as you would, but solve all those dependency problems. To set up a cube cluster on top of Amazon, I'm not talking about an AKS or something like that right now, but the sort of cube cluster means I have to set up load balances, I have to set up networks, I have to set up monitors, I have to set up the instances, I have to deploy Kubernetes, and then I'm only getting started. I still haven't integrated that to my corporate identity management. We're saying we'll bring all that to give them, we are bringing all that together in the form of Docker Enterprise container cloud. >> Yeah, definitely as you said, we need more simplicity here. The promise of cloud it's supposed to be simplicity and now of course we have the paradox of choice when it comes there. >> Yeah. >> One of the other things we've seen, rapid change a lot the last year or so is many of the offerings out there are now managed services. So as you said, I don't want to have to build all of those pieces. I want to just be able to go to somebody. What are you hearing from your customers? How does manage service fit into what Mirantis is doing? >> Great, well, what we're hearing from customers is they want the pain to go away. The answer to that could be delivered through software that's really easy to use and doesn't set up any barriers and gets them started fast, which is where we focus from a product perspective. Mirantis also has a strong manage services on so we've been doing manage services for some of the biggest enterprises in the world for MCP products for many years. We've brought those teams forward and we're now offering those same managed services on top of all of our platforms. So Docker Enterprise container cloud, we'll deploy it for you, we'll manage it for you. We'll handle all the dependencies around getting container cloud up and running within your organization, and then offer you that hands on service. So when you build clusters, when you want clusters that are much more longer lived, we can handle all the extra detail that goes around those. Short term, so if you just want quick clusters for your developers, easy access, you still have that as part of the service. So we're focusing on how fast can we get you started? How fast can you get up the cushions to market, not put any infrastructure barriers on the way, or where there are traditional infrastructure barriers find ways around us. That still acceptable to those enterprise operators who still have list as long as my arm, probably twice as long as my arm of fine print that they have to comply with for everything under the sun, the regulators, et cetera. >> Yeah, Shaun since you are based in Europe, I'm wondering if you can give us a little bit of the perspective on cloud adoption there, here in North America, discussion point has been for many years, just that massive movement to public cloud, of course governance the key issue in Europe and above also kind of the COVID impact, anecdotally there's lots of discussions of acceleration of public cloud. So what's the reality on the ground? How do your enterprise customers look at public cloud? How fast or slow are they moving and what is the 2020 impact? >> So interesting if you'd asked me this question, six months ago, seven months ago, pre COVID, I would have said public cloud is growing. People are still building some small private clouds for very unique use cases, looking at where our customers are now, all of a sudden there's a risk balance. So they're driving into public cloud, but they want those public clouds to be with European companies and European operators, or at least to have some level of security. You know, recently the European community canceled the privacy shield legislation that was in place between the US and Europe, which meant all of a sudden, a lot of companies in Europe had to look for other places to store their data, or had to deal with different rules around storing the data that they may have but in the US previously. What we're seeing customers saying is we have to go multicloud. The drive is no longer we can accept one vendor risk. We want to remove that risk, we will still have equipment on-premise. So on-prem equipment is still important to us, but as a backup to the public cloud, and as a way to secure our data and the mechanisms that we own and can touch and control. That's the operator's view. If we talk to developers, people writing applications, if they are not forced to, they will go public cloud almost every time. It's just easier for them. And that's really what we're, that's really the challenge that we're also trying to focus on here. >> Yeah, I'm curious, are there any European cloud providers that are rising to the top the big three have such a large megaphone that they kind of drown out a lot of discussion and understand that there's pockets and many local suppliers, and of course thousands of kind of cloud service providers out there, but any ones that are good partners of Mirantis or ones that you're hearing. >> There are a couple. >> Yeah. >> Sorry, there are a couple, I dunno if I can mention them here, but there's some great ones providing very unique businesses, places like the Netherlands, very unique, very focused business where they're taking advantage of specific laws within, well, the Netherlands and Germany, there's another company that we're working very closely with that feels that they can do a much more affordable, much more hands on service or cloud. So their cloud experience provide everything developers want, but at the same time handle those operator requirements and those enterprise requirements within Germany. So focusing on the GDPR laws, focusing on German technology laws, which are very complex, very much focused on privacy. And there are a few unique companies like that across Europe, I know of one in Italy, there's a company that focuses on providing cloud services to the EU government themselves, who we've worked with in the past. So yeah, but as you say, it's the big three, they're growing, they're dealing with those challenges. We see them as resources, we see them as partners to what we're trying to achieve. We certainly not trying to compete with them at that level. >> Absolutely, all right, Shaun final question I have for you, tell us what your customers see as the real differentiation, what draws them to Mirantis and what we should expect to see over the coming months? >> So I think choice is a key differentiator. We're offering choice, we're not trying to tell you you can only use one cloud platform or one cloud provider. And that's extremely important as one of the key differentiators. I've mentioned this many times, simplicity, driving simplicity at all levels, from the operator through to the developer, to the consumer of the cloud, let's make it easy. Let's truly reduce the friction to getting started, all right that's one of the really key focus areas for us and that's something we talk about all the time in every meeting and we question ourselves constantly is, does this make it easier? And then security is a major component for us. We really focus on security as part of our tool sets, providing that standardized platform and that standardized security across all of these environments, and ultimately reducing the complexity. >> Shaun O'Meara, thank you so much. Great to hear that the real customer interaction and what they're dealing with today. >> Sure, thank you very much. >> Be sure to check out the tracks for developers, for infrastructure as well as all the rest theCUBE interviews on the Mirantis Launchpad site of course powered by CUBE365. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of Mirantis Launchpad 2020, brought to you by Mirantis. >> Welcome back I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of Mirantis Launchpad 2020. Big event, multiple tracks powered by theCUBE365. Happy to welcome you to the program. We have a first time guest, Willem du Plessis. He's the Director of Customer Success and Operations with Mirantis. Willem, thanks so much for joining us. >> Hi Stu, thanks for having me. >> So customer success, of course, a big topic in the industry last few years. CX a is so important. Employee success and enabling that, but what, give us a little bit, your background and the purview that you and your team cover. >> Exactly, yeah, so everything under my umbrella would be basically post-sales. The whole customer experience after the point of a sale's been made so the whole account management, thereafter, the success of the accounts, as well as the health of the account, thereafter, that will be anything basically post-sales would be under my umbrella. >> Wonderful, well, the big piece is the shift. As we know, software went from shrink wrapped, and hardware talking about CapX to the cloud really ushered in OpX we're touching more subscription managed services and the like, so Mirantis has a subscription offering. Why don't you lay out for us the new pieces of this and how Mirantis puts together its offerings? >> Yeah, absolutely. So with the launch of our new product, Docker Enterprise Container Cloud, we're making two subscriptions available as well, named ProdCare, which is a 24/7 mission critical support offering and OpsCare, being a fully managed platform as a service subscription. Now, these offerings have been available on the Mirantis Cloud platform side of our business for quite some time, we've been very successful with them, so it's really excited making them available to our Docker Enterprise customers. So what we're trying to achieve with these accounts or with these subscriptions, rather, you know, 30% of the Fortune 100 companies are Mirantis customers, so we work on a day to day basis with their container and Kubernetes initiatives. So when we speak to these customers, there are really two trends that are becoming very clear, the first being the requirements of service providers or vendors being able to provide a true 24/7 experience. What I mean by that is not the ability to just react to an incident on a 24/7 basis. That's what I mean, what I mean is all of these companies would have operation centers spread across the globe. So it is at every hour of the day, it would be business as usual. And what these companies require is a, a partner or a service provider that can match that level, that way of operating. That is the first trend that we're noting. The second piece is really the, the evolution of the dev environment. The dev environment is no longer really seen as a secondary or a lower class citizen, if you want to call it, it's really become part of the whole DevOps pipeline, so it is really part of a mission critical process so that what customers, what we hear from our customers is that they require a real enterprise-grade subscription that they can cover this whole pipeline under and, you know, have the same quality of service from whether that is a dev or a production environment. So if you have a failure on your dev environment and your developer cannot push code, that is, is the same level of criticality than there would then they would be on if the failure was on the production environment. So this whole pipeline is decidedly seen as a mission critical component. And that's a great, that's really where ProdCare comes in. It is really this 24/7 mission critical follow the sun, enterprise-grade subscription that provides our customers with enhanced SLAs that, like I said, we've been running on the Mirantis Cloud platform side for quite some time, we've had some significant success with some really large companies. The second offering that we're making available with, like I said, is OpsCare. Now OpsCare is an ITIL-based managed service subscription, where we provide a platform as a service experience to a customer on their infrastructure of choice. So it is really irrelevant for us what your infrastructure is, whether that is on-prem or in the public cloud, as long as the product can support the infrastructure, you know, the subscription would be available for you and the experience would be very much the same. So what OpsCare, like I said, entails is, is this whole ITIL framework that would include, you know, the monitoring and managing of your alerts, the incident management process, the problem management process, as well as change management that would include the lifecycle management of the whole environment. And that would just enable our customers to run on the latest and greatest offer of our product at all times. And same as with ProdCare that's been available for our brass cloud platform customers for quite a while, and have seen some significant success with that, as well. >> Well, we definitely have seen that growth of the managed care offerings like you're talking about with OpsCare, you know, shift left is so important for companies to be able to focus on what's critically important. As you said, developers need to be enabled, it can't just be waiting for things or be, you know, relegated to, you know, have to wait in line or use something that's not optimal. What are some of those outcomes? What can companies do that they weren't able before? What are some of those successes that you're seeing with the managed care OpsCare solution? >> Yeah, so the real way we OpsCare really comes to its own is allowing the customer ability to focus on what is important to their business and spend less time on what we call, keep the lights on. What I mean by that is they're solely focused on developing the application, developing the workload and spend basically no time on managing the infrastructure and, you know, maintaining it, or, you know, providing, do whatever to, to keep the platform stable, because that is done by Mirantis, already. So for example, if we take 2020 year to date, all the platforms running under OpsCare has an availability number of above four nines, and that is a significant number. So that really just sets such a strong foundation for a customer to just have that sole focus on, on what is important to them and, you know, just sets that foundation for them to develop their workload, to develop their business, and achieve their goals. >> Well, what about when it comes to the managing and monitoring of the environment? What kind of metrics are your customers having? Help us understand what the customer still does themselves or the reporting they're getting and what Mirantis, I'm assuming there's probably a Tam involved for at least some of the larger accounts there. Help us understand that shared responsibility, if you would for these type of environments. >> Yeah, exactly. So the whole ITIL framework, as I explained earlier, incident management, problem management, change, all of that, this is wrapped around why a customer success manager that is, you know, brings a single level of ownership on an accountability, and just have a customer direct for a single point of contact as a business partner. So all this is all our customers, their primary KPI or metric that we look at is just the availability of the platform. That is the primary SLA and thereafter, all of the other things happening, you know, the success of the workload and so on, because there's a lot of things that makes the result of the workload, not just the platform or the infrastructure, it's the quality of the workload, and so on, and so forth. But the main metric our customer would be looking at is that availability number, you know, how available and how stable and accessible is the environment, and, you know, like I said, just removing that requirement for them to spend, basically, no time on the platform or the infrastructure, and just focusing on the workload. >> Yeah, when it comes to in the field, your field, your partners, that line between ProdCare and OpsCare, obviously, the trend is going towards, you know, the fully managed option, but what guidance do you have out there, or what trends do you seeing? Is it a certain size company, that tends to be trending that way? Are there certain verticals that may be are further ahead? What's the reality, today? What do you expect to see over the next kind of six, 12 months? >> Yeah, so most of the companies that we see that as, that is engaging with us on an OpsCare, or managed service engagement, you know, they have the ambitions to go down the block model and build, operate, transfer, you know, to take the operations over themselves, at some point, and we have that option available to them, if they wish to choose it further along the line. What we do find is, is that they, that they don't really, you know, exercise that later on. It is, we do find it is such a smooth integration with our customers, that they tend to stay on OpsCare and see the value. This is actually a money saver for them, if they could, just focus their efforts on building, you know, focusing their time on the workload on top of the platform. From a vertical perspective, it's really anything and everything. We have customers in the science and research, we have TELCOs, large manufacturing, manufacturing, a lot of large organizations. There's really the breadth of the verticals that we see that are utilizing OpsCare and not even to mention ProdCare, that's really everything in there, as well. So it is not a really a subscription that is, that is custom for one vertical. It is basically something that we, that any vertical can actually utilize and find a significant amount of value in. >> All right, well, what final words do you have that you want to leave everyone with today? >> Yeah, so over the last six to nine months, you know, we've invested a significant amount of resources in the Docker Enterprise support business and we just with one focus, and that is just to take the support business to the next level and improve or give the customers an optimal customer experience. So with the availability of all these new subscriptions, I'm really excited to engage with our Docker Enterprise customers with these new, enhanced SLAs and just be able to work with them on these, like I said, enhanced subscriptions and just see, just give them a better customer experience. So, I'm really looking forward to working with them on the subscriptions. >> Willem, thank you so much for all the updates and want to welcome everyone to be sure to check out all the rest of the tracks on the Launchpad 2020 event. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (soft electronic music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe it's the CUBE with digital coverage of Mirantis Launchpad 2020, brought to you by Mirantis. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is the CUBE's coverage of Mirantis Launchpad 2020. And always love when we get to be able to talk to the practitioners that are using some of the technologies here. One of the interesting things we've been digging into is lens, the IDE in this space, as it's being referred to. So, happy to welcome to the program Matti Paksula. He is the founder and chief technology officer at supervisor.com. Matti, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you, thank you thank you for having me. >> So, if you could just, you help us understand, you know, your company as supervisor.com. What's the background as the founder? What was kind of the impetus to creating that business too? >> Sure, so, supervisor was this like super simple because we believe, and we know, that the only way to tests websites, if they can handle load, for example, eCommerce sites on black Friday, or when you, or, just about to make a product launch or that kind of stuff. Is just by sending real web browsers to the site. That's actually click and scroll and do it all the same things as a real users will do. But, and unlike, our secret thing is that we can do it, like before Black Friday. So, if somebody wants to simulate if they can handle like 2000 users or 5000 users, then they can use supervisor.com to make it happen like today. >> So, I'm just curious, you know, the concern always is about the DDoS attacks and the like. Do you help companies along that line too? Or is it more the, the testing for proper traffic and we leave the security aspect to somebody else? >> Yeah, well, like with any load testing tool, you have to verify yourself somehow. And with us, it's super easy because we integrated with Google analytics. And if you authorize us to read your Google Analytics Data, then we know that you are allowed to test your site. >> Wonderful, well, as I said in the lead, you're using lens, my understanding you've been using it since the early day, of course, a technology that closed source Mirantis has, has acquired that and the team, it's now also open source. So if you could bring us back to, you know, how did you get involved with lens? What was the, you know, the problem statement that it helped you resolve? >> Yeah, sure. So the (inaudible) super briefly is that Lens was developed by this startup called Condena, it's a finish startup, and they made a couple of attempts in container orchestration, like before Kubernetes and then Coobernetti's game. And they just felt like Kubernetes is super hard to kind of visualize or like, understand what's going on because you have these containers flying around, you have nodes going in going out. So they built this lens and then since I'd be working with those guys from 2015 or so, I was like one of the first outside users, or probably the first user outside of the company. >> So, that, pretty neat that you had that, you know, that project that they were doing. As an early user, you know, give us a little bit of that journey. What does it enable for your company? You know, how has it expanded from kind of the early use cases to where it is today. >> Yeah. So, if you're using Kubernetes traditionally, or like how most of the people who haven't yet heard about Lens use it is by or from the command line. So that's where you use keep CTL or cube control. You say cube CTL pod, and then you get the listing pod. But the problem is that, all that data is stale on the screen. So if you trend try to, for example, delete a port and you issue cutesy delete pod, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then you enter on the pod all ready, it might be gone. So Lens makes like everything real time. And like, if you try to delete something with lens, you move your mouse on top of the pod. And if it's getting deleted, you know, this, it, because it just disappears from your screen and like, it's not there anymore. And I think that's a huge a productivity boost in a way, that's how you can like get more and more stuff done every day as these kind of like, when you are a developer or CSI admin or whatever you need to kind of like, see what's happening in your cluster and house that note and pods are doing. And that. So back to your question, when you asked, like, how has the evolved lens it's like nowadays it's super stable. It handles big workloads very well. In the very, very early on, they had some performance issues with like, like large clusters, for example, when supervisor, when we run a load test with, for example, 10,000 concurrent web browsers. So basically what we have in Kubernetes is we have 10,000 pods. And then when you connect something like lens to it, it's just like started to spin up my fans until on the laptop, still about eating all the Ram. So I helped them a lot with my special use case of running like super big Ephemeral workloads there. >> Yeah. It's an interesting discussion. And in the whole, you know, container space, there's all that discussion of scale(chuckling). You know, of course everybody thinks back to Google and how they use it. So we know it can go really big, but, you know, environments, I needed to be able to work really small or youth cases like yours. I needed to be able to, you know, burst use that usage when you need it and go back on that a less density that we hope for in, in cloud. So I'm curious any, what's your expectation with it, you know, going open source, coming into Mirantis as a, as a longtime user of it, you know, what do you expect to see? >> Well, I think like Mirantis offers the right kind of home for the product, because they really get what's happening in the space. And I think they're like commercial offering on top of the open source will be around authentication. That's why, like, I kind of understood from the press release. And I think it makes sense because like, developers don't want to pay for these kinds of tools. And there are other tools that are commercial. And even if it's like just 100 bucks per year, I think that's still not going to work out with most of the developers and you kind of need this kind of long tail developer adoption for these kinds of products to succeed. And I think that, like, that's kind of like authentication, like centralized, like who can see what, and that kind of stuff. It doesn't like affect most of the startups or Indie Devs, but like for any company who was doing it like a real business, those are the features that are needed. And when you use that, the products for business, then I think it makes sense to pay also. >> Yeah, absolutely. There's always that, challenge developers of course love open source tools if they can use them. And, you know, the packaging, the monetization, isn't a question for you it's(chuckling), you know, for the Miranda's team. What would you say to your peers out there, people that are in this space, you know, what are the areas that they say, Oh, you know, if I have this type of environment, or if I have type, if I have this team, this is what lens will really be awesome for me. What are some of the things that you would recommend to your peers out there from, from all the usage that you've done? >> Yeah. So let's say three things. The first thing is what I already mentioned the real timeness that everything updates live, the second thing is the integrated metrics. So you cannot, for example, follow how much memory or CPU something is consuming. It's super helpful when you want to like, understand what's really going on and how much resources something is taken. And then the third thing is that Landis is great for debugging because once you have deployed something and something is off, and it's kind of hard to reproduce locally, especially with this kind of a microservice architecture, whatever, what you might have is that you can just like go inside at any part or note instantly from the UI. You don't have to, like, again, you don't have to use cubes sheets, the L blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And, and you have just like in there also, because you are already in the. But its the fourth thing is that if you manage multiple Kubernetes clusters, it's super easy to accidentally connect to the wrong cluster. But like, if you have, some visual tool where you can see in I'm in this. I mean, my production cluster are I'm in my staging cluster and you make the selection like visually there, then all the cube sees and everything works against that's a cluster. So I think that's like very helpful so that you don't actually accidentally delete something from production, for example. >> Wonderful. Last question I have for you either blend specifically, or kind of the eco-system around it, what, would be on your wishlist for, as I said, either lance specifically, or to, you know, manage your environments surrounding that, you know, what, what would you be asking kind of Miranda and, the broader eco-system for? >> I know that, well, let me think. Yeah. Okay. First of all, I have like maybe 50, 60 issues still open a GitHub that I have opened there. So that's like my wish list, but like, if you, they got like longer term, I think it would just be great, if you could actually like start deployments from Lance, there are a bunch of deployment tools, like customize and help. But again, if you just wanted to get something running quickly, I think integrating that to Lance would be like, super good. Just you it's just like click like I want to deploy this app. That's, that's something I'm looking forward to. >> Yeah, absolutely. Everybody wants that simplicity. All right. Well, Hey, thank you so much. Great to hear the feedback. We always talk about the people that developed code, as well as, you know, the people that do the beta testing and the feedback. So critically important to the maturation development of everything that's based though. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> Stay tuned for more coverage from Mirantis Launchpad 2020 I'm Stu Miniman. And thank you for watching the cube. (upbeat music)

>>Welcome everyone. Good morning. Good evening to all of you around the world. I am so excited to welcome you to launch bad our annual conference for customers, for partners, for our own colleagues here at Mirandes. This is meant to be a forum for learning, for sharing for discovery. One of openness. We're incredibly excited. Do you have you here with us? I want to take a few minutes this morning and opened the conference and share with you first and foremost where we're going as a company. What is our vision then? I also want to share with you on update on what we have been up to you for the past year. Especially with two important acquisitions, Doc Enterprise and then container and lens. And what are some of the latest developments at Mirandes? And then I'll close also with an exciting announcement that we have today, which we hope is going to be interesting and valuable for all of you. But let me start with our mission. What are we here to Dio? It's very simple. We want to help you the ship code faster. This is something that we're very excited about, something that we have achieved for many of you around the world. And we just want thio double down on. We feel this is a mission that's very much worthwhile and relevant and important to you. Now, how do we do that? How do we help you ship code faster? There are three things we believe in. We believe in this world of cloud. Um, choice is incredibly important. We all know that developers want to use the latest tools. We all know that cloud technology is evolving very quickly and new innovations appear, um, very, very quickly, and we want to make them available to you. So choice is very important. At the same time, consuming choice can be difficult. So our mission is to make choice simple for you to give developers and operators simplicity and then finally underpinning everything that we dio is security. These are the three big things that we invest in and that we believe that choice, simplicity and security and the foundation technology that we're betting on to make that happen for you is kubernetes many of you, many of our customers use kubernetes from your aunties today and they use it at scale. And this is something we want to double down on the fundamental benefit. The our key promise we want to deliver for you is Speed. And we feel this is very relevant and important and and valuable in the world that we are in today. So you might also be interested in what have been our priorities since we acquired Doc Enterprise. What has happened for the past year at Miranda's And there are three very important things we focused on as a company. The first one is customer success. Um, when we acquired Doc Enterprise, the first thing we did is listen to you connect with the most important customers and find out what was your sentiment. What did you like? What were you concerned about? What needed to improve? How can we create more value and a better experience for you? So, customers success has been a top of our list of priorities ever since. And here is what we've heard here is what you've told us. You've told us that you very much appreciated the technology that you got a lot of value out of the technology, but that at the same time, there are some things that we can do better. Specifically, you wanted better. Sele's better support experience. You also wanted more clarity on the road map. You also wanted to have a deeper alignment and a deeper relationship between your needs and your requirements and our our technical development that keep people in our development organization are most important engineers. So those three things are were very, very important to you and they were very important to us here. So we've taken that to heart and over the past 12 months, we believe, as a team, we have dramatically improved the customer support experience. We introduced new SLS with prod care. We've rolled out a roadmap to many many of our customers. We've taken your requirements of the consideration and we've built better and deeper relationships with so many of you. And the evidence for that that we've actually made some progress is in a significant increase off the work clothes and in usage of all platforms. I was so fortunate that we were able to build better and stronger relationships and take you to the next level of growth for companies like Visa like soc T general, like nationwide, like Bosch, like Axa X l like GlaxoSmithKline, like standard and Poor's, like Apple A TNT. So many, many off you, Many of all customers around the world, I believe over the past 12 months have experienced better, better, better support strong s L. A s a deeper relationship and a lot more clarity on our roadmap and our vision forward. The second very big priority for us over the last year has been product innovation. This is something that we are very excited about that we've invested. Most of our resource is in, and we've delivered some strong proof points. Doc Enterprise 3.1 has been the first release that we have shipped. Um, as Mirant is as the unified company, Um, it's had some big innovative features or Windows support or a I and machine learning use cases and a significant number off improvements in stability and scalability earlier this year. We're very excited to have a quiet lens and container team, which is by far the most popular kubernetes. I'd, um, in the world today and every day, 600 new users are starting to use lens to manage the community's clusters to deploy applications on top of communities and to dramatically simplify the experience for communities for operators and developers alike. That is a very big step forward for us as a company. And then finally, this week at this conference, we announcing our latest product, which we believe is a huge step forward for Doc Enterprise and which we call Doc Enterprise, Container Cloud, and you will hear a lot more about that during this conference. The third vector of development, the third priority for us as a company over the past year was to become mawr and Mawr developer centric. As we've seen over the past 10 years, developers really move the world forward. They create innovation, they create new software. And while our platform is often managed and run and maybe even purchased by RT architects and operators and I T departments, the actual end users are developers. And we made it our mission a za company, to become closer and closer to developers to better understand their needs and to make our technology as easy and fast to consume as possible for developers. So as a company, we're becoming more and more developers centric, really. The two core products which fit together extremely well to make that happen, or lens, which is targeted squarely at a new breed off kubernetes developers sitting on the desktop and managing communities, environments and the applications on top on any cloud platform anywhere and then DACA enterprise contain a cloud which is a new and radically innovative, contain a platform which we're bringing to market this week. So with this a za background, what is the fundamental problem which we solve for you, for our customers? What is it that we feel are are your pain points that can help you resolve? We see too very, very big trends in the world today, which you are experiencing. On one side, we see the power of cloud emerging with more features mawr innovation, more capabilities coming to market every day. But with those new features and new innovations, there is also an exponential growth in cloud complexity and that cloud complexity is becoming increasingly difficult to navigate for developers and operators alike. And at the same time, we see the pace of change in the economy continuing to accelerate on bits in the economy and in the technology as well. So when you put these two things together on one hand, you have MAWR and Mawr complexity. On the other hand, you have fast and faster change. This makes for a very, very daunting task for enterprises, developers and operators to actually keep up and move with speed. And this is exactly the central problem that we want to solve for you. We want to empower you to move with speed in the middle off rising complexity and change and do it successfully and with confidence. So with that in mind, we are announcing this week at LAUNCHPAD a big and new concept to take the company forward and take you with us to create value for you. And we call this your cloud everywhere, which empowers you to ship code faster. Dr. Enterprise Container Cloud is a lynch bit off your cloud everywhere. It's a radical and new container platform, which gives you our customers a consistent experience on public clouds and private clouds alike, which enables you to ship code faster on any infrastructure, anywhere with a cohesive cloud fabric that meets your security standards that offers a choice or private and public clouds and offer you a offers you a simple, an extremely easy and powerful to use experience. for developers. All of this is, um, underpinned by kubernetes as the foundation technology we're betting on forward to help you achieve your goals at the same time. Lens kubernetes e. It's also very, very well into the real cloud. Every concept, and it's a second very strong linchpin to take us forward because it creates the developing experience. It supports developers directly on their desktop, enabling them Thio manage communities workloads to test, develop and run communities applications on any infrastructure anywhere. So Doc, Enterprise, Container, Cloud and Lens complement each other perfectly. So I'm very, very excited to share this with you today and opened the conference for you. And with this I want to turn it over to my colleague Adam Parker, who runs product development at Mirandes to share a lot more detail about Doc Enterprise Container Cloud. Why we're excited about it. Why we feel is a radical step forward to you and why we feel it can add so much value to your developers and operators who want to embrace the latest kubernetes technology and the latest container technology on any platform anywhere. I look forward to connecting with you during the conference and we should all the best. Bye bye. >>Thanks, Adrian. My name is Adam Parco, and I am vice president of engineering and product development at Mirant ISS. I'm extremely excited to be here today And to present to you Dr Enterprise Container Cloud Doc Enterprise Container Cloud is a major leap forward. It Turpal charges are platform. It is your cloud everywhere. It has been completely designed and built around helping you to ship code faster. The world is moving incredibly quick. We have seen unpredictable and rapid changes. It is the goal of Docker Enterprise Container Cloud to help navigate this insanity by focusing on speed and efficiency. To do this requires three major pillars choice, simplicity and security. The less time between a line of code being written and that line of code running in production the better. When you decrease that cycle, time developers are more productive, efficient and happy. The code is higher, quality contains less defects, and when bugs are found are fixed quicker and more easily. And in turn, your customers get more value sooner and more often. Increasing speed and improving developer efficiency is paramount. To do this, you need to be able to cycle through coding, running, testing, releasing and monitoring all without friction. We enabled us by offering containers as a service through a consistent, cloudlike experience. Developers can log into Dr Enterprise Container Cloud and, through self service, create a cluster No I T. Tickets. No industry specific experience required. Need a place to run. A workload simply created nothing quicker than that. The clusters air presented consistently no matter where they're created, integrate your pipelines and start deploying secure images everywhere. Instantly. You can't have cloud speed if you start to get bogged down by managing, so we offer fully automated lifecycle management. Let's jump into the details of how we achieve cloud speed. The first is cloud choice developers. Operators add mons users they all want. In fact, mandate choice choice is extremely important in efficiency, speed and ultimately the value created. You have cloud choice throughout the full stack. Choice allows developers and operators to use the tooling and services their most familiar with most efficient with or perhaps simply allows them to integrate with any existing tools and services already in use, allowing them to integrate and move on. Doc Enterprise Container Cloud isn't constructive. It's open and flexible. The next important choice we offer is an orchestration. We hear time and time again from our customers that they love swarm. That's simply enough for the majority of their applications. And that just works that they have skills and knowledge to effectively use it. They don't need to be or find coop experts to get immediate value, so we will absolutely continue to offer this choice and orchestration. Our existing customers could rest assure their workloads will continue to run. Great as always. On the other hand, we can't ignore the popularity that growth, the enthusiasm and community ecosystem that has exploded with communities. So we will also be including a fully conforming, tested and certified kubernetes going down the stock. You can't have choice or speed without your choice and operating system. This ties back to developer efficiency. We want developers to be able to leverage their operating system of choice, were initially supporting full stack lifecycle management for a bun, too, with other operating systems like red hat to follow shortly. Lastly, all the way down at the bottom of stack is your choice in infrastructure choice and infrastructure is in our DNA. We have always promoted no locking and flexibility to run where needed initially were supporting open stock AWS and full life cycle management of bare metal. We also have a road map for VM Ware and other public cloud providers. We know there's no single solution for the unique and complex requirements our customers have. This is why we're doubling down on being the most open platform. We want you to truly make this your cloud. If done wrong, all this choice at speed could have been extremely complex. This is where cloud simplification comes in. We offer a simple and consistent as a service cloud experience, from installation to day to ops clusters Air created using a single pane of glass no matter where they're created, giving a simple and consistent interface. Clusters can be created on bare metal and private data centers and, of course, on public cloud applications will always have specific operating requirements. For example, data protection, security, cost efficiency edge or leveraging specific services on public infrastructure. Being able to create a cluster on the infrastructure that makes the most sense while maintaining a consistent experience is incredibly powerful to developers and operators. This helps developers move quick by being able to leverage the infra and services of their choice and operators by leveraging, available, compute with the most efficient and for available. Now that we have users self creating clusters, we need centralized management to support this increase in scale. Doc Enterprise Container cloud use is the single pane of glass for observe ability and management of all your clusters. We have day to ops covered to keep things simple and new. Moving fast from this single pane of glass, you can manage the full stack lifecycle of your clusters from the infra up, including Dr Enterprise, as well as the fully automated deployment and management of all components deployed through it. What I'm most excited about is Doc Enterprise Container Cloud as a service. What do I mean by as a service doctor? Enterprise continue. Cloud is fully self managed and continuously delivered. It is always up to date, always security patched, always available new features and capabilities pushed often and directly to you truly as a service experience anywhere you want, it run. Security is of utmost importance to Miranda's and our customers. Security can't be an afterthought, and it can't be added later with Doctor and a price continued cloud, we're maintaining our leadership and security. We're doing this by leveraging the proven security and Dr Enterprise. Dr. Enterprise has the best and the most complete security certifications and compliance, such as Stig Oscar, How and Phipps 1 $40 to thes security certifications allows us to run in the world's most secure locations. We are proud and honored to have some of the most security conscious customers in the world from all industries into. She's like insurance, finance, health care as well as public, federal and government agencies. With Dr Enterprise Container Cloud. We put security as our top concern, but importantly, we do it with speed. You can't move fast with security in the way so they solve this. We've added what we're calling invisible security security enabled by default and configured for you as part of the platform. Dr Price Container Cloud is multi tenant with granular are back throughout. In conjunction with Doc Enterprise, Docker Trusted Registry and Dr Content Trust. We have a complete end to end secured software supply chain Onley run the images that have gone through the appropriate channels that you have authorized to run on the most secure container engine in the >>industry. >>Lastly, I want to quickly touch on scale. Today. Cluster sprawl is a very real thing. There are test clusters, staging clusters and, of course, production clusters. There's also different availability zones, different business units and so on. There's clusters everywhere. These clusters are also running all over the place. We have customers running Doc Enterprise on premise there, embracing public cloud and not just one cloud that might also have some bare metal. So cloud sprawl is also a very real thing. All these clusters on all these clouds is a maintenance and observe ability. Nightmare. This is a huge friction point to scaling Dr Price. Container Cloud solves these issues, lets you scale quicker and more easily. Little recap. What's new. We've added multi cluster management. Deploy and attach all your clusters wherever they are. Multi cloud, including public private and bare metal. Deploy your clusters to any infra self service cluster creation. No more I T. Tickets to get resources. Incredible speed. Automated Full stack Lifecycle management, including Dr Enterprise Container, cloud itself as a service from the in for up centralized observe ability with a single pane of glass for your clusters, their health, your APs and most importantly to our existing doc enterprise customers. You can, of course, add your existing D clusters to Dr Enterprise Container Cloud and start leveraging the many benefits it offers immediately. So that's it. Thank you so much for attending today's keynote. This was very much just a high level introduction to our exciting release. There is so much more to learn about and try out. I hope you are as excited as I am to get started today with Doc Enterprise. Continue, Cloud, please attend the tutorial tracks up Next is Miska, with the world's most popular Kubernetes E Lens. Thanks again, and I hope you enjoy the rest of our conference.

>>thank you everyone for joining. I'm here today to talk about English controllers. AP Gateways and service mention communities three very hot topics that are also frequently confusing. So I'm Richard Lee, founder CEO of Ambassador Labs, formerly known as Data Wire. We sponsor a number of popular open source projects that are part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, including telepresence and Ambassador, which is a kubernetes native AP gateway. And most of what I'm going to talk about today is related to our work around ambassador. Uh huh. So I want to start by talking about application architecture, er and workflow on kubernetes and how applications that are being built on kubernetes really differ from how they used to be built. So when you're building applications on kubernetes, the traditional architectures is the very famous monolith, and the monolith is a central piece of software. It's one giant thing that you build, deployed run, and the value of a monolith is it's really simple. And if you think about the monolithic development process, more importantly, is the architecture er is really reflecting that workflow. So with the monolith, you have a very centralized development process. You tend not to release too frequently because you have all these different development teams that are working on different features, and then you decide in advance when you're going to release that particular pieces offering. Everyone works towards that release train, and you have specialized teams. You have a development team which has all your developers. You have a Q A team. You have a release team, you have an operations team, so that's your typical development organization and workflow with a monolithic application. As organization shift to micro >>services, they adopt a very different development paradigm. It's a decentralized development paradigm where you have lots of different independent teams that are simultaneously working on different parts of the application, and those application components are really shipped as independent services. And so you really have a continuous release cycle because instead of synchronizing all your teams around one particular vehicle, you have so many different release vehicles that each team is able to ship a soon as they're ready. And so we call this full cycle development because that team is >>really responsible, not just for the coding of that micro service, but also the testing and the release and operations of that service. Um, >>so this is a huge change, particularly with workflow. And there's a lot of implications for this, s o. I have a diagram here that just try to visualize a little bit more the difference in organization >>with the monolith. You have everyone who works on this monolith with micro services. You have the yellow folks work on the Yellow Micro Service, and the purple folks work on the Purple Micro Service and maybe just one person work on the Orange Micro Service and so forth. >>So there's a lot more diversity around your teams and your micro services, and it lets you really adjust the granularity of your development to your specific business need. So how do users actually access your micro services? Well, with the monolith, it's pretty straightforward. You have one big thing. So you just tell the Internet while I have this one big thing on the Internet, make sure you send all your travel to the big thing. But when you have micro services and you have a bunch of different micro services, how do users actually access these micro services? So the solution is an AP gateway, so the gateway consolidates all access to your micro services, so requests come from the Internet. They go to your AP gateway. The AP Gateway looks at these requests, and based on the nature of these requests, it routes them to the appropriate micro service. And because the AP gateway is centralizing thing access to all the micro services, it also really helps you simplify authentication, observe ability, routing all these different crosscutting concerns. Because instead of implementing authentication in each >>of your micro services, which would be a maintenance nightmare and a security nightmare, you put all your authentication in your AP gateway. So if you look at this world of micro services, AP gateways are really important part of your infrastructure, which are really necessary and pre micro services. Pre kubernetes Unhappy Gateway Well valuable was much more optional. So that's one of the really big things around. Recognizing with the micro services architecture er, you >>really need to start thinking much more about maybe a gateway. The other consideration within a P A gateway is around your management workflow because, as I mentioned, each team is actually response for their own micro service, which also means each team needs to be able to independently manage the gateway. So Team A working on that micro service needs to be able to tell the AP at Gateway. This this is >>how I want you to write. Request to my micro service, and the Purple team needs to be able to say something different for how purple requests get right into the Purple Micro Service. So that's also really important consideration as you think about AP gateways and how it fits in your architecture. Because it's not just about your architecture. It's also about your workflow. So let me talk about a PR gateways on kubernetes. I'm going to start by talking about ingress. So ingress is the process of getting traffic from the Internet to services inside the cluster kubernetes. From an architectural perspective, it actually has a requirement that all the different pods in a kubernetes cluster needs to communicate with each other. And as a consequence, what Kubernetes does is it creates its own private network space for all these pods, and each pod gets its own I p address. So this makes things very, very simple for inter pod communication. Cooper in any is, on the other hand, does not say very much around how traffic should actually get into the cluster. So there's a lot of detail around how traffic actually, once it's in the cluster, how you routed around the cluster and it's very opinionated about how this works but getting traffic into the cluster. There's a lot of different options on there's multiple strategies pot i p. There's ingress. There's low bounce of resource is there's no port. >>I'm not gonna go into exhaustive detail on all these different options on. I'm going to just talk about the most common approach that most organizations take today. So the most common strategy for routing is coupling an external load balancer with an ingress controller. And so an external load balancer can be >>ah, Harvard load balancer. It could be a virtual machine. It could be a cloud load balancer. But the key requirement for an external load balancer >>is to be able to attack to stable I people he address so that you can actually map a domain name and DNS to that particular external load balancer and that external load balancer, usually but not always well, then route traffic and pass that traffic straight through to your ingress controller, and then your English controller takes that traffic and then routes it internally inside >>kubernetes to the various pods that are running your micro services. There are >>other approaches, but this is the most common approach. And the reason for this is that the alternative approaches really required each of your micro services to be exposed outside of the cluster, which causes a lot of challenges around management and deployment and maintenance that you generally want to avoid. So I've been talking about in English controller. What exactly is an English controller? So in English controller is an application that can process rules according to the kubernetes English specifications. Strangely, Kubernetes is not actually ship with a built in English controller. Um, I say strangely because you think, well, getting traffic into a cluster is probably a pretty common requirement. And it is. It turns out that this is complex enough that there's no one size fits all English controller. And so there is a set of ingress >>rules that are part of the kubernetes English specifications at specified how traffic gets route into the cluster >>and then you need a proxy that can actually route this traffic to these different pods. And so an increase controller really translates between the kubernetes configuration and the >>proxy configuration and common proxies for ingress. Controllers include H a proxy envoy Proxy or Engine X. So >>let me talk a little bit more about these common proxies. So all these proxies and there >>are many other proxies I'm just highlighting what I consider to be probably the most three most well established proxies. Uh, h a proxy, uh, Engine X and envoy proxies. So H a proxy is managed by a plastic technology start in 2000 and one, um, the H a proxy organization actually creates an ingress controller. And before they kept created ingress controller, there was an open source project called Voyager, which built in ingress Controller on >>H a proxy engine X managed by engine. Xing, subsequently acquired by F five Also open source started a little bit later. The proxy in 2004. And there's the engine Xing breast, which is a community project. Um, that's the most popular a zwelling the engine Next Inc Kubernetes English project which is maintained by the company. This is a common source of confusion because sometimes people will think that they're using the ingress engine X ingress controller, and it's not clear if they're using this commercially supported version or the open source version, and they actually, although they have very similar names, uh, they actually have different functionality. Finally. Envoy Proxy, the newest entrant to the proxy market originally developed by engineers that lift the ride sharing company. They subsequently donated it to the cloud. Native Computing Foundation Envoy has become probably the most popular cloud native proxy. It's used by Ambassador uh, the A P a. Gateway. It's using the SDO service mash. It's using VM Ware Contour. It's been used by Amazon and at mesh. It's probably the most common proxy in the cloud native world. So, as I mentioned, there's a lot of different options for ingress. Controller is the most common. Is the engine X ingress controller, not the one maintained by Engine X Inc but the one that's part of the Cooper Nannies project? Um, ambassador is the most popular envoy based option. Another common option is the SDO Gateway, which is directly integrated with the SDO mesh, and that's >>actually part of Dr Enterprise. So with all these choices around English controller. How do you actually decide? Well, the reality is the ingress specifications very limited. >>And the reason for this is that getting traffic into the cluster there's a lot of nuance into how you want to do that. And it turns out it's very challenging to create a generic one size fits all specifications because of the vast diversity of implementations and choices that are available to end users. And so you don't see English specifying anything around resilience. So if >>you want to specify a time out or rate limiting, it's not possible in dresses really limited to support for http. So if you're using GSPC or Web sockets, you can't use the ingress specifications, um, different ways of routing >>authentication. The list goes on and on. And so what happens is that different English controllers extend the core ingress specifications to support these use cases in different ways. Yeah, so engine X ingress they actually use a combination of config maps and the English Resource is plus custom annotations that extend the ingress to really let you configure a lot of additional extensions. Um, that is exposing the engineers ingress with Ambassador. We actually use custom resource definitions different CRTs that extend kubernetes itself to configure ambassador. And one of the benefits of the CRD approach is that we can create a standard schema that's actually validated by kubernetes. So when you do a coup control apply of an ambassador CRD coop Control can immediately validate and tell >>you if you're actually applying a valid schema in format for your ambassador configuration on As I previously mentioned, ambassadors built on envoy proxy, >>it's the Gateway also uses C R D s they can to use a necks tension of the service match CRD s as opposed to dedicated Gateway C R D s on again sdo Gateway is built on envoy privacy. So I've been talking a lot about English controllers. But the title of my talk was really about AP gateways and English controllers and service smashed. So what's the difference between an English controller and an AP gateway? So to recap, an immigrant controller processes kubernetes English routing rules and a P I. G. Wave is a central point for managing all your traffic to community services. It typically has additional functionality such as authentication, observe, ability, a >>developer portal and so forth. So what you find Is that not all Ap gateways or English controllers? Because some MP gateways don't support kubernetes at all. S o eso you can't make the can't be ingress controllers and not all ingrates. Controllers support the functionality such as authentication, observe, ability, developer portal >>that you would typically associate with an AP gateway. So, generally speaking, um, AP gateways that run on kubernetes should be considered a super set oven ingress controller. But if the A p a gateway doesn't run on kubernetes, then it's an AP gateway and not an increase controller. Yeah, so what's the difference between a service Machin and AP Gateway? So an AP gateway is really >>focused on traffic into and out of a cluster, so the political term for this is North South traffic. A service mesh is focused on traffic between services in a cluster East West traffic. All service meshes need >>an AP gateway, so it's Theo includes a basic ingress or a P a gateway called the SDO gateway, because a service mention needs traffic from the Internet to be routed into the mesh >>before it can actually do anything Omelet. Proxy, as I mentioned, is the most common proxy for both mesh and gateways. Dr. Enterprise provides an envoy based solution out of the box. >>Uh, SDO Gateway. The reason Dr does this is because, as I mentioned, kubernetes doesn't come package with an ingress. Uh, it makes sense for Dr Enterprise to provide something that's easy to get going. No extra steps required because with Dr Enterprise, you can deploy it and get going. Get exposed on the Internet without any additional software. Dr. Enterprise can also be easily upgraded to ambassador because they're both built on envoy and interest. Consistent routing. Semantics. It also with Ambassador. You get >>greater security for for single sign on. There's a lot of security by default that's configured directly into Ambassador Better control over TLS. Things like that. Um And then finally, there's commercial support that's actually available for Ambassador. SDO is an open source project that has a has a very broad community but no commercial support options. So to recap, ingress controllers and AP gateways are critical pieces of your cloud native stack. So make sure that you choose something that works well for you. >>And I think a lot of times organizations don't think critically enough about the AP gateway until they're much further down the Cuban and a journey. Considerations around how to choose that a p a gateway include functionality such as How does it do with traffic management and >>observe ability? Doesn't support the protocols that you need also nonfunctional requirements such as Does it integrate with your workflow? Do you offer commercial support? Can you get commercial support for this on a P? A. Gateway is focused on north south traffic, so traffic into and out of your kubernetes cluster. A service match is focused on East West traffic, so traffic between different services inside the same cluster. Dr. Enterprise includes SDO Gateway out of the box easy to use but can also be extended with ambassador for enhanced functionality and security. So thank you for your time. Hope this was helpful in understanding the difference between a P gateways, English controllers and service meshes and how you should be thinking about that on your kubernetes deployment

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Miranda's launchpad 2020 brought to you by more antis. >>Hi, I'm stupid man. And this is the cubes coverage of Miran Tous Launchpad 2020. Happy to welcome to the program First time guest William Do places. He's the head of customer success in operations with Miran Tous William. Thanks so much for joining us, >>Steve. Thanks for two. Thanks for having me. >>Yeah, why don't we start with a little bit? You know, customer success operations. Tell us what that's entail, What's what's under your purview, Right? >>So is everything basically, you know, post sales, right? So after a customer has portions, their their subscription, we basically take it from there Going forward, you know, looking after the relationship with the customer, ensure they you know, the whole, you know, subscription fulfillment element off it. Whether that is just bored with that is to cut the relationship management from a post sales perspective and so on, so forth. So that is basically into end from the point off purchase to the renewal face. Would would would fall with any supporting operations. >>Well, that's such an important piece of the whole cloud conversation. Of course, people, you know, we talked for such a long time cap ex op X. We talk about descriptions and manage services. Of course, has been a riel. You know, growth segment of the market place. Love to hear a little bit, you know, What are you hearing from your customers? And, you know, give us the lay of the land As to the various options that that that Miranda is offering today and we'll get into any of the new pieces also. >>Yeah. So the the the options that we're making available for our customers primary called Prod Care, which is a 24 7 mission critical support subscription. Andi Ops Care, which is a fully managed service offering. Um, what we hear from our customers is is, you know, the the the notion of having a development environment and a production environment with different, you know, sls and entitlements and so on. You know that that that notion is disappearing because your divots chain or pipeline is all connected. So you could just think for yourself. If you have a group of developers like 50 or 100 or 1000 developers that are basically standing there still, because they cannot push code because there's a problem or a new issue on the development cloud. But the development cloud is not. Beings is not seen or is treated as a mission critical platform. You know, those developers are standing date stole, so that is a very expensive problem for a customer at that point in time, so that the whole chain, the whole pipeline that makes part off your your develop cycle, should be seen as one entity. And that's what we've seen in the market at the moment that we're realizing with a large customers that are really embracing the kind of the approach to modern applications. Andi. This is why we're making these options available. Thio, our Doctor Enterprise customers We've been running with them for quite a while on the on the Miranda's cloud platform, which is our Infrastructures service offering on. We've had some great success with that, and we now in a position to make that available to our customers. So it's really providing a customer that true enterprise mission critical regardless of time off they the day of the week availability off support whether that is a my question or whether that is really an outage or a failure. You know, you know, you've got that safety net that is that is online and available for you. Thio to sort Whatever problem you have about, you know, that is from the support perspective, you know. And if we go over into the manage service offering we have for on up Skate that is a really hardened Eitel based, um infrastructure or platform as a service offering that we provide eso. We've had some great success. Like I said on the on the Miranda's cloud platform Peace. And we're now making that available for Doc Enterprise customers as well. So that is taking the whole the whole chain through. We look after the the whole platform for the customer and allow the customer to get on with what is important to them. You know, how do they develop their applications? You know, optimize that for their business instead, off spending their times and keep spending their time on keeping the lights on, so to speak, you know? So we take care of all of that. They have that responsibility over to us on DWI. We manage that as our own and we basically could become an extension of their business. So we have a fully integrated into the environment, the whole logging and not monitoring piece we take over the whole life cycle. Management off the environment. We take over, we do the whole change Management piece Incident Management Incident Management piece on. This whole process is truly transparent to the customer. At no point are they, you know, in the dark what's going on where we're going and we have the and the whole pieces wrapped around Bio customer success Manager which is bringing this whole sense off ownership Onda priority. That customer, you've got a single point of contact that is your business partner and that the only piece, the only metric that that individuals measured on is the success off that customer with our our product. So that in a nutshell, at a very high level what these are. But these offerings are all about >>well, we all know these days how important it is toe, you know, make your developers productive. It's funny listening to you, I think back to the Times where you talked about making sure that it's mission critical environment You know, years ago it was like, Oh, well, the developer just gets whatever old hardware we have, and they do it on their own. Now, of course, you know you want Dev in production toe have a very similar environment. And as you said, those manage services offering and be, you know, so important because we want to be able to shift left, let my platform let my vendors take care of some of the things that's gonna be able to enable me to build my new applications toe, respond to the business and do. In fact, I don't want my developers getting bogged down. So do you have any, You know, what are some of the successes there? How do your customers measure that? They Hey, I'm getting great value for going to manage service. Obviously, you know, you talked about that, That technical manager that helps them there. Anybody that's used, you know, enterprise offerings. There's certain times where it's like, Hey, I use it a lot. Other times it's it's just nice to be there, but, you know, why do you bring us in a little bit? Some of the customers, obviously anonymous. You need Teoh you know, how do they say, You know, this is phenomenal value for my business. >>Yes, it's all. It's all about the focus, right? So you're the customer. 100% focus on what is like I said, important to them, they are not being distracted at any point for, you know, on spending time on infrastructure related or platform related issues they purely focused on. Like I said, that is, that is important to their business. Andi, The successes that we see from that it is, is that we have this integration into into our customers like a seamless approach. We work with them is a true, transparent approach to work with our customers. There's a there's an active dialogue off what they developers want to see from the environment, what the customers want to see from from from the environment, what is working well, what we need to optimize. And that is really seeing ah, really good a approach from from from us and we're seeing some some great successes in it. But it all comes down to the customer is focusing on one thing, and that is on what is important to them on. But is there business instead off. You know, like you said, focusing on the stuff that shoot me, that that should be shift left. >>Yeah. And will, um, is there anything that really stands out when you talk about that? The monitoring that you in the reporting that you give the customers Is it all self serve? You know, how did they set that up and make sure that I'm getting valuable data. That's what what my company needs. >>Yes. So that is where your custom success manager comes in is really how to customize that approach to what fit for the customers. So we've got it in the background, very much automated, but we do the tweaks Thio customize it for for the customer that makes sense for them. Some customers want to see very granular details. Other customers just want a glance over it and look at the the high level metrics what they find important. So it is finding that balance and and understanding what your customer find important, and then put that in a way that makes sense for them Now. That might sound might sound kind of obvious, but it's more difficult than you think to put data from the customer That makes sense to them, uh, in their in their context. And then, you know, be in a position where you can take the information that you receive and give your customer the the runway to plan their the application. You know, where are they trending? So be able. Dutilleux. Look. 3452 quarters 345 months to quarters ahead to say this is where you're going to be. If you continue down this path, we might need to look at shifting direction or shift workload around or at Resource is or or, you know, depending on the situation. But it's all about having that insight going forward, looking forward. Rather, um, instead off, you know, playing things by year end, looking, looking at the year. And now because then that ISS that is done and dusted, really. So it's all about what is coming down the line for us and then be able to to plan for it and have an educated conversation of with with with your customer where they want to go. >>You mentioned that part of this offering is making this available for the Docker Enterprise base. Uh, maybe, if you could explain a little bit as to you know, what's gonna be compelling for for those customers. You know what Laurentis is has built specifically for that base? >>Yeah. So, like I said, this is an offering we have available on our Miranda's cloud platform for quite a while. You've seen some great success from it. Um, we're making it now available for the Doctor Enterprise customers. So it is really a true platform as a service offering, um, on your infrastructure of choice, whether that is on prim or whether that is on public cloud, we don't really care. We'll work with customers whichever way it is. And yeah, Like I said, just give that true platform as a service experience for our customers, Onda allow them to to focus on what's important to them. >>Alright, let me let you have the final word. Will tell us what you want your customers to understand about Iran tous when they leave launchpad this year. >>Yeah, So the main thing the main theme that I want to leave with is is that you know, the the we've made significant progress over the last 62 229 months on the doc enterprise side on. We're now in a position where we're taking the next step in making these offerings available for our customers, and we're really for the customers. That's the handful of custom that we have already. My greater to these offerings with getting some really good feedback from them on it is really helping them just thio thio just to expedite. They they, you know, wherever they're gonna go, whatever they want to want to achieve the, you know, expedite, think goals on bond. It is really there to ensure that we provide a customer or customers a true, um, you know, mission critical feeling, uh, giving them the support they need when they needed at the priority or the severity or the intensity that they need as well as they provide them. The ability to to focus on what is important to them on board. Let us look after the infrastructure and platform for them. >>Well, well, okay. Congratulations on Although the work that the team's done and definitely look forward to hearing more in the future. >>Excellent. Thank you very much for your time. >>Be sure to check out all the tracks for Miranda's launchpad 2020 of course. Powered by Cuba 3. 65. Got the infrastructure. The developers Lots of good content. Both live and on demand. And I'm still minimum. Thank you for watching. Thank you.

>>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. >>Hey, welcome back. You're ready, Jeffrey here with the Cuban Apollo Alto studios today, and we're excited. You know, we're slowly coming out of the, uh, out of the summer season. We're getting ready to jump back into the fall. Season, of course, is still covet. Everything is still digital. But you know, what we're seeing is a digital events allow a lot of things that you couldn't do in the physical space. Mainly get a lot more people to attend that don't have to get in airplanes and file over the country. So to preview this brand new inaugural event that's coming up in about a month, we have We have a new guest. He's Dave and Everen. He is the senior vice president of marketing. Former ran tous. Dave. Great to see you. >>Happy to be here today. Thank you. >>Yeah. So tell us about this inaugural event. You know, we did an event with Miranda's years ago. I had to look it up like 2014. 15. Open stack was hot and you guys sponsored a community event in the Bay Area because the open stack events used to move all over the country each and every year. But you guys said, and the top one here in the Bay Area. But now you're launching something brand new based on some new activity that you guys have been up to over the last several months. So let us give us give us the word. >>Yeah, absolutely. So we definitely have been organizing community events in a variety of open source communities over the years. And, you know, we saw really, really good success with with the Cube And are those events in opens tax Silicon Valley days? And, you know, with the way things have gone this year, we've really seen that virtual events could be very successful and provide a new, maybe slightly different form of engagement but still very high level of engagement for our guests and eso. We're excited to put this together and invite the entire cloud native industry to join us and learn about some of the things that Mantis has been working on in recent months. A zwelling as some of the interesting things that are going on in the Cloud native and kubernetes community >>Great. So it's the inaugural event is called Moran Sous launchpad 2020. The Wares and the Winds in September 16th. So we're about a month away and it's all online is their registration. Costars is free for the community. >>It's absolutely free. Eso everyone is welcome to attend You. Just visit Miranda's dot com and you'll see the info for registering for the event and we'd love it. We love to see you there. It's gonna be a fantastic event. We have multiple tracks catering to developers, operators, general industry. Um, you know, participants in the community and eso we'd be happy to see you on join us on and learn about some of the some of the things we're working on. >>That's awesome. So let's back up a step for people that have been paying as close attention as they might have. Right? So you guys purchase, um, assets from Docker at the end of last year, really taken over there, they're they're kind of enterprise solutions, and you've been doing some work with that. Now, what's interesting is we we cover docker con, um, A couple of months ago, a couple three months ago. Time time moves fast. They had a tremendously successful digital event. 70,000 registrants, people coming from all over the world. I think they're physical. Event used to be like four or 5000 people at the peak, maybe 6000 Really tremendous success. But a lot of that success was driven, really by the by the strength of the community. The docker community is so passionate. And what struck me about that event is this is not the first time these people get together. You know, this is not ah, once a year, kind of sharing of information and sharing ideas, but kind of the passion and and the friendships and the sharing of information is so, so good. You know, it's a super or, um, rich development community. You guys have really now taken advantage of that. But you're doing your Miranda's thing. You're bringing your own technology to it and really taking it to more of an enterprise solution. So I wonder if you can kind of walk people through the process of, you know, you have the acquisition late last year. You guys been hard at work. What are we gonna see on September 16. >>Sure, absolutely. And, you know, just thio Give credit Thio Docker for putting on an amazing event with Dr Khan this year. Uh, you know, you mentioned 70,000 registrants. That's an astounding number. And you know, it really is a testament thio. You know, the community that they've built over the years and continue to serve eso We're really, really happy for Docker as they kind of move into, you know, the next the next path in their journey and, you know, focus more on the developer oriented, um, solution and go to market. So, uh, they did a fantastic job with the event. And, you know, I think that they continue toe connect with their community throughout the year on That's part of what drives What drove so many attendees to the event assed faras our our history and progress with with Dr Enterprise eso. As you mentioned mid November last year, we did acquire Doctor Enterprise assets from Docker Inc and, um, right away we noticed tremendous synergy in our product road maps and even in the in the team's eso that came together really, really quickly and we started executing on a Siris of releases. Um that are starting Thio, you know, be introduced into the market. Um, you know, one was introduced in late May and that was the first major release of Dr Enterprise produced exclusively by more antis. And we're going to announce at the launch pad 2020 event. Our next major release of the Doctor Enterprise Technology, which will for the first time include kubernetes related in life cycle management related technology from Mirant is eso. It's a huge milestone for our company. Huge benefit Thio our customers on and the broader user community around Dr Enterprise. We're super excited. Thio provide a lot of a lot of compelling and detailed content around the new technology that will be announcing at the event. >>So I'm looking at the at the website with with the agenda and there's a little teaser here right in the middle of the spaceship Docker Enterprise Container Cloud. So, um, and I glanced into you got a great little layout, five tracks, keynote track D container track operations and I t developer track and keep track. But I did. I went ahead and clicked on the keynote track and I see the big reveal so I love the opening keynote at at 8 a.m. On the 76 on the September 16th is right. Um, I, Enel CEO who have had on many, many times, has the big reveal Docker Enterprise Container Cloud. So without stealing any thunder, uh, can you give us any any little inside inside baseball on on what people should expect or what they can get excited about for that big announcement? >>Sure, absolutely so I definitely don't want to steal any thunder from Adrian, our CEO. But you know, we did include a few Easter eggs, so to speak, in the website on Dr Enterprise. Container Cloud is absolutely the biggest story out of the bunch eso that's visible on the on the rocket ship as you noticed, and in the agenda it will be revealed during Adrian's keynote, and every every word in the product name is important, right? So Dr Enterprise, based on Dr Enterprise Platform Container Cloud and there's the new word in there really is Cloud eso. I think, um, people are going to be surprised at the groundbreaking territory that were forging with with this release along the lines of a cloud experience and what we are going to provide to not only I t operations and the Op Graders and Dev ops for cloud environment, but also for the developers and the experience that we could bring to developers As they become more dependent on kubernetes and get more hands on with kubernetes. We think that we're going thio provide ah lot of ways for them to be more empowered with kubernetes while at the same time lowering the bar, the bar or the barrier of entry for kubernetes. As many enterprises have have told us that you know kubernetes can be difficult for the broader developer community inside the organization Thio interact with right? So this is, uh, you know, a strategic underpinning of our our product strategy. And this is really the first step in a non going launch of technologies that we're going to make bigger netease easier for developing. >>I was gonna say the other Easter egg that's all over the agenda, as I'm just kind of looking through the agenda. It's kubernetes on 80 infrastructure multi cloud kubernetes Miranda's open stack on kubernetes. So Goober Netease plays a huge part and you know, we talk a lot about kubernetes at all the events that we cover. But as you said, kind of the new theme that we're hearing a little bit more Morris is the difficulty and actually managing it so looking, kind of beyond the actual technology to the operations and the execution in production. And it sounds like you guys might have a few things up your sleeve to help people be more successful in in and actually kubernetes in production. >>Yeah, absolutely. So, uh, kubernetes is the focus of most of the companies in our space. Obviously, we think that we have some ideas for how we can, you know, really begin thio enable enable it to fulfill its promise as the operating system for the cloud eso. If we think about the ecosystem that's formed around kubernetes, uh, you know, it's it's now really being held back on Lee by adoption user adoption. And so that's where our focus in our product strategy really lives is around. How can we accelerate the move to kubernetes and accelerate the move to cloud native applications on? But in order to provide that acceleration catalyst, you need to be able to address the needs of not only the operators and make their lives easier while still giving them the tools they need for things like policy enforcement and operational insights. At the same time, Foster, you know, a grassroots, um, upswell of developer adoption within their company on bond Really help the I t. Operations team serve their customers the developers more effectively. >>Well, Dave, it sounds like a great event. We we had a great time covering those open stack events with you guys. We've covered the doctor events for years and years and years. Eso super engaged community and and thanks for, you know, inviting us back Thio to cover this inaugural event as well. So it should be terrific. Everyone just go to Miranda's dot com. The big pop up Will will jump up. You just click on the button and you can see the full agenda on get ready for about a month from now. When when the big reveal, September 16th will happen. Well, Dave, thanks for sharing this quick update with us. And I'm sure we're talking a lot more between now in, uh, in the 16 because I know there's a cube track in there, so we look forward to interview in our are our guests is part of the part of the program. >>Absolutely. Eso welcome everyone. Join us at the event and, uh, you know, stay tuned for the big reveal. >>Everybody loves a big reveal. All right, well, thanks a lot, Dave. So he's Dave. I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering the AWS Accenture Executive Summit. Brought to you by Accenture. (echoing percussive music) >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit, here at the Venetian in Las Vegas, I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We have two guests this segment, we have Brian Bohan, the AABG global business lead at AWS, and Chris Wegmann, welcome back to theCUBE, managing director Accenture AWS Business Group. Thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thanks for having us, yeah. >> So I want to start with you, Chris. It's been three years since Accenture and AWS announced this relationship, bring us up to speed on what's happened in those three years. >> Yeah, it's been a fast-paced three years. We've seen AWS continue to mature the platform, grow their number of services, we've seen our customers go from looking at just lift and shifting workloads at AWS, to now doing full cloud native services, machine learning, containerization, all the really cool stuff they can do on the platform. So for the business group, we've gone through that journey and that maturity as well. We started very focused on things like lift and shift migrations, and cloud management, and investing in assets and capabilities, now to really focus on innovation, and helping our customers drive the innovation on top of that platform. >> I want to get into that, but you've also recently said you're going to continue to expand this partnership, Brian-- >> Mhmm. >> And so what does this mean? >> Yeah, I mean just kind of keying off some of the things Chris talked about, right, is that, and I think we've talked about innovation specifically, really where we're going to focus, and we're also going to talk about vertical and industry solutions, which I think we'll talk about a little bit later. But, even if we looked at where we've had a lot of success in the mass migrations, moving enterprise applications like SAP to AWS, what we're seeing now, customers are in their maturity curve, where they're there in the cloud, and now they're asking what can I do? Right, so I have SAP, I have my core systems in the cloud, and so we're investing heavily, as Chris mentioned, in some of the modern technologies, so application modernization, cloud native development. Andy in his keynote today talked a lot about database freedom, so now that you're in the cloud, how can we start looking at your database portfolios, start using some RDS or Aurora, some other native AWS services. So, these are way that we can innovate with our customers that you maybe typically don't think about, but are critically important, and I would say on the other side, and what Chris mentioned as well, is the investments we're making in machine learning, and in AI, and in analytics, and edge computing. And then really at the core of that is data, right. And what we find, with these kinds of projects, is you need to move very, very quickly, and you also need to prove out the concepts. So these are two important things, and so what we're doing is a big investment in the partnership, is investing something we call Launchpad. So this a mechanism in Amazon parlance, we can think about it as two pizza teams, so several nodes of two pizza teams around the world, and these folks are 100% focused on driving innovation, and driving POCs, and pilots, and prototyping, and asset development, in the innovation areas around AWS machine learning, analytics, connect, so new modern customers care capabilities. So that's really important, and then, kind of related to that, very closely, is our innovation studios. So these team will be located across the world, some of them in or around liquid studios that Accenture has. So the innovation studio is a place where we can bring clients to get together, and we can execute on working backward, and ideation, and design thinking sections, so we can take it from an idea to actually a concrete, implementable set of requirements, and then use that Launchpad team to execute very quickly. So this is something we're really excited about. >> So interested, you bring clients into the studio. Now, why is that so important, to get everyone in the room together? >> Now I think what we've seen is it gets them out of their day-to-day environment, right? And in an innovative environment, where they can go through that innovation process, come up with those ideas, and then very quickly see them in reality, versus sitting and writing a bunch of requirements down and things like that. So the whole design thinking process and going through that, we find works very well, in a very innovative studio type format. >> So how does it work, I mean a client comes-- >> Yep. >> You're together, Accenture, AWS, together, with the clients-- >> Yep. >> saying what are your problems, and so how do you help them learn to think expansively about what their biggest challenges are? >> So we start with some design thinking workshops. So thinking about what they're trying to achieve, not the technology, right, we get the technology, but what they're trying to do, how they want to think about the problem differently, and we do the working backwards. So, idea is, where do you want to end up, either press release, or something like that, that documents where they want to be. Then we work backwards, at leverage the design thinking, and then going to the idea-zation phase, look at what will work, what might not work, and then how technology, we can use the AWS technology. So the technologists are there, they say, "Oh if we can go use these three services "off the platform, we can actually deliver this," and take advantage of this data that you may not have had before to help to answer that problem. >> And the technologists are also saying, "If we can leverage these three existing technologies, "we can also build some more stuff." >> Yeah, and I think Andy was again hitting home, the right tool for the right job, and as Chris mentioned, we don't start with the technology, we really start with the problem. And what's really cool about this is that Accenture's gotten very mature and developed and deep capabilities through their digital practice, around design thinking, working backward. And when folks come visit Amazon, one of our most popular EBC or executive briefing sessions, is around Amazon culture, and how does Amazon innovate. So we programatize that, as well, into our working backward methodology, that we work with clients, and what we've done is we've married these two things together. So, we're able now to bring the best of both worlds, and help our customers through that journey, getting from idea to actual realization. And then, as you saw, we now have I don't know how many services, 130 plus services, there's plenty of things in the bag that our technologists can then start working together with the clients to solve those problems. So it's really exciting. >> How do we innovate, that's sort of the question of the hour, the question of the era. At a company like Amazon that is now so big, but still is famous for it's start up mentality, and it's ability to innovate and deliver products that customers don't know they need, until they until they (Rebecca laughs) have them in their little hands, how do you do it? I mean, what is the secret sauce? >> So, I mean, there's a few things, and I don't have time to talk about all of them, but I think culture, we've talked about it a little bit, is hugely important, and you just can't graft on or import culture. You saw Guardian's CIO talk today how important it was. They didn't start with technology to cloud, they started with actually redesigning their work spaces and how their teams work together, that's super important. So at Amazon, we work in what we call two pizza teams. So every team is fairly autonomic, fairly small. They interact with other teams, but they can make decisions autonomously, and move fast. And then the other thing that we reward moving fast, is if you're going to move fast, you're also going to make some mistakes, you're going to take risks, you're going to experiment, and you're going to fail. So Jeff Bezos always likes to say, if you're not failing, then you're really not innovating. Right, so we want to controlled failures, and we want to make sure that when we are failing, it's what we call a two-way door, meaning that if we fail, we can come back through the door, and do it again. We haven't committed ourselves down a path that we can't retreat. So, you know, again, small teams, our culture, a culture that also rewards risk-taking, controlled risk-taking and failure, and that's also I think why getting us in the cloud is so important because now we have a platform where you can spin up nodes to run your analytics and your machine learning. If it's wrong, it doesn't work, you just tear it down, and that's it, you start over. So, it's a great platform for that as well. >> Chris, what have been some of the most exciting new business ideas, models, approaches, that you've come up with; we're having a number of really fascinating guests theCUBE, what personally excites you most? >> Yeah, I think one of the things is the research life science cloud and then some of the work we've done with AWS and marketed around that. To bring the research all together to make the researchers jobs much easier, bring all that data together and get the value out of the data. I was amazed when I first got involved in that and didn't realize how much time was spent just duplicating data across different systems during the research process, and I thought that's a lot of waste of time by very, very smart people, just coding data, and by us being able to do that, it just opens up the possibilities of what research can do. And it's all about saying how can we help lives to be better, and that's something that's really doing it. Other thing is just, customer interaction. So, one of the things I've talked about and have been very excited over the last couple of years, was you know Amazon Connect, future next generation call center capabilities, again, like Brian said, as a service, you can step up it up very quickly. You don't have to go and buy PBXs and install them and go through that whole, and the the 360 relationship that you can build with those services, that customers are demanding and asking for, right? You can go into organizations that have not been known for great customer care, and now within a few days, and do 360 type customer and omni-channel, and pass off chats, and stuff like that. You know, all the things that Amazon themselves, as dot com business, are famous for, right? And they can, they can get there. So you know, those things just excite me, and I see the clients get really excited when we go and sit down and talk about that stuff. >> And how are they measuring the ROI because I mean, as you said, at a company like Merck that is doing life-saving medicine every day, it's kind of obvious, but at a company that maybe is not good with customers, and then to suddenly have this more customer-centric call center, it really can change things. So how are they measuring what they're getting out of this? >> So they're measuring the sentiment of the customers, right, which Amazon can help you do too, right? You know, so really understanding how satisfied the customers are, they can tell by the way they're talking to the reps, and listening to the recordings, and stuff like that. And see how angry they get, and how much that reduces over time, and really get there, right. They're looking at customer satisfaction, of course. >> Yeah. >> Right, and almost every call center finishes up with some type of survey, right? So looking to see how those surveys have improved. They look at call volumes, they look at how many they're able to answer via chatbot, or via text, and things like that, and how many of those a customer care rep can do at the same time. When you're on the phone, usually you can only talk to one person, but a customer care rep might be able to take four or five calls at the same time, via chat, and be able to help customers which reduces the time waiting on the phone, and the less time you wait on the phone, the happier the customer is. >> Brian, last word, what do you think we're going to be talking about at AWS 2019. >> So I think if you look at the trend that we're seeing, so as we move more into the innovation services, what also is true is that we're getting increasingly focused on industry problems, right, and Chris already mentioned one with life sciences and the research life science cloud because it's sort of a migration across industries, with some variances, but when you're talking about deep applied learning and analytics, it's going to be very specific. So I think what we're going to see next year, is a lot more things like the research life science cloud across industries, right, so we're diving deep in financial services and capital markets, and banking around things like money-laundering, and anti-fraud platforms, right? We're working across over into PNC, and insurance, on kind of completely new ways to have customers think about how they engage with their PNC insurance companies. So, as we dive deeper into this, and as we apply a lot of these up the stack innovation services, I think we're going to see a lot more really compelling, exciting business solutions specific to industry problems, and I'm just super excited about that. >> Great, well we're looking forward to seeing you >> Yeah, yeah. (Rebecca laughs) >> here again. >> I'm sure we will. >> I'm looking forward to it. (Chris laughs) >> We'll be here. >> Chris, Brian, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> Appreciate it. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, we will have more of theCUBE's live coverage at the AWS Executive Summit coming up in just a little bit. (bouncy percussive music)