(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE special presentation, Simplifying Hybrid Cloud brought to you by Cisco. We're here with Vikas Ratna who's the director of product management for UCS at Cisco and James Leach, who is director of business development at Cisco. Gents welcome back to theCUBE, good to see you again. >> Hey, thanks for having us. >> Okay Jim, let's start. We know that when it comes to navigating a transition to hybrid cloud, it's a complicated situation for a lot of customers. And as organizations as they hit the pavement for their hybrid cloud journeys, what are the most common challenges that they face? What are they telling you? How Cisco specifically UCS helping them deal with these problems? >> Well, you know, first I think that's a, you know, that's a great question and, you know, customer-centric view is the way that we've taken, is kind of the approach we've taken from day one right? So I think that if you look at the challenges that we're solving for that our customers are facing, you could break them into just a few kind of broader buckets. The first would definitely be applications right? That's the, that's where the rubber meets your proverbial road with the customer, and I would say that, you know, what we're seeing is the challenges customers are facing within applications come from the way that applications have evolved. So what we're seeing now is more data-centric applications for example. Those require that we, you know, are able to move, and process large datasets really in real time. And the other aspect of applications I think that give our customers kind of some, you know, pose some challenges, would be around the fact that they're changing so quickly. So the application that exists today, or the day that they, you know, make a purchase of infrastructure to be able to support that application, that application is most likely changing so much more rapidly than the infrastructure can keep up with today. So, that creates some challenges around, you know, how do I build the infrastructure? How do I rightsize it without over provisioning for example? But also there's a need for some flexibility around life cycle and planning those purchase cycles based on the life cycle of the different hardware elements. And within the infrastructure, which I think is the second bucket of challenges, we see customers who are being forced to move away from the, like a modular or Blade approach which offers a lot of operational and consolidation benefits, and they have to move to something like a rack server model for some applications because of these needs that these data-centric applications have, and that creates a lot of, you know, opportunity for siloing infrastructure. And those silos in turn create multiple operating models within the, you know, a data center environment that, you know, again drive a lot of complexity. So that complexity is definitely the enemy here. And then finally I think life cycles. We're seeing this democratization of processing if you will, right? So it's no longer just CPU-focused, we have GPU, we have FPGA, we have, you know, things that are being done in storage and the fabrics that stitch them together, that are all changing rapidly and have very different life cycles. So, when those life cycles don't align, for a lot of our customers they see a challenge in how they can manage this, you know, these different life cycles and still make a purchase, without having to make too big of a compromise in one area or another because of the misalignment of life cycles. So that is a, you know, kind of the other bucket. And then finally I think management is huge, right? So management, you know, at its core is really rightsized for our customers and give them the most value when it meets the mark around scale and scope. You know, back in 2009 we weren't meeting that mark in the industry and UCS came about and took a management outside the chassis, right? We put it at the top of the rack and that worked great for the scale and scope we needed at that time, however, as things have changed, we're seeing a very new scale and scope needed right? So we're talking about a hybrid cloud world that has to manage across data centers, across clouds, and, you know, having to stitch things together for some of our customers poses a huge challenge. So there are tools for all of those operational pieces that touch the application, that touch the infrastructure but they're not the same tool. They tend to be disparate tools that have to be put together. >> Dave: All right. >> So our customers, you know, don't really enjoy being in the business of, you know, building their own tools so that creates a huge challenge. And one where I think that they really crave that full hybrid cloud stack that has that application visibility but also can reach down into the infrastructure. >> Right, you know, Jim I said in my open that you guys, Cisco had sort of changed the server game with the original UCS, but the X-Series is the next generation, the generation for the next decade which is really important 'cause you touched on a lot of things. These data-intensive workloads, alternative processors to sort of meet those needs, the whole cloud operating model and hybrid cloud has really changed so how is it going with with the X-Series? You made a big splash last year, what's the reception been in the field? >> Actually it's been great. You know, we're finding that customers can absolutely relate to our, you know, UCS X-Series story. I think that, you know, the main reason they relate to it is they helped create it, right? It was their feedback and their partnership that gave us really the, those problem areas, those areas that we could solve for the customer that actually add, you know, significant value. So, you know, since we brought UCS to market back in 2009, you know, we had this unique architectural paradigm that we created, and I think that created a product which was the fastest in Cisco history in terms of growth. What we're seeing now is X-Series is actually on a faster trajectory. So we're seeing a tremendous amount of uptake, we're seeing, you know, both in terms of, you know, the number of customers, but also more importantly, the number of workloads that our customers are using, and the types of workloads are growing, right? So we're growing this modular segment that exists, not just, you know, bringing customers onto a new product but we're actually bringing them into the product in the way that we had envisioned which is one infrastructure that can run any application into it seamlessly. So we're really excited to be growing this modular segment. I think the other piece, you know, that, you know, we judge ourselves is, you know, sort of not just within Cisco but also within the industry. And I think right now as a, you know, a great example, you know, our competitors have taken kind of swings and misses over the past five years at this, at a, you know, kind of the new next architecture, and we're seeing a tremendous amount of growth even faster than any of our competitors have seen when they announced something that was new to this space. So, I think that the ground-up work that we did is really paying off, and I think that what we're also seeing is it's not really a leapfrog game as it may have been in the past. X-Series is out in front today and, you know, we're extending that lead with some of the new features and capabilities we have. So we're delivering on the story that's already been resonating with customers, and, you know, we're pretty excited that we're seeing the results as well. So as our competitors hit walls, I think we're, you know, we're executing on the plan that we laid out back in June, when we launched X-Series to the world. And, you know, as we continue to do that, we're seeing, you know, again, tremendous uptake from our customers. >> So thank you for that Jim. So, Vikas I was just on Twitter just today actually talking about the gravitational pull, you've got the public clouds pulling CXOs one way, and you know, on-prem folks pulling the other way, and hybrid cloud so, organizations are struggling with a lot of different systems and architectures, and ways to do things. And I said that what they're trying to do is abstract all that complexity away and they need infrastructure to support that and I think your stated aim is really to try to help with that confusion with the X-Series right? I mean, so how so? Can you explain that? >> Sure, and that's the right, the context that you built up right there Dave. If you walk into enterprise data center you'll see plethora of compute systems spread all across because every application has its unique needs, and hence you find drive node, drive-dense system, memory-dense system, GPU-dense system, core-dense system, and variety of form factors, 1U, 2U, 4U, and every one of them typically come with, you know, variety of adapters and cables and so forth. This creates the siloness of resources. Fabric is brought, the adapter is brought, the power and cooling implications, the rack, you know, space challenges. And above all, the multiple management plane that they come up with which makes it very difficult for IT to have one common center policy, and enforce it all across the firmware, and software, and so forth. And then think about upgrade challenges of the siloness makes it even more complex as these go through the upgrade references of their own. As a result we observe quite a few of our customers, you know, really, seeing a slowness in their agility, and high burdened in the cost of overall ownership. This is where with the X-Series powered by Intersight, we have one simple goal. We want to make sure our customers get out of that complexities, they become more agile, and drive lower these issues. And we are delivering it by doing three things, three aspects of simplification. First, simplify their whole infrastructure by enabling them to run their entire workload on single infrastructure. An infrastructure which removes the siloness of form factor. An infrastructure which reduces the rightful footprint that is required. Infrastructure where power and cooling budgets are in the lower. Second, we want to simplify with, by delivering a cloud operating model. Where they can create the policy once across compute, network, storage, and deploy it all across. And third, we want to take away the pain they have by simplifying the process of upgrade, and any platform evolution that they're going to go through in the next two, three years. So that's where, the focus is on just driving down the simplicity, lowering down their issues. >> Oh, that's key. Less friction is always a good thing. Now of course, Vikas we heard from the HyperFlex guys earlier, they had news not to be outdone, you have hard news as well, what innovations are you announcing around X-Series today? >> Absolutely, so we are following up on the exciting X-Series announcement that we made in June last year Dave, and we are now introducing three innovation on X-Series with the goal of three things. First, expand the supported workload on X-Series. Second, take the performance to new levels. Third, dramatically reduce the complexities in the data center by driving down the number of adapters and cables that are needed. To that end, three new innovations are coming in. First, we are introducing the support for the GPU node using a cableless and very unique X Fabric architecture. This is the most elegant design to add the GPUs to the compute node in the modular form factor. Thereby our customers can now power in AI/ML workload, or any workload that need many more number of GPUs. Second, we are bringing in GPUs right onto the compute node. And thereby our customers can now fire up the accelerated VDI workload for example. And third, which is what you know, we are extremely proud about, is we are innovating again by introducing the 5th generation of our very popular Unified Fabric Technology. With the increased bandwidth that it brings in, coupled with the local drive capacity and densities that we have on the compute node, our customers can now fire up the big data workload, the HCI workload, the SDS workload, all these workloads that have historically not lived in the modular farm factor, can be run over there and benefit from the architectural benefits that we have. Second, with the announcement of fifth generation fabric we've become the only vendor to now finally enable 100 Gig end-to-end single port bandwidth, and there are multiple of those that are coming in there. And we are working very closely with our CI partners to deliver the benefit of this performance through our Cisco Validated Design to our CI franchise. And third, the innovations in the fifth gen fabric will again allow our customers to have fewer physical adapters, may it be ethernet adapter, may it be with fiber channel adapters, or may it be the other storage adapters, they've reduced it down and coupled with the reduction in the cable. So very, very excited about these three big announcements that we are making in the smart release. >> Great, a lot there, you guys have been busy, so thank you for that Vikas. So Jim you talked a little bit about the momentum that you have, customers are adopting, what problems are they telling you that X-Series addresses and how do they align with where they want to go in the future? >> That's a great question. I think if you go back to and think about some of the things that we mentioned before in terms of the problems that we originally set out to solve, we're seeing a lot of traction. So what Vikas mentioned I think is is really important, right? Those pieces that we just announced really enhanced that story and really move, again, to the, kind of to the next level of taking advantage of some of these, you know, problem solving for our customers. You know, if you look at, you know, I think Vikas mentioned accelerated VDI, that's a great example. These are where customers, you know, they need to have this dense compute, they need video acceleration, they need tight policy management, right? And they need to be able to deploy these systems anywhere in the world. Well, that's exactly what we're hitting on here with X-Series right now. We're hitting the market every, every single way, right? We have the highest compute config density that we can offer across the, you know, the very top end configurations of CPUs, and a lot of room to grow, we have the, you know, the premier cloud-based management you know, hybrid cloud suite in the industry right? So check there. We have the flexible GPU accelerators that you, that Vikas just talked about that we're announcing both on the system and also adding additional ones to the, through the use of the X Fabric, which is really, really critical to this launch as well, and, you know, I think finally the fifth generation of Fabric Interconnect, and Virtual Interface Card, and Intelligent Fabric Module go hand in hand in creating this 100 Gig end-to-end bandwidth story that we can move a lot of data. Again, you know, having all this performance is only as good as what we can get in and out of it right? So giving customers the ability to manage it anywhere, to be able to get the bandwidth that they need, to be able to get the accelerators that are flexible to, that it fit exactly their needs, this is huge, right? It solves a lot of the problems we can tick off right away. With the infrastructure as I mentioned, X Fabric is really critical here because it opens a lot of doors here, you know, we're talking about GPUs today, but in the future there are other elements that we can disaggregate like the GPUs that solve of these life cycle mismanagement issues, they solve issues around the form factor limitations. It solves all these issues for, like it does for GPU we can do that with storage or memory in the future. So that's going to be huge, right? This is disaggregation that actually delivers, right? It's not just a gimmicky bar trick here that we're doing, this is something that customers can really get value out of day one. And then finally, I think the, you know, the future readiness here, you know, we avoid saying future proof because we're kind of embracing the future here. We know that not only are the GPUs going to evolve, the CPUs are going to evolve, the drives, you know, the storage modules are going to evolve. All of these things are changing very rapidly, the fabric that stitches them together is critical and we know that we're just on the edge of some of the developments that are coming with CXL, with some of the PCI Express changes that are coming in the very near future, so we're ready to go. X, and the X Fabric is exactly the vehicle that's going to be able to deliver those technologies to our customers, right? Our customers are out there saying that, you know, they want to buy into something like X-Series that has all the operational benefits, but at the same time, they have to have the comfort in knowing that they're protected against being locked out of some technology that's coming in the future right? We want our customers to take these disruptive technologies and not be disrupted but use them to disrupt their competition as well. So we, you know, we're really excited about the pieces today, and I think it goes a long way towards continuing to tell the customer benefit story that X-Series brings, and, you know, again, you know, stay tuned because it's going to keep getting better as we go. >> Yeah, a lot of headroom for scale and the management piece is key there. Just have time for one more question Vikas, talk, give us some nuggets on the roadmap. What's next for X-Series that we can look forward to. >> Absolutely Dave. As we talked about and James also hinted, this is a future-ready architecture. A lot of focus and innovation that we are going through is about enabling our customers to seamlessly and painlessly adopt very disruptive hardware technologies that are coming up, no refund replace. And there we are looking into enabling the customer's journey as they transition from PCA in less than four to five to six, without rip and replace, as they embrace CXL without rip and replace, as they embrace the newer paradigm of computing through the disaggregated memory, disaggregated PCI or NVMe-based dense drives and so forth. We are also looking forward to X Fabric next generation which will allow dynamic assignment of GPUs anywhere within the chassis and much more. So this is again all about focusing on the innovation that will make the enterprise data center operations a lot more simpler, and drive down the TCO, by keeping them not only covered for today but also for future. So that's where some of the focus is on Dave. >> Okay, thank you guys, we'll leave it there, in a moment I'll have some closing thoughts. (bright upbeat music) We're seeing a major evolution perhaps even a bit of a revolution in the underlying infrastructure necessary to support hybrid work. Look, virtualizing compute and running general purpose workloads is something it figured out a long time ago. But just when you have it nailed down in the technology business, things change don't they? You can count on that. The cloud operating model has bled into on-premises locations, and is creating a new vision for the future, which we heard a lot about today. It's a vision that's turning into reality and it supports much more diverse and data-intensive workloads and alternative compute modes. It's one where flexibility is a watchword enabling change, attacking complexity, and bringing a management capability that allows for a granular management of resources at massive scale. I hope you've enjoyed this special presentation, remember all these videos are available on demand at thecube.net, and if you want to learn more please click on the information link. Thanks for watching Simplifying Hybrid Cloud brought to you by Cisco and theCUBE, your leader in enterprise tech coverage. This is Dave Vellante be well, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> The introduction of the modern public cloud in the mid 2000s, permanently changed the way we think about IT. At the heart of it, the cloud operating model attacked one of the biggest problems in enterprise infrastructure, human labor costs. More than half of IT budgets were spent on people, and much of that effort added little or no differentiable value to the business. The automation of provisioning, management, recovery, optimization, and decommissioning infrastructure resources has gone mainstream as organizations demand a cloud-like model across all their application infrastructure, irrespective of its physical location. This has not only cut cost, but it's also improved quality and reduced human error. Hello everyone, my name is Dave Vellante and welcome to Simplifying Hybrid Cloud, made possible by Cisco. Today, we're going to explore Hybrid Cloud as an operating model for organizations. Now the definite of cloud is expanding. Cloud is no longer an abstract set of remote services, you know, somewhere out in the clouds. No, it's an operating model that spans public cloud, on-premises infrastructure, and it's also moving to edge locations. This trend is happening at massive scale. While at the same time, preserving granular control of resources. It's an entirely new game where IT managers must think differently to deal with this complexity. And the environment is constantly changing. The growth and diversity of applications continues. And now, we're living in a world where the workforce is remote. Hybrid work is now a permanent state and will be the dominant model. In fact, a recent survey of CIOs by Enterprise Technology Research, ETR, indicates that organizations expect 36% of their workers will be operating in a hybrid mode. Splitting time between remote work and in office environments. This puts added pressure on the application infrastructure required to support these workers. The underlying technology must be more dynamic and adaptable to accommodate constant change. So the challenge for IT managers is ensuring that modern applications can be run with a cloud-like experience that spans on-prem, public cloud, and edge locations. This is the future of IT. Now today, we have three segments where we're going to dig into these issues and trends surrounding Hybrid Cloud. First up, is DD Dasgupta, who will set the stage and share with us how Cisco is approaching this challenge. Next, we're going to hear from Manish Agarwal and Darren Williams, who will help us unpack HyperFlex which is Cisco's hyperconverged infrastructure offering. And finally, our third segment will drill into Unified Compute. More than a decade ago, Cisco pioneered the concept of bringing together compute with networking in a single offering. Cisco frankly, changed the legacy server market with UCS, Unified Compute System. The X-Series is Cisco's next generation architecture for the coming decade and we'll explore how it fits into the world of Hybrid Cloud, and its role in simplifying the complexity that we just discussed. So, thanks for being here. Let's go. (upbeat music playing) Okay, let's start things off. DD Dasgupta is back on theCUBE to talk about how we're going to simplify Hybrid Cloud complexity. DD welcome, good to see you again. >> Hey Dave, thanks for having me. Good to see you again. >> Yeah, our pleasure. Look, let's start with big picture. Talk about the trends you're seeing from your customers. >> Well, I think first off, every customer these days is a public cloud customer. They do have their on-premise data centers, but, every customer is looking to move workloads, new services, cloud native services from the public cloud. I think that's one of the big things that we're seeing. While that is happening, we're also seeing a pretty dramatic evolution of the application landscape itself. You've got, you know, bare metal applications, you always have virtualized applications, and then most modern applications are containerized, and, you know, managed by Kubernetes. So I think we're seeing a big change in, in the application landscape as well. And, probably, you know, triggered by the first two things that I mentioned, the execution venue of the applications, and then the applications themselves, it's triggering a change in the IT organizations in the development organizations and sort of not only how they work within their organizations, but how they work across all of these different organizations. So I think those are some of the big things that, that I hear about when I talk to customers. >> Well, so it's interesting. I often say Cisco kind of changed the game in server and compute when it developed the original UCS. And you remember there were organizational considerations back then bringing together the server team and the networking team and of course the storage team as well. And now you mentioned Kubernetes, that is a total game changer with regard to whole the application development process. So you have to think about a new strategy in that regard. So how have you evolved your strategy? What is your strategy to help customers simplify, accelerate their hybrid cloud journey in that context? >> No, I think you're right Dave, back to the origins of UCS and we, you know, why did a networking company build a server? Well, we just enabled with the best networking technologies so, would do compute better. And now, doing something similar on the software, actually the managing software for our hyperconvergence, for our, you know, Rack server, for our blade servers. And, you know, we've been on this journey for about four years. The software is called Intersight, and, you know, we started out with Intersight being just the element manager, the management software for Cisco's compute and hyperconverged devices. But then we've evolved it over the last few years because we believe that a customer shouldn't have to manage a separate piece of software, would do manage the hardware, the underlying hardware. And then a separate tool to connect it to a public cloud. And then a third tool to do optimization, workload optimization or performance optimization, or cost optimization. A fourth tool to now manage, you know, Kubernetes and like, not just in one cluster, one cloud, but multi-cluster, multi-cloud. They should not have to have a fifth tool that does, goes into observability anyway. I can go on and on, but you get the idea. We wanted to bring everything onto that same platform that manage their infrastructure. But it's also the platform that enables the simplicity of hybrid cloud operations, automation. It's the same platform on which you can use to manage the, the Kubernetes infrastructure, Kubernetes clusters, I mean, whether it's on-prem or in a cloud. So, overall that's the strategy. Bring it to a single platform, and a platform is a loaded word we'll get into that a little bit, you know, in this conversation, but, that's the overall strategy, simplify. >> Well, you know, you brought platform. I like to say platform beats products, but you know, there was a day, and you could still point to some examples today in the IT industry where, hey, another tool we can monetize that. And another one to solve a different problem, we can monetize that. And so, tell me more about how Intersight came about. You obviously sat back, you saw what your customers were going through, you said, "We can do better." So tell us the story there. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, look, it started with, you know, three or four guys in getting in a room and saying, "Look, we've had this, you know, management software, UCS manager, UCS director." And these are just the Cisco's management, you know, for our, softwares for our own platforms. And every company has their own flavor. We said, we took on this bold goal of like, we're not, when we rewrite this or we improve on this, we're not going to just write another piece of software. We're going to create a cloud service. Or we're going to create a SaaS offering. Because the same, the infrastructure built by us whether it's on networking or compute, or the cyber cloud software, how do our customers use it? Well, they use it to write and run their applications, their SaaS services, every customer, every customer, every company today is a software company. They live and die by how their applications work or don't. And so, we were like, "We want to eat our own dog food here," right? We want to deliver this as a SaaS offering. And so that's how it started, we've being on this journey for about four years, tens of thousands of customers. But it was a pretty big, bold ambition 'cause you know, the big change with SaaS as you're familiar Dave is, the job of now managing this piece of software, is not on the customer, it's on the vendor, right? This can never go down. We have a release every Thursday, new capabilities, and we've learned so much along the way, whether it's to announce scalability, reliability, working with, our own company's security organizations on what can or cannot be in a SaaS service. So again, it's been a wonderful journey, but, I wanted to point out, we are in some ways eating our own dog food 'cause we built a SaaS application that helps other companies deliver their SaaS applications. >> So Cisco, I look at Cisco's business model and I compare, of course compare it to other companies in the infrastructure business and, you're obviously a very profitable company, you're a large company, you're growing faster than most of the traditional competitors. And, so that means that you have more to invest. You, can afford things, like to you know, stock buybacks, and you can invest in R&D you don't have to make those hard trade offs that a lot of your competitors have to make, so-- >> You got to have a talk with my boss on the whole investment. >> Yeah, right. You'd never enough, right? Never enough. But in speaking of R&D and innovations that you're intro introducing, I'm specifically interested in, how are you dealing with innovations to help simplify hybrid cloud, the operations there, improve flexibility, and things around Cloud Native initiatives as well? >> Absolutely, absolutely. Well, look, I think, one of the fundamentals where we're kind of philosophically different from a lot of options that I see in the industry is, we don't need to build everything ourselves, we don't. I just need to create a damn good platform with really good platform services, whether it's, you know, around, searchability, whether it's around logging, whether it's around, you know, access control, multi-tenants. I need to create a really good platform, and make it open. I do not need to go on a shopping spree to buy 17 and 1/2 companies and then figure out how to stich it all together. 'Cause it's almost impossible. And if it's impossible for us as a vendor, it's three times more difficult for the customer who then has to consume it. So that was the philosophical difference and how we went about building Intersight. We've created a hardened platform that's always on, okay? And then you, then the magic starts happening. Then you get partners, whether it is, you know, infrastructure partners, like, you know, some of our storage partners like NetApp or PR, or you know, others, who want their conversion infrastructures also to be managed, or their other SaaS offerings and software vendors who have now become partners. Like we did not write Terraform, you know, but we partnered with Hashi and now, you know, Terraform service's available on the Intersight platform. We did not write all the algorithms for workload optimization between a public cloud and on-prem. We partner with a company called Turbonomic and so that's now an offering on the Intersight platform. So that's where we're philosophically different, in sort of, you know, how we have gone about this. And, it actually dovetails well into, some of the new things that I want to talk about today that we're announcing on the Intersight platform where we're actually announcing the ability to attach and be able to manage Kubernetes clusters which are not on-prem. They're actually on AWS, on Azure, soon coming on GC, on GKE as well. So it really doesn't matter. We're not telling a customer if you're comfortable building your applications and running Kubernetes clusters on, you know, in AWS or Azure, stay there. But in terms of monitoring, managing it, you can use Intersight, and since you're using it on-prem you can use that same piece of software to manage Kubernetes clusters in a public cloud. Or even manage DMS in a EC2 instance. So. >> Yeah so, the fact that you could, you mentioned Storage Pure, NetApp, so Intersight can manage that infrastructure. I remember the Hashi deal and I, it caught my attention. I mean, of course a lot of companies want to partner with Cisco 'cause you've got such a strong ecosystem, but I thought that was an interesting move, Turbonomic you mentioned. And now you're saying Kubernetes in the public cloud. So a lot different than it was 10 years ago. So my last question is, how do you see this hybrid cloud evolving? I mean, you had private cloud and you had public cloud, and it was kind of a tug of war there. We see these two worlds coming together. How will that evolve on for the next few years? >> Well, I think it's the evolution of the model and I, really look at Cloud, you know, 2.0 or 3.0, or depending on, you know, how you're keeping terms. But, I think one thing has become very clear again, we, we've be eating our own dog food, I mean, Intersight is a hybrid cloud SaaS application. So we've learned some of these lessons ourselves. One thing is for sure that the customers are looking for a consistent model, whether it's on the edge, on the COLO, public cloud, on-prem, no data center, it doesn't matter. They're looking for a consistent model for operations, for governance, for upgrades, for reliability. They're looking for a consistent operating model. What (indistinct) tells me I think there's going to be a rise of more custom clouds. It's still going to be hybrid, so applications will want to reside wherever it most makes most sense for them which is obviously data, 'cause you know, data is the most expensive thing. So it's going to be complicated with the data goes on the edge, will be on the edge, COLO, public cloud, doesn't matter. But, you're basically going to see more custom clouds, more industry specific clouds, you know, whether it's for finance, or transportation, or retail, industry specific, I think sovereignty is going to play a huge role, you know, today, if you look at the cloud provider there's a handful of, you know, American and Chinese companies, that leave the rest of the world out when it comes to making, you know, good digital citizens of their people and you know, whether it's data latency, data gravity, data sovereignty, I think that's going to play a huge role. Sovereignty's going to play a huge role. And the distributor cloud also called Edge, is going to be the next frontier. And so, that's where we are trying line up our strategy. And if I had to sum it up in one sentence, it's really, your cloud, your way. Every customer is on a different journey, they will have their choice of like workloads, data, you know, upgrade reliability concern. That's really what we are trying to enable for our customers. >> You know, I think I agree with you on that custom clouds. And I think what you're seeing is, you said every company is a software company. Every company is also becoming a cloud company. They're building their own abstraction layers, they're connecting their on-prem to their public cloud. They're doing that across clouds, and they're looking for companies like Cisco to do the hard work, and give me an infrastructure layer that I can build value on top of. 'Cause I'm going to take my financial services business to my cloud model, or my healthcare business. I don't want to mess around with, I'm not going to develop, you know, custom infrastructure like an Amazon does. I'm going to look to Cisco and your R&D to do that. Do you buy that? >> Absolutely. I think again, it goes back to what I was talking about with platform. You got to give the world a solid open, flexible platform. And flexible in terms of the technology, flexible in how they want to consume it. Some of our customers are fine with the SaaS, you know, software. But if I talk to, you know, my friends in the federal team, no, that does not work. And so, how they want to consume it, they want to, you know, (indistinct) you know, sovereignty we talked about. So, I think, you know, job for an infrastructure vendor like ourselves is to give the world a open platform, give them the knobs, give them the right API tool kit. But the last thing I will mention is, you know, there's still a place for innovation in hardware. And I think some of my colleagues are going to get into some of those, you know, details, whether it's on our X-Series, you know, platform or HyperFlex, but it's really, it's going to be software defined, it's a SaaS service and then, you know, give the world an open rock solid platform. >> Got to run on something All right, Thanks DD, always a pleasure to have you on the, theCUBE, great to see you. >> Thanks for having me. >> You're welcome. In a moment, I'll be back to dig into hyperconverged, and where HyperFlex fits, and how it may even help with addressing some of the supply chain challenges that we're seeing in the market today. >> It used to be all your infrastructure was managed here. But things got more complex in distributing, and now IT operations need to be managed everywhere. But what if you could manage everywhere from somewhere? One scalable place that brings together your teams, technology, and operations. Both on-prem and in the cloud. One automated place that provides full stack visibility to help you optimize performance and stay ahead of problems. One secure place where everyone can work better, faster, and seamlessly together. That's the Cisco Intersight cloud operations platform. The time saving, cost reducing, risk managing solution for your whole IT environment, now and into the future of this ever-changing world of IT. (upbeat music) >> With me now are Manish Agarwal, senior director of product management for HyperFlex at Cisco, @flash4all, number four, I love that, on Twitter. And Darren Williams, the director of business development and sales for Cisco. MrHyperFlex, @MrHyperFlex on Twitter. Thanks guys. Hey, we're going to talk about some news and HyperFlex, and what role it plays in accelerating the hybrid cloud journey. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Thanks a lot Dave. >> Thanks Dave. >> All right Darren, let's start with you. So, for a hybrid cloud, you got to have on-prem connection, right? So, you got to have basically a private cloud. What are your thoughts on that? >> Yeah, we agree. You can't have a hybrid cloud without that prime element. And you've got to have a strong foundation in terms of how you set up the whole benefit of the cloud model you're building in terms of what you want to try and get back from the cloud. You need a strong foundation. Hyperconversions provides that. We see more and more customers requiring a private cloud, and they're building it with Hyperconversions, in particular HyperFlex. Now to make all that work, they need a good strong cloud operations model to be able to connect both the private and the public. And that's where we look at Intersight. We've got solution around that to be able to connect that around a SaaS offering. That looks around simplified operations, gives them optimization, and also automation to bring both private and public together in that hybrid world. >> Darren let's stay with you for a minute. When you talk to your customers, what are they thinking these days when it comes to implementing hyperconverged infrastructure in both the enterprise and at the edge, what are they trying to achieve? >> So there's many things they're trying to achieve, probably the most brutal honesty is they're trying to save money, that's probably the quickest answer. But, I think they're trying to look in terms of simplicity, how can they remove layers of components they've had before in their infrastructure? We see obviously collapsing of storage into hyperconversions and storage networking. And we've got customers that have saved 80% worth of savings by doing that collapse into a hyperconversion infrastructure away from their Three Tier infrastructure. Also about scalability, they don't know the end game. So they're looking about how they can size for what they know now, and how they can grow that with hyperconvergence very easy. It's one of the major factors and benefits of hyperconversions. They also obviously need performance and consistent performance. They don't want to compromise performance around their virtual machines when they want to run multiple workloads. They need that consistency all all way through. And then probably one of the biggest ones is that around the simplicity model is the management layer, ease of management. To make it easier for their operations, yeah, we've got customers that have told us, they've saved 50% of costs in their operations model on deploying HyperFlex, also around the time savings they make massive time savings which they can reinvest in their infrastructure and their operations teams in being able to innovate and go forward. And then I think probably one of the biggest pieces we've seen as people move away from three tier architecture is the deployment elements. And the ease of deployment gets easy with hyperconverged, especially with Edge. Edge is a major key use case for us. And, what I want, what our customers want to do is get the benefit of a data center at the edge, without A, the big investment. They don't want to compromise in performance, and they want that simplicity in both management and deployment. And, we've seen our analysts recommendations around what their readers are telling them in terms of how management deployment's key for our IT operations teams. And how much they're actually saving by deploying Edge and taking the burden away when they deploy hyperconversions. And as I said, the savings elements is the key bit, and again, not always, but obviously those are case studies around about public cloud being quite expensive at times, over time for the wrong workloads. So by bringing them back, people can make savings. And we again have customers that have made 50% savings over three years compared to their public cloud usage. So, I'd say that's the key things that customers are looking for. Yeah. >> Great, thank you for that Darren. Manish, we have some hard news, you've been working a lot on evolving the HyperFlex line. What's the big news that you've just announced? >> Yeah, thanks Dave. So there are several things that we are announcing today. The first one is a new offer called HyperFlex Express. This is, you know, Cisco Intersight led and Cisco Intersight managed eight HyperFlex configurations. That we feel are the fastest path to hybrid cloud. The second is we are expanding our server portfolio by adding support for HX on AMD Rack, UCS AMD Rack. And the third is a new capability that we are introducing, that we are calling, local containerized witness. And let me take a minute to explain what this is. This is a pretty nifty capability to optimize for Edge environments. So, you know, this leverages the, Cisco's ubiquitous presence of the networking, you know, products that we have in the environments worldwide. So the smallest HyperFlex configuration that we have is a 2-node configuration, which is primarily used in Edge environments. Think of a, you know, a backroom in a departmental store or a oil rig, or it might even be a smaller data center somewhere around the globe. For these 2-node configurations, there is always a need for a third entity that, you know, industry term for that is either a witness or an arbitrator. We had that for HyperFlex as well. And the problem that customers face is, where you host this witness. It cannot be on the cluster because the job of the witness is to, when the infrastructure is going down, it basically breaks, sort of arbitrates which node gets to survive. So it needs to be outside of the cluster. But finding infrastructure to actually host this is a problem, especially in the Edge environments where these are resource constraint environments. So what we've done is we've taken that witness, we've converted it into a container reform factor. And then qualified a very large slew of Cisco networking products that we have, right from ISR, ASR, Nexus, Catalyst, industrial routers, even a Raspberry Pi that can host this witness. Eliminating the need for you to find yet another piece of infrastructure, or doing any, you know, care and feeding of that infrastructure. You can host it on something that already exists in the environment. So those are the three things that we are announcing today. >> So I want to ask you about HyperFlex Express. You know, obviously the whole demand and supply chain is out of whack. Everybody's, you know, global supply chain issues are in the news, everybody's dealing with it. Can you expand on that a little bit more? Can HyperFlex Express help customers respond to some of these issues? >> Yeah indeed Dave. You know the primary motivation for HyperFlex Express was indeed an idea that, you know, one of the folks are on my team had, which was to build a set of HyperFlex configurations that are, you know, would have a shorter lead time. But as we were brainstorming, we were actually able to tag on multiple other things and make sure that, you know, there is in it for, something in it for our customers, for sales, as well as our partners. So for example, you know, for our customers, we've been able to dramatically simplify the configuration and the install for HyperFlex Express. These are still HyperFlex configurations and you would at the end of it, get a HyperFlex cluster. But the part to that cluster is much, much simplified. Second is that we've added in flexibility where you can now deploy these, these are data center configurations, but you can deploy these with or without fabric interconnects, meaning you can deploy with your existing top of rack. We've also, you know, added attractive price point for these, and of course, you know, these will have better lead times because we've made sure that, you know, we are using components that are, that we have clear line of sight from our supply perspective. For partner and sales, this is, represents a high velocity sales motion, a faster turnaround time, and a frictionless sales motion for our distributors. This is actually a set of disty-friendly configurations, which they would find very easy to stalk, and with a quick turnaround time, this would be very attractive for the distys as well. >> It's interesting Manish, I'm looking at some fresh survey data, more than 70% of the customers that were surveyed, this is the ETR survey again, we mentioned 'em at the top. More than 70% said they had difficulty procuring server hardware and networking was also a huge problem. So that's encouraging. What about, Manish, AMD? That's new for HyperFlex. What's that going to give customers that they couldn't get before? >> Yeah Dave, so, you know, in the short time that we've had UCS AMD Rack support, we've had several record making benchmark results that we've published. So it's a powerful platform with a lot of performance in it. And HyperFlex, you know, the differentiator that we've had from day one is that it has the industry leading storage performance. So with this, we are going to get the fastest compute, together with the fastest storage. And this, we are hoping that we'll, it'll basically unlock, you know, a, unprecedented level of performance and efficiency, but also unlock several new workloads that were previously locked out from the hyperconverged experience. >> Yeah, cool. So Darren, can you give us an idea as to how HyperFlex is doing in the field? >> Sure, absolutely. So, both me and Manish been involved right from the start even before it was called HyperFlex, and we've had a great journey. And it's very exciting to see where we are taking, where we've been with the technology. So we have over 5,000 customers worldwide, and we're currently growing faster year over year than the market. The majority of our customers are repeat buyers, which is always a good sign in terms of coming back when they've proved the technology and are comfortable with the technology. They, repeat buyer for expanded capacity, putting more workloads on. They're using different use cases on there. And from an Edge perspective, more numbers of science. So really good endorsement of the technology. We get used across all verticals, all segments, to house mission critical applications, as well as the traditional virtual server infrastructures. And we are the lifeblood of our customers around those, mission critical customers. I think one big example, and I apologize for the worldwide audience, but this resonates with the American audience is, the Super Bowl. So, the SoFi stadium that housed the Super Bowl, actually has Cisco HyperFlex running all the management services, through from the entire stadium for digital signage, 4k video distribution, and it's completely cashless. So, if that were to break during Super Bowl, that would've been a big news article. But it was run perfectly. We, in the design of the solution, we're able to collapse down nearly 200 servers into a few nodes, across a few racks, and have 120 virtual machines running the whole stadium, without missing a heartbeat. And that is mission critical for you to run Super Bowl, and not be on the front of the press afterwards for the wrong reasons, that's a win for us. So we really are, really happy with HyperFlex, where it's going, what it's doing, and some of the use cases we're getting involved in, very, very exciting. >> Hey, come on Darren, it's Super Bowl, NFL, that's international now. And-- >> Thing is, I follow NFL. >> The NFL's, it's invading London, of course, I see the, the picture, the real football over your shoulder. But, last question for Manish. Give us a little roadmap, what's the future hold for HyperFlex? >> Yeah. So, you know, as Darren said, both Darren and I have been involved with HyperFlex since the beginning. But, I think the best is yet to come. There are three main pillars for HyperFlex. One is, Intersight is central to our strategy. It provides a, you know, lot of customer benefit from a single pane of class management. But we are going to take this beyond the lifecycle management, which is for HyperFlex, which is integrated into Intersight today, and element management. We are going to take it beyond that and start delivering customer value on the dimensions of AI Ops, because Intersight really provides us a ideal platform to gather stats from all the clusters across the globe, do AI/ML and do some predictive analysis with that, and return back as, you know, customer valued, actionable insights. So that is one. The second is UCS expand the HyperFlex portfolio, go beyond UCS to third party server platforms, and newer UCS server platforms as well. But the highlight there is one that I'm really, really excited about and think that there is a lot of potential in terms of the number of customers we can help. Is HX on X-Series. X-Series is another thing that we are going to, you know, add, we're announcing a bunch of capabilities on in this particular launch. But HX on X-Series will have that by the end of this calendar year. And that should unlock with the flexibility of X-Series of hosting a multitude of workloads and the simplicity of HyperFlex. We're hoping that would bring a lot of benefits to new workloads that were locked out previously. And then the last thing is HyperFlex data platform. This is the heart of the offering today. And, you'll see the HyperFlex data platform itself it's a distributed architecture, a unique distributed architecture. Primarily where we get our, you know, record baring performance from. You'll see it can foster more scalable, more resilient, and we'll optimize it for you know, containerized workloads, meaning it'll get granular containerized, container granular management capabilities, and optimize for public cloud. So those are some things that we are, the team is busy working on, and we should see that come to fruition. I'm hoping that we'll be back at this forum in maybe before the end of the year, and talking about some of these newer capabilities. >> That's great. Thank you very much for that, okay guys, we got to leave it there. And you know, Manish was talking about the HX on X-Series that's huge, customers are going to love that and it's a great transition 'cause in a moment, I'll be back with Vikas Ratna and Jim Leach, and we're going to dig into X-Series. Some real serious engineering went into this platform, and we're going to explore what it all means. You're watching Simplifying Hybrid Cloud on theCUBE, your leader in enterprise tech coverage. >> The power is here, and here, but also here. And definitely here. Anywhere you need the full force and power of your infrastructure hyperconverged. It's like having thousands of data centers wherever you need them, powering applications anywhere they live, but manage from the cloud. So you can automate everything from here. (upbeat music) Cisco HyperFlex goes anywhere. Cisco, the bridge to possible. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's special presentation, Simplifying Hybrid Cloud brought to you by Cisco. We're here with Vikas Ratna who's the director of product management for UCS at Cisco and James Leach, who is director of business development at Cisco. Gents, welcome back to theCUBE, good to see you again. >> Hey, thanks for having us. >> Okay, Jim, let's start. We know that when it comes to navigating a transition to hybrid cloud, it's a complicated situation for a lot of customers, and as organizations as they hit the pavement for their hybrid cloud journeys, what are the most common challenges that they face? What are they telling you? How is Cisco, specifically UCS helping them deal with these problems? >> Well, you know, first I think that's a, you know, that's a great question. And you know, customer centric view is the way that we've taken, is kind of the approach we've taken from day one. Right? So I think that if you look at the challenges that we're solving for that our customers are facing, you could break them into just a few kind of broader buckets. The first would definitely be applications, right? That's the, that's where the rubber meets your proverbial road with the customer. And I would say that, you know, what we're seeing is, the challenges customers are facing within applications come from the the way that applications have evolved. So what we're seeing now is more data centric applications for example. Those require that we, you know, are able to move and process large data sets really in real time. And the other aspect of applications I think to give our customers kind of some, you know, pause some challenges, would be around the fact that they're changing so quickly. So the application that exists today or the day that they, you know, make a purchase of infrastructure to be able to support that application, that application is most likely changing so much more rapidly than the infrastructure can keep up with today. So, that creates some challenges around, you know, how do I build the infrastructure? How do I right size it without over provisioning, for example? But also, there's a need for some flexibility around life cycle and planning those purchase cycles based on the life cycle of the different hardware elements. And within the infrastructure, which I think is the second bucket of challenges, we see customers who are being forced to move away from the, like a modular or blade approach, which offers a lot of operational and consolidation benefits, and they have to move to something like a Rack server model for some applications because of these needs that these data centric applications have, and that creates a lot of you know, opportunity for siloing the infrastructure. And those silos in turn create multiple operating models within the, you know, a data center environment that, you know, again, drive a lot of complexity. So that, complexity is definitely the enemy here. And then finally, I think life cycles. We're seeing this democratization of processing if you will, right? So it's no longer just CPU focused, we have GPU, we have FPGA, we have, you know, things that are being done in storage and the fabrics that stitch them together that are all changing rapidly and have very different life cycles. So, when those life cycles don't align for a lot of our customers, they see a challenge in how they can manage this, you know, these different life cycles and still make a purchase without having to make too big of a compromise in one area or another because of the misalignment of life cycles. So, that is a, you know, kind of the other bucket. And then finally, I think management is huge, right? So management, you know, at its core is really right size for our customers and give them the most value when it meets the mark around scale and scope. You know, back in 2009, we weren't meeting that mark in the industry and UCS came about and took management outside the chassis, right? We put it at the top of the rack and that worked great for the scale and scope we needed at that time. However, as things have changed, we're seeing a very new scale and scope needed, right? So we're talking about a hybrid cloud world that has to manage across data centers, across clouds, and, you know, having to stitch things together for some of our customers poses a huge challenge. So there are tools for all of those operational pieces that touch the application, that touch the infrastructure, but they're not the same tool. They tend to be disparate tools that have to be put together. >> Right. >> So our customers, you know, don't really enjoy being in the business of, you know, building their own tools, so that creates a huge challenge. And one where I think that they really crave that full hybrid cloud stack that has that application visibility but also can reach down into the infrastructure. >> Right. You know Jim, I said in my open that you guys, Cisco sort of changed the server game with the original UCS, but the X-Series is the next generation, the generation for the next decade which is really important 'cause you touched on a lot of things, these data intensive workload, alternative processors to sort of meet those needs. The whole cloud operating model and hybrid cloud has really changed. So, how's it going with with the X-Series? You made a big splash last year, what's the reception been in the field? >> Actually, it's been great. You know, we're finding that customers can absolutely relate to our, you know, UCS X-Series story. I think that, you know, the main reason they relate to it is they helped create it, right? It was their feedback and their partnership that gave us really the, those problem areas, those areas that we could solve for the customer that actually add, you know, significant value. So, you know, since we brought UCS to market back in 2009, you know, we had this unique architectural paradigm that we created, and I think that created a product which was the fastest in Cisco history in terms of growth. What we're seeing now is X-Series is actually on a faster trajectory. So we're seeing a tremendous amount of uptake. We're seeing all, you know, both in terms of, you know, the number of customers, but also more importantly, the number of workloads that our customers are using, and the types of workloads are growing, right? So we're growing this modular segment that exist, not just, you know, bringing customers onto a new product, but we're actually bring them into the product in the way that we had envisioned, which is one infrastructure that can run any application and do it seamlessly. So we're really excited to be growing this modular segment. I think the other piece, you know, that, you know, we judge ourselves is, you know, sort of not just within Cisco, but also within the industry. And I think right now is a, you know, a great example, you know, our competitors have taken kind of swings and misses over the past five years at this, at a, you know, kind of the new next architecture. And, we're seeing a tremendous amount of growth even faster than any of our competitors have seen when they announced something that was new to this space. So, I think that the ground up work that we did is really paying off. And I think that what we're also seeing is it's not really a leap frog game, as it may have been in the past. X-Series is out in front today, and, you know, we're extending that lead with some of the new features and capabilities we have. So we're delivering on the story that's already been resonating with customers and, you know, we're pretty excited that we're seeing the results as well. So, as our competitors hit walls, I think we're, you know, we're executing on the plan that we laid out back in June when we launched X-Series to the world. And, you know, as we continue to do that, we're seeing, you know, again, tremendous uptake from our customers. >> So thank you for that Jim. So Vikas, I was just on Twitter just today actually talking about the gravitational pull, you've got the public clouds pulling CXOs one way and you know, on-prem folks pulling the other way and hybrid cloud. So, organizations are struggling with a lot of different systems and architectures and ways to do things. And I said that what they're trying to do is abstract all that complexity away and they need infrastructure to support that. And I think your stated aim is really to try to help with that confusion with the X series, right? I mean, so how so can you explain that? >> Sure. And, that's the right, the context that you built up right there Dave. If you walk into enterprise data center you'll see plethora of compute systems spread all across. Because, every application has its unique needs, and, hence you find drive node, drive-dense system, memory dense system, GPU dense system, core dense system, and variety of form factors, 1U, 2U, 4U, and, every one of them typically come with, you know, variety of adapters and cables and so forth. This creates the siloness of resources. Fabric is (indistinct), the adapter is (indistinct). The power and cooling implication. The Rack, you know, face challenges. And, above all, the multiple management plane that they come up with, which makes it very difficult for IT to have one common center policy, and enforce it all across, across the firmware and software and so forth. And then think about upgrade challenges of the siloness makes it even more complex as these go through the upgrade processes of their own. As a result, we observe quite a few of our customers, you know, really seeing an inter, slowness in that agility, and high burden in the cost of overall ownership. This is where with the X-Series powered by Intersight, we have one simple goal. We want to make sure our customers get out of that complexities. They become more agile, and drive lower TCOs. And we are delivering it by doing three things, three aspects of simplification. First, simplify their whole infrastructure by enabling them to run their entire workload on single infrastructure. An infrastructure which removes the siloness of form factor. An infrastructure which reduces the Rack footprint that is required. An infrastructure where power and cooling budgets are in the lower. Second, we want to simplify by delivering a cloud operating model, where they can and create the policy once across compute network storage and deploy it all across. And third, we want to take away the pain they have by simplifying the process of upgrade and any platform evolution that they're going to go through in the next two, three years. So that's where the focus is on just driving down the simplicity, lowering down their TCOs. >> Oh, that's key, less friction is always a good thing. Now, of course, Vikas we heard from the HyperFlex guys earlier, they had news not to be outdone. You have hard news as well. What innovations are you announcing around X-Series today? >> Absolutely. So we are following up on the exciting X-Series announcement that we made in June last year, Dave. And we are now introducing three innovation on X-Series with the goal of three things. First, expand the supported workload on X-Series. Second, take the performance to new levels. Third, dramatically reduce the complexities in the data center by driving down the number of adapters and cables that are needed. To that end, three new innovations are coming in. First, we are introducing the support for the GPU node using a cableless and very unique X-Fabric architecture. This is the most elegant design to add the GPUs to the compute node in the modular form factor. Thereby, our customers can now power in AI/ML workload, or any workload that need many more number of GPUs. Second, we are bringing in GPUs right onto the compute node, and thereby our customers can now fire up the accelerated VDI workload for example. And third, which is what you know, we are extremely proud about, is we are innovating again by introducing the fifth generation of our very popular unified fabric technology. With the increased bandwidth that it brings in, coupled with the local drive capacity and densities that we have on the compute node, our customers can now fire up the big data workload, the FCI workload, the SDS workload. All these workloads that have historically not lived in the modular form factor, can be run over there and benefit from the architectural benefits that we have. Second, with the announcement of fifth generation fabric, we've become the only vendor to now finally enable 100 gig end to end single port bandwidth, and there are multiple of those that are coming in there. And we are working very closely with our CI partners to deliver the benefit of these performance through our Cisco Validated Design to our CI franchise. And third, the innovations in the fifth gen fabric will again allow our customers to have fewer physical adapters made with ethernet adapter, made with power channel adapters, or made with, the other storage adapters. They've reduced it down and coupled with the reduction in the cable. So very, very excited about these three big announcements that we are making in this month's release. >> Great, a lot there, you guys have been busy, so thank you for that Vikas. So, Jim, you talked a little bit about the momentum that you have, customers are adopting, what problems are they telling you that X-Series addresses, and how do they align with where they want to go in the future? >> That's a great question. I think if you go back to, and think about some of the things that we mentioned before, in terms of the problems that we originally set out to solve, we're seeing a lot of traction. So what Vikas mentioned I think is really important, right? Those pieces that we just announced really enhance that story and really move again, to the, kind of, to the next level of taking advantage of some of these, you know, problem solving for our customers. You know, if you look at, you know, I think Vikas mentioned accelerated VDI. That's a great example. These are where customers, you know, they need to have this dense compute, they need video acceleration, they need tight policy management, right? And they need to be able to deploy these systems anywhere in the world. Well, that's exactly what we're hitting on here with X-Series right now. We're hitting the market in every single way, right? We have the highest compute config density that we can offer across the, you know, the very top end configurations of CPUs, and a lot of room to grow. We have the, you know, the premier cloud based management, you know, hybrid cloud suite in the industry, right? So check there. We have the flexible GPU accelerators that Vikas just talked about that we're announcing both on the system and also adding additional ones to the, through the use of the X-Fabric, which is really, really critical to this launch as well. And, you know, I think finally, the fifth generation of fabric interconnect and virtual interface card, and, intelligent fabric module go hand in hand in creating this 100 gig end to end bandwidth story, that we can move a lot of data. Again, you know, having all this performance is only as good as what we can get in and out of it, right? So giving customers the ability to manage it anywhere, to be able to get the bandwidth that they need, to be able to get the accelerators that are flexible that it fit exactly their needs, this is huge, right? This solves a lot of the problems we can tick off right away. With the infrastructure as I mentioned, X-Fabric is really critical here because it opens a lot of doors here, you know, we're talking about GPUs today, but in the future, there are other elements that we can disaggregate, like the GPUs that solve these life cycle mismanagement issues. They solve issues around the form factor limitations. It solves all these issues for like, it does for GPU we can do that with storage or memory in the future. So that's going to be huge, right? This is disaggregation that actually delivers, right? It's not just a gimmicky bar trick here that we're doing, this is something that customers can really get value out of day one. And then finally, I think the, you know, the future readiness here, you know, we avoid saying future proof because we're kind of embracing the future here. We know that not only are the GPUs going to evolve, the CPUs are going to evolve, the drives, you know, the storage modules are going to evolve. All of these things are changing very rapidly. The fabric that stitches them together is critical, and we know that we're just on the edge of some of the development that are coming with CXL, with some of the PCI Express changes that are coming in the very near future, so we're ready to go. And the X-Fabric is exactly the vehicle that's going to be able to deliver those technologies to our customers, right? Our customers are out there saying that, you know, they want to buy into to something like X-Series that has all the operational benefits, but at the same time, they have to have the comfort in knowing that they're protected against being locked out of some technology that's coming in the future, right? We want our customers to take these disruptive technologies and not be disrupted, but use them to disrupt their competition as well. So, you know, we're really excited about the pieces today, and, I think it goes a long way towards continuing to tell the customer benefit story that X-Series brings, and, you know, again, you know, stay tuned because it's going to keep getting better as we go. >> Yeah, a lot of headroom for scale and the management piece is key there. Just have time for one more question Vikas. Give us some nuggets on the roadmap. What's next for X-Series that we can look forward to? >> Absolutely Dave. As we talked about, and as Jim also hinted, this is a future ready architecture. A lot of focus and innovation that we are going through is about enabling our customers to seamlessly and painlessly adopt very disruptive hardware technologies that are coming up, no refund replace. And, there we are looking into, enabling the customer's journey as they transition from PCI generation four, to five to six without driven replace, as they embrace CXL without driven replace. As they embrace the newer paradigm of computing through the disaggregated memory, disaggregated PCIe or NVMe based dense drives, and so forth. We are also looking forward to X-Fabric next generation, which will allow dynamic assignment of GPUs anywhere within the chassis and much more. So this is again, all about focusing on the innovation that will make the enterprise data center operations a lot more simpler, and drive down the TCO by keeping them not only covered for today, but also for future. So that's where some of the focus is on Dave. >> Okay. Thank you guys we'll leave it there, in a moment, I'll have some closing thoughts. (upbeat music) We're seeing a major evolution, perhaps even a bit of a revolution in the underlying infrastructure necessary to support hybrid work. Look, virtualizing compute and running general purpose workloads is something IT figured out a long time ago. But just when you have it nailed down in the technology business, things change, don't they? You can count on that. The cloud operating model has bled into on-premises locations. And is creating a new vision for the future, which we heard a lot about today. It's a vision that's turning into reality. And it supports much more diverse and data intensive workloads and alternative compute modes. It's one where flexibility is a watch word, enabling change, attacking complexity, and bringing a management capability that allows for a granular management of resources at massive scale. I hope you've enjoyed this special presentation. Remember, all these videos are available on demand at thecube.net. And if you want to learn more, please click on the information link. Thanks for watching Simplifying Hybrid Cloud brought to you by Cisco and theCUBE, your leader in enterprise tech coverage. This is Dave Vellante, be well and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>Mm. >>Welcome back to the Cube. Special presentation. Simplifying Hybrid Cloud Brought to You by Cisco We're here with Vegas Rattana, who's the director of product management for you? CSS Cisco and James Leach, who was director of business development at Cisco. Gents, welcome back to the Cube. Good to see you again. >>Hey, thanks for having us. >>Okay, Jim, let's start. We know that when it comes to navigating a transition to hybrid cloud, it's a complicated situation for a lot of customers and as organisations that they hit the pavement for their hybrid cloud journeys, one of the most common challenges that they face. What are they telling you? How is Cisco specifically UCS helping them deal with these problems? >>Well, you know, first, I think that's a That's a great question. And, you know, the customer centric view is is the way that we've taken. Um, it's kind of the approach we've taken from Day one, right? So I think that if you look at the challenges that we're solving for their customers are facing, you could break them into just a few kind of broader buckets. The first would definitely be applications, right? That's the That's where the rubber meets your proverbial road. Um, with the customer. And I would say that you know, what we're seeing is the challenges customers are facing within applications come from the way that applications have evolved. So what we're seeing now is more data centric applications. For example, um, those require that we are able to move, um, and process large datasets really in real time. Um, and the other aspect of application, I think, to give our customers kind of some pose some challenges would be around the fact that they're changing so quickly. So the application that exists today or the day that they make a purchase of infrastructure to be able to support that application. That application is most likely changing so much more rapidly than the infrastructure can't keep up with today. So, um, that creates some some challenges around. How do I build the infrastructure? How do I write? Size it without over provisioning, for example. But also there's a need for some flexibility around life cycle and planting those purchase cycles based on the life cycle of the different hardware elements and within the infrastructure, which I think is the second bucket of challenges. We see customers who are being forced to move away from the like a modular or blade approach, which offers a lot of operational and consolidation benefits. And they have to move to something like, um, Iraq server model for some applications because of these needs that these data centric applications have. And that creates a lot of opportunity for silo going. The infrastructure and those silos, in turn, create multiple operating models within the A data centre environment that, you know, again drive a lot of complexity. So that complexity is definitely the the enemy here. Um, and then finally, I think life cycles. We're seeing this democratisation of of processing, if you will, right, so it's no longer just CPU focus. We have GPU. We have F p g A. We have things that are being done in storage and the fabrics that stitch them together that are all changing rapidly and have very different life cycles. So when those life cycles don't align for a lot of our customers, they see a challenge in how they can can manage this these different life cycles and still make a purchase without having to make too big of a compromise in one area or another because of the misalignment of life cycles. So that is a kind of the other bucket. And then finally, I think management is huge, right? So management at its core is really right size for for our customers and give them the most value when it when it meets the mark around scale and scope. Um, back in 2000 and nine, we weren't meeting that mark in the industry and UCS came about and took management outside the chassis, right? We put at the top of the rack, and that works great for the scale and scope we needed at that time. However, as things have changed, we're seeing a very new scale and scope needed, Right? So we're talking about hybrid cloud world that has to manage across data centres across clouds. And, um, you know, having to stitch things together for some of our customers poses a huge challenge. So there are tools for all of those those operational pieces that that touched the application that touched the infrastructure. But they're not the same tool. They tend to be, um, disparate tools that have to be put together. So our customers, you know, don't really enjoy being in the business of building their own tools. So, um, so that creates a huge challenge. And one where I think that they really crave that full hybrid cloud stack that has that application visibility but also can reach down into the infrastructure. >>Right? You know, Jim, I said in my my Open that you guys, Cisco sort of changed the server game with the original UCS. But the X Series is the next generation, the generation of the next decade, which is really important cause you touched on a lot of things. These data intensive workloads, alternative processors to sort of meet those needs. The whole cloud operating model and hybrid cloud has really changed. So how's it going with the X Series? You made a big splash last year. What's the reception been in the field? >>Actually, it's been great. Um, you know, we're finding that customers can absolutely relate to our UCS X series story. Um, I think that the main reason they relate to it as they helped create it, right, it was their feedback and their partnership that they gave us Really, those problem areas, those, uh, those areas that we could solve for the customer that actually add significant value. So, you know, since we brought you see s to market back in 2000 and nine, we had this unique architectural, um uh, paradigm that we created. And I think that created a product which was the fastest in Cisco history. Um, in terms of growth, Um, what we're seeing now is X series is actually on a faster trajectory. So we're seeing a tremendous amount of uptake. We're seeing, uh, both in terms of the number of customers. But also, more importantly, the number of workloads that our customers are using and the types of workloads are growing. Right? So we're growing this modular segment that exists not just, um, you know, bringing customers onto a new product, But we're actually bringing them into the product in the way that we had envisioned, which is one infrastructure that can run any application and do it seamlessly. So we're really excited to be growing this modular segment. Um, I think the other piece, you know that, you know, we judge ourselves is, you know, sort of not just within Cisco, but also within the industry and I think right now is a You know, a great example. Our competitors have taken kind of swings and misses over the past five years at this, um, at a kind of a new next architecture, and we're seeing a tremendous amount of growth even faster than any any of our competitors have seen. When they announced something, um, that was new to this space. So I think that the ground up work that we did is really paying off. Um, and I think that what we're also seeing is it's not really a leapfrog game, Um, as it may have been in the past, Um, X series is out in front today, and we're extending that lead with some of the new features and capabilities we have. So we're delivering on the story that's already been resonating with customers, and we're pretty excited that we're seeing the results as well. So as our competitors hit walls, I think we're you know, we're executing on the plan that we laid out back in June when we launched that series to the world. And, uh, you know, as we as we continue to do that, um, we're seeing, you know, again tremendous uptake from our customers. >>So thank you for that, Jim. So viscous. I was just on Twitter just today, actually talking about the gravitational pull. You've got the public clouds pulling C x o is one way. And you know I'm Prem folks pulling the other way and hybrid cloud So organisations are struggling with a lot of different systems and architectures and and ways to do things. And I said that what they're trying to do is abstract all that complexity away, and they need infrastructure to support that. And I think your stated aim is really to try to help with that with that confusion with the X series. Right? So how so? Can you explain that? >>Sure. And and and that's the right, Uh, the context that you built up right there, Dave, if you walk into Enterprise Data Centre, you see platform of computer systems spread all across because every application has its unique needs. And hence you find Dr Note Driving system memory system, computing system, coordinate system and a variety of farm factors. When you do, you, for you and every one of them typically come with a variety of adapters and cables and so forth Just create silence of resources. Fabric is broad. The actress brought the power and cooling implications the rack, you know, the space challenges and above all, the multiple management plane that they come of it, which makes it very difficult for I t to have one common centre policy and enforce it all across across the firmware and software and so forth and then think about the great challenges of the baroness makes it even more complex as these go through the great references of their own. As a result, we observe quite a few of our customers. Uh, you know, really, uh, seeing Anna slowness in that agility and high burden, uh, in the cost of overall ownership, this is where the X rays powered by inter side. We have one simple goal. We want to make sure our customers get out of that complexities. They become more Asyl and drive lower tco and we are delivering it by doing three things. Three aspects of simplification first simplify their whole infrastructure by enabling them to run their entire workload on single infrastructure and infrastructure, which removes the narrowness of fun factor and infrastructure which reduces direct from footprint that is required infrastructure were power and cooling better served in the Lord. Second, we want to simplify it with by delivering a cloud operating model where they can create the policy ones across compute network stories and deployed all across. And third, we want to take away the pain they have by simplifying the process of upgrade and any platform evolution that they are going to go through the next 23 years. So that's where the focus is on just driving down the simplicity lowering down there. >>That's key. Less friction is is always a good thing now, of course, because we heard from the hyper flex guys earlier, they had news. Not to be outdone, you have hard news as well. What innovations are you announcing around X series today? >>Absolutely. So we are following up on the excited, exciting extras announcement that we made in June last year. Day and we are now introducing three innovation on experience with the bowl of three things First, expand the supported World War and extra days. Second, take the performance to new levels. Third dramatically reduced the complex cities in the data centre by driving down the number of adapters and cables. To that end, three new innovations are coming in. First, we are introducing the support for the GPU note using a cable list and very unique X fabric architecture. This is the most elegant design to add the GPS to the compute note in the model of form factor thereby, our customers can now power in AML workload on any workload that needs many more number of GPS. Second, we are bringing in GPS right onto the computer note and thereby the our customers can now fire up the accelerated video upload, for example, and turf, which is what you know we are extremely proud about, is we are innovating again by introducing the fifth generation of our very popular unified fabric technology with the increased bandwidth that it brings in, coupled with the local drive capacity and density is that we have on the computer note our customers can now fire up the big data workloads the F C I work. Lord, uh, the FDA has worked with all these workloads that have historically not lived in the model of form. Factor can be run over there and benefit from the architectural benefits that we have. Second, with the announcement of fifth generation fabric, we become the only vendor to now finally enable 100 gig and two and single board banned word and the multiple of those that are coming in there. And we are working very closely with our partners to deliver the benefit of these performance through our Cisco validated design to oversee a franchise. And third, the innovations in, uh, in the in the fifth and public again allow our customers to have fewer physical adapters, made the Internet adapter made with our general doctors or maybe the other stories adapters. They reduced it down and coupled with the reduction in the cable so very, very excited about these three big announcements that we're making in this part of the great >>A lot There. You guys have been busy. So thank you for that. Because so, Jim, you talked a little bit about the momentum that you have. Customers are adopting. What problems are they telling you that X series addresses and and how do they align with where where they want to go in the future? >>Um, that's a great question. I think if you go back to um and think about some of the things that we mentioned before. Um, in terms of the problems that we originally set out to solve, we're seeing a lot of traction. So what the cost mentioned, I think, is really important, right? Those pieces that we just announced really enhanced that story and really move again to kind of to the next level of, of taking advantage of some of these problem solving for our customers. You know, if you look, you know, I think the cost mentioned accelerated VD. That's a great example. Um, these are where customers you know, they need to have this dense compute. They need video acceleration, they need type policy management, right. And they need to be able to deploy these, um, these systems anywhere in the world. Well, that's exactly what we're hitting on here with X series right now, we're hitting the mark in every every single way, right? We have the highest compute config density that we can offer across the, you know, the very top end configurations of CPUs. Um, and a lot of room to grow. Um, we have the the premier cloud based management. You know, hybrid cloud suite. Um uh, in the industry. Right. So check there. We have the flexible GPU accelerators that that the cost just talked about that we're announcing both on the system and also adding additional ones to the through the use of the X fabric, which is really, really critical to this launch as well. And, uh, you know, I think finally, the fifth generation of fabric interconnect and virtual interface card, um, and an intelligent fabric module go hand in hand in creating this 100 gig and end bandwidth story that we can move a lot of data again. You know, having all this performance is only as good as what we can get in and out of it, right? So giving customers the ability to manage it anywhere be able to get the bandwidth that they need to be able to get the accelerators that are flexible to that fit exactly their needs. This is huge, right? This solves a lot of the problems we can take off right away with the infrastructure. As I mentioned, X fabric is really critical here because it opens a lot of doors here. We're talking about GPS today, but in the future, there are other elements that we can disaggregate like the GPS that solve these lifecycle mismanagement issues. They solve issues around the form factor limitations. It solves all these issues for like it does for GPU. We can do that with storage or memory in the future, So that's going to be huge, right? This is disaggregate Asian that actually delivers right. It's not just a gimmicky bar trick here that we're doing. This is something that that customers can really get value out of Day one. And then finally, I think the future readiness here. You know, we avoid saying future proof because we're kind of embracing the future here. We know that not only are the GPS going to evolve, the CPUs are going to evolve the drives, the storage modules are going to evolve. All of these things are changing very rapidly. The fabric that stitches them together. It's critical, and we know that we're just on the edge of some of the developments that are coming with C XL with with some of the the PC express changes that are coming in the in the very near future. So we're ready to go X and the X fabric is exactly the vehicle that's going to be able to deliver those technologies to our customers. Our customers are out there saying that you know, they want to buy into something like X Series that has all the operational benefits, but at the same time, they have to have the comfort in knowing that they're protected against being locked out of some technology that's coming in the future. We want our customers to take these disruptive technologies and not be disrupted, but use them to disrupt, um, their competition as well. So, um, you know, we're really excited about the pieces today, and I think it goes a long way towards continuing to tell the customer benefit story that X Series brings And, um, again, stay tuned because it's going to keep getting better as we go. >>A lot of headroom, uh, for scale and the management piece is key. There just have time for one more question because talk to give us some nuggets on the road map. What's next for? For X X series that we can look forward to? >>Absolutely Dave, as as we talked about. And James also hinted this is the future radio architecture, a lot of focus and innovation that we are going through is about enabling our customers to seamlessly and painlessly adopt very disruptive hardware technologies that are coming up no infantry place. And there we are, looking into enabling the customer journey as the transition from PCH in less than 4 to 5 to six without rip and replace as they embraced the Excel without rip and replace as they embrace the newer paradigm of computing through the desegregated memory desegregated P. C, A, r N B and dance drives and so forth. We're also looking forward to extract Brick Next Generation, which will and now that dynamic assignment of GPS anywhere within the chassis and much more. Um, so this this is again all about focusing on the innovation that will make the Enterprise Data Centre operations a lot more simpler and drive down the PCO by keeping them not only covered for today, but also for future. So that's where some of the focus is on there. >>Okay, Thank you guys. We'll leave it there in a moment. I'll have some closing thoughts. >>Mhm

(gentle upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome to theCUBE presentation of the AWS Startup Showcase Open Cloud Innovations. This is season two episode one of an ongoing series covering setting status from the AWS ecosystem. Talking about innovation, here it's open source for this theme. We do this every episode, we pick a theme and have a lot of fun talking to the leaders in the industry and the hottest startups. I'm your host John Furrier here with Lisa Martin in our Palo Alto studios. Lisa great series, great to see you again. >> Good to see you too. Great series, always such spirited conversations with very empowered and enlightened individuals. >> I love the episodic nature of these events, we get more stories out there than ever before. They're the hottest startups in the AWS ecosystem, which is dominating the cloud sector. And there's a lot of them really changing the game on cloud native and the enablement, the stories that are coming out here are pretty compelling, not just from startups they're actually penetrating the enterprise and the buyers are changing their architectures, and it's just really fun to catch the wave here. >> They are, and one of the things too about the open source community is these companies embracing that and how that's opening up their entry to your point into the enterprise. I was talking with several customers, companies who were talking about the 70% of their pipeline comes from the open source community. That's using the premium version of the technology. So, it's really been a very smart, strategic way into the enterprise. >> Yeah, and I love the format too. We get the keynote we're doing now, opening keynote, some great guests. We have Sir John on from AWS started program, he is the global startups lead. We got Swami coming on and then closing keynote with Deepak Singh. Who's really grown in the Amazon organization from containers now, compute services, which now span how modern applications are being built. And I think the big trend that we're seeing that these startups are riding on that big wave is cloud natives driving the modern architecture for software development, not just startups, but existing, large ISV and software companies are rearchitecting and the customers who buy their products and services in the cloud are rearchitecting too. So, it's a whole new growth wave coming in, the modern era of cloud some say, and it's exciting a small startup could be the next big name tomorrow. >> One of the things that kind of was a theme throughout the conversations that I had with these different guests was from a modern application security perspective is, security is key, but it's not just about shifting lab. It's about doing so empowering the developers. They don't have to be security experts. They need to have a developer brain and a security heart, and how those two organizations within companies can work better together, more collaboratively, but ultimately empowering those developers, which goes a long way. >> Well, for the folks who are watching this, the format is very simple. We have a keynote, editorial keynote speakers come in, and then we're going to have a bunch of companies who are going to present their story and their showcase. We've interviewed them, myself, you Dave Vallante and Dave Nicholson from theCUBE team. They're going to tell their stories and between the companies and the AWS heroes, 14 companies are represented and some of them new business models and Deepak Singh who leads the AWS team, he's going to have the closing keynote. He talks about the new changing business model in open source, not just the tech, which has a lot of tech, but how companies are being started around the new business models around open source. It's really, really amazing. >> I bet, and does he see any specific verticals that are taking off? >> Well, he's seeing the contribution from big companies like AWS and the Facebook's of the world and large companies, Netflix, Intuit, all contributing content to the open source and then startups forming around them. So Netflix does some great work. They donated to open source and next thing you know a small group of people get together entrepreneurs, they form a company and they create a platform around it with unification and scale. So, the cloud is enabling this new super application environment, superclouds as we call them, that's emerging and this new supercloud and super applications are scaling data-driven machine learning and AI that's the new formula for success. >> The new formula for success also has to have that velocity that developers expect, but also that the consumerization of tech has kind of driven all of us to expect things very quickly. >> Well, we're going to bring in Serge Shevchenko, AWS Global Startup program into the program. Serge is our partner. He is the leader at AWS who has been working on this program Serge, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, likewise, John, thank you for having me very excited to be here. >> We've been working together on collaborating on this for over a year. Again, season two of this new innovative program, which is a combination of CUBE Media partnership, and AWS getting the stories out. And this has been a real success because there's a real hunger to discover content. And then in the marketplace, as these new solutions coming from startups are the next big thing coming. So, you're starting to see this going on. So I have to ask you, first and foremost, what's the AWS startup showcase about. Can you explain in your terms, your team's vision behind it, and why those startup focus? >> Yeah, absolutely. You know John, we curated the AWS Startup Showcase really to bring meaningful and oftentimes educational content to our customers and partners highlighting innovative solutions within these themes and ultimately to help customers find the best solutions for their use cases, which is a combination of AWS and our partners. And really from pre-seed to IPO, John, the world's most innovative startups build on AWS. From leadership downward, very intentional about cultivating vigorous AWS community and since 2019 at re:Invent at the launch of the AWS Global Startup program, we've helped hundreds of startups accelerate their growth through product development support, go to market and co-sell programs. >> So Serge question for you on the theme of today, John mentioned our showcases having themes. Today's theme is going to cover open source software. Talk to us about how Amazon thinks about opensource. >> Sure, absolutely. And I'll just touch on it briefly, but I'm very excited for the keynote at the end of today, that will be delivered by Deepak the VP of compute services at AWS. We here at Amazon believe in open source. In fact, Amazon contributes to open source in multiple ways, whether that's through directly contributing to third-party project, repos or significant code contributions to Kubernetes, Rust and other projects. And all the way down to leadership participation in organizations such as the CNCF. And supporting of dozens of ISV myself over the years, I've seen explosive growth when it comes to open source adoption. I mean, look at projects like Checkov, within 12 months of launching their open source project, they had about a million users. And another great example is Falco within, under a decade actually they've had about 37 million downloads and that's about 300% increase since it's become an incubating project in the CNCF. So, very exciting things that we're seeing here at AWS. >> So explosive growth, lot of content. What do you hope that our viewers and our guests are going to be able to get out of today? >> Yeah, great question, Lisa. I really hope that today's event will help customers understand why AWS is the best place for them to run open source, commercial and which partner solutions will help them along their journey. I think that today the lineup through the partner solutions and Deepak at the end with the ending keynote is going to present a very valuable narrative for customers and startups in selecting where and which projects to run on AWS. >> That's great stuff Serge would love to have you on and again, I want to just say really congratulate your team and we enjoy working with them. We think this showcase does a great service for the community. It's kind of open source in its own way if I can co contributing working on out there, but you're really getting the voices out at scale. We've got companies like Armory, Kubecost, Sysdig, Tidelift, Codefresh. I mean, these are some of the companies that are changing the game. We even had Patreon a customer and one of the partners sneak with security, all the big names in the startup scene. Plus AWS Deepak saying Swami is going to be on the AWS Heroes. I mean really at scale and this is really a great. So, thank you so much for participating and enabling all of this. >> No, thank you to theCUBE. You've been a great partner in this whole process, very excited for today. >> Thanks Serge really appreciate it. Lisa, what a great segment that was kicking off the event. We've got a great lineup coming up. We've got the keynote, final keynote fireside chat with Deepak Singh a big name at AWS, but Serge in the startup showcase really innovative. >> Very innovative and in a short time period, he talked about the launch of this at re:Invent 2019. They've helped hundreds of startups. We've had over 50 I think on the showcase in the last year or so John. So we really gotten to cover a lot of great customers, a lot of great stories, a lot of great content coming out of theCUBE. >> I love the openness of it. I love the scale, the storytelling. I love the collaboration, a great model, Lisa, great to work with you. We also Dave Vallante and Dave Nicholson interview. They're not here, but let's kick off the show. Let's get started with our next guest Swami. The leader at AWS Swami just got promoted to VP of the database, but also he ran machine learning and AI at AWS. He is a leader. He's the author of the original DynamoDB paper, which is celebrating its 10th year anniversary really impacted distributed computing and open source. Swami's introduced many opensource aspects of products within AWS and has been a leader in the engineering side for many, many years at AWS, from an intern to now an executive. Swami, great to see you. Thanks for coming on our AWS startup showcase. Thanks for spending the time with us. >> My pleasure, thanks again, John. Thanks for having me. >> I wanted to just, if you don't mind asking about the database market over the past 10 to 20 years cloud and application development as you see, has changed a lot. You've been involved in so many product launches over the years. Cloud and machine learning are the biggest waves happening to your point to what you're doing now. Software is under the covers it's powering it all infrastructure is code. Open source has been a big part of it and it continues to grow and change. Deepak Singh from AWS talks about the business model transformation of how like Netflix donates to the open source. Then a company starts around it and creates more growth. Machine learnings and all the open source conversations around automation as developers and builders, like software as cloud and machine learning become the key pistons in the engine. This is a big wave, what's your view on this? How how has cloud scale and data impacting the software market? >> I mean, that's a broad question. So I'm going to break it down to kind of give some of the back data. So now how we are thinking about it first, I'd say when it comes to the open source, I'll start off by saying first the longevity and by ability of open sources are very important to our customers and that is why we have been a significant contributor and supporter of these communities. I mean, there are several efforts in open source, even internally by actually open sourcing some of our key Amazon technologies like Firecracker or BottleRocket or our CDK to help advance the industry. For example, CDK itself provides some really powerful way to build and configure cloud services as well. And we also contribute to a lot of different open source projects that are existing ones, open telemetries and Linux, Java, Redis and Kubernetes, Grafana and Kafka and Robotics Operating System and Hadoop, Leucine and so forth. So, I think, I can go on and on, but even now I'd say the database and observability space say machine learning we have always started with embracing open source in a big material way. If you see, even in deep learning framework, we championed MX Linux and some of the core components and we open sourced our auto ML technology auto Glue on, and also be open sourced and collaborated with partners like Facebook Meta on Fighter showing some major components and there, and then we are open search Edge Compiler. So, I would say the number one thing is, I mean, we are actually are very, very excited to partner with broader community on problems that really mattered to the customers and actually ensure that they are able to get amazing benefit of this. >> And I see machine learning is a huge thing. If you look at how cloud group and when you had DynamoDB paper, when you wrote it, that that was the beginning of, I call the cloud surge. It was the beginning of not just being a resource versus building a data center, certainly a great alternative. Every startup did it. That's history phase one inning and a half, first half inning. Then it became a large scale. Machine learning feels like the same way now. You feel like you're seeing a lot of people using it. A lot of people are playing around with it. It's evolving. It's been around as a science, but combined with cloud scale, this is a big thing. What should people who are in the enterprise think about how should they think about machine learning? How has some of your top customers thought about machine learning as they refactor their applications? What are some of the things that you can share from your experience and journey here? >> I mean, one of the key things I'd say just to set some context on scale and numbers. More than one and a half million customers use our database analytics or ML services end-to-end. Part of which machine learning services and capabilities are easily used by more than a hundred thousand customers at a really good scale. However, I still think in Amazon, we tend to use the phrase, "It's day one in the age of internet," even though it's an, or the phrase, "Now, but it's a golden one," but I would say in the world of machine learning, yes it's day one but I also think we just woke up and we haven't even had a cup of coffee yet. That's really that early, so. And, but when you it's interesting, you've compared it to where cloud was like 10, 12 years ago. That's early days when I used to talk to engineering leaders who are running their own data center and then we talked about cloud and various disruptive technologies. I still used to get a sense about like why cloud and basic and whatnot at that time, Whereas now with machine learning though almost every CIO, CEO, all of them never asked me why machine learning. Instead, the number one question, I get is, how do I get started with it? What are the best use cases? which is great, and this is where I always tell them one of the learnings that we actually learned in Amazon. So again, a few years ago, probably seven or eight years ago, and Amazon itself realized as a company, the impact of what machine learning could do in terms of changing how we actually run our business and what it means to provide better customer experience optimize our supply chain and so far we realized that the we need to help our builders learn machine learning and the help even our business leaders understand the power of machine learning. So we did two things. One, we actually, from a bottom-up level, we built what I call as machine learning university, which is run in my team. It's literally stocked with professors and teachers who offer curriculum to builders so that they get educated on machine learning. And now from a top-down level we also, in our yearly planning process, we call it the operational planning process where we write Amazon style narratives six pages and then answer FAQ's. We asked everyone to answer one question around, like how do you plan to leverage machine learning in your business? And typically when someone says, I really don't play into our, it does not apply. It's usually it doesn't go well. So we kind of politely encourage them to do better and come back with a better answer. This kind of dynamic on top-down and bottom-up, changed the conversation and we started seeing more and more measurable growth. And these are some of the things you're starting to see more and more among our customers too. They see the business benefit, but this is where to address the talent gap. We also made machine learning university curriculum actually now open source and freely available. And we launched SageMaker Studio Lab, which is a no cost, no set up SageMaker notebook service for educating learner profiles and all the students as well. And we are excited to also announce AIMLE scholarship for underrepresented students as well. So, so much more we can do well. >> Well, congratulations on the DynamoDB paper. That's the 10 year anniversary, which is a revolutionary product, changed the game that did change the world and that a huge impact. And now as machine learning goes to the next level, the next intern out there is at school with machine learning. They're going to be writing that next paper, your advice to them real quick. >> My biggest advice is, always, I encourage all the builders to always dream big, and don't be hesitant to speak your mind as long as you have the right conviction saying you're addressing a real customer problem. So when you feel like you have an amazing solution to address a customer problem, take the time to articulate your thoughts better, and then feel free to speak up and communicate to the folks you're working with. And I'm sure any company that nurtures good talent and knows how to hire and develop the best they will be willing to listen and then you will be able to have an amazing impact in the industry. >> Swami, great to know you're CUBE alumni love our conversations from intern on the paper of DynamoDB to the technical leader at AWS and database analyst machine learning, congratulations on all your success and continue innovating on behalf of the customers and the industry. Thanks for spending the time here on theCUBE and our program, appreciate it. >> Thanks again, John. Really appreciate it. >> Okay, now let's kick off our program. That ends the keynote track here on the AWS startup showcase. Season two, episode one, enjoy the program and don't miss the closing keynote with Deepak Singh. He goes into great detail on the changing business models, all the exciting open source innovation. (gentle bright music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome everyone to theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Startup Showcase Open Cloud Innovations. This is season two of the ongoing series. We're covering exciting start startups in the AWS ecosystem to talk about open source community stuff. I'm your host, Dave Nicholson. And I'm delighted today to have two guests from Weaveworks. Steve George, COO of Weaveworks, and Steve Waterworth, technical marketing engineer from Weaveworks. Welcome, gentlemen, how are you? >> Very well, thanks. >> Very well, thanks very much. >> So, Steve G., what's the relationship with AWS? This is the AWS Startup Showcase. How do Weaveworks and AWS interact? >> Yeah sure. So, AWS is a investor in Weaveworks. And we, actually, collaborate really closely around EKS and some specific EKS tooling. So, in the early days of Kubernetes when AWS was working on EKS, the Elastic Kubernetes Service, we started working on the command line interface for EKS itself. And due to that partnership, we've been working closely with the EKS team for a long period of time, helping them to build the CLI and make sure that users in the community find EKS really easy to use. And so that brought us together with the AWS team, working on GitOps and thinking about how to deploy applications and clusters using this GitOps approach. And we've built that into the EKS CLI, which is an open source tool, is a project on GitHub. So, everybody can get involved with that, use it, contribute to it. We love hearing user feedback about how to help teams take advantage of the elastic nature of Kubernetes as simply and easily as possible. >> Well, it's great to have you. Before we get into the specifics around what Weaveworks is doing in this area that we're about to discuss, let's talk about this concept of GitOps. Some of us may have gotten too deep into a Netflix series, and we didn't realize that we've moved on from the world of DevOps or DevSecOps and the like. Explain where GitOps fits into this evolution. >> Yeah, sure. So, really GitOps is an instantiation, a version of DevOps. And it fits within the idea that, particularly in the Kubernetes world, we have a model in Kubernetes, which tells us exactly what we want to deploy. And so what we're talking about is using Git as a way of recording what we want to be in the runtime environment, and then telling Kubernetes from the configuration that is stored in Git exactly what we want to deploy. So, in a sense, it's very much aligned with DevOps, because we know we want to bring teams together, help them to deploy their applications, their clusters, their environments. And really with GitOps, we have a specific set of tools that we can use. And obviously what's nice about Git is it's a very developer tool, or lots and lots of developers use it, the vast majority. And so what we're trying to do is bring those operational processes into the way that developers work. So, really bringing DevOps to that generation through that specific tooling. >> So Steve G., let's continue down this thread a little bit. Why is it necessary then this sort of added wrinkle? If right now in my organization we have developers, who consider themselves to be DevOps folks, and we give them Amazon gift cards each month. And we say, "Hey, it's a world of serverless, "no code, low code lights out data centers. "Go out and deploy your code. "Everything should be fine." What's the problem with that model, and how does GitOps come in and address that? >> Right. I think there's a couple of things. So, for individual developers, one of the big challenges is that, when you watch development teams, like deploying applications and running them, you watch them switching between all those different tabs, and services, and systems that they're using. So, GitOps has a real advantage to developers, because they're already sat in Git, they're already using their familiar tooling. And so by bringing operations within that developer tooling, you're giving them that familiarity. So, it's one advantage for developers. And then for operations staff, one of the things that it does is it centralizes where all of this configuration is kept. And then you can use things like templating and some other things that we're going to be talking about today to make sure that you automate and go quickly, but you also do that in a way which is reliable, and secure, and stable. So, it's really helping to bring that run fast, but don't break things kind of ethos to how we can deploy and run applications in the cloud. >> So, Steve W., let's start talking about where Weaveworks comes into the picture, and what's your perspective. >> So, yeah, Weaveworks has an engine, a set of software, that enables this to happen. So, think of it as a constant reconciliation engine. So, you've got your declared state, your desired state is declared in Git. So, this is where all your YAML for all your Kubernetes hangs out. And then you have an agent that's running inside Kubernetes, that's the Weaveworks GitOps agent. And it's constantly comparing the desired state in Git with the actual state, which is what's running in Kubernetes. So, then as a developer, you want to make a change, or an operator, you want to make a change. You push a change into Git. The reconciliation loop runs and says, "All right, what we've got in Git does not match "what we've got in Kubernetes. "Therefore, I will create story resource, whatever." But it also works the other way. So, if someone does directly access Kubernetes and make a change, then the next time that reconciliation loop runs, it's automatically reverted back to that single source of truth in Git. So, your Kubernetes cluster, you don't get any configuration drift. It's always configured as you desire it to be configured. And as Steve George has already said, from a developer or engineer point of view, it's easy to use. They're just using Git just as they always have done and continue to do. There's nothing new to learn. No change to working practices. I just push code into Git, magic happens. >> So, Steve W., little deeper dive on that. When we hear Ops, a lot of us start thinking about, specifically in terms of infrastructure, and especially since infrastructure when deployed and left out there, even though it's really idle, you're paying for it. So, anytime there's an Ops component to the discussion, cost and resource management come into play. You mentioned this idea of not letting things drift from a template. What are those templates based on? Are they based on... Is this primarily an infrastructure discussion, or are we talking about the code itself that is outside of the infrastructure discussion? >> It's predominantly around the infrastructure. So, what you're managing in Git, as far as Kubernetes is concerned, is always deployment files, and services, and horizontal pod autoscalers, all those Kubernetes entities. Typically, the source code for your application, be it in Java, Node.js, whatever it is you happen to be writing it in, that's, typically, in a separate repository. You, typically, don't combine the two. So, you've got one set of repository, basically, for building your containers, and your CLI will run off that, and ultimately push a container into a registry somewhere. Then you have a separate repo, which is your config. repo, which declares what version of the containers you're going to run, how many you're going to run, how the services are bound to those containers, et cetera. >> Yeah, that makes sense. Steve G., talk to us about this concept of trusted application delivery with GitOps, and frankly, it's what led to the sort of prior question. When you think about trusted application delivery, where is that intertwinement between what we think of as the application code versus the code that is creating the infrastructure? So, what is trusted application delivery? >> Sure, so, with GitOps, we have the ability to deploy the infrastructure components. And then we also define what the application containers are, that would go to be deployed into that environment. And so, this is a really interesting question, because some teams will associate all of the services that an application needs within an application team. And sometimes teams will deploy sort of horizontal infrastructure, which then all application teams services take advantage of. Either way, you can define that within your configuration, within your GitOps configuration. Now, when you start deploying speed, particularly when you have multiple different teams doing these sorts of deployments, one of the questions that starts to come up will be from the security team, or someone who's thinking about, well, what happens if we make a deployment, which is accidentally incorrect, or if there is a security issue in one of those dependencies, and we need to get a new version deployed as quickly as possible? And so, in the GitOps pipeline, one of the things that we can do is to put in various checkpoints to check that the policy is being followed correctly. So, are we deploying the right number of applications, the right configuration of an application? Does that application follow certain standards that the enterprise has set down? And that's what we talk about when we talk about trusted policy and trusted delivery. Because really what we're thinking about here is enabling the development teams to go as quickly as possible with their new deployments, but protecting them with automated guard rails. So, making sure that they can go fast, but they are not going to do anything which destroys the reliability of the application platform. >> Yeah, you've mentioned reliability and kind of alluded to scalability in the application environment. What about looking at this from the security perspective? There've been some recently, pretty well publicized breaches. Not a lot of senior executives in enterprises understand that a very high percentage of code that their businesses are running on is coming out of the open source community, where developers and maintainers are, to a certain degree, what they would consider to be volunteers. That can be a scary thing. So, talk about why an enterprise struggles today with security, policy, and governance. And I toss this out to Steve W. Or Steve George. Answer appropriately. >> I'll try that in a high level, and Steve W. can give more of the technical detail. I mean, I'll say that when I talk to enterprise customers, there's two areas of concern. One area of concern is that, we're in an environment with DevOps where we started this conversation of trying to help teams to go as quickly as possible. But there's many instances where teams accidentally do things, but, nonetheless, that is a security issue. They deploy something manually into an environment, they forget about it, and that's something which is wrong. So, helping with this kind of policy as code pipeline, ensuring that everything goes through a set of standards could really help teams. And that's why we call it developer guard rails, because this is about helping the development team by providing automation around the outside, that helps them to go faster and relieves them from that mental concern of have they made any mistakes or errors. So, that's one form. And then the other form is the form, where you are going, David, which is really around security dependencies within software, a whole supply chain of concern. And what we can do there, by, again, having a set of standard scanners and policy checking, which ensures that everything is checked before it goes into the environment. That really helps to make sure that there are no security issues in the runtime deployment. Steve W., anything that I missed there? >> Yeah, well, I'll just say, I'll just go a little deeper on the technology bit. So, essentially, we have a library of policies, which get you started. Of course, you can modify those policies, write your own. The library is there just to get you going. So, as a change is made, typically, via, say, a GitHub action, the policy engine then kicks in and checks all those deployment files, all those YAML for Kubernetes, and looks for things that then are outside of policy. And if that's the case, then the action will fail, and that'll show up on the pull request. So, things like, are your containers coming from trusted sources? You're not just pulling in some random container from a public registry. You're actually using a trusted registry. Things like, are containers running as route, or are they running in privileged mode, which, again, it could be a security? But it's not just about security, it can also be about coding standards. Are the containers correctly annotated? Is the deployment correctly annotated? Does it have the annotation fields that we require for our coding standards? And it can also be about reliability. Does the deployment script have the health checks defined? Does it have a suitable replica account? So, a rolling update. We'll actually do a rolling update. You can't do a rolling update with only one replica. So, you can have all these sorts of checks and guards in there. And then finally, there's an admission controller that runs inside Kubernetes. So, if someone does try and squeeze through, and do something a little naughty, and go directly to the cluster, it's not going to happen, 'cause that admission controller is going to say, "Hey, no, that's a policy violation. "I'm not letting that in." So, it really just stops. It stops developers making mistakes. I know, I know, I've done development, and I've deployed things into Kubernetes, and haven't got the conflict quite right, and then it falls flat on its face. And you're sitting there scratching your head. And with the policy checks, then that wouldn't happen. 'Cause you would try and put something in that has a slightly iffy configuration, and it would spit it straight back out at you. >> So, obviously you have some sort of policy engine that you're you're relying on. But what is the user experience like? I mean, is this a screen that is reminiscent of the matrix with non-readable characters streaming down that only another machine can understand? What does this look like to the operator? >> Yeah, sure, so, we have a console, a web console, where developers and operators can use a set of predefined policies. And so that's the starting point. And we have a set of recommendations there and policies that you can just attach to your deployments. So, set of recommendations about different AWS resources, deployment types, EKS deployment types, different sets of standards that your enterprise might be following along with. So, that's one way of doing it. And then you can take those policies and start customizing them to your needs. And by using GitOps, what we're aiming for here is to bring both the application configuration, the environment configuration. We talked about this earlier, all of this being within Git. We're adding these policies within Git as well. So, for advanced users, they'll have everything that they need together in a single unit of change, your application, your definitions of how you want to run this application service, and the policies that you want it to follow, all together in Git. And then when there is some sort of policy violation on the other end of the pipeline, people can see where this policy is being violated, how it was violated. And then for a set of those, we try and automate by showing a pull request for the user about how they can fix this policy violation. So, try and make it as simple as possible. Because in many of these sorts of violations, if you're a busy developer, there'll be minor configuration details going against the configuration, and you just want to fix those really quickly. >> So Steve W., is that what the Mega Leaks policy engine is? >> Yes, that's the Mega Leaks policy engine. So, yes, it's a SaaS-based service that holds the actual policy engine and your library of policies. So, when your GitHub action runs, it goes and essentially makes a call across with the configuration and does the check and spits out any violation errors, if there are any. >> So, folks in this community really like to try things before they deploy them. Is there an opportunity for people to get a demo of this, get their hands on it? what's the best way to do that? >> The best way to do it is have a play with it. As an engineer, I just love getting my hands dirty with these sorts of things. So, yeah, you can go to the Mega Leaks website and get a 30-day free trial. You can spin yourself up a little, test cluster, and have a play. >> So, what's coming next? We had DevOps, and then DevSecOps, and now GitOps. What's next? Are we going to go back to all infrastructure on premises all the time, back to waterfall? Back to waterfall, "Hot Tub Time Machine?" What's the prediction? >> Well, I think the thing that you set out right at the start, actually, is the prediction. The difference between infrastructure and applications is steadily going away, as we try and be more dynamic in the way that we deploy. And for us with GitOps, I think we're... When we talk about operations, there's a lots of depth to what we mean about operations. So, I think there's lots of areas to explore how to bring operations into developer tooling with GitOps. So, that's, I think, certainly where Weaveworks will be focusing. >> Well, as an old infrastructure guy myself, I see this as vindication. Because infrastructure still matters, kids. And we need sophisticated ways to make sure that the proper infrastructure is applied. People are shocked to learn that even serverless application environments involve servers. So, I tell my 14-year-old son this regularly, he doesn't believe it, but it is what it is. Steve W., any final thoughts on this whole move towards GitOps and, specifically, the Weaveworks secret sauce and superpower. >> Yeah. It's all about (indistinct)... It's all about going as quickly as possible, but without tripping up. Being able to run fast, but without tripping over your shoe laces, which you forgot to tie up. And that's what the automation brings. It allows you to go quickly, does lots of things for you, and yeah, we try and stop you shooting yourself in the foot as you're going. >> Well, it's been fantastic talking to both of you today. For the audience's sake, I'm in California, and we have a gentleman in France, and a gentlemen in the UK. It's just the wonders of modern technology never cease. Thanks, again, Steve Waterworth, Steve George from Weaveworks. Thanks for coming on theCUBE for the AWS Startup Showcase. And to the rest of us, keep it right here for more action on theCUBE, your leader in tech coverage. (upbeat music)

(bright music) >> Hi, everyone. Welcome to the CUBE's presentation of the AWS Startup Showcase around open cloud innovations. It's the season two episode one of the ongoing series covering exciting startups from the AWS ecosystem and talking about open source and innovation. I'm John Furrier, your host. Today, we're joined by two great guests. Dan Garfield, chief open source officer and co-founder of Codefresh IO, and Raziel Tabib, CEO and co-founder. Two co-founders in the middle of all the innovation. Gentlemen thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> So you guys have a great platform and as cloud native goes mainstream in the enterprise and for developers, the big topic is unification, end-to-end, horizontally scalable, leveraging data. All these things around agile that I call agile cloud next level. This is kind of what we're seeing. The CNCF is growing. You've seen KubeCon every year is more about these kinds of things. Words like orchestration, Kubernetes, container, security. All of those complexities are now at the center of making things easier for developers. This is a key value proposition and you guys at Codefresh are offering really the first enterprise delivery solution powered by Argo, which is an open source project. Again, open source driving really big changes. So let's get into it. And first of all, congratulations, and thanks for working on this project. What's so special about- >> Thank you for that. >> Argo the project, and why have you guys decided to build a platform on it, and where is this coming together? Take us through why this is so important. >> I think Argo has been a very fast growing open source project for multiple reasons. A, it has been built for the new way of building and deploying an application. It's cloud native. You mentioned Kubernetes becoming kind of the de facto way of running application. It's the de facto way to run automation and pipeline. But also Argo has been built from the ground up to the latest practices of how we deploy software. We deploy software now differently. We deploy it using a GitOps practice. We're deploying it using canary blue-green progressive deployment. And Argo has been built around these practices, around these technologies, and has been very much widely adopted by the community. In the past, the KubeCon you've mentioned, Argo was all over the place. And we were very glad to be working with the community to talk about what the next steps with Argo. >> Yeah, it's a really good point. I would like to just follow up on that because you see this being talked about. It always comes up, where is open source really outside of a pure contributors matter? And when you have corporations contributing, you seeing this has been the trend. You saw it with Lyft, with Envoy, companies doing more and more open source. This is part of a big collaboration. And again, this comes back down to this whole why it's relevant and why it's so special with Argo. Continue to talk about relationship because it's not just you guys, it's now community. >> Yeah, I can speak to that. The Argo project is something that we maintain in partnership with several other companies and really our relationship with it is that this is something that we're actively contributing to. This is something that we're helping build the roadmap on and planning the events around and all those kinds of things. And we're doing that because we really believe in this technology and we've built our platform on it. So when you deploy Codefresh, you're deploying technology that's built directly on Argo and is designed specifically to solve that problem that you spoke to at the top of the hour. We all want to deliver software faster. We all want to have fewer regressions. We want to have fewer breaking changes. We want software to be super reliable. We want to be comfortable with what we're doing. That's really why we picked Argo because that technology that we have it is to Raziel's point delivered in this new way. It's delivered using GitOps. And that's a whole revolution and change in the way that people build and deploy software. And bringing cohesion into that experience is so critical to building the confidence that lets you actually deploy often and frequently and more. >> Dan, if you don't mind just expanding on that one point about the problem you solve, because to me, this has been kind of that evolution. It's almost like, yeah, there's been problems, plural, and opportunities that you saw with those in growing markets like this with DevOps and DevSecOps and now cloud native. What is the catalyst behind all of this? What was the epiphany behind it? How did it get so much momentum? What was it really doing under the covers? >> Well, it's a very simple and easy to use set of tools. And that's one of the big things is that if you look at the ideas of GitOps and there's actually a foundation around this that were part of called open GitOps to GitOps working group under the CNCF. And those principles of, I want to, yes, do my software defined as code. I want to do my infrastructure defined as code and I need something monitoring by production run times and making sure that the declared desired state is always matching the actual state. Those principles have actually been around for a number of years. And with Kubernetes, we really unlocked an API that allowed us to start doing GitOps and this is why we bring in Argo and you see the rise of Argo CD and other workflows and what we've been doing is really because that technology has been unlocked now. So the ability to define how your software is supposed to run and now your entire software delivery stack should run, all defined and then monitored and then kept in check using the GitOps operator. That critical unlock is what's really driving the massive adoption. And like Raziel said, Argo is the fastest growing and most popular open source project for delivering software. And it's not even close. >> Yeah, this is really great point. And I want to get into that 'cause I want to know why, what you guys do on your platform versus the open source and get that relationship settled? Before we get there, though, I want to get your reaction to some of the commentary in the industry 'cause GitOps trend has been exploding into new directions. I mean, it used to be a term about 10 years ago called big data. And at the beginning where data was all big data. Now it was DevOps revolution around data as well. But now you're hearing people talk about big code. Like, I mean, the code bases are becoming so huge. So as a developer, you're leveraging large open source code. This idea of the software delivery with existing code and new code just adds to more code. There's more code being developed every day. >> There is more code delivered every day. And I think that organization realize today, almost in every industry that they have to pace up how fast and how frequent they update their software delivery. We're living in a world in which every aspect of our life has been disrupted by software and organization realize that they have to keep up and figure out how to deploy software more frequent and more lively. And I think, you mentioned that really Kubernetes, the cloud native became the de facto way of running application. I think most of organization has made that decision to move into cloud native. The second question is after, is okay, now we have all applications running, how fast and how more frequent we can deploy applications to the cloud native? And that's the stage in which we're super excited about Argo and our up platform because that's basically streamline the building application for these cloud native, deploying applications for the cloud native, and so on. >> Yeah, and I think that highlights the business value. You getting a lot of the conversations with businesses that say they want the modern application on the cloud scale. And at the end of the day, it comes down to speed and security. So how fast can I get the app out? How well does it work? Does it run performance? And does it have security? And I don't want a slow. >> Exactly. Exactly. It kind of oversimplifies it, but that's kind of the net net. So when you look at Argo open source, what's that's done and kind of where you guys are taking it. Can you talk about the differences between your enterprise version and the open source version and the interplay there, the relationship, the business model health customers can play on both sides or understand the difference? >> Sure. >> Go ahead. >> Go ahead, Raziel. Okay, so I think Argo, as you mentioned, is probably the most advanced technology today to both run pipelines. They're like events to trigger pipelines and Argo work for the one that pipelines, the Argo CD for GitOps and Rollout, for Canary blue-green strategies. And the adoption is really exploding. Just as an Advocate that we had in December, we have worked with the community and organized ArgoCon events in which we had initially kind of thought about 500 attendees. And so we have more than 4,000 registrants and majority of them are coming from enterprise. Now as we have talked to the community during this conference and figure out, okay, so what are the things that you're still missing? And that will help you take the benefit that you get from Argo to the next level. The few things that came up. One is Argo is a great technology. However, Argo now is fragmented into four projects. There is an advance. There is workflow. There is Argo CD. And there is Argo Rollout. And there is a need to bring them all together into a solid platform, solid one run time that can be easily installed, monitor all of these in a single UI, in a single control plane. That's one aspect. The second is the scalability. Really being able to manage it centrally across multiple clusters, not in one cluster. And what we bring in with the new one, we're so excited about this platform, is we're bringing that big. The first to get all of these four projects in one runtime, and one control plane, but also allow the community to run it across multiple cluster from one place getting into the solution, not just as a technology. >> If I may add to that, the value of bringing these projects together, it provides so many insights. So when you're trying to figure out, there's some breaking change that has been made, but you don't necessarily know where it is because you have a lot of microservices that are out there. You have a lot of teams working on it. By bringing all of these things together, we're able to look at all of the commits, all of the deployments, all of the Jira issues. All of these components combined together, so you really get a single view where you can see everything that's going on. And this is another element where when you're trying to deploy software at scale, you're trying to deliver it faster. People are getting a little bit overwhelmed because there are so many updates and so many different services and so many teams working that they're starting to miss that visibility. So this is what we want to bring into the ecosystem is we really want them that visibility to be super clear. And by bringing all of the Argo components, the Argo tools together, we're able to do that in a single dashboard. >> Yeah, so if I get this right, let me just double click on that because it sounds like, yeah, Argo's great. It's been organically growing, a lot of different components to it, but when you start getting into pushing code in an organization, you have, I call the old-school version control kind of vibe going on where it's like you don't know what's out there and how that affects the system as it's a distributed system, which cloud is. There are consequences when stuff breaks. So we all know that. Is that kind of where you guys are getting at? The challenge is actually the opportunity at the same time where it's all goodness, but then when you start looking at scale and the system impact, is that kind of where the open source and you guys pick up, is that right? >> This is one aspect. I think the second one is that again, when you look at each individual component of Argo, each provide a lot of value by itself. But when you sum it, the value of the sum is greater than the value of the individual. So when you're taking, really the events and workflow, Argo CD and Argo Rollout, and you bring them all together into single runtime. The value of its time is really automation all the way from code to cloud. It's not breaking into, there is like an automation for CI, there's an automation for CD, there's information for progressive delivery. It's actually automated all the way from the Git commit through the GitOps through the deployment strategy, and so on. And being able to monitor it and scale it in the enterprise scale. So, of course, it's helping enterprise and make Argo to some level more crucial for enterprise, if I may say, but second is really bringing all of these components together and get the outcome be greater than the individual parts. >> Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, make it make a commercial grade, if you will, for enterprise who wants to have support and consistency and whatnot. What other problems are you solving? Dan, can you chime in on the whole, how you guys resolve some of these challenges for the enterprise? Because, again, some stability is key as well, but also the business benefit has got to be there for the development teams. >> Yeah. So there's several. One aspect is that the way that most people operate today is they essentially do a bunch of commands and engage with systems. And then hopefully at the end, they write those things to Git. And this is a little bit backwards if you think about it because there's a situation where you can end up with things in production that were never checked in, or maybe somebody is operating and they're making a change. If we look at most of the downtime that's occurred over the last two years, it's because people have flubbed a key when they were typing in a command or something like that. The way that this system works is that we provide an interface, both the CLI and the GUI, where those operations interactions actually end with a Git commit. So rather than doing an operation and then hopefully committing to Git, most of the operations are actually done first in Git, or if there is something that can't be done first in Git, it's maybe bootstrapped and then committed to Git as part of a single command. So this means you have end-to-end traceability. It also means your auditability is way better. And then the second, the other component that we're adding is that security and scale layer. So we are securing these things, we're building in single sign-on, and all those robust security things you would expect to have across all these instances. So many organizations, when they're building their software delivery tools, they have to deploy instances in many locations. And so this is how you end up with companies that have 5,000 instances that are all out of date and insecure. Well with Codefresh, if you need to deploy a component onto this end cluster or something like that, you may have thousands of them. All of those are monitored and taken care of in a centralized way, so I can do all of my updates at once. I can make sure they're all up to date. I'm not running with a bunch of known CVEs or something like that and it's clear. The components are also designed in an architectural way. So that only the information that is needed is ever passed out. So I can have a cluster that is remotely managed, that checks out code, that the control plane never has access to. So this hybrid model has been really popular with our customers. We have customers in healthcare, we have customers in defense and in financial services, all these regulated industries. The flow of information is really critical. So this hybrid model allows you to deploy something that has the ease of a SaaS solution, but has the security of an on-prem solution while being centrally managed and easy to take care of. >> Yeah, it's a platform. It's what it is. It's not a tool. It's not a tool anymore. It's a platform. >> Exactly. >> I think the foundational aspect of this is critical. And you mentioned automation before. If you're going to go end-to-end automation, you have some stuff in the system that whether it hasn't been checked in yet. I mean, we know what this leads to. Disaster or a lot of troubleshooting and disruption. That's what it seems to solve. Am I getting that right? Is that right? >> Yeah. >> Go ahead. >> Yeah, it helps automate the whole process. But as you say, it's really like identify what needs not to be going all the way to production and really kind of avoid vulnerabilities or any flaws in the software. So it automates everything, but in a way that the automation can identify issues and avoid them from coming into the production. >> Well, great stuff here. I've got to ask you guys now that you've got that settled. It's really, I see the value there, how you guys are letting it grow organically and with Argo and then building that platform for businesses and developers. It's really cool. And I see the foundational value there. It just only gets better. How you guys contributing back to open source and helping the wider GitOps and Argo communities? Because this is, again, the rising tide that's bringing all the boats into the harbor, so to speak. So this is a good trend and people will acknowledge that. So how's this going to work as you guys work back into the open source community? >> So we work closely with both myself and the other maintainers worked closely with the community on the roadmap and making sure that we're addressing issues. I think if you look in the last quarter, we probably have upwards of 40 or 50 different issues that we've solved in terms of fixing a bug or adding features or things like that. So making sure that these tools, which are really the undergirding components of our platform, they have to be really robust. They have to be really strong. And so we're contributing those things back. And then when it comes to the scalability side, these are things that we can build into the platform. So the value should be really clear. I can deploy this, I can manage it myself, I can build tools on top of it. And if I want to start doing it at scale, maybe I want support. That's when I really am going to go to Codefresh and start saying, let's get the enterprise little platform. >> Awesome. GitOps, a lot of people like some naysayers may say, Hey, it's the latest fad. Is it here to stay? We were talking about big code earlier. GitOps, obviously seeing open source. Just every year, just get better and better and growth. I mean, I remember when I was breaking into the business, you have to sell under the table. Now it's all free and open and getting better every year. Just the growth of code. Is GitOps a fad? How do you talk to people who say that? I mean, besides slapping around saying wake up. I mean, how do you guys address that when people say it's just the latest fad? >> So if I may comment here and Dan feel free to chime in, I think that the GitOps is a continuation of a trend that everything is a source code. As a developer, many years ago myself and still writing code, always both code and code was the source of tool that's where we write the code. But now code actually is also describing how our application is running in production. And we've already seen kind of where it's get next. We also hear about infrastructure as a code. So now actually we storing the code the way the infrastructure should be. And I think that the benefit of storing all this configuration in a source code, which has been built to track changes, to be enabled to roll back, that is just going to be here to stay. And I think that's the new way of doing things. >> All right, gentlemen, great. Closing statements. Please share an update on the company. What it's all about? What event you got coming? I know you got a big launch. Can you take us through? Take us home. >> Join on February 1st, we're going to be launching the Codefresh software delivery platform. Raziel and I will be hosting the event. We've got a number of customers, a number of members of the community who are going to be joining us to show off that platform. So you're going to be able to see it in action, see how the features work, and understand the value of it. And you'll see how it works with GitOps. You'll see how it helps you deliver software at scale. That's February 1st. You can get information at codefresh.io. >> Raziel, Dan, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Pretty good showcase. Thanks for sharing. Congratulations. Great venture. Loved the approach. Love the growth in cloud native and you guys sure on the cutting edge. Fresh code, people love fresh code, codefresh.io. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. Thank you. >> Okay, this is the AWS Startup Showcase Open Cloud Innovations. Cloud scale, software, data. That's the future of modern applications being developed, changing the game to the next level. This is the CUBE's coverage season two episode one of the ongoing AWS Startup series here in theCUBE.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to the AWS start up showcase, theCUBE's premiere platform and show. This is our second season, episode one of this program. I'm Lisa Martin, your host here with two guests here to talk about open source. Please welcome Andrew Backes, the VP of engineering at Armory, and one of our alumni, Ian Delahorne, the staff site, reliability engineer at Patreon. Guys, it's great to have you on the program. >> Thank you. >> Good to be back. >> We're going to dig into a whole bunch of stuff here in the next fast paced, 15 minutes. But Andrew, let's go ahead and start with you. Give the audience an overview of Armory, who you guys are, what you do. >> I'd love to. So Armory was founded in 2016 with the vision to help companies unlock innovation through software. And what we're focusing on right now is, helping those companies and make software delivery, continuous, collaborative, scalable, and safe. >> Got it, those are all very important things. Ian help the audience, if anyone isn't familiar with Patreon, it's a very cool platform. Talk to us a little bit about that Ian. >> Absolutely, Patreon is a membership platform for creators to be able to connect with their fans and for fans to be able to subscribe to their favorite creators and help creators get paid and have them earn a living with, just by being connected straight to their audience. >> Very cool, creators like podcasters, even journalists video content writers. >> Absolutely. There's so many, there's everything from like you said, journalists, YouTubers, photographers, 3D modelers. We have a nightclub that's on there, there's several theater groups on there. There's a lot of different creators. I keep discovering new ones every day. >> I like that, I got to check that out, very cool. So Andrew, let's go to your, we talk about enterprise scale and I'm using air quotes here. 'Cause it's a phrase that we use in every conversation in the tech industry, right? Scalability is key. Talk to us about what enterprise scale actually means from Armory's perspective. Why is it so critical? And how do you help enterprises to actually achieve it? >> Yeah, so the, I think a lot of the times when companies think about enterprise scale, they think about the volume of infrastructure, or volume of software that's running at any given time. There's also a few more things that go into that just beyond how many EC2 instances you're running or containers you're running. Also velocity, count how much time does it take you to get features out to your customers and then stability and reliability. Then of course, in enterprises, it isn't as simple as everyone deploying to the same targets. It isn't always just EC2, a lot of the time it's going to be multiple targets, EC2, it's going to be ECS, Lambda. All of these workloads are out there running. And how does a central platform team or a tooling team at a site enable that for users, enable deployment capabilities to those targets? Then of course, on top of that, there's going to be site specific technologies. And how do, how does your deployment tooling integrate with those site specific technologies? >> Is, Andrew is enterprise scale now even more important given the very transformative events, we've seen the last two years? We've seen such acceleration, cloud adoption, digital transformation, really becoming a necessity for businesses to stay alive. Do you think that, that skill now is even more important? >> Definitely, definitely. The, what we see, we've went through a wave of the, the first set of digital transformations, where companies are moving to the cloud and we know that's accelerating quite a bit. So that scale is all moving to the cloud and the amount of multiple targets that are being deployed to at any given moment, they just keep increasing. So that is a concern that companies need to address. >> Let's talk about the value, but we're going to just Spinnaker here in the deployment. But also let's start Andrew with the value that, Armory delivers on top of Spinnaker. What makes this a best of breed solution? >> Yeah, so on top of open-source Spinnaker, there are a lot of other building blocks that you're going to need to deploy at scale. So you're going to need to be able to provide modules or some way of giving your users a reusable building block that is catered to your site. So that is one of the big areas that Armory focuses on, is how can we provide building blocks on top of open source Spinnaker that sites can use to tailor the solution to their needs. >> Got it, tailor it to their needs. Ian let's bring you back into the conversation. Now, talk to us about the business seeds, the compelling event that led Patreon to choose Spinnaker on top of Armory. >> Absolutely. Almost three years ago, we had an outage which resulted in our payment processing slowed down. And that's something we definitely don't want to have happen because this would hinder creator's ability to get paid on time for them to be able to pay their employees, pay their rent, hold that hole, like everything that, everyone that depends on them. And there were many factors that went into this outage and one of them we identified is that it was very hard for us to, with our custom belt deploy tooling, to be able to easily deploy fast and to roll back if things went wrong. So I had used Spinnaker before to previous employer early on, and I knew that, that would be a tool that we could use to solve our problem. The problem was that the SRE team at Patreon at that time was only two people. So Spinnaker is a very complex product. I didn't have the engineering bandwidth to be able to, set up, deploy, manage it on my own. And I had happened to heard of Armory just that week before and was like, "This is the company that could probably help me solve my problems." So I engaged early on with Andrew and the team. And we migrated our customers deployed to, into Spinnaker and help stabilize our deploys and speed them up. >> So you were saying that the deployments were taking way too long before. And of course, as you mentioned from a payment processing perspective, that's people's livelihoods. So that's a pretty serious issue there. You found Armory a week into searching this seems like stuff went pretty quickly. >> And the week before the incident, they had randomly, the, one of the co-founders randomly reached out to me and was like, "We're doing this thing with Armory. You might be interested in this, we're doing this thing with Spinnaker, it's called Armory." And I kind of filed it away. And then they came fortuitous that we were able to use them, like just reach out to them like a week later. >> That is fortuitous, my goodness, what a good outreach and good timing there on Armory's part. And sticking with you a little bit, talk to us about what it is that the business challenges that Armory helps you to resolve? What is it about it that, that just makes you know this is the exact right solution for us? Obviously you talked about not going direct with Spinnaker as a very lean IT team. But what are some of the key business needs that it's solving? >> Yeah, there's several business things that we've been able to leverage Armory for. One of them as I mentioned, they, having a deployment platform that we know will give us, able deploys has been very important. There's been, they have a policy engine module that we use for making sure that certain environments can only be deployed to by certain individuals for compliance issues. We definitely, we use their pipelines as code module for being able to use, build, to build reusable deploy pipelines so that software engineers can easily integrate Spinnaker into their builds. Without having to know a lot about Spinnaker. There's like here, take these, take this pipeline module and add your variables into it, and you'll be off to the races deploying. So those are some of the value adds that Armory has been able to add on top of Spinnaker. On top of that, we use their managed products. So they have a team that's managing our Spinnaker installation, helping us with upgrades, helping up the issues, all that stuff that unlocks us to be able to focus on building our creators. Instead of focusing on operating Spinnaker. >> Andrew, back to you. Talk to me a little bit about as the VP of engineering, the partnership, the relationship that Armory has with Patreon and how symbiotic is it? How much are they helping you to develop the product that Armory is delivering to its customers? >> Yeah, one of the main things we want to make sure we do is help Patreon be successful. So that's, there are going to be some site specific needs there that we want to make sure that we are in tune with and that we're helping with, but really we view it as a partnership. So, Patreon has worked with us. Well, I can't believe it's been three years or kind of a little bit more now. But it's, it, we have had a lot of inner, a lot of feedback sessions, a lot of going back and forth on how we can improve our product to meet the needs of Patreon better. And then of course the wider market. So one thing that is neat about seeing a smaller team, SRE team that Ian is on, is they can depend on us more. They have less bandwidth with themselves to invest into their tooling. So that's the opportunity for us to provide those more mature building blocks to them. So that they can combine those in a way that makes them, that meets their needs and their business needs. >> And Ian, back to you, talk to me about how has the partnership with Armory? You said it's been almost three years now. How has that helped you do your job better as an SRE? What are some of the advantages of that, to that role? >> Yeah, absolutely. Armory has been a great partner to work with. We've used their expertise in helping to bring new features into the open-source Spinnaker. Especially when we decided that we wanted to not only deploy to EC2 instances, but we wanted to play to elastic container service and Lambdas to shift from our normal instance based deploys into the containerization. There were several warrants around the existing elastic container service deploy, and Lambda deploys that we were able to work with Armory and have them champion some changes inside open-source as well as their custom modules to help us be able to shift our displays to those targets. >> Got it. Andrew back over to you, talk to me, I want to walk through, you talked about from an enterprise scale perspective, some of the absolute critical components there. But I want to talk about what Armory has done to help customers like Patreon to address things like speed to market, customer satisfaction as Ian was talking about, the compelling event was payment processing. A lot of content creators could have been in trouble there. Talk to, walk me through how you're actually solving those key challenges that not just Patreon is facing, but enterprises across industries. >> Yeah, of course, so the, talking to specifically to what brought Ian in was, a problem that they needed to fix inside of their system. So when you are rolling out a change like that, you want it to be fast. You want to get that chain, change out very quickly, but you also want to make sure that the deployment system itself is stable and reliable. So the last thing you're going to want is any sort of hiccup with the tool that you're using to fix your product, to roll out changes to your customers. So that is a key focus area for us in everything that we do is we make sure that whenever we're building features that are going to expand capabilities, deployment capabilities. That we're, we are focusing firstly on stability and reliability of the deployment system itself. So those are a few features, a few focus areas that we continually build into the product. And you can, I mean, I'm sure a lot of enterprises know that as soon as you start doing things at massive scale, sometimes the stability and reliability, can, you'll be jeopardized a little bit. Or you start hitting against those limits or what are the, what walls do you encounter? So one of the key things we're doing is building ahead of that, making sure that our features are enabling users to hit deployment scales they've never seen or imagined before. So that's a big part of what Armory is. >> Ian, can you add a number to that in terms of the before Armory and the after in terms of that velocity? >> Absolutely, before Armory our deploys would take some times, somewhere around 45 minutes. And we cut that in half, if not more to down to like the like 16 to 20 minute ranges where we are currently deploying to a few hundred hosts. So, and that is the previous deployment strategy would take longer. If we scaled up the number of instances for big events, like our payment processing we do the first of the month currently. So being able to have that and know that our deploys will take about the same amount of time each time, it will be faster. That helps us bring features to create some fans a lot faster. And the stability aspect has also been very important, knowing that we have a secure way to roll back if needed, which you didn't have previously in case something goes wrong, that's been extremely useful. >> And I can imagine, Ian that velocity is critical because I mean more and more and more these days, there are content creators everywhere in so many different categories that we've talked about. Even nightclubs, that to be able to deliver that velocity through a part, a technology like Armory is table-stakes for against business. >> Absolutely, yeah. >> Andrew, back over to you. I want to kind of finish out here with, in the last couple of years where things have been dynamic. Have you seen any leading indices? I know you guys work with enterprises across organizations and Fortune 500s. But have you seen any industries in particular that are really leaning on Armory to help them achieve that velocity that we've been talking about? >> We have a pretty good spread across the market, but since we are focused on cloud, to deploy to cloud technologies, that's one of the main value props for Armory. So that's going to be enabling deployments to AWS in similar clouds. So the companies that we work with are really ones that have either already gone through that transformation or are on their journey. Then of course, now Kubernetes is a force, it's kind of taken over. So we're getting pulled into even more companies that are embracing Kubernetes. So I wouldn't say that there's an overall trend, but we have customers all across the Fortune 500, all across mid-market to Fortune 500. So there's depending on the complexity of the corporation itself or the enterprise itself we're able to do. I think Ian mentioned our policy engine and a few other features that are really tailored to companies that have restricted environments and moving into the cloud. >> Got it, and that's absolutely critical these days to help organizations pivot multiple times and to get that speed to market. 'Cause that's, of course as consumers, whether we're on the business side or the commercial side, we have an expectation that we're going to be able to get whatever we want A-S-A-P. And especially if that's payments processing, that's pretty critical. Guys, thank you for joining me today, talking about Armory, built on Spinnaker, what it's doing for customers like Patreon. We appreciate your time and your insights. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you. Thank you so much. >> For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's, AWS startup showcase, season two, episode one. (upbeat music)

(digital music) >> Hello everyone. And welcome to theCUBE where we're covering the recent news from Hewlett Packard Enterprise Making Moves and Storage. And with me are Omer Asad, Vice President and General Manager for Primary Storage, HCI and Data Management at HPE and Sandeep Singh who's the Vice President of Storage Marketing at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Gentlemen, welcome back to theCUBE. Great to see you both. >> Dave its a pleasure to be here. >> Always a pleasure talking to you Dave thank you so much. >> Oh, it's my pleasure. Hey, so we just watched HPE make a big announcement and I wonder Sandeep, if you could give us a quick recap. >> Yeah, of course Dave. In the world of enterprise storage there hasn't been a moment like this in decades, a point at which everything is changing for data and infrastructure and it's really coming at the nexus of data, cloud and AI that's opening up the opportunity for customers across industries to accelerate their data-driven transformation. Building on that we just unveiled a new vision for data that accelerates the data driving transformation for customers edge to cloud. And to pay that off we introduce a new data services platform that consists of two game-changing innovations. First it's a data services cloud console which is a SaaS based console that delivers cloud operational agility for customers. And it's designed to unify data operations through a suite of cloud services. Though our second announcement is HPE Electra. HPE Electra is a cloud native data infrastructure portfolio to power your data edge to cloud. It's managed natively with data services cloud console and it brings that cloud operational model to customers wherever their data lives. These innovations are really combined with our industry leading AIOPS platform which is HPE InfoSight and combine these innovations radically simplify and bring that cloud operational model to customers our data and infrastructure management. And it gives the opportunity for streamlining data management across the life cycle. These innovations are making it possible for organizations across the industries to unleash the power of data. >> That's kind of cool. There're a lot of the stuff we've been talking about for all these years is sort of this unified layer across all clouds on-prem, AI injected in I could tell you're excited and it sounds like you you can't wait to get these offerings in the hands of customers, but I wonder we get back up a minute. Omer, maybe you could describe the problem statement that you're addressing with this announcement. What are customers really pain points? >> Excellent question, Dave. So in my role, as the General Manager for Data Management and Storage here at HPE I get the wonderful opportunity to talk to hundreds of customers in a year. And, you know, as time has progressed as the amount of data under organizations' management has continued to increase, what I have noticed is that recently there are three main themes that are continuously emerging and are now bubbling at the top. The first one is storage infrastructure management itself is extremely complex for customers. While there have been lots of leaps and down progress in managing a single array or managing two arrays with a lot of simplification of the UI and maybe some modern UIs are present but as the problem starts to get at scale as customers acquire more and more assets to store and manage their data on premise the management at scale is extremely complex. Yes, storage has gotten faster, yes, flash has had a profound effect on performance availability and latency access to the data but infrastructure management and storage management as a whole has become a pain for customers and it's a constant theme as storage lifecycle management comes up storage refresh has come up and deploying and managing storage infrastructure at scale comes up. So that's one of the main problems that I've been seeing as I talk to customers. Now, secondly, a lot of customers are now talking about two different elements. One is storage and storage deployment and life cycle management. And the second is the management of data that is stored on those storage devices. As the amount of data grows the silos continue to grow a single view of life cycle management of data doesn't, you know, customers don't get to see it. And lastly, one of the biggest things that we see is a lot of customers are now asking, how can I extract a value from this data under my management because they can't seem to parse through the silos. So there is an incredible amount of productivity lost when it comes to data management as a whole, which is just fragmented into silos, and then from a storage management. And when you put these two together and especially add two more elements to it which is hybrid management of data or a multicloud management of data the silos and the sprawl just continues and there is nothing that is stitching together this thing at scale. So these are the three main themes that constantly appear in these discussions. Although in spite of these a lot of modern enhancements in storage >> Well, I wonder if I could comment guys 'cause I've been following this industry for a number of years and you're absolutely right, Omer. I mean, if you look at the amount of money and time and energy that's spent into or put into the data architectures people are frustrated they're not getting enough out of it. And I'd note that, you know, the prevailing way in which we've attacked complexity historically is you build a better box. And well, while that system was maybe easier to manage than the predecessor systems all it did is create another silo and then the cloud, despite its impaired simplicity that was another disconnected siloed. So then we threw siloed management solutions at the problem and we're left with this collection of point solutions with data sort of trapped inside. So I wonder if you could give us your thoughts on that and you know, do you agree, what data do you have around this problem statement? >> Yeah, Dave that's a great point. And actually ESG just recently conducted a survey of over 250 IT decision makers. And that actually brings one of the perfect validations of the problems that Omer and you just articulated. What it showed is that 93% of the respondents indicated that storage and data management, that complexity is impeding their digital transformation. On average, the organizations have over 23 different data management tools which just typifies and is a perfect showcase of the fragmentation and the complexity that exists in that data management. And 95% of the respondents indicated that solving storage and data management that complexity is a top 10 business initiative for them. And actually top five for 67% of the respondents. So it's a great validation across the board. >> Well, its fresh in their minds too, because pre pandemic there was probably, you know, a mixed picture, right. It was probably well there's complacency or we're not moving fast enough, we have other priorities, but they were forced into this. Now they know what the real problem is it's front and center. Yeah, I liked that you're putting out there in your announcement this sort of future state that you're envisioning for customers. And I wonder if we could sort of summarize that and share with our listeners that vision that you unveiled what does it look like and how are you making it real? >> Yeah, overall, we feel very strongly that it's time for our customers to reimagine data management. And our vision is that customers need to break down the silos and complexity that plagues the distributed data environments. And they need to experience a new data experience across the board that's going to help them accelerate their data-driven transformation and we call this vision Unified DataOps. Unified DataOps integrates data-centric policies across the board to streamline data management, cloud-native control and operations to bring that agility of cloud and the operational model to wherever data lives. And AI driven insights and intelligence to make the infrastructure invisible. It delivers a whole new experience to customers to radically simplify and bring the agility of cloud to data and data infrastructure, streamlined data management and really help customers innovate faster than ever before. And we're making the promise of Unified DataOps real by transforming the entire HPE storage business to a cloud native software defined data services and that's through introducing a data services platform that expands HPE GreenLake. >> I mean, the key word I take away there Sandeep, is invisible. I mean, as a customer I want you to abstract that complexity away that underlying infrastructure complexity I just don't want to see it anymore. Omer, I wonder if we could start with the first part of the announcement maybe you can help us unpack data services, cloud console. I mean, you know, people are immediately going to think it's just another software product to manage infrastructure. But to really innovate, I'm hoping that it's more than that. >> Absolutely, Dave, it's a lot more than that. What we have done fundamentally at the root of the problem is we have taken the data and infrastructure control away from the hardware and through that, we provided a unified approach to manage the data wherever it lives. It's a full blown SaaS console which our customers get onto and from there they can deploy appliances, manage appliances, lifecycle appliances and then they not only stop at that but then go ahead and start to get context around their data. But all of that (indistinct) available through a SaaS platform, a SaaS console as every customer onboards themselves and their equipment and their storage infrastructure onto this console then they can go ahead and define role-based access for different parts of their organization. They can also apply role-based access to HPE GreenLake management personnel so they can come in and do and perform all the operations for the customers via the same console by just being another access control methodology in that. And then in addition to that, as you know, data mobility is extremely important to our customers. How do you make data available in different hyperscaler clouds if the customer's digital transformation requires that? So again, from that single cloud console from that single data console, which we are naming here as data services console customers are able to curate the data, maneuver the data, pre-positioned the data into different hyperscalers. But the beautiful thing is that the entire view of the storage infrastructure, the data with its context that is stored on top of that access control methodologies and management framework is operational from a single SaaS console which the customer can decide to give access to whichever management entity or authority comes into help them. And then what this leads us into is then combining these things into a northbound API. So anybody that wants to streamline operational manageability can then use these APIs to program against a single API which will then control the entire infrastructure on behalf of the customer. So if somebody dare what this is it is bringing that cloud operational model that was so desired by each one of our customers into their data centers and this is what I call an in-place transformation of a management experience for our customer by making them seamlessly available on a cloud operational model for their infrastructure. >> Yeah, and you've turned that into essentially an API with a lot of automation, that's great. So, okay. So that's kind of how you're trying to change the game here you're charting new territory. I want you to talk, you talked to hundreds and hundreds of customers every year I wonder if you could paint a picture from the customer perspective how does their experience actually change? >> Right, that's a wonderful question, Dave. This allows me to break it down into bits and bytes further for you and I love that, right. So the way you look at it is, you know, recently if you look at the storage management, as we talked about earlier, from an array perspective or maybe two arrays perspective has been simplified I mean, it's a solved problem. But when you start to imagine deploying hundreds of arrays and these are large customers, they have massive amounts of data assets, storage management hasn't scaled along as the infrastructure scales. But if you look at the consumer world you can have hundreds of devices but the ownership model is completely (indistinct). So the inspiration for solving this problem for us actually was inspired from consumerization of IT and that's a big trend over here. So now we're changing the customer's ownership model, the customer's deployment model and the customer's data management model into a true cloud first model. So let me give some of the examples of that, right. So first of all, let's talk about deployment. So previously deployment has been a massive challenge for our customers. What does deployment in this new data services console world looks like? Devices show up, you rack them up and then you plug in the power cable, you plug in the network cable and then you walk out of the data center. Data center administrator or the storage of administrator they will be on their iPad, on their data services console, or iPhone or whatever the device of their choice is and from that console, from that point on the device will be registered, onboarded, its initial state will be given to it from the cloud. And if the customer has some predefined States for their previous deployment model already saved with the data console they don't even need to do that we'll just take that and apply that state and induct the device into the fleet that's just one example. It's extremely simple plug in the power cable, plug in the network cable and the data center operational manager just walks out. After that you could be on the beach, you could be at your home, you could be driving in a car and this don't, I advise people not to fiddle with their iPhones when they're driving in a car, but still you could do it if you want to, right. So that's just one part from a deployment methodology perspective. Now, the second thing that, you know, Sandeep and I often bounce ideas on is provisioning of a workload. It's like a science these days. And is this array going to be able to absorb my workload, is the latency going to go South does this workload latency profile match this particular piece of device in my data center? All of this is extremely manual and it literally takes, I mean, if you talk to any of the customers or even analysts, deploying a workload is a massive challenge. It's a guesswork that you have to model and, you know basically see how it works out. I think based on HPE InfoSight, we're collecting hundreds and millions of data points from all these devices. So now to harness that and present that back to a customer in a very simple manner so that we can model on their behalf to the data services console, which is now workload of it, you just describe your workload, hey, I'm going to need these many IOPS and by the way, this happens to be my application. And that's it. On the backend because we're managing your infrastructure the cloud console understands your entire fleet. We are seeing the statistics and the telemetric coming off of your systems and because now you've described the workload for us we can do that matching for you. And what intent based provisioning does is describe your workloads in two or three clicks or maybe two or three API construct formats and we'll do the provisioning, the deployment and bringing it up for you on your behalf on the right pieces of infrastructure that matched it. And if you don't like our choices you can manually change it as well. But from a provisioning perspective I think that took days can now come down to a couple of minutes of the description. And lastly, then, you know, global data management distributed infrastructure from edge to cloud, invisible upgrades, only upgrading the right amount of infrastructure that needs the upgrade. All of that just comes rolling along with it, right. So those are some of the things that this data services console as a SaaS management and scale allows you to. >> And actually, if I can just jump in and add a little bit of what Omer described, especially with intent-based provisioning, that's really bringing a paradigm shift to provisioning. It's shifting it from a LAN-centric to app-center provisioning. And when you combine it with identity management and role-based access what it means is that you're enabling self-service on demand provisioning of the underlying data infrastructure to accelerate the app workload deployments. And you're eliminating guesswork and providing the ability to be able to optimize service level objectives. >> Yeah, it sounds like you've really nailed that in an elegant way that provisioning challenge. I've been saying for years if your primary expertise is deploying logical unit numbers you better find some other scales because the day is coming that that's just going to get automated away. So that's cool. There's another issue that I'm sure you've thought about but I wonder if you could address, I mean, you've got the cloud, the definition of cloud is changing that the cloud is expanding to on-prem on-prem expand to the cloud. It's going out to the edge, it's going across clouds and so, you know, security becomes a big issue that threat surface is expanding, the operating model is changing. So how are you thinking about addressing those security concerns? >> Excellent question, Dave. So, you know, most of the organizations that we talked to in today's modern world, you know almost every customer that I talk to has deployed either some sort of a cloud console where they're either one of the customers were the hyperscalers or you know, buy in for SaaS-based applications or pervasive across the customer base. And as you know, we were the first ones to introduce the automatic telemeter management through HPE InfoSight that's one of the largest storage SaaS services in production today that we operate on behalf of our customers, which has, you know, Dave, about 85% connectivity rate. So from that perspective, keeping customer's data secure, keeping customer's telemetry information secure we're no stranger to that. Again, we follow all security protocols that any cloud operational SaaS service would do. So a reverse handling, the firewall compliancy security audit logs that are published to our customers and published to customers' chief information security officers. So all of those, you know what I call crossing the T's and dotted the I's we do that with security expert and security policies for which each of our customers has a different set of rules. And we have a proper engagement model that we go through that particular audit process for our customers. Then secondly, Dave the data services cloud console is actually built on a fundamental cloud deployment technology that is not sort of that new. Aruba Central which is an Aruba management console which is also an HPE company it's been deployed and it's managing millions of access points in a SaaS framework for our customers. So the fundamental building blocks of the data storage console from a basic enablement perspective come from the Aruba Central console. And what we've taken is we've taken those generic cloud-based SaaS services and then built data and storage centric SaaS services on top of that and made them available to our customers. >> Yeah, I really like the Aruba. You picked that up several years ago and it's same thing with InfoSight the way that you bring it to other parts of the portfolio those are really good signs to watch of successful acquisitions. All right, there's a lot here. I want to talk about the second part of the announcement. I know you're a branding team you guys are serious about branding that new product brand. Maybe you could talk about that. >> So again, so delivering the cloud operational model is just the first piece, right. And now the second part of the announcement is delivering the cloud native hardware infrastructure which is extremely performing to go along with this cloud operational model. So what we have done Dave, in this announcement is we've announced HPE Electra. This is our new brand for our cloud native infrastructure to power your data and its appliances from core to the edge, to the cloud, right. And what it does is it takes the cloud operational model and this hardware is powered by that, it's completely wrapped around data. And so HPE Electra is available in two models right now, the HB electron 9,000 which is available for mission critical workloads for those high intensity workloads with a hundred percent availability guarantee where no failure is ever an option. And then it's also available as HPE Electra, 6,000 which is available for general purpose, business critical workloads generally trying to address that mid range of the storage market. And both of these systems are full 100% NBME front and back. And they're powered by the same unified cloud management operational experience that the data cloud console provides. And what it does is it allows our customers to simplify the deployment model, it simplifies their management model and really really allows them to focus on the context, the data and their app diversity whereas data mobility, data connectivity, data management in a multicloud world is then completely obstructed from them. >> Dave: Yeah. >> Sandeep: And Dave. >> Dave: Go ahead, please. >> Just to jump in HPE Electra combined with data services cloud console is delivering a cloud experience that makes deploying and scaling the application workloads as simple as flipping a switch. >> Dave: Nice. >> It really does. And you know, I'm very comfortable in saying this you know, like HPE InfoSight, we were the first in the industry to bring AI-based elementary and support enabled metrics (indistinct). And then here with data services console and the hardware that goes with it we're just completely transforming the storage ownership and a storage management model. And for our customers, it's a seamless non-disruptive upgrade with fully data in place upgrade. And they transform to a cloud operational model where they can manage their infrastructure better where they are through a complete consumer grade SaaS console is again the first of its kind when you look at storage management and storage management at scale. >> And I like how you're emphasizing that management layer, but underneath you got all the modern hardware technologies too which is important because it's a performance got to be, you know, a good price performance. >> Absolutely. >> So now can we bring this back again to the customers what are the outcomes that this is going to enable for them? >> So I think Dave, the first and the foremost thing is as they scale their storage infrastructures they don't have to think it's really as simple as yeah, just send it to the data center, plug in the power cable, plug in the network cable and up it comes. And from that point onwards the life cycle and the device management aspect are completely abstracted by the data services console. All they have to focus is I just have new capacity available to me and when I have an application the system will figure it out for me where they need to deploy. So no more needing the guesswork, the Excel sheets of capacity management, you know the chargeback models, none of that stuff is needed. And for customers that are looking to transform their applications customers looking to refactor their applications into a hyperscaler model or maybe transform from VM to containers, all they need to think about and focus is on that the data will just follow these workloads from that perspective. >> And Dave, just to almost response here as I speak with customers one of the things I'm hearing from IT is that line of business really wants IT to deliver that agility of cloud yet IT also has to deliver all of the enterprise reliability, availability, all of the data services. And what's fantastic here is that through this cloud operational model IT can deliver that agility, that line of business owners are looking for at the same time they've been under pressure to do a lot more with less. And through this agility, IT is able to get time back be able to focus more on the strategic projects at the same time, be able to get time back to spend more time with their families that's incredibly important. >> Omer: Right >> Well, I love the sort of mindset shift that I'm seeing from HPE we're not talking about how much the box weighs (laughing) we're talking about the customer experience. And I wonder, you know, that kind of leads me, Sandeep to how this kind of fits in to this new really, to me, I'm seeing the transformation before our eyes but how does it fit into HPE's overall mission? >> Well, Dave, our mission overall is to be the edge to cloud platform as a service company with HPE GreenLake, being the key to delivering that cloud experience. And as Omer put it, be able to deliver that cloud experience wherever the customer's data lives. And today we're advancing HPE GreenLake as a service transformation of the HPE storage business to a software defined cloud data services business overall. And for our customers, this translates to how to operational and ownership experience that unleashes their agility, their data and their innovation. So we're super excited >> Guys, I can tell you're excited. Thanks so much for coming to theCUBE and summarizing the announcements, congratulations and best of luck to both of you and to HPE and your customers. >> Thank you Dave. It was a pleasure. (digital music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, and welcome to The CUBE where we're covering the recent news from Hewlett Packard enterprise, making moves and storage. And with me are Omar Assad, vice president and general manager for Primary Storage, HCI and data management at HPE. And Sandeep Singh, who's the vice president of Storage Marketing at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Gentlemen, welcome back to the CUBE Great to see you both. >> David, it's pleasure to be here. >> Always a pleasure talking to you David, thank you so much. >> Oh, it's my pleasure. Hey, so we just watched HPE make a big announcement and I wonder Sandeep if you could give us a quick recap. >> Yeah, of course, Dave. In the world of enterprise storage, there hasn't been a moment like this in decades upon at which everything is changing for data and infrastructure. And it's really coming at the nexus of data cloud and AI that's opening up the opportunity for customers across industries to accelerate their data-driven transformation. Building on that, we just unveiled a new vision for data that accelerates the data driving transformation for customers edge to cloud. And to pay that off, we introduce a new data services platform that consists of two game-changing innovations. First it's a data services cloud console which is a SAS based console that delivers cloud operational agility for customers. And it's designed to unify data operations through a suite of cloud services. Then our second announcement is HPE Electra. HB Electra is a cloud native data infrastructure portfolio to power your data edge to cloud. It's managed natively with data services cloud console and it brings that cloud operational model to customers wherever their data lives. These innovations are really combined with our industry leading AI ops platform which is HPE in foresight, and combine these innovations radically simplify and bring that cloud operational model to customers or data and infrastructure management. And it gives the opportunity for streamlining data management across the life cycle. These innovations are making it possible for organizations across the industries to unleash the power of data. >> That's kind of cool, I mean, a lot of the stuff we've been talking about for all these years is sort of this unified layer across all clouds on prem, AI injected in, I could tell you're excited and it sounds like you you can't wait to get these offerings in the hands of customers. But I wonder if we get back up a little a minute. Omer, maybe you could describe the problem statement that you're addressing with this announcement. What are customers really, what are their pain points? >> Excellent question, Dave. So in my role, as the general manager for data management and storage here at HPE, I get the wonderful opportunity to talk to hundreds of customers in a year. And as time has progressed, as the amount of data under organizations management has continued to increase. What I have noticed is that recently there are three main themes that are continuously emerging and are now bubbling at the top. The first one is storage infrastructure management itself is extremely complex for customers. While there have been lots of leaps and down progress in managing a single array or managing two arrays with a lot of simplification of the UI and maybe some modern UI are present. But as the problem starts to get at scale, as customers acquire more, and more assets to store and manage their data on premise, the management at scale is extremely complex. Yes, storage has gotten faster. Yes, flash has had a profound effect on performance availability and latency access to the data but infrastructure management and storage management as a whole has become a pain for customers and it's a constant theme as storage lifecycle management comes up, storage refresh has come up and deploying and managing storage infrastructure at scale comes up. So that's one of the main problems that I've been seeing as I talk to customers. Now, secondly, a lot of customers are now talking about two different elements. One is storage and storage deployment and life cycle management. And the second is the management of data that is stored on those storage devices. As the amount of data grows the silos continue to grow, a single view of life cycle management of data customers don't get to see it. And lastly, one of the biggest things that we see is a lot of customers are now asking, how can I extract a value from this data under my management because they can't seem to parse through the silos. So there is an incredible amount of productivity lost when it comes to data management as a whole, which is just fragmented into silos and then from a storage management. And when you put these two together and especially add two more elements to it which is hybrid management of data or a multi-cloud management of data, the silos and the sprawl just continues and there is nothing that is stitching together this thing at scale. So these are the three main themes that constantly appear in these discussions. Although in spite of these, a lot of modern enhancements in storage. >> Well, I wonder if I could comment guys. Is I've been following this industry for a number of years and you're absolutely right Omer. I mean, if you look at the amount of money and time and energy that's spent into or put into the data architectures, people are frustrated, they're not getting enough out of it. And I'd note that, the prevailing way in which we've attacked complexity historically is you build a better box. And well, that system was maybe easier to manage than the predecessor systems. All it did is create another silo and then the cloud, despite its inherent simplicity, that was another disconnected siloed. So then we threw siloed management solutions at the problem, and we're left with this collection of point solutions with data sort of trapped inside. So I wonder if you could give us your thoughts on that and do you agree? What data do you have around this problem statement? >> Yeah, Dave that's a great point. And actually ESG just recently conducted a survey of over 250 IT decision makers. And that actually brings one of the perfect validations of the problems that Omer, and you just articulated. What it showed is that 93% of the respondents indicated that storage and data management, that complexity is impeding their digital transformation. On average, the organizations have over 23 different data management tools which just typifies and is a perfect showcase of the fragmentation and the complexity that exists in that data management. And 95% of the respondents indicated that solving storage and data management, that complexity is a top 10 business initiative for them. And actually top five for 67% of the respondents. So it's a great validation across the board. >> Well, it's fresh in their minds too, because pre pandemic there was probably a mixed picture, right? It was probably well there's complacency or we're not moving fast enough, we have other priorities, but they were forced into this. Now they know what the real problem is. It's front and center. I liked that you're putting out there in your announcement, this sort of future state that you're envisioning for customers. And I wonder if we could sort of summarize that and share with our listeners that vision that you unveiled, what does it look like and how are you making it real? >> Yeah, overall, we feel very strongly that it's time for our customers to reimagine data management. And our vision is that customers need to break down the silos and complexity that plagues the distributed data environments. And they need to experience a new data experience across the board. That's going to help them accelerate their data-driven transformation. And we call this vision unified data ops. Unified data ops integrates data centric policies across the board to streamline data management, cloud native control and operations, to bring that agility of cloud and the operational model to wherever data lives. And AI driven insights and intelligence to make the infrastructure invisible. It delivers a whole new experience to customers to radically simplify and bring the agility of talent to data and data infrastructure. Streamlined data management, and really help customers innovate faster than ever before. And we're making the promise of unified data ops real by transforming the entire HPE storage business to a cloud native software defined data services. And that's through introducing a data services platform that expands HPE GreenLake. >> I mean, the key word I take away there Sandeep is invisible. I mean, as a customer I want you to abstract that complexity away that underlying infrastructure complexity is. I just don't want to see it anymore over. Omer, I wonder if we could start with the first part of the announcement. Maybe you can help us unpack data services, cloud console. I mean, people are immediately going to think it's just another software product to manage infrastructure. But to really innovate, I'm hoping that it's more than that. >> Absolutely, David, it's a lot more than that. What did we have done fundamentally at the root of the problem is we have taken the data and infrastructure control away from the hardware and through that, we provided a unified approach to manage the data wherever it lives. It's a full blown SAS console, which our customers get onto. And from there they can deploy appliances, manage appliances, lifecycle appliances and then they're not only stop at that, but then go ahead and start to get context around their data. But all of that is available through a SAS platform, a SAS console. 'Cause as every customer onboard themselves and their equipment and their storage infrastructure onto this console, then they can go ahead and define role-based access for different parts of their organization. They can also apply role-based access to HPE GreenLake management personnel, so they can come in and do and perform all the operations for the customers. We at the same console, by just being another access control methodology in that. And then in addition to that, data mobility is extremely important to our customers. How do you make data available in different hyperscaler clouds? If the customer's digital transformation requires that. So again, from that single cloud console, from that single data console, which we are naming here as data services console, customers are able to curate the data, maneuver the data, pre-position the data into different hyperscalers. But the beautiful thing is that the entire view of the storage infrastructure, the data with its that is stored on top of that access control methodologies and management framework is operational from a single SAS console which the customer can decide to give access to whichever management entity or authority comes into help them. And then what this leads us into is then combining these things into a northbound API. So anybody that wants to streamline operational manageability can then use these APIs to program against a single API which will then control the entire infrastructure on behalf of the customer. So if somebody, they, what this is, is it is bringing that cloud operational model that was so desired by each one of our customers into their data centers. And this is what I call an in-place transformation of a management experience for our customer by making them seamlessly available on a cloud operational model for their infrastructure. >> Yeah, and you've turned that into essentially an API with a lot of automation, that's great. So, okay. So that's kind of how you're trying to change the game here. You're charting new territory. You've talked to hundreds and hundreds of customers every year. I wonder if you could paint a picture from the customer perspective. How does their experience actually change? >> Wonderful, Dave. This allows me to break it down into bits and bites further for you. And I love that, right? So the way you look at it is, recently, the storage management from an, as we talked about earlier from an array perspective or maybe two arrays perspective has been simplified. I mean, it's a solved problem. But when you start to imagine deploying hundreds of arrays and these are large customers, they have massive amounts of data assets, storage management hasn't scaled along as the infrastructure scales. But if you look at the consumer world, you can have hundreds of devices, but the ownership model is completely set. So the inspiration for solving this problem for us actually lied, was inspired from consumerization of IT. And that's a big trend over here. So now we're changing the customer's ownership model, the customer's deployment model and the customer's data management model into a true cloud first model. So let me give some of the examples of that, right? So first of all, let's talk about deployment. So previously deployment has been a massive challenge for our customers. What does deployment in this new data services console world looks like? Devices show up, you rack them up and then you plug in the power cable, you plug in the network cable, and then you walk out of the data center. Data center administrator or the storage administrator, they will be on their iPad, on their data services console or iPhone or whatever the device of their choices, and from that console, from that point on, the device will be registered, onboarded. Its initial state will be given to it from the cloud. And if the customer has some predefined states for their previous deployment model already saved with the data console, they don't even need to do that. We'll just take that and apply that state and induct the device into the fleet. That's just one example. It's extremely simple. Plug in the power cable, plug in the network cable and the data center operational manager just walks out. After that you could be on the beach, you could be at your home, you could be driving in a car and this don't, I advise people not to fiddle with their I-phones when they're driving in a car, but still you could do it if you want to. So that's just one part from a deployment methodology perspective. Now, the second thing that Sandeep and I often bounce ideas bond is is it is provisioning of a workload. It's like a science these days. And is this array going to be able to absorb my workload? Is the latency going to go South? Does this workload latency profile match this particular piece of device in my data center? All of this is extremely manual. And it literally takes, I mean, if you talk to any of the customers or even analysts, deploying a workload is a massive challenge. It's a guesswork that you have to model and basically see how it works out. I think based on HPE info site, we're collecting hundreds and millions of data points from all these devices. So now to harness that and present that back to a customer in a very simple manner so that we can model on their behalf to the data services console, which is now workload of it. you just describe your workload. Hey, I'm going to need these many IOPS. And by the way, this happens to be my application. And that's it. On the backend, because we're managing your infrastructure, the cloud console understands your entire fleet. We are seeing the statistics and the telemetric coming off of your systems. And because now you've described the workload for us we can do that matching for you. And what intent based provisioning does is, describe your workloads in two or three clicks or maybe two or three API construct formats and we'll do the provisioning, the deployment and bringing it up for you on your behalf on the right pieces of infrastructure that matched it. And if you don't like our choices, you can manually change it as well. But from a provisioning perspective, a thing that took days can now come down to a couple of minutes of the description. And lastly then, global data management, distributed infrastructure from edge to cloud, invisible upgrades, only upgrading the right amount of infrastructure that needs the upgrade. All of that just comes rolling along with it, right? So those are some of the things that this data services console as a SAS management and scale allows you to do. >> And actually, if I can just jump in and add a little bit. What Omer described, especially with intent based provisioning, that's really bringing a paradigm shift to provisioning. It's shifting it from a long centric to app centric provisioning. And when you combine it with identity management and role-based access, what it means is that you're enabling self-service on demand provisioning of the underlying data infrastructure to accelerate the app workload deployment. And you're eliminating guesswork and providing the ability to be able to optimize service level objectives. >> Yeah, it sounds like you've really nailed in an elegant way that provisioning challenge. I've been saying for years if your primary expertise is deploying logical unit numbers you better find some other skills because the day is coming that that's just going to get automated away. So that's cool. There's another issue that I'm sure you've thought about, but I wonder if you could address. I mean, you've got the definition of cloud is changing, the cloud is expanding to on prem expand. The cloud is going out to the edge, it's going across clouds. And so security becomes a big issue that threat surface is expanding. The operating model is changing. So how are you thinking about addressing those security concerns? >> Excellent question, Dave. So most of the organizations that we've talked to... In today's modern world, almost every customer that I've talked to has deployed either some sort of a cloud console where they're either one of the customers for the hyperscalers or buy in for SAS based applications are pervasive across the customer base. And as you know, we were the first ones to introduce the automatic telemeter management through HPE info site. That's one of the largest storage SAS services in production today that we operate on behalf of our customers, which has, Dave, about 85% connectivity rate. So from that perspective, keeping customers data secure, keeping customers telemetry information secure, we're no stranger to that. Again, we follow all security protocols that any cloud operational SAS service would do so. Reverse tunneling, the firewall compliancy security audit logs that are published to our customers and published to customers chief information security officers. So all of those, what I call crossing the T's and dotted the I's, we do that with security expert and security policies for which each of our customers has a different set of rules. And we have a property engagement model that we go through that particular audit process for our customers. Then secondly, Dave, the data services cloud console is actually built on a fundamental cloud deployment technology that is not, sort of new. Aruba central, which is an Aruba management console which is also an HPE company it's been deployed, it's managing millions of access points in a SAS framework for our customers. So the fundamental building blocks of the data storage console from a basic enablement perspective come from the Aruba central console. And what we've taken is we've taken those generic cloud-based SAS services and then built data and storage centric SAS services on top of that and made them available to our customers. >> Yeah, I really like the Aruba. You picked that up several years ago . And it's same thing with, with info site, the way that you bring it to other parts of the portfolio. Those are really good signs to watch of successful acquisitions. All right, there's a lot here. I want to talk about the second part of the announcement. I know your branding team, you guys are serious about branding. That new product brand, maybe you could talk about that. >> So again, so delivering the cloud operational model is just the first piece, right? And now the second part of the announcement is delivering the cloud native hardware infrastructure which is extremely performance to go along with this cloud operational model. So what we have done Dave, in this announcement is we've announced HPE Electra. This is our new brand for our cloud native infrastructure to power your data and its appliances from core to the edge, to the cloud. And what it does is it takes the cloud operational model and this hardware is powered by that. It's completely wrapped around that. And so HPE Electra is available in two models right now, the HB electron 9,000, which is available for mission critical workloads, for those high intensity workloads with a hundred percent availability guarantee where no failure is ever an option. And then it's also available as HPE Electra 6,000, which is available for general purpose, business critical workloads, generally trying to address that mid range of the storage market. And both of these systems are full 100% NBME front and back. And they're powered by the same unified cloud management operational experience that the data cloud console provides. And what it does is it allows our customers to simplify the deployment model. It simplifies their management model and really, really allows them to focus on the context, the data and the app diversity, whereas data mobility, data connectivity, data management in a multi-cloud world is then completely obstructed from them. >> [Sandeep And Dave-- >> Go ahead, please. >> Just to jump in. HPE Electra combined with data services cloud console is delivering a cloud experience that makes deploying and scaling the application workloads as simple as flipping a switch. >> It really does. It really does. And I'm very comfortable in saying this, like HPE in foresight, we were the first in the industry to bring AI based elementary and support enabled metrics to work. And then here with data services console and the hardware that goes with it, we're just completely transforming the storage ownership and a storage management model. And for our customers, it's a seamless, non-disruptive upgrade with fully data in place upgrade. And they transform to a cloud operational model where they can manage their infrastructure better where they are through a complete consumer grade SAS console, is again the first of its kind, when you look at storage management and storage management at scale. >> And I like how you're emphasizing that management layer, but underneath you've got all the modern hardware technologies too which is important, because it's a performance it's got to be, a good price performance. So now can we bring this back again to the customers? What are the outcomes that this is going to enable for them? >> So I think Dave, the first and the foremost thing is as they scale their storage infrastructures, they don't have to think. It's really as simple as yeah, just send it to the data center, plug in the power cable, plug in the network cable and up it comes. And from that point onwards, the life cycle and the device management aspect are completely abstracted by the data services console. All they have to focus is I just have new capacity available to me and when I have an application, the system will figure it out for me where they need to deploy. So no more needing the guesswork, the Excel sheets of capacity management, the charge back models, none of that stuff is needed. And for customers that are looking to transform their applications, customers looking to refactor their applications into a hyperscaler model, or maybe transform from VM to containers, all they need to think about and focus is on that. The data will just follow these workloads from that perspective. >> And David, just to almost response here. As I speak with customers, one of the things I'm hearing from IT is that line of business really wants IT to deliver that agility of cloud. Yet IT also has to deliver all of the enterprise reliability, availability, all of the data services. And what's fantastic here is that through this cloud operational model, IT can deliver that agility, that line of business owners are looking for. At the same time they're been under pressure to do a lot more with less. And through this agility, IT is able to get time back, be able to focus more on the strategic projects, at the same time, be able to get time back to spend more time with our families. That's incredibly important. >> Well, I love the sort of mindset shift I'm seeing from HPE. We're not talking about how much the box weighs, we're talking about the customer experience. And I wonder, you know, that kind of leads me, Sandeep to how this kind of fits in to this new. Really to me, I'm seeing the transformation before our eyes but how does it fit into HPE's overall mission? >> Well Dave, our mission overall is to be the edge to cloud platform as a service company with HPE GreenLake, being the key to delivering that cloud experience. And as Omer put it, be able to deliver that cloud experience wherever the customer data lives. And today we're advancing HPE GreenLake as a service transformation of the HPE storage business to a software defined cloud data services business overall. And for our customers, this translates to our operational and ownership experience that unleashes their agility, their data and their innovation. So we're super excited. >> Guys, I can tell you're excited. Thanks so much for coming to the CUBE and summarizing the announcements, congratulations and best of luck to both of you and to HPE and your customers. >> Thank you, Dave. It was a pleasure. >> Thanks, Dave. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to this special cloud virtual event, theCUBE on cloud. This is our continuing editorial series of the most important stories in cloud. We're going to explore the cutting edge most relevant technologies and companies that will impact business and society. We have special guests from Jeff Barr, Michael Liebow, Jerry Chen, Ben Haynes, Michael skulk, Mike Feinstein from AWS all today are presenting the top startups in the AWS ecosystem. This is the AWS showcase of startups. I'm showing with Dave Vellante. Dave great to see you. >> Hey John. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. >> So awesome day today. We're going to feature a 10 grade companies amplitude, auto grid, big ID, cordial Dremio Kong, multicloud, Reltio stardog wire wheel, companies that we've talked to. We've researched. And they're going to present today from 10 for the rest of the day. What's your thoughts? >> Well, John, a lot of these companies were just sort of last decade, they really, were keyer kicker mode, experimentation mode. Now they're well on their way to hitting escape velocity which is very exciting. And they're hitting tens of millions dollars of ARR, many are planning IPO's and it's just it's really great to see what the cloud has enabled and we're going to dig into that very deeply today. So I'm super excited. >> Before we jump into the keynote (mumbles) our non Huff from AWS up on stage Jeremy is the brains behind this program that we're doing. We're going to do this quarterly. Jeremy great to see you, you're in the global startups program at AWS. Your job is to keep the crops growing, keep the startups going and keep the flow of innovation. Thanks for joining us. >> Yeah. Made it to startup showcase day. I'm super excited. And as you mentioned my team the global startup program team, we kind of provide white glove service for VC backed startups and help them with go to market activities. Co-selling with AWS and we've been looking for ways to highlight all the great work they're doing and partnering with you guys has been tremendous. You guys really know how to bring their stories to life. So super excited about all the partner sessions today. >> Well, I really appreciate the vision and working with Amazon this is like truly a bar raiser from theCUBE virtual perspective, using the virtual we can get more content, more flow and great to have you on and bring that the top hot startups around data, data ops. Certainly the most important story in tech is cloud scale with data. You you can't look around and seeing more innovation happening. So I really appreciate the work. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, and don't forget, we're making this a quarterly series. So the next one we've already been working on it. The next one is Wednesday, June 16th. So mark your calendars, but super excited to continue doing these showcases with you guys in the future. >> Thanks for coming on Jeremy. I really appreciate it,. Dave so I want to just quick quickly before we get Jeff up here, Jeff Barr who's a luminary guests for us this week who has been in the industry has been there from the beginning of AWS the role of data, and what's happened in cloud. And we've been watching the evolution of Amazon web services from the beginning, from the startup market to dominate in the enterprise. If you look at the top 10 enterprise companies Amazon wasn't on that list in 2010 they weren't even bringing the top 10 Andy Jassy's keynote at reinvent this past year. Highlighted that fact, I think they were number five or four as vendor in just AWS. So interesting to see that you've been reporting and doing a lot of analysis on the role of data. What's your analysis for these startups and as businesses need to embrace the new technologies and be on the right side of history not part of that old guard, incumbent failed model. >> Well, I think again, if you look back on the early days of cloud, it was really about storage and networking and compute infrastructure. And then we collected all this data and now you're seeing the next generation of innovation and value. We're going to talk to Michael Liebow about this is really if you look at all the value points in the leavers, it's all around data and data is going through a massive change in the way that we think about it, that we talk about it. And you hear that a lot. Obviously you talk about the volumes, the giant volumes but there's something else going on as AWS brings the cloud to the edge. And of course it looks at the data centers, just another edge device, data is getting highly decentralized. And what we're seeing is data getting into the hands of business owners and data product builders. I think we're going to see a new parlance emerge and that's where you're seeing the competitive advantage. And if you look at all the real winners these days in the marketplace especially in the digital with COVID, it all comes back to the data. And we're going to talk about that a lot today. >> One of the things that's coming up in all of our cube interviews, certainly we've seen, I mean we've had a great observation space across all the ecosystems, but the clear thing that's coming out of COVID is speed, agility, scale, and data. If you don't have that data you are going to be a non-player. And I think I heard some industry people talking about the future of how the stock market's going to work and that if you're not truly in market with an AI or machine learning data value play you probably will be shorted on the stock market or delisted. I think people are looking at that as a table stakes competitive advantage item, where if you don't have some sort of data competitive strategy you're going to be either delisted or sold short. And that's, I don't think delisted but the point is this table-stakes Dave. >> Well, I think too, I think the whole language the lingua franca of data is changing. We talk about data as an asset all the time, but you think about it now, what do we do with assets? We protect it, we hide it. And we kind of we don't share it. But then on the other hand, everybody talks about sharing the data and that is a huge trend in the marketplace. And so I think that everybody is really starting to rethink the whole concept of data, what it is, its value and how we think about it, talk about it, share it make it accessible, and at the same time, protect it and make it governed. And I think you're seeing, computational governance and automation really hidden. Couldn't do this without the cloud. I mean, that's the bottom line. >> Well, I'm super excited to have Jeff Barr here from AWS as our special keynote guests. I've been following Jeff's career for a long, long time. He's a luminaries, he's a technical, he's in the industry. He's part of the community, he's been there from the beginning AWS just celebrate its 15th birthday as he was blogging hard. He's been a hardcore blogger. I think Jeff, you had one of the original ping service. If I remember correctly, you were part of the web services foundational kind of present at creation. No better guests to have you Jeff thanks for coming up on our stage. >> John and Dave really happy to be here. >> So I got to ask you, you've been blogging hard for the past decade or so, going hard and your job has evolved from blogging about what's new with Amazon. A couple of building blocks a few services to last reinvent them. You must have put out I don't know how many blog posts did you put out last year at every event? I mean, it must have been a zillion. >> Not quite a zillion. I think I personally wrote somewhere between 20 and 25 including quite a few that I did in the month or so run up to reinvent and it's always intense, but it's always really, really fun. >> So I've got to ask you in the past couple of years, I mean I quoted Andy Jassy's keynote where we highlight in 2010 Amazon wasn't even on the top 10 enterprise players. Now in the top five, you've seen the evolution. What is the big takeaway from your standpoint as you look at the enterprise going from Amazon really dominating the start of a year startups today, you're in the cloud, you're born in the cloud. There's advantage to that. Now enterprises are kind of being reborn in the cloud at the same time, they're building these new use cases rejuvenating themselves and having innovation strategy. What's your takeaway? >> So I love to work with our customers and one of the things that I hear over and over again and especially the last year or two is really the value that they're placing on building a workforce that has really strong cloud skills. They're investing in education. They're focusing on this neat phrase that I learned in Australia called upskilling and saying let's take our set of employees and improve their skill base. I hear companies really saying we're going to go cloud first. We're going to be cloud native. We're going to really embrace it, adopt the full set of cloud services and APIs. And I also see that they're really looking at cloud as part of often a bigger picture. They often use the phrase digital transformation, in Amazon terms we'd say they're thinking big. They're really looking beyond where they are and who they are to what they could be and what they could grow into. Really putting a lot of energy and creativity into thinking forward in that way. >> I wonder Jeff, if you could talk about sort of how people are thinking about the future of cloud if you look at where the spending action is obviously you see it in cloud computing. We've seen that as the move to digital, serverless Lambda is huge. If you look at the data it's off the charts, machine learning and AI also up there containers and of course, automation, AWS leads in all of those. And they portend a different sort of programming model a different way of thinking about how to deploy workloads and applications maybe different than the early days of cloud. What's driving that generally and I'm interested in serverless specifically. And how do you see the next several years folding out? >> Well, they always say that the future is the hardest thing to predict but when I talked to our enterprise customers the two really big things that I see is there's this focus that says we need to really, we're not simply like hosting the website or running the MRP. I'm working with one customer in particular where they say, well, we're going to start on the factory floor all the way up to the boardroom effectively from IOT and sensors on the factory floor to feed all the data into machine learning. So they understand that the factory is running really well to actually doing planning and inventory maintenance to putting it on the website to drive the analytics, to then saying, okay, well how do we know that we're building the right product mix? How do we know that we're getting it out through the right channels? How are our customers doing? So they're really saying there's so many different services available to us in the cloud and they're relatively easy and straightforward to deploy. They really don't think in the old days as we talked about earlier that the old days where these multi-year planning and deployment cycles, now it's much more straightforward. It's like let's see what we can do today. And this week and this month, and from idea to some initial results is a much, much shorter turnaround. So they can iterate a lot more quickly which is just always known to produce better results. >> Well, Jeff and the spirit of the 15th birthday of AWS a lot of services have been built from the original three. I believe it was the core building blocks and there's been a lot of history and it's kind of like there was a key decoupling of compute from storage, those innovations what's the most important architectural change if any has happened or built upon those building blocks with AWS that you could share with companies out there as many people are coming into the cloud not just lifting and shifting and having that innovation but really building cloud native and now hybrid full cloud operations, day two operations. However you want to look at it. That's a big thing. What architecturally has changed that's been innovative from those original building blocks? >> Well, I think that the basic architecture has proven to be very, very resilient. When I wrote about the 15 year birthday of Amazon S3 a couple of weeks ago one thing that I thought was really incredible was the fact that the same APIs that you could have used 15 years ago they all still work. The put, the get, the list, the delete, the permissions management, every last one of those were chosen with extreme care. And so they all still work. So one of the things you think about when you put APIs out there is in Amazon terms we always talk about going through a one-way door and a one way door says, once you do it you're committed for the indefinite future. And so you we're very happy to do that but we take those steps with extreme care. And so those basic building blocks so the original S3 APIs, the original EC2 APIs and the model, all those things really worked. But now they're running at this just insane scale. One thing that blows me away I routinely hear my colleagues talking about petabytes and exabytes, and we throw around trillions and quadrillions like they're pennies. It's kind of amazing. Sometimes when you hear the scale of requests per day or request per month, and the orders of magnitude are you can't map them back to reality anymore. They're simply like literally astronomical. >> If I can just jump in real quick Dave before you ask Jeff, I was watching the Jeff Bezos interview in 1999 that's been going around on LinkedIn in a 60 minutes interview. The interviewer says you are reporting that you can store a gigabyte of customer data from all their purchases. What are you going to do with that? He basically nailed the answer. This is in 99. We're going to use that data to create, that was only a gig. >> Well one of the things that is interesting to me guys, is if you look at again, the early days of cloud, of course I always talked about that in small companies like ours John could have now access to information technology that only big companies could get access to. And now you've seen we just going to talk about it today. All these startups rise up and reach viability. But at the same time, Jeff you've seen big companies get the aha moment on cloud and competition drives urgency and that drives innovation. And so now you see everybody is doing cloud, it's a mandate. And so the expectation is a lot more innovation, experimentation and speed from all ends. It's really exciting to see. >> I know this sounds hackneyed and overused but it really, really still feels just like day one. We're 15 plus years into this. I still wake up every morning, like, wow what is the coolest thing that I'm going to get to learn about and write about today? We have the most amazing customers, one of the things that is great when you're so well connected to your customers, they keep telling you about their dreams, their aspirations, their use cases. And we can just take that and say we can actually build awesome things to help you address those use cases from the ground on up, from building custom hardware things like the nitro system, the graviton to the machine learning inferencing and training chips where we have such insight into customer use cases because we have these awesome customers that we can make these incredible pieces of hardware and software to really address those use cases. >> I'm glad you brought that up. This is another big change, right? You're getting the early days of cloud like, oh, Amazon they're just using off the shelf components. They're not buying these big refrigerator sized disc drives. And now you're developing all this custom Silicon and vertical integration in certain aspects of your business. And that's because workload is demanding. You've got to get more specialized in a lot of cases. >> Indeed they do. And if you watch Peter DeSantis' keynote at re-invent he talked about the fact that we're researching ways to make better cement that actually produces less carbon dioxide. So we're now literally at the from the ground on up level of construction. >> Jeff, I want to get a question from the crowd here. We got, (mumbles) who's a good friend of theCUBE cloud Arate from the beginning. He asked you, he wants to know if you'd like to share Amazon's edge aspirations. He says, he goes, I mean, roadmaps. I go, first of all, he's not going to talk about the roadmaps, but what can you share? I mean, obviously the edge is key. Outpost has been all in the news. You obviously at CloudOps is not a boundary. It's a distributed network. What's your response to-- >> Well, the funny thing is we don't generally have technology roadmaps inside the company. The roadmap is always listen really well to customers not just where they are, but the customers are just so great at saying, this is where we'd like to go. And when we hear edge, the customers don't generally come to us and say edge, they say we need as low latency as possible between where the action happens within our factory floors and our own offices and where we might be able to compute, analyze, store make decisions. And so that's resulted in things like outposts where we can put outposts in their own data center or their own field office, wavelength, where we're working with 5G telecom providers to put computing storage in the carrier hubs of the various 5G providers. Again, with reducing latency, we've been doing things like local zones, where we put zones in an increasing number of cities across the country with the goal of just reducing the average latency between the vast majority of customers and AWS resources. So instead of thinking edge, we really think in terms of how do we make sure that our customers can realize their dreams. >> Staying on the flywheel that AWS has built on ship stuff faster, make things faster, smaller, cheaper, great mission. I want to ask you about the working backwards document. I know it's been getting a lot of public awareness. I've been, that's all I've learned in interviewing Amazon folks. They always work backwards. I always mentioned the customer and all the interviews. So you've got a couple of customer references in there check the box there for you. But working backwards has become kind of a guiding principles, almost like a Harvard Business School case study approach to management. As you guys look at this working backwards and ex Amazonians have written books about it now so people can go look at, it's a really good methodology. Take us back to how you guys work back from the customers because here we're featuring 10 startups. So companies that are out there and Andy has been preaching this to customers. You should think about working backwards because it's so fast. These companies are going into this enterprise market your ecosystem of startups to provide value. What things are you seeing that customers need to think about to work backwards from their customer? How do you see that? 'Cause you've been on the community side, you see the tech side customers have to move fast and work backwards. What are the things that they need to focus on? What's your observation? >> So there's actually a brand new book called "Working Backwards," which I actually learned a lot about our own company from simply reading the book. And I think to me, a principal part of learning backward it's really about humility and being able to be a great listener. So you don't walk into a customer meeting ready to just broadcast the latest and greatest that we've been working on. You walk in and say, I'm here from AWS and I simply want to learn more about who you are, what you're doing. And most importantly, what do you want to do that we're not able to help you with right now? And then once we hear those kinds of things we don't simply write down kind of a bullet item of AWS needs to improve. It's this very active listening process. Tell me a little bit more about this challenge and if we solve it in this way or this way which one's a better fit for your needs. And then a typical AWS launch, we might talk to between 50 and 100 customers in depth to make sure that we have that detailed understanding of what they would like to do. We can't always meet all the needs of these customers but the idea is let's see what is the common base that we can address first. And then once we get that first iteration out there, let's keep listening, let's keep making it better and better and better as quickly. >> A lot of people might poopoo that John but I got to tell you, John, you will remember this the first time we ever met Andy Jassy face-to-face. I was in the room, you were on the speaker phone. We were building an app on AWS at the time. And he was asking you John, for feedback. And he was probing and he pulled out his notebook. He was writing down and he wasn't just superficial questions. He was like, well, why'd you do it that way? And he really wanted to dig. So this is cultural. >> Yeah. I mean, that's the classic Amazon. And that's the best thing about it is that you can go from zero startups zero stage startup to traction. And that was the premise of the cloud. Jeff, I want to get your thoughts and commentary on this love to get your opinion. You've seen this grow from the beginning. And I remember 'cause I've been playing with AWS since the beginning as well. And it says as an entrepreneur I remember my first EC2 instance that didn't even have custom domain support. It was the long URL. You seen the startups and now that we've been 15 years in, you see Dropbox was it just a startup back in the day. I remember these startups that when they were coming they were all born on Amazon, right? These big now unicorns, you were there when these guys were just developers and these gals. So what's it like, I mean, you see just the growth like here's a couple of people with them ideas rubbing nickels together, making magic happen who knows what's going to turn into, you've been there. What's it been like? >> It's been a really unique journey. And to me like the privilege of a lifetime, honestly I've like, you always want to be part of something amazing and you aspire to it and you study hard and you work hard and you always think, okay, somewhere in this universe something really cool is about to happen. And if you're really, really lucky and just a million great pieces of luck like lineup in series, sometimes it actually all works out and you get to be part of something like this when it does you don't always fully appreciate just how awesome it is from the inside, because you're just there just like feeding the machine and you are just doing your job just as fast as you possibly can. And in my case, it was listening to teams and writing blog posts about their launches and sharing them on social media, going out and speaking, you do it, you do it as quickly as possible. You're kind of running your whole life as you're doing that as well. And suddenly you just take a little step back and say, wow we did this kind of amazing thing, but we don't tend to like relax and say, okay, we've done it at Amazon. We get to a certain point. We recognize it. And five minutes later, we're like, okay, let's do the next amazingly good thing. But it's been this just unique privilege and something that I never thought I'd be fortunate enough to be a part of. >> Well, then the last few minutes we have Jeff I really appreciate you taking the time to spend with us for this inaugural launch of theCUBE on cloud startup showcase. We are showcasing 10 startups here from your ecosystem. And a lot of people who know AWS for the folks that don't you guys pride yourself on community and ecosystem the global startups program that Jeremy and his team are running. You guys nurture these startups. You want them to be successful. They're vectoring out into the marketplace with growth strategy, helping customers. What's your take on this ecosystem? As customers are out there listening to this what's your advice to them? How should they engage? Why is these sets of start-ups so important? >> Well, I totally love startups and I've spent time in several startups. I've spent other time consulting with them. And I think we're in this incredible time now wheres, it's so easy and straightforward to get those basic resources, to get your compute, to get your storage, to get your databases, to get your machine learning and to take that and to really focus on your customers and to build what you want. And we see this actual exponential growth. And we see these startups that find something to do. They listen to one of their customers, they build that solution. And they're just that feedback cycle gets started. It's really incredible. And I love to see the energy of these startups. I love to hear from them. And at any point if we've got an AWS powered startup and they build something awesome and want to share it with me, I'm all ears. I love to hear about them. Emails, Twitter mentions, whatever I'll just love to hear about all this energy all those great success with our startups. >> Jeff Barr, thank you for coming on. And congratulations, please pass on to Andy Jassy who's going to take over for Jeff Bezos and I saw the big news that he's picking a successor an Amazonian coming back into the fold, Adam. So congratulations on that. >> I will definitely pass on your congratulations to Andy and I worked with Adam in the past when AWS was just getting started and really looking forward to seeing him again, welcoming back and working with him. >> All right, Jeff Barr with AWS guys check out his Twitter and all the social coordinates. He is pumping out all the resources you need to know about if you're a developer or you're an enterprise looking to go to the next level, next generation, modern infrastructure. Thanks Jeff for coming on. Really appreciate it. Our next guests want to bring up stage Michael Liebow from McKinsey cube alumni, who is a great guest who is very timely in his McKinsey role with a paper he and his colleagues put out called cloud's trillion dollar prize up for grabs. Michael, thank you for coming up on stage with Dave and I. >> Hey, great to be here, John. Thank you. >> One of the things I loved about this and why I wanted you to come on was not only is the report awesome. And Dave has got a zillion questions, he want us to drill into. But in 2015, we wrote a story called Andy Jassy trillion dollar baby on Forbes, and then on medium and silken angle where we were the first ones to profile Andy Jassy and talk about this trillion dollar term. And Dave came up with the calculation and people thought we were crazy. What are you talking about trillion dollar opportunity. That was in 2015. You guys have put this together with a serious research report with methodology and you left a lot on the table. I noticed in the report you didn't even have a whole section quantified. So I think just scratching the surface trillion. I'd be a little light, Dave, so let's dig into it, Michael thanks for coming on. >> Well, and I got to say, Michael that John's a trillion dollar baby was revenue. Yours is EBITDA. So we're talking about seven to X, seven to eight X. What we were talking back then, but great job on the report. Fantastic work. >> Thank you. >> So tell us about the report gives a quick lowdown. I got some questions. You guys are unlocking the value drivers but give us a quick overview of this report that people can get for free. So everyone who's registered will get a copy but give us a quick rundown. >> Great. Well the question I think that has bothered all of us for a long time is what's the business value of cloud and how do you quantify it? How do you specify it? Because a lot of people talk around the infrastructure or technical value of cloud but that actually is a big problem because it just scratches the surface of the potential of what cloud can mean. And we focus around the fortune 500. So we had to box us in somewhat. And so focusing on the fortune 500 and fast forwarding to 2030, we put out this number that there's over a trillion dollars worth of value. And we did a lot of analysis using research from a variety of partners, using third-party research, primary research in order to come up with this view. So the business value is two X the technical value of cloud. And as you just pointed out, there is a whole unlock of additional value where organizations can pioneer on some of the newest technologies. And so AWS and others are creating platforms in order to do not just machine learning and analytics and IOT, but also for quantum or mixed reality for blockchain. And so organizations specific around the fortune 500 that aren't leveraging these capabilities today are going to get left behind. And that's the message we were trying to deliver that if you're not doing this and doing this with purpose and with great execution, that others, whether it's others in your industry or upstarts who were motioning into your industry, because as you say cloud democratizes compute, it provides these capabilities and small companies with talent. And that's what the skills can leverage these capabilities ahead of slow moving incumbents. And I think that was the critical component. So that gives you the framework. We can deep dive based on your questions. >> Well before we get into the deep dive, I want to ask you we have startups being showcased here as part of the, it will showcase, they're coming out of the ecosystem. They have a lot of certification from Amazon and they're secure, which is a big issue. Enterprises that you guys talk to McKinsey speaks directly to I call the boardroom CXOs, the top executives. Are they realizing that the scale and timing of this agility window? I mean, you want to go through these key areas that you would break out but as startups become more relevant the boardrooms that are making these big decisions realize that their businesses are up for grabs. Do they realize that all this wealth is shifting? And do they see the role of startups helping them? How did you guys come out of them and report on that piece? >> Well in terms of the whole notion, we came up with this framework which looked at the opportunity. We talked about it in terms of three dimensions, rejuvenate, innovate and pioneer. And so from the standpoint of a board they're more than focused on not just efficiency and cost reduction basically tied to nation, but innovation tied to analytics tied to machine learning, tied to IOT, tied to two key attributes of cloud speed and scale. And one of the things that we did in the paper was leverage case examples from across industry, across-region there's 17 different case examples. My three favorite is one is Moderna. So software for life couldn't have delivered the vaccine as fast as they did without cloud. My second example was Goldman Sachs got into consumer banking is the platform behind the Apple card couldn't have done it without leveraging cloud. And the third example, particularly in early days of the pandemic was Zoom that added five to 6,000 servers a night in order to scale to meet the demand. And so all three of those examples, plus the other 14 just indicate in business terms what the potential is and to convince boards and the C-suite that if you're not doing this, and we have some recommendations in terms of what CEOs should do in order to leverage this but to really take advantage of those capabilities. >> Michael, I think it's important to point out the approach at sometimes it gets a little wonky on the methodology but having done a lot of these types of studies and observed there's a lot of superficial studies out there, a lot of times people will do, they'll go I'll talk to a customer. What kind of ROI did you get? And boom, that's the value study. You took a different approach. You have benchmark data, you talked to a lot of companies. You obviously have a lot of financial data. You use some third-party data, you built models, you bounded it. And ultimately when you do these things you have to ascribe a value contribution to the cloud component because fortunate 500 companies are going to grow even if there were no cloud. And the way you did that is again, you talk to people you model things, and it's a very detailed study. And I think it's worth pointing out that this was not just hey what'd you get from going to cloud before and after. This was a very detailed deep dive with really a lot of good background work going into it. >> Yeah, we're very fortunate to have the McKinsey Global Institute which has done extensive studies in these areas. So there was a base of knowledge that we could leverage. In fact, we looked at over 700 use cases across 19 industries in order to unpack the value that cloud contributed to those use cases. And so getting down to that level of specificity really, I think helps build it from the bottom up and then using cloud measures or KPIs that indicate the value like how much faster you can deploy, how much faster you can develop. So these are things that help to kind of inform the overall model. >> Yeah. Again, having done hundreds, if not thousands of these types of things, when you start talking to people the patterns emerge, I want to ask you there's an exhibit tool in here, which is right on those use cases, retail, healthcare, high-tech oil and gas banking, and a lot of examples. And I went through them all and virtually every single one of them from a value contribution standpoint the unlocking value came down to data large data sets, document analysis, converting sentiment analysis, analytics. I mean, it really does come down to the data. And I wonder if you could comment on that and why is it that cloud is enabled that? >> Well, it goes back to scale. And I think the word that I would use would be data gravity because we're talking about massive amounts of data. So as you go through those kind of three dimensions in terms of rejuvenation one of the things you can do as you optimize and clarify and build better resiliency the thing that comes into play I think is to have clean data and data that's available in multiple places that you can create an underlying platform in order to leverage the services, the capabilities around, building out that structure. >> And then if I may, so you had this again I want to stress as EBITDA. It's not a revenue and it's the EBITDA potential as a result of leveraging cloud. And you listed a number of industries. And I wonder if you could comment on the patterns that you saw. I mean, it doesn't seem to be as simple as Negroponte bits versus Adam's in terms of your ability to unlock value. What are the patterns that you saw there and why are the ones that have so much potential why are they at the top of the list? >> Well, I mean, they're ranked based on impact. So the five greatest industries and again, aligned by the fortune 500. So it's interesting when you start to unpack it that way high-tech oil, gas, retail, healthcare, insurance and banking, right? Top. And so we did look at the different solutions that were in that, tried to decipher what was fully unlocked by cloud, what was accelerated by cloud and what was perhaps in this timeframe remaining on premise. And so we kind of step by step, expert by expert, use case by use case deciphered of the 700, how that applied. >> So how should practitioners within organizations business but how should they use this data? What would you recommend, in terms of how they think about it, how they apply it to their business, how they communicate? >> Well, I think clearly what came out was a set of best practices for what organizations that were leveraging cloud and getting the kind of business return, three things stood out, execution, experience and excellence. And so for under execution it's not just the transaction, you're not just buying cloud you're changing their operating model. And so if the organization isn't kind of retooling the model, the processes, the workflows in order to support creating the roles then they aren't going to be able, they aren't going to be successful. In terms of experience, that's all about hands-on. And so you have to dive in, you have to start you have to apply yourself, you have to gain that applied knowledge. And so if you're not gaining that experience, you're not going to move forward. And then in terms of excellence, and it was mentioned earlier by Jeff re-skilling, up-skilling, if you're not committed to your workforce and pushing certification, pushing training in order to really evolve your workforce or your ways of working you're not going to leverage cloud. So those three best practices really came up on top in terms of what a mature cloud adopter looks like. >> That's awesome. Michael, thank you for coming on. Really appreciate it. Last question I have for you as we wrap up this trillion dollar segment upon intended is the cloud mindset. You mentioned partnering and scaling up. The role of the enterprise and business is to partner with the technologists, not just the technologies but the companies talk about this cloud native mindset because it's not just lift and shift and run apps. And I have an IT optimization issue. It's about innovating next gen solutions and you're seeing it in public sector. You're seeing it in the commercial sector, all areas where the relationship with partners and companies and startups in particular, this is the startup showcase. These are startups are more relevant than ever as the tide is shifting to a new generation of companies. >> Yeah, so a lot of think about an engine. A lot of things have to work in order to produce the kind of results that we're talking about. Brad, you're more than fair share or unfair share of trillion dollars. And so CEOs need to lead this in bold fashion. Number one, they need to craft the moonshot or the Marshot. They have to set that goal, that aspiration. And it has to be a stretch goal for the organization because cloud is the only way to enable that achievement of that aspiration that's number one, number two, they really need a hardheaded economic case. It has to be defined in terms of what the expectation is going to be. So it's not loose. It's very, very well and defined. And in some respects time box what can we do here? I would say the cloud data, your organization has to move in an agile fashion training DevOps, and the fourth thing, and this is where the startups come in is the cloud platform. There has to be an underlying platform that supports those aspirations. It's an art, it's not just an architecture. It's a living, breathing live service with integrations, with standardization, with self service that enables this whole program. >> Awesome, Michael, thank you for coming on and sharing the McKinsey perspective. The report, the clouds trillion dollar prize is up for grabs. Everyone who's registered for this event will get a copy. We will appreciate it's also on the website. We'll make sure everyone gets a copy. Thanks for coming, I appreciate it. Thank you. >> Thanks, Michael. >> Okay, Dave, big discussion there. Trillion dollar baby. That's the cloud. That's Jassy. Now he's going to be the CEO of AWS. They have a new CEO they announced. So that's going to be good for Amazon's kind of got clarity on the succession to Jassy, trusted soldier. The ecosystem is big for Amazon. Unlike Microsoft, they have the different view, right? They have some apps, but they're cultivating as many startups and enterprises as possible in the cloud. And no better reason to change gears here and get a venture capitalist in here. And a friend of theCUBE, Jerry Chen let's bring them up on stage. Jerry Chen, great to see you partner at Greylock making all the big investments. Good to see you >> John hey, Dave it's great to be here with you guys. Happy marks.Can you see that? >> Hey Jerry, good to see you man >> So Jerry, our first inaugural AWS startup showcase we'll be doing these quarterly and we're going to be featuring the best of the best, you're investing in all the hot startups. We've been tracking your careers from the beginning. You're a good friend of theCUBE. Always got great commentary. Why are startups more important than ever before? Because in the old days we've talked about theCUBE before startups had to go through certain certifications and you've got tire kicking, you got to go through IT. It's like going through security at the airport, take your shoes off, put your belt on thing. I mean, all kinds of things now different. The world has changed. What's your take? >> I think startups have always been a great way for experimentation, right? It's either new technologies, new business models, new markets they can move faster, the experiment, and a lot of startups don't work, unfortunately, but a lot of them turned to be multi-billion dollar companies. I thing startup is more important because as we come out COVID and economy is recovery is a great way for individuals, engineers, for companies for different markets to try different things out. And I think startups are running multiple experiments at the same time across the globe trying to figure how to do things better, faster, cheaper. >> And McKinsey points out this use case of rejuvenate, which is essentially retool pivot essentially get your costs down or and the next innovation here where there's Tam there's trillion dollars on unlock value and where the bulk of it is is the innovation, the new use cases and existing new use cases. This is where the enterprises really have an opportunity. Could you share your thoughts as you invest in the startups to attack these new waves these new areas where it may not look the same as before, what's your assessment of this kind of innovation, these new use cases? >> I think we talked last time about kind of changing the COVID the past year and there's been acceleration of things like how we work, education, medicine all these things are going online. So I think that's very clear. The first wave of innovation is like, hey things we didn't think we could be possible, like working remotely, e-commerce everywhere, telemedicine, tele-education, that's happening. I think the second order of fact now is okay as enterprises realize that this is the new reality everything is digital, everything is in the cloud and everything's going to be more kind of electronic relation with the customers. I think that we're rethinking what does it mean to be a business? What does it mean to be a bank? What does it mean to be a car company or an energy company? What does it mean to be a retailer? Right? So I think the rethinking that brands are now global, brands are all online. And they now have relationships with the customers directly. So I think if you are a business now, you have to re experiment or rethink about your business model. If you thought you were a Nike selling shoes to the retailers, like half of Nike's revenue is now digital right all online. So instead of selling sneakers through stores they're now a direct to consumer brand. And so I think every business is going to rethink about what the AR. Airbnb is like are they in the travel business or the experience business, right? Airlines, what business are they in? >> Yeah, theCUBE we're direct to consumer virtual totally opened up our business model. Dave, the cloud premise is interesting now. I mean, let's reset this where we are, right? Andy Jassy always talks about the old guard, new guard. Okay we've been there done that, even though they still have a lot of Oracle inside AWS which we were joking the other day, but this new modern era coming out of COVID Jerry brings this up. These startups are going to be relevant take territory down in the enterprises as new things develop. What's your premise of the cloud and AWS prospect? >> Well, so Jerry, I want to to ask you. >> Jerry: Yeah. >> The other night, last Thursday, I think we were in Clubhouse. Ben Horowitz was on and Martine Casado was laying out this sort of premise about cloud startups saying basically at some point they're going to have to repatriate because of the Amazon VIG. I mean, I'm paraphrasing and I guess the premise was that there's this variable cost that grows as you scale but I kind of shook my head and I went back. You saw, I put it out on Twitter a clip that we had the a couple of years ago and I don't think, I certainly didn't see it that way. Maybe I'm getting it wrong but what's your take on that? I just don't see a snowflake ever saying, okay we're going to go build our own data center or we're going to repatriate 'cause they're going to end up like service now and have this high cost infrastructure. What do you think? >> Yeah, look, I think Martin is an old friend from VMware and he's brilliant. He has placed a lot of insights. There is some insights around, at some point a scale, use of startup can probably run things more cost-effectively in your own data center, right? But I think that's fewer companies more the vast majority, right? At some point, but number two, to your point, Dave going on premise versus your own data center are two different things. So on premise in a customer's environment versus your own data center are two different worlds. So at some point some scale, a lot of the large SaaS companies run their own data centers that makes sense, Facebook and Google they're at scale, they run their own data centers, going on premise or customer's environment like a fortune 100 bank or something like that. That's a different story. There are reasons to do that around compliance or data gravity, Dave, but Amazon's costs, I don't think is a legitimate reason. Like if price is an issue that could be solved much faster than architectural decisions or tech stacks, right? Once you're on the cloud I think the thesis, the conversation we had like a year ago was the way you build apps are very different in the cloud and the way built apps on premise, right? You have assume storage, networking and compute elasticity that's independent each other. You don't really get that in a customer's data center or their own environment even with all the new technologies. So you can't really go from cloud back to on-premise because the way you build your apps look very, very different. So I would say for sure at some scale run your own data center that's why the hyperscale guys do that. On-premise for customers, data gravity, compliance governance, great reasons to go on premise but for vast majority of startups and vast majority of customers, the network effects you get for being in the cloud, the network effects you get from having everything in this alas cloud service I think outweighs any of the costs. >> I couldn't agree more and that's where the data is, at the way I look at it is your technology spend is going to be some percentage of revenue and it's going to be generally flat over time and you're going to have to manage it whether it's in the cloud or it's on prem John. >> Yeah, we had a quote on theCUBE on the conscious that had Jerry I want to get your reaction to this. The executive said, if you don't have an AI strategy built into your value proposition you will be shorted as a stock on wall street. And I even went further. So you'll probably be delisted cause you won't be performing with a tongue in cheek comment. But the reality is that that's indicating that everyone has to have AI in their thing. Mainly as a reality, what's your take on that? I know you've got a lot of investments in this area as AI becomes beyond fashion and becomes table stakes. Where are we on that spectrum? And how does that impact business and society as that becomes a key part of the stack and application stack? >> Yeah, I think John you've seen AI machine learning turn out to be some kind of novelty thing that a bunch of CS professors working on years ago to a funnel piece of every application. So I would say the statement of the sentiment's directionally correct that 20 years ago if you didn't have a web strategy or a website as a company, your company be sure it, right? If you didn't have kind of a internet website, you weren't real company. Likewise, if you don't use AI now to power your applications or machine learning in some form or fashion for sure you'd be at a competitive disadvantage to everyone else. And just like if you're not using software intelligently or the cloud intelligently your stock as a company is going to underperform the rest of the market. And the cloud guys on the startups that we're backing are making AI so accessible and so easy for developers today that it's really easy to use some level of machine learning, any applications, if you're not doing that it's like not having a website in 1999. >> Yeah. So let's get into that whole operation side. So what would you be your advice to the enterprises that are watching and people who are making decisions on architecture and how they roll out their business model or value proposition? How should they look at AI and operations? I mean big theme is day two operations. You've got IT service management, all these things are being disrupted. What's the operational impact to this? What's your view on that? >> So I think two things, one thing that you and Dave both talked about operation is the key, I mean, operations is not just the guts of the business but the actual people running the business, right? And so we forget that one of the values are going to cloud, one of the values of giving these services is you not only have a different technology stack, all the bits, you have a different human stack meaning the people running your cloud, running your data center are now effectively outsource to Amazon, Google or Azure, right? Which I think a big part of the Amazon VIG as Dave said, is so eloquently on Twitter per se, right? You're really paying for those folks like carry pagers. Now take that to the next level. Operations is human beings, people intelligently trying to figure out how my business can run better, right? And that's either accelerate revenue or decrease costs, improve my margin. So if you want to use machine learning, I would say there's two areas to think about. One is how I think about customers, right? So we both talked about the amount of data being generated around enterprise individuals. So intelligently use machine learning how to serve my customers better, then number two AI and machine learning internally how to run my business better, right? Can I take cost out? Can I optimize supply chain? Can I use my warehouses more efficiently my logistics more efficiently? So one is how do I use AI learning to be a more familiar more customer oriented and number two, how can I take cost out be more efficient as a company, by writing AI internally from finance ops, et cetera. >> So, Jerry, I wonder if I could ask you a little different subject but a question on tactical valuations how coupled or decoupled are private company valuations from the public markets. You're seeing the public markets everybody's freaking out 'cause interest rates are going to go up. So the future value of cash flows are lower. Does that trickle in quickly into the private markets? Or is it a whole different dynamic? >> If I could weigh in poly for some private markets Dave I would have a different job than I do today. I think the reality is in the long run it doesn't matter as much as long as you're investing early. Now that's an easy answer say, boats have to fall away. Yes, interest rates will probably go up because they're hard to go lower, right? They're effectively almost zero to negative right now in most of the developed world, but at the end of the day, I'm not going to trade my Twilio shares or Salesforce shares for like a 1% yield bond, right? I'm going to hold the high growth tech stocks because regardless of what interest rates you're giving me 1%, 2%, 3%, I'm still going to beat that with a top tech performers, Snowflake, Twilio Hashi Corp, bunch of the private companies out there I think are elastic. They're going to have a great 10, 15 year run. And in the Greylock portfolio like the things we're investing in, I'm super bullish on from Roxanne to Kronos fear, to true era in the AI space. I think in the long run, next 10 years these things will outperform the market that said, right valuation prices have gone up and down and they will in our careers, they have. In the careers we've been covering tech. So I do believe that they're high now they'll come down for sure. Will they go back up again? Definitely, right? But as long as you're betting these macro waves I think we're all be good. >> Great answer as usual. Would you trade them for NFTs Jerry? >> That $69 million people piece of artwork look, I mean, I'm a longterm believer in kind of IP and property rights in the blockchain, right? And I'm waiting for theCUBE to mint this video as the NFT, when we do this guys, we'll mint this video's NFT and see how much people pay for the original Dave, John, Jerry (mumbles). >> Hey, you know what? We can probably get some good bang for that. Hey it's all about this next Jerry. Jerry, great to have you on, final question as we got this one minute left what's your advice to the people out there that either engaging with these innovative startups, we're going to feature startups every quarter from the in the Amazon ecosystem, they are going to be adding value. What's the advice to the enterprises that are engaging startups, the approach, posture, what's your advice. >> Yeah, when I talk to CIOs and large enterprises, they often are wary like, hey, when do I engage a startup? How, what businesses, and is it risky or low risk? Now I say, just like any career managing, just like any investment you're making in a big, small company you should have a budget or set of projects. And then I want to say to a CIO, Hey, every priority on your wish list, go use the startup, right? I mean, that would be 10 for 10 projects, 10 startups. Probably too much risk for a lot of tech companies. But we would say to most CIOs and executives, look, there are strategic initiatives in your business that you want to accelerate. And I would take the time to invest in one or two startups each quarter selectively, right? Use the time, focus on fewer startups, go deep with them because we can actually be game changers in terms of inflecting your business. And what I mean by that is don't pick too many startups because you can't devote the time, but don't pick zero startups because you're going to be left behind, right? It'd be shorted as a stock by the John, Dave and Jerry hedge fund apparently but pick a handful of startups in your strategic areas, in your top tier three things. These really, these could be accelerators for your career. >> I have to ask you real quick while you're here. We've got a couple minutes left on startups that are building apps. I've seen DevOps and the infrastructure as code movement has gone full mainstream. That's really what we're living right now. That kind of first-generation commercialization of DevOps. Now DevSecOps, what are the trends that you've seen that's different from say a couple of years ago now that we're in COVID around how apps are being built? Is it security? Is it the data integration? What can you share as a key app stack impact (mumbles)? >> Yeah, I think there're two things one is security is always been a top priority. I think that was the only going forward period, right? Security for sure. That's why you said that DevOps, DevSecOps like security is often overlooked but I think increasingly could be more important. The second thing is I think we talked about Dave mentioned earlier just the data around customers, the data on premise or the cloud, and there's a ton of data out there. We keep saying this over and over again like data's new oil, et cetera. It's evolving and not changing because the way we're using data finding data is changing in terms of sources of data we're using and discovering and also speed of data, right? In terms of going from Basser real-time is changing. The speed of business has changed to go faster. So I think these are all things that we're thinking about. So both security and how you use your data faster and better. >> Yeah you were in theCUBE a number of years ago and I remember either John or I asked you about you think Amazon is going to go up the stack and start developing applications and your answer was you know what I think no, I think they're going to enable a new set of disruptors to come in and disrupt the SaaS world. And I think that's largely playing out. And one of the interesting things about Adam Selipsky appointment to the CEO, he comes from Tableau. He really helped Tableau go from that sort of old guard model to an ARR model obviously executed a great exit to Salesforce. And now I see companies like Salesforce and service now and Workday is potential for your scenario to really play out. They've got in my view anyway, outdated pricing models. You look at what's how Snowflake's pricing and the consumption basis, same with Datadog same with Stripe and new startups seem to really be a leading into the consumption-based pricing model. So how do you, what are your thoughts on that? And maybe thoughts on Adam and thoughts on SaaS disruption? >> I think my thesis still holds that. I don't think Selipsky Adam is going to go into the app space aggressively. I think Amazon wants to enable next generation apps and seeing some of the new service that they're doing is they're kind of deconstructing apps, right? They're deconstructing the parts of CRM or e-commerce and they're offering them as services. So I think you're going to see Amazon continue to say, hey we're the core parts of an app like payments or custom prediction or some machine learning things around applications you want to buy bacon, they're going to turn those things to the API and sell those services, right? So you look at things like Stripe, Twilio which are two of the biggest companies out there. They're not apps themselves, they're the components of the app, right? Either e-commerce or messaging communications. So I can see Amazon going down that path. I think Adam is a great choice, right? He was a longterm early AWS exact from the early days latent to your point Dave really helped take Tableau into kind of a cloud business acquired by Salesforce work there for a few years under Benioff the guy who created quote unquote cloud and now him coming home again and back to Amazon. So I think it'll be exciting to see how Adam runs the business. >> And John I think he's the perfect choice because he's got operations chops and he knows how to... He can help the startups disrupt. >> Yeah, and he's been a trusted soldier of Jassy from the beginning, he knows the DNA. He's got some CEO outside experience. I think that was the key he knows. And he's not going to give up Amazon speed, but this is baby, right? So he's got him in charge and he's a trusted lieutenant. >> You think. Yeah, you think he's going to hold the mic? >> Yeah. We got to go. Jerry Chen thank you very much for coming on. Really appreciate it. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on our inaugural cube on cloud AWS startup event. Now for the 10 startups, enjoy the sessions at 12:30 Pacific, we're going to have the closing keynote. I'm John Ferry for Dave Vellante and our special guests, thanks for watching and enjoy the rest of the day and the 10 startups. (upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting Cuban cloud brought to you by silicon angle, everybody to Cuban cloud. My name is Dave Volonte, and I'll be here throughout the day with my co host, John Ferrier, who was quarantined in an undisclosed location in California. He's all good. Don't worry. Just precautionary. John, how are you doing? >>Hey, great to see you. John. Quarantine. My youngest daughter had covitz, so contact tracing. I was negative in quarantine at a friend's location. All good. >>Well, we wish you the best. Yeah, well, right. I mean, you know what's it like, John? I mean, you're away from your family. Your basically shut in, right? I mean, you go out for a walk, but you're really not in any contact with anybody. >>Correct? Yeah. I mean, basically just isolation, Um, pretty much what everyone's been kind of living on, kind of suffering through, but hopefully the vaccines are being distributed. You know, one of the things we talked about it reinvent the Amazon's cloud conference. Was the vaccine on, but just the whole workflow around that it's gonna get better. It's kind of really sucky. Here in the California area, they haven't done a good job, a lot of criticism around, how that's rolling out. And, you know, Amazon is now offering to help now that there's a new regime in the U. S. Government S o. You know, something to talk about, But certainly this has been a terrible time for Cove it and everyone in the deaths involved. But it's it's essentially pulled back the covers, if you will, on technology and you're seeing everything. Society. In fact, um, well, that's big tech MIT disinformation campaigns. All these vulnerabilities and cyber, um, accelerated digital transformation. We'll talk about a lot today, but yeah, it's totally changed the world. And I think we're in a new generation. I think this is a real inflection point, Dave. You know, modern society and the geo political impact of this is significant. You know, one of the benefits of being quarantined you'd be hanging out on these clubhouse APS, uh, late at night, listening to experts talk about what's going on, and it's interesting what's happening with with things like water and, you know, the island of Taiwan and China and U. S. Sovereignty, data, sovereignty, misinformation. So much going on to talk about. And, uh, meanwhile, companies like Mark injuries in BC firm starting a media company. What's going on? Hell freezing over. So >>we're gonna be talking about a lot of that stuff today. I mean, Cuba on cloud. It's our very first virtual editorial event we're trying to do is bring together our community. It's a it's an open forum and we're we're running the day on our 3 65 software platform. So we got a great lineup. We got CEO Seo's data Practitioners. We got a hard core technologies coming in, cloud experts, investors. We got some analysts coming in and we're creating this day long Siri's. And we've got a number of sessions that we've developed and we're gonna unpack. The future of Cloud computing in the coming decade is, John said, we're gonna talk about some of the public policy new administration. What does that mean for tech and for big tech in General? John, what can you add to that? >>Well, I think one of the things that we talked about Cove in this personal impact to me but other people as well. One of the things that people are craving right now is information factual information, truth texture that we call it. But hear this event for us, Davis, our first inaugural editorial event. Robbo, Kristen, Nicole, the entire Cube team Silicon angle, really trying to put together Morva cadence we're gonna doom or of these events where we can put out feature the best people in our community that have great fresh voices. You know, we do interview the big names Andy Jassy, Michael Dell, the billionaires with people making things happen. But it's often the people under there that are the rial newsmakers amid savory, for instance, that Google one of the most impressive technical people, he's gotta talk. He's gonna present democratization of software development in many Mawr riel people making things happen. And I think there's a communal element. We're going to do more of these. Obviously, we have, uh, no events to go to with the Cube. So we have the cube virtual software that we have been building and over years and now perfecting and we're gonna introduce that we're gonna put it to work, their dog footing it. We're gonna put that software toe work. We're gonna do a lot mawr virtual events like this Cuban cloud Cuban startup Cuban raising money. Cuban healthcare, Cuban venture capital. Always think we could do anything. Question is, what's the right story? What's the most important stories? Who's telling it and increase the aperture of the lens of the industry that we have and and expose that and fastest possible. That's what this software, you'll see more of it. So it's super exciting. We're gonna add new features like pulling people up on stage, Um, kind of bring on the clubhouse vibe and more of a community interaction with people to meet each other, and we'll roll those out. But the goal here is to just showcase it's cloud story in a way from people that are living it and providing value. So enjoy the day is gonna be chock full of presentations. We're gonna have moderated chat in these sessions, so it's an all day event so people can come in, drop out, and also that's everything's on demand immediately after the time slot. But you >>want to >>participate, come into the time slot into the cube room or breakout session. Whatever you wanna call it, it's a cube room, and the people in there chatting and having a watch party. So >>when you're in that home page when you're watching, there's a hero video there. Beneath that, there's a calendar, and you'll see that red line is that red horizontal line of vertical line is rather, it's a linear clock that will show you where we are in the day. If you click on any one of those sessions that will take you into the chat, we'll take you through those in a moment and share with you some of the guests that we have upcoming and and take you through the day what I wanted to do. John is trying to set the stage for the conversations that folks are gonna here today. And to do that, I wanna ask the guys to bring up a graphic. And I want to talk to you, John, about the progression of cloud over time and maybe go back to the beginning and review the evolution of cloud and then really talk a little bit about where we think it Z headed. So, guys, if you bring up that graphic when a W S announced s three, it was March of 2000 and six. And as you recall, John you know, nobody really. In the vendor and user community. They didn't really pay too much attention to that. And then later that year, in August, it announced E C two people really started. They started to think about a new model of computing, but they were largely, you know, chicken tires. And it was kind of bleeding edge developers that really leaned in. Um what? What were you thinking at the time? When when you saw, uh, s three e c to this retail company coming into the tech world? >>I mean, I thought it was totally crap. I'm like, this is terrible. But then at that time, I was thinking working on I was in between kind of start ups and I didn't have a lot of seed funding. And then I realized the C two was freaking awesome. But I'm like, Holy shit, this is really great because I don't need to pay a lot of cash, the Provisional Data center, or get a server. Or, you know, at that time, state of the art startup move was to buy a super micro box or some sort of power server. Um, it was well past the whole proprietary thing. But you have to assemble probably anyone with 5 to 8 grand box and go in, and we'll put a couple ghetto rack, which is basically, uh, you know, you put it into some coasting location. It's like with everybody else in the tech ghetto of hosting, still paying monthly fees and then maintaining it and provisioning that's just to get started. And then Amazon was just really easy. And then from there you just It was just awesome. I just knew Amazon would be great. They had a lot of things that they had to fix. You know, custom domains and user interface Council got better and better, but it was awesome. >>Well, what we really saw the cloud take hold from my perspective anyway, was the financial crisis in, you know, 709 It put cloud on the radar of a number of CFOs and, of course, shadow I T departments. They wanted to get stuff done and and take I t in in in, ah, pecs, bite sized chunks. So it really was. There's cloud awakening and we came out of that financial crisis, and this we're now in this 10 year plus boom um, you know, notwithstanding obviously the economic crisis with cove it. But much of it was powered by the cloud in the decade. I would say it was really about I t transformation. And it kind of ironic, if you will, because the pandemic it hits at the beginning of this decade, >>and it >>creates this mandate to go digital. So you've you've said a lot. John has pulled forward. It's accelerated this industry transformation. Everybody talks about that, but and we've highlighted it here in this graphic. It probably would have taken several more years to mature. But overnight you had this forced march to digital. And if you weren't a digital business, you were kind of out of business. And and so it's sort of here to stay. How do you see >>You >>know what this evolution and what we can expect in the coming decades? E think it's safe to say the last 10 years defined by you know, I t transformation. That's not gonna be the same in the coming years. How do you see it? >>It's interesting. I think the big tech companies are on, but I think this past election, the United States shows um, the power that technology has. And if you look at some of the main trends in the enterprise specifically around what clouds accelerating, I call the second wave of innovations coming where, um, it's different. It's not what people expect. Its edge edge computing, for instance, has talked about a lot. But industrial i o t. Is really where we've had a lot of problems lately in terms of hacks and malware and just just overall vulnerabilities, whether it's supply chain vulnerabilities, toe actual disinformation, you know, you know, vulnerabilities inside these networks s I think this network effects, it's gonna be a huge thing. I think the impact that tech will have on society and global society geopolitical things gonna be also another one. Um, I think the modern application development of how applications were written with data, you know, we always been saying this day from the beginning of the Cube data is his integral part of the development process. And I think more than ever, when you think about cloud and edge and this distributed computing paradigm, that cloud is now going next level with is the software and how it's written will be different. You gotta handle things like, where's the compute component? Is it gonna be at the edge with all the server chips, innovations that Amazon apple intel of doing, you're gonna have compute right at the edge, industrial and kind of human edge. How does that work? What's Leighton see to that? It's it really is an edge game. So to me, software has to be written holistically in a system's impact on the way. Now that's not necessarily nude in the computer science and in the tech field, it's just gonna be deployed differently. So that's a complete rewrite, in my opinion of the software applications. Which is why you're seeing Amazon Google VM Ware really pushing Cooper Netease and these service messes in the micro Services because super critical of this technology become smarter, automated, autonomous. And that's completely different paradigm in the old full stack developer, you know, kind of model. You know, the full stack developer, his ancient. There's no such thing as a full stack developer anymore, in my opinion, because it's a half a stack because the cloud takes up the other half. But no one wants to be called the half stack developer because it doesn't sound as good as Full Stack, but really Cloud has eliminated the technology complexity of what a full stack developer used to dio. Now you can manage it and do things with it, so you know, there's some work to done, but the heavy lifting but taking care of it's the top of the stack that I think is gonna be a really critical component. >>Yeah, and that that sort of automation and machine intelligence layer is really at the top of the stack. This this thing becomes ubiquitous, and we now start to build businesses and new processes on top of it. I wanna I wanna take a look at the Big Three and guys, Can we bring up the other The next graphic, which is an estimate of what the revenue looks like for the for the Big three. And John, this is I asked and past spend for the Big Three Cloud players. And it's It's an estimate that we're gonna update after earning seasons, and I wanna point a couple things out here. First is if you look at the combined revenue production of the Big Three last year, it's almost 80 billion in infrastructure spend. I mean, think about that. That Z was that incremental spend? No. It really has caused a lot of consolidation in the on Prem data center business for guys like Dell. And, you know, um, see, now, part of the LHP split up IBM Oracle. I mean, it's etcetera. They've all felt this sea change, and they had to respond to it. I think the second thing is you can see on this data. Um, it's true that azure and G C P they seem to be growing faster than a W s. We don't know the exact numbers >>because >>A W S is the only company that really provides a clean view of i s and pass. Whereas Microsoft and Google, they kind of hide the ball in their numbers. I mean, I don't blame them because they're behind, but they do leave breadcrumbs and clues about growth rates and so forth. And so we have other means of estimating, but it's it's undeniable that azure is catching up. I mean, it's still quite distance the third thing, and before I want to get your input here, John is this is nuanced. But despite the fact that Azure and Google the growing faster than a W s. You can see those growth rates. A W s I'll call this out is the only company by our estimates that grew its business sequentially last quarter. Now, in and of itself, that's not significant. But what is significant is because AWS is so large there $45 billion last year, even if the slower growth rates it's able to grow mawr and absolute terms than its competitors, who are basically flat to down sequentially by our estimates. Eso So that's something that I think is important to point out. Everybody focuses on the growth rates, but it's you gotta look at also the absolute dollars and, well, nonetheless, Microsoft in particular, they're they're closing the gap steadily, and and we should talk more about the competitive dynamics. But I'd love to get your take on on all this, John. >>Well, I mean, the clouds are gonna win right now. Big time with the one the political climate is gonna be favoring Big check. But more importantly, with just talking about covert impact and celebrating the digital transformation is gonna create a massive rising tide. It's already happening. It's happening it's happening. And again, this shift in programming, uh, models are gonna really kinda accelerating, create new great growth. So there's no doubt in my mind of all three you're gonna win big, uh, in the future, they're just different, You know, the way they're going to market position themselves, they have to be. Google has to be a little bit different than Amazon because they're smaller and they also have different capabilities, then trying to catch up. So if you're Google or Microsoft, you have to have a competitive strategy to decide. How do I wanna ride the tide If you will put the rising tide? Well, if I'm Amazon, I mean, if I'm Microsoft and Google, I'm not going to try to go frontal and try to copy Amazon because Amazon is just pounding lead of features and scale and they're different. They were, I would say, take advantage of the first mover of pure public cloud. They really awesome. It passed and I, as they've integrated in Gardner, now reports and integrated I as and passed components. So Gardner finally got their act together and said, Hey, this is really one thing. SAS is completely different animal now Microsoft Super Smart because they I think they played the right card. They have a huge installed base converted to keep office 3 65 and move sequel server and all their core jewels into the cloud as fast as possible, clarified while filling in the gaps on the product side to be cloud. So you know, as you're doing trends job, they're just it's just pedal as fast as you can. But Microsoft is really in. The strategy is just go faster trying. Keep pedaling fast, get the features, feature velocity and try to make it high quality. Google is a little bit different. They have a little power base in terms of their network of strong, and they have a lot of other big data capabilities, so they have to use those to their advantage. So there is. There is there is competitive strategy game application happening with these companies. It's not like apples, the apples, In my opinion, it never has been, and I think that's funny that people talk about it that way. >>Well, you're bringing up some great points. I want guys bring up the next graphic because a lot of things that John just said are really relevant here. And what we're showing is that's a survey. Data from E. T. R R Data partners, like 1400 plus CEOs and I T buyers and on the vertical axis is this thing called Net score, which is a measure of spending momentum. And the horizontal axis is is what's called market share. It's a measure of the pervasiveness or, you know, number of mentions in the data set. There's a couple of key points I wanna I wanna pick up on relative to what John just said. So you see A W S and Microsoft? They stand alone. I mean, they're the hyper scale er's. They're far ahead of the pack and frankly, they have fall down, toe, lose their lead. They spend a lot on Capex. They got the flywheel effects going. They got both spending velocity and large market shares, and so, but they're taking a different approach. John, you're right there living off of their SAS, the state, their software state, Andi, they're they're building that in to their cloud. So they got their sort of a captive base of Microsoft customers. So they've got that advantage. They also as we'll hear from from Microsoft today. They they're building mawr abstraction layers. Andy Jassy has said We don't wanna be in that abstraction layer business. We wanna have access to those, you know, fine grain primitives and eso at an AP level. So so we can move fast with the market. But but But so those air sort of different philosophies, John? >>Yeah. I mean, you know, people who know me know that I love Amazon. I think their product is superior at many levels on in its way that that has advantages again. They have a great sass and ecosystem. They don't really have their own SAS play, although they're trying to add some stuff on. I've been kind of critical of Microsoft in the past, but one thing I'm not critical of Microsoft, and people can get this wrong in the marketplace. Actually, in the journalism world and also in just some other analysts, Microsoft has always had large scale eso to say that Microsoft never had scale on that Amazon owned the monopoly on our franchise on scales wrong. Microsoft had scale from day one. Their business was always large scale global. They've always had infrastructure with MSN and their search and the distributive how they distribute browsers and multiple countries. Remember they had the lock on the operating system and the browser for until the government stepped in in 1997. And since 1997 Microsoft never ever not invested in infrastructure and scale. So that whole premise that they don't compete well there is wrong. And I think that chart demonstrates that there, in there in the hyper scale leadership category, hands down the question that I have. Is that there not as good and making that scale integrate in because they have that legacy cards. This is the classic innovator's dilemma. Clay Christensen, right? So I think they're doing a good job. I think their strategy sound. They're moving as fast as they can. But then you know they're not gonna come out and say We don't have the best cloud. Um, that's not a marketing strategy. Have to kind of hide in this and get better and then double down on where they're winning, which is. Clients are converting from their legacy at the speed of Microsoft, and they have a huge client base, So that's why they're stopping so high That's why they're so good. >>Well, I'm gonna I'm gonna give you a little preview. I talked to gear up your f Who's gonna come on today and you'll see I I asked him because the criticism of Microsoft is they're, you know, they're just good enough. And so I asked him, Are you better than good enough? You know, those are fighting words if you're inside of Microsoft, but so you'll you'll have to wait to see his answer. Now, if you guys, if you could bring that that graphic back up I wanted to get into the hybrid zone. You know where the field is. Always got >>some questions coming in on chat, Dave. So we'll get to those >>great Awesome. So just just real quick Here you see this hybrid zone, this the field is bunched up, and the other companies who have a large on Prem presence and have been forced to initiate some kind of coherent cloud strategy included. There is Michael Michael, multi Cloud, and Google's there, too, because they're far behind and they got to take a different approach than a W s. But as you can see, so there's some real progress here. VM ware cloud on AWS stands out, as does red hat open shift. You got VM Ware Cloud, which is a VCF Cloud Foundation, even Dell's cloud. And you'd expect HP with Green Lake to be picking up momentum in the future quarters. And you've got IBM and Oracle, which there you go with the innovator's dilemma. But there, at least in the cloud game, and we can talk about that. But so, John, you know, to your point, you've gotta have different strategies. You're you're not going to take out the big too. So you gotta play, connect your print your on Prem to your cloud, your hybrid multi cloud and try to create new opportunities and new value there. >>Yeah, I mean, I think we'll get to the question, but just that point. I think this Zeri Chen's come on the Cube many times. We're trying to get him to come on lunch today with Features startup, but he's always said on the Q B is a V C at Greylock great firm. Jerry's Cloud genius. He's been there, but he made a point many, many years ago. It's not a winner. Take all the winner. Take most, and the Big Three maybe put four or five in there. We'll take most of the markets here. But I think one of the things that people are missing and aren't talking about Dave is that there's going to be a second tier cloud, large scale model. I don't want to say tear to cloud. It's coming to sound like a sub sub cloud, but a new category of cloud on cloud, right? So meaning if you get a snowflake, did I think this is a tale? Sign to what's coming. VM Ware Cloud is a native has had huge success, mainly because Amazon is essentially enabling them to be successful. So I think is going to be a wave of a more of a channel model of indirect cloud build out where companies like the Cube, potentially for media or others, will build clouds on top of the cloud. So if Google, Microsoft and Amazon, whoever is the first one to really enable that okay, we'll do extremely well because that means you can compete with their scale and create differentiation on top. So what snowflake did is all on Amazon now. They kind of should go to azure because it's, you know, politically correct that have multiple clouds and distribution and business model shifts. But to get that kind of performance they just wrote on Amazon. So there's nothing wrong with that. Because you're getting paid is variable. It's cap ex op X nice categorization. So I think that's the way that we're watching. I think it's super valuable, I think will create some surprises in terms of who might come out of the woodwork on be a leader in a category. Well, >>your timing is perfect, John and we do have some questions in the chat. But before we get to that, I want to bring in Sargi Joe Hall, who's a contributor to to our community. Sargi. Can you hear us? All right, so we got, uh, while >>bringing in Sarpy. Let's go down from the questions. So the first question, Um, we'll still we'll get the student second. The first question. But Ronald ask, Can a vendor in 2021 exist without a hybrid cloud story? Well, story and capabilities. Yes, they could live with. They have to have a story. >>Well, And if they don't own a public cloud? No. No, they absolutely cannot. Uh hey, Sergey. How you doing, man? Good to see you. So, folks, let me let me bring in Sergeant Kohala. He's a He's a cloud architect. He's a practitioner, He's worked in as a technologist. And there's a frequent guest on on the Cube. Good to see you, my friend. Thanks for taking the time with us. >>And good to see you guys to >>us. So we were kind of riffing on the competitive landscape we got. We got so much to talk about this, like, it's a number of questions coming in. Um, but Sargi we wanna talk about you know, what's happening here in Cloud Land? Let's get right into it. I mean, what do you guys see? I mean, we got yesterday. New regime, new inaug inauguration. Do you do you expect public policy? You'll start with you Sargi to have What kind of effect do you think public policy will have on, you know, cloud generally specifically, the big tech companies, the tech lash. Is it gonna be more of the same? Or do you see a big difference coming? >>I think that there will be some changing narrative. I believe on that. is mainly, um, from the regulators side. A lot has happened in one month, right? So people, I think are losing faith in high tech in a certain way. I mean, it doesn't, uh, e think it matters with camp. You belong to left or right kind of thing. Right? But parlor getting booted out from Italy s. I think that was huge. Um, like, how do you know that if a cloud provider will not boot you out? Um, like, what is that line where you draw the line? What are the rules? I think that discussion has to take place. Another thing which has happened in the last 23 months is is the solar winds hack, right? So not us not sort acknowledging that I was Russia and then wish you watching it now, new administration might have a different sort of Boston on that. I think that's huge. I think public public private partnership in security arena will emerge this year. We have to address that. Yeah, I think it's not changing. Uh, >>economics economy >>will change gradually. You know, we're coming out off pandemic. The money is still cheap on debt will not be cheap. for long. I think m and a activity really will pick up. So those are my sort of high level, Uh, >>thank you. I wanna come back to them. And because there's a question that chat about him in a But, John, how do you see it? Do you think Amazon and Google on a slippery slope booting parlor off? I mean, how do they adjudicate between? Well, what's happening in parlor? Uh, anything could happen on clubhouse. Who knows? I mean, can you use a I to find that stuff? >>Well, that's I mean, the Amazons, right? Hiding right there bunkered in right now from that bad, bad situation. Because again, like people we said Amazon, these all three cloud players win in the current environment. Okay, Who wins with the U. S. With the way we are China, Russia, cloud players. Okay, let's face it, that's the reality. So if I wanted to reset the world stage, you know what better way than the, you know, change over the United States economy, put people out of work, make people scared, and then reset the entire global landscape and control all with cash? That's, you know, conspiracy theory. >>So you see the riches, you see the riches, get the rich, get richer. >>Yeah, well, that's well, that's that. That's kind of what's happening, right? So if you start getting into this idea that you can't actually have an app on site because the reason now I'm not gonna I don't know the particular parlor, but apparently there was a reason. But this is dangerous, right? So what? What that's gonna do is and whether it's right or wrong or not, whether political opinion is it means that they were essentially taken offline by people that weren't voted for that. Weren't that when people didn't vote for So that's not a democracy, right? So that's that's a different kind of regime. What it's also going to do is you also have this groundswell of decentralized thinking, right. So you have a whole wave of crypto and decentralized, um, cyber punks out there who want to decentralize it. So all of this stuff in January has created a huge counterculture, and I had predicted this so many times in the Cube. David counterculture is coming and and you already have this kind of counterculture between centralized and decentralized thinking and so I think the Amazon's move is dangerous at a fundamental level. Because if you can't get it, if you can't get buy domain names and you're completely blackballed by by organized players, that's a Mafia, in my opinion. So, uh, and that and it's also fuels the decentralized move because people say, Hey, if that could be done to them, it could be done to me. Just the fact that it could be done will promote a swing in the other direction. I >>mean, independent of of, you know, again, somebody said your political views. I mean Parlor would say, Hey, we're trying to clean this stuff up now. Maybe they didn't do it fast enough, but you think about how new parlor is. You think about the early days of Twitter and Facebook, so they were sort of at a disadvantage. Trying to >>have it was it was partly was what it was. It was a right wing stand up job of standing up something quick. Their security was terrible. If you look at me and Cory Quinn on be great to have him, and he did a great analysis on this, because if you look the lawsuit was just terrible. Security was just a half, asshole. >>Well, and the experience was horrible. I mean, it's not It was not a great app, but But, like you said, it was a quick stew. Hand up, you know, for an agenda. But nonetheless, you know, to start, get to your point earlier. It's like, you know, Are they gonna, you know, shut me down? If I say something that's, you know, out of line, or how do I control that? >>Yeah, I remember, like, 2019, we involved closing sort of remarks. I was there. I was saying that these companies are gonna be too big to fail. And also, they're too big for other nations to do business with. In a way, I think MNCs are running the show worldwide. They're running the government's. They are way. Have seen the proof of that in us this year. Late last year and this year, um, Twitter last night blocked Chinese Ambassador E in us. Um, from there, you know, platform last night and I was like, What? What's going on? So, like, we used to we used to say, like the Chinese company, tech companies are in bed with the Chinese government. Right. Remember that? And now and now, Actually, I think Chinese people can say the same thing about us companies. Uh, it's not a good thing. >>Well, let's >>get some question. >>Let's get some questions from the chat. Yeah. Thank you. One is on M and a subject you mentioned them in a Who do you see is possible emanate targets. I mean, I could throw a couple out there. Um, you know, some of the cdn players, maybe aka my You know, I like I like Hashi Corp. I think they're doing some really interesting things. What do you see? >>Nothing. Hashi Corp. And anybody who's doing things in the periphery is a candidate for many by the big guys, you know, by the hyper scholars and number two tier two or five hyper scholars. Right. Uh, that's why sales forces of the world and stuff like that. Um, some some companies, which I thought there will be a target, Sort of. I mean, they target they're getting too big, because off their evaluations, I think how she Corpuz one, um, >>and >>their bunch in the networking space. Uh, well, Tara, if I say the right that was acquired by at five this week, this week or last week, Actually, last week for $500 million. Um, I know they're founder. So, like I found that, Yeah, there's a lot going on on the on the network side on the anything to do with data. Uh, that those air too hard areas in the cloud arena >>data, data protection, John, any any anything you could adhere. >>And I think I mean, I think ej ej is gonna be where the gaps are. And I think m and a activity is gonna be where again, the bigger too big to fail would agree with you on that one. But we're gonna look at white Spaces and say a white space for Amazon is like a monster space for a start up. Right? So you're gonna have these huge white spaces opportunities, and I think it's gonna be an M and a opportunity big time start ups to get bought in. Given the speed on, I think you're gonna see it around databases and around some of these new service meshes and micro services. I mean, >>they there's a There's a question here, somebody's that dons asking why is Google who has the most pervasive tech infrastructure on the planet. Not at the same level of other to hyper scale is I'll give you my two cents is because it took him a long time to get their heads out of their ads. I wrote a piece of around that a while ago on they just they figured out how to learn the enterprise. I mean, John, you've made this point a number of times, but they just and I got a late start. >>Yeah, they're adding a lot of people. If you look at their who their hiring on the Google Cloud, they're adding a lot of enterprise chops in there. They realized this years ago, and we've talked to many of the top leaders, although Curry and hasn't yet sit down with us. Um, don't know what he's hiding or waiting for, but they're clearly not geared up to chicken Pete. You can see it with some some of the things that they're doing, but I mean competed the level of Amazon, but they have strength and they're playing their strength, but they definitely recognize that they didn't have the enterprise motions and people in the DNA and that David takes time people in the enterprise. It's not for the faint of heart. It's unique details that are different. You can't just, you know, swing the Google playbook and saying We're gonna home The enterprises are text grade. They knew that years ago. So I think you're going to see a good year for Google. I think you'll see a lot of change. Um, they got great people in there. On the product marketing side is Dev Solution Architects, and then the SRE model that they have perfected has been strong. And I think security is an area that they could really had a lot of value it. So, um always been a big fan of their huge network and all the intelligence they have that they could bring to bear on security. >>Yeah, I think Google's problem main problem that to actually there many, but one is that they don't They don't have the boots on the ground as compared to um, Microsoft, especially an Amazon actually had a similar problem, but they had a wide breath off their product portfolio. I always talk about feature proximity in cloud context, like if you're doing one thing. You wanna do another thing? And how do you go get that feature? Do you go to another cloud writer or it's right there where you are. So I think Amazon has the feature proximity and they also have, uh, aske Compared to Google, there's skills gravity. Larger people are trained on AWS. I think Google is trying there. So second problem Google is having is that that they're they're more focused on, I believe, um, on the data science part on their sort of skipping the cool components sort of off the cloud, if you will. The where the workloads needs, you know, basic stuff, right? That's like your compute storage and network. And that has to be well, talk through e think e think they will do good. >>Well, so later today, Paul Dillon sits down with Mids Avery of Google used to be in Oracle. He's with Google now, and he's gonna push him on on the numbers. You know, you're a distant third. Does that matter? And of course, you know, you're just a preview of it's gonna say, Well, no, we don't really pay attention to that stuff. But, John, you said something earlier that. I think Jerry Chen made this comment that, you know, Is it a winner? Take all? No, but it's a winner. Take a lot. You know the number two is going to get a big chunk of the pie. It appears that the markets big enough for three. But do you? Does Google have to really dramatically close the gap on be a much, much closer, you know, to the to the leaders in orderto to compete in this race? Or can they just kind of continue to bump along, siphon off the ad revenue? Put it out there? I mean, I >>definitely can compete. I think that's like Google's in it. Then it they're not. They're not caving, right? >>So But But I wrote I wrote recently that I thought they should even even put mawr oven emphasis on the cloud. I mean, maybe maybe they're already, you know, doubling down triple down. I just I think that is a multi trillion dollar, you know, future for the industry. And, you know, I think Google, believe it or not, could even do more. Now. Maybe there's just so much you could dio. >>There's a lot of challenges with these company, especially Google. They're in Silicon Valley. We have a big Social Justice warrior mentality. Um, there's a big debate going on the in the back channels of the tech scene here, and that is that if you want to be successful in cloud, you have to have a good edge strategy, and that involves surveillance, use of data and pushing the privacy limits. Right? So you know, Google has people within the country that will protest contract because AI is being used for war. Yet we have the most unstable geopolitical seen that I've ever witnessed in my lifetime going on right now. So, um, don't >>you think that's what happened with parlor? I mean, Rob Hope said, Hey, bar is pretty high to kick somebody off your platform. The parlor went over the line, but I would also think that a lot of the employees, whether it's Google AWS as well, said, Hey, why are we supporting you know this and so to your point about social justice, I mean, that's not something. That >>parlor was not just social justice. They were trying to throw the government. That's Rob e. I think they were in there to get selfies and being protesters. But apparently there was evidence from what I heard in some of these clubhouse, uh, private chats. Waas. There was overwhelming evidence on parlor. >>Yeah, but my point is that the employee backlash was also a factor. That's that's all I'm saying. >>Well, we have Google is your Google and you have employees to say we will boycott and walk out if you bid on that jet I contract for instance, right, But Microsoft one from maybe >>so. I mean, that's well, >>I think I think Tom Poole's making a really good point here, which is a Google is an alternative. Thio aws. The last Google cloud next that we were asked at they had is all virtual issue. But I saw a lot of I T practitioners in the audience looking around for an alternative to a W s just seeing, though, we could talk about Mano Cloud or Multi Cloud, and Andy Jassy has his his narrative around, and he's true when somebody goes multiple clouds, they put you know most of their eggs in one basket. Nonetheless, I think you know, Google's got a lot of people interested in, particularly in the analytic side, um, in in an alternative, hedging their bets eso and particularly use cases, so they should be able to do so. I guess my the bottom line here is the markets big enough to have Really? You don't have to be the Jack Welch. I gotta be number one and number two in the market. Is that the conclusion here? >>I think so. But the data gravity and the skills gravity are playing against them. Another problem, which I didn't want a couple of earlier was Google Eyes is that they have to boot out AWS wherever they go. Right? That is a huge challenge. Um, most off the most off the Fortune 2000 companies are already using AWS in one way or another. Right? So they are the multi cloud kind of player. Another one, you know, and just pure purely somebody going 200% Google Cloud. Uh, those cases are kind of pure, if you will. >>I think it's gonna be absolutely multi cloud. I think it's gonna be a time where you looked at the marketplace and you're gonna think in terms of disaster recovery, model of cloud or just fault tolerant capabilities or, you know, look at the parlor, the next parlor. Or what if Amazon wakes up one day and said, Hey, I don't like the cubes commentary on their virtual events, so shut them down. We should have a fail over to Google Cloud should Microsoft and Option. And one of people in Microsoft ecosystem wants to buy services from us. We have toe kind of co locate there. So these are all open questions that are gonna be the that will become certain pretty quickly, which is, you know, can a company diversify their computing An i t. In a way that works. And I think the momentum around Cooper Netease you're seeing as a great connective tissue between, you know, having applications work between clouds. Right? Well, directionally correct, in my opinion, because if I'm a company, why wouldn't I wanna have choice? So >>let's talk about this. The data is mixed on that. I'll share some data, meaty our data with you. About half the companies will say Yeah, we're spreading the wealth around to multiple clouds. Okay, That's one thing will come back to that. About the other half were saying, Yeah, we're predominantly mono cloud we didn't have. The resource is. But what I think going forward is that that what multi cloud really becomes. And I think John, you mentioned Snowflake before. I think that's an indicator of what what true multi cloud is going to look like. And what Snowflake is doing is they're building abstraction, layer across clouds. Ed Walsh would say, I'm standing on the shoulders of Giants, so they're basically following points of presence around the globe and building their own cloud. They call it a data cloud with a global mesh. We'll hear more about that later today, but you sign on to that cloud. So they're saying, Hey, we're gonna build value because so many of Amazon's not gonna build that abstraction layer across multi clouds, at least not in the near term. So that's a really opportunity for >>people. I mean, I don't want to sound like I'm dating myself, but you know the date ourselves, David. I remember back in the eighties, when you had open systems movement, right? The part of the whole Revolution OS I open systems interconnect model. At that time, the networking stacks for S N A. For IBM, decadent for deck we all know that was a proprietary stack and then incomes TCP I p Now os I never really happened on all seven layers, but the bottom layers standardized. Okay, that was huge. So I think if you look at a W s or some of the comments in the chat AWS is could be the s n a. Depends how you're looking at it, right? And you could say they're open. But in a way, they want more Amazon. So Amazon's not out there saying we love multi cloud. Why would they promote multi cloud? They are a one of the clouds they want. >>That's interesting, John. And then subject is a cloud architect. I mean, it's it is not trivial to make You're a data cloud. If you're snowflake, work on AWS work on Google. Work on Azure. Be seamless. I mean, certainly the marketing says that, but technically, that's not trivial. You know, there are latent see issues. Uh, you know, So that's gonna take a while to develop. What? Do your thoughts there? >>I think that multi cloud for for same workload and multi cloud for different workloads are two different things. Like we usually put multiple er in one bucket, right? So I think you're right. If you're trying to do multi cloud for the same workload, that's it. That's Ah, complex, uh, problem to solve architecturally, right. You have to have a common ap ice and common, you know, control playing, if you will. And we don't have that yet, and then we will not have that for a for at least one other couple of years. So, uh, if you if you want to do that, then you have to go to the lower, lowest common denominator in technical sort of stock, if you will. And then you're not leveraging the best of the breed technology off their from different vendors, right? I believe that's a hard problem to solve. And in another thing, is that that that I always say this? I'm always on the death side, you know, developer side, I think, uh, two deaths. Public cloud is a proxy for innovative culture. Right. So there's a catch phrase I have come up with today during shower eso. I think that is true. And then people who are companies who use the best of the breed technologies, they can attract the these developers and developers are the Mazen's off This digital sort of empires, amazingly, is happening there. Right there they are the Mazen's right. They head on the bricks. I think if you don't appeal to developers, if you don't but extensive for, like, force behind educating the market, you can't you can't >>put off. It's the same game Stepping story was seeing some check comments. Uh, guard. She's, uh, linked in friend of mine. She said, Microsoft, If you go back and look at the Microsoft early days to the developer Point they were, they made their phones with developers. They were a software company s Oh, hey, >>forget developers, developers, developers. >>You were if you were in the developer ecosystem, you were treated his gold. You were part of the family. If you were outside that world, you were competitors, and that was ruthless times back then. But they again they had. That was where it was today. Look at where the software defined businesses and starve it, saying it's all about being developer lead in this new way to program, right? So the cloud next Gen Cloud is going to look a lot like next Gen Developer and all the different tools and techniques they're gonna change. So I think, yes, this kind of developer ecosystem will be harnessed, and that's the power source. It's just gonna look different. So, >>Justin, Justin in the chat has a comment. I just want to answer the question about elastic thoughts on elastic. Um, I tell you, elastic has momentum uh, doing doing very well in the market place. Thea Elk Stack is a great alternative that people are looking thio relative to Splunk. Who people complain about the pricing. Of course it's plunks got the easy button, but it is getting increasingly expensive. The problem with elk stack is you know, it's open source. It gets complicated. You got a shard, the databases you gotta manage. It s Oh, that's what Ed Walsh's company chaos searches is all about. But elastic has some riel mo mentum in the marketplace right now. >>Yeah, you know, other things that coming on the chat understands what I was saying about the open systems is kubernetes. I always felt was that is a bad metaphor. But they're with me. That was the TCP I peep In this modern era, C t c p I p created that that the disruptor to the S N A s and the network protocols that were proprietary. So what KUBERNETES is doing is creating a connective tissue between clouds and letting the open source community fill in the gaps in the middle, where kind of way kind of probably a bad analogy. But that's where the disruption is. And if you look at what's happened since Kubernetes was put out there, what it's become kind of de facto and standard in the sense that everyone's rallying around it. Same exact thing happened with TCP was people were trashing it. It is terrible, you know it's not. Of course they were trashed because it was open. So I find that to be very interesting. >>Yeah, that's a good >>analogy. E. Thinks the R C a cable. I used the R C. A cable analogy like the VCRs. When they started, they, every VC had had their own cable, and they will work on Lee with that sort of plan of TV and the R C. A cable came and then now you can put any TV with any VCR, and the VCR industry took off. There's so many examples out there around, uh, standards And how standards can, you know, flair that fire, if you will, on dio for an industry to go sort of wild. And another trend guys I'm seeing is that from the consumer side. And let's talk a little bit on the consuming side. Um, is that the The difference wouldn't be to B and B to C is blood blurred because even the physical products are connected to the end user Like my door lock, the August door lock I didn't just put got get the door lock and forget about that. Like I I value the expedience it gives me or problems that gives me on daily basis. So I'm close to that vendor, right? So So the middle men, uh, middle people are getting removed from from the producer off the technology or the product to the consumer. Even even the sort of big grocery players they have their APs now, uh, how do you buy stuff and how it's delivered and all that stuff that experience matters in that context, I think, um, having, uh, to be able to sell to thes enterprises from the Cloud writer Breuder's. They have to have these case studies or all these sample sort off reference architectures and stuff like that. I think whoever has that mawr pushed that way, they are doing better like that. Amazon is Amazon. Because of that reason, I think they have lot off sort off use cases about on top of them. And they themselves do retail like crazy. Right? So and other things at all s. So I think that's a big trend. >>Great. Great points are being one of things. There's a question in there about from, uh, Yaden. Who says, uh, I like the developer Lead cloud movement, But what is the criticality of the executive audience when educating the marketplace? Um, this comes up a lot in some of my conversations around automation. So automation has been a big wave to automate this automate everything. And then everything is a service has become kind of kind of the the executive suite. Kind of like conversation we need to make everything is a service in our business. You seeing people move to that cloud model. Okay, so the executives think everything is a services business strategy, which it is on some level, but then, when they say Take that hill, do it. Developers. It's not that easy. And this is where a lot of our cube conversations over the past few months have been, especially during the cova with cute virtual. This has come up a lot, Dave this idea, and start being around. It's easy to say everything is a service but will implement it. It's really hard, and I think that's where the developer lead Connection is where the executive have to understand that in order to just say it and do it are two different things. That digital transformation. That's a big part of it. So I think that you're gonna see a lot of education this year around what it means to actually do that and how to implement it. >>I'd like to comment on the as a service and subject. Get your take on it. I mean, I think you're seeing, for instance, with HP Green Lake, Dell's come out with Apex. You know IBM as its utility model. These companies were basically taking a page out of what I what I would call a flawed SAS model. If you look at the SAS players, whether it's salesforce or workday, service now s a P oracle. These models are They're really They're not cloud pricing models. They're they're basically you got to commit to a term one year, two year, three year. We'll give you a discount if you commit to the longer term. But you're locked in on you. You probably pay upfront. Or maybe you pay quarterly. That's not a cloud pricing model. And that's why I mean, they're flawed. You're seeing companies like Data Dog, for example. Snowflake is another one, and they're beginning to price on a consumption basis. And that is, I think, one of the big changes that we're going to see this decade is that true cloud? You know, pay by the drink pricing model and to your point, john toe, actually implement. That is, you're gonna need a whole new layer across your company on it is quite complicated it not even to mention how you compensate salespeople, etcetera. The a p. I s of your product. I mean, it is that, but that is a big sea change that I see coming. Subject your >>thoughts. Yeah, I think like you couldn't see it. And like some things for this big tech exacts are hidden in the plain >>sight, right? >>They don't see it. They they have blind spots, like Look at that. Look at Amazon. They went from Melissa and 200 millisecond building on several s, Right, Right. And then here you are, like you're saying, pay us for the whole year. If you don't use the cloud, you lose it or will pay by month. Poor user and all that stuff like that that those a role models, I think these players will be forced to use that term pricing like poor minute or for a second, poor user. That way, I think the Salesforce moral is hybrid. They're struggling in a way. I think they're trying to bring the platform by doing, you know, acquisition after acquisition to be a platform for other people to build on top off. But they're having a little trouble there because because off there, such pricing and little closeness, if you will. And, uh, again, I'm coming, going, going back to developers like, if you are not appealing to developers who are writing the latest and greatest code and it is open enough, by the way open and open source are two different things that we all know that. So if your platform is not open enough, you will have you know, some problems in closing the deals. >>E. I want to just bring up a question on chat around from Justin didn't fitness. Who says can you touch on the vertical clouds? Has your offering this and great question Great CP announcing Retail cloud inventions IBM Athena Okay, I'm a huge on this point because I think this I'm not saying this for years. Cloud computing is about horizontal scalability and vertical specialization, and that's absolutely clear, and you see all the clouds doing it. The vertical rollouts is where the high fidelity data is, and with machine learning and AI efforts coming out, that's accelerated benefits. There you have tow, have the vertical focus. I think it's super smart that clouds will have some sort of vertical engine, if you will in the clouds and build on top of a control playing. Whether that's data or whatever, this is clearly the winning formula. If you look at all the successful kind of ai implementations, the ones that have access to the most data will get the most value. So, um if you're gonna have a data driven cloud you have tow, have this vertical feeling, Um, in terms of verticals, the data on DSO I think that's super important again, just generally is a strategy. I think Google doing a retail about a super smart because their whole pitches were not Amazon on. Some people say we're not Google, depending on where you look at. So every of these big players, they have dominance in the areas, and that's scarce. Companies and some companies will never go to Amazon for that reason. Or some people never go to Google for other reasons. I know people who are in the ad tech. This is a black and we're not. We're not going to Google. So again, it is what it is. But this idea of vertical specialization relevant in super >>forts, I want to bring to point out to sessions that are going on today on great points. I'm glad you asked that question. One is Alan. As he kicks off at 1 p.m. Eastern time in the transformation track, he's gonna talk a lot about the coming power of ecosystems and and we've talked about this a lot. That that that to compete with Amazon, Google Azure, you've gotta have some kind of specialization and vertical specialization is a good one. But of course, you see in the big Big three also get into that. But so he's talking at one o'clock and then it at 3 36 PM You know this times are strange, but e can explain that later Hillary Hunter is talking about she's the CTO IBM I B M's ah Financial Cloud, which is another really good example of specifying vertical requirements and serving. You know, an audience subject. I think you have some thoughts on this. >>Actually, I lost my thought. E >>think the other piece of that is data. I mean, to the extent that you could build an ecosystem coming back to Alan Nancy's premise around data that >>billions of dollars in >>their day there's billions of dollars and that's the title of the session. But we did the trillion dollar baby post with Jazzy and said Cloud is gonna be a trillion dollars right? >>And and the point of Alan Answer session is he's thinking from an individual firm. Forget the millions that you're gonna save shifting to the cloud on cost. There's billions in ecosystems and operating models. That's >>absolutely the business value. Now going back to my half stack full stack developer, is the business value. I've been talking about this on the clubhouses a lot this past month is for the entrepreneurs out there the the activity in the business value. That's the new the new intellectual property is the business logic, right? So if you could see innovations in how work streams and workflow is gonna be a configured differently, you have now large scale cloud specialization with data, you can move quickly and take territory. That's much different scenario than a decade ago, >>at the point I was trying to make earlier was which I know I remember, is that that having the horizontal sort of features is very important, as compared to having vertical focus. You know, you're you're more healthcare focused like you. You have that sort of needs, if you will, and you and our auto or financials and stuff like that. What Google is trying to do, I think that's it. That's a good thing. Do cook up the reference architectures, but it's a bad thing in a way that you drive drive away some developers who are most of the developers at 80 plus percent, developers are horizontal like you. Look at the look into the psyche of a developer like you move from company to company. And only few developers will say I will stay only in health care, right? So I will only stay in order or something of that, right? So they you have to have these horizontal capabilities which can be applied anywhere on then. On top >>of that, I think that's true. Sorry, but I'll take a little bit different. Take on that. I would say yes, that's true. But remember, remember the old school application developer Someone was just called in Application developer. All they did was develop applications, right? They pick the framework, they did it right? So I think we're going to see more of that is just now mawr of Under the Covers developers. You've got mawr suffer defined networking and software, defined storage servers and cloud kubernetes. And it's kind of like under the hood. But you got your, you know, classic application developer. I think you're gonna see him. A lot of that come back in a way that's like I don't care about anything else. And that's the promise of cloud infrastructure is code. So I think this both. >>Hey, I worked. >>I worked at people solved and and I still today I say into into this context, I say E r P s are the ultimate low code. No code sort of thing is right. And what the problem is, they couldn't evolve. They couldn't make it. Lightweight, right? Eso um I used to write applications with drag and drop, you know, stuff. Right? But But I was miserable as a developer. I didn't Didn't want to be in the applications division off PeopleSoft. I wanted to be on the tools division. There were two divisions in most of these big companies ASAP. Oracle. Uh, like companies that divisions right? One is the cooking up the tools. One is cooking up the applications. The basketball was always gonna go to the tooling. Hey, >>guys, I'm sorry. We're almost out of time. I always wanted to t some of the sections of the day. First of all, we got Holder Mueller coming on at lunch for a power half hour. Um, you'll you'll notice when you go back to the home page. You'll notice that calendar, that linear clock that we talked about that start times are kind of weird like, for instance, an appendix coming on at 1 24. And that's because these air prerecorded assets and rather than having a bunch of dead air, we're just streaming one to the other. So so she's gonna talk about people, process and technology. We got Kathy Southwick, whose uh, Silicon Valley CEO Dan Sheehan was the CEO of Dunkin Brands and and he was actually the c 00 So it's C A CEO connecting the dots to the business. Daniel Dienes is the CEO of you I path. He's coming on a 2:47 p.m. East Coast time one of the hottest companies, probably the fastest growing software company in history. We got a guy from Bain coming on Dave Humphrey, who invested $750 million in Nutanix. He'll explain why and then, ironically, Dheeraj Pandey stew, Minuteman. Our friend interviewed him. That's 3 35. 1 of the sessions are most excited about today is John McD agony at 403 p. M. East Coast time, she's gonna talk about how to fix broken data architectures, really forward thinking stuff. And then that's the So that's the transformation track on the future of cloud track. We start off with the Big Three Milan Thompson Bukovec. At one oclock, she runs a W s storage business. Then I mentioned gig therapy wrath at 1. 30. He runs Azure is analytics. Business is awesome. Paul Dillon then talks about, um, IDs Avery at 1 59. And then our friends to, um, talks about interview Simon Crosby. I think I think that's it. I think we're going on to our next session. All right, so keep it right there. Thanks for watching the Cuban cloud. Uh huh.

>> Well, quick introductions for everybody kind of out there watching in the Data Summit. I'm Ali Tierney. I am the GVP. I run EMEA Sales for Snowflake, and I'm joined today with Michael Gillespie. Quick, just to introduce himself, what he does, and the DPE come structure as it goes. Go ahead, Micheal. >> Thanks, Ali. So as you said, I'm CDTO at Domino's Pizza Enterprises. So the company that I work for, we have the franchise rights and run Australia and New Zealand, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Japan, Luxembourg, and Denmark. And that's obviously Domino's Pizza for those markets. I look after four different verticals within the business. IT for the group, Strategy and Insights where our BI team resides and has a lot to do with Snowflake. Our Store Innovations Team, our Store Innovation Operations team which look at everything from robotics in store, how to use data better in store to be working at optimum level, and our digital team which is where I started in, actually, 13 years ago. And they're guiding our digital platform at a global level and how we localize it with the local marketing teams. >> Brilliant, I'm American and I grew up with Domino's Pizza, so help me understand, kind of, from a high structure. You've been there 13 years. My growing up experience was picking up a phone and pushing buttons and calling Domino's, and clearly a ton of modernization has come in the last 20 years, and you've been with the company for 13. What have you seen as you've grown into the DPE digital kind of space and you're driving that market? How are you guys using data? What have you seen happen over the last 13 years? >> Domino is itself, or at least DPE as well, has always been a data-driven business. What we've seen, though, as we've become more of a business that utilizes digital and technology to enhance, whether the customer experience or our store operations or our enterprise team. Is the availability of data to make decisions or to actually find insights. And if I look back, I've been lucky to go on a journey of 13 years with DPE. The power of analytics and data was apparent in a digital space. And it gave us a level of insight over a purchase that we never had before. So a great example of our first use of real data in a customer experience outside callbacks people are late, where we could give real-time feedback to a customer around their progression of their order through something called Pizza Tracker, which is shared across all and used across most Domino's in the world. And they're most common for most purchasing processes. Since then, we've gone from, I could count, very easily in between this call, how many orders would make in a day online, to now over 70% of our businesses online. We have a huge amount of data coming in from different, different areas of business. And now the challenge for myself and my team is how do we make this data readily available? To the local marketing teams, local operations teams. To really get better insights on the local market. So we've just gone from having a small pool of data to a tremendous quantum of data. >> So as you look to kind of localize your markets, right? I think you just mentioned seven or eight different markets that you're in. And I would assume then you have some data sharing that goes on within DPE, right? So Belgium wants something that's different than the Netherlands that was different than Japan, right? So how are you right now democratizing that data and giving it to your customers so that your end users can see how to use that, right? In local marketing in local, kind of, business uses. >> Correct. So, we have, we have nine markets now within DPE and all those markets, every market has unique needs and wants and challenges that they're trying to solve for. So our goal is to really try to simplify the access. And that's what we talk about democratizing data. We have a series of reports so we can build customized reports so that we don't have to do as many ad hoc requests. Then when giving those dashboards having the ability to customize and benchmark where you need to. And then when it comes down to a unique customer experience that's obviously going to be a localized marketing on them because different customers bought certain, certain volumes of pizza or sides and different market that's different. So we need to make the tools that each of them and or allow our marketing teams around the world to get access to the data that they can really help them make the most informed decisions to support their franchisees and stores. >> How much of your technology has moved in general to the cloud? And then secondarily to that question, as you've moved there, and I assume significant multi-clouds because you've got so many different regions and locations, how are using Snowflake to help move data into the cloud? >> I would say from a cloud perspective we're well advanced in being clouded for a majority of our platforms or at least moving in that direction. And we're being cloud friendly economic solution and some of that data solutions for quite a while. We still have some on-premise data, like most companies, and we're in the process of migrating. And we have to be aware that we operate within markets like Europe, where GDPR is there. And we have to, we have to be well across requirements from that ability that perspective. But regardless of GDPR or not with any form of customer data or employee data or any personal data we have, we know it's a privilege to hold. So anytime we are working with data we always want to make sure that we're storing it and accessing it in the most secure way. And then beyond that, we want to make sure that, as I talked about, we want to democratize data and make it more accessible. So, you know, I'm really looking forward to seeing as we build out and continue to build out our data strategy, how we continue to work with the likes of Snowflake to just bring faster and more insightful, you know, visibility into each particular market and at a global level as well. So that our global leaders can understand how the business is performing but also get micro where they need to. >> How, as you go through your cloud journey and then and with Snowflake specifically, how did you guys look to governance and how did you look to ensure your security around data? >> Yeah. So know for us, it's all about making sure we've got the right governance and controls and processes. So working with our security team, working with the right architects on data flow and processes, working with our legal team and representatives in each market and that's vital. You know, having policies and governance around any form of activity whether it be data or around changes on the website or changes even in any operational processes is important. So. >> Yeah >> And the greatest thing is if he can, you know, through, if you're making dashboards that are unquantifiable non-personal data, you know that's a lot easier to manage, as well. Because that's giving you a representation of groups not actually down to the particular customer. >> That makes perfect sense. How have you found migrating to Snowflake? Talk through that journey a little bit and I know you're relatively early in the journeys but talk at your experience has its been so far. >> You know, the BI team, my BI team and Strategy and Insights Team have definitely been huge fans of Snowflake and the support from the team there and and the partners we're using for integration. You know, one thing that I know that, that excites me from a strategic level, it's Snowflake's ability to be cloud agnostic and for us everything we build in the future we have chosen partners that we work with in the cloud space. We shouldn't be, we should always be having that ability to be flexible or we're always going to have some fragmented data sets and the ability to utilize a solution that can stretch out into those is very important. So you know, from a strategic level that's a great level of flexibility and from a micro level, and to look at how the team operate when they're coming with stories around greater efficiency, greater flexibility, reduced processing time, reduce, reduce time, reduction in costs and certain activities. That's a great story to be told. That's what I like about this story is that they were all wins. You know, I'm getting from the team that I can run more intensive workloads now. You know, that they can they can do more immediate action. You know, they are cutting down time, as I said, something down from hours to minutes down getting some early results and that's so important. >> So, tell me what kind of business insights you're delivering back to your stakeholders when you get through this process? The quick wins. >> Yeah, well I guess it's just us being able to get reports out faster. Get information out faster, Get access to any acts, build, build bespoke things quicker. It's all about Domino's as a business that's quite an entrepreneurial fast moving. So if you can find efficiencies that, like any business, that's, that's the point. But if we can find efficiencies within our team what it means is we've got a quantum of work the team can do or a service can do, or a bucket of costs can do. If we can reduce that quantum of whether it be cost or time and human effort, that means we can output more. One thing that we're also looking at is we talked about democratizing data earlier, but how can we empower, empower teams to get insights faster? Or to go, I always think there should be no one key holder. There should be key holders of obviously the security of the data and the, and the safety and the and the rules around it. But, in regards to broad insight data or in visibility of results, we should be trying to make that as accessible as possible so that teams can find the reading sites. You've got then thousands or hundreds of people that are looking. Whether it be franchisees at store or team members that had offices in different departments. If they can get greater visibility at a top level data and drill in micro and performance, imagine the insights you continue to do or if you can get reports in their hands faster. Time in a fast moving business a day or two of lost opportunity is huge. So how do you get to make those decisions faster? And how do you stay ahead of your game? >> So as you think of data cloud and as you think of how you're going to build out a DPE specific data cloud, where do you see that going? How, where do you get where's your nirvana and end goal from your data club? >> How do we make better use of that data? So, how do we win? We know that our data repositories are only going to continue to grow. You know, we're a business that was growing at a relatively strong rate. If you look at our previous results, we have a multitude of countries. We have 2,600 stores around the world pumping out pieces every night. And that's creating different forms of data. We have 70% of our customers online. When you're capturing a continuous amount of data. One thing that we want to do is not only manage it efficiently We know that capturing data is a privilege as well, so that we're capturing the right data. And then when you're capturing the right data we still know that the quantum of that will increase. So then how we are storing it and making sure that as we add more data to our repositories we are not actually making its harder to access or it's slower to access. So it's bringing down our reports that we're continuing to optimize and what we're seeing and I touched on when you're bringing time down from hours to minutes with a tool. We're doing that. We're bringing down those solutions. So being able to manage the increasing volume of data we're getting in a more efficient way. Being able to democratize the access of it in a safe, secure, but insightful way. But, you know, having the backing of a service like Snowflake in the background, supporting access and functioning about data. Hopefully, this just means that it will give us more ability to be nimble and do more in the future. >> As you've broken down data silos with using Snowflake and started to democratize data and put it all in one spot your ML becomes richer and more able to make better decisions because you got it all out of silos at this point. >> Yeah.We've got a better floral collection about data. And we can make those data repositories more accessible or no more efficient in accessing them. It's only going to enrich our models and it's going to challenge us. I can challenge and the business can challenge the strategy and insights and BI team to look at a multitude of ways as part of supporting the business. Because they've always got a backlog of reports or solutions they want to deliver. So, we had started a journey of being a data driven company. We have started the journey of a digital company many, many years ago. >> So as we leave today Michael and we wrap up. Last question I have for you is, as you know, everybody's coming and saying do the next bread is coolest next thing. What would you recommend the users of our conference? What would you say? Like how would you, how would you say to go to market and do it the right way? >> Yeah. Let's say the main thing is for those people to reflect upon their own business and understand the challenges at hand. it's very easy to be asked, why aren't we doing AI? Why aren't we doing machine learning? Why aren't we? But those are just solutions. You should be trying to take time to say okay, but what are some of that challenges? And then can we apply those technologies to it? or could a rudimentary approach, approach of just a simple report or a very basic algorithm solve for that. But if you could take your system to the next level with ML, don't do it for ML's sake or if you could take it with a complex data extract. Make sure you've got an angle inside of what you want to deliver. And then know, once you go down the path of anything more complicated, especially with things like machine learning, that it's a never-ending story. And you're probably not going to get the result you like in the first couple of weeks or month because that's what it is. It's a learning solution. It's a ever evolving beast and you can't just throw it out there and say, "Oh, everyone will be happy." So make sure you've got a fair commitment to getting into that game. And that you've got an envision in hand, and that envision will, I can tell you, usually move once you achieve it. Because you're only going to unlock more realities or more alternative solutions that'll grow from it. >> Absolutely. >> So be strong and want the challenges. >> I love that, and it's how we like to think about the data cloud in general, right? Is we are delivering to the business. At the end of the day, data is useless if you're not giving insights and ability for your business to make decisions and move forward. So I completely agree and I really appreciate the time you took today to sit down with me and educate me on Domino's and educate the world on how you're using data to make better decisions in the business. Thanks, Michael. >> Thanks for your time.

>> Announcer: From London, England, it's theCUBE, covering Coupa Inspire '19 EMEA, brought to you by Coupa. >> Hey, welcome to theCUBE! Lisa Martin on the ground in London at Coupa Inspire. Because I'm in the UK, I have to say, you know of Sting, right? Well, guess who's here? Somebody cool enough to go by one name, it's Chandar, the CMO at Coupa. Welcome back! >> Great, Lisa, it's great to be here. >> So, this morning kicked off with Rob's talk all about community. One of the interesting things about Coupa is this community that you guys have built. Talk to me about, I know $1.3 trillion of spend is going through the Coupa platform, the community. Talk to me about how you've cultivated this community at Coupa. >> Yeah, it's a great question. Now, if you take a step back, you know, people don't buy features, people buy tribal feelings. And if you think it, if you look at, like, you know, if you look at a product like Harley-Davidson. Anybody can go buy any bike, but people are not buying the features, they're buying the tribal feeling of being part of that community. If you look at a product like Peloton, you know, people can go buy, have any stationary bike or any workout bike today. But they want to be part of that community. And as my wife tells me, Sephora, right? I don't have a lot of experience with that-- >> She's right. >> She is right, great, (Lisa laughs) thanks for the endorsement there. But again, it is about being part of the community and people like that and stuff, and that's what we're doing is, it's the features or the capability, it's the community the tribal feeling, and that's what Rob was talking about, the inspirational attributes of these different people that are part of this community, and how we're trying to, how we are building this community by showcasing the great leaders and their attributes and how they're transforming change in their organizations, and that's what we're creating in this conference, the feeling, the #emotion, of I want to be part of this cool club, and that's what we're doing. >> You know, a lot of companies talk about customer first, customer centricity. The community here is really helping Coupa innovate on its own technology. Talk to me about some of the things that, you know, since we last spoke, a few months ago, that have been inspired by the voice of the community. >> Yeah, so, you know, there is this concept of co-creation that Rob talked about today with our community. And a lot of the community is inspired by the community and it's for the community. And we have a number of innovations, 80 plus innovations that have been inspired in the last one year by the community. And even a concept like Source Together that Rob talked about, and the idea of Source Together is how can we come together as one community and drive the best negotiated savings together with a supplier, this is an idea that's been co-created with the community. So there's a number of different things. You look at community intelligence, Rob talked about commodity insights, as well as a number of other capabilities that we are showcasing today, has been driven, co-created, inspired by the community. And that's what's great. You want to set the innovation agenda for the industry by having this community inspire us. In fact we had our customer advisory board at every conference that is happening for us, and that's what drives to a lot of the innovation that we do today. >> Speaking of customers, Rob shared a lot of examples during his keynote this morning. I lost count of how many of your Coupa Spendsetters were mentioned, other customers, all with very strong business, measurable business outcomes. I know tomorrow in your keynote, you're going to be talking with a number of customers. But some of the things that are interesting about what Rob shared is these are examples that aren't just about refining procurement and reducing spend and, it's much more transformative. Give me some of your favorite examples of where this is beyond improving procurement. >> Yeah, it's a great question. It's a great question. And we have a number of stories, for example, tomorrow in my keynote, I'm going to be talking about storytelling, right. I'm going to be talking about how we can inspire the community through storytelling, and great storytelling starts with great storytellers. And these Spendsetters, and we can see them in the hallways here, we have found about 15 of them, and they're all great storytellers for one reason. They have great transformative stories in business spend management, but what makes them a great storyteller is that they're telling a story beyond the boundaries of the business spend management. Let me give a couple of examples, right. So one story that I'll highlight tomorrow is about Jarkko, the CPO of Telia. Now, I don't know if we know Telia, but 60% of the word's internet traffic goes through Telia. >> 60%? >> 60%. So everyday morning, checking out coupa.com that we all do. >> Every day. >> Or I'm looking at some less popular sites like Facebook or LinkedIn or anything else, you're probably on the Telia network, especially in this part of the world. And their challenge, their business spend management challenge is, they're pretty fragmented across the Nordics and the Baltics and other regions, and now with Jarkko, he's a strategic crusader, not a hired gun, but more of a driven crusader who's come in, transformed the sourcing function, made it more strategic, consolidated seven systems into one system with Coupa, and had 20,000 employees using that as well as all the different people for sourcing, so that they get the global benefits of scale across the regions. Now that's a great business spend management story, but what makes him a great storyteller, he's telling a story beyond the boundaries of business spend management, because he's not talking about savings attainability, he's talking about environmental sustainability, and the story he talks about is what their initiative at a board level is, you know, zero emission and zero waste by 2030, and how the work that his team is doing is directly impacting that board level initiative on how are they driving a communication strategy across the supplier base to get their environmental plans into the Telia's operations, and how me measures plans and progress of every supplier in their CO2 emission, and how that's going to be an explicit part of how they work with their suppliers, and how he is the trusted advisor that he is actually challenging everybody to rethink this whole idea of source to pay. That is telling a boundary beyond the boundaries of business spend management, it's telling a story. So that's one example, right. >> Is that a gentleman who's in procurement in finance within an organization? >> He is the CPO, the procurement-- >> That is having an impact on the sustainability footprint of the company. >> That's right, so directly associating with the initiative at a board level, right. So he's shifted it, by shifting the storytelling from talking about savings attainability to environmental sustainability, he shifted the perception of the organization from something that's operational to something that's very strategic in the organization. So that's one good storytelling. The other one I'll highlight, an example, is Matthieu at Global Fund. Now the Global Fund is the world's largest financier of fighting malaria, AIDS, HIV in 100-plus countries. They disperse $4 billion every year for that. And they have this partner called OneWorld.org, it's powered by Coupa, that Matthieu and his team are doing. So he could get a great business spend management story. He can say, you know, I've driven digital transformation, I've done 99.9% of my POs are electronic, and I've come to this new age of where, you know, on contract spend is being done, et cetera. Now what makes him a great storyteller, he's telling the story beyond the boundaries of BSM again. He's talking about a story of how this, the work that his team is doing, is directly impacting saving 32 million lives. How they are treating millions of people, get the right treatment for HIV, help pregnant mothers or on HIV, they get the right treatment on time, so that the babies don't get infected with HIV, and how they're distributing hundreds of millions of mosquito nets throughout the world for preventing malaria, through this OneWorld tool that's powered by Coupa to get the right medication on time. So that's millions and millions of lives, but the speed and ease of every single medication to get there, has an impact on the life of that person, and that's the story he's telling. >> This is so interesting, because it's so common for businesses to tell the common success story, and a lot of what Coupa shares of customers holding those big white cards with big numbers of what they're saving are very impactful. What was the idea behind the Spendsetters program, 'cause when I was reading a few of them in preparation to come here, it seems like it was a little bit more about the person and how that individual has facilitated transformation. Tell me about the concept-- >> It's a great point. There's two components to it, right. One is empirical, two is emotive. And if you look at both concepts, one of them is the empirical value that, yes, ultimately Coupa is about driving value, and that has to be as a company, has a capability of driving value to our customers. And that's the empirical value of you have driven so much saving, so much percentage of spend, and you know, millions of dollars, billions of dollars savings et cetera. Procter & Gamble, for example, $2.5 billion in savings. That's the empirical value. It's very clear, that's the value. But behind that is a person, and that is the emotive story of what is that person, what is the personal story, what have they gone through in their life, what's their, you know, nurture and nature, and how that's influenced them that's becoming, that made them into the great leader today, and that's the emotive stories we're trying to also tell on the Spendsetters site. So there's the value side of the story, and then there is the emotive side of the story, and the spendsetters.com is purely on telling the human stories, because behind every purchase order is a person, and we're telling the story of that person. >> So as we look at the changing role of the Chief Procurement Officer, the changing role of finance decision makers, not just here in the UK, and I know Coupa recently did a study that showed that 96% of UK financial decision makers said, "Hey, I don't have complete visibility over all my spend", so big opportunity there, but even from a transformation perspective, the Spendsetters examples, how is that showing that Coupa can fundamentally help a business not just change procurement, but have such wide lasting impacts? >> Yeah, I think ultimately, if you look at procurement, you know, for it to go as going from operation to strategic, you're just getting that seat at the table. And getting that seat at the table in any executive discussion is about first aligning to some strategic initiative that is important at that executive table. So more as we align these value stories and the value that procurement is driving, through these strategic initiatives that are important at the board level, at the executive level, the more the profile and the more the R-E-S-P-E-C-T, as we like to say, and get that seat at the table, and that's what this whole Spendsetters program is aiming to do is A, showcase the personal heroes, and B, showcase how they're telling stories that align to bigger level initiatives, that's getting them get that elevate their position and get that seat at the table. And that's what the plan is there. >> So, lots of growth. Second quarter results, I was taking a look at those, revenues up, billings are up, very high renewal rates. So from a customer satisfaction perspective, the data is there to show that Coupa is going in the right direction. From your perspective, how influential are your existing, your incumbent customers in helping prospective customers evaluate Coupa and go, this is the right decision for us. >> It's a great question. You know, I say we live in a peer-bound world, right, where it's really, we more and more, first of all, 80 to 90% of buyers' journeys are self directed, because buyers have more power than ever before, and second of all, anything we do within our personal lives as well as in business decisions, we rely more on peers and people we trust to help us make those decisions, right? From that perspective, our best sellers, the best sellers we have in this conference, are our customers. I just came from an executive luncheon, where we had 50% of the room was customers and 50% of the room was prospects, and we had our best sellers, not our salespeople, our customers talking to the prospects, in real, authentic conversations of what's value, what's their journey, what did they struggle with, and what are the lessons learned, and how did they get there. And those are really meaningful interactions that ultimately is going to make a prospect, influence a prospect on what decision they have to make. >> Absolutely. >> So that's very, very important from us, and then providing a platform for this authentic dialog and these authentic interactions. That's important for us. And also, I think, you know, ultimately in a SaaS business, the true measurement of success, I say is two things, right. One is what I call lifetime value, and two is the number of brand advocates. So the idea there if someone is staying with you longer and giving you lifetime value, and is shouting from the rooftop that I really love my interaction with this brand, then invariably you're driving value to them in a long term way. And that's really the true measure of success, and that's what excites us from our perspective. >> And is the foundation of that trust? >> The foundation of that is two things. It's trust based on value, right, and you've got to deliver value, and Rob has a great line where he talks about, it is not about customer satisfaction, it's about customer success. 'Cause many times a customer may be satisfied, may not really know what their success metrics really mean, but it's not about sometimes a customer may not be satisfied, but really be successful because you're driving the true metrics what is important to the customer. So once you get the value delivered, and do it in an open, authentic way, then, in that case, there's trust that build, and based on that trust, you earned that trust, and that becomes the foundation of the lifetime value. >> We were talking about, well, we, Rachel Botsman was talking about the importance of a brand, any brand, earning trust. A lot of times she gave that example in her keynote where she showed three brand logos, Uber, Facebook, and Amazon, and said, trust is so contextual and so subjective, but clap for which brand you trust the most. And it's so interesting when she started talking about, Facebook got the least, in fact Facebook got no applause at all, I was expecting a few folks (Chandar laughs) to maybe do some clapping, but Amazon being the clear winner, and I thought, yeah, I trust Amazon to deliver whatever it is that I buy when they say they're going to deliver it, and she said she trusts them to do the same, but, would you trust them to pay their taxes on time-- >> Chandar: Sure. >> So when she started talking about trust being subjective and contextual, it really kind of changes the whole dynamic. >> Chandar: It does. >> So that earned trust, but also the ability to reduce the risk that your customers are facing, whether it's overpaying suppliers or paying duplicate invoices, that trust risk balance seems pretty critical as well. >> Ti does, it does. It's an interesting perspective. I think because, in that case of Amazon, I think there's operational trust, that they're going to get the job done and deliver the whatever you ordered in one day with frame or two days with frames, this is operational trust. But is there a trust in the sense of purpose is where she was going with, right. And today for organizations, especially with the millennial crowd, as being customers as well as employees, the question is, you can get operational trust, but you also have a sense of purpose that they trust in, and have that be, and be authentic as an organization. And that's why is say it is not being, you talk about AI, as artificial intelligence, the real AI is authentic interactions. >> Lisa: Authentic interactions. >> And that's really the authenticity as a brand, being open, and acknowledge your failures but strive for excellence for success, and have this open platform with your customers, and always look towards adding value. I think that invariably, over time, creates this trust feeling that ultimately drives long term lifetime value for us. So that I think is the most important thing. >> Absolutely. So tell me again, which three customers are going to be on stage with you tomorrow sharing their stories? >> It's great, I have three. One, Procter & Gamble, a company that my mom knows about, my 86-year-old mom. So one of the greatest brands, so that's a great story about, again, they have a great business spend management story, but they're telling a story beyond the boundaries of business spend management and it's a fun story. And then we're going to have the Global Fund. Again, I told you, one of the world's largest financier of fighting HIV, malaria and AIDS. And we're going to have Telia, one of the largest telecommunications providers. >> Excellent. So really kind of showing the breadth of the technologies and the industries that Coupa helps to transform. >> And the breadth of the personalities, and the people behind that are driving all this change. >> Excellent, well Chandar, thank you for joining me on theCUBE. I wish we were going to be here tomorrow to see your keynote, but it sounds exciting and the Spendsetter program is certainly one that I think is quite differentiated in terms of telling those transformative stories that you said are both empirical and emotional. >> Yes, thank you Lisa, it's great to be here. >> Likewise. >> Great. >> For Chandar, I am Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from Coupa Inspire London. Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: Live from San Diego, California. It's the Cube. Covering Cisco Live US 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back. We're here in San Diego Convention Center for Cisco Live 2019. I'm Stu Miniman and my co-hosts Dave volante. Lisa Martin's also been here for our three days, wall to wall coverage with about 28 to 30,000 here in attendance for the 30th anniversary of the user and partner show for Cisco. Happy to welcome to the program our first time guest, Jeff Scheaffer, who's Vice President of Product Management Strategy inside of Cisco. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you Stu, glad to be here. >> Alright, so Jeff DNA center, some of the environments that you have. There were some announcements on Monday, why don't we start there? Walk us through the updates to the product line. >> Thanks Stu. So we're really excited, right. >> So as you know, with Cisco, we're really building out the intent based network, in support of digital transformation for all of our customers. And one of the key aspects of the intent based network is that we have incredible programability in the network, all supported through the DNA see controller. And this week, we're really excited. We announced two new innovations in the controller. One was incorporating a new set of analytics and machine learning capabilities as part of our assurance package so that we can more quickly troubleshoot network issues. And the third is being able to connect together the multi dev environments. So how do we stitch together, the software defined access to the Software defined WAN, to the software defined data center so that we can lay digital services across the entire network. >> Stu: Yeah, it's a story we've been watching the last couple of years at Cisco is that this move to software in many ways as a unifying factor. >> Yes. >> Used to be I had all these product lines, and I need to learn the interfaces, as my friends that come to the show for many years, when you said single pane of glass, there's like, come on that's spelt P-A-I-N. Today's world, it's an API economy. And what's been really interesting to watch the last... Recently, a lot of times, it's that ml and AI underneath that spans and helps automate a lot of those pieces underneath the covers now. >> Yes, absolutely, it does. So the thing we're excited AI is a broad topic as you know. And underneath that umbrella we have built in new capabilities around the machine learning, the ability to do deep learning, as we look at anonymized data sets in the cloud on deduce patterns that people don't know yet. And then thirdly, we're looking at machine reasoning. So how do we take that the analytics to pinpoint or identify anomalies in the fabric of the network in these new IBM fabrics and then be able to couple that with a set of orchestrated automation so that we can we can emulate the behavior that a network engineer would normally do in order to troubleshoot and diagnose problems and so we're that much faster at identifying them, pinpointing the root cause and then actually being able to give recommendations if not automatically fixing it, the recommendations to resolve the issues. >> So the programability aspect, of course, we're here in the DevNet zone. So, can we dig into that a little bit? I mean I'm imagining by that, it allows me to provision, bandwidth performance, certain levels, all through API calls and it's through software. And I can set thresholds, I can talk more about what that does for me as a customer. >> Sure. So in general, within DNA center, we have a kind of very rich programability capability. It's very much an API first developed controller. So everything that we can do within the controller is a setup of published and curated API's. And those API's come in different categories. So we have API's that are around the automatic configuration and the provisioning of the network infrastructure. Very much, Dave as you're suggesting that you can run as a headless entity inside of a if somebody like a lot of service providers and partners are using this to offer a service to their end customers. And so they can automatically provision out the network and they can do that in support of new applications. We're really actually excited with that in our partnership with Red Hat, we just introduced a new set of answerable plugins as an example, to support a DevOps process by which software developers build new applications as part of that DevOps code pipeline. By using the answerable plugins, we can actually drive automation into the network to provision the networking in support of those apps. So a lot of capabilities there. >> So is the uniqueness of that you can actually do that or is the uniqueness that you're Cisco. >> I know. So to a large part of it... In terms of the way things have been done historically, and this is that most of the time, if you were to look at how do you configure a network, it was device by device and it was through command line interfaces. >> Right. >> And it's error prone, it's complex, it's cumbersome, it takes a lot of time. And so what we've done with the network controllers, is by moving above the top of the intent based network, we're actually able to automatically configure and provision either policy through policies, either QoS or segmentation for security and do that in a very automated way. And to be able to do it in a scalable way. So that is an amusing new kind of configuration mechanisms we're very proud of the work we're doing around NetComp and YANG Models and that's something that's very unique in the way we're approaching that in the market today. >> Yeah, Jeff, historically, one of the concerns was the network. It's tied to the application wasn't as tight there. It's like you talked about networking people, it's just the water that runs through the pipes that we watched with first with ACI now with intent based networking. We're getting closer and closer to that application, especially you talk about multi domain what's going on at ties right with the microservices architectures that are coming on there. So as the applications get more complicated, the network needs to be able to understand what's happening there and respond to what's needed and give back the services that they need. >> Yeah. So I think building on where you're taking that conversation, one of the really kind of key or anchor points of the whole idea around the multi domain integrations that we provided, when we bring together Software Defined access, the software defined when and the software defined data center. We're using the the rich API's that exists in all of our controllers, whether its DNA see for software defined access, whether it's vManaged for the software defined WAN, or whether it's ACI around the software defined data center. And we're integrating all three of these controllers so that they can do a couple of really important things for customers. So in the context of the application. So the very first thing is how do we provide for segmentation? So segmentation is about how do we provide access policy and drive that into the network so that the right users have access to the right applications and other people don't. And then being able to use the programability. If the user moves from say the campus to the branch, we can automatically have the policy follow the user. If the application moves from the data center to the cloud, We can have the policy automatically follow the application and that way we always ensure that the right people have access to the right applications at the right time. The other use case around the around the API's and the multi domain segmentation is that to the extent an application needs quality of service. We think about an 82% of the US we move forward in time or roughly 82% of the traffic on the internet is starting to become video on the networks and like an 8k video is 7.29 terabits per second. So how do you ensure that there's enough bandwidth and enough quality of service to ensure the latency of like virtual reality or augmented reality where latency matters. And so the other thing we're doing with policy is provisioning up the Qos, so that as you configure it in the data center, it's honored in the software defined WAN and it's honored it all the way to the end user in the software defined access. >> Stu you were saying earlier how traditional is like don't touch my network, right, okay. So Jeff, my question is if you look over the last 10 years, as you bring in the software design defined data center and infrastructure programmable and infrastructure, infrastructures code. How is that change? And is it changing the relationship between infrastructure pros and application developers and application development heads? >> Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So kind of comes from two different angles. So number one, from the extent that every software development organization becomes more and more of a DevOps organization and they want to be able to deliver value, the experience, the velocity around the applications to production, as they go through those code pipelines through the DevOps practices, they need to be able to automatically provision out test environments, they need to be able to automatically provision out the pre stage and then automatically promote the applications into production environments. And that's what why it's so important, for example, as we as we mentioned earlier about the answerable plugins that allow the configuration of the network in support of application DevOps teams. The second thing that we find with the network engineers themselves, to the extent we've defined everything as software defined. We have this rich set of digital services that we're starting to manage in these infrastructures and through the controller that programability, the controller, network engineers are having to evolve their capability. And so, you know, we're really excited that the show that Susie Wee, who leads our DevNet program introduced a whole new category of offerings in support of how you start to become both not only a network engineer, but also development aware through for example, the DevNet automation exchange, by making DevNet certifications available through Cisco certifications. And by hosting these curated communities, where we're able to contribute new applications that run on top of our controllers. We're able to contribute new integrations, new automation, logic, new AI, ml logic, everything that's possible. And by curating it, it means it's curated code, but then it's stored in very common repositories like GitHub. It's still really excited with everything she's doing. If Cisco is going to prime the pump with initially right with apps and code started-- >> We've been priming the pump. But we've actually over the last little bit, we've developed a number of partnerships. So we have over 25 partners that have built value added applications and integrations for example, DNA center, we have a number of partners that have actually taken DNA center and wrapped it with a new kind of a new service offering a solution offering to the network. I'll give you a great example. So one of our partner that Tall tale. So what they've done is they've taken DNA Center at the core and our ability to quickly provision wireless infrastructure. And they've wrapped it with a hook telling solution for Convention Center. So think about a convention center, you have a large space, multiple concurrent shows, every one of them setting up their own wireless network with their own SSID. And so the ability to set these up, tear these down, resolve problems quickly in these high density spaces. And they built out completely as a solution on top of the programability of DNA center and our IBM infrastructure. So it's a very exciting time. >> Alright, so Jeff, some new things announced but I also want you to touch on I believe, about a year ago, API and programability was launched. What lessons learned? What feedback from the customers? Give us the update. >> Yeah, so we launched the programability. And as we mentioned before, it's a kind of a very broad ecosystem of capability. Now, the first thing about, programability is really meant to do a couple of key things. One, and probably most important, is to enable all of our customers to be able to make sure that everything's fit for purpose. So how do we integrate into their existing enterprise ecosystems. And so we know we're API first, we have SDK sample apps, we have a bunch of out of the box integrations that use all these SDK for example, integrations with service now and others. And so that's new. The second thing that we're doing with all of the program abilities, we're using it to enable the community. So the challenges we all know, in technology spaces, is that the rate of innovation continues to expand. It's like innovation is on the sphere. You know, it's the surface area of the sphere. And as every year progresses, that surface area gets bigger. The rate of innovation gets bigger and the ability to keep up with that, exceeds the capacity of most organizations. So the best way to harness that is a community based approach. And if you don't have communities, if you don't have programability, if you don't take that strategic approach, it's very hard to stay current and relevant to the market of the future. So that's another big thing that we're really excited by is being able to track that community and then an ecosystem of partners in development. >> Great, Jeff, want to just give you the final word, a lot going on in your space, any final customer takeaways or things you want people to walk away from your team from Cisco Live 2019. >> Yeah, so the present thing that I'm most excited by is that as we look at the transformation of networks, from kind of the device centricity to how do we manage segmentation in these multi domain fabrics. And do that in support of ensuring quality of experience, so the bandwidth and the latency and support of the applications. Ensuring the segmentation and the secure, being able to minimize the attack surface on these new infrastructures by driving segmentation through the fabric. It really takes kind of a systems approach to this, which is how we bring the intent based network together with, for example, the new Cat9K family from Cisco and then bringing DNA centered the controller together. By bringing those two things together. We're really helping to change the entire architecture of the industry for the next 20 years. So very excited to be here. Thank you guys. >> Excellent. >> Dave: You are welcome. >> Well, Jeff Schafer, really appreciate all the updates. Congratulations on what's going there. For Dave volante, Dave, you have a final word to say. >> Well go Bruins is the only thing I can think about right now Stu. >> That's what I was expecting you to say. So Dave Volante I'm Stu Miniman. We back, getting towards the end of three days wall to wall coverage here from San Diego, for Cisco Live 2019. Thanks for watching the Cube (techy music)

>> live from Washington, D. C. It's the Cube covering a ws public sector summit I wrote to you by Amazon Web services. Welcome >> back, everyone. You are watching the Cube and we are here in our nation's capital at the A. W s Public sector summit. I'm your host, Rebecca Night hosting alongside John Furrier. We're joining Cuba LEM Doug Van Dyke, CEO of Inquisitor to our show. Thanks so much for coming back on. >> Well, thank you for having me back. It's good to be here. >> So as I said, You're a Cuba LEM. You're also a nails on alum. And there's a story there, so >> we'll just do a quick rehash of last year. So I started a day ws in 2,012 with the federal business helped the federal business grow started. The eight of US nonprofit Vertical was invited by John and in stew last year to be on the Cube. The video is a great discussion. The video is seen by some of our best partners and inquisitor who happens to be one of the best partners that I had in public sector. We started some discussions and later I was hired to be the CEO. So, John, >> thank you. I didn't know this was >> going to be a career opportunity >> for you. You're the one who's got the jobs. You through the interviews? Well, political, absolutely appreciated community. Great to have you on. Good. Thank you. Thank you for meeting with Theresa. You've known Therese for many, many years. Microsoft Public Sector Game is certainly on fire. You got Andy chassis on the fireside chat. Kind of bring in. You see the frustration like he's got problems and he's never known any for many, many years. For him to be that animated with his opinion means that it's critical more more than ever. Now, where is public sector opportunity right now? Because it seems to be clouds validated, are we? There is just a turning moment for the whole public sector community, >> yet we're so we're absolutely seeing that and inquisitive fact inquisitor. One of the things I like most about inquisitor is it is focused exclusively on the public sector, so our background is in education. If you know, a student is graduating from high school now and applying to one of the many colleges and universities they use the common application We worked with the common app to help build that system that graduating students can apply to multiple universities as opposed to when I was a graduating high school student, had to fill out the form, send in a check, wait for it to come back in the mail. Now that's all done online. You can apply to multiple colleges at the same time. So I look at that as one of the first innovations that happened in the public sector on a ws inquisitor was a part of it. It was one of the things that attracted me to inquisitor, but the innovations that was in two thousand 92 1,010 it was the beginning. We are just hitting that hockey stick that Andy has talked about in public sector, where you know, the federal business. You talked a little bit about the Intel business and how when the agency moved onto a ws, it really validated security. I think we've seen the government go in. I think we've seen education and nonprofits, so I think this is the time that public sector is really going to take off in the clouds >> about the company that you're leading is the chief now, and the product is using common app. You tell what the common app that my high school's graduates had to fill out. Okay, it's send okay. Is that it? >> That's it. That's it. So I >> got some issues with this thing. >> So follow up that was >> definitely on love on different you. Heavy lifting when filling out applications. Automate is great, but it increases the MAWR schools you can apply to, so creates more inbound applications to schools. It does. I'm sure there's some challenges there that's on the horizon with you guys is solving them that creates more. I won't say span because this legit, but a lot of schools are like people throwing in 17 applications now. 20 applications. >> Well, it's automated. I >> mean technology. So, yes, there's more automation, but there's more background. There's more data and these surgeries going on database decision. So sure we'll let me start with inquisitor. You asked about inquisitive 2,000 to quiz it's started and doing application development. It was in two thousand nine that we really saw the light to move Teo a Ws, and it was through the work that we were doing with the common app that we realised the scale of handling all these applications, that the paper based way isn't an easier. In fact, it really restricts the number of colleges that students can apply, and it restricts the number of applicants that colleges get. So with more students applying to more universities and universities receiving more applications, they can be really selective. They have more data sources, more information aboutthe people. They're going to bring on and have a very inclusive and representative university. We have students applying from China and Europe, too, United States University. So we're getting a lot of diversity, and I think you know, there's probably a little bit more volume, but that's what technology >> today is the first digital data. So that's why I appreciate that. But there's gotta be more automation machine learning going in because now you have a relationship with a student and a school. What, what's next? What happens next? >> Well, it's so Sky's the limit, and you can do once you've got data. So data reporting is basically limited by the quality of the input data. So you have more students applying with more background information, and you could get really personal. So we helped a large Ivy League university in the Northeast migrate all into a ws. And this was after we worked with common app to build the common application way helped this university migrate all into a ws and we realized that there were benefits and challenges along the way. Some of the challenges we saw were repeatable, so we built a proprietary product called Sky Map. And what sky map does is it helps the full migration. So it integrates with your discovery applications like a risk network. It integrates with a ws cloud endure and we were working with cloud endure before a ws acquired them. So we have a p I's there, it manages the whole migration. And your question was, you get all this information about an organization's infrastructure, what do you do with it? Will use the next up is a M l. So we've used some of the higher level services that a bit Amazon Web services has with artificial intelligence. We were using Lambda Server lis and we could go there because I think that's and you've >> got to hand over their 80 must educate. >> Oh, yeah, >> you know, you're great. Get a common app over there. Any university coming soon >> I would Did he mention that I saw he was >> on the show before? >> And I just think that it was You got a huge inbound educational thing going on. So education seems to be a big part of the whole themes here. >> Well, that's our legacy, and we're working with a lot of universities were seeing. So you asked, Where is the cloud going? And in the future, we're seeing large universities move all in on a WS because of they're going to get more flexibility. The costs are going to go down. They're going to have more information on the students. They're going to be able to provide better learning. >> When you're talking to your client of this this big Ivy league in the Northeast, what are its pain points? Because I mean, college admissions is a controversial topic in the United States, and its been there's been scandal this year. What? When? When you were talking with this company and they said, Well, we want to do this. But what was the problem they were trying to solve? I mean, what what were they? What were their pain points. >> Well, one of the first pain points is they were located in a major city and their data center was in the major city. And this is expensive real estate. And so to use expensive real estate that you for date us, you know, for servers, etcetera for data center instead of using it for education is a cost to the university. So very simply put, moving out of that data center opening that space up for education and moving into a ws cloud saved it gave them more space for education. It helped them with cost avoidance, and way had a bunch of lessons learned along the way. So way at the time could move about five servers a week, which may seem like a good number. But now, with the automation that we get through sky map our product, we're working with the large a group of private universities as well as Wharton University. And with this large group of private universities, we found we could do on average over 20 the best week we had 37 servers migrate, hire >> a housefly. They like to be on the cutting edge, but still there public sector. Where's the modernisation Progress on that? Because now you're you've been on both sides of the table. You were Amazon Web services. Now years leading is the CEO of this company in higher ed. How's that modernization going? What's your perspective? What's your observation around? >> Sure, So you know. First of all, I had the opportunity to go work it with the university that's local here last week. And what I love seeing is with this access to the cloud you've got, everyone in the university now has access to nearly unlimited resource is for education. They were staffing their own help desk with their students. And I love seeing that kind of experience being brought from, You know, someone who used to be an IT professional is now being brought down to a student because of thes new technologies are so readily accessible to everybody. >> So so what's that? Tell us some other things that you're seeing that you're hearing. They're they're exciting innovations to you in the in the sector. >> Yeah, well, another opportunity that were working with is we worked with the Small Business Administration, and that was pretty rewarding. For us is a small business and three of the applications that we worked on their were. So we are a small a day, and it used to take our founder TC Ratna pur e about two months. Oh, and we had to hire an outside consultant to apply for our small business accreditation. So he was doing the paperwork and all the, you know, the old school application certification. After we built this application with the Small Business Administration, it took him several hours. He did it by himself. We applied. Got the accreditation. So thes modernizations air happening both in universities as well as in the federal government. >> So what's your business plan? You're the CEO now. What's the company's plan? Which your goals. >> So there's so many things I could talk about ill talk about one or two. We see in the next 1 2 3 to 5 years in public sector that these organizations are going to migrate all in on the cloud. And so we're building up a group. That's what Sky map is mainly addressing is way. Want to make sure that organizations are able tto orchestrate their move to the cloud and we're using? We're going to start exposing the tool that we use for our own internal resource is we're gonna start exposing that, leaving that with universities in the federal government and anyone else who's willing to use it to help them get all in on the cloud. Then we think there's probably going to be a wave where they're trying. Teo, learn the cloud and howto operate It will help them is a manage service provider. And then where I'm excited is you go to server lists and I mentioned were already using Lambda for our sky map product that we see in the future after the M S P V organisations. They're going to be servant lis and they'll be running into no ops environments. >> The classic example of sometimes you your business evolves areas you don't know based off on the wave You're on you guys, we're very proficient at migrating We are now You got sky map which is you're gonna take that those learnings and pay it forward bringing >> that are bringing them to the market that >> we don't have to do that themselves by build kind of thing. >> Well, and it's a little bit like you're doing here, John. And what a ws >> is the only one I get up. I tell everybody that, like >> a ws did eight of us start is away for Amazon to manage their internal servers. And, you know, eventually they realized everyone else in the market can use thes same innovations that they've got. And, >> well, I think this proves the point that if you assassin based model with open AP eyes, you Khun offer and pretty much anything is a service. If you get the speed and agility equation right, someone might say why she is not a court company. Why should I buy? I'll just use that service. I hope so. It's the sad, small hopes up. >> Yeah, and sorry. >> I was going to say you were on the inside. Now you're on the outside of that. This conference. What are your impressions? What are you What kind of conversations are you having that you are going to take back to inquisitor and say, Hey, I learned this at the summit. Are these people over here working on something cool? We got to get this in >> here. Well, it's been really fun for me is a change of perspective. For the last seven years, I've been helping plan and organize the event. Make sure it >> goes off this time. I'm a guest. You know, e I look a little bit >> more relaxed than last year is because, you know, I'm a guest now, but the takeaways are really You know, the innovation is continuing at A W s. And, you know, as a partner of Amazon Web services, I've got to make sure that my team and I stay up to date with all of the services that are being released and simplify those. And, like John was asking earlier, you know, make sure that there's a strategy for migration support and then continuing to re factor what they're doing. >> Well, congratulations on the new job. Get a great tale. When, with cloud growth adoption just early days, public sector continuing toe astonished with numbers. Next, she'll be 38,000 people. A lawsuit is like reinvent size, only 30,000 people. >> This is huge. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm sure you guys are enjoying it as well. >> Yeah, I know. It's been great, Doug. Thanks so much for returning to the Q B. I your two time >> alone. Thank you. Thank >> you. I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. We will have more from the Amazon, Uh, a ws public sector, something coming up in just a little bit.

>> From the heart of Silicon Valley, it's the Cube, covering CloudNOW's seventh annual Top Women Entrepreneurs in Cloud Innovation Awards. (upbeat music) >> Lisa Martin on the ground with the Cube at Facebook headquarters. We are at the seventh annual CloudNOW Top Women Entrepreneurs in Cloud Innovations Awards event. Joined by one of the 2016 winners welcoming you back to the Cube Syamala Bandla you are now at Facebook, a Director of Production Engineering. Welcome back to the Cube. >> Thank you Lisa. >> So we are at Facebook Headquarters, and we were talking with Jocelyn DeGance Graham a little bit ago who is the founder of CloudNOW. Their 7th annual event, first time at Facebook, and you a past winner are largely responsible for getting Facebook to say yes. Tell us a little bit about how you are paying it forward as a winner and enabling this years awards to have such a boost up. >> So I attended the CloudNOW event at the Google campus in 2016, and when I walked out of the event just not being the award recipient, but just meeting the other award winners, as well as the speakers, I was completely pumped up and charged. When I joined Facebook last year I saw how much deeply Facebook actually cares about diversity and inclusion. And I know that cloud computing and conversion technologies as an area where women are under represented. So when I pitched to my leadership team that when we care so much about, we should be hosting this years event and they jumped on board immediately. >> So it was an easy sell, but something also that's pretty remarkable that you should know about is that this year one of the keynote speakers is the COO of Facebook Sheryl Sandberg, and again Syamala you were instrumental in securing Sheryl who has a crazy busy schedule. That's huge for everybody here, and the ground swell of women in technology. Tell us a little bit about that coup. >> So when we decided finally to host it and as we were planning and all the line up of, great line up of speakers and the winners. We couldn't have thought about anybody else to do the opening remarks than Sheryl Sandberg. I know we had, she had, a very very tough schedule but my leadership team and I, we were persistent, and it's an honor to have her here to do the opening remarks. >> Absolutely yes. So talk to us a little bit about your tenure here at Facebook, you mentioned joining about eight or nine months or so ago and being a culture that fosters diversity, gender diversity, thought diversity. Tell us a little bit about your team in production engineering and how that culture, how are you helping to grow that? >> That's a great question. So definitely I'll be very honest, we have a lot more to do. Production engineering predominately in the industry is male-dominated. But just this year, just in the teams around me, we have hired quite a bit of female managers as well as individual contributors. And the support we get from our peers, the open thoughts, the collaboration, it's just great to be in an environment where we can foster that culture. >> And one of the things too, tell me about your background. Is your education background in a STEM field? Your engineering background? >> Yes. >> Yes, so talk to us about one of the things that's also challenging that we're all very familiar with, with women in technical roles, is the under representation, but it's also being able to retain women. You are establishing a great tech career yourself, what's your advice for inspiring your generation, and then the younger generation that you're helping to hire here at Facebook, to stay in technology. >> So cloud computing or technology, I mean we all have to pay it forward. I think we as women who are in influential positions and can make an impact on the younger generation I think need to absolutely do a lot more to pay it forward. It is not only with awareness but also wherever, whenever you get opportunities try to mentor students. Early on in their career encourage them to believe in themselves, to reach out for mentors and sponsors, do networking, which I think in general girls and women they shy away from it. I would say networking, meeting with people in the industry, they would be learning a lot more early on in their career. >> Great advice. One of the things that's also fantastic, and a first for this 7th annual CloudNOW event, is its, not only is it sold out, they're expecting over 300 attendees here tonight, both men and women, but also there was no advertising for the selling of tickets, so this was all word of mouth from the sponsors, Facebook, Google, Intel, past winners like yourself. So Jocelyn talked about that ground swell, that momentum that we're all feeling, what are your expectations for the event tonight? >> First of all we are super thrilled and excited. Like when I look at the list of the guest list, when I look at the speakers, when I look at the winners. I mean it was just the word of mouth as we started telling who will be the speakers and we will have a VC panel, and the winners. I think the word of mouth really paid it forward and we're super thrilled to have about close to 300 people attending the evening tonight. >> And there's a really nice diverse set of winners you mentioned. I was chatting with Jocelyn earlier and this is the first year that they've been able to recognize female, technical founders who are venture backed. And there's a variety of technologies, we're going to be speaking with all the winners tonight from the smart homes, the smart apartments technology, to blockchain, intelligence on blockchain, so the diversity there, and also not just the technologies but also the background of some of these entrepreneurs who, one of them is a lawyer who was a practicing attorney for 17 years founding Digitory Legal. Just really interesting backgrounds, what are your thoughts on that? >> So I think when we looked we had more than 100 nominees. It was very very hard, and I was also part of the committee as we were going through the winner, choosing the winners. It was very hard. But one of the things we really wanted to make sure was that we had a diverse set of winners. Not only from their backgrounds, but also the technology domain they were representing, which is very very important. And as we were going through the planning deck, and looking at the presentations, I can't wait to hear what they have to present. It is so thrilling to see the accomplishments and what they have achieved in their respective fields. >> And we're excited as well. Syamala thanks for taking time to stop by and join us on the program tonight, and it was good to see you again. >> Thank you so much Lisa, it's been a pleasure being here. Thank You >> Excellent. We want to thank you for watching Lisa Martin on the ground at Facebook for the Cube. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> From Boston, Massachusets it's theCube. Covering LiveWorx 18. Brought to you by PTC. >> Welcome back to bean town, everybody. This is theCube, the leader in live tech coverage, and we're covering LiveWorx, the three day conference hosted by PTC. We're at the BCEC, which is kind of the Starship Enterprise. I'm Dave Vellante, with my co-host Stu Miniman. As I say, Cube one day coverage of this three day conference. Maciek Kranz is here. He's the Vice President of Strategic Innovations at Cisco. Maciek, thanks for coming on theCube. >> Thank you so much for having me. It really looks like a cube. >> Usually we're out in the open, but they've put us here in a cube, which is great. Of course we were at Cisco Live last week. You were there, it was an awesome show. 27, 28 thousand people. A lot of the innovations that we're talking about here, you guys, you know, at Cisco, are obviously touching upon. Whether it was blockchain or the edge. May I ask you, innovation's in your title. What are you doing here at this conference? >> Basically we're on the mission to make sure that every company, large and small, whatever the industry you're in, gets started on the IOT journey. All of us here, we were talking about it last week at Cisco Live, we are sort of on the mission to make sure that everybody knows how to do it, how to get started, how to go through the journey. So I'm here to promote the cause. >> You had posted a blog a little bit ago on LinkedIn. Check it out, if you go to Maciek's LinkedIn profile you'll see it. Five myths around IOT, and I thought it was quite instructive. I'm going to start with the middle of it, which is IOT is this one big market, and we've been talking about how it's a trillion dollar market. It's almost impossible to size. It's so fragmented, and bringing together the operations technology and information technology world, and there's the edge, there's the core, there's hardware, there's software, there's services. How should we think about the IOT, obviously not as one big market as you pointed out in your blog. >> Right, and you actually nailed it. When you think about sort of a traditional way that technology companies think about the market, it was sort of model of just get a billion people to get on your platform and the good things will happen. Well in the IOT space, as you pointed out, it's a very fragmented market. So you basically need to have two strategies. You either become a horizontal specialist and then you integrate with a vertical specialist to develop a joint solution, or you focus on use case and you focus on one market, and you go deep and focus with customers. So from that perspective the approach is different, but in a nutshell to be successful in this space, it's not only about technology, it's about ecosystem. It's about building the coaliltion of the willing, because at the end of the day, the customers want solutions to their problems. And they don't want to just buy your technology, they want to work with you on developing solutions that drive business outcomes. >> Maciek, one of the things that's been interesting to watch is that people want to try, and they want to try faster. One of the big benefits of public cloud was that I have this sandbox that I could throw some people at, have a little bit of money, and try things and fail and try again. One of the concerns I have when I hear things like PTC and Microsoft get up on stage and say, "It's going to take 20 to 25 partners to put this together." When I hear that it's fragmented, it's going to take time, it's going to take money, help us. Are there are ways I can start playing with things to understand what will and what won't work for my environment, or is this something that I have to throw a million dollars and group of people for a year and a half on? >> It's actually a great point, and it's another, I would say, misconception, which is I need to go deep, have a sort of a big strategy. One of the things that I talk about with the customers is, yes, dream big but start small. So yes, have a sort of a big vision, big architecture, but then focus on a first project, because it's a multi-year, multi-phased journey. So from that perspective, you know, at Cisco we have roughly 14,000 customers that already got started on this IOT journey, and the use cases that we've seen sort of are in four different categories. First one is connect things, so connecting your operations, the second one is remote operations, the third one is predictive analytics, the fourth one is preventive maintenance. So don't be a hero, pick one of these four use cases, try it out, then do a ROI on this, and if your ROI is positive then do a next, maybe more sophisticated, more adventurous kind of a project down the road. So pace yourself. >> This is our 9th year doing theCube, and the one thing we've learned about information technology, operations technology, is it all comes back to data. And you pointed out again, you pointed it out in your piece, it's not just about connecting, it's about the data. So let's talk about the data, the data model. You've got edge, you've got core. You've got this really increasingly complex and elongating data pipeline. You've got physics, you've got latency. So what's your perspective on the data, how that's evolving, and how organizations need to take advantage of the data? >> Dave, I think you nailed it. It may come across funny because I work for Cisco and we connect things, but if you think about the first wave of internet, the main purpose of the devices and the way we were connecting them, was basically for you and I to get access to each other, to get access to the online data, to the online processes. The main purpose we connecting IOT devices, so that they can generate the data, and then we can analyze that data, turn these systems into solutions to drive business outcomes. So from that perspective we're actually seeing a big shift in the sort of data model, and it requires flexibility. Traditionally, we talked about cloud, right? In a cloud we usually see the use cases that require a processing of a lot of data, sort of in the batch possessing mode, or for example if you want to connect a bunch of vending machines, you can connect them directly to the cloud, because these machines actually send only very few packets and they send them very infrequently. Basically saying, "Hey, come on over "and replenish a bunch of supplies." But if you look at connected vehicle, if you look at an oil rig, in the case of oil rig, there's let's say a large one that has 100,000 sensors. These sensors generate a couple terabytes of data per day. You can't just send this data directly to the cloud through the satellite connection, right? You have to process the data on the oil rig based on the policy coming from the cloud. So from that perspective we've seen that there's a need for a more flexible architecture. We call it Fog Computing, which basically allows you to have flexibility of extending the cloud to the edge so you can process the data at the edge. You can execute on the AI functions at the edge as well. So that's one of the big architectural shifts that we've seen with IOT as well. >> Maciek, one of the opportunities of new architectures has been to do a redo for security. When it comes to IOT, though, there's a lot of concern around that, because just the surface area that we're going to have, the devices. Talk to us about how security fits into IOT. >> Yeah, it's hard to talk about IOT without mentioning security, right? And we obviously seen over the last two years a lot of press around IOT denial of service attacks and so forth, and for me I think the silver lining out of all of this news is that, first of all, that we have seen the vendor community finally taking IOT security seriously. So all the security vendors are actually investing in IOT security now appropriately. We now working together as an industry on standards, on interoperability, on sort of come on architectures, even with the device vendors who traditionally didn't pay much attention to security as well. Sort of like what we did with wifi, you remember, about 15 years ago but at a much greater scale. So the vendor community's focusing on it, but more importantly also the businesses are moving from what I would consider sort of a... I would say that kind of a denial. Hoping that their plant is not connected to the outside world and that it's secure. Moving down now to the much more modern model, which is basically a comprehensive architecture working with are-see-sos, across the enterprise, focusing on before, during, and after. So IOT now is being integrated into a broader security architecture, and IT and OT are working together. So yes, there is a concern, yes. There are a lot of events hitting the news, but I also think as an industry we're making progress. >> Just to follow up on that, Cisco obviously has an advantage in security, because you go end-to-end, you guys make everything, and you can do deep-packet inspection, and that seems to be a real advantage here. But then there's this thing called blockchain, and everybody talks about how blockchain can be applied. Where do you see blockchain fitting into the security equation? >> Yeah, I think that's a good question. Maybe a bit more broader story, I actually believe there's four legs to this digital transformations tool. There's IOT generating the data and acting on the decisions, there's AI, there is the fog computing we talked about, and the fourth tool is blockchain, which basically allows us to make sure that the data we're using we can actually trust. At the high level blockchain, people often confuse blockchain and Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, but blockchain is an underlying technology behind sort of the crypto, that allows basically multiple parties to write their transactions in a fast and permanent way. But in the enterprise context, in IOT context, blockchain allows us to actually come up with very new use cases by looking at the provenance, and looking at the data across multiple parties. The data we can trust. For example, the use cases such as counterfeiting, there are use cases like food safety. Like patient records. Like provenance of materials. So now we can enable these use cases, because we have a single source of truth. >> I want to ask you about disruption. I like the mental model and picture that you created before of a horizontal technologies, and you kind of get vertical industries, and it seems like, again I'm bringing it back to data. We heard Super Mario at the host of the conference say this was the largest digital transformation conference. Which we laughed, like every conference is a digital transformation conference. But to us, digital transformation, digital means data. And that picture you drew of horizontal technology and vertical industries, it's all data, and data enables disruption. It used to be a vertical stack of talent and manufacturing and supply chain within an industry, and now data seems to be blowing that to pieces in digital. You see Amazon getting into, you know, buying Whole Foods in grocery. You see Apple in financial services. Others, Silicon Valley type companies, disrupting healthcare, which we all know needs disruption. What do you make of disruption? It seems like no industry is safe. It seems like Silicon Valley has this dual disruption agenda. Horizontal technology and then partnering within industries, and everything is getting turned up on its side. What do you make of it all? >> Dave, I think you nailed it. It is about and verus or, right? When you think about companies, you mentioned Microsoft, Cisco, Amazon, verus PTC or Rockwell, or Emerson and others. 10 years ago we sort of lived on a different planet, right, and rarely these companies even talked to each other. And now, even at this show, these companies are actually showing joint solutions. So that's precisely, I think, what we've seen, which is technology competence coming from the Valley and from traditional technology industry, and then the vertical and market expertise coming from these more traditional vendors. At the end of the day, it is about technology, but it is also about talent. It is about skillsets. It's about all of us pulling our resources together to develop solutions to drive business outcomes. So cloud, obviously, was a very disruptive force in our industry. But when you think about IOT, just based on what you just said, it seems to me given the assets, the resources, the people, the plants, the equipment, it seems like IOT is maybe somewhat evolutionary. Not a completely... It's a disruptive force in that's new and that it's different, but it seems like the incumbents, I mean look at PTC, their resurgence. It seems like the incumbents have an advantage here. What are your thoughts? >> I think that if they play it right they absolutely do. But it requires also a shift in mindset, and I think we seeing it already, which is moving from a vertical, one company does it all kind of mentality, into the lets build an ecosystem based on open systems, open standards, interoperability. And that's sort of a shift I think we are seeing. So for me, I think that the incumbents, if they embrace this kind of a model, they absolutely have a critical role to play. On the flip side, the technology companies realizing that they need to, it's not only about technology, but it's also about partnering. It's about integrating within legacy ecosystems and the legacy infrastructure. So each of the sides of the coin need to learn new tricks. >> Okay, last question, is your initial thoughts, anyway, on this event, some initial take aways. I know it's early, day one, but you've been here. You've heard the keynotes. Final thoughts? >> I think so far it's actually a great start to the event. I have to say, what we've talked about already, my biggest take away is to see, and actually joy, is to see companies from different walks of life working together. You have robotics companies, you have AI companies, you have industrial companies. All of them are coming up with solutions together, and that's basically what we want to see. Is breaking the barriers and multiple companies working together to move the industry forward. >> And you're also seeing the big SIs are here. I can see Accenture, I can see Deloid. I know InfoSys is here, et cetera, et cetera. So if they're here, you know there's a lot of money to be made. So Maciek, thanks very much. It's really a pleasure having you. Alright, keep it right there, everybody. This is theCube, from LiveWorx in Boston. We'll be right back after this short break.