(intro music plays) >> Okay, welcome back to Supercloud 2. I'm John Furrier with my co-host, Dave Vellante, here in our Palo Alto Studio, with a live performance all day unpacking the wave of Supercloud. This is our second edition. Back for keynote review here is Vittorio Viarengo, talking about the hype and the reality of the Supercloud momentum. Vittorio, great to see you. You got a presentation. Looking forward to hearing the update. >> It's always great to be here on this stage with you guys. >> John Furrier: (chuckles) So the business imperative for cloud right now is clear and the Supercloud wave points to the builders and they want to break through. VMware, you guys have a lot of builders in the ecosystem. Where do you guys see multicloud today? What's going on? >> So, what we see is, when we talk with our customers is that customers are in a state of cloud chaos. Raghu Raghuram, our CEO, introduced this term at our user conference and it really resonated with our customers. And the chaos comes from the fact that most enterprises have applications spread across private cloud, multiple hyperscalers, and the edge increasingly. And so with that, every hyperscaler brings their own vertical integrated stack of infrastructure development, platform security, and so on and so forth. And so our customers are left with a ballooning cost because they have to train their employees across multiple stacks. And the costs are only going up. >> John Furrier: Have you talked about the Supercloud with your customers? What are they looking for when they look at the business value of Cross-Cloud Services? Why are they digging into it? What are some of the reasons? >> First of all, let's put this in perspective. 90, 87% of customers use two or more cloud including the private cloud. And 55%, get this, 55% use three or more clouds, right? And so, when you talk to these customers they're all asking for two things. One, they find that managing the multicloud is more difficult than the private cloud. And that goes without saying because it's new, they don't have the skills, and they have many of these. And pretty much everybody, 87% of them, are seeing their cost getting out of control. And so they need a new approach. We believe that the industry needs a new approach to solving the multicloud problem, which you guys have introduced and you call it the Supercloud. We call it Cross-Cloud Services. But the idea is that- and the parallel goes back to the private cloud. In the private cloud, if you remember the old days, before we called it the private cloud, we would install SAP. And the CIO would go, "Oh, I hear SAP works great on HP hardware. Oh, let's buy the HP stack", right? (hosts laugh) And then you go, "Oh, oh, Oracle databases. They run phenomenally on Sun Stack." That's another stack. And it wasn't sustainable, right? And so, VMware came in with virtualization and made everything look the same. And we unleashed a tremendous era of growth and speed and cost saving for our customers. So we believe, and I think the industry also believes, if you look at the success of Supercloud, first instance and today, that we need to create a new level of abstraction in the cloud. And this abstraction needs to be at a higher level. It needs to be built around the lingua franca of the cloud, which is Kubernetes, APIs, open source stacks. And by doing so, we're going to allow our customers to have a more unified way of building, managing, running, connecting, and securing applications across cloud. >> So where should that standardization occur? 'Cause we're going to hear from some customers today. When I ask them about cloud chaos, they're like, "Well, the way we deal with cloud chaos is MonoCloud". They sort of put on the blinders, right? But of course, they may be risking not being able to take advantage of best-of-breed. So where should that standardization layer occur across clouds? >> [Vittorio Viarengo] Well, I also hear that from some customers. "Oh, we are one cloud". They are in denial. There's no question about it. In fact, when I met at our user conference with a number of CIOs, and I went around the room and I asked them, I saw the entire spectrum. (laughs) The person is in denial. "Oh, we're using AWS." I said, "Great." "And the private cloud, so we're all set." "Okay, thank you. Next." "Oh, the business units are using AWS." "Ah, okay. So you have three." "Oh, and we just bought a company that is using Google back in Europe." So, okay, so you got four right there. So that person in denial. Then, you have the second category of customers that are seeing the problem, they're ahead of the pack, and they're building their solution. We're going to hear from Walmart later today. >> Dave Vellante: Yeah. >> So they're building their own. Not everybody has the skills and the scale of Walmart to build their own. >> Dave Vellante: Right. >> So, eventually, then you get to the third category of customers. They're actually buying solutions from one of the many ISVs that you are going to talk with today. You know, whether it is Azure Corp or Snowflake or all this. I will argue, any new company, any new ISV, is by definition a multicloud service company, right? And so these people... Or they're buying our Cross-Cloud Services to solve this problem. So that's the spectrum of customers out there. >> What's the stack you're focusing on specifically? What is VMware? Because virtualization is not going away. You're seeing a lot more in the cloud with networking, for example, this abstraction layer. What specifically are you guys focusing on? >> [Vittorio Viarengo] So, I like to talk about this beyond what VMware does, just 'cause I think this is an industry movement. A market is forming around multicloud services. And so it's an approach that pretty much a whole industry is taking of building this abstraction layer. In our approach, it is to bring these services together to simplify things even further. So, initially, we were the first to see multicloud happening. You know, Raghu and Sanjay, back in what, like 2016, 17, saw this coming and our first foray in multicloud was to take this sphere and our hypervisor and port it natively on all the hyperscaling, which is a phenomenal solution to get your enterprise application in the cloud and modernize them. But then we realized that customers were already in the cloud natively. And so we had to have (all chuckle) a religion discussion internally and drop that hypervisor religion and say, "Hey, we need to go and help our customers where they are, in a native cloud". And that's where we brought back Pivotal. We built tons around it. We shifted. And then Aria. And so basically, our evolution was to go from, you know, our hypervisor to cloud native. And then eventually we ended up at what we believe is the most comprehensive multicloud services solution that covers Application Development with Tanzu, Management with Aria, and then you have NSX for security and user computing for connectivity. And so we believe that we have the most comprehensive set of integrated services to solve the challenges of multicloud, bringing excess simplicity into the picture. >> John Furrier: As some would say, multicloud and multi environment, when you get to the distributed computing with the edge, you're going to need that capability. And you guys have been very successful with private cloud. But to be devil's advocate, you guys have been great with private cloud, but some are saying like, you guys don't get public cloud yet. How do you answer that? Because there's a lot of work that you guys have done in public cloud and it seems like private cloud successes are moving up into public cloud. Like networking. You're seeing a lot of that being configured in. So the enterprise-grade solutions are moving into the cloud. So what would you say to the skeptics out there that say, "Oh, I think you got private cloud nailed down, but you don't really have public cloud." (chuckles) >> [Vittorio Viarengo] First of all, we love skeptics. Our engineering team love skeptics and love to prove them wrong. (John laughs) And I would never ever bet against our engineering team. So I believe that VMware has been so successful in building a private cloud and the technology that actually became the foundation for the public cloud. But that is always hard, to be known in a new environment, right? There's always that period where you have to prove yourself. But what I love about VMware is that VMware has what I believe, what I like to call "enterprise pragmatism". The private cloud is not going away. So we're going to help our customers there, and then, as they move to the cloud, we are going to give them an option to adopt the cloud at their own pace, with VMware cloud, to allow them to move to the cloud and be able to rely on the enterprise-class capabilities we built on-prem in the cloud. But then with Tanzu and Aria and the rest of the Cross-Cloud Service portfolio, being able to meet them where they are. If they're already in the cloud, have them have a single place to build application, a single place to manage application, and so on and so forth. >> John Furrier: You know, Dave, we were talking in the opening. Vittorio, I want to get your reaction to this because we were saying in the opening that the market's obviously pushing this next gen. You see ChatGPT and the success of these new apps that are coming out. The business models are demanding kind of a digital transformation. The tech, the builders, are out there, and you guys have a interesting view because your customer base is almost the canary in the coal mine because this is an Operations challenge as well as just enabling the cloud native. So, I want to get your thoughts on, you know, your customer base, VMware customers. They've been in IT Ops for generations. And now, as that crowd moves and sees this Supercloud environment, it's IT again, but it's everywhere. It's not just IT in a data center. It's on-premises, it's cloud, it's edge. So, almost, your customer base is like a canary in the coal mine for this movement of how do you operationalize multiple environments? Which includes clouds, which includes apps. I mean, this is the core question. >> [Vittorio Viarengo] Yeah. And I want to make this an industry conversation. Forget about VMware for a second. We believe that there are like four or five major pillars that you need to implement to create this level of abstraction. It starts from observability. If you don't know- You need to know where your apps are, where your data is, how the the applications are performing, what is the security posture, what is their performance? So then, you can do something about it. We call that the observability part of this, creating this abstraction. The second one is security. So you need to be- Sorry. Infrastructure. An infrastructure. Creating an abstraction layer for infrastructure means to be able to give the applications, and the developer who builds application, the right infrastructure for the application at the right time. Whether it is a VM, whether it's a Kubernetes cluster, or whether it's microservices, and so on and so forth. And so, that allows our developers to think about infrastructure just as code. If it is available, whatever application needs, whatever the cost makes sense for my application, right? The third part of security, and I can give you a very, very simple example. Say that I was talking to a CIO of a major insurance company in Europe and he is saying to me, "The developers went wild, built all these great front office applications. Now the business is coming to me and says, 'What is my compliance report?'" And the guy is saying, "Say that I want to implement the policy that says, 'I want to encrypt all my data no matter where it resides.' How does it do it? It needs to have somebody logging in into Amazon and configure it, then go to Google, configure it, go to the private cloud." That's time and cost, right? >> Yeah. >> So, you need to have a way to enforce security policy from the infrastructure to the app to the firewall in one place and distribute it across. And finally, the developer experience, right? Developers, developers, developers. (all laugh) We're always trying to keep up with... >> Host: You can dance if you want to do... >> [Vittorio Viarengo] Yeah, let's not make a fool of ourselves. More than usual. Developers are the kings and queens of the hill. They are. Why? Because they build the application. They're making us money and saving us money. And so we need- And right now, they have to go into these different stacks. So, you need to give developers two things. One, a common development experience across this different Kubernetes distribution. And two, a way for the operators. To your point. The operators have fallen behind the developers. And they cannot go to the developer there and tell them, "This is how you're going to do things." They have to see how they're doing things and figure out how to bring the gallery underneath so that developers can be developers, but the operators can lay down the tracks and the infrastructure there is secure and compliant. >> Dave Vellante: So two big inferences from that. One is self-serve infrastructure. You got- In a decentralized cloud, a Supercloud world, you got to have self-serve infrastructure, you got to be simple. And the second is governance. You mentioned security, but it's also governance. You know, data sovereignty as we talked about. So the question I have, Vittorio, is where does the customer start? >> [Vittorio Viarengo] So I, it always depends on the business need, but to me, the foundational layer is observability. If you don't know where your staff is, you cannot manage, you cannot secure it, you cannot manage its cost, right? So I think observability is the bar to entry. And then it depends on the business needs, right? So, we go back to the CIO that I talked to. He is clearly struggling with compliance and security. >> Hosts: Mm hmm. >> And so, like many customers. And so, that's maybe where they start. There are other customers that are a little behind the head of the pack in terms of building applications, right? And so they're looking at these, you know, innovative companies that have the developers that get the cloud and build all these application. They are leader in the industry. They're saying, "How do I get some of that?" Well, the way you get some of that is by adopting modern application development and platform operational capabilities. So, that's maybe, that's where they should start. And so on and so forth. It really depends on the business. To me, observability is the foundational part of this. >> John Furrier: Vittorio, we've been on this conversation with you for over a year and a half now with Supercloud. You've been a leader in seeing the wave, you and Raghu and the team at VMware, among other industry leaders. This is our second event. If you're- In the minute and a half that we have left, when you get asked, "what is this Supercloud multicloud Cross-Cloud thing? What's it mean?" I mean, I mentioned earlier, the market, the business models are changing, tech's changing, society needs more economic value out of the cloud. Builders are out there. If someone says, "Hey, Vittorio, what's the bottom line? What's really going on? Why should I pay attention to this wave? What's going on?" How would you describe the relevance of Supercloud? >> I think that this industry is full of smart vendors and smart customers. And if we are smart about it, we look at the history of IT and the history of IT repeats itself over and over again. You follow the- He said, "Follow the money." I say, "Follow the developers." That's how I made my career. I follow great developers. I look at, you know, Kit Colbert. I say, "Okay. I'm going to get behind that guy wherever he is going." And I try to add value to that person. I look at Raghu and all the great engineers that I was blessed to work with. And so the engineers go and explore new territories and then the rest of the stacks moves around. The developers have gone multicloud. And just like in any iteration of IT, at some point, the way you get the right scales at the right cost is with abstractions. And you can see it everywhere from, you know, bits and bytes, integration, to SOA, to APIs and microservices. You can see it now from best-of-breed hyperscaler across multiple clouds to creating an abstraction layer, a Supercloud, that creates a unified way of building, managing, running, securing, and accessing applications. So if you're a customer- (laughs) A minute and a half. (hosts chuckle) If you are customers that are out there and feeling the pain, you got to adopt this. If you are customers that is behind and saying, "Maybe you're in denial" look at the customers that are solving the problems today, and we're going to have some today. See what they're doing and learn from them so you don't make the same mistakes and you can get there ahead of it. >> Dave Vellante: Gracely's Law, John. Brian Gracely. That history repeats itself and- >> John Furrier: And I think one of these, "follow the developers" is interesting. And the other big wave, I want to get your comment real quick, is that developers aren't just application developers. They're network developers. The stack has completely been software-enabled so that you have software-defined networking, you have all kinds of software at all aspects of observability, infrastructure, security. The developers are everywhere. It's not just software. Software is everywhere. >> [Vittorio Viarengo] Yeah. Developers, developers, developers. The other thing that we can tell, I can tell, and we know, because we live in Silicon Valley. We worship developers but if you are out there in manufacturing, healthcare... If you have developers that understand this stuff, pamper them, keep them happy. (hosts laugh) If you don't have them, figure out where they hang out and go recruit them because developers indeed make the IT world go round. >> John Furrier: Vittorio, thank you for coming on with that opening keynote here for Supercloud 2. We're going to unpack what Supercloud is all about in our second edition of our live performance here in Palo Alto. Virtual event. We're going to talk to customers, experts, leaders, investors, everyone who's looking at the future, what's being enabled by this new big wave coming on called Supercloud. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back after this short break. (ambient theme music plays)

>> Welcome back to SuperCloud2. This is Dave Vellante, and we're here with Jack Greenfield. He's the Vice President of Enterprise Architecture and the Chief Architect for the global technology platform at Walmart. Jack, I want to thank you for coming on the program. Really appreciate your time. >> Glad to be here, Dave. Thanks for inviting me and appreciate the opportunity to chat with you. >> Yeah, it's our pleasure. Now we call what you've built a SuperCloud. That's our term, not yours, but how would you describe the Walmart Cloud Native Platform? >> So WCNP, as the acronym goes, is essentially an implementation of Kubernetes for the Walmart ecosystem. And what that means is that we've taken Kubernetes off the shelf as open source, and we have integrated it with a number of foundational services that provide other aspects of our computational environment. So Kubernetes off the shelf doesn't do everything. It does a lot. In particular the orchestration of containers, but it delegates through API a lot of key functions. So for example, secret management, traffic management, there's a need for telemetry and observability at a scale beyond what you get from raw Kubernetes. That is to say, harvesting the metrics that are coming out of Kubernetes and processing them, storing them in time series databases, dashboarding them, and so on. There's also an angle to Kubernetes that gets a lot of attention in the daily DevOps routine, that's not really part of the open source deliverable itself, and that is the DevOps sort of CICD pipeline-oriented lifecycle. And that is something else that we've added and integrated nicely. And then one more piece of this picture is that within a Kubernetes cluster, there's a function that is critical to allowing services to discover each other and integrate with each other securely and with proper configuration provided by the concept of a service mesh. So Istio, Linkerd, these are examples of service mesh technologies. And we have gone ahead and integrated actually those two. There's more than those two, but we've integrated those two with Kubernetes. So the net effect is that when a developer within Walmart is going to build an application, they don't have to think about all those other capabilities where they come from or how they're provided. Those are already present, and the way the CICD pipelines are set up, it's already sort of in the picture, and there are configuration points that they can take advantage of in the primary YAML and a couple of other pieces of config that we supply where they can tune it. But at the end of the day, it offloads an awful lot of work for them, having to stand up and operate those services, fail them over properly, and make them robust. All of that's provided for. >> Yeah, you know, developers often complain they spend too much time wrangling and doing things that aren't productive. So I wonder if you could talk about the high level business goals of the initiative in terms of the hardcore benefits. Was the real impetus to tap into best of breed cloud services? Were you trying to cut costs? Maybe gain negotiating leverage with the cloud guys? Resiliency, you know, I know was a major theme. Maybe you could give us a sense of kind of the anatomy of the decision making process that went in. >> Sure, and in the course of answering your question, I think I'm going to introduce the concept of our triplet architecture which we haven't yet touched on in the interview here. First off, just to sort of wrap up the motivation for WCNP itself which is kind of orthogonal to the triplet architecture. It can exist with or without it. Currently does exist with it, which is key, and I'll get to that in a moment. The key drivers, business drivers for WCNP were developer productivity by offloading the kinds of concerns that we've just discussed. Number two, improving resiliency, that is to say reducing opportunity for human error. One of the challenges you tend to run into in a large enterprise is what we call snowflakes, lots of gratuitously different workloads, projects, configurations to the extent that by developing and using WCNP and continuing to evolve it as we have, we end up with cookie cutter like consistency across our workloads which is super valuable when it comes to building tools or building services to automate operations that would otherwise be manual. When everything is pretty much done the same way, that becomes much simpler. Another key motivation for WCNP was the ability to abstract from the underlying cloud provider. And this is going to lead to a discussion of our triplet architecture. At the end of the day, when one works directly with an underlying cloud provider, one ends up taking a lot of dependencies on that particular cloud provider. Those dependencies can be valuable. For example, there are best of breed services like say Cloud Spanner offered by Google or say Cosmos DB offered by Microsoft that one wants to use and one is willing to take the dependency on the cloud provider to get that functionality because it's unique and valuable. On the other hand, one doesn't want to take dependencies on a cloud provider that don't add a lot of value. And with Kubernetes, we have the opportunity, and this is a large part of how Kubernetes was designed and why it is the way it is, we have the opportunity to sort of abstract from the underlying cloud provider for stateless workloads on compute. And so what this lets us do is build container-based applications that can run without change on different cloud provider infrastructure. So the same applications can run on WCNP over Azure, WCNP over GCP, or WCNP over the Walmart private cloud. And we have a private cloud. Our private cloud is OpenStack based and it gives us some significant cost advantages as well as control advantages. So to your point, in terms of business motivation, there's a key cost driver here, which is that we can use our own private cloud when it's advantageous and then use the public cloud provider capabilities when we need to. A key place with this comes into play is with elasticity. So while the private cloud is much more cost effective for us to run and use, it isn't as elastic as what the cloud providers offer, right? We don't have essentially unlimited scale. We have large scale, but the public cloud providers are elastic in the extreme which is a very powerful capability. So what we're able to do is burst, and we use this term bursting workloads into the public cloud from the private cloud to take advantage of the elasticity they offer and then fall back into the private cloud when the traffic load diminishes to the point where we don't need that elastic capability, elastic capacity at low cost. And this is a very important paradigm that I think is going to be very commonplace ultimately as the industry evolves. Private cloud is easier to operate and less expensive, and yet the public cloud provider capabilities are difficult to match. >> And the triplet, the tri is your on-prem private cloud and the two public clouds that you mentioned, is that right? >> That is correct. And we actually have an architecture in which we operate all three of those cloud platforms in close proximity with one another in three different major regions in the US. So we have east, west, and central. And in each of those regions, we have all three cloud providers. And the way it's configured, those data centers are within 10 milliseconds of each other, meaning that it's of negligible cost to interact between them. And this allows us to be fairly agnostic to where a particular workload is running. >> Does a human make that decision, Jack or is there some intelligence in the system that determines that? >> That's a really great question, Dave. And it's a great question because we're at the cusp of that transition. So currently humans make that decision. Humans choose to deploy workloads into a particular region and a particular provider within that region. That said, we're actively developing patterns and practices that will allow us to automate the placement of the workloads for a variety of criteria. For example, if in a particular region, a particular provider is heavily overloaded and is unable to provide the level of service that's expected through our SLAs, we could choose to fail workloads over from that cloud provider to a different one within the same region. But that's manual today. We do that, but people do it. Okay, we'd like to get to where that happens automatically. In the same way, we'd like to be able to automate the failovers, both for high availability and sort of the heavier disaster recovery model between, within a region between providers and even within a provider between the availability zones that are there, but also between regions for the sort of heavier disaster recovery or maintenance driven realignment of workload placement. Today, that's all manual. So we have people moving workloads from region A to region B or data center A to data center B. It's clean because of the abstraction. The workloads don't have to know or care, but there are latency considerations that come into play, and the humans have to be cognizant of those. And automating that can help ensure that we get the best performance and the best reliability. >> But you're developing the dataset to actually, I would imagine, be able to make those decisions in an automated fashion over time anyway. Is that a fair assumption? >> It is, and that's what we're actively developing right now. So if you were to look at us today, we have these nice abstractions and APIs in place, but people run that machine, if you will, moving toward a world where that machine is fully automated. >> What exactly are you abstracting? Is it sort of the deployment model or, you know, are you able to abstract, I'm just making this up like Azure functions and GCP functions so that you can sort of run them, you know, with a consistent experience. What exactly are you abstracting and how difficult was it to achieve that objective technically? >> that's a good question. What we're abstracting is the Kubernetes node construct. That is to say a cluster of Kubernetes nodes which are typically VMs, although they can run bare metal in certain contexts, is something that typically to stand up requires knowledge of the underlying cloud provider. So for example, with GCP, you would use GKE to set up a Kubernetes cluster, and in Azure, you'd use AKS. We are actually abstracting that aspect of things so that the developers standing up applications don't have to know what the underlying cluster management provider is. They don't have to know if it's GCP, AKS or our own Walmart private cloud. Now, in terms of functions like Azure functions that you've mentioned there, we haven't done that yet. That's another piece that we have sort of on our radar screen that, we'd like to get to is serverless approach, and the Knative work from Google and the Azure functions, those are things that we see good opportunity to use for a whole variety of use cases. But right now we're not doing much with that. We're strictly container based right now, and we do have some VMs that are running in sort of more of a traditional model. So our stateful workloads are primarily VM based, but for serverless, that's an opportunity for us to take some of these stateless workloads and turn them into cloud functions. >> Well, and that's another cost lever that you can pull down the road that's going to drop right to the bottom line. Do you see a day or maybe you're doing it today, but I'd be surprised, but where you build applications that actually span multiple clouds or is there, in your view, always going to be a direct one-to-one mapping between where an application runs and the specific cloud platform? >> That's a really great question. Well, yes and no. So today, application development teams choose a cloud provider to deploy to and a location to deploy to, and they have to get involved in moving an application like we talked about today. That said, the bursting capability that I mentioned previously is something that is a step in the direction of automatic migration. That is to say we're migrating workload to different locations automatically. Currently, the prototypes we've been developing and that we think are going to eventually make their way into production are leveraging Istio to assess the load incoming on a particular cluster and start shedding that load into a different location. Right now, the configuration of that is still manual, but there's another opportunity for automation there. And I think a key piece of this is that down the road, well, that's a, sort of a small step in the direction of an application being multi provider. We expect to see really an abstraction of the fact that there is a triplet even. So the workloads are moving around according to whatever the control plane decides is necessary based on a whole variety of inputs. And at that point, you will have true multi-cloud applications, applications that are distributed across the different providers and in a way that application developers don't have to think about. >> So Walmart's been a leader, Jack, in using data for competitive advantages for decades. It's kind of been a poster child for that. You've got a mountain of IP in the form of data, tools, applications best practices that until the cloud came out was all On Prem. But I'm really interested in this idea of building a Walmart ecosystem, which obviously you have. Do you see a day or maybe you're even doing it today where you take what we call the Walmart SuperCloud, WCNP in your words, and point or turn that toward an external world or your ecosystem, you know, supporting those partners or customers that could drive new revenue streams, you know directly from the platform? >> Great question, Steve. So there's really two things to say here. The first is that with respect to data, our data workloads are primarily VM basis. I've mentioned before some VMware, some straight open stack. But the key here is that WCNP and Kubernetes are very powerful for stateless workloads, but for stateful workloads tend to be still climbing a bit of a growth curve in the industry. So our data workloads are not primarily based on WCNP. They're VM based. Now that said, there is opportunity to make some progress there, and we are looking at ways to move things into containers that are currently running in VMs which are stateful. The other question you asked is related to how we expose data to third parties and also functionality. Right now we do have in-house, for our own use, a very robust data architecture, and we have followed the sort of domain-oriented data architecture guidance from Martin Fowler. And we have data lakes in which we collect data from all the transactional systems and which we can then use and do use to build models which are then used in our applications. But right now we're not exposing the data directly to customers as a product. That's an interesting direction that's been talked about and may happen at some point, but right now that's internal. What we are exposing to customers is applications. So we're offering our global integrated fulfillment capabilities, our order picking and curbside pickup capabilities, and our cloud powered checkout capabilities to third parties. And this means we're standing up our own internal applications as externally facing SaaS applications which can serve our partners' customers. >> Yeah, of course, Martin Fowler really first introduced to the world Zhamak Dehghani's data mesh concept and this whole idea of data products and domain oriented thinking. Zhamak Dehghani, by the way, is a speaker at our event as well. Last question I had is edge, and how you think about the edge? You know, the stores are an edge. Are you putting resources there that sort of mirror this this triplet model? Or is it better to consolidate things in the cloud? I know there are trade-offs in terms of latency. How are you thinking about that? >> All really good questions. It's a challenging area as you can imagine because edges are subject to disconnection, right? Or reduced connection. So we do place the same architecture at the edge. So WCNP runs at the edge, and an application that's designed to run at WCNP can run at the edge. That said, there are a number of very specific considerations that come up when running at the edge, such as the possibility of disconnection or degraded connectivity. And so one of the challenges we have faced and have grappled with and done a good job of I think is dealing with the fact that applications go offline and come back online and have to reconnect and resynchronize, the sort of online offline capability is something that can be quite challenging. And we have a couple of application architectures that sort of form the two core sets of patterns that we use. One is an offline/online synchronization architecture where we discover that we've come back online, and we understand the differences between the online dataset and the offline dataset and how they have to be reconciled. The other is a message-based architecture. And here in our health and wellness domain, we've developed applications that are queue based. So they're essentially business processes that consist of multiple steps where each step has its own queue. And what that allows us to do is devote whatever bandwidth we do have to those pieces of the process that are most latency sensitive and allow the queue lengths to increase in parts of the process that are not latency sensitive, knowing that they will eventually catch up when the bandwidth is restored. And to put that in a little bit of context, we have fiber lengths to all of our locations, and we have I'll just use a round number, 10-ish thousand locations. It's larger than that, but that's the ballpark, and we have fiber to all of them, but when the fiber is disconnected, and it does get disconnected on a regular basis. In fact, I forget the exact number, but some several dozen locations get disconnected daily just by virtue of the fact that there's construction going on and things are happening in the real world. When the disconnection happens, we're able to fall back to 5G and to Starlink. Starlink is preferred. It's a higher bandwidth. 5G if that fails. But in each of those cases, the bandwidth drops significantly. And so the applications have to be intelligent about throttling back the traffic that isn't essential, so that it can push the essential traffic in those lower bandwidth scenarios. >> So much technology to support this amazing business which started in the early 1960s. Jack, unfortunately, we're out of time. I would love to have you back or some members of your team and drill into how you're using open source, but really thank you so much for explaining the approach that you've taken and participating in SuperCloud2. >> You're very welcome, Dave, and we're happy to come back and talk about other aspects of what we do. For example, we could talk more about the data lakes and the data mesh that we have in place. We could talk more about the directions we might go with serverless. So please look us up again. Happy to chat. >> I'm going to take you up on that, Jack. All right. This is Dave Vellante for John Furrier and the Cube community. Keep it right there for more action from SuperCloud2. (upbeat music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Welcome back, everyone, to the "Supercloud 22." I'm John Furrier, host of "The Cube." This is the Cloud-erati panel, the distinguished experts who have been there from day one, watching the cloud grow, from building clouds, and all open source stuff as well. Just great stuff. Good friends of "The Cube," and great to introduce back on "The Cube," Adrian Cockcroft, formerly with Netflix, formerly AWS, retired, now commentating here in "The Cube," as well as other events. Great to see you back out there, Adrian. Lori MacVittie, Cloud Evangelist with F5, also wrote a great blog post on supercloud, as well as Dave Vellante as well, setting up the supercloud conversation, which we're going to get into, and Chris Hoff, who's the CTO and CSO of LastPass who's been building clouds, and we know him from "The Cube" before with security and cloud commentary. Welcome, all, back to "The Cube" and supercloud. >> Thanks, John. >> Hi. >> All right, Lori, we'll start with you to get things going. I want to try to sit back, as you guys are awesome experts, and involved from building, and in the trenches, on the front lines, and Adrian's coming out of retirement, but Lori, you wrote the post setting the table on supercloud. Let's start with you. What is supercloud? What is it evolving into? What is the north star, from your perspective? >> Well, I don't think there's a north star yet. I think that's one of the reasons I wrote it, because I had a clear picture of this in my mind, but over the past, I don't know, three, four years, I keep seeing, in research, my own and others', complexity, multi-cloud. "We can't manage it. They're all different. "We have trouble. What's going on? "We can't do anything right." And so digging into it, you start looking into, "Well, what do you mean by complexity?" Well, security. Migration, visibility, performance. The same old problems we've always had. And so, supercloud is a concept that is supposed to overlay all of the clouds and normalize it. That's really what we're talking about, is yet another abstraction layer that would provide some consistency that would allow you to do the same security and monitor things correctly. Cornell University actually put out a definition way back in 2016. And they said, "It's an architecture that enables migration "across different zones or providers," and I think that's important, "and provides interfaces to everything, "makes it consistent, and normalizes the network," basically brings it all together, but it also extends to private clouds. Sometimes we forget about that piece of it, and I think that's important in this, so that all your clouds look the same. So supercloud, big layer on top, makes everything wonderful. It's unicorns again. >> It's interesting. We had multiple perspectives. (mumbles) was like Snowflake, who built on top of AWS. Jerry Chan, who we heard from earlier today, Greylock Penn's "Castles in the Cloud" saying, "Hey, you can have a moat, "you can build an advantage and have differentiation," so startups are starting to build on clouds, that's the native cloud view, and then, of course, they get success and they go to all the other clouds 'cause they got customers in the ecosystem, but it seems that all the cloud players, Chris, you commented before we came on today, is that they're all fighting for the customer's workloads on their infrastructure. "Come bring your stuff over to here, "and we'll make it run better." And all your developers are going to be good. Is there a problem? I mean, or is this something else happening here? Is there a real problem? >> Well, I think the north star's over there, by the way, Lori. (laughing) >> Oh, there it is. >> Right there. The supercloud north star. So indeed I think there are opportunities. Whether you call them problems or not, John, I think is to be determined. Most companies have, especially if they're a large enterprise, whether or not they've got an investment in private cloud or not, have spent time really trying to optimize their engineering and workload placement on a single cloud. And that, regardless of your choice, as we take the big three, whether it's Amazon, Google, or Microsoft, each of them have their pros and cons for various types of workloads. And so you'll see a lot of folks optimizing for a particular cloud, and it takes a huge effort up and down the stack to just get a single cloud right. That doesn't take into consideration integrations with software as a service, instantiated, oftentimes, on top of infrastructure of the service that you need to supplement where the obstruction layer ends in infrastructure of the service. You've seen most IS players starting to now move up-chain, as we predicted years ago, to platform as a service, but platforms of various types. So I definitely see it as an opportunity. Previous employers have had multiple clouds, but they were very specifically optimized for the types of workloads, for example, in, let's say, AWS versus GCP, based on the need for different types and optimized compute platforms that each of those providers ran. We never, in that particular case, thought about necessarily running the same workloads across both clouds, because they had different pricing models, different security models, et cetera. And so the challenge is really coming down to the fact that, what is the cost benefit analysis of thinking about multi-cloud when you can potentially engineer the resiliency or redundancy, all the in-season "ilities" that you might need to factor into your deployments on a single cloud, if they are investing at the pace in which they are? So I think it's an opportunity, and it's one that continues to evolve, but this just reminds me, your comments remind me, of when we were talking about OpenStack versus AWS. "Oh, if there were only APIs that existed "that everybody could use," and you saw how that went. So I think that the challenge there is, what is the impetus for a singular cloud provider, any of the big three, deciding that they're going to abstract to a single abstraction layer and not be able to differentiate from the competitors? >> Yeah, and that differentiation's going to be big. I mean, assume that the clouds aren't going to stay still like AWS and just not stop innovating. We see the devs are doing great, Adrian, open source is bigger and better than ever, but now that's been commercialized into enterprise. It's an ops problem. So to Chris's point, the cost benefit analysis is interesting, because do companies have to spin up multiple operations teams, each with specialized training and tooling for the clouds that they're using, and does that open up a can of worms, or is that a good thing? I mean, can you design for this? I mean, is there an architecture or taxonomy that makes it work, or is it just the cart before the horse, the solution before the problem? >> Yeah, well, I think that if you look at any large vendor... Sorry, large customer, they've got a bit of everything already. If you're big enough, you've bought something from everybody at some point. So then you're trying to rationalize that, and trying to make it make sense. And I think there's two ways of looking at multi-cloud or supercloud, and one is that the... And practically, people go best of breed. They say, "Okay, I'm going to get my email "from Google or Microsoft. "I'm going to run my applications on AWS. "Maybe I'm going to do some AI machine learning on Google, "'cause those are the strengths of the platforms." So people tend to go where the strength is. So that's multi-cloud, 'cause you're using multiple clouds, and you still have to move data and make sure they're all working together. But then what Lori's talking about is trying to make them all look the same and trying to get all the security architectures to be the same and put this magical layer, this unicorn magical layer that, "Let's make them all look the same." And this is something that the CIOs have wanted for years, and they keep trying to buy it, and you can sell it, but the trouble is it's really hard to deliver. And I think, when I go back to some old friends of ours at Enstratius who had... And back in the early days of cloud, said, "Well, we'll just do an API that abstracts "all the cloud APIs into one layer." Enstratius ended up being sold to Dell a few years ago, and the problem they had was that... They didn't have any problem selling it. The problem they had was, a year later, when it came up for renewal, the developers all done end runs around it were ignoring it, and the CIOs weren't seeing usage. So you can sell it, but can you actually implement it and make it work well enough that it actually becomes part of your core architecture without, from an operations point of view, without having the developers going directly to their favorite APIs around them? And I'm not sure that you can really lock an organization down enough to get them onto a layer like that. So that's the way I see it. >> You just defined- >> You just defined shadow shadow IT. (laughing) That's pretty- (crosstalk) >> Shadow shadow IT, yeah. >> Yeah, shadow shadow it. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> I mean, this brings up the question, I mean, is there really a problem? I mean, I guess we'll just jump to it. What is supercloud? If you can have the magic outcome, what is it? Enstratius rendered in with automation? The security issues? Kubernetes is hot. What is the supercloud dream? I guess that's the question. >> I think it's got easier than it was five, 10 years ago. Kubernetes gives you a bunch of APIs that are common across lots of different areas, things like Snowflake or MongoDB Atlas. There are SaaS-based services, which are across multiple clouds from vendors that you've picked. So it's easier to build things which are more portable, but I still don't think it's easy to build this magic API that makes them all look the same. And I think that you're going to have leaky abstractions and security being... Getting the security right's going to be really much more complex than people think. >> What about specialty superclouds, Chris? What's your view on that? >> Yeah, I think what Adrian is alluding to, those leaky abstractions, are interesting, especially from the security perspective, 'cause I think what you see is if you were to happen to be able to thin slice across a set of specific types of workloads, there is a high probability given today that, at least on two of the three major clouds, you could get SaaS providers that sit on those same infrastructure of the service clouds for you, string them together, and have a service that technically is abstracted enough from the things you care about to work on one, two, or three, maybe not all of them, but most SaaS providers in the security space, or identity space, data space, for example, coexist on at least Microsoft and AWS, if not all three, with Google. And so you could technically abstract a service to the point that you let that level of abstract... Like Lori said, no computer science problem could not be... So, no computer science problem can't be solved with more layers of abstraction or misdirection... Or redirection. And in that particular case, if you happen to pick the right vendors that run on all three clouds, you could possibly get close. But then what that really talks about is then, if you built your seven-layer dip model, then you really have specialty superclouds spanning across infrastructure of the service clouds. One for your identity apps, one for data and data layers, to normalize that, one for security, but at what cost? Because you're going to be charged not for that service as a whole, but based on compute resources, based on how these vendors charge across each cloud. So again, that cost-benefit ratio might start being something that is rather imposing from a budgetary perspective. >> Lori, weigh in on this, because the enterprise people love to solve complexity with more complexity. Here, we need to go the other way. It's a commodity. So there has to be a better way. >> I think I'm hearing two fundamental assumptions. One, that a supercloud would force the existing big three to implement some sort of equal API. Don't agree with that. There's no business case for that. There's no reason that could compel them to do that. Otherwise, we would've convinced them to do that, what? 10, 15 years ago when we said we need to be interoperable. So it's not going to happen there. They don't have a good reason to do that. There's no business justification for that. The other presumption, I think, is that we would... That it's more about the services, the differentiated services, that are offered by all of these particular providers, as opposed to treating the core IaaS as the commodity it is. It's compute, it's some storage, it's some networking. Look at that piece. Now, pull those together by... And it's not OpenStack. That's not the answer, it wasn't the answer, it's not the answer now, but something that can actually pull those together and abstract it at a different layer. So cloud providers don't have to change, 'cause they're not going to change, but if someone else were to build that architecture to say, "all right, I'm going to treat all of this compute "so you can run your workloads," as Chris pointed out, "in the best place possible. "And we'll help you do that "by being able to provide those cost benefit analysis, "'What's the best performance, what are you doing,' "And then provide that as a layer." So I think that's really where supercloud is going, 'cause I think that's what a lot of the market actually wants in terms of where they want to run their workloads, because we're seeing that they want to run workloads at the edge, "a lot closer to me," which is yet another factor that we have to consider, and how are you going to be moving individual workloads around? That's the holy grail. Let's move individual workloads to where they're the best performance, the security, cost optimized, and then one layer up. >> Yeah, I think so- >> John Considine, who ultimately ran CloudSwitch, that sold to Verizon, as well as Tom Gillis, who built Bracket, are both rolling in their graves, 'cause what you just described was exactly that. (Lori laughing) Well, they're not even dead yet, so I can't say they're rolling in their graves. Sorry, Tom. Sorry, John. >> Well, how do hyperscalers keep their advantage with all this? I mean, to that point. >> Native services and managed services on top of it. Look how many flavors of managed Kubernetes you have. So you have a choice. Roll your own, or go with a managed service, and then differentiate based on the ability to take away and simplify some of that complexity. Doesn't mean it's more secure necessarily, but I do think we're seeing opportunities where those guys are fighting tooth and nail to keep you on a singular cloud, even though, to Lori's point, I agree, I don't think it's about standardized APIs, 'cause I think that's never going to happen. I do think, though, that SaaS-y supercloud model that we were talking about, layering SaaS that happens to span all the three infrastructure of the service are probably more in line with what Lori was talking about. But I do think that portability of workload is given to you today within lots of ways. But again, how much do you manage, and how much performance do you give up by running additional abstraction layers? And how much security do you give up by having to roll your own and manage that? Because the whole point was, in many cases... Cloud is using other people's computers, so in many cases, I want to manage as little of it as I possibly can. >> I like this whole SaaS angle, because if you had the old days, you're on Amazon Web Services, hey, if you build a SaaS application that runs on Amazon, you're all great, you're born in the cloud, just like that generations of startups. Great. Now when you have this super pass layer, as Dave Vellante was riffing on his analysis, and Lori, you were getting into this pass layer that's kind of like SaaS-y, what's the SaaS equation look like? Because that, to me, sounds like a supercloud version of saying, "I have a workload that runs on all the clouds equally." I just don't think that's ever going to happen. I agree with you, Chris, on that one. But I do see that you can have an abstraction that says, "Hey, I don't really want to get in the weeds. "I don't want to spend a lot of ops time on this. "I just want it to run effectively, and magic happens," or, as you said, some layer there. How does that work? How do you see this super pass layer, if anything, enabling a different SaaS game? >> I think you hit on it there. The last like 10 or so years, we've been all focused on developers and developer productivity, and it's all about the developer experience, and it's got to be good for them, 'cause they're the kings. And I think the next 10 years are going to be very focused on operations, because once you start scaling out, it's not about developers. They can deliver fast or slow, it doesn't matter, but if you can't scale it out, then you've got a real problem. So I think that's an important part of it, is really, what is the ops experience, and what is the best way to get those costs down? And this would serve that purpose if it was done right, which, we can argue about whether that's possible or not, but I don't have to implement it, so I can say it's possible. >> Well, are we going to be getting into infrastructure as code moves into "everything is code," security, data, (laughs) applications is code? I mean, "blank" is code, fill in the blank. (Lori laughing) >> Yeah, we're seeing more of that with things like CDK and Pulumi, where you are actually coding up using a real language rather than the death by YAML or whatever. How much YAML can you take? But actually having a real language so you're not trying to do things in parsing languages. So I think that's an interesting trend. You're getting some interesting templates, and I like what... I mean, the counterexample is that if you just go deep on one vendor, then maybe you can go faster and it is simpler. And one of my favorite vendor... Favorite customers right now that I've been talking to is Liberty Mutual. Went very deep and serverless first on AWS. They're just doing everything there, and they're using CDK Patterns to do it, and they're going extremely fast. There's a book coming out called "The Value Flywheel" by Dave Anderson, it's coming out in a few months, to just detail what they're doing, but that's the counterargument. If you could pick one vendor, you can go faster, you can get that vendor to do more for you, and maybe get a bigger discount so you're not splitting your discounts across vendors. So that's one aspect of it. But I think, fundamentally, you're going to find the CIOs and the ops people generally don't like sitting on one vendor. And if that single vendor is a horizontal platform that's trying to make all the clouds look the same, now you're locked into whatever that platform was. You've still got a platform there. There's still something. So I think that's always going to be something that the CIOs want, but the developers are always going to just pick whatever the best tool for building the thing is. And a analogy here is that the developers are dating and getting married, and then the operations people are running the family and getting divorced. And all the bad parts of that cycle are in the divorce end of it. You're trying to get out of a vendor, there's lawyers, it's just a big mess. >> Who's the lawyer in this example? (crosstalk) >> Well... (laughing) >> Great example. (crosstalk) >> That's why ops people don't like lock-in, because they're the ones trying to unlock. They aren't the ones doing the lock-in. They're the ones unlocking, when developers, if you separate the two, are the ones who are going, picking, having the fun part of it, going, trying a new thing. So they're chasing a shiny object, and then the ops people are trying to untangle themselves from the remains of that shiny object a few years later. So- >> Aren't we- >> One way of fixing that is to push it all together and make it more DevOps-y. >> Yeah, that's right. >> But that's trying to put all the responsibilities in one place, like more continuous improvement, but... >> Chris, what's your reaction to that? Because you're- >> No, that's exactly what I was going to bring up, yeah, John. And 'cause we keep saying "devs," "dev," and "ops" and I've heard somewhere you can glue those two things together. Heck, you could even include "sec" in the middle of it, and "DevSecOps." So what's interesting about what Adrian's saying though, too, is I think this has a lot to do with how you structure your engineering teams and how you think about development versus operations and security. So I'm building out a team now that very much makes use of, thanks to my brilliant VP of Engineering, a "Team Topologies" approach, which is a very streamlined and product oriented way of thinking about, for example, in engineering, if you think about team structures, you might have people that build the front end, build the middle tier, and the back end, and then you have a product that needs to make use of all three components in some form. So just from getting stuff done, their ability then has to tie to three different groups, versus building a team that's streamlined that ends up having front end, middleware, and backend folks that understand and share standards but are able to uncork the velocity that's required to do that. So if you think about that, and not just from an engineering development perspective, but then you couple in operations as a foundational layer that services them with embedded capabilities, we're putting engineers and operations teams embedded in those streamlined teams so that they can run at the velocity that they need to, they can do continuous integration, they can do continuous deployment. And then we added CS, which is continuously secure, continuous security. So instead of having giant, centralized teams, we're thinking there's a core team, for example, a foundational team, that services platform, makes sure all the trains are running on time, that we're doing what we need to do foundationally to make the environments fully dev and operator and security people functional. But then ultimately, we don't have these big, monolithic teams that get into turf wars. So, to Adrian's point about, the operators don't like to be paned in, well, they actually have a say, ultimately, in how they architect, deploy, manage, plan, build, and operate those systems. But at the same point in time, we're all looking at that problem across those teams and go... Like if one streamline team says, "I really want to go run on Azure, "because I like their services better," the reality is the foundational team has a larger vote versus opinion on whether or not, functionally, we can satisfy all of the requirements of the other team. Now, they may make a fantastic business case and we play rock, paper, scissors, and we do that. Right now, that hasn't really happened. We look at the balance of AWS, we are picking SaaS-y, supercloud vendors that will, by the way, happen to run on three platforms, if we so choose to expand there. So we have a similar interface, similar capability, similar processes, but we've made the choice at LastPass to go all in on AWS currently, with respect to how we deliver our products, for all the reasons we just talked about. But I do think that operations model and how you build your teams is extremely important. >> Yeah, and to that point- >> And has the- (crosstalk) >> The vendors themselves need optionality to the customer, what you're saying. So, "I'm going to go fast, "but I need to have that optionality." I guess the question I have for you guys is, what is today's trade-off? So if the decision point today is... First of all, I love the go-fast model on one cloud. I think that's my favorite when I look at all this, and then with the option, knowing that I'm going to have the option to go to multiple clouds. But everybody wants lock-in on the vendor side. Is that scale, is that data advantage? I mean, so the lock-in's a good question, and then also the trade-offs. What do people have to do today to go on a supercloud journey to have an ideal architecture and taxonomy, and what's the right trade-offs today? >> I think that the- Sorry, just put a comment and then let Lori get a word in, but there's a lot of... A lot of the market here is you're building a product, and that product is a SaaS product, and it needs to run somewhere. And the customers that you're going to... To get the full market, you need to go across multiple suppliers, most people doing AWS and Azure, and then with Google occasionally for some people. But that, I think, has become the pattern that most of the large SaaS platforms that you'd want to build out of, 'cause that's the fast way of getting something that's going to be stable at scale, it's got functionality, you'd have to go invest in building it and running it. Those platforms are just multi-cloud platforms, they're running across them. So Snowflake, for example, has to figure out how to make their stuff work on more than one cloud. I mean, they started on one, but they're going across clouds. And I think that that is just the way it's going to be, because you're not going to get a broad enough view into the market, because there isn't a single... AWS doesn't have 100% of the market. It's maybe a bit more than them, but Azure has got a pretty solid set of markets where it is strong, and it's market by market. So in some areas, different people in some places in the world, and different vertical markets, you'll find different preferences. And if you want to be across all of them with your data product, or whatever your SaaS product is, you're just going to have to figure this out. So in some sense, the supercloud story plays best with those SaaS providers like the Snowflakes of this world, I think. >> Lori? >> Yeah, I think the SaaS product... Identity, whatever, you're going to have specialized. SaaS, superclouds. We already see that emerging. Identity is becoming like this big SaaS play that crosses all clouds. It's not just for one. So you get an evolution going on where, yes, I mean, every vendor who provides some kind of specific functionality is going to have to build out and be multi-cloud, as it were. It's got to work equally across them. And the challenge, then, for them is to make it simple for both operators and, if required, dev. And maybe that's the other lesson moving forward. You can build something that is heaven for ops, but if the developers won't use it, well, then you're not going to get it adopted. But if you make it heaven for the developers, the ops team may not be able to keep it secure, keep everything. So maybe we have to start focusing on both, make it friendly for both, at least. Maybe it won't be the perfect experience, but gee, at least make it usable for both sides of the equation so that everyone can actually work in concert, like Chris was saying. A more comprehensive, cohesive approach to delivery and deployment. >> All right, well, wrapping up here, I want to just get one final comment from you guys, if you don't mind. What does supercloud look like in five years? What's the Nirvana, what's the steady state of supercloud in five to 10 years? Or say 10 years, make it easier. (crosstalk) Five to 10 years. Chris, we'll start with you. >> Wow. >> Supercloud, what's it look like? >> Geez. A magic pane, a single pane of glass. (laughs) >> Yeah, I think- >> Single glass of pain. >> Yeah, a single glass of pain. Thank you. You stole my line. Well, not mine, but that's the one I was going to use. Yeah, I think what is really fascinating is ultimately, to answer that question, I would reflect on market consolidation and market dynamics that happens even in the SaaS space. So we will see SaaS companies combining in focal areas to be able to leverage the positions, let's say, in the identity space that somebody has built to provide a set of compelling services that help abstract that identity problem or that security problem or that instrumentation and observability problem. So take your favorite vendors today. I think what we'll end up seeing is more consolidation in SaaS offerings that run on top of infrastructure of the service offerings to where a supercloud might look like something I described before. You have the combination of your favorite interoperable identity, observability, security, orchestration platforms run across them. They're sold as a stack, whether it be co-branded by an enterprise vendor that sells all of that and manages it for you or not. But I do think that... You talked about, I think you said, "Is this an innovator's dilemma?" No, I think it's an integrator's dilemma, as it has always ultimately been. As soon as you get from Genesis to Bespoke Build to product to then commoditization, the cycle starts anew. And I think we've gotten past commoditization, and we're looking at niche areas. So I see just the evolution, not necessarily a revolution, of what we're dealing with today as we see more consolidation in the marketplace. >> Lori, what's your take? Five years, 10 years, what does supercloud look like? >> Part of me wants to take the pie in the sky unicorn approach. "No, it will be beautiful. "One button, and things will happen," but I've seen this cycle many times before, and that's not going to happen. And I think Chris has got it pretty close to what I see already evolving. Those different kinds of super services, basically. And that's really what we're talking about. We call them SaaS, but they're... X is a service. Everything is a service, and it's really a supercloud that can run anywhere, but it presents a different interface, because, well, it's easier. And I think that's where we're going to go, and that's just going to get more refined. And yes, a lot of consolidation, especially on the observability side, but that's also starting to consume the security side, which is really interesting to watch. So that could be a little different supercloud coming on there that's really focused on specific types of security, at least, that we'll layer across, and then we'll just hook them all together. It's an API first world, and it seems like that's going to be our standard for the next while of how we integrate everything. So superclouds or APIs. >> Awesome. Adrian... Adrian, take us home. >> Yeah, sure. >> What's your- I think, and just picking up on Lori's point that these are web services, meaning that you can just call them from anywhere, they don't have to run everything in one place, they can stitch it together, and that's really meant... It's somewhat composable. So in practice, people are going to be composable. Can they compose their applications on multiple platforms? But I think the interesting thing here is what the vendors do, and what I'm seeing is vendors running software on other vendors. So you have Google building platforms that, then, they will support on AWS and Azure and vice versa. You've got AWS's distro of Kubernetes, which they now give you as a distro so you can run it on another platform. So I think that trend's going to continue, and it's going to be, possibly, you pick, say, an AWS or a Google software stack, but you don't run it all on AWS, you run it in multiple places. Yeah, and then the other thing is the third tier, second, third tier vendors, like, I mean, what's IBM doing? I think in five years time, IBM is going to be a SaaS vendor running on the other clouds. I mean, they're already halfway there. To be a bit more controversial, I guess it's always fun to... Like I don't work for a corporate entity now. No one tells me what I can say. >> Bring it on. >> How long can Google keep losing a billion dollars a quarter? They've either got to figure out how to make money out of this thing, or they'll end up basically being a software stack on another cloud platform as their, likely, actual way they can make money on it. Because you've got to... And maybe Oracle, is that a viable cloud platform that... You've got to get to some level of viability. And I think the second, third tier of vendors in five, 10 years are going to be running on the primary platform. And I think, just the other final thing that's really driving this right now. If you try and place an order right now for a piece of equipment for your data center, key pieces of equipment are a year out. It's like trying to buy a new fridge from like Sub-Zero or something like that. And it's like, it's a year. You got to wait for these things. Any high quality piece of equipment. So you go to deploy in your data center, and it's like, "I can't get stuff in my data center. "Like, the key pieces I need, I can't deploy a whole system. "We didn't get bits and pieces of it." So people are going to be cobbling together, or they're going, "No, this is going to cloud, because the cloud vendors "have a much stronger supply chain to just be able "to give you the system you need. "They've got the capacity." So I think we're going to see some pandemic and supply chain induced forced cloud migrations, just because you can't build stuff anymore outside the- >> We got to accelerate supercloud, 'cause they have the supply. They are the chain. >> That's super smart. That's the benefit of going last. So I'm going to scoop in real quick. I can't believe we can call this "Web3 Supercloud," because none of us said "Web3." Don't forget DAO. (crosstalk) (indistinct) You have blockchain, blockchain superclouds. I mean, there's some very interesting distributed computing stuff there, but we'll have to do- >> (crosstalk) We're going to call that the "Cubeverse." The "Cubeverse" is coming. >> Oh, the "Cubeverse." All right. >> We will be... >> That's very meta. >> In the metaverse, Cubeverse soon. >> "Stupor cloud," perhaps. But anyway, great points, Adrian and Lori. Loved it. >> Chris, great to see you. Adrian, Lori, thanks for coming on. We've known each other for a long time. You guys are part of the cloud-erati, the group that has been in there from day one, and watched it evolve, and you get the scar tissue to prove it, and the experience. So thank you so much for sharing your commentary. We'll roll this up and make it open to everybody as additional content. We'll call this the "outtakes," the longer version. But really appreciate your time, thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thanks so much. >> Okay, we'll be back with more "Supercloud 22" right after this. (bright upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome everyone to this CUBE coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. We have a lot going on at this year's re:Invent with over 100 guests on the program, and I'm excited to welcome two of those guests here with me right now. We are joined by Ralph Munsen, the Chief Information Officer at Warner Music Group and Atif Khan, the CTO of Alkira and founder of Alkira as well. Gentlemen, welcome to the program. >> Thank you so much, Lisa. So glad to be here with you. >> Good to be here. >> Yeah. Good old fashioned Zoom is become our best friend in the last 22 months or so I'm losing count. Atif, I'd like to start with you. I know Alkira has been on the key before, but it's been a while and you guys are a relatively young company. Give the audience an overview of Alkira and what it is that you deliver. >> Absolutely, Lisa. So we started back in may of 2018, and the Cloud networking space, multicloud networking. And we came out of stealth mode back in April of 2020, and launched the company. In fact, one of our first events coming out of stealth mode was a Cuban interview back in April of 2020. So here at Telecare, what we are doing is we are building a Cloud platform, which allows customers to build a common network across multiple Clouds with built-in network and security services, with the policy and management layer on top full end to end visibility and governance capabilities. And all of this is delivered as a service and consumed as a service as well. And I'm very glad to be here with Ralph, who is from Warner Music Group and is one of our marquee customers. So I'll let Ralph introduce himself, and tell us a bit more about Alkira and WMTS Cloud journey. >> That sounds great. Ralph, why don't you start by giving the audience? I'm sure everyone knows Warner Music Group, but in case there's anyone out there that might not. Give us a little bit of a background. >> Yeah, so the Warner Music Group has been around since 1950 and 1940 even it had its roots at Hollywood and out of Warner Brothers Pictures, Today, say global company in 79 countries we operated. If the 100 employees and we have two major divisions, we have our era recorded music division, which has the labels people commonly turn to Atlantic records, Warner brothers records, and so forth. And then we have our publishing division, which is more a chapel, which is where our songwriters live. And of course we have some singer songwriters that are on both sides of our business. But now currently people may know our artists. We have ed Sheeran, Bruno Mars, Coldplay, Cardi B, Blake Shelton and I could go on and on. But exciting, great year, we're having one of our best years ever. And I'm so glad to be here and partnering with an Alkira. >> Excellent. I love all of those artists that you mentioned. Fantastic. So let's talk a little bit now Ralph about the backstory. Talk to me about the IT infrastructure at Warner Music Group, what you had there and some of the challenges that you had that you came to Alkira to solve. >> Yeah, well initially when I took over about five years ago now, we were very much a data center based business with traditional networking and IT functions. Additionally with our foreign affiliates, IT was sort of decentralized in the sense that a lot of the networking and data center components were left to regions. And so while we operated globally, we didn't really operate globally, at Warner among our affiliates. So one of the challenges was how do we get out of the data center? Cloud was new. One of the big things that were coming with big data, which is absolutely right for moving, going straight to the Cloud, especially if you don't have anything on-prem and how do we rationalize all of these different locations and conduct all the M&A work we've been doing? So it was quite a challenge, really. At the end, we wanted to have one view of the network, and Alkira. I looked at many a company and Alkira seemed the best to provide that to us. So. >> Well, talk to me a little bit more about why Alkira, because as Atif was saying, they're very young. What came out of stealth mode during the pandemic Warner Music Group, being around since the 40s and 50s, the legacy institution, a great brand. What made you take a risk on such an early stage startup? >> Quite frankly, there was nothing in the space (chuckles) at the time you loved, there were companies that had components of it, of what Alkira does, which is basically network orchestration allowing us to use existing components. And nobody has the whole package, especially incorporating security. So, we figured why not take, take a chance? There's no, it won't hurt you no harm. And if anything is successful, it will give us a great ability to manage our network, much more efficiently taking things that took days down to hours and being able to do it much more efficiently with much fewer staff, as opposed to hiring a lot more because when you orchestrate all the components that are underneath, obviously it requires more bodies, more resources. >> Right. That efficiency and cost optimization is key there. Atif I have to ask you, talk to me about, this is only a few years ago, the gap in the market that you and your brothers saw a few years ago, when you founded the company, because as Rob was saying, there was nobody else in the market at the time that could do what you're doing. >> Yeah, absolutely. So Lisa, as you know, myself and Amir, we were also a part of the founding team of Viptela, which was the SD-WAN Company. So back in the day when we did SD-WAN, the requirement was to connect sites together. So if you go back like 5, 10, 5, 7, 10 years ago, networking was done to connect sites together, which could be remote sites, data centers, sites to data centers, all of that together. But fast forward, a few more years with the adoption of Cloud, requirements changed from the networking perspective. So now your network is not just connecting sites together, but most of the traffic now is from sites or users, which could be sitting anywhere. If you look at, what's going on? in the pandemic people are working from all across the globe. They are not just sitting in campuses or sites. So traffic patterns are from sites or users mostly to the Cloud or SaaS applications. So now networks also need to evolve and they need to be built inside the Cloud rather than from outside or connecting into the Cloud. So Cloud access is one capability, but building a network inside the Cloud becomes a requirement. And secondly, now it's not just only about connectivity because security becomes even more important because your security perimeter is changing as well. So securing all these Cloud networks becomes very, very complicated. And now as Ralph can tell you, majority of the enterprises have a multicloud strategy and each Cloud is done differently. So the moment you bring in multiple Clouds, multiple regions across the globe, it becomes so complicated for enterprises to build and manage. They need something, or a platform which makes it easy, gives them one way of doing networking, building a common network across whether you're connecting multiple Clouds or Clouds to your on-prem locations or Clouds to internet or sites to internet. So that's where we saw this gap and we decided to build Alkira to tackle this problem. >> Got it. So Rob, let's talk now about what you've implemented as a team was saying we live in this, in this work from anywhere hybrid multicloud world. Talk to us about Warner, what you implemented and maybe a little bit about your multicloud strategy, if you've got one. >> Ralph: Yeah. So over the last five years, Warner has migrated entirely into Cloud. And to this point before it's multicloud, we're mainly in AWS, but we do have some pleasure and some Google Cloud. And with that, I was telling Atif and Amir. It was interesting and they built a Cloud on site. They totally forgot about the networking aspect. So (laughs), you have ease of use for services and servers inside (indistinct) cloud, but networking is not really present, not to mention when it was built out, it wasn't made to go to competing Clouds. So most companies are facing this problem. How do you treat these environments as a single holistic environment? How do you turn things up, turn things down? How do you secure it, When every single one is different habits, selling unique ways of doing things? So that really was, how we ended up looking for an out Alkira, because I just kept looking at the costs and the profit print grow and grow and grow. And the complexity to a (indistinct) before is growing exponential. One change in one thing would lead to two changes to another. If you add another Cloud or you add another point on the network, you've got exponential growth and complexity, complexity, you have to deal with. So one stop shop. (chuckles) >> One stop shop and reducing that complexity. Talk to me about reducing complexity, and what you're accomplishing there. Especially, in the last year and a half as things have been so dynamic, shall we say? (chuckles) >> Yeah, well, I will say this. It was turnkey for the most part. It took a matter of months as opposed to years, because out of the box, there was a lot of integrations with the major network of players. So as of right now, you can buy firewalls, routing, VPC, things like this, they all exist, but they're not orchestrated together. Right? And then you have policies and security, again not orchestrating a different set of tools. So it really only took us two to three months to get it up and running, I acts, I just had a conversation (chuckles) with them when we were going to finish. So I think we'll be finishing this up completely in January and sometime. So, I was pretty sure. >> LISA: That's fantastic. So really, >> Yeah. >> Sorry Relaph fast time to market there with getting things implemented. Talk to me about from a business outcome perspective, you are CIO, what are some of the outcomes? That this technology is enabling you to deliver back to the business? >> Yeah, it really, the number 1, 2 big ones come to mind. One being able to provide them a secure enterprise. I know when there is the change it's made uniforms for our network without, some of older something's being forgotten about. So that's number one, security is big. You can imagine a company like more ever marquee brands, all brands, any company of marquee brands are targets today. That's number one. Number two is our time to market for eminent. So when we buy a company the time it takes us to get them to be completely part of Warner and therefore start realizing the business case and benefits sort of reasonably bought. Bought the company to begin with. So, we're buying a lot more and we're turning them up and turning those business cases up faster. But usually those cases would say things like six months to a year to integrate with us, and then we can unlock the set of benefits. Now it's more like, two to three months and you start to be able to lock the benefits sooner. And of course, those are different than a case by case basis, but that's. >> Sure, but significantly faster there, you're looking at a two to three X multiplier there, as you talked about. >> Ralph: right. >> Now, you mentioned multicloud Ralph. So here we are at re:Invent. I imagine part of your AWS as part of your Cloud infrastructure and they're a technology partner of ALkira's. >> Ralph: Correct. Yeah. So AWS is actually our biggest Cloud provider of the three, and yeah (laugh) they're their partner without cure. So Good. >> And Atif then you, Alkira's technology partner of AWS, correct? >> Yeas. Alkira is a technology partner of AWS, we are also available on AWS marketplace. So customers can consume, AlKira's platform from AWS marketplace as well. >> But given the fact that so many businesses in every industry are multicloud, I assume that you work with all the Cloud vendors. Atif Yeah? >> Absolutely. So our platform runs inside of the Cloud and runs in AWS is a Cloud as well. And from there it connects to multiple Clouds. So if customers need to connect to Azure or AWS from there or Oracle Cloud or any other Cloud, for that matter, they can connect from our platform and our platform is it scales horizontally. So as customers needs scale, it scales as well. And one of the key advantages is, it's consumed as a service. So there's no software to download or hardware to run for or to acquire for any of the customers. It's a software solution and it's consumed as a service. >> Got it. Ralph one on one more question for you before we wrap things up here, want to get your recommendations for IT Executives, CEOs, who might be in a similar situation to you, whether or not they are with a legacy organization, what are some of your recommendations that you say you need to be looking at a, B and C? >> Yeah, I would primarily say really need to be looking at some of these newer technologies that can help speed up, people, especially in this case to transition to the Cloud and that planning ahead of time, especially goal-setting, I find to be it's any of these places, providers is absolutely Paramount, because you can, if you don't make your own (indistinct) take that step forward and you can end up with shelter. So I make sure that it's very important that when you commit to that, you commit fully, you plan it out and you make sure you actually use it to get the benefits. One of my tech key is software. So. (chuckles) (Lisa Laughing) I'm a bit of it so. >> Well, you've been there and It costs a lot of money and it doesn't do any good. It doesn't move the business forward. And in this day and age, there is a competitor right behind the rear view mirror who might be smaller, more nimble, and more agile, who can take your place easily. >> Absolutely. >> If the organization isn't willing to take the risks and commit, as you said, Atif last question over for you, where are the customers go to learn more? I know you are at re:Invent your booth 1628, but what do you recommend folks go attendees of the event, as well as just other prospects to go to learn more about what you guys are delivering for companies like Warner Music Group. >> So if you're at re:Invent, please stop by our booth. And one of our Cloud specialists will give you a demo as well. So it's a very quick demo and you'll see, how we are reinventing networking for the Cloud narrow. You can also go to our website and you'll find a lot of information on our website. You can request a demo there as well. So look forward to seeing most of you at our booth and those who are not attending in person, please go visit our website. >> Lisa: Reinventing Networking. I like your play on words. They are Atif very appropriate. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me today talking about Alkira, Warner Music Group, what you guys are doing together and how this new early stage technology is really quite transformative. We appreciate your insights. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much. >> For Ralph Munsen and Atif Khan, I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. Thanks for watching. (soft techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of splunk.com 2021 virtual. We're here live in the Splunk studios. We're all here gettin all the action, all the stories. Garth Fort, senior vice president, Chief Product Officer at Splunk is here with me. CUBE alumni. Great to see you. Last time I saw you, we were at AWS now here at Splunk. Congratulations on the new role. >> Thank you. Great to see you again. >> Great keynote and great team. Congratulations. >> Thank you. Thank you. It's a lot of fun. >> So let's get into the keynote a little bit on the product. You're the Chief Product Officer. We interviewed Shawn Bice, who's also working with you as well. He's your boss. Talk about the, the next level, cause you're seeing some new enhancements. Let's get to the news first. Talk about the new enhancements. >> Yeah, this was actually a really fun keynote for me. So I think there was a lot of great stuff that came out of the rest of it. But I had the honor to actually showcase a lot of the product innovation, you know, since we did .conf last year, we've actually closed four different acquisitions. We shipped 43 major releases and we've done hundreds of small enhancements, like we're shipping code in the cloud every six weeks and we're shipping new versions twice a year for our Splunk Enterprise customers. And so this was kind of like if you've seen that movie Sophie's Choice, you know, where you have to pick one of your children, like this was a really hard, hard thing to pick. Cause we only had about 25 minutes, but we did like four demos that I think landed really well. The first was what we call ingest actions and you know, there's customers that are using, they start small with gigabytes and they go to terabytes and up to petabytes of data per day. And so they wanted tools that allow them to kind of modify filter and then route data to different sort of parts of their infrastructure. So that was the first demo. We did another demo on our, our visual playbook editor for SOAR, which has improved quite a bit. You know, a lot of the analysts that are in the, in the, in the SOC trying to figure out how to automate responses and reduce sort of time to resolution, like they're not Python experts. And so having a visual playbook editor that lets them drag and drop and sort of with a few simple gestures create complex playbooks was pretty cool. We showed some new capabilities in our APM tool. Last year, we announced we acquired a company called Plumbr, which has expertise in basically like code level analysis and, and we're calling it "Always On" profiling. So we, we did that demo and gosh, we did one more, four, but four total demos. I think, you know, people were really happy to see, you know, the thing that we really tried to do was ground all of our sort of like tech talk and stuff that was like real and today, like this is not some futuristic vision. I mean, Shawn did lay out some, some great visions, visionary kind of pillars. But, what we showed in the keynote was I it's all shipping code. >> I mean, there's plenty of head room in this market when it comes to data as value and data in motion, all these things. But we were talking before you came on camera earlier in the morning about actually how good Splunk product and broad and deep the product portfolio as well. >> Garth: Yeah. >> I mean, it's, I mean, it's not a utility and a tooling, it's a platform with tools and utilities. >> Garth: Yeah >> It's a fully blown out platform. >> Yeah. Yeah. It is a platform and, and, you know, it's, it's one that's quite interesting. I've had the pleasure to meet a couple of big customers and it's kind of amazing, like what they do with Splunk. Like I was meeting with a large telco on the east coast and you know, they actually, for their set top boxes, they actually have to figure out in real time, which ads to display and the only tool they could find to process 15 million events in real time, to decide what ad to display, was Splunk. So that was, that was like really cool to hear. Like we never set out to be like an ad tech kind of platform and yet we're the only tool that operates at that level of scale and that kind of data. >> You know, it's funny, Doug Merritt mentioned this in my interview with him earlier today about, you know, and he wasn't shy about it, which was great. He was like, we're an enabling platform. We don't have to be experts in all these vertical industries >> Garth: Yep >> because AI takes care of that. That's where the machine learning >> Garth: Yeah >> and the applications get built. So others are trying to build fully vertically integrated stacks into these verticals when in reality they don't have to, if they don't want it. >> Yeah, and Splunk's kind of, it's quite interesting when you look across our top 100 customers, you know, Doug talks about like the, you know, 92 of the fortune 100 are kind of using Splunk today, but the diversity across industries and, you know, we have government agencies, we have, you know, you name the retail or the vertical, you know, we've got really big customers, they're using Splunk. And the other thing that I kind of, I was excited about, we announced the last demo I forgot was TruSTAR integration with Enterprise Security. That's pretty cool. We're calling that Splunk Threat Intelligence. And so That was really fun and we only acquired, we closed the acquisition to TruSTAR in May, but the good news is they've been a partner with us like for 18 months before we actually bought em. And so they'd already done a lot of the work to integrate. And so they had a running start in that regard, But other, one other one that was kind of a, it was a small thing. I didn't get to demo it, but we talked about the, the content pack for application performance monitoring. And so, you know, in some ways we compete in the APM level, but in many ways there's a ton of great APM vendors out there that customers are using. But what they wanted us to do was like, hey, if I'm using APM for that one app, I still want to get data out of that and into Splunk because Splunk ends up being like the core repository for observability, security, IT ops, Dev Sec Ops, et cetera. It's kind of like where the truth, the operational truth of how your systems works, lives in Splunk. >> It's so funny. The Splunk business model has actually been replicated. They call it data lake, whatever you want to call it. People are bringing up all these different metaphors. But at the end of the day, if you guys can create a value proposition where you can have data just be, you know, stored and dumped and dumped into whatever they call it stored in a way >> Garth: We call it ingest >> Ingested, ingested. >> Garth: Not dumped. >> Data dump. >> Garth: It's ingested. >> Well, I mean, well you given me a plan, but you don't have to do a lot of work to store just, okay, we can only get to it later, >> Garth: Yep. >> But let the machines take over >> Garth: Yep. >> With the machine learning. I totally get that. Now, as a pro, as a product leader, I have to ask you your, your mindset around optimization. What do you optimize for? Because a lot of times these use cases are emerging. They just pop out of nowhere. It's a net new use case that you want to operationalize. So balancing the headroom >> Yep. >> Or not to foreclose those new opportunities for customers. How are customers deciding what's important to them? How do you, because you're trying to read the tea leaves for the future >> Garth: A little bit, yeah. >> and then go, okay, what do our customers need, but you don't want to foreclose anything. How do you think about product strategy around that? >> There's a ton of opportunity to interact with customers. We have this thing called the Customer Advisory Board. We run, I think, four of them and we run a monthly. And so we got an opportunity to kind of get that anecdotal data and the direct contact. We also have a portal called ideas.splunk.com where customers can come tell us what they want us to build next. And we look at that every month, you know, and there's no way that we could ever build everything that they're asking us to, but we look at that monthly and we use it in sort of our sprint planning to decide where we're going to prioritize engineering resources. And it's just, it's kind of like customers say the darndest things, right? Sometimes they ask us for stuff and we never imagined building it in a million years, >> John: Yeah. >> Like that use case around ads on the set top box, but it's, it's kind of a fun place to be like, we, we just, before this event, we kind of laid out internally what, you know, Shawn and I kind of put together this doc, actually Shawn wrote the bulk of it, but it was about sort of what do we think? Where, where can we take Splunk to the next three to five years? And we talked about these, we referred to them as waves of innovation. Cause you know, like when you think about waves, there's multiple waves that are heading towards the beach >> John: Yeah. >> in parallel, right? It's not like a series of phases that are going to be serialized. It's about making a set of investments. that'll kind of land over time. And, and the first wave is really about, you know, what I would say is sort of, you know, really delivering on the promise of Splunk and some of that's around integration, single sign-on things about like making all of the Splunk Splunk products work together more easily. We've talked a lot in the Q and a about like edge and hybrid. And that's really where our customers are. If you watch the Koby Avital's sort of customer keynote, you know, Walmart by necessity, given their geographic breadth and the customers they serve has to have their own infrastructure. They use Google, they use Azure and they have this abstraction layer that Koby's team has built on top. And they use Splunk to manage kind of, operate basically all of their infrastructure across those three clouds. So that's the hybrid edge scenario. We were thinking a lot about, you mentioned data lakes. You know, if you go back to 2002, when Splunk was founded, you know, the thing we were trying to do is help people make sense of log files. But now if you talk to customers that are moving to cloud, everybody's building a data lake and there's like billions of objects flowing into millions of these S3 buckets all over the place. And we're kind of trying to think about, hey, is there an opportunity for us to point our indexing and analytics capability against structured and unstructured data and those data lakes. So that that'll be something we're going to >> Yeah. >> at least start prototyping pretty soon. And then lastly, machine learning, you know, I'd say, you know, to use a baseball metaphor, like in terms of like how we apply machine learning, we're like in the bottom of the second inning, >> Yeah. >> you know, we've been doing it for a number of years, but there's so much more. >> There's so, I mean, machine learning is only as good as the data you put into the machine learning. >> Exactly, exactly. >> And so if you have, if you have gap in the data, the machine learning is going to have gaps in it. >> Yeah. And we have, we announced a feature today called auto detect. And I won't go into the gory details, but effectively what it does is it runs a real-time analytics job over whatever metrics you want to look at and you can do what I would consider more statistics versus machine learning. You can say, hey, if in a 10 minute period, like, you know, we see more errors than we see on average over the last week, throw an alert so I can go investigate and take a look. Imagine if you didn't have to figure out what the right thresholds were, if we could just watch those metrics for you and automatically understand the seasonality, the timing, is it a weekly thing? Is it a monthly thing? And then like tell you like use machine learning to do the anomaly detection, but do it in a way that's more intelligent than just the static threshold. >> Yeah. >> And so I think you'll see things like auto detect, which we announced this week will evolve to take advantage of machine learning kind of under the covers, if you will. >> Yeah. It was interesting with cloud scale and the data velocity, automations become super important. >> Oh yeah. >> You don't have a lot of new disciplines emerge, like explainable AI is hot right now. So you got, the puck is coming. You can see where the puck is going. >> Yeah >> And that is automation at the app edge or the application layer where the data has got to be free-flowing or addressable. >> Garth: Yeah. >> This is something that is being talked about. And we talked about data divide with, with Chris earlier about the policy side of things. And now data is part of everything. It's part of the apps. >> Garth: Yeah. >> It's not just stored stuff. So it's always in flight. It should be addressable. This is what people want. What do you think about all of that? >> No, I think it's great. I actually just can I, I'll quote from Steve Schmidt in, in sort of the keynote, he said, look like security at the end of the day is a human problem, but it kind of manifests itself through data. And so being able to understand what's happening in the data will tell you, like, is there a bad actor, like wreaking havoc inside of my systems? And like, you can use that, the data trail if you will, of the bad actor to chase them down and sort of isolate em. >> The digital footprints, if you will, looking at a trail. >> Yeah. >> All right, what's the coolest thing that you like right now, when you look at the treasure trove of, of a value, as you look at it, and this is a range of value, Splunk, Splunk has had customers come in with, with the early product, but they keep the customers and they always do new things and they operationalize it >> Garth: Yep. >> and another new thing comes, they operationalize it. What's the next new thing that's coming, that's the next big thing. >> Dude that is like asking me which one of my daughters do I love the most, like that is so unfair. (laughing) I'm not going to answer that one. Next question please. >> Okay. All right. Okay. What's your goals for the next year or two? >> Yeah, so I just kind of finished roughly my first 100 days and it's been great to, you know, I had a whole plan, 30, 60, 90, and I had a bunch of stuff I wanted to do. Like I'm really hoping, sort of, we get past this current kind of COVID scare and we get to back to normal. Cause I'm really looking forward to getting back on the road and sort of meeting with customers, you know, you can meet over Zoom and that's great, but what I've learned over time, you know, I used to go, I'd fly to Wichita, Kansas and actually go sit down with the operators like at their desk and watch how they use my tools. And that actually teaches you. Like you, you come up with things when you see, you know, your product in the hands of your customer, that you don't get from like a CAB meeting or from a Zoom call, you know? >> John: Yeah, yeah. >> And so being able to visit customers where they live, where they work and kind of like understand what we can do to make their lives better. Like that's going to, I'm actually really excited to gettin back to travel. >> If you could give advice to CTO, CISO, or CIO or a practitioner out there who are, who is who's sitting at their virtual desk or their physical desk thinking, okay, the pandemic, were coming through the pandemic. I want to come out with a growth strategy, with a plan that's going to be expansive, not restrictive. The pandemic has shown what's what works, what doesn't work. >> Garth: Sure. >> So it's going to be some projects that might not get renewed, but there's doubling down on, certainly with cloud scale. What would advice would you give that person when they start thinking about, okay, I got to get my architecture right. >> Yeah. >> I got to get my playbooks in place. I got to get my people aligned. >> Yeah >> What's what do you see as a best practice for kind of the mindset to actual implementation of data, managing the data? >> Yeah, and again, I'm, I'm, this is not an original Garth thought. It actually came from one of our customers. You know, the, I think we all, like you think back to March and April of 2020 as this thing was really getting real. Everybody moved as fast as they could to either scale up or scale scaled on operations. If you were in travel and hospitality, you know, that was, you know, you had to figure how to scale down quickly and like what you could shut down safely. If you were like in the food delivery business, you had to figure out how you could scale up, like Chipotle hit two, what is it? $2 billion run rate on delivery last year. And so people scrambled as fast as they could to sort of adapt to this new world. And I think we're all coming to the realization that as we sort of exit and get back to some sense of new normal, there's a lot of what we're doing today that's going to persist. Like, I think we're going to have like flexible rules. I don't think everybody's going to want to come back into the office. And so I think, I think the thing to do is you think about returning to whatever this new normal looks like is like, what did we learn that was good. And like the pandemic had a silver lining for folks in many ways. And it sucked for a lot. I'm not saying it was a good thing, but you know, there were things that we did to adapt that I think actually made like the workplace, like stronger and better. And, and sort of. >> It showed that data's important, internet is important. Didn't break, the internet didn't break. >> Garth: Correct. >> Zoom was amazing. And the teleconferencing with other tools. >> But that's kind of, just to sort of like, what did you learn over the last 18 months that you're going to take for it into the next 18 years? You know what I mean? Cause there was a lot of good and I think people were creative and they figured out like how to adapt super quickly and take the best of the pandemic and turn it into like a better place to work. >> Hybrid, hybrid events, hybrid workforce, hybrid workflows. What's what's your vision on Splunk as a tier one enterprise? Because a lot of the news that I'm seeing that's, that's the tell sign to me in terms of this next growth wave is big SI deals, Accenture and others are yours working with and you still got the other Partnerverse going. You have the ecosystems emerging. >> Garth: Yep. >> That's a good, that means your product's enabling people to make money. >> Garth: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> And that's a good thing. >> Yeah, BlueVoyant was a great example in the keynote yesterday and they, you know, they've really, they've kind of figured out how, you know, most of their customers, they serve customers in heavily regulated industries kind of, and you know, those customers actually want their data in a Splunk tenant that they own and control and they want to have that secure boundary around that. But BlueVoyant's figured out how they can come in and say, hey, I'm going to take care of the heavy lifting of the day-to-day operations, the monitoring of that environment with the security. So, so BlueVoyant has done a great job sort of pivoting and figuring out how they can add value to customers and do, you know, because they they're managing not just one Splunk instance, but they're managing 100s of Splunk cloud instances. And so they've got best practices and automation that they can play across their entire client base. And I think you're going to see a lot more of that. And, and Teresa's just, Teresa is just, she loves Partners, absolutely loves Partners. And that was just obvious. You could, you could hear it in her voice. You could see it in her body language, you know, when she talked about Partnerverse. So I think you'll see us start to really get a lot more serious. Cause as big as Splunk is like our pro serve and support teams are not going to scale for the next 10,000, 100,000 Splunk customers. And we really need to like really think about how we use Partners. >> There's a real growth wave. And I, and I love the multiples wave in parallel because I think that's what everyone's consensus on. So I have to ask you as a final question, what's your takeaway? Obviously, there's been a virtual studio here where all the Splunk executives and, and, and customers and partners are here. TheCUBE's here doing all the presentations, live by the way. It was awesome. What would you say the takeaway is for this .conf, for the people watching and consuming all the content online? A lot of asynchronous consumption would be happening. >> Sure. >> What's your takeaway from this year's Splunk .conf? >> You know, I, it's hard cause you know, you get so close to it and we've rehearsed this thing so many times, you know, the feedback that I got and if you look at Twitter and you look at my Slack and everything else, like this felt like a conf that was like kind of like a really genuine, almost like a Splunk two dot O. But it's sort of true to the roots of what Splunk was true to the product reality. I mean, you know, I was really careful with my team and to avoid any whiff of vaporware, like what were, what we wanted to show was like, look, this is Splunk, we're acquiring companies, you know, 43 major releases, you know, 100s of small ones. Like we're continuing to innovate on your behalf as fast as we can. And hopefully this is the last virtual conf. But even when we go back, like there was so much good about the way we did this this week, that, you know, when we, when we broke yesterday on the keynote and we were sitting around with the crew and it kind of looking at that stage and everything, we were like, wow, there is a lot of this that we want to bring to an in-person event as well. Cause so for those that want to travel and come sit in the room with us, we're super excited to do that as soon as we can. But, but then, you know, there may be 25, 50, 100,000 that don't want to travel, but can access us via this virtual event. >> It's like a time. It's a moment in time that becomes a timeless moment. That could be, >> Wow, did you make that up right now? >> that could be an NFT. >> Yeah >> We can make a global cryptocurrency. Garth, great to see you. Of course I made it up right then. So, great to see you. >> Air bump, air bump? Okay, good. >> Okay. Garth Fort, senior vice president, Chief Product Officer. In theCUBE here, we're live on site at Splunk Studio for the .conf virtual event. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. >> All right. Thank you guys. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's, ongoing coverage of VMworld 2021. My name is Dave Volante. You know, I've been following VMware since the early days. And what is the one of, one of the most interesting stories in the history of enterprise tech? One of the hallmarks of VMware over the course of its long history has been a strong number two leader, an individual who looked after operations or advanced corporate development and enhanced, if you will, expanded the eyes, the ears, the heart, and the mind of the CEO. You know, at one point last decade, VMware actually had four co presidents. Some of the most accomplished individuals in Silicon valley have held this role. And it's our pleasure to welcome in VMware's newest president, Sumit Dhawan. Sumit welcome back to the cube, good to see you. >> Thank you, Dave. Great to be here. >> Okay, so you've been in this role for just over a hundred days after a 16 month stint as chief customer officer. So that's certainly a nice dovetail into your new role as president, but give us an overview of your new role here at VMware. What are your priorities? What are the key areas of focus? You know, SAS transformation, you got a lot going on, share with us. >> Yeah. You know, I think the main focus for me is to make sure our company's priorities are aligned with our customers. And in the first hundred days, my first objective was to spend as much time as possible with customers because it's, it's a source of learning for us. It's, it's clear speaking with customers, what their challenges are and what we ought to be doing to assist them in addressing those challenges. So I, really my responsibility, obviously I've got all the operations part of the business, which enable our customers to be successful, starting from, you know, ensuring that we chart the right path for them in success, in the sales organization, all the way to making sure that they are successful with the adoption of our solutions, with our services and support organizations. So, so spending time with the customers has been critical. And Dave, what I've learned is that customers are looking for VMware, just like they have in the past, be this trusted foundation for all of their innovation in the prior era pre cloud era to their data center and mobility technologies take that forward into the multicloud era, which is where now is where they're building new applications, taking their existing applications to the power of the cloud and across multiple clouds. And our objective is to make sure we keep providing that trusted foundation for them, for the new multi-cloud era. And I'm excited about it. >> Yeah, me too. Let's do it. We're going to dig into that a little bit. So you're obviously spending time getting close to the customers, of course, remotely, for the most part, some of those big themes you've mentioned, but I'd like to sort of peel the onion on that. Maybe some of the challenges that your customers are facing in terms of actually bringing forth that multi-cloud vision and specifically what's your approach to solving those challenges. >> Yeah. So, you know, as we all know, customers start out with this adopt started out adoption of the cloud. They started building some applications on the cloud. A lot of times these were the applications that were built, which were customer facing. And there was this cloud first thinking at that point of time. But soon the customers have realized and now customers have realized that power of building new innovation doesn't just lie in one cloud because there are certain capabilities like AI and ML that maybe they get from a cloud like Google. There are certain capabilities that may be storage and compute where maybe they prefer AWS productivity and identity maybe coming from Microsoft cloud. So the power comes in by adopting all of these services across cloud. It has lots of benefits, innovation at the fastest possible speed for our customers. Secondly, it helps customers not necessarily risk locking in and helps manage them, manage their costs. But in this multicloud world, it's a fairly complicated, and it can get very complex. Think about all the security networking developer experience control. Now this is where our customers need freedom and yet control to be able to have this multicloud environment managed and enabled for developer experience as best as possible. That's the problem we are committed to solving, and our solution and we call that across cloud services. >> I want to stay on this for a minute because I've been talking about multi-cloud this abstraction layer. This is really your opportunity on the cube last year with John farrier. You said the following quote multicloud doesn't mean you're running two different architectures on two different clouds. That's not multicloud. Multicloud means running a singular architecture on multiple clouds. Now Sumit, you're a technologist at the core. What you described is not trivial, it's a huge technical challenge. Can you talk about what VMware has to do to make that single architecture a reality? >> That's exactly the challenge team because you can adopt multiple clouds, but if you're doing so with different architectures, you're not getting the benefits of the velocity of building new applications fast, security is done in a unified fashion operations, at scale. To me, I would call that not a smart path to multi multiple clouds. The smart path to multiple cloud would be through a unified experience for developers, a control layer, which helps you orchestrate your applications in a unified fashion for your operators and security done in an, in a unified or a consistent fashion so that you know that you have the right governance. That's what I consider the smart path to multicloud. Doing any other way would actually be not fruitful. And that's what customers have had to face with without a solution like VMs. So we provide, that's what I call the smart path to multicloud. >> All right. So don't hate me for this, but I want to, I want to push on this and get your point of view on record if I can, because it's an important topic and you've intimated that choosing a single cloud provider, it's, it's problematic for customers, it's it, it limits the customers flexibility and choice. And I want to unpack that a bit and if I'm mischaracterizing your view, please correct me, but, but I want to understand why this is limiting. For example, if I go to AWS, I got access to primitives and API APIs. I got a range of compute storage, networking options, dozens of databases, open source, I get VMware cloud and AWS. So explain why this is a constraint for a customer. >> Yeah, it's a, it's a constraint for really three major reasons. Number one, different services are available across cloud that provide different capabilities. Sure, AWS provides a very rich set of primitives. So does Azure. So does Google. And in certain cases, when you're dealing with data sovereignty requirements across different countries, so to those clouds. So the, but if you are really looking for the best possible solution for AI and ML that may or may not sit in the cloud that you may have preferred for your compute and storage. If you're looking for identity solutions that integrate really well with the productivity applications that you have, that may not be the same cloud that you may have booked picked for AI and ML. You don't need to make compromises. In fact, developers don't want to make those compromises, but because by making those compromises, you're increasing your cost and lowering their customer experience. That's the power of leveraging innovation across cloud. Secondly, think about now, if you just build all your applications, buy services from one cloud and your entire business gets dependent on it. If there's risk there's cost. And that's why customers are telling us that they have made a decision for multicloud. In fact, we did a recent study Dave, and in the recent study, we found out that 73% of our customers are already running their applications on multi-cloud. If this is no longer a something of a future it's here today, they're just facing these challenges today with multicloud. >> And am I right? That there they're running applications on multiple clouds, but it's your job and your challenge now, to be able to abstract the underlying complexity of those multiple clouds and make it appear as one, I'm assuming that's not fully happening today, maybe that's an understatement, but that is your opportunity and your customer's opportunity, is that a fair statement? >> That's exactly our mission. We are providing our customers that foundation so that they can enable multicloud and drive their own innovation agenda at the pace that they want to. We did that in the past for data center technologies or mobile devices. Remember mobile devices come in different operating systems, different formats and data centers, hardware from servers, storage and network has always come in different flavors. We have abstracted that complexity for our customers in the past to deliver innovation three cloud, we're bringing the same value proposition. Now in the world of multicloud, obviously the applications have changed. They're no longer traditional applications. Now they are more and more cloud native applications. So we have solutions for cloud native enterprise applications that continue to be the heartbeat of more, more, most customers. We have solutions for traditional enterprise applications and the new and emerging edge native applications because of just now people and workforce being anywhere. We have solutions for providing security and providing additional functions for edge native applications. So that's what we are bringing to our customers as a platform that abstracts this complexity of multicloud. >> So much to talk to you about because you're right, the application is, are evolving. It's not just the standard SAP windows, et cetera. There's cloud native applications, there's data intensive applications. But, but I want to ask you, so in order for you to achieve that, you have to be able to exploit those primitives that we were talking about, whether it's AWS or Google Azure, Alibaba, you've got to understand as engineers, how to take advantage of whatever the cloud provider is offering, and then hide that complexity from the customer, and then build that, that layer and to do that it, to accommodate all these new applications. Not only do you have to have traditional, you have to have processor optionality, you got edge, you see arm coming in. If my understanding is, that's a big part of what project Monterrey is all about is offering that optionality around different workloads. Can you, can we dig into that a little bit? >> Yeah. So I think first of all, the people under appreciated or under estimate what it would be required for making sure that the applicant, the complexity of all of these different cloud platforms is, is, you know, abstracted by VMware solution. So customers don't have to think about, you know, what are the-- what is the different storage or server or primitives that are needed on Azure versus AWS? All of that gets hidden from customers in a simplified fashion, so with our solution, okay. So, and yet at the same time, there's no compromise that customers have. They can still leverage all the native primitives and services that the different cloud providers are using seamlessly. So that's very important. Now, in addition, what we are doing is we are continually making sure our platform can run the next generation of applications we are continually innovating to do so. And that's where project Monterey comes in. As customers build new applications, when they want to build those new applications and run emerging services that are highly sort of compute centric or network centric, or are providing rich amount of data. This is where project Monterey comes in. It enables our customers to, A, take all of the traditional applications onto VMware cloud, run it on across any cloud. And then B, when they are trying to expand those capabilities into the applications, the project Monterey enables them to do so by enabling new capabilities being powered in to the VMware cloud foundation. >> Yeah. So essentially you're, you're, you're building what I would look at as a new type of cloud that, that comprises on prem connections to public, to public cloud, across public clouds. And then out to the edge, you've talked a lot about telco, the specialized needs of the telco. Clearly there's different processing requirements. You've talked about 5G where we might not always have connectivity out there. Developers need to be able to write code for that edge. So it's an entirely new world you're essentially building out your own cloud. So you have to build in all that optionality all the tools. And at the same time, if, if just like the big cloud providers, you have to provide your own tooling, but also be open to providing other people's tooling. Am I getting that right? >> Yeah, I think you're right. In terms of the tooling part there, what has happened is standards for controlling. All of the infrastructure has, you know, has become Kubernetes. Okay. So we have embraced that in fact, most the talent that has created the best Kubernetes at this point in time, we have it at VMware. Okay. The most contributions that are being made in terms of that standard, the most interesting ones are coming from VMware. So in terms of Kubernetes, we have embraced it. And what we are seeing is a tooling needs to be done in a way so that our customers can manage from infrastructure to their platform, all via code, all the standard like Kubernetes. And that's what we have embraced while at the same time, this tooling is done in a fashion so that the entire VM-ware cloud and the entire VMware Tansu platform can be controlled in a fashion that fits into customer's entire environment on how they manage it overall. >> Okay. So let's take that conversation to security. I don't know if you're familiar with the Optiva, it's this mind blowing, eye bleeding chart with all the different security tools in there, and I've been watching the moves that you guys have been making, you know, Carbon Black's an obvious one, what you're doing with end user computing and a number of other applications, creating a security, you know, cloud group within VMware. So that's a good example, but at the same time, customers are using all kinds of different, different toolings based on that chart. So are you saying it's the Kubernetes is the, is the secret their API APIs that allow you to, if a customer wants to use Octa or CrowdStrike or whatever it is, you can, you can incorporate that into the framework, or if they want to go all VMware, they can do that as well. Can you help us understand that? >> Yeah, I think our philosophy is that there are two components that are critical for making a solution, help our customers take the smartest path to multicloud, networking and security. So on security front, the philosophy is quite simple. You know, these days when you're going out and buying a car, you're not getting buying the car and outfitting it with airbags and, you know, AB, ABS, and any other sort of safety features, okay, why do we do that in the world of infrastructure and technology? It should just come as an, as an, even an option or a required component within the infrastructure itself, that's our philosophy. And so coming back to, if, if customers say they want to take an approach to multicloud, they want to make sure their developer experience their DevOps capabilities and their infrastructure management capabilities are there across all types of three applications, I mentioned, you know, the, the, the modern apps, the traditional enterprise apps and edge edge native apps. Our approach is quite simple, networking and security. Firstly is built in, okay, it's integrated in, you're not installing agents, you're not managing security thing on top. You're not putting air bags into the car after the purchase, they come with the purchase, you can choose to activate them or not activate them based on your price sensitivity. Second, we tell, we have, they're consistent once you learn them how to do it for traditional enterprise applications, the same capabilities, the same security workbench, the same detection and response capabilities carry forward to cloud native applications and edge native applications. That's the way we are thinking about for security for in our portfolio. >> It is the strategy summit to sort of be an end to end supplier of security, in other words, when you touch all parts of the stack, I mean, obviously with carbon black could do an end point, but, but things like identity and privilege, access and governance, I mean, there's just so many pieces to the value chain. Ca, will you try to try to be best of breed across that chain? Or do you see yourself picking this picking spots? >> No, Our focus is to pick the areas that we have focused on which is to enable customers to run, build and run and secure those, those applications that I mentioned, you know, the cloud native applications, edge native applications and enterprise applications. And our focus is to, to be able to secure those applications in, A, a consistent fashion and, B, built into the infrastructure, so it's not boarded on. So that's a focus on strategy and we still have great partnerships in the ecosystem for the rest of the portfolio, for the security technology to fit in with the rest of it. We just don't think that for the infrastructure that's running these critical business applications, you need, you should have, you know, a requirement to build these applications, build a security on top of it. And that's sort of our commitment to our customers. >> Got it. That makes sense. I mean, you've got a pretty clear swim lane in your infrastructure space. There might be a little gray area there, but you'll let the ecosystem take care of that if it makes sense. So I guess I would say I look back and if it was, first of all, VMware has had amazing engineering over the years, you're, you're very well known for that. You just, you just mentioned some of the best Kubernetes engineers on the planet. And of course, November is a big milestone for VMware, with the spin, you now will become a completely independent company again. And, and that's a big deal in my mind because I think, I think this is going to be expensive. I mean, to actually do this, these are big investments that you have to make. And I've, I feel like you finally going to get control of your own balance sheet, so you can make these investments as you see fit. So that's got to be an exciting time for you. And because I think you're going to need that free cash flow to really drive this in, in addition to the other things that you're going to do with buybacks and stock options, et cetera. >> I think we had excited about this whole upcoming, you know, spin off from Dell. Dell will continue to be a very important partner of ours. In fact, we have quoted and quantified what we are doing with them on innovation, as well as on sales and distribution perspective together. And I think, you know, to be candid just through that agreements that we have put in place without, I think the partnership could even get stronger because we have 15 statements of work where we have defined new innovation projects with Dell, for example. Okay. But at the same time, like you mentioned, we get a little bit more flexibility to be able to chart our own course, which is critical in the world of multicloud. Okay. We need, we are able to, not, not that we were constrained on, but customers still always asked us about how would you continue to sustain the partnerships with the cloud and hyperscalers? That's no longer a question in customers' eyes once you're independent. And secondly, it does give us flexibility on balance sheet to be able to make investments as needed within the agenda that we have on multicloud without having to, you know, sort of negotiate that. >> Yeah, I think it's an awesome move, of course, because I mean, I've certainly since the, the, the Dell acquisition of EMC, your business has even grown more with those combined companies. So we've seen that, but I, you know, I liken it to the, to the coach who has a kid on the team and the coach is extra hard on the kid, you know, and that's kind of almost the way it had to be in that relationship because your posture with the ecosystem had to be, hey, we're an open ecosystem. And so, and that was sometimes kind of weird and uncomfortable. Now it's clean, it's transparent. So I'm really looking forward to the innovation that you can create with Dell, of course, but with other parts of the ecosystem, which you always have, but I'm hoping the ecosystem now leans in even more. It's always had too, because you've got half a million customers and you've got a, such a huge presence in the market, but, but I think now there's going to be a little more comfort level there. So I'm really excited for that Sumit. >> Great. >> Hey, so this was great conversation. I can't wait to have you back really appreciate your time and insights. >> Well, thank you so much, Dave, from our perspective at VMware, you know, as I started with customers, I'm going to end sort of this thing with customers as well, always great times, great to spend time with customers. And we truly believe we have the best platform to give our customers the smartest path to multicloud. And I know, I know the feedback so far has been great. It's always great spending time with you. Thank you for having me. >> It's our pleasure, and we wish you the best. And thank you everybody for watching. This is Dave Volante for the cubes, continuous coverage of VM world 2021. Keep it right there. (upbeat music)

>>mhm Yes. Welcome back to the cubes coverage of red hat summit 2021 virtual john for your host of the cube paul. Comey who's here is the president and Ceo of red hat cube alumni paul always great to have you on the leader of red hat now President and Ceo for a year I think about a year now we're looking at under your belt now part of IBM Great to see you. >>You too nice to see you again john. >>So we've talked many times on the Cuban now. It's kind of playing out in real time. The software world with open source has gone mainstream. The conversation was moved to the cloud. Okay. People move to the cloud. Cloud native emerges devil has been around for a while. But now the conversation is cloud for the enterprise that uh, the enterprises, it's a tough world. You gotta, it's complicated is a lot of legacies, a lot of value and you want the new stuff. This is what the conversation is now. It's shifted to I got cloud, it's hybrid. What's your reaction to that? >>Well, you know, it really is, as you say, it's complicated but it's evolving and really, really fast. I mean, you know, I think you remember we've been here a lot. You first remember first software is eating the world and open source software is eating the world and in every every company is becoming a software company. All true. But that evolution continues today with the proliferation of hybrid cloud environments that it encompasses everything from data centers to public cloud services to And even now we'll talk about two for far flung edge deployments. That's all now part of the cloud. I mean, this is all what makes up hybrid. I like to always say that Hybrid really is the new data centers but now see IOS and I thi leaders, they need to reconsider what their roles, what their role here is and the way we look at it as every C I O now needs to be a cloud operator because because Hybrid is what their environment is now today, that used to be all in their data center. So, so but one of the things that really makes a choice even more important and its leaders, they need to address address specific needs, um not only to the organization, but even as they change and evolve in this because it really is a dynamic environment, I mean think about it and just mentioned edge and how how important that is to see IOS, we weren't even talking about that two years ago, so, so it's not a single answer here, right? Um and and you know, and there as there wasn't a single answer when it was all in one building or in one data center, but now it's even it's even more complex. So, so we need to enable really a new wave of cloud operators here with technologies that can be deployed as cloud services as well as on premises. We'll talk more about this too, but and we'll talk about this at the summit. We talked about the summit. Cloud services become really important, especially managed services, for example, because, um because we're so complex, Hybrid brings so much power, but it is complex. You know, see I need help with this, they need help managing this now. And so that's really where a lot of our focus is today. >>It's interesting you say there's no single answer. I would agree with you because it's now you can actually do a lot more customization with cloud and Hybrid. I think there's a general sentiment and directionally correct answer uh in the industry is that hybrid is operating model right? And I think you guys are have a whole division of SRS google talks about this all the time and their cloud site reliability engineers. And I think you're seeing that in educational institutions which we'll talk about. But I think this idea of cloud scale as the new I. T. And you mentioned hybrids, the new data center. You know, I don't I don't want to offend my I. T. Friends out there but they're kind of all realizing it to that if they don't understand how to operate cloud scale they'll be irrelevant and they're and they understand that their jobs are not just provisioning storage, networking and servers. Those are now involved in a hybrid architecture. And by the way, there is no one recipe, it's dependent. Each enterprise can have its own set of architecture based on their workloads again. So I buy that no single answer, but there is hybrid and I think it's pretty well understood. I mean, do you agree with that? >>I absolutely agree with that. But let's take a look at this, unpack it a little bit and take a look at the building blocks a bit. Right. Um, you know, we talked about open sources, what's driving all of this now and and everything we're talking about here is built in and around Lennox and it was only possible because Lennox was so open, so available and became so powerful, that's now been the platform that all this new innovation is built around. I mean, I oftentimes saying it's true the cloud just wouldn't be here had Lennox not only made its way in the open source development environment, but made its way into the enterprise to enable it to companies like us that make it enterprise ready, secure etcetera. So I think that's really an important thing to understand here. So when you talk about skills that the Ceos need certainly SRE skills, operation skills etcetera, but they also need Lennox skills and even open source skills. So so I think I think that's important, everything that's coming down the road and in in this space in um in his open source based and built in and around Lennox things like ai quantum computing, autonomous vehicles um IOT in and out to the edge all built on a foundation of Lennox and open source. So we see it in the enterprise everywhere now. I mean a survey where you know we did a survey out there and looking at the survey of C I O s out there, open is predominant out there, Lennox is predominant out there in hybrid is predominant and growing in a pretty big clip every year. >>You know, paul, I want to get your reaction to something because this may be kind of a dot connecting moment for me because I want to get your thoughts on this because it's a it's a pattern I'm seeing emerging now multiple times and usually I thought this was kind of a one off, but I'm starting to see it. So I'm going to get your thoughts on this. You guys have been super successful with open source in the enterprise, Super successful over decades, building a community and an ecosystem now with open source with with cloud Native, specifically we're seeing end users participating more in the, in the contribution starts out with the hyper scale ear's but now you're seeing kind of, I would call general purpose mainstream enterprises contributing projects, not necessarily their expertise, but they've been participating in taking the goodness of open source and bringing that into the into the enterprise. And I'll see you relying on you guys as well. But now I'm starting to see the pattern where people are relying on you to bring your community to them and they merge their communities with you guys and being kind of a steward there, is that a pattern? Do you see that evolving? Because we've heard that on multiple interviews on the cube where we've heard end users say we love the red hat ecosystem and and that seems to be more and more about they want to be building their ecosystem. So you did it for yourselves, you did it for the industry. Now, enterprises want this service is this is this is a pattern. And what's your reaction to that? >>It actually is a pattern because it's actually one of the reasons why innovation is moving so quickly right now. As I just said, you know, you know, this whole area here in infrastructure and cloud and development environments, Hybrid included. It's all built in and around, it's all built in and around Lennox. And in the past, what's happening and driven by open source development in the past? What happened? Look at the old fashioned way, right, where a company like us would be in a company, software company, not like us, but any old software company would be, you know, in their stovepipe, talking to their customers, getting their requirements and then bringing those requirements back from the customer base and then trying to work that into their products over time, get that back out to the customer to test it and try it, see it as it works. That's probably a five year, there's probably a five year journey, uh, for big, big requirements for big change requirements you look at now with, with actually end users now participating in upstream development, they're building their requirements into that upstream, which is our development environment. And actually that's what feeds our products. And so we've cut out the middleman, if you will completely in there now when we're building those requirements into our future future, R and D work in the upstream and then we bring that down into a product back into their enterprise for them to use in production. So it cuts out years of time for that innovation to get from concept to building to product, rising to production. And, and I think, you know, john, that's one of the big reasons why that customer base participating is one of the big reason why we're seeing innovation move like we've never seen it before in the enterprise, which in the old days that was a stodgy place where they didn't want to move very quickly. >>Yeah. And the values there, I mean I think it's clear what the pandemic we get to this towards the the last last talking track here. But with the pandemic I think it's pretty clear what the value is and the speed to capture opportunities and growth. I think enterprises are realizing that I think the power of the ecosystem is a modern error kind of phenomenon that is now kind of showing its its value and clearly in the market. And I think people who harness communities and ecosystems not try to fork them but connect them and and intersect them and kind of played well together. So again this is an open source concept kind of re imagined so we'll keep an eye on that. So, um, I want to get to your comment in the kino you mentioned at the top here every C I. O. It has to be a cloud operator. You know, that reminds me of all the start ups and all the positioning statements. Every company needs to be a software company. Every company needs to be a media company. Every company needs to be a cloud operator. So I love that. What does it mean? Because I could say, hey paul, I have a cloud, I'm working on amazon Or is that it? Or wait a minute as yours got, I got 365 over here and I'm using big query over here. I might use oracle over here. I mean all these multi cloud conversations. So it's confusing. >>Yeah. Tell me what, you know, if you look at, if you look at it, we were really one of the first ones to really build around this hybrid, this hybrid concept. And the reason why we were one of the first ones is because what amazon hit the world 12 or 13 years ago or something like that, They were the first major cloud and at the time that the narrative was that, you know, every application was going to move to the cloud tomorrow. Right well, because as I said earlier, everything is built in and in and around open source. And legs were very involved with our customers as they tried to move those first applications to the cloud. So certainly is a lot of value and moving to the cloud. But our customers quickly realized with us helping them, quickly realized that you know what, this is great. But not every application suited for the cloud, um for any cloud, but also I may want to run multiple clouds because another cloud provider over here might have a better service than this particular service over here, vice versa. And so we were in the middle of that. So one of the decisions we made seven or eight years ago, everything we did in that last seven or eight years around the portfolio, whether it was building products, m and A, requiring new companies etcetera, was built around that hybrid portfolio. What that means is a common platform that sits both on premise and bare metal machines. Virtual machines, private clouds on premise multiple clouds across out in the enterprise, that common platform so that developers, operators and the security people have that common platform to build with because just like in Lenox, even though they are all derived from open source upstream, they're all different, they all make different choices and how they're going to configure themselves. So, so that's important. So now we're out there with these multiple clouds. One of our surveys we see our Ceo is telling us now that You're using on the average I think six Clouds today and they expect that to go 8-10 over the next 3-5 years. So how are they going to manage that? How are they going to secure that? How are their operations people going to operate with that? That's all the things that we've been working on over the last number of years. So from that common platform, which is sort of the basis which is open shift to underneath it, which is the Linux operating system, which is well that spans all those footprints that I talked about. And then also you look at one of the latest trends is as well as manage services because what customers are now telling us is okay I got this environment that this hybrid is now my data center. It means I have to worry about these apps all in different footprints. Um I want to the platform to act like a cloud in some cases I don't want to I don't want to even manage it. I want you to manage it for me because for many reasons I want great up time. I might not have the right skill sets in my organization and so I want you to manage it. And so that's where we develop managed services and that's where we have set a large group today large SRE group that's providing those managed services no matter where our platform runs for our customers. Also, what I talked about in my keynote today is that to support that thought process is that we're doing a lot of research in this and so, you know, in a typical computer science research world, you know, of the past, you might really be into the into the real computer science of Research. We with the consortium around mass Open cloud with Boston University, MIT, Harvard Northeastern with this consortium. We're running mass Open cloud on all Red Hat with the collaboration of these universities and we're really focusing on the sorry aspect of it. What do we need to manage it? What do we need around automation to manage it? What do we need around ai to manage it? What do we need for tools to manage it? And and that's really goes down to what I fully briefly said in the beginning, is that every C I O N I T uh executive now has to be their own cloud operator because they are effectively stitching all these disparate clouds together. So that's where a big part of our focus takes us all the way from, You know, upstream development to product to the research we're doing for the next 3-5 plus years. >>You know, I gotta say the hybrid cloud is a new data center which is implying I T in the cloud operators with C X O S and C IOS is interesting because it's validated by Mckinsey's recent report that came out that said there's a trillion dollars of untapped value in one retrofitting existing infrastructure and operations and to net new operate use cases that the cloud enables. So there's clearly not two categories of value proposition that businesses are facing. One is, you know, kind of take care of the existing and then also bring in the new that cloud enables. So, you know, I think that's really key and that will drive the business leaders to foresight, if you will to be agile and adaptive to that. So so totally agree on that. I love this open cloud initiative, you mentioned the mass open cloud which I know is kind of like this beanpot for techies, um people who know what that means, uh it's in the boston area these institutions um this is gonna be a training and an opportunity to train the next generation and if you take it to the next level cybersecurity is also in this kind of net new novelty, interdisciplinary components. So you got engineering which is like devops engineering and then Systems Engineering and Computer Science intersecting together with kind of this data discipline. So it hits cybersecurity which is a board level conversation, it hits the new business model opportunities which is a driver, this is new, this is there's no pre existing curriculum. What how do you explain that to heads of the departments and the deans of these institutions saying, you know, it's an engineering thing. No, it's computer science thing. No, it's a it's a business school thing with data science. What's your what's your conversation with folks in the industry when you say this is a different thing? >>Uh you know, the university, you know, the university is getting, it was actually one of the one of the first things this is you know what you'll see. You know, I talked to uh dr bob Brown from President bu earlier in an interview and and this is what we imagined with them early on and even they brought those disciplines together now in in in what they call a harry institute, where to bring data, computer science engineering as you say. And now even operations, it's almost like, you know, systems engineering on steroids, it's a really big spanning system. And so so the universities are starting understand that's why these universities in the consortium, that's why we're working here. But also, you know, the industry's kind of learning it the hard way because now that they get some of their developers starting to move some of their application developments out into one, maybe two clouds and having the now they have to figure out how they're going to do all those things that we talked about, develop, secure operated. So they're they're learning the hard way that this is the new discipline because that's reality. I also think that, you know, as I said, like anything in tech, we always say this is going to happen tomorrow. I also think, like I said, when when cloud first came came out, everybody saying, I'm moving every app to the cloud tomorrow. We even had customers that bought into that said we're moving going full board but they realized once they get into it it wasn't practical. Don't take me wrong. Cloud brings a ton of value here but from a practical perspective it's going to be some apps and across many clouds and and so now they're having to deal with the I. T. Execs and the C. I. Was having to deal with it. So they're learning really fast because of the reality that they have to deal with. Now having said all that to it also brings up why managed services you're seeing so popular right now because as that's moving so fast they just don't have the skills necessary in many cases to really operate and run in this in this type of environment. It brings so much power but the skills aren't necessarily there in the industry. So that now you see the connection between the industry where we sit and even the university now looking at this whole big problem as as you put said, john, actually a new discipline, >>I think, I think, and I think one final leg of a three legged stool is at the business schools because when you think about systems programming, you mentioned that and you know, I love to go back in history and look at the history of operating systems. And you know, paul, we've talked us in the past and you guys know a lot about operating systems from a technology standpoint, it's not just about a productivity suite for a user or a department with the system, it's a company that needs to be programmed. So when people want to globally operate their business, that software defined this isn't now and this is now happening, right? So this the new leaders in these companies that want to run these global companies that scale operate them, just like operating the business not necessary. Operating a tech or shiny new toy, have to build the operating system for the business. To me, I think that's where I see IBM looking at cloud differently and saying, hey, this is an operating system under the covers for the business. The applications are multi fold from, you know, an application for productivity to an edge device, industrial or consumer user work at home. I mean it's a plethora of applications. What's your reaction to that? And you you see the same thing? >>I mean frankly, I think this is an area that a lot of the infrastructure players missed in the past. And I think I think this is what IBM saw with with bringing us in as well. It's all about the application. You know, I said earlier that, you know, we said every every company was a software company is true. And so that means the companies are running their businesses on these applications. So it's all about the app and I think a lot of infrastructure companies miss that. And and so with Hybrid now you have that ability to run the app wherever makes the most sense for for a whole host of reasons. And so now, but now comes the complexity of all of that. I think, I think IBM with bringing us in saw that that Hybrid was maybe as big, if not a bigger opportunity than cloud itself because of of the complexity it's going to bring, the power is going to bring. But also the complexity is gonna bring. I see that's why, you see Arvind, I sort of doubling down the entire IBM company on on hybrid services that are that are going to be really important here, that they provide these applications on top that are going to be really important, but that have to be architected in such a way that they can run in a hybrid environment. And finally there's all the infrastructure and tools and development pieces that we bring to the table. So, So yeah, I think I think are really, really understood that as they made the decision to bring redheaded, >>I talked to a center all the time and they also have this kind of concept of re factoring and reprogramming your business. Uh, it's not, it's a holistic view. This is kind of what's happening. So my final question for you is as as that becomes software enabled and programmed if you will with applications the business with many different subsystems in there. Um a lot of companies now looking at the light at the end of the tunnel with the pandemic and they're seeing vaccines coming out. Some say vaccines will be pretty much everywhere, everyone over 12 by the fall. So we're back to real life. There's gonna be a pullback of some projects on doubling down on others. As you as you mentioned, what are we doing? We're starting to see hybrid as companies come out of the pandemic, they're all jockeying to make sure that they have either done their work to re factor or reposition, reprogrammed their business and be set up for net new opportunities. >>What >>do you see as a growth model or growth opportunities for companies? You want to come out with a growth strategy out of the gate of the pandemic. What's your thoughts? >>Well, I mean, I think you have to plan for companies have to plan for your workforce to be anywhere, but in order to be anywhere in and to be productive, you need you need services like we're on right now for example, but you need the infrastructure to be able to do that. You need you need a way for your customers if you buy the fact that every company is a software company, you're running a business through their applications either way for your customers to be able to interact with you anywhere from where they are anywhere in a real time way. And so I think that's why from our perspective, things like that we're pushing a lot on the edge. Now, that's why you're seeing the hybrid cloud moved all the way out into the edge and you can see it in every vertical, you know, in the telco space. The edge means you gotta do, you have data and compute that needs to be done on the set on the cell tower in the manufacturing world. You have the state and compute that needs to be done on the factory floor, in the retail vertical. We see the edge really being significant in all these verticals, but but that edge is now extends that hybrid data center that we've been talking so much about. So even though you have all these edge devices way out there on the edge, it's a critical part of the business. So you have to have, your developers need need to be able to develop for it, you need to secure it, you need to and you need to operate it and manage it. So now, you know, in a very short period of time, hybrids taken on another dimension, bringing you out to all these points on the edge which is the same but slightly different in every vertical. Now comes complexity and that's why automation is so important because with that power comes complexity but it's going to take automation to keep it all running, >>paul. Great insight. Thanks for coming on the cube. Open innovation out in the open with with you guys again continue. And the focus of the evolution of software and the cloud with enterprise I. T. Clearly a lot of innovation and your contribution to academia and the mass open cloud and all the open cloud initiatives, phenomenal. The world's going. Open source and continues and continues. Doesn't stop. The operating system of businesses is coming and you guys are well positioned. Thanks for coming on. >>Thanks again john. Always a pleasure. >>Okay paul, Cormier, President Ceo of Red Hat here on the Cuban, john for your host. Thanks for watching. Yeah. Yeah. Mhm mm.

>>the >>globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS >>reinvent 2020 >>sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. Everyone welcome back to the cubes. Virtual coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 Virtual I'm John for your host. Got a great segment here with two analyst day Volonte and Zia's Carvell who's head principles of zk research dot com. Guys. Great to see you A W s Kino. Thanks for >>coming on. Let's be back in the cube. >>Welcome back. Great to see you guys. Wanna get your thoughts? Um, it's mainly you because we talked with the enterprise a lot. You are leading analyst. You cover a broad range from networking all the way up to the C suite for enterprise buyers and and technology trends. Um, Andy Jassy laid down, in my opinion, what was directionally his next 20 mile stare. The next conquest for Amazon. And that is global. I t spend they locked in the infrastructures of service pass kicking ass. There. Check check. Hello, Enterprise. Different ballgame. What's your thoughts? >>Yeah, they have so much in different areas, obviously. You know, they have dominated cloud instances right there. Mawr compute storage memory. You know insists that anybody but you can see him, um, spreading their wings now, right? I think one of the more interesting announcements was actually what they're doing with Amazon connect. That's their contact center platform. And this is something that I think, Even last year, a lot of people weren't really even sure if they'd be in a long primary in the pocket. People about this market, they were asking, If you really think Amazon's in this, there's something they're experimenting. But we're here to stay. And I think one of the interesting things that they bring to market is, you know, almost unprecedented scale with their cloud platform as well as all the machine learning algorithms. And I think if if you believe that machine learning artificial intelligence is changing, I t. Forever and that's everything from the infrastructure to the network through the applications, then they have an inherent advantage because they have all those machine learning albums built into this stuff that they dio and so they can constantly look at these different markets and disruptive, disruptive, disrupt and take more and more sharing that and that's what they've done. E think that's you know, the context and announcements were great example that they're not doing the telephony things, and, you know, they're kind of bare table stakes. They do that pretty well, but they've just unloaded a whole bunch of ai based features that >>Dave, what's your take on this context center? Because it's not just call centers. I mean, there was a whole industry around call center, unified communications. That whole world. This is about the contact. It's about the person. This is not just a nuanced thing like telephony or, you know, PBX is in the old days. Remember those days? Things is not about the call. It's about the contact. This is what Jazzy saying. >>I think that way had Diana or on early. And I said, I like the fact that their AWS specifically is going after these solutions because several years ago it was just sort of. Here's a bunch of tools. Go figure it out. I think the contact center is I mean, everybody can relate Thio the pains of going through getting rerouted, having to restate all your credentials, not knowing who you are. And so between machine learning, Alexa, Natural language processing, better work flows. I mean there's this huge opportunity toe reinvent the whole call center contact center. So, uh, yeah, I think you called it John. It's a no brainer for a W s toe Really disrupt that >>business. Well, it also puts him in a position. You know, news is breaking on the day of and yet his keynote here at reinvent that, uh, you got Salesforce spying slack for 27 close toe, $28 billion. That's a 55% premium over when they announced it. And that's like a 30 x or 50 x on on revenue. Massive number to confess the message board software. I mean, so So. So. If Amazon can come in and get the context center model, which is not just voice, it's chat, it's machine learning. It's bots. And the innovation to create a step function kind of brings it back into the that integration of user network compute. You know, I just think that it feels very edgy in the sense of edge computing, because if I'm a person, I'm mobile. If I'm a person at work or at home, so there's a whole redefinition Zs, what's your take on this edge? Play from Amazon in context toe the enterprise software landscape. That seems to be, you know, focus on buying companies like Salesforce. >>Well, I think edges really the next big foray for computing. If one of the things and you ask we talked about this, you know, was that the compute, the unit of Compute, has gotten smaller and smaller, Right? We went from data centers to servers to virtual machines, the virtual machines and clouds. Now we're talking about containers and containers on edges, and this requires, um if you if you believe in the world of distributed computing where we're gonna have mawr containers running in MAWR, places on MAWR edges, right. The value proposition where companies is now they can move their data closer to the customer. They could move data closer to the user. And so, if I'm a retailer and I'm trying to understand what a customer is doing, I could do that in store. If I'm Tesla and I'm trying to understand what the drivers doing, I could do that in car, right? If I'm a cellular provider, I could do it by cellular edge. So the edge, I think, is where a lot of the innovation is going to be at Amazon has the luxury of this massive global network. You know, they just announced the number another a number of other local nodes, including Boston and a few other places. So they've got the footprint in place. And this this is what makes Amazon's are difficult to compete with, right? They built this massive network and this all these, no doubt for their e commerce business. And now they're leveraging that deliver I t services. You can't just go build this from the ground up the variety, right? You have to be able to monetize it another way. And they've been doing that with the commerce for a long time. And so it makes them. It makes it very, very difficult for them to capture Google could with Daniel forget about the item. Oh, yeah, so good. Microsoft. Possibly. But they I think that the more distributed compute becomes the more favors Amazon, >>I would add to that if I could, John, I mean, look good. Look at the prevailing way in which many of the infrastructure the old guard is Andy. Jesse calls them. Companies have pursued the edge they've essentially taking, taking x 86 boxes and, you know, maybe made him rugged and throwing them over the fence to the edge. And that really is not gonna play the edges. Now there's not one edge. I mean, there's a very highly specific use cases and factories and windmills. And maybe maybe it's small retail organizations, and whatever it is that those are gonna be really unique situations. And I think the idea of putting a programmable infrastructure at the edge is gonna win. I also think that the edge architecture is gonna be different. It's going to require much more efficient processing to do a I Influencing a lot of the data is gonna be, uh, stay at the edge. A lot of it's not gonna be persisted. Some of it's gonna come back to the cloud. But I think most of it is actually gonna gonna either not be persisted or stay at the edge and be affected in real time. When you think of autonomous vehicles so totally different programming model, >>well, I think that's the point of what I was saying earlier Zeus was talking about Is that it's It's the edges is just different. I mean, you got purpose built stuff. I mean, they were talking by the way they have snowball. So they have, ah, hard edge device. And they got out outpost now in multiple flavors and sizes. But they also were talking about computer vision and machine learning. We're going together for that. The panoramic appliance. I think it was where there's all these different cases to your point, Dave, where it's just different. At the edge, you have the zones for five G. I mean, if you go to a five g tower, that's essentially an edge. Just there's equipment up to this. Radios is transceivers and other back haul equipment. So when you look at the totality of what it is, the diversity, I think that's why this whole idea of Lambda and Containers is interesting. Toe Zia's. When you were saying about the compute sizes being small, because if you could put compute at the edge on small pieces to match the form factor that becomes interesting. I think that's what this Lambda container announcement I found interesting because I see that playing directly into that your reaction to >>that. It actually, um, makes it. If not done correctly, it could make I t much more complex because, um, containers air interesting because they're not like virtual machines. First live in perpetuity. Containers you They're very ephemeral, right? You spin them up to 30 seconds, you spin them up for a couple of minutes that you deprecate them. So at any given point in time, you could have thousands of containers, a handful of containers, millions of containers, Right? But it necessitates a common management. Uh huh. Underlay that could be used to visualize where these containers are, what's running on them. And that's what AWS provides. You know, all the stuff they're doing Lambda and Eks and things like that that lends itself to that. So a customer can then go and almost create a container architecture that spans all their cloud's edges, even on Prem. Now, uh, when Amazon has but still be able to manage it and simplify it, I think somebody's trying to do it themselves. They're gonna find that the complexity almost becomes untenable. Unless you have a Nike organization the size of Amazon companies don't. So we're >>gonna here, we're gonna hear from Deepak singing in a few sessions. He did the eks anywhere. That's essentially kubernetes service on the data center. But look at what they did with eks anywhere and then CCS, which has a common control plane to your point, that's compelling. And so, you know, if you're a developer or you're an enterprise, you might not have If you want to go with this. I t world. We talked about earlier zeros before you came on on our last segment. Most I t is not that built out in terms of capabilities. So learning new stuff is hard, so operating Amazon might be foreign to most I t shops. This is a challenge. Did you agree with that? Or or how do you see that? >>Um, well, a lot of Amazon used, obviously just the interviews and numbers of fucked that right. Um, but I think the concept of in a world where you have that common operating layer that spans it's no longer geographically limited to a data center or to a server. You know, it's it's now distributed across your entire multi cloud or distributed cloud environment. And so one of the important things right people remember is the world is becoming more dynamic and or distributed, and your I t strategy has to follow that. If you're doing things that are counted that you're not only standing still, you're actually going backwards. And so what Amazon is doing is they're allowing companies to be is dynamic distributors. They need to be to be able to maintain that that common operating layer that actually makes it management, because without it, you just you wind up in a situation. Like I said, that's incredible. A lot of people facing that today. And that's why that's why there's this big divergence, right? This five native cos they're going fast and legacy companies that can. >>Guys, I want to spend the next 10 minutes we have getting into more of the business side from this keynote because because I know your research on digital transmission first. I know you know the networking side up and down the stack and all that good stuff, but you've been doing a lot of research around the digital transformation with the cloud. Dave, you just put out a great great breaking and else think your 55th, um, episode on digital transformation with the cloud. It's very clear that Jackie is basically preaching, saying, Hey, Clay Christensen is former professor who passed away. He brought up this whole innovator's dilemma kind of theme and saying, Hey, if you don't get the reality that you're in, you better wake up and smell the coffee. It's a wake up call. That's what he's basically saying That's my take away. This is really this business management lesson. Leadership thinking is super important, and I know we've We've talked about people process, technology. Uh, let's Covad eyes this real quick. Bottom line. What is the playbook? Do you agree with jazz? His point of view here? Um, he's pretty being hardcore. He's like, literally saying adapter die in his own way. What, you guys thoughts on this? This is a true forcing function. This cove, In reality, >>I mean I mean, if you talk about the business transformation, digital transformation, business transformation, you know, what does that mean? I, like, said earlier that the last 10 years about I t transformation, I think the next 10 is gonna be about business transformation, organizational industry transformation, and I think what that means is the entire operational stack is gonna get digitized. So your sales you're marketing your your customer support your logistics. You know you're gonna have one interface to the customer as opposed toe, you know, fragmented stovepipe siloed. You know, data sets all over the place, and that is a major change. And I think that's ultimately what a W. S is trying to affect with its model and has obviously big challenges in doing so. But But that, to me, is what digital transformation is ultimately all about. And I think you're going to see it unfold very rapidly over the next several >>years. What's your reaction? What's your view on on the on Jackie? >>And he talked about his eight steps toe reinvention. Um and e think what digital transformation to me is the willingness to re invent disruptive own business even in the face that it might look horrible for your business, right? But understanding he is there something that I think is true. And a lot of, um, business leaders don't fully by this that if something is good for your customer, they're going to do it, and you can either make it happen, or you gonna watch it happen and then have the market taken away from me because there's a lot of cases you look at how slow you know, A lot of the banks, you know, operated until you know, the a lot of these, uh, cloud native, uh, money exchange systems came around the cape. Alan Ben more and things like that, right? Even retailers Amazon completely disrupted that model. You could say that Amazon killed, you know, Toys R us, but 20 rescue Toys R Us E. And I think there's got to be this hard willingness to look at your business model and be willing to disrupt yourself. And what Kobe did, John, I think, is a taught us a lesson that you have to be prepared for anything because nobody saw this coming. And sure you can. And a lot of companies thrived out of this, and a lot of one's gone away, but that the ability to be agile has never been more important. But you're only is Angela's. Ike lets you be, and that's what that's what. The W. Is going to sell us the ability to do anything you want with your business. But the staff, you have to have the business because they're willing to do that. >>You know, that's a great point. That's so smart. It's crime that's worth calling out. And we were talking before we came on live about our business with the Cube. There's no virtual, there's no floor anymore. So we had to go virtual if we weren't in the cloud. If we weren't doing R and D and tinkering with some software and having our studio, we'd be out of business. Dave. Everyone knows it. Now Get the Cube virtual. We have some software were position, and this kind of speaks directly to what Andy Jassy said. He said. Quote. If you're not in the process of figuring out as a company, how you're going to reinvent your customer experience in your product and reinvent who you are, you are starting to unwind. You may not realize it, but you are. What he's saying is you better wake up and smell the coffee and I want to get your guys reacted. You, particularly you around your experience and research. I've noticed that some customers that had cloud going on did well with co vid and said ones that didn't are still struggling not to catch up. So you're kind of intense. You got some companies that were that were on the wave, Maybe kind of figuring it out, that we're in good position and some that were flat footed and are desperate. Um, seems to be a trend. Do you agree with that? And what's your view on this idea of being ready? What does that even mean to be? Have readiness or >>take, you don't get the data points that Andy threw up there, right? That 50% of the companies that were the global fortune $500.2000 or are no longer here, Right? That Zatz Pretty shocking statistic. And that does come, uh, you know, from the willingness to disrupt your business. And if you got you're right. The companies that had a good, solid class raging in place, we're able to adapt their business very quickly. You could you look at retailers. Some had a very strong online presence. They had online customer service set up those companies didn't find other ones, were really forced to try and figure out how to let people in the store had a mimic. You know, the in store experience, you know, through from, uh, you know, support interface or whatever. Those are the ones that really struggling. So you're right. I think companies that were on the offensive plug to Dover companies that were fully in the cloud really accelerated their business and ones that didn't buy into it. I think they're struggling to survive in a lot of They're gone. >>Yeah, and all that. John, When Jesus was talking about his view of digital transformation, I was just writing down some of the examples to your point. The folks that were sort of had were cloud ready, covert ready, if you will. And those that weren't But think about think about automobiles. You know, there's testily even a manufacturer of automobiles or they software company. Personal health has completely changed over the last nine months with remote. You know, uh, telehealth automated manufacturing. You think about digital cash, e commerce and retail is completely, you know, accelerated. Obviously toe online. Think about kids in college and kids in high school and remote learning farming. You know, we've done a great job in terms of mono crops and actually creating a lot of food. But now I think the next 10 years is gonna be how do we get more nutritious food to people and so virtually every industry is ripe for disruption, and the cloud is the underpinning of that disruption. >>Alright, guys, got a few more minutes left. I want to get your thoughts quickly on the keynote. What it means for the customers that we're watching again. This is not a sales and marketing conference as they talk about. But if you're sitting in the audience, you guys, we're watching and we're virtual um Did it hit home with you? If you're a customer, what did he what? Give us Give the grades. Where do you Where do you hit a home run? Where he missed. Did he leave anything out? What's your take Zia's? We'll start with you. >>Um, I thought it was actually really good Keynote. I thought you did a good job of making the case for AWS. They talked about the open. They have more instances than anybody. So you could do almost any kind of compute in their cloud. I think one of the important lessons variety to is the importance. You can't just do everything. The software right? Hardware Still important silicon still important that, and to meet the needs of very special he needs from things like machine learning and AI. Amazon's actually spending their own silicon very much like Athens doing with their computers. And so if you are going to be a customer service focused company, you need to think of the I T. Stack and everything from the silicon, the hardware through the software, and build that integrated experience to Amazon's giving a tools to do that Now E. Do I would like to see Amazon be a little more, um, a supposed the cloud competitive friendly. The one thing I hear from customers all the time is they love the Amazon tools. They love the optimization capabilities, but you know, if they are adopting some kind of multi cloud strategy, the Amazon tools don't work in Azure and the capital don't work in Amazon. The same with Google, and it would be well within the best interests of those three companies. They find a way to get together and allow their common framework to work across clouds. Amazon's already got a lead that they could do that, and I don't think it's gonna be, but that that is something I think that's still missing from this world is they make it very difficult for customers to move the multi cloud. >>Well, some would say some people are saying, saying that the number one in the cloud I mean, got cloud wars Bob Evans over there saying Microsoft is dominating number one position over everybody else, multiple quarters in a row Now he's looking at revenue and granted. You got a lot of propping up there you got. You know, Windows server and sequel. You got a bunch of professional services, But clearly the I as in past side of the market, Microsoft is, like, way behind um So, yeah, they've got the numbers little legacy in their Microsoft should, and they got a little base. If I'm Amazon, I'm not. I'm worried about Microsoft more than anybody. I think you know, I looking at the Civil War between the Seattle forces. I mean, this is really Microsoft's gotta greatest all base, and they could flip that license deals and >>the cloud is good enough. I mean, it's myself doing very, very well with its classic Microsoft. You know >>they your point. Microsoft is the king of good enough, right? They put out features. They market heavily to the I t pro on. They put out licensing packages, so you're almost foolish to not at least fry their products. And then they do roll it out. So it's good enough and then you live with it for a while. But ultimately, whenever people use Microsoft, they do have an alternative under in there for a very special case. But e don't wanna >>the king of good enough. That's a great line. I love that. I'm gonna use that. But this Babel fish thing for Aurora that is a huge dagger. Potentially, it's an escape valve for customers. They wanna leave Microsoft. But clearly, if Microsoft you're gonna get penalized by running your license on Amazon. >>If our CEO our i t c t, I'd say, Okay, I definitely want to do business with with Amazon. That's what I heard today from Jassy, and I would want to hedge my bets either with Microsoft, especially if I'm a Microsoft shop or with Google's from analytics heavy unquestionably. I'd want to hedge my bets and have some kind of 70 30 80 20 mix. >>Look, if you're Andy Jassy and he's told me my interview, do it directly. I asked this question. He was very forthright. He doesn't hide from the fact that, uh, customers have multiple clouds, but they have a primary and secondary, but they're not gonna have, like, five or six major clouds. Yeah, it's hard to get these teams trained at to begin with. So there's a hedge. There's a supplier leverage. I get that. He's totally gets that. But if you're Amazon, you're gonna have your annual conference. You really don't wanna be in the business of talking about the other guys cloud, you say hybrid, right? It's on my show. You know, like you're competing. This is there's definitely competition between Microsoft and A W s. So you gotta respect that. But yeah, of course. There's multiple clouds called hybrid eks everywhere. Uh, container service. I mean, >>especially global, right? Different cloud providers of different strengths in different regions. You know, Microsoft, very strong in the Gulf. AWS isn't you know. So if you're a global company, um, you know, then you almost by default, have to go multi cloud multiple cloud vendors because of geographic differences. Obviously, China, with its own set of cloud providers. So, you know, smaller midsize businesses could get away with one, but As soon as you become global, you have to use more. >>Well, I'm a big fan of distributed computing. I loved the large scale concept of distribute computing. You got regions. Now you've got local zones. You got I O t edge. You got cloud going on Prem Edge. It's really an edge game at this point. Greater now distributed hyper Put hyper next to anything hyper cloud on your sounds better Piper >>Cube. And the opportunities the cloud providers and Amazon, you know, certainly is leading. This is the ability to take this complex, hyper distributed world and use their management tools toe create a normalized operating simplify What would be an overly complex world about it? >>Okay, we got a break. Just quick plug. There's a big salesforce event coming up on December 10th. Check it out on the Amazon site that that plug in you watching the cube stay tuned for more coverage after this break

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's The Cube. With digital coverage of Ansible Fest 2020 brought to you by Red Hat. >> Hello, welcome back to The Cube's coverage of Ansible Fest 2020. This is The Cube. Cube Virtual. I'm your host, John Furrier with The Cube and Silicon Angle. Two great guests here. Two engineers and architects. Michael McCarthy who is a architect at Delivery Engineering, who's giving a talk with Gamesys and Jurgen Grech who's a technical architect for the platform engineering team at Gamesys. Gentlemen, welcome to The Cube, thanks for coming on. >> Hello. >> Nice to see you. >> Coming in from London, coming in from Malta, you guys are doing a lot of engineering. You're a customer of Ansible, want to get into some of the cool things you're doing obviously Kubernetes automation, platform engineering, this is what everyone's working on right now that's going to be positioned for the future. Before we get started though, tell me a little bit about what Gamesys does and you guys' role. Michael, we'll start with you. >> Sure, so we're a gaming operator, we run multiple bingo-led and casino-led gaming websites, some of them are B2B, some are B2C. I think we've been doing it now for probably 14 or 15 years at least. I've been there for 12 and a half of those. So we essentially run gaming websites where people come and play their favorite games. >> And what's your role there? What do you do? >> So I'm in the operation side of things, I used to be a developer for 12 or so years. We make sure that everything's kind of up and running, we keep the systems running. My team in particular focuses on the speed of delivery for developers so we're constantly looking at, how long has it taken to get things in front of the customers, can we make it faster, can we make it easier, can we put cool stuff out there quicker? So it's a kind of platformy type role that I do, and I enjoy it a lot, so it's good. >> Jurgen you're platform engineering that sounds deep. >> Yes. >> Which is your role? (laughing) >> Well, I've been with Gamesys also for eight and a half years now. I hold the position of technical architect at the moment within this platform engineering group which is mostly tasked with all things ops related. I am responsible for designing, implementing and validating strategies for continuous deployment, whilst always ensuring high availability on both production and pre-production systems. I'm also responsible for the design and implementation of automated dynamic environment to support the needs of the development teams and also collaborating with other architects, especially those on the development floors in order to optimize the deployment and operational strategies for both existing and new types of services alike. >> Awesome, thanks for sharing that. Good, good context. Well, I mean, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that when you talk about gaming it's uptime and a high availability is critical. You know, having people, being the login you got to have the right data strategies, it can't be down, right. (laughs) It's a critical app. People are not going to enjoy it if they're not at, so I can see how scale's huge. Can you guys talk about how Ansible fits in because automation's been the theme here, you guys have been having a journey with automation. What's been your automation solution with Ansible? >> I'll go Michael. >> Yeah sure. >> So, basically back in July 2014, we started to look at Ansible to replace those commonly used, day to day, best scripts, which our ops team use to execute and which could lead to some human error. That was our main original goal of using Ansible at the time. At the time was our infrastructure looked considerably different. Definitely much, much smaller than the current private cloud footprint. And as I said, as early adopters within the operations team it was imperative for us to automate as much as possible. Those repetitive tasks, which involved the execution of various scripts and were prone to human error. Since then however, aware Ansible usage, it worked quickly. Since 2014, we went through two major infrastructure overhauls and automation using Ansible was always at the heart of each of those overhauls. In fact, our latest private cloud which is based on OpenStack is completely built from the ground up using Ansible code. So this includes the provision and co-visual machines, our entire networking stacks, so switches, routers, firewall, the SDN which OpenStack is built up on, our internal DNS system. Basically all you need to have a fully functional private cloud. At Gamesys we also have some workloads running in two different public clouds. And even in this case, we are running against the build code to set up all the required infrastructure components. Again, since we were fairly new adopters at the time of this technology, without all of those Ansible code, using the original as the case, cover now this has worked considerably and with enhancements of litigated modules polished public cloud, we've made the code look much cleaner, readable and ad approved. >> You made some great progress. Michael, you want to weigh in on this? Any thoughts on? >> Yeah, I think it's kind of, I mean, adding to what Jurgen said I think it's kind of everywhere. So, you know, you mentioned, you mentioned high availability, you mentioned kind of uptime, you know, imagine the people that operate the infra, the people who get called out and they're working 24 seven, you know, a lot of the things that they would do, the kind of run books they would use to, you know, restart something they're Ansible as well. So it's the deployment scripts, it's the kind of scripts that keep things running, it's the stuff that spins up the environments as Jurgen said. I've noticed a lot on the development side where, you know, we look at continuous delivery, people are running their own build servers. A lot of the scripting that people do, which, you know you'd imagine, might be done with say Bash, I think I've seen a lot of Ansible being used there amongst developers, I guess. Yeah, it's got an easy learning curve. It's all of those modules. A lot of the scripting around CD I think is Ansible. It plays quite nicely, you know, URI module and file modules and yeah, I think it's kind of everywhere I think. It's quite pervasive. >> Once again I said, when to get something going. Good, it's awesome. >> Yeah. Automation get great success. So it's been a big theme of Ansible Fest 2020 automation collectors, et cetera. But the question I have for you guys as customers, is how large of an IT estate were you looking to automate and where was the most imperative places to automate first? >> The most imperative items we wanted to automate first as I said, were those operational day to day tasks handled by our network operations team. Our estate is massive. So we are running our infrastructure across five different data centers around the world, thousands of virtual machines, hundreds of network components. So we, we deal with customers all around the world. So our point of presence is spread out around the world as well. And you can't really handle such kind of size without some sort of automation. And Ansible fit the bill perfectly, in my opinion. >> And so your goal is to automate the entire landscape. Are you there now? Where are you on that progress? >> I would say we're at a very advanced stage in that process. Since 2014 we've made huge strides. All of our most recent private cloud setups as I said, have been built from the ground up using Ansible. And I would say a good 90% plus of our operational tasks are handled using some kind of Ansible playbook. >> Yeah, that makes total sense. Michael you brought up the, you start early in people's, it spreads. Those are my words, but you were saying that. What kind of systems do people tend to start with at Ansible? And what's, where's that first sticky moment where it lands and expands and which teams jump on it first? Is it the developers? Is it more the IT? Take us through some of the how this all gets started and how it spreads. >> I think in the, the first time I remember using it was probably I think 2014, 2015. And it was what Jurgen mentioned. I was on the Dev side and we wanted a way to have consistency in how we deployed. We wanted to be able to deploy the exact same way, you know into earlier environments, into Dev environments as we did in staging and production. And, you know, someone kind of found Ansible and then someone in operations kind of saw it and they were happy with it and they felt comfortable using the, kind of getting up to speed. And I think it was hard to know where it really started first, but you sort of looked around and every team, every team kind of had it. So, you know, who actually started I'm not sure, but it's all over the place. >> He did. (laughs) >> Yeah. I think, you know, where people start with it first it probably depends if you're on the ops or the dev side, I think on the dev side you know, we're encouraging people to own their own deployment playbooks you know, you're responsible for the deployment of your system to production. Obviously you've got the network operations the not group sort of doing it for you, but you know, your first exposure is probably going to be writing a playbook to deploy your app or maybe it's around some build tooling, spinning up your own build environment but that's something you'll be doing. I know with Ansible and it's especially around this point of stuff because everything's in git, there's that collaboration which I never saw, obviously I saw people chatting over kind of slack in teams but in terms of being able to sort of raise PR's having developers raise PR's, having operations comment on them the same the other way around, that's been a massive change which I think has come from using Ansible. >> The collaboration piece is huge. And I think it's one of those things early on out of all the Ansible friends that I know that use it and customers and in the company product was just good. It just word of mouth, spreads it around and be like, this is workable, saves a lot of time and it's a pain point remover. Also enables some things to happen with now automation, but now it's mature. Right? So Jurgen I got to ask you in the maturation of all this automation you're talking about scale, you mentioned it. OpenStack, you guys got the private clouds, people use it for public cloud, I now see Red Hat has a angle on that. But when you think about the current modern state of the art today, you can't go anywhere without talking about Kubernetes. >> Yup. >> Kubernetes has really emerged on the scene to manage these clusters but yet it's just getting started. You have a lot of experience with Ansible and Kubernetes. Can you share your journey with Kubernetes and Ansible, and what's your reaction to that? >> Yes, so back in June 2016 Gamesys was developing a new gaming platform which was stood on now Kubernetes. Kubernetes at the time was fairly new to many at an enterprise level with only a handful of production systems online. So we were tasked to assess how we're going to bring Kubernetes into production. So we first, we identified the requirements to set up a production grade cluster and given our experience with Ansible, we embarked on a journey to automate the installation process. Again using Ansible this would ensure that all the required installation and configuration parameters as Michael mentioned, we are committing it, the code is shared with all the respective development teams for ease of collaboration and feedback. And we decided to logically divide our code into two. And we said, we're going to have an installation code in order to provide Kubernetes as a service. So this basically installs Docker onto every worker node. It installs cube lit, all the master playing components of Kubernetes installs core DNS, the container storage interface, and they full blown and cluster monitoring stack. Then we also had our configuration code which basically sets up name spaces, it labels nodes for specific uses at certain security policies according to the cluster use case and creates all the required role based access configurations. This need to split the code in two came about really with the growing adoption of Kubernetes because at the inception stage we only had the one team which had a requirement to use Kubernetes. However, with various teams getting on board each required their own flavor with their particular unique configurations. This is of course well managed quite easily to reduce of different Ansible inventories. And it's all integrated now within Ansible Tower with different unique drop templates to install and configure the Kubernetes clusters. We started as I said with just one pre-production or staging cluster in 2010 16. Today we manage 42 different Kubernetes clusters including six which are in production. >> What problems >> So, as I mentioned earlier >> I got to ask you 'cause Kubernetes certainly when it came out, I mean, that was a big fan boy of that. I was promoting Kubernetes from the beginning. I saw it as a really great opportunity to bring things together with containers. It turns out that developers love it for that reason. What, so getting your hands on is great, but as you moved it in to practice, what problems did it solve for you? >> So using Ansible, definitely solve the problem of ensuring that all of our 42 clusters across all the different data centers are running the same configuration. So they're running the same version. They're running the same security policies. They're running the same name space, according to the type. Each team has a similar deployment token. And it's very, very convenient to roll out changes and upgrades especially when all of our code has been integrated with Ansible Tower through a simple user interface click. >> How's Ansible Tower working for you? Is that going well? Ansible Tower? >> Eh, I would say so, yes. Most of our code now is integrated with Ansible Tower. It's allowed us to also share some of the tasks with a wider group of people. Within Peg we are the guardians of the production environments really. However, we share the responsibility of staging environments with the respective development teams, who primarily those environments. So as such, through the use of Ansible Tower we've managed to also securely and consistently share the same way how they can install and upgrade these clusters themselves without our involvement. >> Thank you. Michael you're giving, oh sorry go ahead. Go ahead Jurgen. >> Sorry is no no. >> Michael, you're giving a presentation breakout session at Ansible Fest. Can you give us a sneak peek >> Yup. >> Of what you're going to talk about? >> Yeah sure. So we, I said we've been using Tower for a long time. We've been using it since 2015 I think. Think we've probably made some mistakes along the way, I guess, or we've learned a lot of stuff from how we started then to now. So what it does is it follows this sort of timeline of how we started, why there was this big move to making an effort to put all of our deployment playbooks in Ansible. Why you would go to Tower over and above Ansible itself. It talks about our early interactions with quite an old version of Tower and now version two, things that we struggled with, then we saw version three came out there was loads and loads of really good stuff in version three. And it's really about kind of how we've used the new features, how it's worked out for us. It's kind of about what Gamesys have done with Tower but I think it's probably applicable to everyone and anyone that uses Tower I think will, they'll probably come across the same things, how do I scale it for multiple teams? How do I give teams the ownership to kind of own their own playbooks? How do I automate Tower itself? It talks about that. Sort of check pointing every few years about where we'd got to and what was going well and what was going less well. So, and a bit of a look forward to, what's going to come next with Tower. So we're constantly keeping up to date and we've got kind of roadmap for where we want to go. >> What's interesting about you guys is you think about look at OpenStack and then how Cloud came on the scene and Private Cloud has emerged with hybrid and obviously public, you guys are right on the wave of all this large scale stuff and your gaming app really kind of highlights that. And you've been through the paces with Ansible. So I guess my question, and you've got a lot of scar tissue and you got success to show for it too, a lot of great stuff. What advice would you give people who are now getting on the new wave, the bigger wave that's coming which is more users, more scale, more features more automation, microservices are coming around the corner. As long as I get more scale. What advice would you give someone who's coming on board with Ansible for the first time? >> I think there was, you were talking before about Kubernetes and it was so where we were, I think we'd got into containers kind of relatively early. And we were deploying Docker and we had some pretty big, kind of scary playbooks and they managed low balances and deployed Docker containers. And it was always interesting thinking how is this all going to change when Kubernetes comes along? And I think that's been really smooth. I think there's a really nice Ansible module that's just called gates. And I think it's really simple actually, it simplified a lot of the playbooks. And I think that the technologies can coexist quite happily. I don't think you have to feel like Kubernetes is going to change all of the investment you've made into Ansible. Even if you go down the route of Kubernetes operators, you can write them in Ansible. So I still think it's a very relevant tool even with Kubernetes being so kind of prevalent. >> Jurgen what's your thoughts on folks getting in now, who want to jump in and take advantage of the automation, all the cool stuff with Ansible? What advice would you give them? >> Yes, I would definitely recommend to look at their infrastructure set ups as they would look at their code. So break it down into small manageable components, start small, build your roles, make sure to build your roles properly for each of that small component. And then definitely look at Ansible Tower as a way to visualize and control the execution of your code. Make sure you're running it with the proper security policies with the proper credentials and all, they're not, of course so break anything which is at the production level. >> Michael McCarthy, Jurgen Grech two great engineers at Gamesys. Congratulations on your success and love to unpack the infrastructure and the scale you have and certainly automation, great success path. And it's going to get easier. I mean, that's what everyone's saying, it's going to get easier. Thanks for coming on. I appreciate the conversation. Thank you very much. >> Thank you, welcome >> Thank you, take care. Bye bye. >> I'm John Furrier with The Cube here in Palo Alto California. We're virtual, The Cube virtual for Ansible Fest 2020 virtual. Thank you for watching. (upbeat music)

>>It's the queue covering the virtual vertical Big Data Conference 2020. Brought to you by vertical. >>Hello, everybody. Welcome to the new Normal. You're watching the Cube, and it's remote coverage of the vertical big data event on digital or gone Virtual. My name is Dave Volante, and I'm here with Colin Mahoney, who's a senior vice president at Micro Focus and the GM of Vertical Colin. Well, strange times, but the show goes on. Great to see you again. >>Good to see you too, Dave. Yeah, strange times indeed. Obviously, Safety first of everyone that we made >>a >>decision to go Virtual. I think it was absolutely the right all made it in advance of how things have transpired, but we're making the best of it and appreciate your time here, going virtual with us. >>Well, Joe and we're super excited to be here. As you know, the Cube has been at every single BDC since its inception. It's a great event. You just you just presented the key note to your to your audience, You know, it was remote. You didn't have that that live vibe. And you have a lot of fans in the vertical community But could you feel the love? >>Yeah, you know, it's >>it's hard to >>feel the love virtually, but I'll tell you what. The silver lining in all this is the reach that we have for this event now is much broader than it would have been a Z you know, you know, we brought this event back. It's been a few years since we've done it. We're super excited to do it, obviously, you know, in Boston, where it was supposed to be on location, but there wouldn't have been as many people that could participate. So the silver lining in all of this is that I think there's there's a lot of love out there we're getting, too. I have a lot of participants who otherwise would not have been able to participate in this. Both live as well. It's a lot of these assets that we're gonna have available. So, um, you know, it's out there. We've got an amazing customers and of practitioners with vertical. We've got so many have been with us for a long time. We've of course, have a lot of new customers as well that we're welcoming, so it's exciting. >>Well, it's been a while. Since you've had the BDC event, a lot of transpired. You're now part of micro focus, but I know you and I know the vertical team you guys have have not stopped. You've kept the innovation going. We've been following the announcements, but but bridge the gap between the last time. You know, we had coverage of this event and where we are today. A lot has changed. >>Oh, yeah, a lot. A lot has changed. I mean, you know, it's it's the software industry, right? So nothing stays the same. We constantly have Teoh keep going. Probably the only thing that stays the same is the name Vertical. Um and, uh, you know, you're not spending 10 which is just a phenomenal released for us. So, you know, overall, the the organization continues to grow. The dedication and commitment to this great form of vertical continues every single release we do as you know, and this hasn't changed. It's always about performance and scale and adding a whole bunch of new capabilities on that front. But it's also about are our main road map and direction that we're going towards. And I think one of the things have been great about it is that we've stayed true that from day one we haven't tried to deviate too much and get into things that are barred to outside your box. But we've really done, I think, a great job of extending vertical into places where people need a lot of help. And with vertical 10 we know we're going to talk more about that. But we've done a lot of that. It's super exciting for our customers, and all of this, of course, is driven by our customers. But back to the big data conference. You know, everybody has been saying this for years. It was one of the best conferences we've been to just so really it's. It's developers giving tech talks, its customers giving talks. And we have more customers that wanted to give talks than we had slots to fill this year at the event, which is another benefit, a little bit of going virtually accommodate a little bit more about obviously still a tight schedule. But it really was an opportunity for our community to come together and talk about not just America, but how to deal with data, you know, we know the volumes are slowing down. We know the complexity isn't slowing down. The things that people want to do with AI and machine learning are moving forward in a rapid pace as well. There's a lot talk about and share, and that's really huge part of what we try to do with it. >>Well, let's get into some of that. Um, your customers are making bets. Micro focus is actually making a bet on one vertical. I wanna get your perspective on one of the waves that you're riding and where are you placing your bets? >>Yeah, No, it's great. So, you know, I think that one of the waves that we've been writing for a long time, obviously Vertical started out as a sequel platform for analytics as a sequel, database engine, relational engine. But we always knew that was just sort of takes that we wanted to do. People were going to trust us to put enormous amounts of data in our platform and what we owe everyone else's lots of analytics to take advantage of that data in the lots of tools and capabilities to shape that data to get into the right format. The operational reporting but also in this day and age for machine learning and from some pretty advanced regressions and other techniques of things. So a huge part of vertical 10 is just doubling down on that commitment to what we call in database machine learning and ai. Um, And to do that, you know, we know that we're not going to come up with the world's best algorithms. Nor is that our focus to do. Our advantage is we have this massively parallel platform to ingest store, manage and analyze the data. So we made some announcements about incorporating PM ML models into the product. We continue to deepen our python integration. Building off of a new open source project we started with uber has been a great customer and partner on This is one of our great talks here at the event. So you know, we're continuing to do that, and it turns out that when it comes to anything analytics machine learning, certainly so much of what you have to do is actually prepare the big shape the data get the data in the right format, apply the model, fit the model test a model operationalized model and is a great platform to do that. So that's a huge bet that were, um, continuing to ride on, taking advantage of and then some of the other things that we've just been seeing. You continue. I'll take object. Storage is an example on, I think Hadoop and what would you point through ultimately was a huge part of this, but there's just a massive disruption going on in the world around object storage. You know, we've made several bets on S three early we created America Yang mode, which separates computing story. And so for us that separation is not just about being able to take care of your take advantage of cloud economics as we do, or the economics of object storage. It's also about being able to truly isolate workloads and start to set the sort of platform to be able to do very autonomous things in the databases in the database could actually start self analysing without impacting many operational workloads, and so that continues with our partnership with pure storage. On premise, we just announced that we're supporting beyond Google Cloud now. In addition to Amazon, we supported on we've got a CFS now being supported by are you on mode. So we continue to ride on that mega trend as well. Just the clouds in general. Whether it's a public cloud, it's a private cloud on premise. Giving our customers the flexibility and choice to run wherever it makes sense for them is something that we are very committed to. From a flexibility standpoint. There's a lot of lock in products out there. There's a lot of cloud only products now more than ever. We're hearing our customers that they want that flexibility to be able to run anywhere. They want the ease of use and simplicity of native cloud experiences, which we're giving them as well. >>I want to stay in that architectural component for a minute. Talk about separating compute from storage is not just about economics. I mean apart Is that you, you know, green, really scale compute separate from storage as opposed to in chunks. It's more efficient, but you're saying there's other advantages to operational and workload. Specificity. Um, what is unique about vertical In this regard, however, many others separate compute from storage? What's different about vertical? >>Yeah, I think you know, there's a lot of differences about how we do it. It's one thing if you're a cloud native company, you do it and you have a shared catalog. That's key value store that all of your customers are using and are on the same one. Frankly, it's probably more of a security concern than anything. But it's another thing. When you give that capability to each customer on their own, they're fully protected. They're not sharing it with any other customers. And that's something that we hear a lot of insights from our customers. They want to be able to separate compute and storage. But they want to be able to do this in their own environment so that they know that in their data catalog there's no one else is. You share in that catalog, there's no single point of failure. So, um, that's one huge advantage that we have. And frankly, I think it just comes from being a company that's operating on premise and, uh, up in the cloud. I think another huge advantages for us is we don't know what object storage platform is gonna win, nor do we necessarily have. We designed the young vote so that it's an sdk. We started with us three, but it could be anything. It's DFS. That's three. Who knows what what object storage formats were going to be there and then finally, beyond just the object storage. We're really one of the only database companies that actually allows our customers to natively operate on data in very different formats, like parquet and or if you're familiar with those in the Hadoop community. So we not only embrace this kind of object storage disruption, but we really embrace the different data formats. And what that means is our customers that have data pipelines that you know, fully automated, putting this information in different places. They don't have to completely reload everything to take advantage of the Arctic analytics. We can go where the data is connected into it, and we offer them a lot of different ways to take advantage of those analytics. So there are a couple of unique differences with verdict, and again, I think are really advance. You know, in many ways, by not being a cloud native platform is that we're very good at operating in different environments with different formats that changing formats over time. And I don't think a lot of the other companies out there that I think many, particularly many of the SAS companies were scrambling. They even have challenges moving from saying Amazon environment to a Microsoft azure environment with their office because they've got so much unique Band Aid. Excuse me in the background. Just holding the system up that is native to any of those. >>Good. I'm gonna summarize. I'm hearing from you your Ferrari of databases that we've always known. Your your object store agnostic? Um, it's any. It's the cloud experience that you can bring on Prem to virtually any cloud. All the popular clouds hybrid. You know, aws, azure, now Google or on Prem and in a variety of different data formats. And that is, I think, you know, you need the combination of those I think is unique in the marketplace. Um, before we get into the news, I want to ask you about data silos and data silos. You mentioned H DFs where you and I met back in the early days of big data. You know, in some respects, you know, Hadoop help break down the silos with distributing the date and leave it in place, and in other respects, they created Data Lakes, which became silos. And so we have. Yet all these other sales people are trying to get to, Ah, digital transformation meeting, putting data at their core virtually obviously, and leave it in place. What's your thoughts on that in terms of data being a silo buster Buster, How does verdict of way there? >>Yeah, so And you're absolutely right, I think if even if you look at his due for all the new data that gets into the do. In many ways, it's created yet another large island of data that many organizations are struggling with because it's separate from their core traditional data warehouse. It's separate from some of the operational systems that they have, and so there might be a lot of data in there, but they're still struggling with How do I break it out of that large silo and or combine it again? I think some some of the things that verdict it doesn't part of the announcement just attend his migration tools to make it really easy. If you do want to move it from one platform to another inter vertical, but you don't have to move it, you can actually take advantage of a lot of the data where it resides with vertical, especially in the Hadoop brown with our external table storage with our building or compartment natively. So we're very pragmatic about how our customers go about this. Very few customers, Many of them tried it with Hadoop and realize that didn't work. But very few customers want a wholesale. Just say we're going to throw everything out. We're gonna get rid of our data warehouse. We're gonna hit the pause button and we're going to go from there. Just it's not possible to do that. So we've spent a lot of time investing in the product, really work with them to go where the data is and then seamlessly migrate. And when it makes sense to migrate, you mentioned the performance of America. Um, and you talked about it is the variety. It definitely is. And one other thing that we're really proud of this is that it actually is not a gas guzzler. Easy either One of the things that we're seeing, a lot of the other cloud databases pound for pound you get on the 10th the hardware vertical running up there. You get over 10 x performance. We're seeing that a lot, so it's Ah, it's not just about the performance, but it's about the efficiency as well. And I think that efficiency is really important when it comes to silos. Because there's there's just only so much horsepower out there. And it's easier for companies to play tricks and lots of servers environment when they start up for so many organizations and cloud and frankly, looking at the bills they're getting from these cloud workloads that are running. They really conscious of that. >>Yeah. The big, big energy companies love the gas guzzlers. A lot of a lot of cloud. Cute. But let's get into the news. Uh, 10 dot io you shared with your the audience in your keynote. One of the one of the highlights of data. What do we need to know? >>Yeah, so, you know, again doubling down on these mega trends, I'll start with Machine Learning and ai. We've done a lot of work to integrate so that you can take native PM ml models, bring them into vertical, run them massively parallel and help shape you know your data and prepare it. Do all the work that we know is required true machine learning. And for all the hype that there is around it, this is really you know, people want to do a lot of unsupervised machine learning, whether it's for healthcare fraud, detection, financial services. So we've doubled down on that. We now also support things like Tensorflow and, you know, as I mentioned, we're not going to come up with the best algorithms. Our job is really to ensure that those algorithms that people coming up with could be incorporated, that we can run them against massive data sets super efficiently. So that's that's number one number two on object storage. We continue to support Mawr object storage platforms for ya mode in the cloud we're expanding to Google G CPI, Google's cloud beyond just Amazon on premise or in the cloud. Now we're also supporting HD fs with beyond. Of course, we continue to have a great relationship with our partners, your storage on premise. Well, what we continue to invest in the eon mode, especially. I'm not gonna go through all the different things here, but it's not just sort of Hey, you support this and then you move on. There's so many different things that we learn about AP I calls and how to save our customers money and tricks on performance and things on the third areas. We definitely continue to build on that flexibility of deployment, which is related to young vote with. Some are described, but it's also about simplicity. It's also about some of the migration tools that we've announced to make it easy to go from one platform to another. We have a great road map on these abuse on security, on performance and scale. I mean, for us. Those are the things that we're working on every single release. We probably don't talk about them as much as we need to, but obviously they're critically important. And so we constantly look at every component in this product, you know, Version 10 is. It is a huge release for any product, especially an analytic database platform. And so there's We're just constantly revisiting you know, some of the code base and figuring out how we can do it in new and better ways. And that's a big part of 10 as well. >>I'm glad you brought up the machine Intelligence, the machine Learning and AI piece because we would agree that it is really one of the things we've noticed is that you know the new innovation cocktail. It's not being driven by Moore's law anymore. It's really a combination of you. You've collected all this data over the last 10 years through Hadoop and other data stores, object stores, etcetera. And now you're applying machine intelligence to that. And then you've got the cloud for scale. And of course, we talked about you bringing the cloud experience, whether it's on Prem or hybrid etcetera. The reason why I think this is important I wanted to get your take on this is because you do see a lot of emerging analytic databases. Cloud Native. Yes, they do suck up, you know, a lot of compute. Yeah, but they also had a lot of value. And I really wanted to understand how you guys play in that new trend, that sort of cloud database, high performance, bringing in machine learning and AI and ML tools and then driving, you know, turning data into insights and from what I'm hearing is you played directly in that and your differentiation is a lot of the things that we talk about including the ability to do that on from and in the cloud and across clouds. >>Yeah, I mean, I think that's a great point. We were a great cloud database. We run very well upon three major clouds, and you could argue some of the other plants as well in other parts of the world. Um, if you talk to our customers and we have hundreds of customers who are running vertical in the cloud, the experience is very good. I think it would always be better. We've invested a lot in taking advantage of the native cloud ecosystem, so that provisioning and managing vertical is seamless when you're in that environment will continue to do that. But vertical excuse me as a cloud platform is phenomenal. And, um, you know, there's a There's a lot of confusion out there, you know? I think there's a lot of marketing dollars spent that won't name many of the companies here. You know who they are, You know, the cloud Native Data Warehouse and it's true, you know their their software as a service. But if you talk to a lot of our customers, they're getting very good and very similar. experiences with Bernie comic. We stopped short of saying where software is a service because ultimately our customers have that control of flexibility there. They're putting verdict on whichever cloud they want to run it on, managing it. Stay tuned on that. I think you'll you'll hear from or more from us about, you know, that going going even further. But, um, you know, we do really well in the cloud, and I think he on so much of yang. And, you know, this has really been a sort of 2.5 years and never for us. But so much of eon is was designed around. The cloud was designed around Cloud Data Lakes s three, separation of compute and storage on. And if you look at the work that we're doing around container ization and a lot of these other elements, it just takes that to the next level. And, um, there's a lot of great work, so I think we're gonna get continue to get better at cloud. But I would argue that we're already and have been for some time very good at being a cloud analytic data platform. >>Well, since you open the door I got to ask you. So it's e. I hear you from a performance and architectural perspective, but you're also alluding two. I think something else. I don't know what you can share with us. You said stay tuned on that. But I think you're talking about Optionality, maybe different consumption models. That am I getting that right and you share >>your difficult in that right? And actually, I'm glad you wrote something. I think a huge part of Cloud is also has nothing to do with the technology. I think it's how you and seeing the product. Some companies want to rent the product and they want to rent it for a certain period of time. And so we allow our customers to do that. We have incredibly flexible models of how you provision and purchase our product, and I think that helps a lot. You know, I am opening the door Ah, a little bit. But look, we have customers that ask us that we're in offer them or, you know, we can offer them platforms, brawl in. We've had customers come to us and say please take over systems, um, and offer something as a distribution as I said, though I think one thing that we've been really good at is focusing on on what is our core and where we really offer offer value. But I can tell you that, um, we introduced something called the Verdict Advisor Tool this year. One of the things that the Advisor Tool does is it collects information from our customer environments on premise or the cloud, and we run through our own machine learning. We analyze the customer's environment and we make some recommendations automatically. And a lot of our customers have said to us, You know, it's funny. We've tried managed service, tried SAS off, and you guys blow them away in terms of your ability to help us, like automatically managed the verdict, environment and the system. Why don't you guys just take this product and converted into a SAS offering, so I won't go much further than that? But you can imagine that there's a lot of innovation and a lot of thoughts going into how we can do that. But there's no reason that we have to wait and do that today and being able to offer our customers on premise customers that same sort of experience from a managed capability is something that we spend a lot of time thinking about as well. So again, just back to the automation that ease of use, the going above and beyond. Its really excited to have an analytic platform because we can do so much automation off ourselves. And just like we're doing with Perfect Advisor Tool, we're leveraging our own Kool Aid or Champagne Dawn. However you want to say Teoh, in fact, tune up and solve, um, some optimization for our customers automatically, and I think you're going to see that continue. And I think that could work really well in a bunch of different wallets. >>Welcome. Just on a personal note, I've always enjoyed our conversations. I've learned a lot from you over the years. I'm bummed that we can't hang out in Boston, but hopefully soon, uh, this will blow over. I loved last summer when we got together. We had the verdict throwback. We had Stone Breaker, Palmer, Lynch and Mahoney. We did a great series, and that was a lot of fun. So it's really it's a pleasure. And thanks so much. Stay safe out there and, uh, we'll talk to you soon. >>Yeah, you too did stay safe. I really appreciate it up. Unity and, you know, this is what it's all about. It's Ah, it's a lot of fun. I know we're going to see each other in person soon, and it's the people in the community that really make this happen. So looking forward to that, but I really appreciate it. >>Alright. And thank you, everybody for watching. This is the Cube coverage of the verdict. Big data conference gone, virtual going digital. I'm Dave Volante. We'll be right back right after this short break. >>Yeah.

>> [Disembodied Voice] From New York, it's the cube. Covering escape 19. >> Welcome back to the Cube's coverage here in New York City for the inaugural multi-cloud conference called Escape 2019. This is a conference dedicated, first conference dedicated to conversations and content and people around the trend of multi-cloud, which I've been critical of, I've called BS in the past. But it is multi-vendor it's developing and the architecture for true multi-cloud is on the horizon. Where well, we will be relevant. Our next guest is Daniel Wall, senior Distinguished Engineer at Red Hat, working on a lot of the technology around what Kubernetes and containers is create a lot of buzz around and that is the abstraction layer around working across clouds. Daniel, welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you for having me. >> I'm sure I butchered what you do, but I know you make a lot of tools. You make containers work. Talk about your role at Red Hat real quick. >> So my role at Red Hat is I am the technical lead of container technology, everything basically underneath Kubernetes main projects over the last few years is to look at what Docker did and then split them into individual tasks. I believe that Docker should be broken into four different main tasks move and container images around playing with containers, building container images, and running containers in production. And then we can run different security realms around each one of them. So we have tools to do that a Scopio, Podman build, and CRI-O is the one we use for Kubernetes. >> And how's it going? Good? >> It's going great. Yeah, we're getting great up. A lot of community support. A lot of people are really excited about some of the security features for so you can run full containers where you traditionally would do a darker you can run a totally non routes and much more secure. >> Well, I'm really interested in your talk you're giving here because the folks that follow The Cube know some of my tirades I've been on the past. I've been saying for a long time that there's been a very non-selection of clouds outside the big three, >> Right. >> And you had a power law that has, know who the big guys and a long tail of people creating their own little niche services. But income, the essentials and the global size and channel part is people using cloud. We have a video cloud, we're building more and more clouds for our media business. This, I was talking about the rise of these new clouds right?. >> Right. >> You're actually put some structure around this around, You're talking about Walmart clouds and niche clouds. Could you explain so this is really important. I want you to take some time to explain that. >> Okay, so my talk today I call it the Walmart clouds, although the analogy is when Walmart first started showing up in the United States and different areas, all of the department stores basically went out of business because Walmart was able to out-commoditize everything in the universe. And so, all these major vendors, district department stores went out of business. The one thing that didn't go out of business was sort of like specialty stores. So, I always kid around and say my wife has me every weekend sitting out front of these specialty stores that she loves to stop shop at. So if I look at the way the clouds have happened is basically most people say there's three major clouds, although I think they ignore one. So you look at Amazon, you have Google and you have Microsoft Azure, although I think Alibaba is going to become important in the future. And I call those the Walmart clouds, because basically, their whole goal is to commoditize and get rid of all the other, >> And scale up and provide more and more departments more services, >> But basically it they will always be rushing to get to the cheapest price. But there were a bunch of other cloud vendors out of the specialty cloud vendors like you talking about the Cube one, you this might be the best one to do in video. So I might want to put part of my workload in the Microsoft cloud or the Amazon cloud to get the cheapest price but I want to run certain certain workloads inside the U.S. We look at another example that is Nvidia right? and there's the Nvidia cloud and they might put the best GPUs in there. And you might want to do your machine learning your AI technologies might want to go in there because they might work better. IBM, who obviously bought Red Hat, but but IBM, you look at what they're doing in their cloud, they can have power series, they can have, mainframe workload z series. They might even have, some of their future, super duper computers type things in it. And then you have Oracle and Oracle would have database, they're probably going to do databases, they've massive database technologies inside of their cloud. So when you really >> Well, they think they're one of the big clouds. But they're not. >> They do. >> But their specialty Database Cloud. >> Basically, I believe that they are. I believe IBM, I think all of them are niche, especially clouds. But the bottom line is you need an API to move between these clouds so you can put workloads in different instances. And I believe that the Walmart clouds the the AWS and Microsoft and Google, their whole goal is to get you into their cloud. They might talk a little bit about on prem cloud and supporting your data centers. But their real goal is to get you off your data centers into their cloud, so they can start making money. They won't have no interest in supporting these, sort of the specialty cloud vendors. But if you look at open shift, which Kubernetes, from Red Hat, our goal is to basically make moving your cloud instances around and keep commodity and stability and move to clouds around. >> Let's take it through a working example. So there's couples and use cases that I see happening, I want to get your reaction. One is our cloud. We're (mutters intelligibly) which we do have. It's coming out. It's on Amazon. So we were small, self funded, company growing having fun. We're building on Amazon. We don't do any work in Azure our solutions on Amazon. Another use case might be a vendor that says hey I have proprietary software, I'm going to stand up my own cloud infrastructure and do all that and build it from the ground up. Is there a difference between the two? Because one is co-locating essentially on Amazon. leveraging the cheap commodity, but building differentiated niche on top of it, versus the standing up a full cloud? >> Well, what I would argue, first of all is is I would want you are your cloud, the one that you're saying is in say, Amazon, it what is the chance of you guys basically getting an offer from Azure to a nickel less per hour. >> Pretty high!(laughs amusingly) >> To be able to move your cloud over, >> It might be high. >> And the problem I would see is if your cloud inside of Amazon cloud starts to take advantage of Amazon's features, then all of a sudden it gets harder and harder for you. the cost of moving off is going to get harder and harder. If you use open source solutions, pure open source and not tied to individual cloud vendors. Then it would become much easier for you to move around. So you could take advantage of, commodity, right? And that you mean, another analogy I use with the big cloud vendors is Hansel and Gretel right. They all want you to come on in and come on in have some of our candy, have some our candy. And next thing you know, you're inside the cage. And, you know, but if you stick to open source, right, this is in a lot of ways the major cloud vendors is a major threat to open source, and that they're trying to lock everybody in right there. We lost it. >> Okay so what's the path? So I told it, by the way, I'm getting what your saying. So I say great I'll take advantage of the cheap I as the infrastructure service layer. But then what an open source toy usually open shift, I still got to build my app, I got to still host it. >> Right. So you build you build your app on top of it. So let me define what open shift is. And so open shift is basically Red Hat's enterprise version of Kubernetes. So if you look at Kubernetes, Kubernetes in some ways is just a higher level distribution of software. So when when Red Hats got into Linux business, there were lots and lots of Linux distributions. And what Red Hat did is they picked a whole kernel and a whole bunch of packages and joined them together and created a distribution that everybody could agree on and build on. So with open shift we're doing is we're taking Kubernetes, but there's a whole bunch of CNCF projects, and we're joining them all together and then testing them and making enterprise so that ready. But really Kubernetes is the key factor here in that if you build everything Kubernetes you CNCF open source projects, for your, save your storage, put it on staff, so Gloucester, one of the network based file systems in the open source world, instead of diving directly into Amazon, now you have the flexibility to be able to get out of the- >> So here's an Architectural question. So I got to ask you as multi-cloud conversation starts to heat up, and by the way, I think people have multiple clouds. It's just not multi-clouding. Right, right, right. Yeah, but it's coming. So architecturally what do someone have to think about architecturally for multi cloud? What's in the mind of the technical architect out there? >> What's on them? What are they should be thinking about from an architecture because you don't want to forclose the future. But I also want to get the best what I can get today from the clouds. >> I mean, I keep keep on hammering on it, but stick to the open source projects to do this as the CNCF projects just to allow you flexibility. A lot of it, the real problem with a lot of this technology right now is it's developing so fast. I mean, I think we have a Kubernetes version every two weeks, it seems at least in my team and see it feels like it. >> So you think Red Hat's of good vendor for the supplier for that person. >> Obviously >> Yeah you know some stuff is hard to deal with so it (mutters) look I'm so busy, these guys, I'm trying to get the transformation going. I don't have time to keep track of what's going on in CNCF. >> Yeah, well, we're a co worker of mine talks about your Red Hat and open shift is a plumbing tool or an electric we're building the foundation of your house and we put the electrical systems and the plumbing empties into your house, but we still need applications to run so we need you you need a toast or you need a toilet, you need a sink. And the applications and one of the one of the differences between Red hat and sort of the cloud vendors is we try not to get into the product, the lab and product business. So we want to support open source projects and other products running in our environment. If you compare that to running inside a cloud, you know if you become incredibly successful inside of Amazon, your video cloud business wants to prevent Amazon to say, oh, we'll just do video will steal everything they're doing and all a sudden we'll do the video inside of Amazon and then put your your cloud out of business. And, your only option then is now you're competing Amazon in Amazon against Amazon. How do you get out of Amazon >> That's called 3D chess.I think. Or maybe 4D chess. >> So if you you know My point being if you have an opportunity to get out and compete against Amazon say on Microsoft compete on your local compete on one of the niche clouds So any vendor that basically ties totally to Amazon, >> This is this is absolutely why I'm here because I believe multi-vendor, that was the buzzword in the 80s and 90s. Is everyone wants to they want to homogeneous they want a heterogeneous network. So multi-vendor will be around multi-cloud has to survive, it will survive. But right now we are in the foundational stages. The second interview, he has talked about plumbing and streets, and that's what we're at. So I guess the final question for you is, as we're setting the foundational infrastructure for multi-cloud, what's the big takeaway that you see that you could share? You mentioned get involved in open source what specifically architecturally should should folks think about in terms of foundational. >> I think, look at what the CNCF that cloud cloud native foundation is doing for open source projects, depends on what level you want to come in. And the bottom line is, built on top of Kubernetes use open standards to do it. Don't fall for the Hansel and Gretel effect of eating the candy because you will find yourself in a cage. >> Well, multi cloud is arrived and it's being thought through by industry leaders from entrepreneurs. We just had the former CEO of Sierra on, now running AVA trace, industry veteran, lot of tech chops in here, laying down the lines, if you will. A lot of good stuff Kubernetes is a key part of the containers. >> Okay, huge part of it. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having me. >> And thanks for sharing the insights here on The Cube. We're in New York City for the inaugural multi-cloud conference Escape 19. I'm John Furrier back with more after this short break (pulsating music) (pulsating music)

>> Narrator: Live from San Diego California it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live, US, 2019 brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back we're here at the San Diego convention center for Cisco Live 2019 and you're watching theCUBE the worldwide leader in enterprise tech coverage helping extract the signal from the noise. I'm Stu Miniman we've had three days wall to wall coverage my co-host Dave Vellante and Lisa Martin are all in the house and I'm really excited to actually sit down one on one with one of the users at this user conference the 30th anniversary conference actually for Cisco with their users and partners over 28,000 so speaking for all of them right? We have Sebastien Morissette who's an IT architect specialist at Intact Financial Corporation come to us from beautiful Montreal Canada. >> Exactly. >> All right thank you so much for joining us so Sebastien first of all how many Cisco Lives have you been too? >> Honestly this is my first. >> Oh absolutely exciting for that, my first one I came too was actually 10 years ago I joked at the 20th anniversary they went back 20 years to have some 80's bands they had The Bangles and Devo on and now on the 30 year they moved 10 years forwards they have two great bands from the 90's Wheezer and Foo Fighters so your first time at Cisco Live give us your general impressions of the show. >> Well actually it's been very great I've had a lot of appearances I had to do as well so I got some sessions in I did some work as well so it's amazing to see how these events unfold right? Like the sheer size of this thing and how many people are involved, how many booths how many technical sessions you can have so, I was very pleased I'm here with a lot of people from my team as well from Intact so you know we get the chance to do stuff outside of the work area as well so it's interesting right? It's giving us this opportunity to really deep dive into what we love which is technology but at the same time spend some time together outside of work. >> That's awesome, we've had gorgeous weather here in San Diego hope you definitely get to see the sights before we geek out on some of the technology just give our audience a little bit about Intact and the insurance business but give us a little bit about the history of the company and core focus. >> Okay well Intact is a company that was, they grew as acquisitions with acquisitions we've typically, we were ING Canada back in, before 2010 and afterwards we were publicly traded now so we're Intact Financial Corp. Typically we're the number one PNC insurer in Canada and we've been working with different partners to build our data center 2.0 initiative which is kind of a new offering of you know modern IT services within Intact. >> Okay great and just to, your purview in the company and just the comment about the company is you know when you talk about those transformations you know MNA is something we see a lot in your industry and put some extra special challenges in place when you're doing that but tell us a little bit about what's under your role and scope as to kind of locations, people however you measure you know what, boxes or ports or whatever. >> Okay well you know typically my role is lead architect within the infrastructure and security group for North America Intact through acquisition we actually bought OneBeacon Insurance last year, so typically we now have a US presence as well in specialty insurance, specialty lines so typically whenever we're looking at different technologies we look at the skills sets that we have, we look to see what can be the better half for us to you know accelerate and be more agile in how we actually consume technology so in some cases whatever we're looking at building up these new features like I was talking for data center 2.0 it happens that some of the technologies and the skill sets we have were with Cisco which is why we are here today with the team. >> All right so Sebastien you talk about data center 2.0 and transformation there at the organizational level is it branded data center transformation does the word digital transformation come up in your discussions? >> Yeah data center 2.0 is actually kind of the project name that we've been giving this initiative for the past two years but it really is at the essence a digital transformation, what we're doing is we're typically taking training wheels to the Cloud so we're building an on-prem private Cloud offering with multi-sites so we have three sites in the scope right now and the goal is really to actually allow our business to expand into the Cloud while being in a secure on-prem environment when we get to that maturity level where we feel we're ready to actually really go into public Cloud our software engineering teams our development teams will have experienced it on-prem safely and will have a confidence level to bringing them there so it has been transformational also because we decided to push DevOps culture as far as we can from an infrastructure team so we were trying to get all the adoption from our software engineering folks to actually structure themselves, bring on DevOps team and that we can share with them so they can actually be more agile and get a lot more done without having to depend on us and spend a lot of time waiting for VM's or stuff so trying to accelerate that. >> Awesome I love that 'cause sometimes you hear okay we're going to 2.0 it's basically a fancy refresh but we're going to keep things mostly the same when I hear DevOps I know that culture and organization is something that is a key piece of that, I have to ask you without getting down into the pedantics of this, when you say a private Cloud that's in your data center we understand some of the covenants and reasons what you have but how do you determine whether, what was your guiding line as to how is this a Cloud versus just some new virtualized environment? >> I've had the chance to have great executive sponsorship from my senior vice president typically we were looking at how can we access the Cloud? The way I approached it was overhauling what we do was not the route to go what I asked him to do is say you know trust me I'll start with a clean slate and we will build a brand new landing area for Cloud native applications and new methodologies for modern IT services so typically in the end we didn't overhaul anything that we had we built a brand new sandbox for Intact to be able to work with so we went from disaster recovery to business continuity in that move we've built a three site approach because when I was looking at kind of my capex expenditure if I was building two sites to be fully resilient and be business continuity I would be spending 200% of my capital to actually build up that capacity when you go to three sites it seems awkward but you just need 50% on each site of your capacity to ensure 100% of coverage of your requirements, so in the end you're actually spending 150% of your capacity, or your capex to buy the compute, so there's an incentive there as well. So to answer your question more precisely it's very easy for us to see how it's a Cloud because we're not operating it the same way we're operating our other environment and since we started from scratch every process has been revised we haven't kept everything we had before so we had the chance to build something brand new for that specific offering that our software engineering groups were asking us to do. >> All right that's exciting stuff there when you look at these multi-site deployments I think back in my career and I worked on some of these environments, management, security and networking are absolutely critical, I hear oh okay I've got 50% in each oh my God what if a site gets isolated and I can't talk to those other two so luckily I'm guessing Cisco has something to do with your rollout, we're obviously here at Cisco Live so give us a little bit inside the architecture and especially you know what kind of Cisco pieces are you using? >> All right well you know typically the way that our story started was kind of weird the first thing we've done is we've actually went to Cisco to redesign a DMZ and we got out from Cisco Montreal team with an idea to not just change and buy ACI switches for the DMZ but actually rebuild our whole design to you know integrate ACI into the fabric and then when you start talking about firewalls or switches they tell you well with ACI you have contracts so it really started that way so we built an ACI fabric with the Cisco HyperFlex hyper-converged infrastructure as our compute layer so typically think of it as Intact is building our new version of a software defined data center. So with building that we have all the components so we have the virtualization like you spoke of earlier which is running like you know VMware on site, on top of the HyperFlex and then we have the ACI since we had three sites we topped it off with the multi-site orchestrator to be able to manage consistent policies around all of our three sites and in the end we needed to have an orchestrator to be able to deploy the content onto that and when we were looking at it early on it was Clicker when Cisco purchased Clicker we were looking at finding a Cloud management platform, so we ended up using CloudCenter which is now CloudCenter Suite and in the way we were using it, which was a little atypical from the typical way clients are using CloudCenter today we're taking it into the data center and out to the Cloud whereas when I was talking with Kip Compton earlier this week he was saying you know what sometimes our clients buy it more for the Cloud first and I was like well we have like the inverse story of exactly how we did the opposite but it works as well, so typically where we stand today I have the three sites we're able to deploy with CloudCenter we've got multi-site on top of that and the idea it really is that, I spoke about training wheels earlier well we're taking them off right? In the next couple of weeks we're starting to look into negotiations with public Cloud providers trying to move towards the public Cloud and you know there's exciting news that came out from Cisco this week while I was here about the fact that now you know they're forecasting a lot more collaboration with Microsoft and AWS and now they have all the three major Cloud providers covered with ACI Anywhere so that means all of our security that you were talking about earlier will now have a consistent policy model applied all, everywhere so to be honest I'm not too concerned about if we did a good choice a couple of years back I think we're in our sweet spot right now. >> Yeah and you're right it's a different story than we've generally heard from Cisco and some customers which is I have all of these public Cloud's and I have my data center and I'm looking for some piece to help tie it together and that the CloudCenter Suite is there so you feel you're confident with the platform that you chose and that's going to give you the flexibility as to whichever public Cloud or public Cloud you choose are you at the point there that do you know which public Cloud you're going to be on or maybe it's a little too early? >> Well to be honest you know we're keeping our options open you know we have different providers that are offered, you know the major public one there's Amazon there's Google Cloud we're not closing any options it's really a question of us to do the same secure approach that we've done right now with this offering to really go one at a time make sure that we're able to nail it down, make it secure that we get all the information back so I'm not at a possibility right now to disclose which ones we're dealing with because we're still negotiating but in the end we're not limiting ourselves we just want to be able to scale. >> Right you're confident that the Cisco solution that you choose will give you the flexibility no matter which one you use or if you use multiples or need to make switches along the way? >> Yeah. >> Question I have for you on that is when you look at multi-Cloud one of the things that are challenging for companies is how do I make sure I've got the skillsets because workloads might be portable, networks might be connected but understanding how I manage each of those environments so do you feel CloudCenter Suite's going to help you through that? You know what do you see as you look out over your roadmap as to what that's going to mean for you know your DevOps team and the people managing this environment as it spreads out to the public Cloud? >> Actually I'm feeling really confident because you know especially after seeing a couple of sessions of what Roland Acra and Kip have announced for the data center and for the Cloud piece we're seeing more and more normalization being done by Cisco to actually allow us to be confident in the fact that on prem we're doing ACI and that our policies are going to be mapped to the constructs of the different Cloud providers. So for me what it means is I don't necessarily need to become specialized in how we're going to be operating inside of a Cloud we need to make sure that we get the proper policies built into the different products you know Cisco's branding it the Anywhere right? They have the HX Anywhere the ACI Anywhere and typically that's what we like about it is I can have one consistent set of skillsets and allow the people to use it one thing I found interesting about this week and it's not necessarily to do like more promotion for Cisco is like the Cloud First ACI right? So being able to be starting with ACI in the Cloud I found that was kind of interesting because when you know how the multi-site orchestrator works means apps you build out in the Cloud you're going to be able to to pull back in through the MSO and push it back on prem or anywhere in other Clouds afterwards so I found that was very intuitive of them to go to that route of allowing us to you know transparently migrate apps between sites. >> All right so Sebastien you're using a lot of the latest and greatest from Cisco you talk about the HX the ACI the CloudCenter Suite what advice do you give to your peers out there and they say you know I've used Cisco products for a long time Cisco makes great products but you know simplicity and management across the product lines was something that you know needed some work what does the Cisco of today look like you know what's working well? What still would you like to see them progress on? >> Well you know for us one of the things that was nice like I mentioned earlier is we're typically going greenfield so I didn't have a lot of the issues that other companies might be facing if they're trying to take their brownfield and actually make it into what we've built so my first advice would be if you're able to get the executive sponsorship to build a greenfield environment there's nothing in Cloud native applications that is you know symmetric with the traditional environment of a data center, it's completely different ways of working we have one week sprints we patch everything as it comes out if an application goes into the environment it needs to be functional with that patching cycle of almost every time we're at n or n-1 so, my thing is think about applications as being the center of what you actually need and not the infrastructure, let the infrastructure be what it is because you're going to be anywhere right? So that's one of the things I would say, from what you said about Cisco and the integration you were right, we have lived a couple of items like that in the last two years and a half, however I've noticed that these new software components like CloudShare and everything not necessarily the hardware part Cisco nails hardware like it works they've been doing it for years the thing is with these software teams they're very customer driven we have access to the engineers now I mean we've had meetings with the Canadian execs Roland Acra's team we were able to get access to the developers and the teams here in the US so, every company has challenges I would be lying if I told you that even at Intact we don't have silos and we don't have issues sometimes with different teams managing together but I feel as if at least for the technologies that we're using they've done good work for us to actually help us get through that. >> Well it's interesting Sebastian you bring that up because I look at you say okay, you've got a greenfield environment awesome, we can go do some new tech, well let's throw in there the DevOps and let's change all the other pieces you're like completely overhauling your environment how much of that were there some new team members that came in as part of that or you know I look people, process and technology sounded like you were taking it all on at once, did that work well? Would you have if you looked back would you have changed some of the ordering and maybe you know gotten one piece before the other or did it help to kind of you know start brand new start fresh and get everything going? >> Well I wouldn't redo the part of starting fresh however, it helped us get really good pace and work you know it's our first agile project as an infrastructure group so all of that was great learning experience the only thing I would say is you need to make sure your organization is ready for that level of change because it's one thing to have one VP sponsorship to actually build out this type of approach but where we struggled a little bit was afterwards getting the rest of our IT organization to kind of want to get onboard. because we are building something new, the traditional environment is not disappearing and we're telling our software engineering groups here's a new area where you can play in but you know typically I'd say that it's been well received we have not had the need to build new skillsets because we're doing infrastructure as code so typically a lot of the stuff we're building we're making sure it's automated so that way it's very nice and lean and when we build a new site we have a lot of automation already built in so we can properly just deploy so lessons learned like you've asked me I'd say that typically I'd probably do much of what I did the same way, but I would work a little bit more on the people area just to make sure that the message is clearly understood that what we're building is for the future of Intact and make sure that we spend a little bit more time managing that aspect because for the technology it's fine for the time it took and everything it's fine, it's really people the change is significant to most of them and when you've been doing something for a long time and someone comes up and disrupts it's like if we were disrupting our own company right? So typically I'd say, that would be something that I would say to people manage that properly or you will have a lot more work to do inside of that initiative to actually gain everybody's momentum and get them to be behind you. >> Well Sebastien I really appreciate you walking us through all of your transformation I want to just give you the final word sounds like you've got great access to Cisco really hope you're happy with what you've done final word is to you know your expectations coming into a show like this and you know what your take aways will be from Cisco Live 2019 in San Diego? >> Well outside from the amazing weather you mean or yeah? so you know typically I like the event I've been to other events before, like I said this is my first time at Cisco but what I've seen is that Cisco's really into getting their customers to understand their technology so they're really present so I really liked how you know we were given the opportunity to do hands on labs and actually learn new technologies so typically great experience coming here and great opportunities and thanks so much for having us. >> Well Sebastien Morissette congratulations to your team at Intact and thank you so much for sharing this story. >> Thank you so much. >> All right we've got a little bit more left here of three days wall to wall coverage Cisco Live 2019 in San Diego for Dave Vellante, Lisa Martin I'm Stu Miniman and thanks as always for watching theCUBE. 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>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering IBM Think 2019, brought to you by IBM. >> Hello everyone welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here at IBM Think 2019 in San Francisco, our exclusive coverage, day four, four days of coverage events winding down, I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman, our next guest, Eric Herzog, CUBE alumni, CMO of IBM storage and VP of storage channels, Eric great to see you wearing the Hawaiian shirt as usual. >> Great, I can't come to theCUBE and not wear the Hawaiian shirt. You guys give me too much of a heart attack. >> Love getting you on to get down and dirty on storage and the impact of Cloud and infrastructure. First, you gave a great talk yesterday to a packed house, I saw that on social media, great response, what's going on for you at the show, tell us. >> So the big focuses for us are around four key initiatives. One is multi-cloud particularly from a hybrid perspective and in fact, I had three presenters with me, panelists and users, all of them were using multiple public cloud providers and all of them had a private cloud. One of them also was a software as a service vendor, so clearly they're really monetizing it. So that's one, the second one is around AI, both AI that we use inside of our storage to make it more efficient and more cost effective for the end user, but also as the platform for AI work loads and applications. Cyber resiliency is our other big theme, we've got all kinds of security, yes everyone is used to of course the Great Wall of China protecting you and then of course chasing the bad guy down when they breach you, but when they breach you it'd sure be nice if everything had data at rest encryption, or when you tiered out to the cloud you knew that it was being backed up or tiered out fully encrypted or how about something that can help you with ransomware and malware. So we have that, and that's a storage product not a regular, you know what you think of from a security vendor. So those are the big things that we've been harking on at the show. >> One of the things that I've observed, you've been very active out in the field, we've seen you at a lot of different events, Cisco Live, others, you guys have had an interesting storage product portfolio, very broad and specific leadership categories, but you also have the ability to work with other partners. This has been a big part of your strategy, you get the channels. What is, how would you summarize the current story around IBM storage and systems, because it's now an ingredient part of other people's infrastructure with cloud storage then becomes a key equation, how would you describe the IBM storage posture, product portfolio, what are the key things? >> So I think the key thing from a portfolio perspective, while it looks broad it's really four things. Software defined storage which we also happened to have bet on on array so theoretically that's one product line, same exact software. Other vendors don't do that, they have an array pack and you buy the array but if you buy their software defined storage it's actually different software, for us it's the same software. Then we have modern data protection and then we have management playing. That's kind of it. I do think one of the big differentiator for us, is even though we're part of IBM, we have already been working with everyone any way. So as we talked about at Cisco Live, for Spectrum Protect alone, our modern data protection platform, we have 400 small and medium cloud service providers all over the world that their back up service is based on it, so even though IBM Cloud has their own cloud division theoretically, we're enabling the competition but we've had that story at IBM storage now for four years. >> So storage anywhere basically is the theme here, AI anywhere storage anywhere, I mean it's not the official tagline but that's the philosophy with software. >> And that's yeah, so even if you think look at AI. We have an AI reference architecture with the power product line, we also have an AI reference architecture with the Nvidia product line, and we're working on a third one right now with another major server vendor because we want our storage to be anywhere there's AI and anywhere there's a cloud, big medium or small. >> Alright, Eric let's tease that out a little bit because I had a great conversation with an IBM fellow yesterday and we think back ten years ago, when you talked about hybrid and multi cloud, when you talked about an application it's "Am I spanning between environments? "Am I bursting between environments?" And architectures just didn't work that way. Today microservices architecture, there's pieces of the solution that can live in lots of environments, Compute I can spin up almost anywhere at any time, data doesn't move and I need to worry about my data, I need to worry about security so there's certain things that multi cloud like data protection, cyber resiliency, those kind of ones need to live everywhere, but when I talk about storage, I'm not moving my storage and my persistent database all over the place. So help us kind of tease out as to what is the multi everywhere and what is the you know the data that the Compute's going to actually move to that data, help us squint through that a little bit. >> So let's do the storage part first. So most applications, workloads, and use cases that are either business critical or mission critical are going to stay on prem, doesn't mean you can't use a public cloud provider for overflow whether that be IBM or Amazon or Microsoft or like I said the 400 cloud providers that we sell to that are not IBM, so but you're still going to have this hybridness where the data is partially on prem and off prem, in that case you're going to be using the public cloud provider, and by the way we did a survey, IBM did, and when you're looking enterprise, so let's say companies that are three or four billion US and up, anywhere in the world, you're seeing that most of them are using five or six different public clouds, whether that be salesforce.com which really is sales enablement software as a service. We have a startup that we work with who uses IBM's flash system and they do cyber security as a service, that's their whole business. So all of this software vendors that now deliver not on prem but you know over the cloud. Then you've got regular public cloud providers for file, block, and object for example we not only support IBM Cloud object storage protocol, but S3. So we have customers that put data out in S3, we have customers that put it out on other clouds because as you know S3's become the de facto standard so all the mid to small cloud providers use it. So I think what you've got is hybrid cloud is a sort of a subset of multi cloud and then multi cloud what you're seeing is because of software as service could even be geographic issues, we have a lot of data centers at IBM Cloud so do the three major cloud providers, but we are not in all 212 countries so if you have the law like in Canada where the data has to physically stay within the premises of Canada, now we all happen to have data centers that are big enough, but that doesn't mean we have data centers in every country, so you have legal issues, you have applications what applications are good, that make sense, what about pricing, and as you know some big companies still buy regionally. >> Eric, one of the things I'd love to get your perspective on is the SAS providers because if we look at the storage market in many ways, you know there was like the threat of public cloud, but really you got to follow the application, follow the data and as SAS proliferation happens, your data is going to go with that, you know you have them as customers in a lot of environments, what are you seeing from the SAS providers, how do they choose what offerings they have and how do they look at their data center versus public cloud mix? >> So when you look at a SAS provider, they've got a couple of different parameters that they look at which is why we've been very successful. One is performance, they already know their subject to the vicissitudes of the cloud so you can't have any bottle neck in your core data center because you're serving that app up, and if it's too slow or it doesn't work right, then of course the end user will go buy a different piece of software from another SAS provider. Second one is availability, because you have no idea when wiki bomb theCUBE is going to turn on that service, it could be the middle of the night right? If you guys expand to Asia, you guys will be asleep but your guy in Australia will be using that software, so it can't ever go down, so availability. Resiliency, can it handle pounding. If CUBE wiki bomb becomes ginormous, and you buy all these other analyst firms and the next thing you know the biggest analyst firm in the world, if you have thousands of people guess what now you're hammering on that software, so it's got to be able to take that workload abuse, right? And that's the kind of thing, so they look for that. >> That's scale basically, scale is critical. >> Right, they cannot have any issues of resiliency or availability and performance so A: they're usually going all flash, some of them will buy like a tape or the older all hard drive arrays as a backup store, ideal for IBM cloud object storage but again the main thing they focus on is flash because they're serving up that software. >> Let me ask you a question, so I know you've been in this business for a long time, storage you know everything about the speeds and fees but also you've been a historian too, you're on the front edge. IBM has got a killer strategy with cloud private, doing very well with Openshift and Redhat acquisition, you're now poised to essentially bring cloud scale across multiple clouds and with AI, it really puts storage at the center of the action. How is storage now positioned and how should customers think about storage, because scale is table stakes, enabling developers to program infrastructure as code, how does storage and how has it changed and how are you guys positioned to take advantage of that? How would you kind of explain that to a customer? >> Yeah so I think there's a couple of changes, first of all you're looking for a storage vendor which should be us, but you're looking for a storage vendor that is always making sure, for example when micro services first came out and containers, okay great except when containers came out and it's still a problem, you don't have storage consistency whereas in a VM ware or a hyper V or you know KVM environment, you do. So when you move things around, you don't lose the dataset, well we have persistency storage. So the key thing that you want to look for is a storage vendor that will stay on that leading edge as you move. Our copy data manager has an API so the developers can spit up their own environments but use real data, so as you guys know well from your pasts that the last thing you want to do is have the dev ops guy be developing things on faux datasets, try to put it in production, and then the real dataset doesn't work, at the same time if they put it out to a public cloud provider you could have a legal or security breach, right? So by being able to take modern data protection, as an example, and not just to have grandfather, father son back up, we all remember that I remember it better than you guys since I'm older, but that's back up right? It's not back up any more, it's modern data protection. You need to be able to take the snapshot, the replica or the back up dataset and use it for development, so you want a storage vendor that's going to be on the leading edge of that. We've done that at IBM on the Kenner side, the modern data protection side, and we'll continue to the do that. The whole multi cloud thing, IBM as you know is now all about multi cloud, what Redhat's been in, the storage division of IBM has been working with Redhat for 15 years. Going to the Redhat summit every year, I know you guys do theCUBE from there sometimes. >> You're on, but this is software defined so at the end of the day a software defined bet with arrays have paid off. >> Yes. >> You'd say that would be kind of a key linchpin. >> I would argue that, while there's some hardware aspects to it, so for example our flash core modules give us a big differentiator from a flash perspective, in general the number one differentiator for a strong, powerful array vendor is actually the underlying software code. The RAID stack, what you can wrap around it, file block and object support, what could you enhance, our Spectrum discover, allowing you to use metadata about unstructured data whether that be in the file space of the object store. That allows the data scientist to dramatically reduce the time it takes to prep the data when they're doing either AI or an analytic workload, so we just saved them money but we're really a storage company that came up with something that a data scientist could use because we understand how storage is at the central foundation and how you could literally use the metadata for something actually valuable, not to a storage person because a data scientist is not the storage guy of course. >> Yeah and Eric I would love to get your feedback, what are some of those key discussions you're having with customers here at the show? We've been talking a lot this week digital transformation, AI into everything there, are those some of the themes? What are the struggles that really the enterprises of today are facing and how your group's helping them? >> So one of the big things is understanding that it's going to be multi cloud and so because we've already been the Switzerland of the storage industry and working with every cloud provider, all the big ones, including ones that compete with our own sister division, but all the little small ones too, right? And all the software as service vendors we work with that we're the safe bet, you don't have to worry about it. Because whoever you pick, or for a big enterprise, in fact I had Aetna on stage with me and he said he's using seven different clouds, one of which is their private cloud and then six different cloud providers they use, and he said not counting salesforce.com and I forgot the other name, so really if you count the softwares there, she really got like nine clouds. She said I use IBM cause I know it's going to work with whoever, and you're not going to say oh I don't work with this one or that one. So that's been obviously making sure everyone realizes that, the whole company is embracing it as you saw and what we're going to do obviously with Redhat and continue for them to participate with all of their existing customer base that they've been doing for years. >> So you see multi cloud and sweet spot, that highlights your value proposition, would you say that to be true? >> I would say that and then the second one is around AI. All the storage vendors including us have had AI sort of inside, what I'll call inside of the box, inside of the array and use that to make the array better, but now with AI being ubiquitous from a work load perspective, you have to have the right foundation underneath that, again performance resiliency availability, if you're going to use AI in a giant car factory, and it's going to run all of those machines, you better make sure the thing never fails because then the assembly line goes down and those things are hundreds of millions of dollars of build every day. So that's the kind of thing you got to look for, so AI's got to have the right platform underneath it as well. >> Eric you have some reporting from the field as you're out in the, doing a lot of talks a lot of customers, give it a couple of anecdotal examples of where the leading edge is in storage and where are use cases that would be a good tell sign of where this kind of multi cloud is going. Can you just give some examples of the use cases, situation, and kind of why is that relevant for where everyone will be going? Where is the puck going to be, so I can skate to where the puck is, as they say. >> So from a multi cloud perspective, A: you've got to deal with how your company is structured, if you have a divisionalized company or one that really lets the regions make their own buy decisions, then you may have NTT Cloud in Japan, you may have Ali Baba in China, you may have IBM Cloud Australia, and then you might have Amazon in Latin America. And as IT guys you got to make sure you're dealing with that, and embrace it. One of the things I think from an IT perspective is why I'm wearing the Hawaiian shirt, you don't fight the wave, you ride the wave. And that's what everyone's got to realize so, they're going to use multi cloud, and remember the cloud was the web was the internet, it's actually all the same stuff from a long time ago, the mid 90's, which also means now procurement's involved and when procurement's involved, what are they going to say to you? Did you get a bid from IBM Cloud, did you see that bid from Amazon and Microsoft? So it's changed the whole thing of, I can just go to any cloud I want to, now procurement's involved that even mid-size companies procurement says you did get another bid right, did you not? Which for server, storage, and network vendors that's been the way it's been for 35, 40 years. >> The bids are changing too, so what are the requirements now? Amazon has a cloud, they have storage, you have storage, but people have on premise they have multiple environments. If the world is one big data center, with multiple regions and locations, this is the resilience you spoke of, what's the new requirements as procurement gets involved because procurement isn't dictating the requirements, they're getting the requirements from the application work loads and the infrastructure, so what are the new requirements that you see? >> So I think the thing you're seeing is if you take cloud just a couple years ago, I'm going to put my storage out there, okay great, I need this kind of availability, ooh that's extra money, sorry Mr. Wikibomb, Mr. CUBE we got to charge you a little extra for that. Oh we need a certain amount of performance, oh that's a little extra. And then for heavy transactional work loads the data's constantly moving back and forth, oh we forgot to tell you that we're charging you every time you move the data in and every time you move the data out. So as you're putting together these RFPs you needs to be aware of that. >> Those are hidden costs. >> Those are hidden costs that are, I think the reason you're seeing such the ride of the hybrid is people went to public cloud and then someone in finance, or maybe even in the IT group sat down with a spread sheet and said "Oh my god, we could've just bought an IBM array "or someone else's array" and actually had less money even counting support, because all every time we're moving the data, but for archive, for back up we don't move the data around a lot, it's a great solution for anything. Then you have the whole factoring of software as a service, so part of that is the software itself, if you're going to go up against salesforce.com then whoever does, they better make sure the software's good, then on top of that again you negotiate with the software vendor, I need it globally, okay what's the fee for that? So I think the IT guys need to understand that with the ubiquity of the cloud, you've got to ask way more questions, in the storage array business, everyone's got five nines and almost everybody's got six nines, well way back when it was four nines then it was five and now it's six, so you don't ask anymore because you know it just changes right? And the cloud is still new enough and the whole software as a service is a different angle, and a lot of people don't even realize software as a service is cloud, but when you say that they go, what are you talking about, it's just I'm getting it over a service. Where do you think it comes from? A cloud data center. >> Well the trend is software defined, you guys are on that early. Congratulations, and don't forget the hardware, the high performance hardware as well, arrays and what not. So great job. Eric thanks for coming on, appreciate it. >> Great, thank you very much. >> CUBE coverage here, I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman. Day four of our live coverage here in Moscone North, in San Francisco for IBM Think 2019. Great packed house here at IBM Think, back for more coverage after this short break. (electronic outro music)

>> Live from New York. It's theCUBE. Covering theCUBE New York City, 2018. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media, and it's ecosystem partners. >> I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris, our next two guests are Jim Franklin with Dell EMC Director of Product Management Anant Chintamaneni, who is the Vice President of Products at BlueData. Welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Thanks, John. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for coming on. >> I've been following BlueData since the founding. Great company, and the founders are great. Great teams, so thanks for coming on and sharing what's going on, I appreciate it. >> It's a pleasure, thanks for the opportunity. >> So Jim, talk about the Dell relationship with BlueData. What are you guys doing? You have the Dell-ready solutions. How is that related now, because you've seen this industry with us over the years morph. It's really now about, the set-up days are over, it's about proof points. >> That's right. >> AI and machine learning are driving the signal, which is saying, 'We need results'. There's action on the developer's side, there's action on the deployment, people want ROI, that's the main focus. >> That's right. That's right, and we've seen this journey happen from the new batch processing days, and we're seeing that customer base mature and come along, so the reason why we partnered with BlueData is, you have to have those softwares, you have to have the contenders. They have to have the algorithms, and things like that, in order to make this real. So it's been a great partnership with BlueData, it's dated back actually a little farther back than some may realize, all the way to 2015, believe it or not, when we used to incorporate BlueData with Isilon. So it's been actually a pretty positive partnership. >> Now we've talked with you guys in the past, you guys were on the cutting edge, this was back when Docker containers were fashionable, but now containers have become so proliferated out there, it's not just Docker, containerization has been the wave. Now, Kubernetes on top of it is really bringing in the orchestration. This is really making the storage and the network so much more valuable with workloads, whether respective workloads, and AI is a part of that. How do you guys navigate those waters now? What's the BlueData update, how are you guys taking advantage of that big wave? >> I think, great observation, re-embrace Docker containers, even before actually Docker was even formed as a company by that time, and Kubernetes was just getting launched, so we saw the value of Docker containers very early on, in terms of being able to obviously provide the agility, elasticity, but also, from a packaging of applications perspective, as we all know it's a very dynamic environment, and today, I think we are very happy to know that, with Kubernetes being a household name now, especially a tech company, so the way we're navigating this is, we have a turnkey product, which has containerization, and then now we are taking our value proposition of big data and AI and lifecycle management and bringing it to Kubernetes with an open source project that we launched called Cube Director under our umbrella. So, we're all about bringing stateful applications like Hadoop, AI, ML to the community and to our customer base, which is some of the largest financial services in health care customers. >> So the container revolution has certainly groped developers, and developers have always had a history of chasing after the next cool technology, and for good reason, it's not like just chasing after... Developers tend not to just chase after the shiny thing, they chased after the most productive thing, and they start using it, and they start learning about it, and they make themselves valuable, and they build more valuable applications as a result. But there's this interesting meshing of creators, makers, in the software world, between the development community and the data science community. How are data scientists, who you must be spending a fair amount of time with, starting to adopt containers, what are they looking at? Are they even aware of this, as you try to help these communities come together? >> We absolutely talk to the data scientists and they're the drivers of determining what applications they want to consume for the different news cases. But, at the end of the day, the person who has to deliver these applications, you know data scientists care about time to value, getting the environment quickly all prepared so they can access the right data sets. So, in many ways, most of our customers, many of them are unaware that there's actually containers under the hood. >> So this is the data scientists. >> The data scientists, but the actual administrators and the system administrators were making these tools available, are using containers as a way to accelerate the way they package the software, which has a whole bunch of dependent libraries, and there's a lot of complexity our there. So they're simplifying all that and providing the environment as quickly as possible. >> And in so doing, making sure that whatever workloads are put together, can scaled, can be combined differently and recombined differently, based on requirements of the data scientists. So the data scientist sees the tool... >> Yeah. >> The tool is manifest as, in concert with some of these new container related technologies, and then the whole CICD process supports the data scientist >> The other thing to think about though, is that this also allows freedom of choice, and we were discussing off camera before, these developers want to pick out what they want to pick out what they want to work with, they don't want to have to be locked in. So with containers, you can also speed that deployment but give them freedom to choose the tools that make them best productive. That'll make them much happier, and probably much more efficient. >> So there's a separation under the data science tools, and the developer tools, but they end up all supporting the same basic objective. So how does the infrastructure play in this, because the challenge of big data for the last five years as John and I both know, is that a lot of people conflated. The outcome of data science, the outcome of big data, with the process of standing up clusters, and lining up Hadoop, and if they failed on the infrastructure, they said it was a failure overall. So how you making the infrastructure really simple, and line up with this time of value? >> Well, the reality is, we all need food and water. IT still needs server and storage in order to work. But at the end of the day, the abstraction has to be there just like VMware in the early days, clouds, containers with BlueData is just another way to create a layer of abstraction. But this one is in the context of what the data scientist is trying to get done, and that's the key to why we partnered with BlueData and why we delivered big data as a service. >> So at that point, what's the update from Dell EMC and Dell, in particular, Analytics? Obviously you guys work with a lot of customers, have challenges, how are you solving those problems? What are those problems? Because we know there's some AI rumors, big Dell event coming up, there's rumors of a lot of AI involved, I'm speculating there's going to be probably a new kind of hardware device and software. What's the state of the analytics today? >> I think a lot of the customers we talked about, they were born in that batch processing, that Hadoop space we just talked about. I think they largely got that right, they've largely got that figured out, but now we're seeing proliferation of AI tools, proliferation of sandbox environments, and you're psyched to see a little bit of silo behavior happening, so what we're trying to do is that IT shop is trying to dispatch those environments, dispatch with some speed, with some agility. They want to have it at the right economic model as well, so we're trying to strike a better balance, say 'Hey, I've invested in all this infrastructure already, I need to modernize it, and that I also need to offer it up in a way that data scientists can consume it'. Oh, by the way, we're starting to see them start to hire more and more of these data scientists. Well, you don't want your data scientists, this very expensive, intelligent resource, sitting there doing data mining, data cleansing, detail offloads, we want them actually doing modeling and analytics. So we find that a lot of times right now as you're doing an operational change, the operational mindset as you're starting to hire these very expensive people to do this very good work, at the corest of the data, but they need to get productive in the way that you hired them to be productive. >> So what is this ready solution, can you just explain what that is? Is it a program, is it a hardware, is it a solution? What is the ready solution? >> Generally speaking, what we do as a division is we look for value workloads, just generally speaking, not necessarily in batch processing, or AI, or applications, and we try and create an environment that solves that customer challenge, typically they're very complex, SAP, Oracle Database, it's AI, my goodness. Very difficult. >> Variety of tools, using hives, no sequel, all this stuff's going on. >> Cassandra, you've got Tensorflow, so we try fit together a set of knowledge experts, that's the key, the intellectual property of our engineers, and their deep knowledge expertise in a certain area. So for AI, we have a sight of them back at the shop, they're in the lab, and this is what they do, and they're serving up these models, they're putting data through its paces, they're doing the work of a data scientist. They are data scientists. >> And so this is where BlueData comes in. You guys are part of this abstraction layer in the ready solutions. Offering? Is that how it works? >> Yeah, we are the software that enables the self-service experience, the multitenancy, that the consumers of the ready solution would want in terms of being able to onboard multiple different groups of users, lines of business, so you could have a user that wants to run basic spark, cluster, spark jobs, or you could have another user group that's using Tensorflow, or accelerated by a special type of CPU or GPU, and so you can have them all on the same infrastructure. >> One of the things Peter and I were talking about, Dave Vellante, who was here, he's at another event right now getting some content but, one of the things we observed was, we saw this awhile ago so it's not new to us but certainly we're seeing the impact at this event. Hadoop World, there's now called Strata Data NYC, is that we hear words like Kubernetes, and Multi Cloud, and Istio for the first time. At this event. This is the impact of the Cloud. The Cloud has essentially leveled the Hadoop World, certainly there's some Hadoop activity going on there, people have clusters, there's standing up infrastructure for analytical infrastructures that do analytics, obviously AI drives that, but now you have the Cloud being a power base. Changing that analytics infrastructure. How has it impacted you guys? BlueData, how are you guys impacted by the Cloud? Tailwind for you guys? Helpful? Good? >> You described it well, it is a tailwind. This space is about the data, not where the data lives necessarily, but the robustness of the data. So whether that's in the Cloud, whether that's on Premise, whether that's on Premise in your own private Cloud, I think anywhere where there's data that can be gathered, modeled, and new insights being pulled out of, this is wonderful, so as we ditched data, whether it's born in the Cloud or born on Premise, this is actually an accelerant to the solutions that we built together. >> As BlueData, we're all in on the Cloud, we support all the three major Cloud providers that was the big announcement that we made this week, we're generally available for AWS, GCP, and Azure, and, in particular, we start with customers who weren't born in the Cloud, so we're talking about some of the large financial services >> We had Barclays UK here who we nominated, they won the Cloud Era Data Impact Award, and what they're actually going through right now, is they started on Prem, they have these really packaged certified technology stacks, whether they are Cloud Era Hadoop, whether they are Anaconda for data science, and what they're trying to do right now is, they're obviously getting value from that on Premise with BlueData, and now they want to leverage the Cloud. They want to be able to extend into the Cloud. So, we as a company have made our product a hybrid Cloud-ready platform, so it can span on Prem as well as multiple Clouds, and you have the ability to move the workloads from one to the other, depending on data gravity, SLA considerations. >> Compliancy. >> I think it's one more thing, I want to test this with you guys, John, and that is, analytics is, I don't want to call it inert, or passive, but analytics has always been about getting the right data to human beings so they can make decisions, and now we're seeing, because of AI, the distinction that we draw between analytics and AI is, AI is about taking action on the data, it's about having a consequential action, as a result of the data, so in many respects, NCL, Kubernetes, a lot of these are not only do some interesting things for the infrastructure associated with big data, but they also facilitate the incorporation of new causes of applications, that act on behalf of the brand. >> Here's the other thing I'll add to it, there's a time element here. It used to be we were passive, and it was in the past, and you're trying to project forward, that's no longer the case. You can do it right now. Exactly. >> In many respects, the history of the computing industry can be drawn in this way, you focused on the past, and then with spreadsheets in the 80s and personal computing, you focused on getting everybody to agree on the future, and now, it's about getting action to happen right now. >> At the moment it happens. >> And that's why there's so much action. We're passed the set-up phase, and I think this is why we're hearing, seeing machine learning being so popular because it's like, people want to take action there's a demand, that's a signal that it's time to show where the ROI is and get action done. Clearly we see that. >> We're capitalists, right? We're all trying to figure out how to make money in these spaces. >> Certainly there's a lot of movement, and Cloud has proven that spinning up an instance concept has been a great thing, and certainly analytics. It's okay to have these workloads, but how do you tie it together? So, I want to ask you, because you guys have been involved in containers, Cloud has certainly been a tailwind, we agree with you 100 percent on that. What is the relevance of Kubernetes and Istio? You're starting to see these new trends. Kubernetes, Istio, Cupflow. Higher level microservices with all kinds of stateful and stateless dynamics. I call it API 2.0, it's a whole other generation of abstractions that are going on, that are creating some goodness for people. What is the impact, in your opinion, of Kubernetes and this new revolution? >> I think the impact of Kubernetes is, I just gave a talk here yesterday, called Hadoop-la About Kubernetes. We were thinking very deeply about this. We're thinking deeply about this. So I think Kubernetes, if you look at the genesis, it's all about stateless applications, and I think as new applications are being written folks are thinking about writing them in a manner that are decomposed, stateless, microservices, things like Cupflow. When you write it like that, Kubernetes fits in very well, and you get all the benefits of auto-scaling, and so control a pattern, and ultimately Kubernetes is this finite state machine-type model where you describe what the state should be, and it will work and crank towards making it towards that state. I think it's a little bit harder for stateful applications, and I think that's where we believe that the Kubernetes community has to do a lot more work, and folks like BlueData are going to contribute to that work which is, how do you bring stateful applications like Hadoop where there's a lot of interdependent services, they're not necessarily microservices, they're actually almost close to monolithic applications. So I think new applications, new AI ML tooling that's going to come out, they're going to be very conscious of how they're running in a Cloud world today that folks weren't aware of seven or eight years ago, so it's really going to make a huge difference. And I think things like Istio are going to make a huge difference because you can start in the cloud and maybe now expand on to Prem. So there's going to be some interesting dynamics. >> Without hopping management frameworks, absolutely. >> And this is really critical, you just nailed it. Stateful is where ML will shine, if you can then cross the chasma to the on Premise where the workloads can have state sharing. >> Right. >> Scales beautifully. It's a whole other level. >> Right. You're going to the data into the action, or the activity, you're going to have to move the processing to the data, and you want to have nonetheless, a common, seamless management development framework so that you have the choices about where you do those things. >> Absolutely. >> Great stuff. We can do a whole Cube segment just on that. We love talking about these new dynamics going on. We'll see you in CF CupCon coming up in Seattle. Great to have you guys on. Thanks, and congratulations on the relationship between BlueData and Dell EMC and Ready Solutions. This is Cube, with the Ready Solutions here. New York City, talking about big data and the impact, the future of AI, all things stateful, stateless, Cloud and all. It's theCUBE bringing you all the action. Stay with us for more after this short break.

For Las Vegas, it's the cube covering vm world 2018, brought to you by vm ware and its ecosystem partners. Ladies and gentlemen, Vm ware would like to thank it's global diamond sponsors and it's platinum sponsors for vm world 2018 with over 125,000 members globally. The vm ware User Group connects via vmware customers, partners and employees to vm ware, information resources, knowledge sharing, and networking. To learn more, visit the [inaudible] booth in the solutions exchange or the hemoglobin gene vm village become a part of the community today. This presentation includes forward looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially as a result of various risk factors including those described in the 10 k's 10 q's and k's vm ware. Files with the SEC. Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome Pat Gelsinger. Welcome to vm world. Good morning. Let's try that again. Good morning and I'll just say it is great to be here with you today. I'm excited about the sixth year of being CEO. When it was on this stage six years ago were Paul Maritz handed me the clicker and that's the last he was seen. We have 20,000 plus here on site in Vegas and uh, you know, on behalf of everyone at Vm ware, you know, we're just thrilled that you would be with us and it's a joy and a thrill to be able to lead such a community. We have a lot to share with you today and we really think about it as a community. You know, it's my 23,000 plus employees, the souls that I'm responsible for, but it's our partners, the thousands and we kicked off our partner day yesterday, but most importantly, the vm ware community is centered on you. You know, we're very aware of this event would be nothing without you and our community and the role that we play at vm wares to build these cool breakthrough innovations that enable you to do incredible things. You're the ones who take our stuff and do amazing things. You altogether. We have truly changed the world over the last two decades and it is two decades. You know, it's our anniversary in 1998, the five people that started a vm ware, right. You know, it was, it was exactly 20 years ago and we're just thrilled and I was thinking about this over the weekend and it struck me, you know, anniversary, that's like old people, you know, we're here, we're having our birthday and it's a party, right? We can't have a drink yet, but next year. Yeah. We're 20 years old. Right. We can do that now. And I'll just say the culture of this community is something that truly is amazing and in my 38 years, 38 years in tech, that sort of sounds like I'm getting old or something, but the passion, the loyalty, almost a cult like behavior that we see in this team of people to us is simply thrilling. And you know, we put together a little video to sort of summarize the 20 years and some of that history and some of the unique and quirky aspects of our culture. Let's watch that now. We knew we had something unique and then we demonstrated that what was unique was also some reasons that we love vm ware, you know, like the community out there. So great. The technology I love it. Ware is solid and much needed. Literally. I do love Vmr. It's awesome. Super Awesome. Pardon? There's always someone that wants to listen and learn from us and we've learned so much from them as well. And we reached out to vm ware to help us start building. What's that future world look like? Since we're doing really cutting edge stuff, there's really no better people to call and Bmr has been known for continuous innovation. There's no better way to learn how to do new things in it than being with a company that's at the forefront of technology. What do you think? Don't you love that commitment? Hey Ashley, you know, but in the prep sessions for this, I thought, boy, what can I do to take my commitment to the next level? And uh, so, uh, you know, coming in a couple days early, I went to down the street to bad ass tattoo. So it's time for all of us to take our commitment up level and sometimes what happens in Vegas, you take home. Thank you. Vm Ware has had this unique role in the industry over these 20 years, you know, and for that we've seen just incredible things that have happened over this period of time and it's truly extraordinary what we've accomplished together. And you know, as we think back, you know, what vm ware has uniquely been able to do is I'll say bridge across know and we've seen time and again that we see these areas of innovation emerging and rapidly move forward. But then as they become utilized by our customers, they create this natural tension of what business wants us flexibility to use across these silos of innovation. And from the start of our history, we have collectively had this uncanny ability to bridge across these cycles of innovation. You know, an act one was clearly the server generation. You know, it may seem a little bit, uh, ancient memory now, but you remember you used to walk into your data center and it looked like the loove the museum of it passed right? You know, and you had your old p series and your z series in your sparks and your pas and your x86 cluster and Yo, it had to decide, well, which architecture or am I going to deploy and run this on? And we bridged across and that was the magic of Esx. You don't want to just changed the industry when that occurred. And I sort of called the early days of Esx and vsphere. It was like the intelligence test. If you weren't using it, you fail because Yup. Servers, 10 servers become one months, become minutes. I still have people today who come up to me and they reflect on their first experience of vsphere or be motion and it was like a holy moment in their life and in their careers. Amazing and act to the Byo d, You know, can we bridge across these devices and users wanted to be able to come in and say, I have my device and I'm productive on it. I don't want to be forced to use the corporate standard. And maybe more than anything was the power of the iphone that was introduced, the two, seven, and suddenly every employee said this is exciting and compelling. I want to use it so I can be more productive when I'm here. Bye. Jody was the rage and again it was a tough challenge and once again vm ware helped to bridge across the surmountable challenge. And clearly our workspace one community today is clearly bridging across these silos and not just about managing devices but truly enabling employee engagement and productivity. Maybe act three was the network and you know, we think about the network, you know, for 30 years we were bound to this physical view of what the network would be an in that network. We are bound to specific protocols. We had to wait months for network upgrades and firewall rules. Once every two weeks we'd upgrade them. If you had a new application that needed a firewall rule, sorry, you know, come back next month we'll put, you know, deep frustration among developers and ceos. Everyone was ready to break the chains. And that's exactly what we did. An NSX and Nice Sierra. The day we acquired it, Cisco stock drops and the industry realizes the networking has changed in a fundamental way. It will never be the same again. Maybe act for was this idea of cloud migration. And if we were here three years ago, it was student body, right to the public cloud. Everything is going there. And I remember I was meeting with a cio of federal cio and he comes up to me and he says, I tried for the last two years to replatform my 200 applications I got to done, you know, and all of a sudden that was this. How do I do cloud migration and the effective and powerful way. Once again, we bridged across, we brought these two worlds together and eliminated this, uh, you know, this gap between private and public cloud. And we'll talk a lot more about that today. You know, maybe our next act is what we'll call the multicloud era. You know, because today in a recent survey by Deloitte said that the average business today is using eight public clouds and expected to become 10 plus public clouds. And you know, as you're managing different tools, different teams, different architectures, those solution, how do you, again bridge across, and this is what we will do in the multicloud era, we will help our community to bridge across and take advantage of these powerful cycles of innovation that are going on, but be able to use them across a consistent infrastructure and operational environment. And we'll have a lot more to talk about on this topic today. You know, and maybe the last item to bridge across maybe the most important, you know, people who are profit. You know, too often we think about this as an either or question. And as a business leader, I'm are worried about the people or the And Milton Friedman probably set us up for this issue decades ago when he said, planet, right? the sole purpose of a business is to make profits. You want to create a multi-decade dilemma, right? For business leaders, could I have both people and profits? Could I do well and do good? And particularly for technology, I think we don't have a choice to think about these separately. We are permeating every aspect of business. And Society, we have the responsibility to do both and have all the things that vm ware has accomplished. I think this might be the one that I'm most proud of over, you know, w we have demonstrated by vsphere and the hypervisor alone that we have saved over 540 million tons of co two emissions. That is what you have done. Can you believe that? Five hundred 40 million tons is enough to have 68 percent of all households for a year. Wow. Thank you for what you have done. Thank you. Or another translation of that. Is that safe enough to drive a trillion miles and the average car or you could go to and from Jupiter just in case that was in your itinerary a thousand times. Right? He was just incredible. What we have done and as a result of that, and I'll say we were thrilled to accept this recognition on behalf of you and what you have done. You know, vm were recognized as number 17 in the fortune. Change the world list last week. And we really view it as accepting this honor on behalf of what you have done with our products and technology tech as a force for good. We believe that fundamentally that is our opportunity, if not our obligation, you know, fundamentally tech is neutral, you know, we together must shape it for good. You know, the printing press by Gutenberg in 1440, right? It was used to create mass education and learning materials also can be used for extremist propaganda. The technology itself is neutral. Our ecosystem has a critical role to play in shaping technology as a force for good. You know, and as we think about that tomorrow, we'll have a opportunity to have a very special guest and I really encourage you to be here, be on time tomorrow morning on the stage and you know, Sanjay's a session, we'll have Malala, Nobel Peace Prize winner and fourth will be a bit of extra security as you come in and you understand that. And I just encourage you not to be late because we see this tech being a force for good in everything that we do at vm ware. And I hope you'll enjoy, I'm quite looking forward to the session tomorrow. Now as we think about the future. I like to put it in this context, the superpowers of tech know and you know, 38 years in the industry, you know, I am so excited because I think everything that we've done over the last four decades is creating a foundation that allows us to do more and go faster together. We're unlocking game, changing opportunities that have not been available to any people in the history of humanity. And we have these opportunities now and I, and I think about these four cloud, you have unimaginable scale. You'll literally with your Amex card, you can go rent, you know, 10,000 cores for $100 per hour. Or if you have Michael's am ex card, we can rent a million cores for $10,000 an hour. Thanks Michael. But we also know that we're in many ways just getting started and we have tremendous issues to bridge across and compatible clouds, mobile unprecedented scale. Literally, your application can reach half the humans on the planet today. But we also know that five percent, the lowest five percent of humanity or the other half of humanity, they're still in the lower income brackets, less than five percent penetrated. And we know that we have customer examples that are using mobile phones to raise impoverished farmers in Africa, out of poverty just by having a smart phone with proper crop, the information field and whether a guidance that one tool alone lifting them out of poverty. Ai knows, you know, I really love the topic of ai in 1986. I'm the chief architect of the 80 46. Some of you remember what that was. Yeah, I, you know, you're, you're my folk, right? Right. And for those of you who don't, it was a real important chip at the time. And my marketing manager comes running into my office and he says, Pat, pat, we must make the 46 a great ai chip. This is 1986. What happened? Nothing an AI is today, a 30 year overnight success because the algorithms, the data have gotten so much bigger that we can produce results, that we can bring intelligence to everything. And we're seeing dramatic breakthroughs in areas like healthcare, radiology, you know, new drugs, diagnosis tools, and designer treatments. We're just scratching the surface, but ai has so many gaps, yet we don't even in many cases know why it works. Right? And we'll call that explainable ai and edge and Iot. We're connecting the physical and the digital worlds was never before possible. We're bridging technology into every dimension of human progress. And today we're largely hooking up things, right? We have so much to do yet to make them intelligent. Network secured, automated, the patch, bringing world class it to Iot, but it's not just that these are super powers. We really see that each and each one of them is a super power in and have their own right, but they're making each other more powerful as well. Cloud enables mobile conductivity. Mobile creates more data, more data makes the AI better. Ai Enables more edge use cases and more edge requires more cloud to store the data and do the computing right? They're reinforcing each other. And with that, we know that we are speeding up and these superpowers are reshaping every aspect of society from healthcare to education, the transportation, financial institutions. This is how it all comes together. Now, just a simple example, how many of you have ever worn a hardhat? Yeah, Yo. Pretty boring thing. And it has one purpose, right? You know, keep things from smacking me in the here's the modern hardhat. It's a complete heads up display with ar head. Well, vr capabilities that give the worker safety or workers or factory workers or supply people the ability to see through walls to understand what's going on inside of the equipment. I always wondered when I was a kid to have x Ray Vision, you know, some of my thoughts weren't good about why I wanted it, but you know, I wanted to. Well now you can have it, you know, but imagine in this environment, the complex application that sits behind it. You know, you're accessing maybe 50 year old building plants, right? You're accessing HVAC systems, but modern ar and vr capabilities and new containerized displays. You'll think about that application. You know, John Gage famously said the network is the computer pat today says the application is now a network and pretty typically a complicated one, you know, and this is the vm ware vision is to make that kind of environment realizable in every aspect of our business and community and we simply have been on this journey, any device, any application, any cloud with intrinsic security. And this vision has been consistent for those of you who have been joining us for a number of years. You've seen this picture, but it's been slowly evolving as we've worked in piece by piece to refine and extend this vision, you know, and for it, we're going to walk through and use this as the compass for our discussion today as we walk through our conversation. And you know, we're going to start by a focus on any cloud. And as we think about this cloud topic, you know, we see it as a multicloud world hybrid cloud, public cloud, but increasingly seeing edge and telco becoming clouds in and have their own right. And we're not gonna spend time on it today, but this area of Telco to the is an enormous opportunity for us in our community. You know, data centers and cloud today are over 80 percent virtualized. The Telco network is less than 10 percent virtualized. Wow. An industry that's almost as big as our industry entirely unvirtualized, although the technologies we've created here can be applied over here and Telco and we have an enormous buildout coming with five g and environments emerging. What an opportunity for us, a virgin market right next to us and we're getting some early mega winds in this area using the technologies that you have helped us cure rate than the So we're quite excited about this topic area as well. market. So let's look at this full view of the multicloud. Any cloud journey. And we see that businesses are on a multicloud journey, you know, and today we see this fundamentally in these two paths, a hybrid cloud and a public cloud. And these paths are complimentary and coexisting, but today, each is being driven by unique requirements and unique teams. Largely the hybrid cloud is being driven by it. And operations, the public cloud being driven more by developers and line of business requirements and as some multicloud environment. So how do we deliver upon that and for that, let's start by digging in on the hybrid cloud aspect of this and as we think about the hybrid cloud, we've been talking about this subject for a number of years and I want to give a very specific and crisp definition. You're the hybrid cloud is the public cloud and the private cloud cooperating with consistent infrastructure and consistent operations simply put seamless path to and from the cloud that my workloads don't care if it's here or there. I'm able to run them in a agile, scalable, flexible, efficient manner across those two environments, whether it's my data center or someone else's, I can bring them together to make that work is the magic of the Vm ware Cloud Foundation. The vm ware Cloud Foundation brings together computer vsphere and the core of why we are here, but combines with that networking storage delivered through a layer of management and automation. The rule of the cloud is ruthlessly automate everything. We laid out this vision of the software defined data center seven years ago and we've been steadfastly working on this vision and vm ware. Cloud Foundation provides this consistent infrastructure and operations with integrated lifecycle management automation. Patching the m ware cloud foundation is the simplest path to the hybrid cloud and the fastest way to get vm ware cloud foundation is hyperconverged infrastructure, you know, and with this we've combined integrated then validated hardware and as a building block inside of this we have validated hardware, the v Sand ready environments. We have integrated appliances and cloud delivered infrastructure, three ways that we deliver that integrate integrated hyperconverged infrastructure solution. And we have by far the broadest ecosystem of partners to do it. A broad set of the sand ready nodes from essentially everybody in the industry. Secondly, we have integrated appliances, the extract of vxrail that we have co engineered with our partners at Dell technology and today in fact Dell is releasing the power edge servers, a major step in blade servers that again are going to be powering vxrail and vxrack systems and we deliver hyperconverged infrastructure through a broader set of Vm ware cloud partners as well. At the heart of the hyperconverged infrastructure is v San and simply put, you know, be San has been the engine that's just been moving rapidly to take over the entire integration of compute and storage and expand to more and more areas. We have incredible momentum over 15,000 customers for v San Today and for those of you who joined us, we say thank you for what you have done with this product today. Really amazing you with 50 percent of the global 2000 using it know vm ware. V San Vxrail are clearly becoming the standard for how hyperconverge is done in the industry. Our cloud partner programs over 500 cloud partners are using ulv sand in their solution, you know, and finally the largest in Hci software revenue. Simply put the sand is the software defined storage technology of choice for the industry and we're seeing that customers are putting this to work in amazing ways. Vm Ware and Dell technologies believe in tech as a force for good and that it can have a major impact on the quality of life for every human on the planet and particularly for the most underdeveloped parts of the world. Those that live on less than $2 per day. In fact that this moment 5 billion people worldwide do not have access to modern affordable surgery. Mercy ships is working hard to change the global surgery crisis with greater than 400 volunteers. Mercy ships operates the largest NGO hospital ship delivering free medical care to the poorest of the poor in Africa. Let's see from them now. When the ship shows up to port, literally people line up for days to receive state of the art life, sane changing life saving surgeries, tumor site limbs, disease blindness, birth defects, but not only that, the personnel are educating and training the local healthcare providers with new skills and infrastructure so they can care for their own. After the ship has left, mercy ships runs on Vm ware, a dell technology with VX rail, Dell Isilon data protection. We are the it platform for mercy ships. Mercy ships is now building their next generation ship called global mercy, which were more than double. It's lifesaving capacity. It's the largest charity hospital ever. It will go live in 20 slash 20 serving Africa and I personally plan on being there for its launch. It is truly amazing what they are doing with our technology. Thanks. So we see this picture of the hybrid cloud. We've talked about how we do that for the private cloud. So let's look over at the public cloud and let's dig into this a little bit more deeply. You know, we're taking this incredible power of the Vm ware Cloud Foundation and making it available for the leading cloud providers in the world and with that, the partnership that we announced almost two years ago with Amazon and on the stage last year, we announced their first generation of products, no better example of the hybrid cloud. And for that it's my pleasure to bring to stage my friend, my partner, the CEO of aws. Please welcome Andy Jassy. Thank you andy. You know, you honor us with your presence, you know, and it really is a pleasure to be able to come in front of this audience and talk about what our teams have accomplished together over the last, uh, year. Yo, can you give us some perspective on that, Andy and what customers are doing with it? Well, first of all, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. It's great to be here with all of you. Uh, you know, the offering that we have together customers because it allows them to use the same software they've been using to again, where cloud and aws is very appealing to manage their infrastructure for years to be able to deploy it an aws and we see a lot of customer momentum and a lot of customers using it. You see it in every imaginable vertical business segment in transportation. You see it with stagecoach and media and entertainment. You see it with discovery communications in education, Mit and Caltech and consulting and accenture and cognizant and dxc you see in every imaginable vertical business segment and the number of customers using the offering is doubling every quarter. So people were really excited about it and I think that probably the number one use case we see so far, although there are a lot of them, is customers who are looking to migrate on premises applications to the cloud. And a good example of that is mit. We're there right now in the process of migrating. In fact, they just did migrate 3000 vms from their data centers to Vm ware cloud native us. And this would have taken years before to do in the past, but they did it in just three months. It was really spectacular and they're just a fun company to work with and the team there. But we're also seeing other use cases as well. And you're probably the second most common example is we'll say on demand capabilities for things like disaster recovery. We have great examples of customers you that one in particular, his brakes, right? Urban in those. The brings security trucks and they all armored trucks coming by and they had a critical need to retire a secondary data center that they were using, you know, for Dr. so we quickly built to Dr Protection Environment for $600. Bdms know they migrated their mission critical workloads and Wallah stable and consistent Dr and now they're eliminating that site and looking for other migrations as well. The rate of 10 to 15 percent. It was just a great deal. One of the things I believe Andy, he'll customers should never spend capital, uh, Dr ever again with this kind of capability in place. That is just that game changing, you know, and you know, obviously we've been working on expanding our reach, you know, we promised to make the service available a year ago with the global footprint of Amazon and now we've delivered on that promise and in fact today or yesterday if you're an ozzie right down under, we announced in Sydney, uh, as well. And uh, now we're in US Europe and in APJ. Yeah. It's really, I mean it's very exciting. Of course Australia is one of the most virtualized places in the world and, and it's pretty remarkable how fast European customers have started using the offering to and just the quarter that's been out there and probably have the many requests customers has had. And you've had a, probably the number one request has been that we make the offering available in all the regions. The aws has regions and I can tell you by the end of 2019 will largely be there including with golf clubs and golf clap. You guys have been, that's been huge for you guys. Yeah. It's a government only region that we have that a lot of federal government workloads live in and we are pretty close together having the offering a fedramp authority to operate, which is a big deal on a game changer for governments because then there'll be able to use the familiar tools they use and vm ware not just to run their workloads on premises but also in the cloud as well with the data privacy requirements, security requirements they need. So it's a real game changer for government too. Yeah. And this you can see by the picture here basically before the end of next year, everywhere that you are and have an availability zone. We're going to be there running on data. Yup. Yeah. Let's get with it. Okay. We're a team go faster. Okay. You'll and you know, it's not just making it available, but this pace of innovation and you know, you guys have really taught us a few things in this respect and since we went live in the Oregon region, you know, we've been on a quarterly cadence of major releases and two was really about mission critical at scale and we added our second region. We added our hybrid cloud extension with m three. We moved the global rollout and we launched in Europe with m four. We really add a lot of these mission critical governance aspects started to attack all of the industry certifications and today we're announcing and five right. And uh, you know, with that, uh, I think we have this little cool thing you know, two of the most important priorities for that we're doing with ebs and storage. Yeah, we'll take, customers, our cost and performance. And so we have a couple of things to talk about today that we're bringing to you that I think hit both of those on a storage side. We've combined the elasticity of Amazon Elastic Block store or ebs with ware is Va v San and we've provided now a storage option that you'll be able to use that as much. It's very high capacity and much more cost effective and you'll start to see this initially on the Vm ware cloud. Native us are five instances which are compute instances, their memory optimized and so this will change the cost equation. You'll be able to use ebs by default and it'll be much more cost effective for storage or memory intensive workloads. Um, it's something that you guys have asked for. It's been very frequently requested it, it hits preview today. And then the other thing is that we've worked really hard together to integrate vm ware's Nsx along with aws direct neck to have a private even higher performance conductivity between on premises and the cloud. So very, very exciting new capabilities to show deep integration between the companies. Yeah. You know, in that aspect of the deep integration. So it's really been the thing that we committed to, you know, we have large engineering teams that are working literally every day. Right on bringing together and how do we fuse these platforms together at a deep and intimate way so that we can deliver new services just like elastic drs and the c and ebs really powerful, uh, capabilities and that pace of innovation continue. So next maybe. Um, maybe six. I don't know. We'll see. All right. You know, but we're continuing this toward pace of innovation, you know, completing all of the capabilities of Nsx. You'll full integration for all of the direct connect to capabilities. Really expanding that. You're only improving licensed capabilities on the platform. We'll be adding pks on top of for expanded developer a capabilities. So just. Oh, thank you. I, I think that was formerly known as Right, and y'all were continuing this pace of storage Chad. So anyway. innovation going forward, but I think we also have a few other things to talk about today. Andy. Yeah, I think we have some news that hopefully people here will be pretty excited about. We know we have a pretty big database business and aws and it's. It's both on the relational and on the nonrelational side and the business is billions of dollars in revenue for us and on the relational side. We have a service called Amazon relational database service or Amazon rds that we have hundreds of thousands of customers using because it makes it much easier for them to set up, operate and scale their databases and so many companies now are operating in hybrid mode and will be for a while and a lot of those customers have asked us, can you give us the ease of manageability of those databases but on premises. And so we talked about it and we thought about and we work with our partners at Vm ware and I'm excited to announce today, right now Amazon rds on Vm ware and so that will bring all the capabilities of Amazon rds to vm ware's customers for their on premises environments. And so what you'll be able to do is you'll be able to provision databases. You'll be able to scale the compute or the memory or the storage for those database instances. You'll be able to patch the operating system or database engines. You'll be able to create, read replicas to scale your database reads and you can deploy this rep because either on premises or an aws, you'll be able to deploy and high high availability configuration by replicating the data to different vm ware clusters. You'll be able to create online backups that either live on premises or an aws and then you'll be able to take all those databases and if you eventually want to move them to aws, you'll be able to do so rather easily. You have a pretty smooth path. This is going to be available in a few months. It will be available on Oracle sql server, sql postgresql and Maria DB. I think it's very exciting for our customers and I think it's also a good example of where we're continuing to deepen the partnership and listen to what customers want and then innovate on their behalf. Absolutely. Thank you andy. It is thrilling to see this and as we said, when we began the partnership, it was a deep integration of our offerings and our go to market, but also building this bi-directional hybrid highway to give customers the capabilities where they wanted cloud on premise, on premise to the cloud. It really is a unique partnership that we've built, the momentum we're feeling to our customer base and the cool innovations that we're doing. Andy, thank you so much for you Jordan Young, rural 20th. You guys appreciate it. Yeah, we really have just seen incredible momentum and as you might have heard from our earnings call that we just finished this. We finished the last quarter. We just really saw customer momentum here. Accelerating. Really exciting to see how customers are starting to really do the hybrid cloud at scale and with this we're just seeing that this vm ware cloud foundation available on Amazon available on premise. Very powerful, but it's not just the partnership with Amazon. We are thrilled to see the momentum of our Vm ware cloud provider program and this idea of the vm ware cloud providers has continued to gain momentum in the industry and go over five years. Right. This program has now accumulated more than 4,200 cloud partners in over 120 countries around the globe. It gives you choice, your local provider specialty offerings, some of your local trusted partners that you would have in giving you the greatest flexibility to choose from and cloud providers that meet your unique business requirements. And we launched last year a program called Vm ware cloud verified and this was saying you're the most complete embodiment of the Vm ware Cloud Foundation offering by our cloud partners in this program and this logo you know, allows you to that this provider has achieved the highest standard for cloud infrastructure and that you can scale and deliver your hybrid cloud and partnering with them. It know a particular. We've been thrilled to see the momentum that we've had with IBM as a huge partner and our business with them has grown extraordinarily rapidly and triple digits, but not just the customer count, which is now over 1700, but also in the depth of customers moving large portions of the workload. And as you see by the picture, we're very proud of the scope of our partnerships in a global basis. The highest standard of hybrid cloud for you, the Vm ware cloud verified partners. Now when we come back to this picture, you know we, you know, we're, we're growing in our definition of what the hybrid cloud means and through Vm Ware Cloud Foundation, we've been able to unify the private and the public cloud together as never before, but we're also seeing that many of you are interested in how do I extend that infrastructure further and farther and will simply call that the edge right? And how do we move data closer to where? How do we move data center resources and capacity closer to where the data's being generated at the operations need to be performed? Simply the edge and we'll dig into that a little bit more, but as we do that, what are the things that we offer today with what we just talked about with Amazon and our VCP p partners is that they can consume as a service this full vm ware Cloud Foundation, but today we're only offering that in the public cloud until project dimension of project dimension allows us to extend delivered as a service, private, public, and to the edge. Today we're announcing the tech preview, a project dimension Vm ware cloud foundation in a hyperconverged appliance. We're partnered deeply with Dell EMC, Lenovo for the first partners to bring this to the marketplace, built on that same proven infrastructure, a hybrid cloud control plane, so literally just like we're managing the Vm ware cloud today, we're able to do that for your on premise. You're small or remote office or your edge infrastructure through that exact same as a service management and control plane, a complete vm ware operated end to end environment. This is project dimension. Taking the vcf stack, the full vm ware cloud foundation stack, making an available in the cloud to the edge and on premise as well, a powerful solution operated by BM ware. This project dimension and project dimension allows us to have a fundamental building block in our approach to making customers even more agile, flexible, scalable, and a key component of our strategy as well. So let's click into that edge a little bit more and we think about the edge in the following layers, the compute edge, how do we get the data and operations and applications closer to where they need to be. If you remember last year I talked about this pendulum swinging of centralization and decentralization edge is a decentralization force. We're also excited that we're moving the edge of the devices as well and we're doing that in two ways. One with workspace, one for human optimized devices and the second is project pulse or Vm ware pulse. And today we're announcing pulse two point zero where you can consume it now as a service as well as with integrated security. And we've now scaled pulse to support 500 million devices. Isn't that incredible, right? I mean this is getting a scale. Billions and billions and finally networking is a key component. You all that. We're stretching the networking platform, right? And evolving how that edge operates in a more cloud and that's a service white and this is where Nsx St with Velo cloud is such a key component of delivering the edge of network services as well. Taken together the device side, the compute edge and rethinking and evolving the networking layer together is the vm ware edge strategy summary. We see businesses are on this multicloud journey, right? How do we then do that for their private of public coming together, the hybrid cloud, but they're also on a journey for how they work and operate it across the public cloud and the public cloud we have this torrid innovation, you'll want Andy's here, challenges. You know, he's announcing 1500 new services or were extraordinary innovation and you'll same for azure or Google Ibm cloud, but it also creates the same complexity as we said. Businesses are using multiple public clouds and how do I operate them? How do I make them work? You know, how do I keep track of my accounts and users that creates a set of cloud operations problems as well in the complexity of doing that. How do you make it work? Right? And your for that. We'll just see that there's this idea cloud cost compliance, analytics as these common themes that of, you know, keep coming up and we're seeing in our customers that are new role is emerging. The cloud operations role. You're the person who's figuring out how to make these multicloud environments work and keep track of who's using what and which data is landing where today I'm thrilled to tell you that the, um, where is acquiring the leader in this space? Cloudhealth technologies. Thank you. Cloudhealth technologies supports today, Amazon, azure and Google. They have some 3,500 customers, some of the largest and most respected brands in the, as a service industry. And Sasa business today rapidly span expanding feature sets. We will take cloudhealth and we're going to make it a fundamental platform and branded offering from the um, where we will add many of the other vm ware components into this platform, such as our wavefront analytics, our cloud, choreo compliance, and many of the other vm ware products will become part of the cloudhealth suite of services. We will be enabling that through our enterprise channels as well as through our MSP and BCPP partners as well know. Simply put, we will make cloudhealth the cloud operations platform of choice for the industry. I'm thrilled today to have Joe Consella, the CTO and founder. Joe, please stand up. Thank you joe to your team of a couple hundred, you know, mostly in Boston. Welcome to the Vm ware family, the Vm ware community. It is a thrill to have you part of our team. Thank you joe. Thank you. We're also announcing today, and you can think of this, much like we had v realize operations and v realize automation, the compliment to the cloudhealth operations, vm ware, cloud automation, and some of you might've heard of this in the past, this project tango. Well, today we're announcing the initial availability of Vm ware, cloud automation, assemble, manage complex applications, automate their provisioning and cloud services, and manage them through a brokerage the initial availability of cloud automation services, service. Your today, the acquisition of cloudhealth as a platform, the aware of the most complete set of multicloud management tools in the industry, and we're going to do so much more so we've seen this picture of this multicloud journey that our customers are on and you know, we're working hard to say we are going to bridge across these worlds of innovation, the multicloud world. We're doing many other things. You're gonna hear a lot at the show today about this year. We're also giving the tech preview of the Vm ware cloud marketplace for our partners and customers. Also today, Dell technologies is announcing their cloud marketplace to provide a self service, a portfolio of a Dell emc technologies. We're fundamentally in a unique position to accelerate your multicloud journey. So we've built out this any cloud piece, but right in the middle of that any cloud is the network. And when we think about the network, we're just so excited about what we have done and what we're seeing in the industry. So let's click into this a little bit further. We've gotten a lot done over the last five years. Networking. Look at these numbers. 80 million switch ports have been shipped. We are now 10 x larger than number two and software defined networking. We have over 7,500 customers running on Nsx and maybe the stat that I'm most proud of is 82 percent of the fortune 100 has now adopted nsx. You have made nsx these standard and software defined networking. Thank you very much. Thank you. When we think about this journey that we're on, we started. You're saying, Hey, we've got to break the chains inside of the data center as we said. And then Nsx became the software defined networking platform. We started to do it through our cloud provider partners. Ibm made a huge commitment to partner with us and deliver this to their customers. We then said, boy, we're going to make a fundamental to all of our cloud services including aws. We built this bridge called the hybrid cloud extension. We said we're going to build it natively into what we're doing with Telcos, with Azure and Amazon as a service. We acquired the St Wagon, right, and a Velo cloud at the hottest product of Vm ware's portfolio today. The opportunity to fundamentally transform branch and wide area networking and we're extending it to the edge. You're literally, the world has become this complex network. We have seen the world go from the old defined by rigid boundaries, simply put in a distributed world. Hardware cannot possibly work. We're empowering customers to secure their applications and the data regardless of where they sit and when we think of the virtual cloud network, we say it's these three fundamental things, a cloud centric networking fabric with intrinsic security and all of it delivered in software. The world is moving from data centers to centers of data and they need to be connected and Nsx is the way that we will do that. So you'll be aware of is well known for this idea of talking but also showing. So no vm world keynote is okay without great demonstrations of it because you shouldn't believe me only what we can actually show and to do that know I'm going to have our CTL come onstage and CTL y'all. I used to be a cto and the CTO is the certified smart guy. He's also known as the chief talking officer and today he's my demo partner. Please walk, um, Vm ware, cto ray to the stage. Right morning pat. How you doing? Oh, it's great ray, and thanks so much for joining us. Know I promised that we're going to show off some pretty cool stuff here. We've covered a lot already, but are you up to the task? We're going to try and run through a lot of demos. We're going to do it fast and you're going to have to keep me on time to ask an awkward question. Slow me down. Okay. That's my fault if you run along. Okay, I got it. I got it. Let's jump right in here. So I'm a CTO. I get to meet lots of customers that. A few weeks ago I met a cio of a large distribution company and she described her it infrastructure as consisting of a number of data centers troll to us, which he also spoke of a large number of warehouses globally, and each of these had local hyperconverged compute and storage, primarily running surveillance and warehouse management applications, and she pulls me four questions. The first question she asked me, she says, how do I migrate one of these data centers to Vm ware cloud on aws? I want to get out of one of these data centers. Okay. Sounds like something andy and I were just talking exactly, exactly what you just spoke to a few moments ago. She also wanted to simplify the management of the infrastructure in the warehouse as themselves. Okay. He's age and smaller data centers that you've had out there. Her application at the warehouses that needed to run locally, butter developers wanted to develop using cloud infrastructure. Cloud API is a little bit late. The rds we spoken with her in. Her final question was looking to the future, make all this complicated management go away. I want to be able to focus on my application, so that's what my business is about. So give me some new ways of how to automate all of this infrastructure from the edge to the cloud. Sounds pretty clear. Can we do it? Yes we can. So we're going to dive right in right now into one of these demos. And the first demo we're going to look at it is vm ware cloud on aws. This is the best solution for accelerating this public cloud journey. So can we start the demo please? So what you were looking at here is one of those data centers and you should be familiar with this product. It's a familiar vsphere client. You see it's got a bunch of virtual machines running in there. These are the virtual machines that we now want to be able to migrate and move the VMC on aws. So we're going to go through that migration right now. And to do that we use a product that you've seen already atx, however it's the x has been, has got some new cool features since the last time we download it. Probably on this stage here last year, I wanted those in particular is how do we do bulk migration and there's a new cool thing, right? Whole thing we want to move the data center en mass and his concept here is cloud motion with vsphere replication. What this does is it replicates the underlying storage of the virtual machines using vsphere replication. So if and when you want to now do the final migration, it actually becomes a vmotion. So this is what you see going on right here. The replication is in place. Now when you want to touch you move those virtual machines. What you'll do is a vmotion and the key thing to think about here is this is an actual vmotion. Those the ends as room as they're moving a hustler, migrating remained life just as you would in a v motion across one particular infrastructure. Did you feel complete application or data center migration with no dying town? It's a Standard v motion kind of appearance. Wow. That is really impressive. That's correct. Wow. You. So one of the other things we want to talk about here is as we are moving these virtual machines from the on prem infrastructure to the VMC on aws infrastructure, unfortunately when we set up the cloud on VMC and aws, we only set up for hosts, uh, that might not be, that'd be enough because she is going to move the whole infrastructure of that this was something you guys, you and Andy referred to briefly data center. Now, earlier, this concept of elastic drs. what elastic drs does, it allows the VMC on aws to react to the workloads as they're being created and pulled in onto that infrastructure and automatically pull in new hosts into the VMC infrastructure along the way. So what you're seeing here is essentially the MC growing the infrastructure to meet the needs of the workloads themselves. Very cool. So overseeing that elastic drs. we also see the ebs capabilities as well. Again, you guys spoke about this too. This is the ability to be able to take the huge amount of stories that Amazon have, an ebs and then front that by visa you get the same experience of v Sign, but you get this enormous amount of storage capabilities behind it. Wow. That's incredible. That's incredible. I'm excited about this. This is going to enable customers to migrate faster and larger than ever before. Correct. Now she had a series of little questions. Okay. The second question was around what about all those data centers and those age applications that I did not move, and this is where we introduce the project which you've heard of already tonight called project dementia. What this does, it gives you the simplicity of Vm ware cloud, but bringing that out to the age, you know what's basically going on here, vmc on aws is a service which manages your infrastructure in aws. We know stretch that service out into your infrastructure, in your data center and at the age, allowing us to be able to manage that infrastructure in the same way. Once again, let's dive down into a demo and take a look at what this looks like. So what you've got here is a familiar series of services available to you, one of them, which is project dimension. When you enter project dimension, you first get a view of all of the different infrastructure that you have available to you, your data centers, your edge locations. You can then dive deeply into one of these to get a closer look at what's going on here. We're diving into one of these The problem is there's a networking problem going on in this warehouse. warehouses and we see it as a problem here. How do we know? We know because vm ware is running this as a managed service. We are directly managing or sorry, monitoring your infrastructure or we discover there's something going wrong here. We automatically create the ASR, so somebody is dealing with this. You have visibility to what's going on, but the vm ware managed service is already chasing the problem for you. Oh, very good. So now we're seeing this dispersed infrastructure with project dementia, but what's running on it so well before we get with running out, you've got another problem and the problem is of course, if you're managing a lot of infrastructure like this, you need to keep it up to date. And so once again, this is where the vm ware managed service kicks in. We manage that infrastructure in terms of patching it and updating it for you. And as an example, when we released a security patch, here's one for the recent l, one terminal fault, the Vmr managed service is already on that and making sure that your on prem and edge infrastructure is up to date. Very good. Now, what's running? Okay. So what's running, uh, so we mentioned this case of this software running at the edge infrastructure itself, and these are workloads which are running locally in those age, uh, those edge locations. This is a surveillance application. You can see it here at the bottom it says warehouse safety monitor. So this is an application which gathers images and then stores those images He said my sql database on top there, now this is where we leverage the somewhere and it puts them in a database. technology you just learned about when Andy and pat spoke about disability to take rds and run that on your on prem infrastructure. The block of virtual machines in the moment are the rds components from Amazon running in your infrastructure or in your edge location, and this gives you the ability to allow your developers to be able to leverage and operate against those Apis, but now the actual database, the infrastructure is running on prem and you might be doing just for performance reasons because of latency, you might be doing it simply because this data center is not always connected to the cloud. When you take a look into under the hood and see what's going on here, what you actually see this is vsphere, a modified version of vsphere. You see this new concept of my custom availability zone. That is the availability zone running on your infrastructure which supports or ds. What's more interesting is you flip back to the Amazon portal. This is typically what your developers are going to do. Once again, you see an availability zone in your Amazon portal. This is the availability zone running on your equipment in your data center. So we've truly taken that already as infrastructure and moved it to the edge so the developer sees what they're comfortable with and the infrastructure sees what they're comfortable with bridging those two worlds. Fabulous. Right. So the final question of course that we got here was what's next? How do I begin to look to the future and say I am going to, I want to be able to see all of my infrastructure just handled in an automated fashion. And so when you think about that, one of the questions there is how do we leverage new technologies such as ai and ml to do that? So what you've got here is, sorry we've got a little bit later. What you've got here is how do I blend ai in a male and the power of what's in the data center itself. Okay. And we could do that. We're bringing you the AI and ml, right? And fusing them together as never before to truly change how the data center operates. Correct. And it is this introduction is this merging of these things together, which is extremely powerful in my mind. This is a little bit like a self driving vehicle, so thinking about a car driving down the street is self driving vehicle, it is consuming information from all of the environment around it, other vehicles, what's happening, everything from the wetter, but it also has a lot of built in knowledge which is built up to to self learning and training along the way in the kids collecting lots of that data for decades. Exactly. And we've got all that from all the infrastructure that we have. We can now bring that to bear. So what we're focusing on here is a project called project magna and project. Magna leverage is all of this infrastructure. What it does here is it helps connect the dots across huge datasets and again a deep insight across the stack, all the way from the application hardware, the infrastructure to the public cloud, and even the age and what it does, it leverages hundreds of control points to optimize your infrastructure on Kpis of cost performance, even user specified policies. This is the use of machine language in order to fundamentally transform. I'm sorry, machine learning. I'm going back to some. Very early was here, right? This is the use of machine learning and ai, which will automatically transform. How do you actually automate these data centers? The goal is true automation of your infrastructure, so you get to focus on the applications which really served needs of your business. Yeah, and you know, maybe you could think about that as in the past we would have described the software defined data center, but in the future we're calling it the self driving data center. Here we are taking that same acronym and redefining it, right? Because the self driving data center, the steep infusion of ai and machine learning into the management and automation into the storage, into the networking, into vsphere, redefining the self driving data center and with that we believe fundamentally is to be an enormous advance and how they can take advantage of new capabilities from bm ware. Correct. And you're already seeing some of this in pieces of projects such as some of the stuff we do in wavefront and so already this is how do we take this to a new level and that's what project magnet will do. So let's summarize what we've seen in a few demos here as we work in true each of these very quickly going through these demos. First of all, you saw the n word cloud on aws. How do I migrate an entire data center to the cloud with no downtime? Check, we saw project dementia, get the simplicity of Vm ware cloud in the data center and manage it at the age as a managed service check. Amazon rds and Vm ware. Cool Demo, seamlessly deploy a cloud service to an on premises environment. In this case already. Yes, we got that one coming in are in m five. And then finally project magna. What happens when you're looking to the future? How do we leverage ai and ml to self optimize to virtual infrastructure? Well, how did ray do as our demo guy? Thank you. Thanks. Thanks. Right. Thank you. So coming back to this picture, our gps for the day, we've covered any cloud, let's click into now any application, and as we think about any application, we really view it as this breadth of the traditional cloud native and Sas Coobernetti is quickly maybe spectacularly becoming seen as the consensus way that containers will be managed and automate as the framework for how modern APP teams are looking at their next generation environment, quickly emerging as a key to how enterprises build and deploy their applications today. And containers are efficient, lightweight, portable. They have lots of values for developers, but they need to also be run and operate and have many infrastructure challenges as well. Managing automation while patch lifecycle updates, efficient move of new application services, know can be accelerated with containers. We also have these infrastructure problems and you know, one thing we want to make clear is that the best way to run a container environment is on a virtual machine. You know, in fact, every leader in public cloud runs their containers and virtual machines. Google the creator and arguably the world leader in containers. They runs them all in containers. Both their internal it and what they run as well as G K, e for external users as well. They just announced gke on premise on vm ware for their container environments. Google and all major clouds run their containers and vms and simply put it's the best way to run containers. And we have solved through what we have done collectively the infrastructure problems and as we saw earlier, cool new container apps are also typically some ugly combination of cool new and legacy and existing environments as well. How do we bridge those two worlds? And today as people are rapidly moving forward with containers and Coobernetti's, we're seeing a certain set of problems emerge. And Dan cone, right, the director of CNCF, the Coobernetti, uh, the cloud native computing foundation, the body for Coobernetti's collaboration and that, the group that sort of stewards the standardization of this capability and he points out these four challenges. How do you secure them? How do you network and you know, how do you monitor and what do you do for the storage underneath them? Simply put, vm ware is out to be, is working to be is on our way to be the dial tone for Coobernetti's. Now, some of you who were in your twenties might not know what that means, so we know over to a gray hair or come and see me afterward. We'll explain what dial tone means to you or maybe stated differently. Enterprise grade standard for Cooper netties and for that we are working together with our partners at Google as well as pivotal to deliver Vm ware, pks, Cooper netties as an enterprise capability. It builds on Bosh. The lifecycle engine that's foundational to the pivotal have offerings today, uh, builds on and is committed to stay current with the latest Coobernetti's releases. It builds on Nsx, the SDN container, networking and additional contributions that were making like harbor the Vm ware open source contribution for the container registry. It packages those together makes them available on a hybrid cloud as well as public cloud environments with pks operators can efficiently deploy, run, upgrade their coopernetties environments on SDDC or on all public clouds. While developers have the freedom to embrace and run their applications rapidly and efficiently, simply put, pks, the standard for Coobernetti's in the enterprise and underneath that Nsx you'll is emerging as the standard for software defined networking. But when we think about and we saw that quote on the challenges of Kubernetes today, we see that networking is one of the huge challenge is underneath that and in a containerized world, things are changing even more rapidly. My network environment is moving more quickly. NSX provides the environment's easily automate networking and security for rapid deployment of containerized environments that fully supports the MRP chaos, fully supports pivotal's application service, and we're also committed to fully support all of the major kubernetes distribution such as red hat, heptio and docker as well Nsx, the only platform on the planet that can address the complexity and scale of container deployments taken together Vm Ware, pks, the production grade computer for the enterprise available on hybrid cloud, available on major public clouds. Now, let's not just talk about it again. Let's see it in action and please walk up to the stage. When di Carter with Ray, the senior director of cloud native marketing for Vm ware. Thank you. Hi everybody. So we're going to talk about pks because more and more new applications are built using kubernetes and using containers with vm ware pts. We get to simplify the deploying and the operation of Kubernetes at scale. When the. You're the experts on all of this, right? So can you take as true the scenario of how pks or vm ware pts can really help a developer operating the Kubernedes environment, developed great applications, but also from an administrator point of view, I can really handle things like networking, security and those configurations. Sounds great. I love to dive into the demo here. Okay. Our Demo is. Yeah, more pks running coubernetties vsphere. Now pks has a lot of cool functions built in, one of which is Nsx. And today what I'm going to show you is how NSX will automatically bring up network objects as quick Coobernetti's name spaces are spun up. So we're going to start with the fees per client, which has been extended to Ron pks, deployed cooper clusters. We're going to go into pks instance one, and we see that there are five clusters running. We're going to select one other clusters, call application production, and we see that it is running nsx. Now a cluster typically has multiple users and users are assigned namespaces, and these namespaces are essentially a way to provide isolation and dedicated resources to the users in that cluster. So we're going to check how many namespaces are running in this cluster and more brought up the Kubernetes Ui. We're going to click on namespace and we see that this cluster currently has four namespaces running wire. We're going to do next is bringing up a new name space and show that Nsx will automatically bring up the network objects required for that name space. So to do that, we're going to upload a Yammel file and your developer may actually use Ku Kata command to do this as well. We're going to check the namespace and there it is. We have a new name space called pks rocks. Yeah. Okay. Now why is that guy now? It's great. We have a new name space and now we want to make sure it has the network elements assigned to us, so we're going to go to the NSX manager and hit refresh and there it is. PKS rocks has a logical robber and a logical switch automatically assigned to it and it's up and running. So I want to interrupt here because you made this look so easy, right? I'm not sure people realize the power of what happened here. The developer, winton using Kubernetes, is api infrastructure to familiar with added a new namespace and behind the scenes pks and tardy took care of the networking. It combination of Nsx, a combination of what we do at pks to truly automate this function. Absolutely. So this means that if you are on the infrastructure operation, you don't need to worry about your developer springing up namespaces because Nsx will take care of bringing the networking up and then bringing them back down when the namespace is not used. So rate, but that's not it. Now, I was in operations before and I know how hard it is for enterprises to roll out a new product without visibility. Right, so pks took care of those dates, you operational needs as well, so while it's running your clusters, it's also exporting Meta data so that your developers and operators can use wavefront to gain deep visibility into the health of the cluster as well as resources consumed by the cluster. So here you see the wavefront Ui and it's showing you the number of nodes running, active parts, inactive pause, et cetera. You can also dive deeper into the analytics and take a look at information site, Georgia namespace, so you see pks rocks there and you see the number of active nodes running as well as the CPU utilization and memory consumption of that nice space. So now pks rocks is ready to run containerized applications and microservices. So you just get us a very highlight of a demo here to see a little bit what pks pks says, where can we learn more? So we'd love to show you more. Please come by the booth and we have more cool functions running on pks and we'd love to have you come by. Excellent. Thank you, Lindy. Thank you. Yeah, so when we look at these types of workloads now running on vsphere containers, Kubernedes, we also see a new type of workload beginning to appear and these are workloads which are basically machine learning and ai and in many cases they leverage a new type of infrastructure, hardware accelerators, typically gps. What we're going to talk about here is how in video and Vm ware have worked together to give you flexibility to run sophisticated Vdi workloads, but also to leverage those same gpu for deep learning inference workloads also on vsphere. So let's dive right into a demo here. Again, what you're seeing here is again, you're looking at here, you're looking at your standard view realized operations product, and you see we've got two sets of applications here, a Vdi desktop workload and machine learning, and the graph is showing what's happening with the Vdi desktops. These are office workers leveraging these desktops everyday, so of course the infrastructure is super busy during the daytime when they're in the office, but the green area shows this is not been used very heavily outside of those times. So let's take a look. What happens to the machine learning application in this case, this organization leverages those available gpu to run the machine learning operations outside the normal working hours. Let's take a little bit of a deeper dive into what the application it is before we see what we can do from an infrastructure and configuration point of view. So this machine learning application processes a vast number of images and it clarify or sorry, it categorizes these images and as it's doing so, it is moving forward and putting each of these in a database and you can see it's operating here relatively fast and it's leveraging some gps to do that. So typical image processing type of machine learning problem. Now let's take a dive in and look at the infrastructure which is making this happen. First of all, we're going to look only at the Vdi employee Dvt, a Vdi infrastructure here. So I've got a bunch of these applications running Vdi applications. What I want to do is I want to move these so that I can make this image processing out a application run a lot faster. Now normally you wouldn't do this, but pot insisted that we do this demo at 10:30 in the morning when the office workers are in there, so we're going to move older Vdi workloads over to the other cluster and that's what you're seeing is going on right now. So as they move over to this other cluster, what we are now doing is freeing up all of the infrastructure. The GPU that Vdi workload was using here. We see them moving across and now you've freed up that infrastructure. So now we want to take a look at this application itself, the machine learning application and see how we can make use of that. Now freed up infrastructure we've got here is the application is running using one gpu in a vsphere cluster, but I've got three more gpu is available now because I've moved the Vdi workloads. We simply modify the application, let it know that these are available and you suddenly see an increase in the processing capabilities because of what we've done here in terms of making the flexibility of accessing those gps. So what you see here is the same gps that youth for Vdi, which you probably have in your infrastructure today, can also be used to run sophisticated machine learning and ai type of applications on your vsphere infrastructure. So let's summarize what we've seen in the various demos here in this section. First of all, we saw how the MRPS simplifies the deployment and operating operation of Kubernetes at scale. What we've also seen is that leveraging the Nvidia Gpu, we can now run the most demanding workloads on vsphere. When we think about all of these applications and these new types of workloads that people are running. I want to take one second to speak to another workload that we're seeing beginning to appear in the data center. And this is of course blockchain. We're seeing an increasing number of organizations evaluating blockchains for smart contract and digital consensus solutions. So this tech, this technology is really becoming or potentially becoming a critical role in how businesses will interact each other, how they will work together. We'd project concord, which is an open source project that we're releasing today. You get the choice, performance and scale of verifiable trust, which you can then bring to bear and run in the enterprise, but this is not just another blockchain implementation. We have focused very squarely on making sure that this is good for enterprises. It focuses on performance, it focuses on scalability. We have seen examples where running consensus algorithms have taken over 80 days on some of the most common and widely used infrastructure in blockchain and we project conquered. You can do that in two and a half hours. So I encourage you to check out this project on get hub today. You'll also see lots of activity around the whole conference. Speaking about this. Now we're going to dive into another section which is the anti device section. And for that I need to welcome pat back up there. Thank you pat. Thanks right. So diving into any device piece of the puzzle, you and as we think about the superpowers that we have, maybe there are no more area that they are more visible than in the any device aspect of our picture. You know, and as we think about this, the superpowers, you know, think about mobility, right? You know, and how it's enabling new things like desktop as a service in the mobile area, these breadth of smartphones and devices, ai and machine learning allow us to manage them, secure them and this expanding envelope of devices in the edge that need to be connected and wearables and three d printers and so on. We've also seen increasing research that says engaged employees are at the center of business success. Engaged employees are the critical ingredient for digital transformation. And frankly this is how I run vm ware, right? You know, I have my device and my work, all my applications, every one of my 23,000 employees is running on our transformed workspace one environment. Research shows that companies that, that give employees ready anytime access are nearly three x more likely to be leaders in digital transformation. That employees spend 20 percent of their time today on manual processes that can be automated. The way team collaboration and speed of division decisions increases by 16 percent with engaged employees with modern devices. Simply put this as a critical aspect to enabling your business, but you remember this picture from the silos that we started with and each of these environments has their own tribal communities of management, security automation associated with them, and the complexity associated with these is mind boggling and we start to think about these. Remember the I'm a pc and I'm a Mac. Well now you have. I'm an Ios. I'm a droid and other bdi and I'm now a connected printer and I'm a connected watch. You remember citrix manager and good is now bad and sccm a failed model and vpns and Xanax. The chaos is now over at the center of that is vm ware, workspace one, get it out of the business of managing devices, automate them from the cloud, but still have the mentor price. Secure cloud based analytics that brings new capabilities to this critical topic. You'll focus your energy on creating employee and customer experiences. You know, new capabilities to allow like our airlift, the new capability to help customers migrate from their sccm environment to a modern management, expanding the use of workspace intelligence. Last year we announced the chromebook and a partnership with HP and today I'm happy to announce the next step in our partnerships with Dell. And uh, today we're announcing that Dell provisioning for Vm ware, workspace one as part of Dell's ready to work solutions Dallas, taking the next leap and bringing workspace one into the core of their client to offerings. And the way you can think about this as Literally a dell drop ship, lap pops showing up to new employee. day one, productivity. You give them their credential and everything else is delivered by workspace one, your image, your software, everything patched and upgraded, transforming your business, right beginning at that device experience that you give to your customer. And again, we don't want to talk about it. We want to show you how this works. Please walk to the stage with re renew the head of our desktop products marketing. Thank you. So we just heard from pat about how workspace one integrated with Dell laptops is really set up to manage windows devices. What we're broadly focused on here is how do we get a truly modern management system for these devices, but one that has an intelligence behind it to make sure that we're kept with a good understanding of how to keep these devices always up to date and secure. Can we start the demo please? So what we're seeing here is to be the the front screen that you see of workspace one and you see you've got multiple devices a little bit like that demo that patch assured. I've got Ios, android, and of course I've got windows renewal. Can you please take us through how workspace one really changes the ability of somebody an it administrator to update and manage windows into our environment? Absolutely. With windows 10, Microsoft has finally joined the modern management body and we are really excited about that. Now. The good news about modern management is the frequency of ostp updates and how quickly they come out because you can address all those security issues that are hitting our radar on a daily basis, but the bad news about modern management is the frequency of those updates because all of us in it admins, we have to test each and every one of our applications would that latest version because we don't want to roll out that update in case of causes any problems with workspace one, we saw that we simply automate and provide you with the APP compatibility information right out of the box so you can now automate that update process. Let's take a quick look. Let's drill down here further into the windows devices. What we'll see is that only a small percentage of those devices are on that latest version of operating system. Now, that's not a good thing because it might have an important security fix. Let's scroll down further and see what the issue is. We find that it's related to app compatibility. In fact, 38 percent of our devices are blocked from being upgraded and the issue is app compatibility. Now we were able to find that not by asking the admins to test each and every one of those, but we combined windows analytics data with APP intelligent out of the box and be provided that information right here inside of the console. Let's dig down further and see what those devices and apps look like. So knew this is the part that I find most interesting. If I am a system administrator at this point I'm looking at workspace one is giving me a key piece of information. It says if you proceed with this update, it's going to fail 84, 85 percent at a time. So that's an important piece of information here, but not alone. Is it telling me that? It is telling me roughly speaking why it thinks it's going to fail. We've got a number of apps which are not ready to work with this new version, particularly the Mondo card sales lead tracker APP. So what we need to do is get engineering to tackle the problems with this app and make sure that it's updated. So let's get fixing it in order to fix it. What we'll do is create an automation and we can do this right out of the box in this automation will open up a Jira ticket right from within the console to inform the engineers about the problem, not just that we can also flag and send a notification to that engineering manager so that it's top of mine and they can get working on this fixed right away. Let's go ahead and save that automation right here, ray UC. There's the automation that we just So what's happening here is essentially this update is now scheduled meeting. saved. We can go and update oldest windows devices, but workspace one is holding the process of proceeding with that update, waiting for the engineers to update the APP, which is going to cause the problem. That's going to take them some time, right? So the engineers have been working on this, they have a fixed and let's go back and see what's happened to our devices. So going back into the ios updates, what we'll find is now we've unblocked those devices from being upgraded. The 38 percent has drastically dropped down. It can rest in peace that all of the devices are compliant and on that latest version of operating system. And again, this is just a snapshot of the power of workspace one to learn more and see more. I invite you all to join our EOC showcase keynote later this evening. Okay. So we've spoken about the presence of these new devices that it needs to be able to manage and operate across everything that they do. But what we're also seeing is the emergence of a whole new class of computing device. And these are devices which are we commonly speak to have been at the age or embedded devices or Iot. And in many cases these will be in factories. They'll be in your automobiles, there'll be in the building, controlling, controlling, uh, the building itself, air conditioning, etc. Are quite often in some form of industrial environment. There's something like this where you've got A wind farm under embedded in each of these turbines. This is a new class of computing which needs to be managed, secured, or we think virtualization can do a pretty good job of that in new virtualization frontier, right at the edge for iot and iot gateways, and that's gonna. That's gonna, open up a whole new realm of innovation in that space. Let's dive down and taking the demo. This spaces. Well, let's do that. What we're seeing here is a wind turbine farm, a very different than a data center than what we're used to and all the compute infrastructure is being managed by v center and we see to edge gateway hose and they're running a very mission critical safety watchdog vm right on there. Now the safety watchdog vm is an fte mode because it's collecting a lot of the important sensor data and running the mission critical operations for the turbine, so fte mode or full tolerance mode, that's a pretty sophisticated virtualization feature allowing to applications to essentially run in lockstep. So if there's a failure, wouldn't that gets to take over immediately? So this no sophisticated virtualization feature can be brought out all the way to the edge. Exactly. So just like in the data center, we want to perform an update, so as we performed that update, the first thing we'll do is we'll suspend ft on that safety watchdog. Next, we'll put two. Oh, five into maintenance mode. Once that's done, we'll see the power of emotion that we're all familiar with. We'll start to see all the virtual machines vmotion over to the second backup host. Again, all the maintenance, all the update without skipping a heartbeat without taking down any daily operations. So what we're seeing here is the basic power of virtualization being brought out to the age v motion maintenance mode, et cetera. Great. What's the big deal? We've been doing that for years. What's the, you know, come on. What's the big deal? So what you're on the edge. So when you get to the age pack, you're dealing with a whole new class of infrastructure. You're dealing with embedded systems and new types of cpu hours and process. This whole demo has been done on an arm 64. Virtualization brought to arm 64 for embedded devices. So we're doing this on arm on the edge, correct. Specifically focused for embedded for age oems. Okay. Now that's good. Okay. Thank you ray. Actually, we've got a summary here. Pat, just a second before you disappear. A lot to rattle off what we've just seen, right? We've seen workspace one cross platform management. What we've also seen, of course esx for arm to bring the power of vfx to edge on 64, but are in platforms will go no. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Thanks. Now we've seen a look at a customer who is taking advantage of everything that we just saw and again, a story of a customer that is just changing lives in a fundamental way. Let's see. Make a wish. So when a family gets the news that a child is sick and it's a critical illness, it could be a life threatening illness. The whole family has turned upside down. Imagine somebody comes to you and they say, what's the one thing you want that's in your heart? You tell us and then we make that happen. So I was just calling to give you the good news that we're going to be able to grant jackson a wish make, which is the largest wish granting organizations in the United States. English was featured in the cbs 60 minutes episode. Interestingly, it got a lot of hits, but uh, unfortunately for the it team, the whole website crashed make a wish is going through a program right now where we're centralizing technology and putting certain security standards in place at our chapters. So what you're seeing here, we're configuring certain cloud services to make sure that they always are able to deliver on the mission whether they have a local problem or not is we continue to grow the partnership and work with vm ware. It's enabling us to become more efficient in our processes and allows us to grant more wishes. It was a little girl. She had a two year old brother. She just wanted a puppy and she was forthright and I want to name the puppy in my name so my brother would always have me to list them off a five year old. It's something we can't change their medical outcome, but we can change their spiritual outcome and we can transform their lives. Thank you. Working together with you truly making wishes come true. The last topic I want to touch on today, and maybe the most important to me personally is security. You got to fundamentally, when we think about this topic of security, I'll say it's broken today and you know, we would just say that the industry got it wrong that we're trying to bolt on or chasing bad, and when we think about our security spend, we're spending more and we're losing more, right? Every day we're investing more in this aspect of our infrastructure and we're falling more behind. We believe that we have to have much less security products and much more security. You know, fundamentally, you know, if you think about the problem, we build infrastructure, right? Generic infrastructure, we then deploy applications, all kinds of applications, and we're seeing all sorts of threats launched that as daily tens of millions. You're simple virus scanner, right? Is having tens of millions of rules running and changing many times a day. We simply believe the security model needs to change. We need to move from bolted on and chasing bad to an environment that has intrinsic security and is built to ensure good. This idea of built in security. We are taking every one of the core vm ware products and we are building security directly into it. We believe with this, we can eliminate much of the complexity. Many of the sensors and agents and boxes. Instead, they'll directly leverage the mechanisms in the infrastructure and we're using that infrastructure to lock it down to behave as we intended it to ensure good, right on the user side with workspace one on the network side with nsx and microsegmentation and storage with native encryption and on the compute with app defense, we are building in security. We're not chasing threats or adding on, but radically reducing the attack surface. When we look at our applications in the data center, you see this collection of machines running inside of it, right? You know, typically running on vsphere and those machines are increasingly connected. Through nsx and last year we introduced the breakthrough security solution called app defense and app defense. Leverages the unique insight we get into the application so that we can understand the application and map it into the infrastructure and then you can lock down, you could take that understanding, that manifest of its behavior and then lock those vms to that intended behavior and we do that without the operational and performance burden of agents and other rear looking use of attack detection. We're shrinking the attack surface, not chasing the latest attack vector, you know, and this idea of bolt on versus chasing bad. You sort of see it right in the network. Machines have lots of conductivity, lots of applications running and something bad happens. It basically has unfettered access to move horizontally through the data center and most of our security is north, south. MosT of the attacks are eastwest. We introduced this idea of microsegmentation five years ago, and by it we're enabling organizations to secure some networks and separate sensitive applications and services as never before. This idea isn't new, that just was never practical before nsx, but we're not standing still. Our teams are innovating to leap beyond 12. What's next beyond microsegmentation, and we see this in three simple words, learn, imagine a system that can look into the applications and understand their behavior and how they should operate. we're using machine learning and ai instead of chasing were to be able to ensure good where that that system can then locked down its behavior so the system consistently operates that way, but finally we know we have a world of increasing dynamic applications and as we move to more containerize the microservices, we know this world is changing, so we need to adapt. We need to have more automation to adapt to the current behavior. Today I'm very excited to have two major announcements that are delivering on this vision. The first of those vsphere platinum, our flagship vm ware vsphere product now has app defense built right in platinum will enable virtualization teams. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, let's use it. Platinum will enable virtualization teams you to give an enormous contribution to the security profile of your enterprise. You could see whatever vm is for its purpose, its behavior until the system. That's what it's allowed to do. Dramatically reducing the attack surface without impact. On operations or performance, the capability is so powerful, so profound. We want you to be able to leverage it everywhere, and that's why we're building it directly into vsphere, vsphere platinum. I call it the burger and fries. You know, nobody leaves the restaurant without the fries who would possibly run a vm in the future without turning security on. That's how we want this to work going forward. Vsphere platinum and as powerful as microsegmentation has been as an idea. We're taking the next step with what we call adaptive microsegmentation. We are fusing Together app defense and vsphere with nsx to allow us to align the policies of the application through vsphere and the network. We can then lock down the network and the compute and enable this automation of the microsegment formation taken together adaptive microsegmentation. But again, we don't want to just tell you about it. We want to show you. Please welcome to the stage vj dante, who heads our machine learning team for app dispense. Vj a very good vj. Thanks for joining us. So, you know, I talked about this idea right, of being able to learn, lock and adapt. Uh, can you show it to us? Great. Yeah. Thank you. With vc a platinum, what we have done is we have put in everything you need to learn, lock and adapt, right with the infrastructure. The next time you bring up your wifi at line, you'll actually see a difference right in there. Let's go with that demo. There you go. And when you look at our defense there, what you see is that all your guests, virtual machines and all your host, hundreds of them and thousands of virtual machines enabling for that difference. It's in there. And what that does is immediately gets you visibility into the processes running on those virtual machines and the risk for the first time. Think about it for the first time. You're looking at the infrastructure through the lens of an application. Here, for example, the ecommerce application, you can see the components that make up that application, how they interact with each other, the specific process, a specific ip address on a specific board. That's what you get, but so we're learning the behavior. Yes. Yeah, that's very good. But how do you make sure you only learn good behavior? Exactly. How do we make sure that it's not bad? We actually verify me insured. It's all good. We ensured that everybody these reputation is verified. We ensured that the haven is verified. Let's go to svc host, for example. This process can exhibit hundreds of behaviors across numerous. Realize what we do here is we actually verify that failure saw us. It's actually a machine learning models that had been trained on millions of instances of good, bad at you said, and then automatically verify that for okay, so we said, you. We learned simply, learn now, lock. How does that work? Well, once you learned the application, locking it is as simple as clicking on that verify and protect button and then you can lock both the compute and network and it's done. So we've pushed those policies into nsx and microsegmentation has been established actually locked down the compute. What is the operating system is exactly. Let's first look at compute, protected the processes and the behaviors are locked down to exactly what is allowed for that application. And we have bacon policies and program your firewall. This is nsx being configured automatically for you, laurie, with one single click. Very good. So we said learn lock. Now, how does this adapt thing work? Well, a bad change is the only constant, but modern applications applications change on a continuous basis. What we do is actually pretty simple. We look at every change as it comes in determinant is good or bad. If it's good, we say allow it, update the policies. That's bad. We denied. Let's look at an example as asco dxc. It's exhibiting a behavior that they've not seen getting the learning period. Okay? So this machine has never behave this This hasn't been that way. But. way. But again, our machine learning models had seen thousands of instances of this process. They know this is normal. It talks on three 89 all the time. So what it's done to the few things, it's lowered the criticality of the alarm. Okay, so false positive. Exactly. The bane of security operations, false positives, and it has gone and updated. Jane does locks on compute and network to allow for that behavior. Applications continues to work on this project. Okay, so we can learn and adapt and action right through the compute and the network. What about the client? Well, we do with workplace one, intelligence protect and manage end user endpoint, but what's one intelligence? Nsx and actually work together to protect your entire data center infrastructure, but don't believe me. You can watch it for yourself tomorrow tom cornu keynote. You want to be there, at 1:00 PM, be there or be nowhere. I love you. Thank you veejay. Great job. Thank you so much. So the idea of intrinsic security and ensuring good, we believe fundamentally changing how security will be delivered in the enterprise in the future and changing the entire security industry. We've covered a lot today. I'm thrilled as I stand on stage to stand before this community that truly has been at the center of changing the world of technology over the last couple of decades. In it. We've talked about this idea of the super powers of technology and as they accelerate the huge demand for what you do, you know in the same way we together created this idea of the virtual infrastructure admin. You'll think about all the jobs that we are spawning in the discussion that we had today, the new skills, the new opportunities for each one of us in this room today, quantum program, machine learning engineer, iot and edge expert. We're on the cusp of so many new capabilities and we need you and your skills to do that. The skills that you possess, the abilities that you have to work across these silos of technology and enabled tomorrow. I'll tell you, I am now 38 years in the industry and I've never been more excited because together we have the opportunity to build on the things that collective we have done over the last four decades and truly have a positive global impact. These are hard problems, but I believe together we can successfully extend the lifespan of every human being. I believe together we can eradicate chronic diseases that have plagued mankind for centuries. I believe we can lift the remaining 10 percent of humanity out of extreme poverty. I believe that we can reschedule every worker in the age of the superpowers. I believe that we can give modern ever education to every child on the planet, even in the of slums. I believe that together we could reverse the impact of climate change. I believe that together we have the opportunity to make these a reality. I believe this possibility is only possible together with you. I asked you have a please have a wonderful vm world. Thanks for listening. Happy 20th birthday. Have a great topic.

>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering DockerCon 18, brought to you by Docker and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to theCUBE. We are live in San Francisco at DockerCon 2018. I am Lisa Martin with my co-host for the day, John Troyer. John, it is not only a stunning day in San Francisco, beautiful blue skies, this is a packed event. Their fifth DockerCon event and they've got between 5,000 and 6,000 people. We just came from the general session keynote, and it was standing room only as far as the eyes could see. >> Yeah, looks like a good crowd here, a lot of energy. Docker keynotes, always super interesting, they always do a lot of demos, they bring up a lot of employees. It's not just like a parade of middle-aged executives, always is super dynamic, a lot of demos. Really liked the keynote this morning. >> I did too. The energy you mentioned was great. It kicked off with... who's the name of that gentleman that is one of the rally guys for... >> Franco Finn. >> Franco Finn, who has worked for the Warriors, the 2018 Golden State Warriors, NBA Champs. So that was a great way to kick it off, but also Steve Singh had great energy, their CEO, we're gonna have him on shortly today. Scott Johnston, and as you talked about their employees and also customers. They have some really great numbers. They've got, I think, about 120 sessions this year at DockerCon. Nine big enterprise customers talking about how they are approaching containerization with DockerCon. One of them was McKesson, which is a 183 year old company with a lot of staff that gave a really compelling keynote or a, yeah, a keynote this morning about how they are moving and modernizing their data center with Docker. >> A really nice story, a really an emphasis on trust, an emphasis on developer usability, and I liked one of the points was, once we got the developers using it it became easier, and I think using the whole platform. Lisa, I think they hit a lot of familiar things for Docker: so, developer experience, really big for Docker. That's they way they started, that's what they're still counting on. When Steve Singh got up, he talked about community, their very first thing. Over half the people here, first time at DockerCon and over half of the folks are just using containers in the late last year. That means this whole journey is just starting. There's a lot of white space in the container world. So developer experience, a big announcement, preview announcement for Docker Desktop, being able to create apps off of templates and things like that but very developer-focused shows as opposed to some of the more IT-focused. There's a broad mix here but definitely a lot of developers here at the show. >> A lot of developers, as you said, but also, you're right, it is a mix. It's IT professionals, it's enterprise architects, and it's executives and that's one of the... one of the targeted audiences that, I think, both Steve Singh and Scott Johnston talked about, so it'll be great to explore. As the CEO and the Chief Product Officer respectfully, what are they hearing from enterprise customers who have a lot of challenges with legacy applications that are very difficult to manage and I also read some stats, they had some stats in the press release this morning, but 80% of enterprise IT budgets are spent keeping the lights on for enterprise apps which leaves about 20% for innovation and of course, as we know, organizations that can aggressively innovate are the ones that win. So I'm not only looking forward to hearing with Docker Desktop, what they're doing to make it easy, easier, for developers to get in there and play around on both on Mac and Windows but also the executive conversation. What are they hearing from the executives and where is containerization, you know, from the c-sweep to the board room. >> Yeah, modernizing enterprise apps also has been a Docker theme for the last few years. Microsoft, the big guest up on stage, they've been a multi-year partnership with Microsoft and Docker, putting Docker with Windows together. The big announcement today, pre-technology preview of Kubernetes and Windows Server and the big demo was, they took a very old .net application and, you know, put it up on Kubernetes on Windows with just a couple of clicks. So again, I think that message to the executives is, "You're very safe in Docker's hands "We've got the developer experience covered, "we've got the partnerships." And then going big on Windows, I think choice was another theme that I heard ... >> Yes, it was. Steve talked a lot about choice. >> Um, to the execs here as well, both GUI and CLI, right? A lot of the cloud is very CLI-focused, very Linux-focused. Docker says "We're in on Windows, we support Windows "just as well as Linux so don't hate on the GUI. "You can use a GUI or you can use a CLI." No religion actually too, in terms of Linux versus Windows but Kubernetes, I thought, was a very big. Got mentioned a lot in the keynote this morning, Lisa. >> It did and you talked about choice. One of the things that Steve Singh mentioned from an executive's perspective is, three things that Docker is aiming to deliver. That sounds to me, as a marketer, like competitive differentiation. Talked about choice so that organizations can run apps wherever it makes sense for them, managing applications on any infrastructure, and, as you said earlier, about a few clips, managing their container infrastructures across multiple clouds in just a few clicks. They also talked about being, they also talked a number of times, not just in the press release but also this morning in the keynote, about no vendor lock-in. John, we hear that a lot, it sounds like a marketing term. What are you expecting to hear? What does that mean for Docker? >> I'm not so sure that lock-in is always important for every enterprise, in that any choice you make, it has a certain element of lock-in but it's an active argument or debate online that I see a lot. "Are you locked in when you go to a certain cloud? "Are you locked in when you choose a certain provider," whether it's open-sourced or not. Certainly a lot of Docker is open source. A lot of your choices are protected and they are really trying to say "We're going to be a platform that's going to "service a lot of different abilities to deploy." The big announcement that finished off the keynote was Docker Enterprise Edition can now manage Kubernetes. Not only Kubernetes in the cloud. Kubernetes on Prim, Kubernetes in the cloud managed by Docker, but can actually work with the native Kubernetes cluster managers of the clouds, of the three major clouds: Google GKE, Azure AKS, and AWS EKS. I think I got all those names right. But that's big because a lot of folks say "run anywhere" but they mean "run within our environment anywhere" and what Docker has done in Tech Preview is to connect its platform with the native platforms, orchestration platforms, of the three different clouds so that you can run on Prim, manage via Docker, or you can connect into the cloud's own cluster orchestration. And if they can deliver on that, the devil is in the details, but if they can deliver on that, that's actually a very nice feature to avoid that sort of lock-in. >> And that also goes to, John, one of the major things which is agility and one of the things that they've talked about is, containers today are portable but one of the challenges is that management of containers has not been portable. I think they said that 85% approximately of enterprise I.T. organizations that they has surveyed are running a multi-cloud strategy so they've gotta be able to really deliver this single pane of glass management so they talked about federated application or federated management of containerized applications. I think that's kind of what you're referring to in terms of getting away from the silos and enabling organizations to have that portability and especially as multi-national organizations need to have different access, different security, policies may be maintained across multiple locations. >> Indeed, right. These are global organizations that are betting on container technology. They do need access to be running apps, either parts of apps or services on different clouds. You might be running a Google cloud in Europe, you might be running an AWS here or vice versa. You might have some on-Prim stuff. We've seen a lot of that. I think another theme that we'll hit on, Lisa, along with that multi-cloud portfolio aspect, is the time to value. It's been a theme of this conference season. This last month or two, you and I have both been at a lot of different conference centers and I think time to value, being able to spin up apps within weeks or months that actually work and have value versus the old way, which was years and I think the theme for 2018 is that it's real. People are actually doing it and we'll talk to a couple of customers, I hope, today. >> And that's essential because enterprises, while there's still trepidation with moving into the container journey, they don't really have a choice to be able to aggressively innovate to be able to be leaders and compete with these cloud-native organizations. They don't have the luxury of time to rip and replace old enterprise applications and put them on a container or a micro-service's space archicture, they've got to be able to leverage something like containers to maximize time to value to deliver differentiating services. >> Absolutely. I'm very interested in being here today and we'll see what the day brings us. >> I think we're gonna have a lot of fun today, John. I think they kicked off things with great energy. I loved how, you know, they always do demos, right, on main stage during general sessions, and we were at SAP last week and of course, one of the demos didn't work. That's just the nature of trying to do things live. I liked how they were very cheeky with the praying to the demo Gods with the fortune cookies. I thought that was really good but the demos were simple. They were very clearly presented and I'm excited with you to dig in to what are they doing. Also what is setting them apart and how are they enabling enterprise organizations like MetLife, like McKesson, PayPal, Splunk to be able to transform to compete. >> Absolutely. One last thing about the conference, Lisa, is I do want to call out. It's a very humane conference. Not only do they have kind of a cheeky sense of humor here at Docker, but there's child care onsite, and there's spouse-tivities, there are activities for if you bring your spouse or family to the conference. They're trying to do a lot of things to make the conference experience good and successful and friendly and humane for people here at the show which I really appreciate. >> I like that, humane conference. You're right. We don't always see that. Well, John and I are going to be here all day talking with Docker executives, customers, partners and we're excited to have you with us. Lisa Martin for John Troyer. You're watching theCUBE at DockerCon 2018. We'll be right back with our first guest. (techno music)