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

(upbeat music) >> Hello, everybody. This is Dave Vellante. Welcome back to Supercloud2, where we're exploring the intersection of data analytics and the future of cloud. In this segment, we're going to look at how the Supercloud will support a new class of applications, not just work that runs on multiple clouds, but rather a new breed of apps that can orchestrate things in the real world. Think Uber for many types of businesses. These applications, they're not about codifying forms or business processes. They're about orchestrating people, places, and things in a business ecosystem. And I'm pleased to welcome my colleague and friend, George Gilbert, former Gartner Analyst, Wiki Bond market analyst, former equities analyst as my co-host. And we're thrilled to have Tristan Handy, who's the founder and CEO of DBT Labs and Bob Muglia, who's the former President of Microsoft's Enterprise business and former CEO of Snowflake. Welcome all, gentlemen. Thank you for coming on the program. >> Good to be here. >> Thanks for having us. >> Hey, look, I'm going to start actually with the SuperCloud because both Tristan and Bob, you've read the definition. Thank you for doing that. And Bob, you have some really good input, some thoughts on maybe some of the drawbacks and how we can advance this. So what are your thoughts in reading that definition around SuperCloud? >> Well, I thought first of all that you did a very good job of laying out all of the characteristics of it and helping to define it overall. But I do think it can be tightened a bit, and I think it's helpful to do it in as short a way as possible. And so in the last day I've spent a little time thinking about how to take it and write a crisp definition. And here's my go at it. This is one day old, so gimme a break if it's going to change. And of course we have to follow the industry, and so that, and whatever the industry decides, but let's give this a try. So in the way I think you're defining it, what I would say is a SuperCloud is a platform that provides programmatically consistent services hosted on heterogeneous cloud providers. >> Boom. Nice. Okay, great. I'm going to go back and read the script on that one and tighten that up a bit. Thank you for spending the time thinking about that. Tristan, would you add anything to that or what are your thoughts on the whole SuperCloud concept? >> So as I read through this, I fully realize that we need a word for this thing because I have experienced the inability to talk about it as well. But for many of us who have been living in the Confluence, Snowflake, you know, this world of like new infrastructure, this seems fairly uncontroversial. Like I read through this, and I'm just like, yeah, this is like the world I've been living in for years now. And I noticed that you called out Snowflake for being an example of this, but I think that there are like many folks, myself included, for whom this world like fully exists today. >> Yeah, I think that's a fair, I dunno if it's criticism, but people observe, well, what's the big deal here? It's just kind of what we're living in today. It reminds me of, you know, Tim Burns Lee saying, well, this is what the internet was supposed to be. It was supposed to be Web 2.0, so maybe this is what multi-cloud was supposed to be. Let's turn our attention to apps. Bob first and then go to Tristan. Bob, what are data apps to you? When people talk about data products, is that what they mean? Are we talking about something more, different? What are data apps to you? >> Well, to understand data apps, it's useful to contrast them to something, and I just use the simple term people apps. I know that's a little bit awkward, but it's clear. And almost everything we work with, almost every application that we're familiar with, be it email or Salesforce or any consumer app, those are applications that are targeted at responding to people. You know, in contrast, a data application reacts to changes in data and uses some set of analytic services to autonomously take action. So where applications that we're familiar with respond to people, data apps respond to changes in data. And they both do something, but they do it for different reasons. >> Got it. You know, George, you and I were talking about, you know, it comes back to SuperCloud, broad definition, narrow definition. Tristan, how do you see it? Do you see it the same way? Do you have a different take on data apps? >> Oh, geez. This is like a conversation that I don't know has an end. It's like been, I write a substack, and there's like this little community of people who all write substack. We argue with each other about these kinds of things. Like, you know, as many different takes on this question as you can find, but the way that I think about it is that data products are atomic units of functionality that are fundamentally data driven in nature. So a data product can be as simple as an interactive dashboard that is like actually had design thinking put into it and serves a particular user group and has like actually gone through kind of a product development life cycle. And then a data app or data application is a kind of cohesive end-to-end experience that often encompasses like many different data products. So from my perspective there, this is very, very related to the way that these things are produced, the kinds of experiences that they're provided, that like data innovates every product that we've been building in, you know, software engineering for, you know, as long as there have been computers. >> You know, Jamak Dagani oftentimes uses the, you know, she doesn't name Spotify, but I think it's Spotify as that kind of example she uses. But I wonder if we can maybe try to take some examples. If you take, like George, if you take a CRM system today, you're inputting leads, you got opportunities, it's driven by humans, they're really inputting the data, and then you got this system that kind of orchestrates the business process, like runs a forecast. But in this data driven future, are we talking about the app itself pulling data in and automatically looking at data from the transaction systems, the call center, the supply chain and then actually building a plan? George, is that how you see it? >> I go back to the example of Uber, may not be the most sophisticated data app that we build now, but it was like one of the first where you do have users interacting with their devices as riders trying to call a car or driver. But the app then looks at the location of all the drivers in proximity, and it matches a driver to a rider. It calculates an ETA to the rider. It calculates an ETA then to the destination, and it calculates a price. Those are all activities that are done sort of autonomously that don't require a human to type something into a form. The application is using changes in data to calculate an analytic product and then to operationalize that, to assign the driver to, you know, calculate a price. Those are, that's an example of what I would think of as a data app. And my question then I guess for Tristan is if we don't have all the pieces in place for sort of mainstream companies to build those sorts of apps easily yet, like how would we get started? What's the role of a semantic layer in making that easier for mainstream companies to build? And how do we get started, you know, say with metrics? How does that, how does that take us down that path? >> So what we've seen in the past, I dunno, decade or so, is that one of the most successful business models in infrastructure is taking hard things and rolling 'em up behind APIs. You take messaging, you take payments, and you all of a sudden increase the capability of kind of your median application developer. And you say, you know, previously you were spending all your time being focused on how do you accept credit cards, how do you send SMS payments, and now you can focus on your business logic, and just create the thing. One of, interestingly, one of the things that we still don't know how to API-ify is concepts that live inside of your data warehouse, inside of your data lake. These are core concepts that, you know, you would imagine that the business would be able to create applications around very easily, but in fact that's not the case. It's actually quite challenging to, and involves a lot of data engineering pipeline and all this work to make these available. And so if you really want to make it very easy to create some of these data experiences for users, you need to have an ability to describe these metrics and then to turn them into APIs to make them accessible to application developers who have literally no idea how they're calculated behind the scenes, and they don't need to. >> So how rich can that API layer grow if you start with metric definitions that you've defined? And DBT has, you know, the metric, the dimensions, the time grain, things like that, that's a well scoped sort of API that people can work within. How much can you extend that to say non-calculated business rules or governance information like data reliability rules, things like that, or even, you know, features for an AIML feature store. In other words, it starts, you started pragmatically, but how far can you grow? >> Bob is waiting with bated breath to answer this question. I'm, just really quickly, I think that we as a company and DBT as a product tend to be very pragmatic. We try to release the simplest possible version of a thing, get it out there, and see if people use it. But the idea that, the concept of a metric is really just a first landing pad. The really, there is a physical manifestation of the data and then there's a logical manifestation of the data. And what we're trying to do here is make it very easy to access the logical manifestation of the data, and metric is a way to look at that. Maybe an entity, a customer, a user is another way to look at that. And I'm sure that there will be more kind of logical structures as well. >> So, Bob, chime in on this. You know, what's your thoughts on the right architecture behind this, and how do we get there? >> Yeah, well first of all, I think one of the ways we get there is by what companies like DBT Labs and Tristan is doing, which is incrementally taking and building on the modern data stack and extending that to add a semantic layer that describes the data. Now the way I tend to think about this is a fairly major shift in the way we think about writing applications, which is today a code first approach to moving to a world that is model driven. And I think that's what the big change will be is that where today we think about data, we think about writing code, and we use that to produce APIs as Tristan said, which encapsulates those things together in some form of services that are useful for organizations. And that idea of that encapsulation is never going to go away. It's very, that concept of an API is incredibly useful and will exist well into the future. But what I think will happen is that in the next 10 years, we're going to move to a world where organizations are defining models first of their data, but then ultimately of their business process, their entire business process. Now the concept of a model driven world is a very old concept. I mean, I first started thinking about this and playing around with some early model driven tools, probably before Tristan was born in the early 1980s. And those tools didn't work because the semantics associated with executing the model were too complex to be written in anything other than a procedural language. We're now reaching a time where that is changing, and you see it everywhere. You see it first of all in the world of machine learning and machine learning models, which are taking over more and more of what applications are doing. And I think that's an incredibly important step. And learned models are an important part of what people will do. But if you look at the world today, I will claim that we've always been modeling. Modeling has existed in computers since there have been integrated circuits and any form of computers. But what we do is what I would call implicit modeling, which means that it's the model is written on a whiteboard. It's in a bunch of Slack messages. It's on a set of napkins in conversations that happen and during Zoom. That's where the model gets defined today. It's implicit. There is one in the system. It is hard coded inside application logic that exists across many applications with humans being the glue that connects those models together. And really there is no central place you can go to understand the full attributes of the business, all of the business rules, all of the business logic, the business data. That's going to change in the next 10 years. And we'll start to have a world where we can define models about what we're doing. Now in the short run, the most important models to build are data models and to describe all of the attributes of the data and their relationships. And that's work that DBT Labs is doing. A number of other companies are doing that. We're taking steps along that way with catalogs. People are trying to build more complete ontologies associated with that. The underlying infrastructure is still super, super nascent. But what I think we'll see is this infrastructure that exists today that's building learned models in the form of machine learning programs. You know, some of these incredible machine learning programs in foundation models like GPT and DALL-E and all of the things that are happening in these global scale models, but also all of that needs to get applied to the domains that are appropriate for a business. And I think we'll see the infrastructure developing for that, that can take this concept of learned models and put it together with more explicitly defined models. And this is where the concept of knowledge graphs come in and then the technology that underlies that to actually implement and execute that, which I believe are relational knowledge graphs. >> Oh, oh wow. There's a lot to unpack there. So let me ask the Colombo question, Tristan, we've been making fun of your youth. We're just, we're just jealous. Colombo, I'll explain it offline maybe. >> I watch Colombo. >> Okay. All right, good. So but today if you think about the application stack and the data stack, which is largely an analytics pipeline. They're separate. Do they, those worlds, do they have to come together in order to achieve Bob's vision? When I talk to practitioners about that, they're like, well, I don't want to complexify the application stack cause the data stack today is so, you know, hard to manage. But but do those worlds have to come together? And you know, through that model, I guess abstraction or translation that Bob was just describing, how do you guys think about that? Who wants to take that? >> I think it's inevitable that data and AI are going to become closer together? I think that the infrastructure there has been moving in that direction for a long time. Whether you want to use the Lakehouse portmanteau or not. There's also, there's a next generation of data tech that is still in the like early stage of being developed. There's a company that I love that is essentially Cross Cloud Lambda, and it's just a wonderful abstraction for computing. So I think that, you know, people have been predicting that these worlds are going to come together for awhile. A16Z wrote a great post on this back in I think 2020, predicting this, and I've been predicting this since since 2020. But what's not clear is the timeline, but I think that this is still just as inevitable as it's been. >> Who's that that does Cross Cloud? >> Let me follow up on. >> Who's that, Tristan, that does Cross Cloud Lambda? Can you name names? >> Oh, they're called Modal Labs. >> Modal Labs, yeah, of course. All right, go ahead, George. >> Let me ask about this vision of trying to put the semantics or the code that represents the business with the data. It gets us to a world that's sort of more data centric, where data's not locked inside or behind the APIs of different applications so that we don't have silos. But at the same time, Bob, I've heard you talk about building the semantics gradually on top of, into a knowledge graph that maybe grows out of a data catalog. And the vision of getting to that point, essentially the enterprise's metadata and then the semantics you're going to add onto it are really stored in something that's separate from the underlying operational and analytic data. So at the same time then why couldn't we gradually build semantics beyond the metric definitions that DBT has today? In other words, you build more and more of the semantics in some layer that DBT defines and that sits above the data management layer, but any requests for data have to go through the DBT layer. Is that a workable alternative? Or where, what type of limitations would you face? >> Well, I think that it is the way the world will evolve is to start with the modern data stack and, you know, which is operational applications going through a data pipeline into some form of data lake, data warehouse, the Lakehouse, whatever you want to call it. And then, you know, this wide variety of analytics services that are built together. To the point that Tristan made about machine learning and data coming together, you see that in every major data cloud provider. Snowflake certainly now supports Python and Java. Databricks is of course building their data warehouse. Certainly Google, Microsoft and Amazon are doing very, very similar things in terms of building complete solutions that bring together an analytics stack that typically supports languages like Python together with the data stack and the data warehouse. I mean, all of those things are going to evolve, and they're not going to go away because that infrastructure is relatively new. It's just being deployed by companies, and it solves the problem of working with petabytes of data if you need to work with petabytes of data, and nothing will do that for a long time. What's missing is a layer that understands and can model the semantics of all of this. And if you need to, if you want to model all, if you want to talk about all the semantics of even data, you need to think about all of the relationships. You need to think about how these things connect together. And unfortunately, there really is no platform today. None of our existing platforms are ultimately sufficient for this. It was interesting, I was just talking to a customer yesterday, you know, a large financial organization that is building out these semantic layers. They're further along than many companies are. And you know, I asked what they're building it on, and you know, it's not surprising they're using a, they're using combinations of some form of search together with, you know, textual based search together with a document oriented database. In this case it was Cosmos. And that really is kind of the state of the art right now. And yet those products were not built for this. They don't really, they can't manage the complicated relationships that are required. They can't issue the queries that are required. And so a new generation of database needs to be developed. And fortunately, you know, that is happening. The world is developing a new set of relational algorithms that will be able to work with hundreds of different relations. If you look at a SQL database like Snowflake or a big query, you know, you get tens of different joins coming together, and that query is going to take a really long time. Well, fortunately, technology is evolving, and it's possible with new join algorithms, worst case, optimal join algorithms they're called, where you can join hundreds of different relations together and run semantic queries that you simply couldn't run. Now that technology is nascent, but it's really important, and I think that will be a requirement to have this semantically reach its full potential. In the meantime, Tristan can do a lot of great things by building up on what he's got today and solve some problems that are very real. But in the long run I think we'll see a new set of databases to support these models. >> So Tristan, you got to respond to that, right? You got to, so take the example of Snowflake. We know it doesn't deal well with complex joins, but they're, they've got big aspirations. They're building an ecosystem to really solve some of these problems. Tristan, you guys are part of that ecosystem, and others, but please, your thoughts on what Bob just shared. >> Bob, I'm curious if, I would have no idea what you were talking about except that you introduced me to somebody who gave me a demo of a thing and do you not want to go there right now? >> No, I can talk about it. I mean, we can talk about it. Look, the company I've been working with is Relational AI, and they're doing this work to actually first of all work across the industry with academics and research, you know, across many, many different, over 20 different research institutions across the world to develop this new set of algorithms. They're all fully published, just like SQL, the underlying algorithms that are used by SQL databases are. If you look today, every single SQL database uses a similar set of relational algorithms underneath that. And those algorithms actually go back to system R and what IBM developed in the 1970s. We're just, there's an opportunity for us to build something new that allows you to take, for example, instead of taking data and grouping it together in tables, treat all data as individual relations, you know, a key and a set of values and then be able to perform purely relational operations on it. If you go back to what, to Codd, and what he wrote, he defined two things. He defined a relational calculus and relational algebra. And essentially SQL is a query language that is translated by the query processor into relational algebra. But however, the calculus of SQL is not even close to the full semantics of the relational mathematics. And it's possible to have systems that can do everything and that can store all of the attributes of the data model or ultimately the business model in a form that is much more natural to work with. >> So here's like my short answer to this. I think that we're dealing in different time scales. I think that there is actually a tremendous amount of work to do in the semantic layer using the kind of technology that we have on the ground today. And I think that there's, I don't know, let's say five years of like really solid work that there is to do for the entire industry, if not more. But the wonderful thing about DBT is that it's independent of what the compute substrate is beneath it. And so if we develop new platforms, new capabilities to describe semantic models in more fine grain detail, more procedural, then we're going to support that too. And so I'm excited about all of it. >> Yeah, so interpreting that short answer, you're basically saying, cause Bob was just kind of pointing to you as incremental, but you're saying, yeah, okay, we're applying it for incremental use cases today, but we can accommodate a much broader set of examples in the future. Is that correct, Tristan? >> I think you're using the word incremental as if it's not good, but I think that incremental is great. We have always been about applying incremental improvement on top of what exists today, but allowing practitioners to like use different workflows to actually make use of that technology. So yeah, yeah, we are a very incremental company. We're going to continue being that way. >> Well, I think Bob was using incremental as a pejorative. I mean, I, but to your point, a lot. >> No, I don't think so. I want to stop that. No, I don't think it's pejorative at all. I think incremental, incremental is usually the most successful path. >> Yes, of course. >> In my experience. >> We agree, we agree on that. >> Having tried many, many moonshot things in my Microsoft days, I can tell you that being incremental is a good thing. And I'm a very big believer that that's the way the world's going to go. I just think that there is a need for us to build something new and that ultimately that will be the solution. Now you can argue whether it's two years, three years, five years, or 10 years, but I'd be shocked if it didn't happen in 10 years. >> Yeah, so we all agree that incremental is less disruptive. Boom, but Tristan, you're, I think I'm inferring that you believe you have the architecture to accommodate Bob's vision, and then Bob, and I'm inferring from Bob's comments that maybe you don't think that's the case, but please. >> No, no, no. I think that, so Bob, let me put words into your mouth and you tell me if you disagree, DBT is completely useless in a world where a large scale cloud data warehouse doesn't exist. We were not able to bring the power of Python to our users until these platforms started supporting Python. Like DBT is a layer on top of large scale computing platforms. And to the extent that those platforms extend their functionality to bring more capabilities, we will also service those capabilities. >> Let me try and bridge the two. >> Yeah, yeah, so Bob, Bob, Bob, do you concur with what Tristan just said? >> Absolutely, I mean there's nothing to argue with in what Tristan just said. >> I wanted. >> And it's what he's doing. It'll continue to, I believe he'll continue to do it, and I think it's a very good thing for the industry. You know, I'm just simply saying that on top of that, I would like to provide Tristan and all of those who are following similar paths to him with a new type of database that can actually solve these problems in a much more architected way. And when I talk about Cosmos with something like Mongo or Cosmos together with Elastic, you're using Elastic as the join engine, okay. That's the purpose of it. It becomes a poor man's join engine. And I kind of go, I know there's a better answer than that. I know there is, but that's kind of where we are state of the art right now. >> George, we got to wrap it. So give us the last word here. Go ahead, George. >> Okay, I just, I think there's a way to tie together what Tristan and Bob are both talking about, and I want them to validate it, which is for five years we're going to be adding or some number of years more and more semantics to the operational and analytic data that we have, starting with metric definitions. My question is for Bob, as DBT accumulates more and more of those semantics for different enterprises, can that layer not run on top of a relational knowledge graph? And what would we lose by not having, by having the knowledge graph store sort of the joins, all the complex relationships among the data, but having the semantics in the DBT layer? >> Well, I think this, okay, I think first of all that DBT will be an environment where many of these semantics are defined. The question we're asking is how are they stored and how are they processed? And what I predict will happen is that over time, as companies like DBT begin to build more and more richness into their semantic layer, they will begin to experience challenges that customers want to run queries, they want to ask questions, they want to use this for things where the underlying infrastructure becomes an obstacle. I mean, this has happened in always in the history, right? I mean, you see major advances in computer science when the data model changes. And I think we're on the verge of a very significant change in the way data is stored and structured, or at least metadata is stored and structured. Again, I'm not saying that anytime in the next 10 years, SQL is going to go away. In fact, more SQL will be written in the future than has been written in the past. And those platforms will mature to become the engines, the slicer dicers of data. I mean that's what they are today. They're incredibly powerful at working with large amounts of data, and that infrastructure is maturing very rapidly. What is not maturing is the infrastructure to handle all of the metadata and the semantics that that requires. And that's where I say knowledge graphs are what I believe will be the solution to that. >> But Tristan, bring us home here. It sounds like, let me put pause at this, is that whatever happens in the future, we're going to leverage the vast system that has become cloud that we're talking about a supercloud, sort of where data lives irrespective of physical location. We're going to have to tap that data. It's not necessarily going to be in one place, but give us your final thoughts, please. >> 100% agree. I think that the data is going to live everywhere. It is the responsibility for both the metadata systems and the data processing engines themselves to make sure that we can join data across cloud providers, that we can join data across different physical regions and that we as practitioners are going to kind of start forgetting about details like that. And we're going to start thinking more about how we want to arrange our teams, how does the tooling that we use support our team structures? And that's when data mesh I think really starts to get very, very critical as a concept. >> Guys, great conversation. It was really awesome to have you. I can't thank you enough for spending time with us. Really appreciate it. >> Thanks a lot. >> All right. This is Dave Vellante for George Gilbert, John Furrier, and the entire Cube community. Keep it right there for more content. You're watching SuperCloud2. (upbeat music)

>>Hello everyone. Welcome to the Super Cloud Event preview. I'm John Forry, host of the Cube, and with Dave Valante, host of the popular Super cloud events. This is Super Cloud two preview. I'm joined by industry leader and Cube alumni, Victoria Vigo, vice president of klos Cross Cloud Services at VMware. Vittorio. Great to see you. We're here for the preview of Super Cloud two on January 17th, virtual event, live stage performance, but streamed out to the audience virtually. We're gonna do a preview. Thanks for coming in. >>My pleasure. Always glad to be here. >>It's holiday time. We had the first super cloud on in August prior to VMware, explore North America prior to VMware, explore Europe prior to reinvent. We've been through that, but right now, super Cloud has got momentum. Super Cloud two has got some success. Before we dig into it, let's take a step back and set the table. What is Super Cloud and why is important? Why are people buzzing about it? Why is it a thing? >>Look, we have been in the cloud now for like 10, 15 years and the cloud is going strong and I, I would say that going cloud first was deliberate and strategic in most cases. In some cases the, the developer was going for the path of risk resistance, but in any sizable company, this caused the companies to end up in a multi-cloud world where 85% of the companies out there use two or multiple clouds. And with that comes what we call cloud chaos, because each cloud brings their own management tools, development tools, security. And so that increase the complexity and cost. And so we believe that it's time to usher a new era in cloud computing, which we, you call the super cloud. We call it cross cloud services, which allows our customers to have a single way to build, manage, secure, and access any application across any cloud. Lowering the cost and simplifying the environment. Since >>Dave Ante and I introduced and rift on the concept of Supercloud, as we talked about at reinvent last year, a lot has happened. Supercloud one, it was in August, but prior to that, great momentum in the industry. Great conversation. People are loving it, they're hating it, which means it's got some traction. Berkeley has come on board as with a position paper. They're kind of endorsing it. They call it something different. You call it cross cloud services, whatever it is. It's kind of the same theme we're seeing. And so the industry has recognized something is happening that's different than what Cloud one was or the first generation of cloud. Now we have something different. This Super Cloud two in January. This event has traction with practitioners, customers, big name brands, Sachs, fifth Avenue, Warner, media Financial, mercury Financial, other big names are here. They're leaning in. They're excited. Why the traction in the customer's industry converts over to, to the customer traction. Why is it happening? You, you get a lot of data. >>Well, in, in Super Cloud one, it was a vendor fest, right? But these vendors are smart people that get their vision from where, from the customers. This, this stuff doesn't happen in a vacuum. We all talk to customers and we tend to lean on the early adopters and the early adopters of the cloud are the ones that are telling us, we now are in a place where the complexity is too much. The cost is ballooning. We're going towards slow down potentially in the economy. We need to get better economics out of, of our cloud. And so every single customers I talked to today, or any sizable company as this problem, the developers have gone off, built all these applications, and now the business is coming to the operators and asking, where are my applications? Are they performing? What is the security posture? And how do we do compliance? And so now they're realizing we need to do something about this or it is gonna be unmanageable. >>I wanna go to a clip I pulled out from the, our video data lake and the cube. If we can go to that clip, it's Chuck Whitten Dell at a keynote. He was talking about what he calls multi-cloud by default, not by design. This is a state of the, of the industry. If we're gonna roll that clip, and I wanna get your reaction to that. >>Well, look, customers have woken up with multiple clouds, you know, multiple public clouds. On-premise clouds increasingly as the edge becomes much more a reality for customers clouds at the edge. And so that's what we mean by multi-cloud by default. It's not yet been designed strategically. I think our argument yesterday was it can be, and it should be, it is a very logical place for architecture to land because ultimately customers want the innovation across all of the hyperscale public clouds. They will see workloads and use cases where they wanna maintain an on-premise cloud. On-premise clouds are not going away. I mentioned edge Cloud, so it should be strategic. It's just not today. It doesn't work particularly well today. So when we say multi-cloud, by default we mean that's the state of the world. Today, our goal is to bring multi-cloud by design, as you heard. Yeah, I >>Mean, I, okay, Vittorio, that's, that's the head of Dell Technologies president. He obvious he runs it. Michael Dell's still around, but you know, he's the leader. This is a interesting observation. You know, he's not a customer. We have some customer equips we'll go to as well, but by default it kind of happened not by design. So we're now kind of in a zoom out issue where, okay, I got this environment just landed on me. What, what is the, what's your reaction to that clip of how multi-cloud has become present in, in everyone's on everyone's plate right now to deal with? Yeah, >>I it is, it is multi-cloud by default, I would call it by accident. We, we really got there by accident. I think now it's time to make it a strategic asset because look, we're using multiple cloud for a reason, because all these hyperscaler bring tremendous innovation that we want to leverage. But I strongly believe that in it, especially history repeat itself, right? And so if you look at the history of it, as was always when a new level of obstruction that simplify things, that we got the next level of innovation at the lower cost, you know, from going from c plus plus to Visual basic, going from integrating application at the bits of by layer to SOA and then web services. It's, it's only when we simplify the environment that we can go faster and lower cost. And the multi-cloud is ready for that level of obstruction today. >>You know, you've made some good points. You know, developers went crazy building great apps. Now they got, they gotta roll it out and operationalize it globally. A lot of compliance issues going on. The costs are going up. We got an economic challenge, but also agility with the cloud. So using cloud and or hybrid, you can get better agility. And also moving to the cloud, it's kind of still slow. Okay, so I get that at reinvent this year and at VMware explorer we were observing and we reported that you're seeing a transition to a new kind of ecosystem partner. Ones that aren't just ISVs anymore. You have ISVs, independent software vendors, but you got the emergence of bigger players that just, they got platforms, they have their own ecosystems. So you're seeing ecosystems on top of ecosystems where, you know, MongoDB CEO and the Databricks CEO both told me, we're not an isv, we're a platform built on a cloud. So this new kind of super cloudlike thing is going on. Why should someone pay attention to the super cloud movement? We're on two, we're gonna continue to do these out in the open. Anyone can participate. Why should people pay attention to this? Why should they come to the event? Why is this important? Is this truly an inflection point? And if they do pay attention, what should they pay attention to? >>I would pay attention to two things. If you are customers that are now starting to realize that you have a multi-cloud problem and the costs are getting outta control, look at what the leading vendors are saying, connect the dots with the early adopters and some of the customers that we are gonna have at Super Cloud two, and use those learning to not fall into the same trap. So I, I'll give you an example. I was talking to a Fortune 50 in Europe in my latest trip, and this is an a CIO that is telling me >>We build all these applications and now for compliance reason, the business is coming to me, I don't even know where they are, right? And so what I was telling him, so look, there are other customers that are already there. What did they do? They built a platform engineering team. What is the platform? Engineering team is a, is an operation team that understands how developers build modern applications and lays down the foundation across multiple clouds. So the developers can be developers and do their thing, which is writing code. But now you as a cio, as a, as a, as a governing body, as a security team can have the guardrail. So do you know that these applications are performing at a lower cost and are secure and compliant? >>Patura, you know, it's really encouraging and, and love to get your thoughts on this is one is the general consensus of industry leaders. I talked to like yourself in the round is the old way was soft complexity with more complexity. The cloud demand simplicity, you mentioned abstraction layer. This is our next inflection point. It's gotta be simpler and it's gotta be easy and it's gotta be performant. That's the table stakes of the cloud. What's your thoughts on this next wave of simplicity versus complexity? Because again, abstraction layers take away complexity, they should make it simpler. What's your thoughts? >>Yeah, so I'll give you few examples. One, on the development side and runtime. You, you one would think that Kubernetes will solve all the problems you have Kubernetes everywhere, just look at, but every cloud has a different distribution of Kubernetes, right? So for example, at VMware with tansu, we create a single place that allows you to deploy that any Kubernetes environment. But now you have one place to set your policies. We take care of the differences between this, this system. The second area is management, right? So once you have all everything deployed, how do you get a single object model that tells you where your stuff is and how it's performing, and then apply policies to it as well. So these are two areas and security and so on and so forth. So the idea is that figure out what you can abstract and make common across cloud. Make that simple and put it in one place while always allowing the developers to go underneath and use the differentiated features for innovation. >>Yeah, one of the areas I'm excited, I want to get your thoughts of too is, we haven't talked about this in the past, but it, I'll throw it out there. I think the, the new AI coming out chat, G P T and other things like lens, you see it and see new kinds of AI coming that's gonna be right in the heavy lifting opportunity to make things easier with AI and automation. I think AI will be a big factor in super cloud and, and cross cloud. What's your thoughts? >>Well, the one way to look at AI is, is one of the main, main services that you would want out of a multi-cloud, right? You want eventually, right now Google seems to have an edge, but you know, the competition creates, you know, innovation. So later on you wanna use something from Azure or from or from Oracle or something that, so you want at some point that is gonna be prone every single service in in the cloud is gonna be prone to obstruction and simplification. And I, I'm just excited about to see >>What book, I can't wait for the chat services to write code automatically for us. Well, >>They >>Do, they do. They're doing it now. They do. >>Oh, the other day, somebody, you know that I do this song par this for. So for fun sometimes. And somebody the other day said, ask the AI to write a parody song for multi-cloud. And so I have the lyrics stay >>Tuned. I should do that from my blog post. Hey, write a blog post on this January 17th, Victoria, thanks for coming in, sharing the preview bottom line. Why should people come? Why is it important? What's your final kind of takeaway? Billboard message >>History is repeat itself. It goes to three major inflection points, right? We had the inflection point with the cloud and the people that got left behind, they were not as competitive as the people that got on top o of this wave. The new wave is the super cloud, what we call cross cloud services. So if you are a customer that is experiencing this problem today, tune in to to hear from other customers in, in your same space. If you are behind, tune in to avoid the, the, the, the mistakes and the, the shortfalls of this new wave. And so that you can use multi-cloud to accelerate your business and kick butt in the future. >>All right. Kicking kick your names and kicking butt. Okay, we're here on J January 17th. Super Cloud two. Momentum continues. We'll be super cloud three. There'll be super cloud floor. More and more open conversations. Join the community, join the conversation. It's open. We want more voices. We want more, more industry. We want more customers. It's happening. A lot of momentum. Victoria, thank you for your time. Thank you. Okay. I'm John Farer, host of the Cube. Thanks for watching.

>>Hello everyone and welcome back to Motor City, Michigan. We're live from the Cube and my name is Savannah Peterson. Joined this afternoon with my co-host John Ferer. John, how you doing? Doing >>Great. This next segment's gonna be awesome about application modernization, scaling pluses. This is what's gonna, how are the next generation software revolution? It's gonna be >>Fun. You know, it's kind of been a theme of our day today is scale. And when we think about the complex orchestration platform that is Kubernetes, everyone wants to scale faster, quicker, more efficiently, and our guests are here to tell us all about that. Please welcome to Char and Andy, thank you so much for being here with us. You were on the Red Hat OpenShift team. Yeah. I suspect most of our audience is familiar, but just in case, let's give 'em a quick one-liner pitch so everyone's on the same page. Tell us about OpenShift. >>I, I'll take that one. OpenShift is our ES platform is our ES distribution. You can consume it as a self-managed platform or you can consume it as a managed service on on public clouds. And so we just call it all OpenShift. So it's basically Kubernetes, but you know, with a CNCF ecosystem around it to make things more easier. So maybe there's two >>Lights. So what does being at coupon mean for you? How does it feel to be here? What's your initial takes? >>Exciting. I'm having a fantastic time. I haven't been to coupon since San Diego, so it's great to be back in person and see old friends, make new friends, have hallway conversations. It's, it's great as an engineer trying to work in this ecosystem, just being able to, to be in the same place with these folks. >>And you gotta ask, before we came on camera, you're like, this is like my sixth co con. We were like, we're seven, you know, But that's a lot of co coupons. It >>Is, yes. I mean, so what, >>Yes. >>Take us status >>For sure. Where we are now. Compare and contrast co. Your first co con, just scope it out. What's the magnitude of change? If you had to put a pin on that, because there's a lot of new people coming in, they might not have seen where it's come from and how we got here is maybe not how we're gonna get to the next >>Level. I've seen it grow tremendously since the first one I went to, which I think was Austin several years ago. And what's great is seeing lots of new people interested in contributing and also seeing end users who are trying to figure out the best way to take advantage of this great ecosystem that we have. >>Awesome. And the project management side, you get the keys to the Kingdom with Red Hat OpenShift, which has been successful. Congratulations by the way. Thank you. We watched that grow and really position right on the wave. It's going great. What's the update on on the product? Kind of, you're in a good, good position right now. Yeah, >>No, we we're feeling good about it. It's all about our customers. Obviously the fact that, you know, we have thousands of customers using OpenShift as the cloud native platform, the container platform. We're very excited. The great thing about them is that, I mean you can go to like OpenShift Commons is kind of a user group that we run on the first day, like on Tuesday we ran. I mean you should see the number of just case studies that our customers went through there, you know? And it is fantastic to see that. I mean it's across so many different industries, across so many different use cases, which is very exciting. >>One of the things we've been reporting here in the Qla scene before, but here more important is just that if you take digital transformation to the, to its conclusion, the IT department and developers, they're not a department to serve the business. They are the business. Yes. That means that the developers are deciding things. Yeah. And running the business. Prove their code. Yeah. Okay. If that's, if that takes place, you gonna have scale. And we also said on many cubes, certainly at Red Hat Summit and other ones, the clouds are distributed computer, it's distributed computing. So you guys are focusing on this project, Andy, that you're working on kcp. >>Yes. >>Which is, I won't platform Kubernetes platform for >>Control >>Planes. Control planes. Yes. Take us through, what's the focus on why is that important and why is that relate to the mission of developers being in charge and large scale? >>Sure. So a lot of times when people are interested in developing on Kubernetes and running workloads, they need a cluster of course. And those are not cheap. It takes time, it takes money, it takes resources to get them. And so we're trying to make that faster and easier for, for end users and everybody involved. So with kcp, we've been able to take what looks like one normal Kubernetes and partition it. And so everybody gets a slice of it. You're an administrator in your little slice and you don't have to ask for permission to install new APIs and they don't conflict with anybody else's APIs. So we're really just trying to make it super fast and make it super flexible. So everybody is their own admin. >>So the developer basically looks at it as a resource blob. They can do whatever they want, but it's shared and provisioned. >>Yes. One option. It's like, it's like they have their own cluster, but you don't have to go through the process of actually provisioning a full >>Cluster. And what's the alternative? What's the what's, what's the, what's the benefit and what was the alternative to >>This? So the alternative, you spin up a full cluster, which you know, maybe that's three control plane nodes, you've got multiple workers, you've got a bunch of virtual machines or bare metal, or maybe you take, >>How much time does that take? Just ballpark. >>Anywhere from five minutes to an hour you can use cloud services. Yeah. Gke, E Ks and so on. >>Keep banging away. You're configuring. Yeah. >>Those are faster. Yeah. But it's still like, you still have to wait for that to happen and it costs money to do all of that too. >>Absolutely. And it's complex. Why do something that's been done, if there's a tool that can get you a couple steps down the path, which makes a ton of sense. Something that we think a lot when we're talking about scale. You mentioned earlier, Tohar, when we were chatting before the cams were alive, scale means a lot of different things. Can you dig in there a little bit? >>Yeah, I >>Mean, so when, when >>We talk about scale, >>We are talking about from a user perspective, we are talking about, you know, there are more users, there are more applications, there are more workloads, there are more services being run on Kubernetes now, right? So, and OpenShift. So, so that's one dimension of this scale. The other dimension of the scale is how do you manage all the underlying infrastructure, the clusters, the name spaces, and all the observability data, et cetera. So that's at least two levels of scale. And then obviously there's a third level of scale, which is, you know, there is scale across not just different clouds, but also from cloud to the edge. So there is that dimension of scale. So there are several dimensions of this scale. And the one that again, we are focused on here really is about, you know, this, the first one that I talk about is a user. And when I say user, it could be a developer, it could be an application architect, or it could be an application owner who wants to develop Kubernetes applications for Kubernetes and wants to publish those APIs, if you will, and make it discoverable and then somebody consumes it. So that's the scale we are talking about >>Here. What are some of the enterprise, you guys have a lot of customers, we've talked to you guys before many, many times and other subjects, Red Hat, I mean you guys have all the customers. Yeah. Enterprise, they've been there, done that. And you know, they're, they're savvy. Yeah. But the cloud is a whole nother ballgame. What are they thinking about? What's the psychology of the customer right now? Because now they have a lot of choices. Okay, we get it, we're gonna re-platform refactor apps, we'll keep some legacy on premises for whatever reasons. But cloud pretty much is gonna be the game. What's the mindset right now of the customer base? Where are they in their, in their psych? Not the executive, but more of the the operators or the developers? >>Yeah, so I mean, first of all, different customers are at different levels of maturity, I would say in this. They're all on a journey how I like to describe it. And in this journey, I mean, I see a customers who are really tip of the sphere. You know, they have containerized everything. They're cloud native, you know, they use best of tools, I mean automation, you know, complete automation, you know, quick deployment of applications and all, and life cycle of applications, et cetera. So that, that's kind of one end of this spectrum >>Advanced. Then >>The advances, you know, and, and I, you know, I don't, I don't have any specific numbers here, but I'd say there are quite a few of them. And we see that. And then there is kind of the middle who are, I would say, who are familiar with containers. They know what app modernization, what a cloud application means. They might have tried a few. So they are in the journey. They are kind of, they want to get there. They have some other kind of other issues, organizational or talent and so, so on and so forth. Kinds of issues to get there. And then there are definitely the quota, what I would call the lag arts still. And there's lots of them. But I think, you know, Covid has certainly accelerated a lot of that. I hear that. And there is definitely, you know, more, the psychology is definitely more towards what I would say public cloud. But I think where we are early also in the other trend that I see is kind of okay, public cloud great, right? So people are going there, but then there is the so-called edge also. Yeah. That is for various regions. You, you gotta have a kind of a regional presence, a edge presence. And that's kind of the next kind of thing taking off here. And we can talk more >>About it. Yeah, let's talk about that a little bit because I, as you know, as we know, we're very excited about Edge here at the Cube. Yeah. What types of trends are you seeing? Is that space emerges a little bit more firmly? >>Yeah, so I mean it's, I mean, so we, when we talk about Edge, you're talking about, you could talk about Edge as a, as a retail, I mean locations, right? >>Could be so many things edges everywhere. Everywhere, right? It's all around us. Quite literally. Even on the >>Scale. Exactly. In space too. You could, I mean, in fact you mentioned space. I was, I was going to >>Kinda, it's this world, >>My space actually Kubernetes and OpenShift running in space, believe it or not, you know, So, so that's the edge, right? So we have Industrial Edge, we have Telco Edge, we have a 5g, then we have, you know, automotive edge now and, and, and retail edge and, and more, right? So, and space, you know, So it's very exciting there. So the reason I tag back to that question that you asked earlier is that that's where customers are. So cloud is one thing, but now they gotta also think about how do I, whatever I do in the cloud, how do I bring it to the edge? Because that's where my end users are, my customers are, and my data is, right? So that's the, >>And I think Kubernetes has brought that attention to the laggards. We had the Laed Martin on yesterday, which is an incredible real example of Kubernetes at the edge. It's just incredible story. We covered it also wrote a story about it. So compelling. Cuz it makes it real. Yes. And Kubernetes is real. So then the question is developer productivity, okay, Things are starting to settle in. We've got KCP scaling clusters, things are happening. What about the tool chains? And how do I develop now I got scale of development, more code coming in. I mean, we are speculating that in the future there's so much code in open source that no one has to write code anymore. Yeah. At some point it's like this gluing things together. So the developers need to be productive. How are we gonna scale the developer equation and eliminate the, the complexity of tool chains and environments. Web assembly is super hyped up at this show. I don't know why, but sounds good. No one, no one can tell me why, but I can kind of connect the dots. But this is a big thing. >>Yeah. And it's fitting that you ask about like no code. So we've been working with our friends at Cross Plain and have integrated with kcp the ability to no code, take a whole bunch of configuration and say, I want a database. I want to be a, a provider of databases. I'm in an IT department, there's a bunch of developers, they don't wanna have to write code to create databases. So I can just take, take my configuration and make it available to them. And through some super cool new easy to use tools that we have as a developer, you can just say, please give me a database and you don't have to write any code. I don't have to write any code to maintain that database. I'm actually using community tooling out there to get that spun up. So there's a lot of opportunities out there. So >>That's ease of use check. What about a large enterprise that's got multiple tool chains and you start having security issues. Does that disrupt the tool chain capability? Like there's all those now weird examples emerging, not weird, but like real plumbing challenges. How do you guys see that evolving with Red >>Hat and Yeah, I mean, I mean, talking about that, right? The software, secure software supply chain is a huge concern for everyone after, especially some of the things that have happened in the past few >>Years. Massive team here at the show. Yeah. And just within the community, we're all a little more aware, I think, even than we were before. >>Before. Yeah. Yeah. And, and I think the, so to step back, I mean from, so, so it's not just even about, you know, run time vulnerability scanning, Oh, that's important, but that's not enough, right? So we are talking about, okay, how did that container, or how did that workload get there? What is that workload? What's the prominence of this workload? How did it get created? What is in it? You know, and what, what are, how do I make, make sure that there are no unsafe attack s there. And so that's the software supply chain. And where Red Hat is very heavily invested. And as you know, with re we kind of have roots in secure operating system. And rel one of the reasons why Rel, which is the foundation of everything we do at Red Hat, is because of security. So an OpenShift has always been secure out of the box with things like scc, rollbacks access control, we, which we added very early in the product. >>And now if you kind of bring that forward, you know, now we are talking about the complete software supply chain security. And this is really about right how from the moment the, the, the developer rights code and checks it into a gateway repository from there on, how do you build it? How do you secure it at each step of the process, how do you sign it? And we are investing and contributing to the community with things like cosign and six store, which is six store project. And so that secures the supply chain. And then you can use things like algo cd and then finally we can do it, deploy it onto the cluster itself. And then we have things like acs, which can do vulnerability scanning, which is a container security platform. >>I wanna thank you guys for coming on. I know Savannah's probably got a last question, but my last question is, could you guys each take a minute to answer why has Kubernetes been so successful today? What, what was the magic of Kubernetes that made it successful? Was it because no one forced it? Yes. Was it lightweight? Was it good timing, right place at the right time community? What's the main reason that Kubernetes is enabling all this, all this shift and goodness that's coming together, kind of defacto unifies people, the stacks, almost middleware markets coming around. Again, not to use that term middleware, but it feels like it's just about to explode. Yeah. Why is this so successful? I, >>I think, I mean, the shortest answer that I can give there really is, you know, as you heard the term, I think Satya Nala from Microsoft has used it. I don't know if he was the original person who pointed, but every company wants to be a software company or is a software company now. And that means that they want to develop stuff fast. They want to develop stuff at scale and develop at, in a cloud native way, right? You know, with the cloud. So that's, and, and Kubernetes came at the right time to address the cloud problem, especially across not just one public cloud or two public clouds, but across a whole bunch of public clouds and infrastructure as, and what we call the hybrid clouds. I think the ES is really exploded because of hybrid cloud, the need for hybrid cloud. >>And what's your take on the, the magic Kubernetes? What made it, what's making it so successful? >>I would agree also that it came about at the right time, but I would add that it has great extensibility and as developers we take it advantage of that every single day. And I think that the, the patterns that we use for developing are very consistent. And I think that consistency that came with Kubernetes, just, you have so many people who are familiar with it and so they can follow the same patterns, implement things similarly, and it's just a good fit for the way that we want to get our software out there and have, and have things operate. >>Keep it simple, stupid almost is that acronym, but the consistency and the de facto alignment Yes. Behind it just created a community. So, so then the question is, are the developers now setting the standards? That seems like that's the new way, right? I mean, >>I'd like to think so. >>So I mean hybrid, you, you're touching everything at scale and you also have mini shift as well, right? Which is taking a super macro micro shift. You ma micro shift. Oh yeah, yeah, exactly. It is a micro shift. That is, that is fantastic. There isn't a base you don't cover. You've spoken a lot about community and both of you have, and serving the community as well as your engagement with them from a, I mean, it's given that you're both leaders stepping back, how, how Community First is Red Hat and OpenShift as an organization when it comes to building the next products and, and developing. >>I'll take and, and I'm sure Andy is actually the community, so I'm sure he'll want to a lot of it. But I mean, right from the start, we have roots in open source. I'll keep it, you know, and, and, and certainly with es we were one of the original contributors to Kubernetes other than Google. So in some ways we think about as co-creators of es, they love that. And then, yeah, then we have added a lot of things in conjunction with the, I I talk about like SCC for Secure, which has become part security right now, which the community, we added things like our back and other what we thought were enterprise features needed because we actually wanted to build a product out of it and sell it to customers where our customers are enterprises. So we have worked with the community. Sometimes we have been ahead of the community and we have convinced the community. Sometimes the community has been ahead of us for other reasons. So it's been a great collaboration, which is I think the right thing to do. But Andy, as I said, >>Is the community well set too? Are well said. >>Yes, I agree with all of that. I spend most of my days thinking about how to interact with the community and engage with them. So the work that we're doing on kcp, we want it to be a community project and we want to involve as many people as we can. So it is a heavy focus for me and my team. And yeah, we we do >>It all the time. How's it going? How's the project going? You feel good >>About it? I do. It is, it started as an experiment or set of prototypes and has grown leaps and bounds from it's roots and it's, it's fantastic. Yeah. >>Controlled planes are hot data planes control planes. >>I >>Know, I love it. Making things work together horizontally scalable. Yeah. Sounds like cloud cloud native. >>Yeah. I mean, just to add to it, there are a couple of talks that on KCP at Con that our colleagues s Stephan Schemanski has, and I, I, I would urge people who have listening, if they have, just Google it, if you will, and you'll get them. And those are really awesome talks to get more about >>It. Oh yeah, no, and you can tell on GitHub that KCP really is a community project and how many people are participating. It's always fun to watch the action live to. Sure. Andy, thank you so much for being here with us, John. Wonderful questions this afternoon. And thank all of you for tuning in and listening to us here on the Cube Live from Detroit. I'm Savannah Peterson. Look forward to seeing you again very soon.

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: theCUBE presents UiPath Forward5. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Hi everybody, we're back in Las Vegas. We're live with Cube's coverage of Forward 5 2022. Dave Vellante with Dave Nicholson Ted Kumer this year is the Executive Vice President, product and engineering at UiPath. Brought on to do a lot of the integration and bring on new capabilities for the platform and we've seen that over the last several years. And he's joined by Dr. Edward Challis, who's the co-founder of the recent acquisition that UiPath made, company called Re:infer. We're going to learn about those guys. Gents, welcome to theCUBE. Ted, good to see you again. Ed, welcome. >> Good to be here. >> First time. >> Thank you. >> Yeah, great to be here with you. >> Yeah, so we have seen, as I said, this platform expanding. I think you used the term business automation platform. It's kind of a new term you guys introduced at the conference. Where'd that come from? What is that? What are the characteristics that are salient to the platform? >> Well, I see the, the evolution of our platform in three chapters. You understand the first chapter, we call that the RPA chapter. And that's where we saw the power of UI automation applied to the old problems of how do I integrate apps? How do I automate processes? That was chapter one. You know, chapter two gets us to Forward3 in 2019, and the definition of this end-to-end automation platform you know, with the capabilities from discover to measure, and building out that core platform. And as the platform's progressed, what we've seen happen with our customers is the use of it goes from being very heavy in automating the repetitive and routine to being more balanced, to now where they're implementing new brought business process, new capability for their organization. So that's where the name, Business Automation Platform, came from. Reflecting now that it's got this central role, as a strategic tool, sitting between their application landscape, their processes, their people, helping that move forward at the rate that it needs to. >> And process mining and task mining, that was sort of the enabler of chapter two, is that right? >> Well, I'd say chapter two was, you know, first the robots got bigger in terms of what they could cover and do. API integration, long running workflows, AI and ML skills integrated document processing, citizen development in addition to professional development, engaging end users with things like user interfaces built with UiPath apps. And then the discovery. >> So, more robustness of the? Yeah, okay. >> Yeah. Just an expansion of the whole surface area which opened up a lot of things for our customers to do. That went much broader than where core RPA started. And so, and the other thing about this progression to the business automation platform is, you know, we see customers now talking more about outcomes. Early on they talk a lot about hours saved and that's great, but then what about the business outcomes it's enabling? The transformations in their business. And the other thing we're doing in the platform is thinking about, well, where can we land with solutions capabilities that more directly land on business, measurable business outcomes? And so we had started, for example, offering an email automation solution, big business problem for a lot of our customers last year. And we'd started encountering this company Re:infer as we were working with customers. And then, and we encountered Re:infer being used with our platform together. And we saw we can accelerate this. And what that is giving us now is a solution now that aligns with a very defined business outcome. And this way, you know, we can help you process communications and do it efficiently and provide better service for your customers. And that's beginning of another important progression for us in our platform. >> So that's a nice segue, Ed. Tell about Re:infer. Why did you start the company? >> Right, yeah, so my whole career has been in machine learning and AI and I finished my PhD around 2013, it was a very exciting time in AI. And me and my co-founders come from UCL, this university in London, and Deep Mind, this company which Google acquired a few years later, came from our same university. So very exciting time amongst the people that really knew about machine learning and AI. And everyone was thinking, you know, how do we, these are just really big breakthroughs. And you could just see there was going to be a whole bunch of subsequent breakthroughs and we thought NLP would be the next breakthrough. So we were really focused on machine reading problems. And, but we also knew as people that had like built machine learning production systems. 'Cause I'd also worked in industry that built that journey from having a hypothesis that machine learning can solve a problem to getting machine learning into production. That journey is of painful, painful journey and that, you know, you can see that you've got these advances, but getting into broad is just way too hard. >> So where do you fit in the platform? >> Yeah, so I think when you look in the enterprise just so many processes start with a message start with a no, start with a case ticket or, you know, some other kind of request from a colleague or a customer. And so it's super exciting to be able to, you know, take automation one step higher in that process chain. So, you could automatically read that request, interpret it, get all the structured data you need to drive that process forward. So it's about bringing automation into these human channels. >> So I want to give the audience a sense here. So we do a lot of events at the Venetian Conference Center, and it's usually very booth heavy, you know, brands and big giant booths. And here the booths are all very small. They're like kiosks, and they're all pretty much the same size. So it's not like one vendor trying to compete with the other. And there are all these elements, you know I feel like there's clouds and there's, you know, of course orange is the color here. And one of the spots is, it has this really kind of cool sitting area around customer stories. And I was in there last night reading about Deutsche Bank. Deutsche Bank was also up on stage. Deutsche Bank, you guys were talking about a Re:infer. So share with our audience what Deutsche Bank are doing with UiPath and Re:infer. >> Yeah, so I mean, you know, before we automate something, we often like to do what we call communications mining. Which is really understanding what all of these messages are about that might be hitting a part of the business. And at Deutsche Bank and in many, you know, like many large financial services businesses, huge volumes of messages coming in from the clients. We analyze those, interpret the high volume query types and then it's about automating against those to free up capacity. Which ultimately means you can provide faster, higher quality service because you've got more time to do it. And you're not dealing with all of those mundane tasks. So it's that whole journey of mining to automation of the coms that come into the corporate bank. >> So how do I invoke the service? So is it mother module or what's the customer onboarding experience like? >> So, I think the first thing that we do is we generate some understanding of actually the communications data they want to observe, right? And we call it mining, but you know, what we're trying to understand is like what are these communications about? What's the intent? What are they trying to accomplish? Tone can be interesting, like what's the sentiment of this customer? And once you understand that, you essentially then understand categories of conversations you're having and then you apply automations to that. And so then essentially those individual automations can be pointed to sets of emails for them to automate the processing of. And so what we've seen is customers go from things they're handling a hundred percent manual to now 95% of them are handled basically with completely automated processing. The other thing I think is super interesting here and why communications mining and automation are so powerful together is communications about your business can be very, very dynamic. So like, new conversations can emerge, something happens right in your business, you have an outage, whatever, and the automation platform, being a very rapid development platform, can help you adapt quickly to that in an automated way. Which is another reason why this is such a powerful thing to put the two things together. >> So, you can build that event into the automation very quickly you're saying? >> Speaker 1: Yeah. >> Speaker 2: That's totally right. >> Cool. >> So Ed, on the subject of natural language processing and machine learning versus machine teaching. If I text my wife and ask her would you like to go to an Italian restaurant tonight? And she replies, fine. Okay, how smart is your machine? And, of course, context usually literally denotes things within the text, and a short response like that's very difficult to do this. But how do you go through this process? Let's say you're implementing this for a given customer. And we were just talking about, you know, the specific customer requirements that they might have. What does that process look like? Do you have an auditor that goes through? And I mean do you get like 20% accuracy, and then you do a pass, and now you're at 80% accuracy, and you do a pass? What does that look? >> Yeah, so I mean, you know when I was talking about the pain of getting a machine learning model into production one of the principle drivers of that is this process of training the machine learning model. And so what we use is a technique called active learning which is effectively where the AI and ML model queries the user to say, teach me about this data point, teach me about this sentence. And that's a dynamic iterative process. And by doing it in that way you make that training process much, much faster. But critically that means that the user has, when you train the model the user defines how you want to encode that interpretation. So when you were training it you would say fine from my wife is not good, right? >> Sure, so it might be fine, do you have a better suggestion? >> Yeah, but that's actually a very serious point because one of the things we do is track the quality of service. Our customers use us to attract the quality of service they deliver to their clients. And in many industries people don't use flowery language, like, thank you so much, or you know, I'm upset with you, you know. What they might say is fine, and you know, the person that manages that client, that is not good, right? Or they might say I'd like to remind you that we've been late the last three times, you know. >> This is urgent. >> Yeah, you know, so it's important that the client, our client, the user of Re:infer, can encode what their notions of good and bad are. >> Sorry, quick follow up on that. Differences between British English and American English. In the U.K., if you're thinking about becoming an elected politician, you stand for office, right? Here in the U.S., you run for office. That's just the beginning of the vagaries and differences. >> Yeah, well, I've now got a lot more American colleagues and I realize my English phrasing often goes amiss. So I'm really aware of the problem. We have customers that have contact centers, some of them are in the U.K., some of them are in America, and they see big differences in the way that the customers get treated based on where the customer is based. So we've actually done analysis in Re:infer to look at how agents and customers interact and how you should route customers to the contact centers to be culturally matched. Because sometimes there can be a little bit of friction just for that cultural mapping. >> Ted, what's the what's the general philosophy when you make an acquisition like this and you bring in new features? Do you just wake up one day and all of a sudden there's this new capability? Is it a separate sort of for pay module? Does it depend? >> I think it depends. You know, in this case we were really led here by customers. We saw a very high value opportunity and the beginnings of a strategy and really being able to mine all forms of communication and drive automated processing of all forms of communication. And in this case we found a fantastic team and a fantastic piece of software that we can move very quickly to get in the hands of our customer's via UiPath. We're in private preview now, we're going to be GA in the cloud right after the first of the year and it's going to continue forward from there. But it's definitely not one size fits all. Every single one of 'em is different and it's important to approach 'em that way. >> Right, right. So some announcements, StudioWeb was one that I think you could. So I think it came out today. Can't remember what was today. I think we talked about it yesterday on the keynotes anyway. Why is that important? What is it all about? >> Well we talked, you know, at a very top level. I think every development platform thinks about two things for developers. They think, how do I make it more expressive so you can do other things, richer scenarios. And how do I make it simpler? 'Cause fast is always better, and lower learning curves is always better, and those sorts of things. So, Re:infer's a great example of look the runtime is becoming more and more expressive and now you can buy in communications state as part of your automation, which is super cool. And then, you know StudioWeb is about kind of that second point and Studios and Studio X are already low code visual, but they're desktop. And part of our strategy here is to elevate all of that experience into the web. Now we didn't elevate all of studio there, it's a subset. It is API integration and web based application automation, Which is a great foundation for a lot of apps. It's a complete reimagining of the studio user interface and most importantly it's our first cross-platform developer strategy. And so that's been another piece of our strategy, is to say to the customers we want to be everywhere you need us to be. We did cross-platform deployment with the automation suite. We got cross-platform robots with linear robots, serverless robots, Mac support and now we got a cross-platform devs story. So we're starting out with a subset of capabilities maybe oriented toward what you would associate with citizen scenarios. But you're going to see more roadmap, bringing more and more of that. But it's pretty exciting for us. We've been working on this thing for a couple years now and like this is a huge milestone for the team to get to this, this point. >> I think my first conversation on theCUBE with a customer was six years ago maybe at one of the earlier Forwards, I think Forward2. And the pattern that I saw was basically people taking existing processes and making them better, you know taking the mundane away. I remember asking customers, yeah, aren't you kind of paving the cow path? Aren't there sort of new things that you can do, new process? And they're like, yeah, that's sort of the next wave. So what are you seeing in terms of automating existing processes versus new processes? I would see Re:infer is going to open up a whole new vector of new processes. How should we think about that? >> Yeah, I think, you know, I mean in some ways RPA has this reputation because there's so much value that's been provided in the automating of the repetitive and routine. But I'd say in my whole time, I've been at the company now for two and a half years, I've seen lots of new novel stuff stood up. I mean just in Covid we saw the platform being used in PPP loan processing. We saw it in new clinical workflows for COVID testing. We see it and we've just seen more and more progression and it's been exciting that the conference, to see customers now talking about things they built with UiPath apps. So app experiences they've been delivering, you know. I talked about one in healthcare yesterday and basically how they've improved their patient intake processing and that sort of thing. And I think this is just the front end. I truly believe that we are seeing the convergence happen and it's happening already of categories we've talked about separately, iPass, BPM, low-code, RPA. It's happening and it's good for customers 'cause they want one thing to cover more stuff and you know, I think it just creates more opportunity for developers to do more things. >> Your background at Microsoft probably well prepared you for a company that you know, was born on-prem and then went all in on the cloud and had, you know, multiple code bases to deal with. UiPath has gone through a similar transformation and we talked to Daniel last night about this and you're now cloud first. So how is that going just in terms of managing multiple code bases? >> Well it's actually not multiple Code bases. >> Oh, it's the same one, Right, deployment models I should say. >> Is the first thing, Yeah, the deployment models. Another thing we did along the way was basically replatform at an infrastructure level. So we now can deploy into a Kubernetes Docker world, what you'd call the cloud native platform. And that allows us to have much more of a shared infrastructure layer as we look to deliver to the automation cloud. The same workload to the automation cloud that we now deliver in the automation suite for deployment on-prem or deploying a public cloud for a customer to manage. Interesting and enough, that's how Re:infer was built, which is it was built also in the cloud native platform. So it's going to be pretty easy. Well, pretty easy, there's some work to do, but it's going to be pretty easy for us to then bring that into the platform 'cause they're already working on that same platform and provide those same services both on premises and in the cloud without having your developers have to think too much about both. >> Okay, I got to ask you, so I could wrap my stack in a container and put it into AWS or Azure or Google and it'll run great. As well, I could tap some of the underlying primitives of those respective clouds, which are different and I could run them just fine. Or/and I could create an abstraction layer that could hide those underlying primitives and then take the best of each and create an automation cloud, my own cloud. Does that resonate? Is that what you're doing architecturally? Is that a roadmap, or? >> Certainly going forward, you know, in the automation cloud. The automation cloud, we announced a great partnership or a continued partnership with Microsoft. And just Azure and our platform. We obviously take advantage of anything we can to make that great and native capabilities. And I think you're going to see in the Automation Suite us doing more and more to be in a deployment model on Azure, be more and more optimized to using those infrastructure services. So if you deploy automation suite on-prem we'll use our embedded distro then when we deploy it say on Azure, we'll use some of their higher level managed services instead of our embedded distro. And that will just give customers a better optimized experience. >> Interesting to see how that'll develop. Last question is, you know what should we expect going forward? Can you show us a little leg on on the future? >> Well, we've talked about a number of directions. This idea of semantic automation is a place where you know, you're going to, I think, continue to see things, shoots, green shoots, come up in our platform. And you know, it's somewhat of an abstract idea but the idea that the platform is just going to become semantically smarter. You know, I had to serve Re:infer as a way, we're semantically smarter now about communications data and forms of communications data. We're getting semantically smarter about documents, screens you know, so developers aren't dealing with, like, this low level stuff. They can focus on business problem and get out of having to deal with all this lower level mechanism. That is one of many areas I'm excited about, but I think that's an area you're going to see a lot from us in the next coming years. >> All right guys, hey, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. Really appreciate you taking us through this. Awesome >> Yeah Always a pleasure. >> Platform extension. Ed. All right, keep it right there, everybody. Dave Nicholson, I will be back right after this short break from UiPath Forward5, Las Vegas. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage of VMware Explore '22, formerly VMworld. This is our 12th year covering it. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellente. Two sets, three days of wall-to-wall coverage. We're starting to get the execs rolling in from VMware. Sumit Dhawan, president of VMware's here. Great to see you. Great keynote, day one. >> Great to be here, John. Great to see you, Dave. Day one, super exciting. We're pumped. >> And you had no problem with the keynotes. We're back in person. Smooth as silk up there. >> We were talking about it. We had to like dust off a cobweb to make some of these inputs. >> It's not like riding a bike. >> No, it's not. We had about 40% of our agencies that we had to change out because they're no longer in business. So, I have to give kudos to the team who pulled it together. They did a fabulous job. >> You do a great check, great presentation. I know you had a lot to crack in there. Raghu set the table. I know this is for him, this was a big moment to lay out the narrative, address the Broadcom thing right out of the gate, wave from Hock Tan in the audience, and then got into the top big news. Still a lot of meat on the bone. You get up there, you got to talk about the use cases, vSphere 8, big release, a lot of stuff. Take us through the keynote. What was the important highlights for you to share, the folks watching that didn't see the keynote or wanted to get your perspective? >> Well, first of all, did any of you notice that Raghu was running on the stage? He did not do that in rehearsal. (John chuckles) I was a little bit worried, but he really did it. >> I said, I betcha that was real. (everyone chuckles) >> Anyways, the jokes aside, he did fabulous. Lays out the strategy. My thinking, as you said, was to first of all speak with their customers and explain how every enterprise is facing with this concept of cloud chaos that Raghu laid out and CVS Health story sort of exemplifies the situation that every customer is facing. They go in, they start with cloud first, which is needed, I think that's the absolutely right approach. Very quickly build out a model of getting a cloud ops team and a platform engineering team which oftentimes be a parallel work stream to a private cloud infrastructure. Great start. But as Roshan, the CIO at CVS Health laid out, there's an inflection point. And that's when you have to converge these because the use cases are where stakeholders, this is the lines of businesses, app developers, finance teams, and security teams, they don't need this stove piped information coming at 'em. And the converge model is how he opted to organize his team. So we called it a multi-cloud team, just like a workspace team. And listen, our commitment and innovations are to solve the problems of those teams so that the stakeholders get what they need. That's the rest of the keynote. >> Yeah, first of all, great point. I want to call out that inflection point comment because we've been reporting coming into VMworld with super cloud and other things across open source and down into the weeds and into the hood. The chaos is real. So, good call. I love how you guys brought that up there. But all industry inflection points, if you go back in history of the tech industry, at every single major inflection point, there was chaos, complexity, or an enemy proprietary. However you want to look at it, there was a situation where you needed to kind of reign in the chaos as Andy Grove would say. So we're at that inflection point, I think that's consistent. And also the ecosystem floor yesterday, the expo floor here in San Francisco with your partners, it was vibrant. They're all on this wave. There is a wave and an inflection point. So, okay. I buy that. So, if you buy the inflection point, what has to happen next? Because this is where we're at. People are feeling it. Some say, I don't have a problem but they're cut chaos such is the problem. So, where do you see that? How does VMware's team organizing in the industry and for customers specifically to solve the chaos, to reign it in and cross over? >> Yeah, you're a 100% right. Every inflection point is associated with some kind of a chaos that had to be reigned in. So we are focused on two major things right now which we have made progress in. And maybe third, we are still work in-progress. Number one is technology. Today's technology announcements are directly to address how that streamlining of chaos can be done through a cloud smart approach that we laid out. Our Aria, a brand new solution for management, significant enhancements to Tanzu, all of these for public cloud based workloads that also extend to private cloud. And then our cloud infrastructure with newer capabilities with AWS, Azure, as well as with new innovations on vSphere 8 and vSAN 8. And then last but not the least, our continuous automation to enable anywhere workspace. All these are simple innovation that have to address because without those innovations, the problem is that the chaos oftentimes is created because lack of technology and as a result structure has to be put in place because tooling and technology is not there. So, number one goal we see is providing that. Second is we have to be independent, provide support for every possible cloud but not without being a partner of theirs. That's not an easy thing to do but we have the DNA as a company, we have done that with data centers in the past, even though being part of Dell we did that in the data center in the past, we have done that in mobility. And so we have taken the challenge of doing that with the cloud. So we are continually building newer innovation and stronger and stronger partnerships with cloud provider which is the basis of our commercial relationships with Microsoft Azure too, where we have brought Azure VMware solution into VMware cloud universal. Again, that strengthens the value of us being neutral because it's very important to have a Switzerland party that can provide these multi-cloud solutions that doesn't have an agenda of a specific cloud, yet an ecosystem, or at least an influence with the ecosystem that can bring going forward. >> Okay, so technology, I get that. Open, not going to be too competitive, but more open. So the question I got to ask you is what is the disruptive enabler to make that happen? 'Cause you got customers, partners and team of VMware, what's the disruptive enabler that's going to get you to that level? >> Over the hump. I mean, listen, our value is this community. All this community has one of two paths to go. Either, they become stove piped into just the public-private cloud infrastructure or they step up as this convergence that's happening around them to say, "You know what? I have the solution to tame this multi-cloud complexity, to reign the chaos," as you mentioned because tooling and technologies are available. And I know they work with the ecosystem. And our objective is to bring this community to that point. And to me, that is the best path to overcome it. >> You are the connective tissue. I was able to sit into the analyst meeting today. You were sort of the proxy for CVS Health where you talked about the private that's where you started, the public cloud ops team, bringing that together. The platform is the glue. That is the connective tissue. That's where Tanzu comes in. That's where Aria comes in. And that is the disruptive technology which it's hard to build that. >> From a technology perspective, it's an enabler of something that has never been done before in that level of comprehensiveness, from a more of a infrastructure side thinking perspective. Yes, infrastructure teams have enabled self-service portals. Yes, infrastructure teams have given APIs to developers, but what we are enabling through Tanzu is completely next level where you have a lot richer experience for developers so that they never ever have to think about the infrastructure at all. Because even when you enable infrastructure as API, that's still an API of the infrastructure. We go straight to the application tier where they're just thinking about authorized set of microservices. Containers can be orchestrated and built automatically, shifting security left where we're truly checking them or enabling them to check the security vulnerabilities as they're developing the application, not going into the production when they have to touch the infrastructure. To me, that's an enabler of a special power that this new multi-cloud team can have across cloud which they haven't had in the past. >> Yeah, it's funny, John, I'd say very challenging technically. The challenge in 2010 was the software mainframe, remember the marketing people killed that term. >> Yeah, exactly. >> But you think about that. We're going to make virtualization and the overhead associated with that irrelevant. We're going to be able to run any workload and VMware achieved that. Now you're saying we run anything anywhere, any Kubernete, any container. >> That's the reality. That's the chaos. >> And the cloud and that's a new, real problem. Real challenging problem that requires serious engineering. >> Well, I mean it's aspirational, right? Let's get the reality, right? So true spanning cloud, not yet there. You guys, I think your vision is definitely right on in the sense that we'd like the chaos and multicloud's a reality. The question is AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, other clouds, they're not going to sit still. No one's going to let VMware just come up and take everything. You got to enable so the market- >> True, true. I don't think this is the case of us versus them because there is so much that they have to express in terms of the value of every cloud. And this happened in the case of, by the way, whether you go into infrastructure or even workspace solutions, as long as the richest of the experience and richest of the controls are provided, for their cloud to the developers that makes the adoption of their cloud simpler. It's a win-win for every party. >> That's the key. I think the simplest. So, I want to ask you, this comes up a lot and I love that you brought that up, simple and self-service has proven developers who are driving the change, cloud DevOps developers. They're driving the change. They're in charge more than ever. They want self-service, easier to deploy. I want a test, if I don't like it, I want to throw it away. But if I like something, I want to stick with it. So it's got to be self-service. Now that's antithetical to the old enterprise model of solve complexity with more complexity. >> Yeah, yeah. >> So the question for you is as the president of VMware, do you feel good that you guys are looking out over the landscape where you're riding into the valley of the future with the demand being automation, completely invisible, abstraction layer, new use case scenarios for IT and whatever IT becomes. Take us through your mindset there, because I think that's what I'm hearing here at this year, VMware Explorer is that you guys have recognized the shift in demographics on the developer side, but ops isn't going away either. They're connecting. >> They're connected. Yeah, so our vision is, if you think about the role of developers, they have a huge influence. And most importantly they're the ones who are driving innovation, just the amount of application development, the number of developers that have emerged, yet remains the scarcest resource for the enterprise are critical. So developers often time have taken control over decision on infrastructure and ops. Why? Because infrastructure and ops haven't shown up. Not because they like it. In fact, they hate it. (John chuckles) Developers like being developers. They like writing code. They don't really want to get into the day to day operations. In fact, here's what we see with almost all our customers. They start taking control of the ops until they go into production. And at that point in time, they start requesting one by one functions of ops, move to ops because they don't like it. So with our approach and this sort of, as we are driving into the beautiful valley of multi-cloud like you laid out, in our approach with the cross cloud services, what we are saying is that why don't we enable this new team which is a reformatted version of the traditional ops, it has the platform engineering in it, the key skill that enables the developer in it, through a platform that becomes an interface to the developers. It creates that secure workflows that developers need. So that developers think and do what they really love. And the infrastructure is seamless and invisible. It's bound to happen, John. Think about it this way. >> Infrastructure is code. >> Infrastructure has code, and even next year, it's invisible because they're just dealing with the services that they need. >> So it's self-service infrastructure. And then you've got to have that capability to simplified, I'll even say automated or computational governance and security. So Chris Wolf is coming on Thursday. >> Yeah. >> Unfortunately I won't be here. And he's going to talk about all the future projects. 'Cause you're not done yet. The project narrows, it's kind of one of these boring, but important. >> Yeah, there's a lot of stuff in the oven coming out. >> There's really critical projects coming down the pipeline that support this multi-cloud vision, is it's early days. >> Well, this is the thing that we were talking about. I want to get your thoughts on. And we were commenting on the keynote review, Hock Tan bought VMware. He's a lot more there than he thought. I mean, I got to imagine him sitting in the front row going there's some stuff coming out of the oven. I didn't even, might not have known. >> He'd be like, "Hmm, this extra value." (everyone chuckles) >> He's got to be pretty stoked, don't you think? >> He is, he is. >> There's a lot of headroom on the margin. >> I mean, independent to that, I think the strategy that he sees is something that's compelling to customers which is what, in my assessment, speaking with him, he bought VMware because it's strategic to customers and the strategic value of VMware becomes even higher as we take our multi-cloud portfolio. So it's all great. >> Well, plus the ecosystem is now re-energize. It's always been energized, but energized cuz it's sort of had to be, cuz it's such a strong- >> And there was the Dell history there too. >> But, yeah it was always EMC, and then Dell, and now it's like, wow, the ecosystem's- >> Really it's released almost. I like this new team, we've been calling this new ops kind of vibe going refactored ops, as you said, that's where the action's happening because the developers want to go faster. >> They want to go faster. >> They want to go fast cuz the velocity's paying off of them. They don't want to have to wait. They don't want security reviews. They want policy. They want some guardrails. Show me the track. >> That's it. >> And let me drive this car. >> That's it because I mean think about it, if you were a developer, listen, I've been a developer. I never really wanted to see how to operate the code in production because it took time away for developing. I like developing and I like to spend my time building the applications and that's the goal of Aria and Tanzu. >> And then I got to mention the props of seeing project Monterey actually come out to fruition is huge because that's the future of computing architecture. >> I mean at this stage, if a customer from here on is modernizing their infrastructure and they're not investing in a holistic new infrastructure from a hardware and software perspective, they're missing out an opportunity on leveraging the numbers that we were showing, 20% increase in calls. Why would you not just make that investment on both the hardware and the software layer now to get the benefits for the next five-six years. >> You would and if I don't have to make any changes and I get 20% automatically. And the other thing, I don't know if people really appreciate the new curve that the Silicon industry is on. It blows away the history of Moore's law which was whatever, 35-40% a year, we're talking about 100% a year price performance or performance improvements. >> I think when you have an inflection point as we said earlier, there's going to be some things that you know is going to happen, but I think there's going to be a lot that's going to surprise people. New brands will emerge, new startups, new talent, new functionality, new use cases. So, we're going to watch that carefully. And for the folks watching that know that theCUBE's been 12 years with covering VMware VMworld, now VMware Explore, we've kind of met everybody over the years, but I want to point out a little nuance, Raghu thing in the keynote. During the end, before the collective responsibility sustainment commitment he had, he made a comment, "As proud as we are," which is a word he used, there's a lot of pride here at VMware. Raghu kind of weaved that in there, I noticed that, I want to call that out there because Raghu's proud. He's a proud product guy. He said, "I'm a product guy." He's delivering keynote. >> Almost 20 years. >> As proud as we are, there's a lot of pride at VMware, Sumit, talk about that dynamic because you mentioned customers, your customer is not a lot of churn. They've been there for a long time. They're embedded in every single company out there, pretty much VMware is in every enterprise, if not all, I mean 99%, whatever percentage it is, it's huge penetration. >> We are proud of three things. It comes down to number one, we are proud of our innovations. You can see it, you can see the tone from Raghu or myself, or other executives changes with excitement when we're talking about our technologies, we're just proud. We're just proud of it. We are a technology and product centric company. The second thing that sort of gets us excited and be proud of is exactly what you mentioned, which is the customers. The customers like us. It's a pleasure when I bring Roshan on stage and he talks about how he's expecting certain relationship and what he's viewing VMware in this new world of multi-cloud, that makes us proud. And then third, we're proud of our talent. I mean, I was jokingly talking to just the events team alone. Of course our engineers do amazing job, our sellers do amazing job, our support teams do amazing job, but we brought this team and we said, "We are going to get you to run an event after three years from not they doing one, we're going to change the name on you, we're going to change the attendees you're going to invite, we're going to change the fact that it's going to be new speakers who have never been on the stage and done that kind of presentation. >> You're also going to serve a virtual audience. >> And we're going to have a virtual audience. And you know what? They embraced it and they surprised us and it looks beautiful. So I'm proud of the talent. >> The VMware team always steps up. You never slight it, you've got great talent over there. The big thing I want to highlight as we end this day, the segment, and I'll get your thoughts and reactions, Sumit, is again, you guys were early on hybrid. We have theCUBE tape to go back into the video data lake and find the word hybrid mentioned 2013, 2014, 2015. Even when nobody was talking about hybrid. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Multicloud, Raghu, I talked to Raghu in 2016 when he did the Pat Gelsinger, I mean Raghu, Pat and Andy Jassy. >> Yeah. >> When that cloud thing got cleared up, he cleared that up. He mentioned multicloud, even then 2016, so this is not new. >> Yeah. >> You had the vision, there's a lot of stuff in the oven. You guys make announcements directionally, and then start chipping away at it. Now you got Broadcom buys VMware, what's in the oven? How much goodness is coming out that's like just hitting the fruits are starting to bear on the tree. There's a lot of good stuff and just put that, contextualize and scale that for us. What's in the oven? >> First of all, I think the vision, you have to be early to be first and we believe in it. Okay, so that's number one. Now having said that what's in the oven, you would see us actually do more controls across cloud. We are not done on networking side. Okay, we announced something as project Northstar with networking portfolio, that's not generally available. That's in the oven. We are going to come up with more capability on supporting any Kubernetes on any cloud. We did some previews of supporting, for example, EKS. You're going to see more of those cluster controls across any Kubernetes. We have more work happening on our telco partners for enablement of O-RAN as well as our edge solutions, along with the ecosystem. So more to come on those fronts. But they're all aligned with enabling customers multi-cloud through these five cross cloud services. They're all really, some of them where we have put a big sort of a version one of solution out there such as Aria continuation, some of them where even the version one's not out and you're going to see that very soon. >> All right. Sumit, what's next for you as the president? You're proud of your team, we got that. Great oven description of what's coming out for the next meal. What's next for you guys, the team? >> I think for us, two things, first of all, this is our momentum season as we call it. So for the first time, after three years, we are now being in, I think we've expanded, explored to five cities. So getting this orchestrated properly, we are expecting nearly 50,000 customers to be engaging in person and maybe a same number virtually. So a significant touchpoint, cuz we have been missing. Our customers have departed their strategy formulation and we have departed our strategy formulation. Getting them connected together is our number one priority. And number two, we are focused on getting better and better at making customers successful. There is work needed for us. We learn, then we code it and then we repeat it. And to me, those are the two key things here in the next six months. >> Sumit, thank you for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for your valuable time, sharing what's going on. Appreciate it. >> Always great to have chatting. >> Here with the president, the CEO's coming up next in theCUBE. Of course, we're John and Dave. More coverage after the short breaks, stay with us. (upbeat music)

(gentle music intro) >> Okay, we're back. We're live here at theCUBE and at VMworld, VMware Explore, formally VMworld. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Three days of wall to wall coverage, we've got Vittorio Viarengo, the vice president of Cross-Cloud Services at VMware. Vittorio, great to see you, and thanks for coming on theCUBE right after your keynote. I can't get that off my tongue, VMworld. 12 years of CUBE coverage. This is the first year of VMware Explore, formerly VMworld. Raghu said in his keynote, he explained the VMworld community now with multi-clouds that you're in charge of at VMworld, VMware, is now the Explore brand's going to explore the multi-cloud, that's a big part of Raghu's vision and VMware. You're driving it and you are on the stage just now. What's, what's going on? >> Yeah, what I said at my keynote note is that our customers have been the explorer of IT, new IT frontier, always challenging the status quo. And we've been, our legendary engineering team, been behind the scenes, providing them with the tools of the technology to be successful in that journey to the private cloud. And Kelsey said it. What we built was the foundation for the cloud. And now it's time to start a new journey in the multi-cloud. >> Now, one of the things that we heard today clearly was: multi-cloud's a reality. Cloud chaos, Kit Colbert was talking about that and we've been saying, you know, people are chaotic. We believe that. Andy Grove once said, "Reign in the chaos. Let chaos reign, then reign in the chaos." That's the opportunity. The complexity of cross-cloud is being solved. You guys have a vision, take us through how you see that happening. A lot of people want to see this cross-cloud abstraction happen. What's the story from your standpoint, how you see that evolving? >> I think that IT history repeats itself, right? Every starts nice and neat. "Oh, I'm going to buy a bunch of HP servers and my life is going to be good, and oh, this store." >> Spin up an EC2. >> Yeah. Eventually everything goes like this in IT because every vendor do what they do, they innovate. And so that could create complexity. And in the cloud is the complexity on steroid because you have six major cloud, all the local clouds, the cloud pro- local cloud providers, and each of these cloud brings their own way of doing management security. And I think now it's time. Every customer that I talk to, they want more simplicity. You know, how do I go fast but be able to manage the complexity? So that's where cross-cloud services- Last year, we launched a vision, with a sprinkle of software behind it, of building a set of cloud-native services that allow our customers to build, run, manage, secure, and access any application consistently across any cloud. >> Yeah, so you're a year in now, it's not like, I mean, you know, when you come together in a physical event like this, it resonates more, you got the attention. When you're watching the virtual events, you get doing a lot of different things. So it's not like you just stumbled upon this last week. Okay, so what have you learned in the last year in terms of post that launch. >> What we learned is what we have been building for the last five years, right? Because we started, we saw multi-cloud happening before anybody else, I would argue. With our announcement with AWS five, six years ago, right? And then our first journey to multi-cloud was let's bring vSphere on all the clouds. And that's a great purpose to help our customers accelerate their journey of their "legacy" application. Their application actually deliver business to the cloud. But then around two, three years ago, I think Raghu realized that to add value, we needed- customers were already in the cloud, we needed to embrace the native cloud. And that's where Tanzu came in as a way to build application. Tanzu manage, way to secure manage application. And now with Aria, we now have more differentiated software to actually manage this application across- >> Yeah, and Aria is the management plane. That's the rebrand. It's not a new product per se. It's a collection of the VMware stuff, right? Isn't it like- >> No, it's, it's a... >> It's a new product? >> There is a new innovation there because basically they, the engineering team built this graph and Raghu compared it to the graph that Google builds up around about the web. So we go out and crawl all your assets across any cloud and we'll build you this model that now allows you to see what are your assets, how you can manage them, what are the performance and all that, so. No, it's more than a brand. It's, it's a new innovation and integration of a technology that we had. >> And that's a critical component of cross-cloud. So I want to get back to what you said about Raghu and what he's been focused on. You know, I remember interviewing him in 2016 with Andy Jassy at AWS, and that helped clear up the cloud game. But even before that Raghu and I had talked, Dave, on theCUBE, I think it was like 2014? >> Yeah. >> Pat Gelson was just getting on board as the CEO of VMware. Hybrid was very much on the conversation then. Even then it was early. Hybrid was early, you guys are seeing multi-cloud early. >> It was private cloud. >> Totally give you props on that. So VMware gets total props on that, being right on that. Where are we in that journey? 'Cause super cloud, as we're talking about, you were contributing to that initiative in the open with our open source project. What is multi-cloud? Where is it in the status of the customer? I think everyone will agree, multi-cloud is an outcome that's going to happen. It's happening. Everyone has multiple clouds and they configure things differently. Where are we on the progress bar in your mind? >> I think I want to answer that question and go back to your question, which I didn't address, you know, what we are learning from customers. I think that most customers are at the very, very beginning. They're either in the denial stage, like yesterday talked to a customer, I said, "Are you multi-cloud, are you on your multi-cloud journey?" And he said, "Oh we are on-prem and a little bit of Azure." I said, "Oh really? So the bus- "Oh no, well the business unit is using AWS, right? And we are required company that is using-" I said, "Okay, so you are... that customer is in cloud first stage." >> Like you said, we've seen this movie before. It comes around, right? >> Yeah. >> Somebody's going to have to clean that up at some point. >> Yeah, I think a lot, a lot of- the majority customers are either in denial or in the cloud chaos. And some customers are pushing the envelope like SMP. SMP Global, we heard this morning. Somebody has done all the journey in the private cloud with us, and now I said, and I talked to him a few months ago, he told me, "I had to get in front of my developers. Enough of this, you know, wild west. I had to lay down the tracks and galleries for them to build multi-cloud in a way that was, give them choice, but for me, as an operator and a security person, being able to manage it and secure it." And so I think most customers are in that chaos phase right now. Very early. >> So at our Supercloud22 event, we were riffing and I was asking you about, are you going to hide the complexity, yes. But you're also going to give access to the, to the developers if they want access to the primitives. And I said to you, "It sounds like you want to have your cake and eat it too." And you said, "And want to lose weight." And I never followed up with you, so I want to follow up now. By "lose weight," I presume you mean be essentially that platform of choice, right? So you're going to, you're going to simplify, but you're going to give access to the developers for those primitives, if in fact they want one. And you're going to be the super cloud, my word of choice. So my question to you is why, first of all, is that correct, your "lose weight"? And why VMware? >> When I say you, you want a cake, eat it and lose weight, I, and I'm going to sound a little arrogant, it's hard to be humble when you're good. But now I work for a company, I work for a company that does that. Has done it over and over and over again. We have done stuff, I... Sometimes when I go before customers, I say, "And our technology does this." Then the customer gets on stage and I go, "Oh my God, oh my God." And then the customers say, "Yeah, plus I realize that I could also do this." So that's, you know, that's the kind of company that we are. And I think that we were so busy being successful with on-prem and that, you know, that we kind of... the cloud happened. Under our eyes. But now with the multi-cloud, I think there is opportunity for VMware to do it all over again. And we are the right company to do it for two reasons. One, we have the right DNA. We have those engineers that know how to make stuff that was not designed to work together work together and the right partnership because everybody partners with us. >> But, you know, a lot of companies like, oh, they missed cloud, they missed mobile. They missed that, whatever it was. VMware was very much aware of this. You made an effort to do kind of your own cloud initiative, backed off from- and everybody was like, this is a disaster waiting to happen and of course it was. And so then you realize that, you learn from your mistakes, and then you embraced the AWS deal. And that changed everything, it changed... It cleared it up for your customers. I'm not hearing anybody saying that the cross-cloud services strategy, what we call multi, uh, super cloud is wrong. Nobody's saying that's like a failed, you know, strategy. Now the execution obviously is very important. So that's why I'm saying it's different this time around. It's not like you don't have your pulse on it. I mean, you tried before, okay, the strategy wasn't right, it backfired, okay, and then you embraced it. But now people are generally in agreement that there's either a problem or there's going to be a problem. And so you kind of just addressed why VMware, because you've always been in the catbird seat to solve those problems. >> But it is a testament to the pragmatism of the company. Right? You try- In technology, you cannot always get it right, right? When you don't get it right, say, "Okay, that didn't work. What is the next?" And I think now we're onto something. It's a very ambitious vision for sure. But I think if you look at the companies out there that have the muscles and the DNA and the resources to do it, I think VMware is one. >> One of the risks to the success, what's been, you know you watch the Twitter chatter is, "Oh, can VMware actually attract the developers?" John chimed in and said, >> Yeah. >> It's not just the devs. I mean, just devs. But also when you think of DevOps, the ops, right? When you think about securing and having that consistent platform. So when you think about the critical factors for you to execute, you have to have that pass platform, no question. Well, how do you think about, okay, where are the gaps that we really have to get right? >> I think that for us to go and get the developers on board, it's too late. And it's too late for most companies. Developers go with the open source, they go with the path of least resistance. So our way into that, and as Kelsey Hightower said, building new application, more applications, is a team sport. And part of that team is the Ops team. And there we have an entry, I think. Because that's what- >> I think it possible. I think you, I think you're hitting it. And my dev comment, by the way, I've been kind of snarky on Twitter about this, but I say, "Oh, Dev's got it easy. They're sitting in the beach with sunglasses on, you know, having focaccia. >> Doing whatever they want. >> Happy doing whatever they want. No, it's better life for the developer now. Open source is the software industry, that's going great. Shift left in CI/CD pipeline. Developers are faster than ever, they're innovating. It's all self-service, it's all DevOps. It's looking good for the developers right now. And that's why everyone's focused on that. They're driving the change. The Ops team, that was traditional IT Ops, is now DevOps with developers. So the seed change of data and security, which is core, we're hearing a lot of those. And if you look at all the big successes, Snowflake, Databricks, MinIO, who was on earlier with the S3 cloud storage anywhere, this is the new connective tissue that VMware can connect to and extend the operational platform of IT and connect developers. You don't need to win them all over. You just connect to them. >> You just have to embrace the tools that they're using. >> Exactly. >> You just got to connect to them. >> You know, you bring up an interesting point. Snowflake has to win the developers, 'cause they're basically saying, "Hey, we're building an application development platform on top of our proprietary system." You're not saying that. You're saying we're embracing the open source tools that developers are using, so use them. >> Well, we gave it a single pane of glass to manage your application everywhere. And going back to your point about not hiding the underlying primitives, we manage that application, right? That application could be moving around, but nobody prevents that application to use that API underneath. I mean, that's, that can always do that. >> Right, right. >> And, and one of the reason why we had Kelsey Hightower and my keynote and the main keynote was that I think he shows that the template, the blueprint for our customers, our operators, if you want to have- even propel your career forward, look at what he did, right? VI admin, going up the stack storage and everything else, and then eventually embrace Kubernetes, became an expert. Really took the time to understand how modern application were- are built. And now he's a luminary in the industry. So we don't have, all have to become luminary, but you can- our customers right here, doing the labs upstairs, they can propel the career forward in this. >> So summarize what you guys are announcing around cross cloud-services. Obviously Aria, another version, 1.3 of Tanzu. Lay out the sort of news. >> Yeah, so we- With Tanzu, we have one step forward with our developer experience so that, speaking of meeting where they are, with application templates, with ability to plug into their idea of choice. So a lot of innovation there. Then on the IR side, I think that's the name of the game in multi-cloud, is having that object model allows you to manage anything across anything. And then, we talk about cross-cloud services being a vision last year, I, when I launched it, I thought security and networking up there as a cloud, but it was still down here as ploy technology. And now with NSX, the latest version, we brought that control plane in the cloud as a cloud native cross-cloud service. So, lot of meat around the three pillars, development, the management, and security. >> And then the complementary component of vSphere 8 and vSAN 8 and the whole DPU thing, 'cause that's, 'cause that's cloud, right? I mean, we saw what AWS did with Nitro. >> Yeah. >> Five, seven years ago. >> That's the consumption model cloud. >> That's the future of computing architecture. >> And the licensing model underneath. >> Oh yeah, explain that. Right, the universal licensing model. >> Yeah, so basically what we did when we launch cloud universal was, okay, you can buy our software using credit that you have on AWS. And I said, okay, that's kind of hybrid cloud, it's not multi-cloud, right? But then we brought in Google and now the latest was Microsoft. Now you can buy our software for credits and investment that our customers already have with these great partners of ours and use it to consume as a subscription. >> So that kind of changes your go-to-market and you're not just chasing an ELA renewal now. You're sort of thinking, you're probably talking to different people within the organizations as well, right? So if I can use credits for whatever, Google, for Azure, for on-prem, for AWS, right? Those are different factions necessarily in the organization. >> So not just the technology's multi-cloud, but also the consumption model is truly multi-cloud. >> Okay, Vittorio, what's next? What's the game plan? What do you have going on? It's getting good traction here again, like Dave said, no one's poo-pooing cross-cloud services. It is kind of a timing market forces. We were just talking before you came on. Oh, customers don't- may not think they have a problem, whether they're the frog boiling water or not, they will have the problem coming up or they don't think they have a problem, but they have chaos reigning. So what's next? What are you doing? Is it going to be new tech, new market? What is the plan? >> So I think for, if I take my bombastic kind of marketing side of me hat off and I look at the technology, I think the customers in these scales wants to be told what to do. And so I think what we need to do going forward is articulate these cross-cloud services use cases. Like okay, what does mean to have an application that uses a service over here, a service over there, and then show the value of getting this component from one company? Because cross-cloud services at your event, how many vendors were there? 20? 30? >> Yeah. >> So the market is there. I mean, these are all revenue-generating companies, right, but they provide a piece of the puzzle. Our ambition is to provide a platform approach. And so we need to articulate better, what are the advantages of getting these components management, security, from- >> And Kit, Kit was saying, it's a hybrid kind of scenario. I was kind of saying, oh, putting my little business school scenario hat on, oh yeah, you go hardcore competitive, best product wins, kill or be killed, compete and win. Or you go open and you create a keiretsu, create a consortium, and get support, standardize or defacto standardize a bunch of it, and then let everyone monetize or participate. >> Yeah, we cannot do it alone. >> What's the approach? What's the approach you guys want to take? >> So I think whatever possible, first of all, we're not going to do it alone. Right, so the ecosystem is going to play a part and if the ecosystem can come together around the consortium or a standard that makes sense for customers? Absolutely. >> Well, and you say, nobody's poo-pooing it, and I stand by that. But they are saying, and I think it is true, it's hard, right? It's a very challenging, ambitious goal that you have. But yeah, you've got a track record of- >> I mean the old playbook, >> Exactly! >> The old playbooks are out. I mean, I always say, the old kill and be highly competitive strategy. Proprietary is dead. And then if you look at the old way of winning was, okay, you know, we're going to lock customers in- >> What do you mean proprietary is dead? Proprietary's not dead. >> No, I mean like, I'm talking- Okay, I'm talking about how people sell. Enterprise companies love to create, simplify, create value with chaos like okay, complexity with more complexity. So that's over, you think that's how people are marketing? >> No, no, it's true. But I mean, we see a lot of proprietary out there. >> Like what? >> It's still happening. Snowflake. (laughing) >> Tell that to the entire open store software industry. >> Right, well, but that's not your play. I mean, you have to have some kind of proprietary advantage. >> The enterprise playbook used to be solve complexity with complexity, lock the customers in. Cloud changed all that with open. You're a seasoned marketer, you're also an executive. You have an interesting new wave. How do you market to the enterprise in this new open way? How do you win? >> For us, I think we have that relationship with the C-level and we have delivered for them over and over again. So our challenge from a marketing perspective is to educate these executives about all that. And the fact that we didn't have this user conference in person didn't help, right? And then show that value to the operator so that they can help us just like we did in the past. I mean, our sales motion in the past was we made these people- I told them today, you were the heroes. When you virtualized, when you brought down 1000 servers to 80, you were the hero, right? So we need to empower them with the technology and the know-how to be heroes again in multi-cloud. And I think the business will take care of itself. >> Okay final question from me, and Dave might have another one of his, everybody wanted to know this year at VMworld, VMware Explore, which is the new name, what would it look like? What would the vibe be? Would people show up? Would it be vibrant? Would cross-cloud hunt? Would super cloud be relevant? I got to say looking at the floor last night, looking at the keynotes, looking at the perspective, it seems to look like, oh, people are on board. What is your take on this? You've been talking to customers, you're talking to people in the hallways. You've been brief talking to all the analysts. What is the vibe about this year's Explore? >> I think, you've been covering us for a long time, this is a religious following we have. And we don't take it for granted. I told the audience today, this to us is a family reunion and we couldn't be, so we got a sense of like, that's what I feels like the family is back together. >> And there's a wave coming too. It's not like business is dying. It's like a whole 'nother. Another wave is coming. >> It's funny you mention about the heroes. 'Cause I go back, I don't really have my last question, but it's just the last thought is, I remember the first time I saw a demo of VMware and I went, "Holy crap, wow. This is totally game changing." I was blown away. Right, like you said, 80 servers down to just a couple of handfuls. This is going to change everything. And that's where it all started. You know, I mean, I know it started in workstations, but that's when it really became transformational. >> Yeah, so I think we have an opportunity to do it over again with the family that is here today, of which you guys consider family as well. >> All right, favorite part of the keynote and then we'll wrap up. What was your favorite part of the keynote today? >> I think the excitement from the developer people that were up there. Kelsey- >> The guy who came after Kelsey, what was his name? I didn't catch it, but he was really good. >> Yeah, I mean, it's, what it's all about, right? People that are passionate about solving hard problems and then cannot wait to share it with the community, with the family. >> Yeah. I love the one line, "You kids have it easy today. We walk to school barefoot in the snow back in the day." >> Uphill, both ways. >> Broke the ice to wash our face. >> Vittorio, great to see you, great friend of theCUBE, CUBE alumni, vice president of cross-cloud serves at VMware. A critical new area that's harvesting the fruits coming off the tree as VMware invested in cloud native many years ago. It's all coming to the market, let's see how it develops. Congratulations, good luck, and we'll be back with more coverage here at VMware Explore. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Stay with us after the short break. (gentle music)

(bright music) >> Welcome back to Supercloud 22. I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE" with Dave Vellante, with the opening keynote conversation with Vittorio Viarengo. He's the Vice President of Cross-Cloud at VMware, Cube Alumni. Vittorio, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Ah, my pleasure. >> So you're kicking off the Supercloud event. Again, a pilot. Again, we were texting just a few months ago around some of the momentum. You identified this right away. You saw it, you saw the momentum. What's the reality around supercloud? What's your perspective? >> Well, I think that we have to go back to the history of IT, over the last ever. I feel like in IT, we're always running after the developers. The developers, they're smart. They go for the path of least resistance, and they create innovations, and then the entire stacks moves around, and if you look at developers over the last, you know, 15 years, they've been going to the cloud, right? And the reason they're going for the cloud is, you now, they say software is eating the world. Is really who builds software? Developers, so I think it's developers are eating the world, and so initially, there was one game in town, so they went with AWS, but eventually, we got the multiple clouds, and now, the reality is that the applications there, it's how we make money, how we save money. They're running on multiple cloud, the 75% of the companies running on multiple clouds today, and so, I think that creates the new computing platform for the next, you know, 10 years, 15 years, and I think that that multi-cloud world brings tremendous advantages, as we just talked, but also some challenges, and it's prime to a simplification, and that's where we're trying. >> One of the things we observe is this abstraction layer across clouds to create a consistent experience for customers, and very importantly, as you point out, developers. So when you think about the history of abstractions, we see another one sort of forming in the 2020s, which is really different, as you pointed out, that we had in the 2010s, where there was really, you know, one main cloud. Now, you have all these clouds. What are your thoughts on the history of abstractions? >> Well, if you look at IT, we always needed abstraction to unleash the next level of growth, right? I grew up as a... I started my career as a C++ developer. So initially, you know, on Windows, if you wanted to open a window on the screen, you had to write 200 lines of code. Then the MFC library came in, and now, you still have to be a C++ developer, but now, with a one line of code, you can initiate, open the yellow world and start to build your applications, but it's only when Visual Basic comes along, then now, we get five millions developers building applications that are 20 years later, we're still using, okay? And then the list goes on and on, and in the application integration, we used to look at the bytes on the bus and say, "Okay, this is the customers, and we're going to map it to SAP," and then we went one level higher with SOA and web services and the rest of history, and then unleashed tremendous, you know, growth and look at, you know, how we now, you know, we be able to throw APIs, integrate anything, and so then the ultimate example of abstraction is virtualization. We made all these different servers and networking and storage look like one, and now, you know, and the business never cares if you're running SAP back on-prem on HP or some other piece of hard drive. They care that it runs, right? And so I think that now, we need to bring a level of abstraction in the cloud that not only abstracts the low level APIs at the highest level, but also uniforms and unify the APIs and the way do management and security across multiple cloud. >> Let's unpack that because I think the virtualization angle is interesting 'cause with virtualization enabled AWS. If you look at AWS' success, virtualization, the Hypervisor, got them going, and that established that value. Now, the new structural change is happening. How do you define that specifically? What is supercloud in your mind? >> So in our mind, supercloud is a set of cloud native services that, first of all... Let's unpack that and go back to the virtualization. Virtualization was a great way to do it on-prem and is no wonder that AWS and Azure, they did it on their cloud, right? But the lingo franca of the cloud is not the virtualization layer. That's taken, it's hidden. It's down there, it just does its thing. The lingo franca of cloud is microservices, API, Kubernetes as the orchestration layer, and one would think, "Okay, now, we have Kubernetes, life is good. I just, you know, deploy on- Well, there are six, seven, eight Kubernetes distribution, and so to us, the supercloud is the ability to take, to factor out the common things that you can do across cloud and give you a single pane or glass to manage your application and single pipeline so you can build your application once and deploy it consistently across multiple clouds, and then, basically, factor out the other two important things with the security and observability of the application. >> One of the trade-offs of abstraction, you go back to the mainframe. They had to squeeze out the performance overheads. VMware had to do the same and done a tremendous job of it. So are we going to see that across clouds with multi-cloud or what we call supercloud. Are you going to see a trade-off? What trade-off do you see that the industry, technically, has to attack? >> Abstractions are always about trade-offs, right? You're trading off the speed. You know, I'm writing C++ code goes really fast for scale. You know, now, I have five million developers writing applications, but I think, eventually, what happens is that or you're trading off specialized skills for, you know, more valuable skills, and if I had a dollar every time I heard, "Oh, we cannot run Oracle Databases on virtualization," well, or the JVM is too slow, but guess what? How many Java developers, how many Java application are running out on the JVM? So I think, eventually, there will be trade-offs, but the technology catches up and it's a matter of like how much value are you getting in terms of scales and saving cost versus maybe the performance trade-off you were making on the lower level. >> On the evolution of hybrid cloud, 'cause right now, hybrid cloud is a steady state. People see that clearly, you know, on-premise and Edge, right around the corner. Public native cloud, there's benefits to be in the native cloud. How does multi-cloud fit? 'Cause by default, people have multiple clouds. If they run on Azure, they probably have some sort of productivity software with Microsoft or other Microsoft products, but it's best to breed. It's not yet connected. So multi-cloud has kind of become a default kind of thing. It's not yet a strategy in some people's minds, yet some people are thinking about it. So we think, and I think you might agree, that multi-cloud will happen, multiple clouds in the sense of workloads running seamlessly. Is that a pipe dream or is that near in our future? (men laugh) >> So there is a lot of unpack there. First of all, our definition of multi-cloud is that because most customers are operating their on-prem as the cloud, so the moment you have your on-prem cloud and AWS, your multi-cloud, so 75%, 85% going to 85%- >> You mean Private Cloud on-premise cloud operations? >> Yeah, and then you have another cloud, you're already multi-cloud. >> I'm assuming the experiences is identical, right? That's the assumption you- >> Well, initially, it's not identical, right? That's why you need a supercloud, right? >> Yeah, exactly. >> And most customers though are in denial, meaning that I see them being in five stages of acceptance or adoption of the multi-cloud. One is denial. We are on-prem and maybe we have one cloud. We're standardized. The second one is euphoria. Oh, look, you know, look how fast we go. All these developers are happy to do whatever they want, and then the third one is like, holy crap. They got the first bill. They realize that the security share responsibility model to deal with. They realize that somebody is to deploy this application and manage the application. Nobody does it for them, and then they go into like, (indistinct). Okay, now, we need to do something about this, right? It's a new normal, and then you end up with the enlightment, right? Now, we're really being productive and strategic about how we use multi-cloud. Very, very few customers are in that stage. Most customers are still within the denial and the new normal, and within the spectrum, you see multi-cloud as, "Okay, I have an application here, an application there. Okay, great, big deal." The next level is, "Okay, I have an application here that uses a pieces of a service of an application over there. Okay, now, I'm coordinating application. I'm using microservices," and then the third stage is like, "Okay, I am designing my application to use multiple services or multiple cloud because each uses differentiated features of that particular cloud." >> Is it part of the problem too, Vittorio, that the industry, the technology industry, you guys have not caught up. The cloud vendors aren't solving that problem. What's VMware doing to solve that problem? >> So we have seen this coming four or five years ago, right? That's why we acquired Pivotal, and then we made a number of acquisition around it because we saw that... Well, let's go back. What is VMware DNA? If you look, I've been running engineering, product management in the company then I moved to the dark side, more on the marketing side, but I've seen, and I sweat with those engineers, and when I look at those engineers, these people know how to make stuff that was not designed to work together work together and deliver value, and so if we go back to, you know, on-prem, we did it with virtualization. In the cloud, we did a new level of abstraction, which is, you know, at the APIs at the... And so over the last five years, we built what we believe is very comprehensive portfolio that unified how you build, you run, manage, secure, and access any application across any cloud. No Hypervisor required. >> So that's the game changer right there. So let me ask you a question. How does the choice factor come in because can VMware do all this or do they need to rely on partners? Because most customers have HashiCorp and other companies in there doing services for them as well. So how do you see the multi-partner strategy approach? Can you do it alone or are you going to need help from the ecosystem? >> First of all, if you look at the success of your event today, look how many vendors from multiple backgrounds and multiple level of the stack that are coming together to talk about the supercloud. So that to me is success already, and, of course, there are tremendous companies that are going to deliver fantastic value for, you know, management like HashiCorp or security and the development experience. Our approach is to bring them together as an integrated platform, and I think VMware has both the DNA and the muscles, the investment to be able to pull that off. >> Okay, you saw Keith Townsend. He had that very cool blackboard, and he called, this was maybe eight or nine months ago, he called the supercloud and VMware's multi-cloud vision aspirational. When is this going to be real? >> I think it's absolutely real today in some of the pieces. Right, there's always an aspiration. You have to look at a company like VMware as a company that looks out five, 10 years, right? You know, we have Raghu as our CEO, you know, which is a technical visionary, and so he saw five years ago, the advent of multi-cloud, and we invested in first part of the stack. What is it? How to build applications natively in the cloud using Tanzu. So with Tanzu, you can build application, manage Kubernetes cluster, secure, creating this service match, and so that's the reality today. Then on the next step is security. We recently announced our security approach. We have a very peculiar position in the stack to be able to see security, not just on the endpoint, not just, you know, in the application, but in between, right? By looking at all the Hypervisor, if you're using Hypervisor. You looking at East-West traffic with NSX and cross cloud networks, and so these are the three main places that are in place today, right? And then I cannot spoil our user conference coming in a couple of weeks where we're going to make more announcement around the supercloud, which we called cross-cloud services. >> Vittorio, I remember in 2016, I interviewed Andy Jassy and Raghu when they announced the deal with VMware. VMware and AWS had the relationship, and you're running on the cloud on AWS VMware, and you look at what's happened since, and this is where the supercloud conversation starts to kick in where Amazon's really good at moving bits around and optimizing the power and the silicon of the infrastructure, which means that the higher level services are going to be much more open for people to innovate around. So Dave calls it, the super pass. This area platform is a service to change the SaaS game. So I have to ask you, how do you see the SaaS game changing with supercloud? Because if you have a Private Cloud or Edge, you're now multiple clouds, technically, as you pointed out. How has that changed the SaaS configuration? Because SaaS and IaaS and PaaS had great relationships in native clouds to solve problems. Now, you have the multi-cloud. How do you see this platform as a service area changing or maybe enabling? >> So I think that that's where the innovation, the ability to aggregate common... Because look, there is a reason why people use multiple cloud, right? They choose it because they have differentiated features. So we don't want to ever hide those features, like if you're using Google, because you need AI capabilities, absolutely. We don't want to prevent that, right? But at the PaaS level, you know, when you are orchestrated these microservices, you don't want to do it in five different ways, right? So those are the areas where I think are prime for aggregation and simplification. How you, you know, look at all this Kubernetes environment and being able to monitor your application and force security policies, both from a resource consumption, this group of developers can only use this many resources, but also a run time that you don't run out of like, you know, you get that bill shock, and so those are the areas where I think there's this more ability for us to innovate and deliver value, not at the lower level which is taken by the- >> So you try to have your cake and eat it too, which is if you can pull that off it's game over, right? You have a specific set of cross-cloud services that are unique and value added that are differentiable in the industry, but at the same time, you're trying to give access to developers, if in fact, they want access to those primitives, right? >> Yeah. >> That's a bold aspiration. >> Well, we want to have the cake, eat it, and lose weight. (men laugh) But seriously, I think, going back to your point about the ecosystem, of course, we're not going to do it alone, right? If we were doing it alone, there is not a market, right? And so I think that the market is so big and the area of challenges for IT is so large that there's room for many companies to add value, and I think that, as I said, our approach is to, you know, we're a platform company, right? So you're going to find tremendous companies that will solve one problem for multiple clouds. You're going to find the hyperscaler that have a platform approach for one cloud. We like to think that we can position ourself in that two by two as the company that has a platform approach across multiple clouds. >> You know, it's great. That's where we've known each other for a long time. It's 12 years of "CUBE" coverage. Watching things like the CNCF emerge and do great work, watching cloud native kind of go that next level's been fun to watch, and the developers have had a great run. I mean, open sources booming, developer goodness is out there. People are shifting left, a lot of great stuff going with containers and Kubernetes. So looking good on the developer experience front right now, and I think it's only going to get better, but developers don't think about locking. They just want to get the job done. Move on to the next line of code. It's the ops teams that we're hearing from that are saying, "Hey, we love this, too, but we got to align with the developer." Level up, so to speak. So ops and security teams are saying, "Hey, I got to run this with automation with the higher level services." So there seems to be a focus around the supercloud conversation around ops teams. This is your wheelhouse, VMware. You guys do a lot of IT operations and things of that nature. How do you see that and what's the message cross-cloud brings to and supercloud brings to the development teams and the ops teams who are really going to be doing DevOps together and/or faster? >> I think if you go back to what where we started, right? Developers run the show, and I think there's been a little bit of inertia in IT organization on the op side and the security side in catching up to see how to catch up to where developers are, right? And with the DevOps revolution, if operators don't really understand what the developers need and get ahead of that, they're going to be left behind. So I'll give you an example, like SMB Global, one of our customers, their band runs their operation. Basically, told me I had to sit down and figure out what these developers were doing because I was being left behind and then or Cerner, one of our partners and customers, same thing they say, okay, we sat down. We realized that we needed to get ahead of the developers and set those guard rails, right? These are the Kubernetes environment you want to use? Okay, this is how we're going to set them up. This is want to make sure that we shift left security, that we have a single pipeline that feeds that, and Cerner, using our technology was able to... They made a business decision to move from one hyperscaler, was going to go unnamed to another hyperscaler, It was going to go unnamed, and they managed to change all the deployments in four hours. So that's the power of the supercloud, being able to say, "Hey, developers, do whatever you want, but these are the guard rails, and we're going to be able to like stay ahead of you and give you the flexibility, but also, make sure that operation and security, as a saying." >> Shift left shield right, basically. >> Awesome, awesome stuff. We've got 15 seconds. What is supercloud? What's the bumper sticker? >> The supercloud is a level of abstraction across any of the public clouds that allows developers to go fast, operators to make sense of what's happening, security to enforce security, and end users to access any application with a great user experience and security. >> And it's inclusive of on-prem. I'll just throw that in. (John laughs) >> All right, great stuff. Thanks for coming on. We're going to have a industry panel to talk about and debate Supercloud 22. We'll be right back after this break.

(light music) >> Hello, welcome back everybody to theCUBE's coverage in New York City of AWS Summit 2022. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We had Dave Vellante, Lisa Martin here earlier. I'm going to wrap it up here with James Forrester, last interview of the day here in New York. Wish we would have had another day. It's a packed house, 10,000 people. James Forrester's the VP Worldwide Technical Leader for VMware's Cloud on AWS. On AWS is a big distinction. James, welcome to theCube. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you so much, John. It's great to be here. >> So I think it's been like six years since the announcement of VMware's Cloud on AWS, which is a separate instance, separate hardware, but it's changed the game for VMware. You guys have done a lot of work, successful traction with customers. Clarified, I remember at that time, it really clarified VMware's Cloud play. Which then gave VMware more time to work on what it's doing now, which is, you know, using all their assets and their operations with Tanzu, Monterey, Cloud Native, Cross Cloud. What they call you guys call Cross Cloud, I call Super Cloud, action, a lot of stuff happening. So thanks for coming on. Okay. So first question is, what's the future look like for VMware's Cloud on AWS? >> Super bright, super bright. And there's a couple of great reasons for that. I think firstly, what we're seeing is that customers have now made enough progress in their cloud journeys. Many of them have chosen AWS and they're going full force. We're going to help them go faster. We're going to help them get there and get native to those adjacent services much quicker with more confidence and more resiliency. So it's a super exciting time to be doing what we do. >> You know, VMware has had a steady install base, okay. I mean basically it's like almost ingrained in the operations. What do you guys see as that next level step up function? Because you know, obviously Broadcom is buying VMware. Obviously that utility will be in place, but there's more. There's more there that customers can tap into. This is the promise of the cross-cloud. How do you talk about that when you got the AWS action? How does that all integrate? >> Yeah, absolutely. And of course, because so many customers are going to AWS on their own cloud journeys right now, what we get to have the conversation about is how they can get there more confidently. And so for customers who are just starting out, who are looking at their application portfolios, who have a ton of skilled IT professionals who they want to bring into that cloud journey, they can use the skills they already have. For those folks who are a little bit further along but they may be finding that refactoring their applications is more complex, more difficult that they anticipated, we give them a way of moving with confidence and with much less risk so they can do those cloud journeys that they anticipated. >> You know, James, I want to get your thoughts on what the state of the current situation is, vis-à-vis, your customers and your customers' appetite for AWS services. 'Cause one of the promises of the original deal was clarifying messaging but more importantly, customers can get the VMware Cloud and take advantage of the higher level services on AWS. What's the update there? What's the current state of the art? What's some of the patterns that you're seeing on the uptake of services and how they're working together? >> Yeah, it's a great call out. And honestly, one of the misconceptions that I address right out of the gate is that somehow going VMware Cloud takes you away from those services. It doesn't, it gets you closer to them. Full, direct, native access to all of those hundreds of great AWS services. So what we often find is that customers have their enterprise data, inside data workloads in their data centers. But what they want to do is get that up next to the AWS services that can use it, like Redshift and Athena and Glue. They can move those workloads right adjacent to those services to start using them right away. So it's a great way to look at the platform. >> So one of the observations that's pretty well understood right now by most people, I'd say 90%, if not more, not a hundred percent 'cause I've heard people like not get it, but it's pretty clear that the operating model for the the enterprise will be hybrid as a steady state. I don't think there's any debate on that unless you think there is. >> Do you feel the same- >> No debate. No debate. >> Okay. Hybrid's a steady state. What does that mean as clients start to think about edge and their data centers. 'Cause now the private cloud is back in the game. So I've heard people talk about private cloud, which we, I think we coined the term with Dave, Wikibon years ago, but it kind of went away because that was not the public cloud. So public cloud won, on premise didn't go away. We saw Amazon with Outpost. So now they're like, I can still have stuff on prem and run it in a cloud operations. So they're calling that private cloud, I think. So you're starting to hear the same things. What it means basically is that hybrid is winning. It's the standard. What does the hybrid environment look like from a VMware perspective as you guys look at that and have been building that out 'cause you have customers that are on premises. >> Yeah. >> Is it just to the cloud and back? Is it, is there any changes? Is there new connective tissue? Is there a glue layer? What's the operating model for VMware customers? >> Well, customers wanted those same benefits from public cloud agility, cost benefits, elasticity, innovation, sovereignty, sustainability, but they wanted to be able to do that everywhere. They wanted it in their data centers. They wanted it at the edge. And as you've pointed out public cloud delivered that for customers. AWS first out there delivering that for customers. Now with innovations like VMware Cloud and AWS outpost, we're able to bring that back into the data center. We're able to bring those same benefits of public cloud into the customers on-prem environment. And you're right. We see hybrid just rolling and rolling and being able to offer our solution across all of it. >> Yeah, we're big fans of VMware because theCube's 12 years old, we've been at every VMworld. Now they're calling it VMware Explorer, the events coming up. So the folks watching, plug for VMware Explorer, formerly VMworld, it's on the schedule. Content catalog just came out last week. It's looking pretty good. So put a plug out there. We'll be there with theCube, two sets. So you know, if you're going to VMworld, now Explorer go register, get up there. It's in San Francisco, always a great event. vSphere and vSAN, always great products. But you got Carbon Black, you got Security. So these things have all been working kind of pistons for VMware. Tanzu, I know Raghu and those guys are doing it. Craig McLuckie and team, they're working on that. You got Tanzu, you got Monterey. That's the new cloud native thing. How is that tracking vis-à-vis, the operating model of the the core engine, vSphere, vSAN and others. And then with the native services of Cloud. So you got AWS Cloud with VMware Cloud, vSphere, vSAN, Carbon Black, and Security. And then you got the Tanzu over here. How are those three things coming together? >> Well, the services that customers know and love first and foremost that they've been running the mission critical workloads on, vSphere, vSAN, NSX. What VMware cloud and AWS is, is a packaging together of those services. So customers don't have to configure it all themselves and do the heavy lifting. We manage and run it on their behalf. What we are adding to that most recently with Tanzu is now the ability to run containers within the same environment. 'Cause customers tell us they've got parts of their organization that are very much on vSphere VMs. Parts of their organization are moving to containers. We want be able to provide a single operating model, a single layer, a single way of managing all of that. No matter where it's deployed. >> You know, remember back in the day, when Raghu wasn't the CEO, Carl Eschenbach was there, Sanjay Poonen was there. Carl's now at Sequoia Capital, Raghu's a CEO. Sanjay's kind of looking for a next gig. I always said, why doesn't vSphere and NSX become that abstraction layer and commoditize the network so that white boxes and Dell and HP could all play in that layer? It just never happened yet. Is that something you guys talk about at all? Like, I mean in the, in the smokey room, in the execs, is that happening? What's the vision? >> Well, we always work backwards- from customers, right? (John laughing) And what customers are telling us is they want us to help them with that undifferentiated heavy lifting. So who knows where that could take us, but right now we're very focused on helping those customers move with confidence to the cloud. >> You didn't take the bait on that one. I appreciate that. (James laughing) Okay. So let's get some perspective. You're out with customers. What are the big things that you're seeing right now from your customers right now? 'Cause you look behind us here, 10,000 people at this event. This is not a no-show. This is not a throwaway event in, you know, somewhere in the corner of the world. This is New York City, only one summit. This is bigger than Snowflake Summit and that was packed. So from an event standpoint, this is pretty a big game statement here for AWS. These companies are not experiencing headwinds, they're changing. So what are your customers telling you around what they're looking at for the cloud native architecture? I mean obviously the digital transformation is continuing, obviously clouds here. And again, we were saying earlier, this is the first time in history that the cloud hyperscalers have been in market during a so-called downturn. So there's no other data. 2008, I wouldn't call 'em up and running. They were building, but AWS, Azure, others, these cloud players they're in market. And so you're starting to see kind of some data coming out saying, Hey, this thing's still working, the engine of innovation is cranking out and it's not slowing down the digital transformation. It might change the capital markets and valuations but it's not changing customers. That's what I'm hearing. Now, you probably would agree with that, right? >> James: I think that's exactly right. >> Okay. So let's stay with that. If you believe that, then it's like, okay, what are they doing? So what are customers doubling down on? What are some of the patterns you're seeing in the environment today that you could share with the audience? >> Yeah, so I think first and foremost is that steady transition to the cloud to deliver all of those benefits, agility, cost, elasticity, innovation, sovereignty, sustainability that hasn't gone away at all. In fact, it's only accelerated. With workloads like virtual desktops, which became so critical during COVID the need to be able to provide that kind of scalable elastic capacity has only increased. Now, coupled with that, most of these customers are already on a cloud journey. And while some folks may have had the luxury of letting that go a little bit more slowly, nowadays the urgency is pervasive across all of the industries that we get to talk to in New York. Everyone needs to go faster. Everybody's not seeing the progress that they expected that we think we can help them deliver. So the opportunity I think that's come out of COVID is more workloads, different use cases, disaster recovery, ransomware- >> Is that more of an awareness or reality or both? >> Both. Absolutely. >> Okay. So let me ask the next question. 'Cause this is a good conversation, I think. I agree a hundred percent. We're seeing the same exact thing. Now let's talk about how companies are thinking about the real opportunity that's emerged, which is refactoring the business model without actually changing the makeup of the organization per se, to take on new territories and potentially take over categories. >> James: Mm hmm. >> So I mean a data warehouse and a data cloud's kind of the same thing. Snowflake probably wouldn't like me saying that they're a data warehouse because they call themselves a data cloud, but it's kind of the same thing, just refactored on AWS. >> James: Yep. >> That's a super cloud. So that's an opportunity for everyone to do that in every vertical. How many customers are actually thinking that way and actually taking steps to pursue that, capture that opportunity? Or do you agree it's the opportunity? >> No, I think that that is an opportunity and I love that idea of super cloud in that what I think customers have started to realize, over the last couple of years in particular, is it's very difficult to take advantage of all of those great cloud services if your applications are still behind a whole lot of different layers of firewalls and so forth. So getting the application close to those services, in proximity to those services is that first step in modernization. Then it doesn't have to be a change the wings on the plane while it's flying conversation, which- >> John: Yeah. >> You know, is very risky for a lot of organizations. >> John: Exactly. >> It's a let's get the plane going a little bit faster. Let's get the plane going a little bit smoother, and let's get the plane to its destination with less risk. >> You know, James, that reminds me of the old school conversations of non disruptive operations. Remember those days? >> James: I do, yeah. >> Mostly around storage and, and servers. But that's what basically what you're saying. Transform while operating, right? >> James: Exactly. >> So this is, you can do both. You got to make time and it's a talent question too. I'd love to get your thoughts on how customers are thinking about who do you put on which task. 'Cause you want your A players on both areas. You don't want all your A players, what I hear, CSOs and CIOs telling me is that, I put all my A players on transformation, I got no one running the business. >> James: Mm hmm. >> So you got to kind of balance. That's a cultural team decision. >> It's a cultural team decision. It's also a skills marketplace decision. >> John: Yeah. >> And there's a practical reality to the skills that are available and how fast you can hire them. So a big part of the conversation that we have is when customers have existing skills sets, plug those into their transformation, plug those into their business outcomes. I like to use the phrase, "Let's make heroes out of IT" because they can be a much more critical player than they think they can be. Yeah, IT basically is not even around anymore. It's part of the organization. And then you have data science and data engineering coming in. So it's, you know, IT is not a department anymore, it's the company >> Exactly right. >> If you're kind of going down that road, yeah. >> Yeah. Alright, so final question. What's the biggest change you've seen and observed in your current year and a half? You know, we're coming out of COVID, knowing what was before, what sea change, what inflection point are we in now? How would you describe this current market? 'Cause again, we're kind of in a unique market. You know, you got crypto around the corner, people getting attracted to that, little bubbly obviously, reality of cloud and 2.0 or super cloud emerging. On premise is not going away. Edge exploding on the industrial side, especially with machine learning coming along. So this operating model is clearly in sight. What's the biggest observation you've noticed. >> I think it's the sense of urgency over the last couple of years in that most customers I talked to are no longer relaxed about the timing of delivering cloud capabilities to their organizations. Most customers are on sort of a transformation journey of their own and digital transformation and cloud transformation are absolutely fundamental to that. >> One more real quick follow up question if you don't mind, 'cause I appreciate your time. One of the things that's come up a lot in our conversations is the role of the ecosystem. Not only as a part of the business model but also validation of the enablement that cloud offers companies. You have an enabling platform, your ecosystem is well known. And so your customers are starting to develop ecosystems. So if the cloud model kind of trickles like downstream, ecosystem is kind of a proof of something. >> James: Mm hmm. >> What's your view of all this ecosystem discussion as we transform this next generation? >> Yeah, I think it touches on a couple of things. So obviously there is a technology ecosystem, which is evolving very rapidly in support of cloud and cloud transformation. But what's interesting, I think is the business ecosystem that's evolving around it. We're seeing our customers evolve their own businesses to assume that those cloud capabilities will be available to them. And if the cloud capabilities are not available to them in a timely fashion, then the ecosystem starts to have a domino effect. So the ecosystems are interdependent between business, and technology, and skills, and talent. And I think that's a great to be >> James Forrester, they're going to shut us down. The speakers are on, they're going to pull the plug. Thanks for being our last interview here in New York City and bringing us home. Really appreciate you taking the time to come on theCube. >> John, thanks so much. Great to be here, really enjoyed it. Okay. We are wrapping it up here in New York City. I'm John Ford with theCube, great day. For Lisa Martin, Dave Vellante, and the entire crew of theCube here on the ground. Live in person events are back. theCube hybrid, get online, check out our coverage there. The SiliconANGLE and thecube.net. I'm John Furrier signing off from New York City. See you next time. (light music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Las Vegas everybody. You're watching theCUBE coverage of AWS reinvent 2021. I tell you this place is packed. It's quite amazing here, over 20,000 people, I'd say it's closer to 25, maybe 27,000, and it's whole overflow, lots going on in the evenings. It's quite remarkable and we're really happy to be part of this. Jay Turner is here, he's the Vice President of Development and Operations, at PCCW Global. He's joined by Garrett Lowell, Vice President of Ecosystem Partnerships for the Americas at PCCW Global. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much. Jay, maybe you could take us through, for those people who aren't familiar with your company, what do you guys do, what are you all about? >> PCCW Global is the international operating wing of Hong Kong telecom. If it's outside of Hong Kong, it's our network. We've got about 695,000 kilometers of diverse cable, we've got about 43, 44 terabit of capacity came into business in 2005, if my brain is serving me correctly right now. We have a very diverse and vast portfolio ranging all the way from satellite teleports, all the way to IP transit. We're a Tier 1 service provider from that perspective as well. We do one of everything when it comes to networking and that's really, what was the basis of Console Connect, was inventing a platform to really enable our users to capitalize on our network and our assets. >> Okay. 2005, obviously you predated Cloud, you laid a bunch of fibers struck it in the ocean, I mean, global networks. There was a big trend to do that you had to think, you had to go bigger, go home in that business, (laughing) all right. Console Connect is your platform, is that right? >> Jay: Yes. >> So explain- >> Yeah, sorry, Console Connect is a software defined interconnection platform. We built a user self-service portal. Users can allocate ports, they get the LOAs issued to them directly from the platform. And then once they've got an active port or they've come in via one of our partnerships, they can then provision connectivity across our platform. That may be extending to their data centers or extending to their branch office, or it could be building a circuit into the Cloud via direct connect, could be building a circuit into an internet exchange. All of those circuits are going to be across that 685,000 kilometers of diverse fiber rather than going across the public internet. >> When you started, it took some time obviously to build out that infrastructure and then the Cloud came into play, but it was still early days, but it sounds like you're taking the AWS Cloud model and applying that to your business, eliminate all that undifferentiated heavy lifting, if you will, like the visioning in management. >> Yeah, we've heard many people, and that's kind of the impetus of this was, I want to be directly connected to my end point. And how do I do that? AWS, yes, they had direct connect, but figuring out how to do that as an enterprise was challenging. So we said, hey, we'll automate that for you. Just tell us what region you want to connect to. And we'll do all the heavy lifting and we'll just hand you back a villain tag. You're good to go. So it's a classic case, okay. AWS has direct connect. People will go, oh, that's directly competitive, but it's now you're adding value on top of that. Right? >> Yeah. >> Describe where you fit, Garrett, inside of the AWS ecosystem. You look around this hall and it's just a huge growing ecosystem, where you fit inside of that ecosystem and then your ecosystem. What's that like? >> Where we fit into the AWS ecosystem, as Jay alluded to, we're adding value to our partners and customers where they can come in, not only are they able to access the AWS platform as well as other Cloud platforms, but they're also able to access each other. We have a marketplace in our platform, which allows our customers and partners to put a description of their services on the marketplace and advertise their capabilities out to the rest of the ecosystem of PCCW Global and Console Connect. >> And you're doing that inside of AWS, is that right or at least in part? >> No, that's not inside of AWS. >> So your platform is your platform. >> Yes. >> Your relationship with AWS is to superpower direct connect. Is that right or? >> So we're directly connected to AWS throughout the globe. And this allows our customers and partners to be able to utilize not only the PCCW global network, but also to expand that capability to the AWS platform in Cloud. >> So wherever there's a Cloud, you plug into it, okay? >> Garrett: That's correct. >> Jay: Yeah. And then another advantage, the customer, obviously doesn't have to be directly co-located with AWS. They don't have to be in the same geographical region. If for some reason you need to be connected to U.S. west, but you're in Frankfurt, fine, we'll back all the traffic for you. >> Dave: Does that happen a lot? >> It actually does. >> How come? What's the use case there. >> Global diversity is certainly one of them just being able to have multiple footprints. But the other thing that we're seeing more of late is these Cloud-based companies are beginning to be attracted to where their customers are located. So they'll start seeing these packets of views and they'll go, well, we're going to go into that region as well, stand up a VPC there. We want our customers then being able to directly connect to that asset that's closest to them. And then still be able to back call that traffic if necessary or take it wherever. >> What's the big macro trends in your business? Broadly you see cost per bit coming down, you see data consumption and usage going through the roof. How does that affect you? What are some of the big trends that you see? >> I think one of the biggest ones and one that we targeted with Console Connect, we were hearing a lot of customers going, the world's changing so dynamically. We don't know how to do a one-year forecast of bandwidth, much less a three-year, which is what a lot of contracts are asking us for. So we said, hey, how about one day? Can you do one day? (Dave laughs) Because that's what our granularity is. We allow for anything from one day up to three years right now, and then even within that term, we're dynamic. If something happens, if suddenly some product goes through the roof and you've suddenly got a spike in traffic, if a ship drags its anchor through a sub sea cable, and suddenly you're having to pivot, you just come into the platform, you click a couple of buttons, 20 seconds later, we've modified your bandwidth for you or we've provisioned a new circuit for you, we've got your backup going, whatever. Really at the end of the day, it's the customer paying for their network, so the customer should be the one making those decisions. >> How's that affect pricing? I presume or so, I can have one day to a three-year term, for example if I commit to three years, I get a better deal. Is that right, or? >> You do, but at the end of the day, it's actually pretty much a moderate, a better deal. We don't want to force the hand of the customer. If you signed a 12 month contract with us, we're going to give you a 3% discount. >> So it's not really, that's not a motivation to do it. It's just (indistinct) reduce the transaction complexity. And that's why you will sign up for a longer term not to get the big discount. >> Correct. And then, like I said, even within a longer contract, we're still going to allow you to flex and flow and modify if you need to, because it's your network. >> What kind of constraints do you put on that? Do I have to commit to a flow? And then everything above that is, I can flex up. Is that how it works? >> Yeah. >> Okay. And then, the more I commit to, the better the deal is, or not necessarily? >> No, it's pretty much flat rate. >> Okay, I'm going to commit and I'm going to say, all right, I know I'm going to use X, or sign up for that and anything over it, you're pretty flexible, I might get a few points if I sign up for more, somebody might want to optimize that if they're big enough. >> And another really neat advantage, the other complaint we heard from customers, they go, I need three different direct connect, I need to be connected to three different parties, but I don't want to run three different cross-connects and I don't want to have three different ports. That's just an expense and I don't want. And we, fine, take your one gig port run one gig of services on it. If that's 20 different services, we're fine. We allow you to multiplex your port and provision as- >> So awesome. I love that model. I know some software companies who I would recommend to take a look at that pricing model. So Garrett, how do you segment the ecosystem? How do you look at that? Maybe you could draw and paint a picture of the idea of partners and what they look like. I know there's not just one category, but, >> Sure. Our ideal partners are internet exchangers, Cloud partners and SAS providers, because a big piece of our business is migration to the Cloud, and the flexibility of our platform allows and encourages our SAS providers and SI partners to perform migration to the Cloud much easier in a flexible format for their customers. >> What can you tell us, any kind of metrics you can give us around your business to give a sense of the scope, the scale? >> Well, of our business, (Dave laughs) one of the driving factors here, Gardner says that about 2023, I think, 40% of the enterprise workloads will be deployed in the Cloud, which is all fine and dandy, except in my head, you're just trading one set of complexities for another. Instead of having everything in a glass house and being able to understand that, now you're going, it's in the Cloud, now I need to manage my connectivity there. wait a minute, are my security policies still the same? Do they apply if I'm going across the public internet? What exposure have I just bought into myself to try to run this? The platform really aims at normalizing that as much as possible. If you're directly connected to AWS, at the end of the day, that's a really long ethernet cable. So your a glass house just got a lot bigger, but you're still able to maintain and use the exact same policies and procedures that you've been using. That's really one of our guiding principles, is to reduce that complexity and make it very simple for the user. >> I understand that, cause in the early days of Cloud, a lot of enterprises, the CIOs, they were concerned about security, then I think they realized, ah, AWS has pretty good security. CIA is using it. But still people would say to me, it's not that it's best security, it's just different. You know, we move slow, Dave. How do you accommodate, there's that diversity, I mean, AWS is obviously matured, but are you suggesting that you can take my security edicts in my glass house and bring those into your networks and ultimately into the Cloud? Is that how it works? >> That's the goal. It's not going to be a panacea more than likely, but the more edicts that we can allow you to bring across and not have to go back and revamp and, the better for you as a customer and the better really for us, because it normalizes things, it makes it much easier for us to accommodate more and more users. >> And is it such now in the eco, is all the diversity in the ecosystem, is it such that there's enough common patterns you guys can accommodate most of those use cases? >> Yeah, absolutely. One of the key components is the fact that the platform runs on our MPLS network, which is inherently secure. It's not on the public internet anywhere. We do have internet on demand capability. So in the event that a customer wants access to the internet, no problem. We can accommodate this. And we also have 5G capability built into the platform to allow flexibility of location and flexibility of, I would say, standing up new customer locations. And then the other component of the security is the fact that the customers can bring their own security and apply anywhere. We're not blocking, we don't have any port filters or anything of this nature. >> If would think 5G actually, I could see people arguing both sides, but my sense is 5G is going to be a huge driver for your business cause it's going to just create so much more demand for your services, I think. I can see somebody arguing the counter about it. What's your point of view on that? >> No, I think that's a fair assessment. I think it's going to drive business for everyone here on the show floor and it's pushing those workloads more toward the edge, which is not an area that people were typically concerned with. The edge was just the door that they walked through. That's becoming much different now. We're also going to start seeing, and we're already seeing it, huge trends of moving that data at the edge rather than bringing it all the way back to a central warehouse and help ending it. The ability to have a dynamic platform where you can see exactly what your network's doing and in the push of a button, modify that, or provision new connectivity in response to how your business is performing. >> Yeah, ultimately it's all about the applications that are going to be driving demand for more data. That's just a tailwind for you guys. >> Yeah. You look at, some of the car companies are coming on, Tesla, you're drive around with like eight CPUs and I think communicating back over the air. >> Dave: Yeah, right. >> You start scaling that and you start getting into some some real bottlenecks. >> Amazing business you guys having obviously capital intensive, but once you get in there, you got a big moat. That is a matter of getting on a flywheel and innovating. Guys, congratulations on all the progress and so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for the time. >> Thank you very much. >> Great to meet you guys. Good luck. All right, thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, the leader in High-Tech Coverage. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Las Vegas everybody. You are watching theCube's coverage of AWS reinvent 2021. I'll tell you this place is packed. It's quite amazing here over 20,000 people, I'd say it's closer to 25, maybe 27,000. And there's a little overflow, lots going on in the evenings. It's quite remarkable. And we're really happy to be part of this. Jay Turner is here, he's the vice president of development and ops at PCCW Global. He's joined by Garrett Lowell, vice-president of ecosystem partnerships for the Americas at PCCW Global. Guys, welcome to theCube. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you so much. >> So, Jay, maybe you could take us through for those people who aren't familiar with your company, what do you guys do? What do you all about? >> Yes, so PCCW Global is the international operating wing of Hong Kong Telecom. So if it's outside of Hong Kong, it's our network. We've got about 695,000 kilometers of diverse cable. We've got about 43, 44 terabit of capacity. Came into business in 2005 if my brain is serving me correctly right now. So we have a very diverse and vast portfolio ranging all the way from satellite teleports, all the way to IP transit. We're a tier one service provider from that perspective as well. So we do one of everything when it comes to networking and that's really what was the basis of Console Connect, was inventing a platform to really enable our users to capitalize on that our network and our assets. >> Okay, so 2005, obviously you predated cloud, you laid a bunch of fibers, it's getting in the ocean, I mean, global networks, I mean, there was a big trend to do that and you had to think, you had to go bigger or go home and that business. >> Jay: Yes you had to do. >> So and Console Connect is your platform, is that right? So explain. >> Yeah, sorry. Yeah, Console Connect is our software defined interconnection platform. So we built a user self-service portal. Users can allocate ports, they get the LOAs issue to them directly from the platform. And then once they've got an active port or they've come in via one of our partnerships, they can then provision connectivity across our platform. And that may be extending to their data centers or extending or their branch office, or it could be building a circuit into the cloud via direct connect, could be building a circuit into an internet exchange. And all of those circuits are going to be across that 685,000 kilometers of diverse fiber rather than going across the public internet. >> So, when you started, it took some time obviously to build out that infrastructure and then the cloud came into play, but it was still early days, but it sounds like you're taking the cloud model, AWS Cloud model and applying that to your business, eliminate all that undifferentiated, heavy lifting, if you will, the visioning and management. >> Yeah, we've heard many people and that's kind of the impetus of this was, I want to be directly connected to my end point. And how do I do that? And AWS, yes, they had direct connect, but figuring out how to do that as an enterprise was challenging. So we said, hey, we'll automate that for you. Just tell us what region you want to connect to. And we'll do all the heavy lifting, and we'll just hand you back a villain tag. You're good to go. >> So it's a classic case of, okay, AWS has direct connect, people they go, "Ah, that's directly competitive, but it's not, you're adding value on top of that." Right. So describe where you fit Garrett inside of the AWS ecosystem. You look around this hall and it's just a huge growing ecosystem, where you fit inside of that ecosystem and then your ecosystem, what's that like? >> Okay, so where we fit into the AWS ecosystem, as Jay alluded to, we're adding value to our partners and customers where they can come in, not only are they able to access the AWS platform as well as other cloud platforms, but they're also able to access each other. So we have a marketplace in our platform, which allows our customers and partners to put a description of their services on the marketplace and advertise their capabilities out to the rest of the ecosystem of PCCW Global and Console Connect. >> Okay, so and you're doing that inside of AWS? I that right? Or at least in part? >> No, that's not inside of AWS. >> Okay, so your platform is your platform. >> Yes. >> And then, so your relationship with AWS is to sort of superpower direct connect, is that right or? >> So we're directly connected to AWS throughout the globe. And this allows our customers and partners to be able to utilize not only the PCCW Global network, but also to expand that capability to the AWS platform in clouds. >> Wherever there's a cloud you plug into it? Okay. >> That's correct. >> And then another advantage there is the customer, obviously doesn't have to be directly co-located with AWS. They don't have to be in the same geographic region. If for some reason you need to be connected to US West, but you're in Frankfurt, fine, we'll back all the traffic for you. >> Does that happen a lot? >> It actually does. >> How come? Why, what's the use case there? >> Global diversity is certainly one of them, just being able to have multiple footprints. But the other thing that we're seeing more of late is these cloud-based companies are beginning to kind of be attracted to where their customers are located. So they'll start seeing these pockets of use and they'll go, well, okay, we're going to go into that region as well, stand up a VPC there. And so then we want to our customers then being able to directly connect to that asset, that's closest to them. And then still be able to back call that traffic if necessary or take it wherever. >> What are the big, sort of macro trends in your business? I mean, broadly you see cost per bit coming down, you see data consumption and usage going through the roof. How does that affect you? What are some of the big trends that you see? >> I think one of the biggest ones and one that we targeted with Console Connect, we were hearing a lot of customers going, the world's changing so dynamically. We don't know how to do a one-year forecast of bandwidth, much less a three-year, which is what a lot of contracts are asking us for. So we said, hey, how about one day? Can you do one day? (Dave laughing) Because that's what our granularity is. So we allow for anything from one day up to three years right now, and then even within that term, we're dynamic. So if something happens, suddenly some product goes through the roof and you've suddenly got a spike in traffic. If a ship drags its anchor through a sub sea cable, and suddenly you're having to pivot, you just come into the platform, you click a couple of buttons, 20 seconds later, we've modified your bandwidth for you, or we've provisioned a new circuit for you. We've got your backup going whatever. Really at the end of the day, it's the customer paying for their network, so the customer should be the one making those decisions. >> How's that affect pricing? I presume, so I can have one date or a three-year term. Presume if I commit to three years, I get a better deal, is that right or? >> You do, but I mean, at the end of the day, it's actually pretty much a moderate, a better deal. We don't want to force the hand of the customer. So yeah, if you signed a 12 month contract with us, we're going to give you a 3% discount. >> Yeah, so it's not really, that's not a motivation to do it. Is just you want to reduce the transaction complexity. And that's why you would sign up for a longer term not to get the big discount. >> Correct. And then, like I said, even within a longer contract, we're still going to allow you to flex and flow and modify if you need to because it's your network. >> What kind of constraints do you put on that? Do I have to commit to a floor and then everything above that is I can flex up? Is that how it works? Okay. And then the more I commit to the better the deal is, or not necessarily? >> No, it's pretty much flat, right. >> So, okay. So I'm going to come in and I'm going to say, all right, I know I'm going to use X, I'll sign up for that and anything over it. You're pretty flexible, I might get a few points if I sign up for more, somebody might want to optimize that if they're big enough. >> And another really neat advantage, and the other complaint we heard from customers, they go, I need three different direct connect, or I need to be connected to three different parties, but I don't want to run three different cross-connects and I don't want to have three different ports. That's just an expense I don't want. And we say, fine, take your one gig port, run one gig of services on it, if that's 20 different services, we're fine. So we allow you to multiplex your port and provision- >> It's awesome. I love that model. I know some software companies who I would recommend take a look at that pricing model. So, Garrett, how do you segment the ecosystem? How do you look at that way? Maybe you could draw paint a picture sort of the, the ideal partners and what they look like. I know there's not just one category, but. >> Sure, so our ideal partners are internet exchanges, cloud partners, and SAS providers, because a big piece of our business is migration to the cloud. And the flexibility of our platform allows and encourages our SAS providers and SI partners to perform migration to the cloud much easier and flexible in a flexible format for their customers. >> Yeah, so what can you tell us, any kind of metrics you can give us around your business to give a sense of the the scope, the scale. >> Well, of our business, kind of one of the driving factors here, Gardner says that about 2023, I think 40% of the enterprise workloads will be deployed in the cloud, which is all fine and dandy, except in my head, you're just trading one set of complexities for another. So now, instead of having everything in a glass house and being able to kind of understand that now you're going, well, okay, so it's in the cloud now I need to manage my connectivity there. And, oh, well, wait a minute, are my security policies still the same? Do they apply if I'm going across the public internet? What exposure have I just, bought into myself to try to run this? So the platform really aims at normalizing that as much as possible. If you're directly connected to AWS, at the end of the day, that's a really long ethernet cable. So you're a glass house just got a lot bigger, but you're still able to maintain and use the exact same policies and procedures that you've been using. So that's really one of our guiding principles is to reduce that complexity and make it very simple for the user. >> Well, I don't understand, 'cause in the early days of cloud, a lot of enterprises, CIO they were concerned about security. And I think they realized that AWS has pretty good security, well, CIA is using it. But still people would say to me, it's not that it's bad security, it's just different. We move slow, Dave. So how do you accommodate, now I don't know, does that diversity, I mean, AWS has obviously matured, but are you suggesting that you can take my security edicts in my glass house and bring those into your networks and ultimately into the cloud? Is that kind of how it works? >> That's the goal. It's not going to be a panacea more than likely, but the more edicts that we can allow you to bring across and not have to go back and revamp and the better for you as a customer and the better really for us, because it normalizes things, it makes it much easier for us to accommodate more and more users. >> It is such now in the eco, it was all the diversity in the ecosystem. Is it such that there's enough common patterns that you you guys can kind of accommodate most of those use cases? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think the, one of the key components is the fact that the platform runs on our MPLS network, which is inherently secure. It's not on the public internet anywhere. Now we do have internet on demand capability. So in the event that a customer wants access to the internet, no problem, we can accommodate this. And we also have 5G capability built into the platform to allow flexibility of location and flexibility of... I would say, standing up new customer locations. And then the other component of the security is the fact that the customers can bring their own security and apply anywhere. So we're not blocking, we don't have any port filters or anything of this nature. >> Well, I would think 5G actually, I mean, I could see people arguing both sides, but my sense is 5G is going to be a huge driver for your business, 'cause it's going to just create so much more demand for your services I think, I could see somebody arguing the counter, but what's your point of view on that? >> No. I think that's a fair assessment. I think it's going to drive business for everyone here on the show floor. And it's pushing those workloads more toward the edge, which is not an area that people were typically concerned with. The edge was just the door that they walked through. That's becoming much different now. And we're also going to start seeing, and we're already seeing it, huge trends of moving that data at the edge, rather than bringing it all the way back to a central warehouse in Hare pending it. So, again, the ability to have a dynamic platform where you can see exactly what your network's doing and in the push of a button, modify that, or provision new connectivity in response to how your business is performing. >> Yeah, and ultimately it's all about the applications that are going to be driving demand for more data. And that's just a tailwind for you guys. >> Yeah, yeah and then you look at some of the car companies are coming on, you know, Tesla, you're driving around with like eight CPU's in that thing, communicating back over the air. >> Dave: Yeah right. >> You start scaling that, and you start getting into some real bottleneck. >> Amazing business you guys having, obviously capital intensive, but once you get in there, you've got a big moat, and then it's a matter of getting on a flywheel and innovating. Guys, congratulations on all the progress and thanks so much for coming on theCube. >> Yeah. No, thanks for the time. >> Thank you very much. >> Yeah, great to meet you guys. Good luck. All right. Thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCube, the leader in high-tech coverage, right back. (upbeat music)

>>from the bellagio Hotel >>in Las Vegas. >>It's the >>cube covering >>Ui Path forward. >>Four brought to >>you by Ui Path. >>Welcome back to Las Vegas. The cube is here. We've been here for two days covering Ui Path Forward for lisa martin here with David Monty. We've talked about automation and many industries. Now this segment is going to focus on automation and healthcare. We've got two guests joining us Jim Petrosea Cto of Blue Cross, Blue Shield and Gadget. Dhaliwal. The global C. I. O. Industry lead at you. I pass guys welcome to the program. Thank you. So let's start unpacking from the CTO level and the ceo level the agenda for automation. Jim let's start with you. What does that look like >>for us. It's actually pretty strategic and part of as we think about digital and what digital transformation means, it actually plays a pretty key role. Um There are a lot of processes that can be very manual within a big organization like Blue cross and Blue shield and to be able to streamline that and take away kind of what I would call the mundane work. Right? The the you know, going through a spreadsheet and then typing it into the screen, there are a lot of processes like that that are legacy. But what if you could take that away um and actually create a better work experience for the people that work there right? And and focus on higher value type uh type things and it's really key. And it really It goes down to our our business folks right? There are a lot of things we can drive with automation. We started a program um in 2019. Um that's been quite successful. We now have 250 box, we measure what we call annualized efficiency gains. So how much efficiency are we getting by these bots? So the bots are doing um this repetitive work that people would do. Um And what we're finding is, you know, we've got about $11 million in any wise efficiency gain through the process and we're just getting started. Um But we're all we're not stopping there too though, we're enabling citizen developers. So we're saying, hey business, if you want to automate, you know, parts of your job, we're gonna help you do that. So we've got about 60 people that were training. Um We run bad Ethan's where they come together and they actually create bots uh And it's really really creating some some impact and buzz in our business >>anywhere from your lens, where does automation fit within the C. I. O. S. Agenda? And how do you work together in unison with the C. T. O. To help roll this out across the enterprise? >>Yeah, no, definitely. And in fact as a part of introduction, I can actually share that. How I'm wearing a Ceo had within your path since I'm just joining join path and I'm actually now helping a client ceos in their automation strategy but I was a deputy ceo in my prior role at L. A. County where actually I ran the automation strategy. So if we look at from our organization perspective B complex as L. A County which is such a Federated organization. From a Ceo perspective, the way we look at the strategy is it's always driven by the business goals of the city or a county and we typically drive into three different areas. One is how we can transform our operational processes so that we can save the tax dollars. It's all about doing more with the less dollars. And then second is about how we can transform our residents experience because end of the day it is all about how we can improve the quality of life for our residents. So we've got 10 million people for L. A. County, the largest populous county in us. So it was an uphill task to serve that such a diverse population need and that the third area is about how to transform the new business models because as we are moving away from a government centric approach to the residents centric approach, you really need to come up with a new digital solutions. And Ceo is in the center of all these three elements when you look at it. So it's a very appear to us to keep keep improving your efficiency and then at a time keep adding the new digital solutions and that's where automation strategy is kind of a horizontal strategy which enables all these components. So what I hear from >>that is alignment with the business. Yeah. Right. Change management. Absolutely. That's like really fundamental and then see IOS this this agent of transformation uh you can see or she has a horizontal purview across the organization now now jim the cto role is the automation at blue cross blue shield lead by you or you there to make sure the technology plugs into your enterprise architecture. What's your shoulder? >>You know? Uh my my role is really to drive uh what I'll call technology enabled business change. Right. So I actually uh started our our automation journey uh at hc sc and I did that by partnering with our business. Um There was actually a lot of buzz around automation and there were actually some small pockets of it, none of it was enterprise scale. Um Right. And we really wanted to go big in this and and working with the business sponsors, they saw value in it. Um and we've you know, we've generated um a lot of uh efficiency, better quality of work because of it but but I very closely had a partner with our business, we have a committee that is lead of business folks that I facilitate. So I view my role as an enabler, um we have to communicate the change management pieces is huge. Uh the education just having a common vernacular on what is automation mean, Right, because everybody interpreted it differently um and then being able to do it at an enterprise scale is quite challenging. Um You know, I I really enjoyed um one of the key notes, I don't know if you had a chance to see shankar by Duncan from the hidden brain, right? But he talked a lot about the brain aspect and how do you get people to change? And and that's a large part of it. There's a lot about technology, but there's really a lot about being a change agent um and and really working very closely with your business, >>how does one measure? I'm hearing a lot time saved. Our saved. How does one measure that and quantify the dollar impact, which by the way, I'm on record as saying the soft dollars are way bigger. And but when you're talking to the, you know, the bottom line CFO and it's all about, you know, the cash flow, whatever is, how do you measure that? >>I can take it. So we, what we do is as we define these use cases right? We we go through an actual structure product process where we we gather them. Um we then rate them and we actually prioritize them based on those that are going to have the greatest impact. Um and we can tell based on, you know, what is the manual effort today. So we understand there are X number of people that do this X number of days and we think this body can take that some load off of them. Right? Um So we we go in with the business case. Um And then the Ui Path platform actually allows us to measure well, how much is that pot running? Right. So we can actually sit there and say, well we wanted that thing to run 10 hours a day and it did and it's generated this kind of efficiency because otherwise the human would have had to do that work. >>So the business case is kind of redeploying >>human. It really is is really maximizing human capital and make and and you know really using because the bots do repetitive stuff really well. They don't do higher level thinking and and we don't view it as replacing people, we view it as augmenting and actually making them more efficient and more effective at what, how do you get the dollars out of that? Well, a couple of ways. Right. And so one of the things we've we've done is we we create and measure the efficiency our business users and financed by the way is one of our bigger ones. And the CFO is one of the sponsors of the program, um can decide how to reinvest it in a lot of cases it is actually cost avoidance as we grow, literally being able to grow without adding staff. I mean that's very measurable. Um in some cases it is actually taking, you know cost out um in in certain cases, but a lot of times that's just through attrition, right? You don't back fill positions, you let it happen naturally. Um and and then there's just things that happen to your business that you have to respond to give you a great example, state of texas, um passes what's the equivalent of the no surprise attack. But they did it there before the federal government did it. Um but it requires a lot of processes to be put in place, because now you have providers and payers having to deal with disputes, right? It actually generates a boatload of work. And we thought there might be, you know, 5000 of these in the first year, where there were 21,000 in the first year. And so far this year we're doubling that amount, right. We were able to use automation to respond to that without having to add a bunch of stuff. If we had to add staff for that, it would have literally been, you know, maybe hundreds of people, right? And but now, you know, there's, you can clearly put a value on it and it's millions of dollars a year, that we would have otherwise had to expect. >>The reason I'm harping on this lease is because I've been through a lot of cycles, as you know, and after the dot com boom, the the cost avoidance meant not writing the check to the software company, right? And that's what nick Carr wrote this, i. T matter. And then, and then, you know, post the financial crisis, we've entered uh a decade plus of awareness on the impact of technology. And I wonder if it's, I think this, I think this the cycle is changing I think. And I wonder if you have an opinion here where people, I think organizations are going to look at Technology completely different than they did like in the early 2000s when it was just easy to cut. >>No, I think the other point I will add to it. I agree with the gym. So we typically look at our away but it doesn't always have to be the cost. Right? If you look from the outcomes of the value, there are other measures also right? If you look at the how automation was able to help in the Covid generate. It was never about costs at that time. It was about a human lives. So you always may not be able to quantify it what you look at. Okay. What how are we maximizing the value or what kind of situations where we are and where we may not even have a human power to do that work. And we are running against the time. It could be the compliance needs. I'll give example of our covid use case which was pretty big success uh within L. A. County we deployed bots for the covid contact tracing program. So we were actually interviewing all the people who were testing positive so that we actually can keep track of them and then bring back that data within our HR so that our criminologists actually can look at the trends and see how we are doing as a county as compared to other counties and nationally. And we were in the peak, we were interviewing about 5000 people a day And we had to process that data manually into our nature and we deployed 15 members to do that. And they were doing like about 600 interviews a day. So every day we had a backlog of 2500 interviews. So it is not about a cost saving or a dollar value here because nobody planned for these unplanned events and now we don't have a time and money to find more data entry operators and parts were able to actually clear up all the backlog. So the value which we were able to bring it is way beyond the cost element. >>I I believe that 100% and I've been fighting this battle for a long time and it's easier to fight now because we're in this economic cycle even despite the pandemic, but I think it can be quantified. I honestly believe it can be tied to the income statement or in the case of a public sector, it could be tied to the budget and the mission how that budget supports the mission of the company. But I really believe it. And and I've always said that those soft factors are dwarf the cost savings, but sometimes, you know, sometimes the CFO doesn't listen, you know, because he or she has to cut. I think automation could change that >>for public sector. We look at how we can do more about it. So it's because we don't look at bottom line, it's about the tax dollars, we have limited dollars, but how we can maximize the value which we are giving to residents, it is not about a profit for us. We look at the different lens when it comes to the commercial >>Side, it's similar for us. So as a as a health care pair, because we're a mutual right? Our members and we have 17 million of them are really the folks that own the company and we're very purpose driven. Our our purpose is to do everything in our power to stand by members in sickness and in health. So how do you get the highest quality, cost effective health care for them? So if automation allows you to be more effective and actually keep that cost down, that means you can cover more people and provide higher quality care to our members. So that's really the driver for mission driven, >>I was gonna ask you as a member as one of your 17 million members, what are some of the ways in which automation is benefiting me? >>Um you know, a number of different ways. First off, you know, um it lowers our administrative costs, right? So that means we can actually lower our rights as as we go out and and and work with folks? That's probably the the the the bottom line impact, but we're also automating processes uh to to make it easier for the member. Right? Uh the example I used earlier was the equivalent of no surprises. Right. How do we take the member out of the middle of this dispute between, you know, out of network providers and the payer and just make it go away. Right, and we take care of it. Um but that that creates potentially administrative burden on our side, but we want to keep their costs down and we do it efficiently using it. So there's a number of use cases that we've we've done across, you know, different parts of our business. We automate a lot of our customer service, right? When you call um there's bots in the background that are helping that that agent do their job. And what that means is you're on the show, you're on the phone a lot shorter of a period of time. And that agent can be more concise and more accurate in answering your question. >>So your employee experience is dramatically improved, as is the member experience? >>Yes, they go hand in hand. They do go hand, unhappy members means unhappy employees, 100% >>mentioned scale before, you said you can't scale in this particular, the departmental pockets. Talk about scale a little bit. I'm curious as to how important cloud is to scale. Is it not matter. Can you scale without cloud? What are the other dimensions of scale? >>Well, you know, especially with my CTO had, we're we're pushing very heavily to cloud. We view ourselves as a cloud first. We want to do things in a cloud versus our own data centers, partially because of the scale that it gives us. But because we're healthcare, we have to do it very securely. So. We are very meticulous about guarding our data, how we encrypt information um, not only in our data center but in the cloud and controlling the keys and having all the controls in place. You know, the C. So and I are probably the best friends right now in the company because we have to do it together and you have to take that that security mind set up front. Right cloud first. Put security first with it. Um, so we're moving what we can to the cloud because we think it's just going to give us better scale as we grow and better economics overall, >>Any thoughts on that? I think a similar thoughts but if we look from L. A. county because of the sheer volume itself because the data which we are talking about. We had 40 departments within the county. Each department is serving a different business purpose for the resident beit voting or B justice or being social services and all and the amount of data which we are generating for 10 million residents and the amount of duplicate asi which it comes out because it's a very government centering model. You have a different systems and they may not be talking to each other. The amount of diplomacy and identity delicacy which we are creating and as we are enabling the interoperability between these functions to give us seamless experience keeping security in mind so fully agree on that because the end of the day we have to ensure that customer guarantee but it's a sheer volume that as and when we are adding these data sets and the patient's data as well as the residents data and now we have started adding a machine data because we have deployed so many IOT solutions so the data which is coming from those machines, the logs and all its exponential so that's where the scale comes into picture and how we can ensure that we are future ready for the upscale which we need and that's where cloud ability definitely helps a lot. >>What do you mean by future ready? >>So if you look at from a future smart city or a smart community perspective, imagine when machines are everywhere machines and IOT solutions are deployed, beat even healthcare, your bad information, you're even patient information, everything is interconnected and amount of data which is getting generated in that your automobile they're going to start talking to entertainment or we have to potentially track a single resident might be going same person going to the justice or maybe same person might be having a mental health issues, A same person might be looking for a social services, how we're going to connect those dots and what all systems they are touching. So all that interconnections needs to happen. So that exponential increase of data is a future readiness, which I'm talking about. Are we future ready from a technology perspective? Are we future ready from the other ecosystem perspective and how and how we're gonna manage those situations? Uh, so those are the things which we >>look at it and it's a it's a multiplier to, right? We all have this influx of information and you need to figure out what to do with it. Right. This is where artificial intelligence, machine learning is so important. But you also have interoperability standards that are coming. So now we're we have this massive data that each of our organizations have. But now you have interoperability which is a good thing for the member saying now I need to be able to share that data. Yeah, I wanted to ask you about >>that because a lot of changes in health care, um, are meaningful use. You have to show that to get paid but the standards weren't mature. Right? And so now that's changing what role does automation play in facilitating those standards. >>So, you know, we're big, big supporters of the fire standard that's out there um to in order to be able to support the standards and and create a P. I. S. And and pull together the information. What what will happen sometimes in the background is there's actually um artificial intelligence, machine learning models that create algorithms right? The output of that though often has to be active. Now a person can do something with that information or a vodka. Right? So when you start taking the ideal of artificial intelligence and now you have a robotic process that can use that to pull together the information and assimilated in a way to make it higher quality. But now it's available. It's kind of in the background. You don't see it but it's there helping. >>What are some of the things that you see? I know we're out of time but I just have a couple more questions. Some of the things that you see here we are you I path forward for we're in person. This is a bold company that's growing very quickly. Some of the announcements that were made, what are what are some of your reaction to that? And how do you see it helping move blue crush blue shield forward even >>faster. Well you know a lot of the announcements in terms of some of the features that that they've added around their robotics processing are great right? The fact that they're in the cloud and and some of the capabilities and and and better ability to to support that the process mining is key. Right. In order for abouts to be effective, you have to understand your process and you just don't want to necessarily automate the bad practices. Right? So you want to take a look at those processes to figure out how you can automate things smartly. Um and some of their capabilities around that are very interesting. We're going to explore that quite a bit but but I think they're the ambition here is beyond robotics. Right. It's actually creating um you know, applications that actually are using bots in the background which is very intriguing and has a lot of potential potentially to drive even more digital transformation. This can really affect all of our workers and allow us to take digital solutions out to the market a lot faster >>and to see what was going to ask you, you are here for four weeks at UI Path, you got to meet a lot of your colleagues, which is great. But what about this company attracted you to leave your former role and come over here to the technology vendor side. >>Well, I think I was able to achieve the similar role within L. A. County, able to establish the automation practice and achieve the maturity, able to stand up things and I feel that this is the same practitioner activity which I can actually take it back to the other clients ceos because of one thing which I really like about your hypothesis. RP is just a small component of it. I really want to change that mindset that we have to start looking ui path as an end to end full automation enterprise solution and it is not only the business automation, it's the idea automation and it's a plus combination and whether we are developing a new industry solutions with our partners to help the different industry segments and we actually helping Ceo in the center of it because Ceo is the one who is driving the automation, enabling the business automation and actually managing the automation ceo and the governess. So CEO is in left and center of it and my role is to ensure that I actually help those Ceos to make successful and get that maturity and you will path as a platform is giving that ability of length and breath and that's what is really fascinating me and I'm really looking forward that how that spectrum is changing that we are getting matured in a process mining area and how we are expanding our horizons to look at the whole automation suit, not just the R. P. Product and that's something which I'm really looking forward and seeing that how we're going to continue expanding other magic quadrants and we're actually going to give the seamless experience so the client doesn't have to worry about okay for this, I have to pick this and further, I have to pick something else >>that's seamless experience is absolutely table stakes these days. Guys, we're out of time. But thank you so much for joining. David me, talking about automation and health care. Your recommendations for best practices, how to go about doing that and and the change management piece. That's a critical piece. We appreciate your time. >>Thanks for having. Thank >>you. Our pleasure for day Volonte. I'm lisa martin live in las Vegas. The cubes coverage of you a path forward for continues next. Mhm. Mhm mm.

(upbeat music) >> In 2010 Wikibon predicted that the all flash data center was coming. The forecast at the time was that flash memory consumer volumes, would drive prices of enterprise flash down faster than those of high spin speed, hard disks. And by mid decade, buyers would opt for flash over 15K HDD for virtually all active data. That call was pretty much dead on and the percentage of flash in the data center continues to accelerate faster than that, of spinning disk. Now, the analyst that made this forecast was David FLoyer and he's with me today, along with Renen Hallak who is the founder and CEO of Vast Data. And they're going to discuss these trends and what it means for the future of data and the data center. Gentlemen, welcome to the program. Thanks for coming on. >> Great to be here. >> Thank you for having me. >> You're very welcome. Now David, let's start with you. You've been looking at this for over a decade and you know, frankly, your predictions have caused some friction, in the marketplace but where do you see things today? >> Well, what I was forecasting was based on the fact that the key driver in any technology is volume, volume reduces the cost over time and the volume comes from the consumers. So flash has been driven over the years by initially by the iPod in 2006 the Nano where Steve Jobs did a great job with Samsung and introducing large volumes of flash. And then the iPhone in 2008. And since then, all of mobile has been flash and mobile has been taking in a greater and greater percentage share. To begin with the PC dropped. But now the PCs are over 90% are using flash when there delivered. So flash has taken over the consumer market, very aggressively and that has driven down the cost of flash much much faster than the declining market of HDD. >> Okay and now, so Renen I wonder if we could come to you, we've got I want you to talk about the innovations that you're doing, but before we get there, talk about why you started Vast. >> Sure, so it was five years ago and it was basically the kill of the hard drive. I think what David is saying resonates very, very well. In fact, if you look at our original presentation for Vast Data. It showed flash and tape. There was no hard drive in the middle. And we said 10 years from now, and this was five years ago. So even the dates match up pretty well. We're not going to have hard drives anymore. Any piece of information that needs to be accessible at all will be on flash and anything that is dormant and never gets read will be on tape. >> So, okay. So we're entering this kind of new phase now, with which is being driven by QLC. David maybe you could give us a quick what is QLC? Just give us a bumper sticker there. >> There's 3D NAND, which is the thing that's growing, very very fast and it's growing on several dimensions. One dimension is the number of layers. Another dimension is the size of each of those pieces. And the third dimension is the number of bits which a QLC is five bits per cell. So those three dimensions have all been improving. And the result of that is that on a wafer of, that you create, more and more data can be stored on the whole wafer on the chip that comes from that wafer. And so QLC is the latest, set of 3D NAND flash NAND flash. That's coming off the lines at the moment. >> Okay, so my understanding is that there's new architectures that are entering the data center space, that could take advantage of QLC enter Vast. Someone said they've rented this, a nice set up for you and maybe before we get into the architecture, can you talk a little bit more about the company? I mean, maybe not everybody's familiar with with Vast, you share why you started it but what can you tell us about the business performance and any metrics you can share would be great? >> Sure, so the company as I said is five years old, about 170, 180 people today. We started selling product just around two years ago and have just hit $150 million in run rate. That's with eight sales people. And so, as you can imagine, there's a lot of demand for flash all the way down the stack in the way that David predicted. >> Wow, okay. So you got pretty comfortable. I think you've got product market fit, right? And now you're going to scale. I would imagine you're going to go after escape velocity and you're going to build your moat. Now part of that, I mean a lot of that is product, right? Product is sales. Those are the cool two golden pillars, but, and David when you think back to your early forecast last decade it was really about block storage. That was really what was under attack. You know, kind of fusion IO got it started with Facebook. They were trying to solve their SQL database performance problems. And then we saw pure storage. They hit escape velocity. They drove a truck through EMC sym metrics HDD based install base which precipitated the acquisition of XtremeIO by EMC. Something Renan knows a little bit about having led development, of the product but flash was late to the NAS party guys, Renan let me start with you. Why is that? And what is the relevance of QLC in that regard? >> The way storage has been always, it looks like a pyramid and you have your block devices up at the top and then your NAS underneath. And today you have object down at the bottom of that pyramid. And the pyramid basically represents capacity and the Y axis is price performance. And so if you could only serve a small subset of the capacity, you would go for block. And that is the subset that needed high performance. But as you go to QLC and PLC will soon follow the price of all flash systems goes down to a point where it can compete on the lower ends of that pyramid. And the capacity grows to a point where there's enough flash to support those workloads. And so now with QLC and a lot of innovation that goes with it it makes sense to build an all flash, NAS and object store. >> Yeah, okay. And David, you and I have talked about the volumes and Renan sort of just alluded to that, the higher volumes of NAS, not to mention the fact that NAS is hard, you know files difficult, but that's another piece of the equation here, isn't it? >> Absolutely, NAS is difficult. It's a large, very large scale. We're talking about petabytes of data. You're talking about very important data. And you're talking about data, which is at the moment very difficult to manage. It takes a lot of people to manage it, takes a lot of resources and it takes up a lot, a lot of space as well. So all of those issues with NAS and complexity is probably the biggest single problem. >> So maybe we could geek out a little bit here. You guys go at it, but Renan talk about the Vast architecture. I presume it was built from the ground up for flash since you were trying to kill HTD. What else do we need to know? >> It was built for flash. It was also built for Crosspoint which is a new technology that came out from Intel and micron about three years ago. Cross point is basically another level of persistent media above flash and below Ram. But what we really set out to do is, as I said to kill the hard drive, and for that what you need is to get the price parity. And of course, flash and hard drives are not at price parity today. As David said, they probably will be in a few years from now. And so we wanted to, jumpstart that, to accelerate that. And so we spent a lot of time in building a new type of architecture with a lot of new metadata structures and algorithms on top to bring that effective price down to a point where it's competitive today. And in fact, two years ago the way we did it was by going out to talk to these vendors Intel with 3D Crosspoint and QLC flash Mellanox with NVMe over fabrics, and very fast ethernet networks. And we took those building blocks and we thought how can we use this to build a completely different type of architecture, that doesn't just take flash one level down the stack but actually allows us to break that pyramid, to collapse it down and to build a single system that is as fast as your fastest all flash block device or faster but as affordable as your hard drive based archives. And once that happens you don't need to think about storage anymore. You have a single system that's big enough and cheap enough to throw everything at it. And it's fast enough such that everything is accessible as sub-millisecond latencies. The way the architecture is built is pretty much the opposite of the way scale-out storage has been done. It's not based on shared nothing. The way XtremIO was the way Isilon is the way Hadoop and the Google file system are. We're basing it on a concept called Dis-aggregated Shared Everything. And what that means is that we have the media on one set of devices, the logic running in containers, just software and you can scale each of those independently. So you can scale capacity independently from performance and you have this shared metadata space, that all of the containers can see. So the containers don't actually have to talk to each other in the synchronous path. That means that it's much more scalable. You can go up to hundreds of thousands of nodes rather than just a few dozen. It's much more resilient. You can have all of them fail and you still didn't lose any data. And it's much more easy to use to David's point about complexity. >> Thank you for that. And then you, you mentioned up front that you not only built for flash, but built for Crosspoint. So you're using Crosspoint today. It's interesting. There was always been this sort of debate about Crosspoint It's less expensive than Ram, or maybe I got that wrong but it's persistent, >> It is. >> Okay, but it's more expensive than flash. And it was sort of thought it was a fence sitter cause it didn't have the volume but you're using it today successfully. That's interesting. >> We're using it both to offset the deficiencies of the low cost flash. And the nice thing about QLC and PLC is that you get the same levels of read performance as you would from high-end flash. The only difference between high cost and low cost flash today is in right cycles and in right performance. And so Crosspoint helps us offset both of those. We use it as a large right buffer and we use it as a large metadata store. And that allows us not just to arrange the information in a very large persistent right buffer before we need to place it on the low cost flash. But it also allows us to develop new types of metadata structures and algorithms that allow us to make better use of the low cost flash and reduce the effective price down even lower than the rock capacity. >> Very cool. David, what are your thoughts on the architecture? give us kind of the independent perspective >> I think it's brilliant architecture. I'd like to just go one step down on the network side of things. The whole use of NBME over fabric allows the users all of the servers to get any data across this whole network directly to it. So you've got great performance right away across the stack. And then the other thing is that by using RDMA for NASS, you're able, if you need to, to get down in microseconds to the data. So overall that's a thousand times faster than any HDD system could manage. So this architecture really allows an any to any simple, single level of storage which is so much easier to think about, architect use or manage is just so much simpler. >> If you had I mean, I said I don't know if there's an answer to this question but if you had to pick one thing Renan that you really were dogmatic about and you bet on from an architectural standpoint, what would that be? >> I think what we bet on in the early days is the fact that the pyramid doesn't work anymore and that tiering doesn't work anymore. In fact, we stole Johnson and Johnson's tagline No More Tears. Only, It's not spelled the same way. The reason for that is not because of storage. It's because of the applications as we move to applications more and more that are machine-based and machines are now not just generating the data. They're also reading the data and analyzing it and providing insights for humans to consume. Then the workloads changed dramatically. And the one thing that we saw is that you can't choose which pieces of information need to be accessible anymore. These new algorithms, especially around AI and machine learning and deep learning they need fast access to the entirety of the dataset and they want to read it over and over and over again in order to generate those insights. And so that was the driving force behind us building this new type of architecture. And we're seeing every single day when we talk to customers how the old architecture is simply break down in the face of these new applications. >> Very cool speaking of customers. I wonder if you could talk about use cases, customers you know, and this NASS arena maybe you could add some color there. >> Sure, our customers are large in data. We started half a petabyte and we grow into the exabyte range. The system likes to be big as, as it grows it grows super linearly. If you have a 100 nodes or a 1000 nodes you get more than 10X in performance, in capacity efficiency and resilience, et cetera. And so that's where we thrive. And those workloads are today. Mainly analytics workloads, although not entirely. If you look at it geographically we have a lot of life science in Boston research institutes medical imaging, genomics universities pharmaceutical companies here in New York. We have a lot of financials, hedge funds, Analyzing everything from satellite imagery to trade data to Twitter feeds out in California. A lot of AI, autonomous driving vehicles as well as media and entertainment both generation of films like animation, as well as content distribution are being done on top of best. >> Great thank you and David, when you look at the forecast that you've made over the years and when I imagine that they match nicely with your assumptions. And so, okay, I get that, but that doesn't, not everybody agrees, David. I mean, certainly the HDD guys don't agree but they, they're obviously fighting to hang on to their awesome run for 50 years, but as well there's others to do in hybrids and the like, and they kind of challenge your assumptions and you don't have a dog in this fight. We just want the truth and try to do our best to report it. But let me start with this. One of the things I've seen is that you're comparing deduped and compressed flash with raw HDD. Is that true or false? >> It's in terms of the fundamentals of the forecast, et cetera, it's false. What I'm taking is the new egg price. And I did it this morning and I looked up a two terabyte disc drive, NAS disc drive. I think it was $54. And if you look at the cost of a a NAND for two terabytes, it's about $200. So it's a four to one ratio. >> So, >> So and that's coming down from what people saw last year, which was five or six and every year has been, that ratio has been coming down. >> The ratio between the cost Delta, between HDD is still cheaper. So Renan I wonder one of the other things that Floyer has said is that because of the advantages of flash, not only performance but also data sharing, et cetera, which really drives other factors like TCO. That it doesn't have to be at parody in order for customers to consume that. I certainly saw that on my laptop, I could have got more storage and it could have been cheaper for per bit for my laptop. I took the flash. I mean, no problem. That that was an intelligence test but what are you seeing from customers? And by the way Floyer I think is forecasting by what, 2026 there will be actually a raw to raw crossover. So then it's game over. But what are you seeing in terms of what customers are telling you or any evidence you have that it doesn't have to be, even that customers actually get more value even if it's more expensive from flash, what are you seeing? >> Yeah in the enterprise space customers aren't buying raw flash they're buying storage systems. And so even if the raw numbers flash versus hard drive are still not there there is a lot of things that can be done at the system level to equalize those two. In fact, a lot of our IP is based on that we are taking flash today is, as David said more expensive than hard drives, but at the system level it doesn't remain more expensive. And the reason for that is storage systems waste space. They waste it on metadata, they waste it on redundancy. We built our new metadata structures, such that they everything lives in Crosspoint and is so much smaller because of the way Crosspoint is accessible at byte level granularity, we built our erasure codes in a way where you can sustain 10, 20, 30 drive failures but you only pay two or 1% in overhead. We built our data reduction mechanisms such that they can reduce down data even if the application has already compressed it and already de-duplicated it. And so there's a lot of innovation that can happen at the software level as part of this new direct dis-aggregated shared everything architecture that allows us to bridge that cost gap today without having customers do fancy TCO calculations. And of course, as prices of flash over the next few years continue declining, all of those advantages remain and it will just widen the gap between hard drives and flash. And there really is no advantage to hard drives once the price thing is solved. >> So thank you. So David, the other thing I've seen around these forecasts is that the comments that you can't really data reduce effectively hard disk. And I understand why the overhead and of course you can in flash you can use all kinds of data reduction techniques and not affect performance, or it's not even noticeable like put the cloud guys, do it upstream. Others do it upstream. What's your comment on that? >> Yes, if you take sequential data and you do a lot of work upfront you can write out in very lot big blocks and that's a perfect sequentially, good way of doing it. The challenge for the HDD people is if they go for that for that sort of sequential type of application that the cheapest way of doing that is to use tape which comes back to the discussion that the two things that are going to remain are tape and flash. So that part of the HDD market in my assertion will go towards tape and tape libraries. And those are serving very well at the moment. >> Yeah I mean, It's just the economics of tape are really attractive. I just feel like I've said this many times that the marketing of tape is lacking. Like I'd like to see, better thinking around how it could play. Cause I think customers have this perception tape, but there's actually a lot of value there. I want to carry on, >> Small point there. Yeah, I mean, there's an opportunity in the same way that Vast have created an architecture for flash. There's an opportunity out there for the tech people with flash to make an architecture that allows you to take that workload and really lower the price, enormously. >> You've called it Flape >> Flape yes. >> There's some interesting metadata opportunities there but we won't go into that. And then David, I want to ask you about NAND shortages. We saw this in 2016 and 2017. A lot of people saying there's an NAND shortage again. So that's a flaw in your forecast prices of you're assuming prices of flash continue to come down faster than those of HDD but the shortages of NAND could be problematic. What do you say to that? >> Well, I've looked at that in some detail and one of the big, important things is what's happening in the flash market and the Chinese, YMTC Chinese company has introduced a lot more volume into the market. They're making 100,000 wafers a month for this year. That's around six to 8% of market of NAND at this year, as a result, Samsung, micron, Intel, Hynix they're all increasing their volumes of NAND so that they're all investing. So I don't see that NAND itself is going to be a problem. There is certainly a shortage of processor chips which drive the intelligence in the NAND itself. But that's a problem for everybody. That's a problem for cars. It's a problem for disk drives. >> You could argue that's going to create an oversupply, potentially. Let's not go there, but you know what at the end of the day it comes back to the customer and all this stuff. It's interesting. I love talking about the architecture but it's really all about customer value. And so, so Renan, I want you to sort of close there. What should customers be paying attention to? And what should observers of Vast Data really watch as indicators for progress for you guys milestones and things in the market that we should be paying attention to but start with the customers. What's your advice to them? >> Sure, for any customer that I talked to I always ask the same thing. Imagine where you'll be five years from now because you're making an investment now that is at least five years long. In our case, we guaranteed the lifespan of the devices for a decade, such that you know that it's going to be there for you and imagine what is going to happen over those next five years. What we're seeing in most customers is that they have a lot of doormen data and with the advances in analytics and AI they want to make use of that data. They want to turn it from a cost center to a profit center and to gain insight from that data and to improve their business based on that information that they have the same way the hyperscalers are doing in order to do that, you need one thing you need fast access to all of that information. Once you have that, you have the foundation to step into this next generation type world where you can actually make money off of your information. And the best way to get very, very fast access to all of your information is to put it on Vast media like flash and Crosspoint. If I can give one example, Hedge Funds. Hedge funds do a lot of back-testing on Vast. And what makes sense for them is to test as much information back as they possibly can but because of storage limitations, they can't do that. And the other thing that's important to them is to have a real-time experience to be able to run those simulations in a few minutes and not as a batch process overnight, but because of storage limitations, they can't do that either. The third thing is if you have many different applications and many different users on the same system they usually step on each other's toes. And so the Vast architecture is solves those three problems. It allows you a lot of information very fast access and fast processing an amazing quality of service where different users of the system don't even notice that somebody else is accessing the same piece of information. And so Hedge Funds is one example. Any one of these verticals that make use of a lot of information will benefit from this architecture in this system. And if it doesn't cost any more, there's really no real reason delay this transition into all flash. >> Excellent very clear thinking. Thanks for laying that out. And what about, you know, things that we should how should we judge you? What are the things that we should watch? >> I think the most important way to judge us is to look at customer adoption and what we're seeing and what we're showing investors is a very high net dollar retention number. What that means is basically a customer buys a piece of kit today, how much more will they buy over the next year, over the next two years? And we're seeing them buy more than three times more, within a year of the initial purchase. And we see more than 90% of them buying more within that first year. And that to me indicates that we're solving a real problem and that they're making strategic decisions to stop buying any other type of storage system. And to just put everything on Vast over the next few years we're going to expand beyond just storage services and provide a full stack for these AI applications. We'll expand into other areas of infrastructure and develop the best possible vertically integrated system to allow those new applications to thrive. >> Nice, yeah. Think investors love that lifetime value story. If you can get above 3X of the customer acquisition cost is to IPO in the way. Guys hey, thanks so much for coming to the Cube. We had a great conversation and really appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> All right, Thanks for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante for the Cube. We'll see you next time. (gentle music)

>>okay. >>Just about a year ago, governments around the world forced shutdowns of their respective economies. We've never seen anything like it. Central banks took immediate action and effective monetary policy like none we've ever seen before. They dropped interest rates to near zero, injected a huge amount of cash into the system, and they fueled this liquidity boom to support those individuals and businesses that were in greatest need. Banks were overwhelmed with the volume of paperwork, for instance, small business P, P P loans and other things. Home buying boomed as mortgage rates hit all time lows for several weeks in the spring, it was complete chaos, but the tech industry stepped up and accommodated work from home. Cloud infrastructure was spun up instantly as access to data centers was really restricted, and Saas companies became a fundamental staple of not only keeping the lights on but helping customers thrive in the face of a pandemic. Automation became a >>mandate >>as humans, they couldn't possibly keep up with the tidal wave of demand, a document overload that was hitting the system. Now, one of the companies that was there to help financial firms in particular, get through the knothole was Oculus, a company that focuses on intelligent automation to deploy the power of machines to allow humans to focus on what they do best. Hello, everyone. And welcome to this cube conversation. My name is Dave Volonte, and we're profiling the most interesting SAS startups that are reimagining how we work. And with me is Sam Bobbly, the co founder and CEO of Oculus. Sam, welcome to the Cube. First time. >>Hey, Dave. Thanks so much for having me excited to have the conversation. >>Yeah, me too. So, listen, I know you've told the story of a zillion times, but I want a community here. How and why did you start the company >>for sure. So when I was in college, I was having a conversation with my dad. Uh, he was telling me about a meeting he just had with his elder law attorney. And the other law attorney was complaining about having to review hundreds or thousands of pages of financial documents for every long term care Medicaid application. When you apply for Medicaid coverage to enter a nursing home, you're required to submit 60 months of financials along with your application. And traditionally the elder law attorney or a nursing home would review those documents literally page by page, line by line to find high value transactions, transfers and other financial trends. And when I heard about this, it just it didn't make sense to me. I said, You know why? In this day and age isn't there? Why isn't there a technology solution that can ingest the documents and spit out a digital report replacing the cumbersome manual page by page review? So it really just started as a research project, trying to learn more about optical character recognition, which is the technology of transforming images into text. And, you know, as we kind of kicked around different products in the market, we we realized that there was an opportunity to build a unique platform that could ingest documents of any format quality and produce perfectly accurate results. And that was the genesis behind what ultimately became Oculus. >>You were a young man at this time. How old were you at that time? >>I was 22 when we started >>so fearless. And, uh, now my friend Eddie Mitchell started a company about 20 years ago. We hacked together a >>Dell >>system and this camera. It was all about the modern operating room in the future, and he showed it to a doctor and and it was just a prototype, she said. How much? He said 10 grand. She wrote a check right there. You have a similar story? How did you see the company? >>So we we we do have a pretty similar experience. You know, Our our concept was we want to get perfect results the customer every time. So if a customer sends us a clean bank statement from Chase or a blurry cell phone image with someone's thumb in the picture from a community bank in Maine, and it's rotated sideways or upside down like we want to give consistent, perfectly active results every single time. And you know, our our view was to completely solve the business problem. So the very first version of the software that we built, we had a rudimentary machine process to extract 60 or 70% of the data, and then we had a little tool built on the back end, where literally, me, myself and some of our early employees would clean up the data output, make sure it's perfect and then return When we couldn't submit, we'd returned to the customer accurate data that could be used at the time for for a Medicaid decision. And what happened is, while we were in our beta period, customers fell in love with the product. They felt it was magical and really just superior from an accuracy standpoint to anything they had ever tested before. And And one of our beta testers said to us, uh, where do I submit credit card information? So at that time, I turned to my colleagues and I said, I think we're ready to I think we're ready. Start charging for this thing and and roll it out for prime time. >>When I was researching the company, I learned that you leveraged. At least some of the idea came from the capture, and I never knew this, But the capture that we all hate came from Google where they write, they had at one point you could maybe you still can. You can go online. You can read books and have to It's just scanned. You can't even read the stuff half the time. So they were putting the capture in front of us, quite brilliant to try to solve for those those those white spaces that they didn't know. So So how did you learn from that? Was there an A P I that you could plug into Google's data set, or did you do your own? What was that? How did that all work? >>The the concept of humans in the loop is super powerful, right? So when we first started, we recognize that OCR and machine data capture couldn't do the job completely. OCR, generally speaking, can process financial documents with roughly 80 to 85% accuracy plus or minus machines, particularly struggled with semi structured and unstructured documents where the format is unpredictable as well as lower quality images. So pretty early on, we recognized that we needed human intervention in the process in order to achieve perfect accuracy every single time, and also to create training data to constantly teach our machine learning models to get smarter and drive additional automation. So, as I mentioned, the very first version was myself and other employees verifying the data on our own. But as we started thinking about how to scale this up and, you know, take on millions and millions of documents, we needed to, uh, you know, learn how to better parallelized task and really build the system for for efficiency and for scanning. So we we we learned about the Google Books Initiative and their ability to leverage capture technology and a distributed workforce to verify pieces of information that their systems couldn't automatically read from books. And we took a lot of those learnings into building our human in the loop infrastructure. And, you know, a way to think about our our product is it's the marriage of machines and humans that makes us unique. As much of the heavy lifting as we can do with machines we do. But whatever we can't do automatically, we slice into smaller tasks and intelligently route those tasks to humans to perform verification. We then layer in algorithmic checks to make sure our humans did the review correctly. The customer gets perfect results, and that same perfect output is used in a feedback loop to train our machine learning models to get smarter and smarter, which dynamically improves the product on an ongoing basis. And, you know, the folks at Google were we're onto this pretty early with the capture technology, and we were following in their footsteps with our own unique take on it, but specifically applying it to financial documents. >>I mean on the Cube. We know a lot about this because we were looking at transcriptions of video all the time, and it just keeps getting better and better and better in our systems. Get smarter and smarter, smarter. So we're sort of closing that gap between what humans can can do and machines can't. And I would expect that you're seeing the same thing. I mean, you think there's always going to be kind of humans in the loop in terms of the quality or is that gap going to be, you know, six nines in the, you know, near near term. >>I think it's gonna take a while to get rid of all the edge cases. You know, you mentioned the PPB program like we've been on the back end processing P p P loans for some of the leading players, like Cross River Bank, blue Vine, Square Capital and others. And you know, what we've seen during the ppb process is just a a wide variety of different documents and inputs, Uh, and a lot of difficult to read documents that are, you know, very challenging to automate. So I think we will, you know, incrementally continue to automate more and more of the process. But the value of having humans plus machines is much more powerful than just having machines alone or just having humans alone. And as it relates to the end customer, our our goal is to do as much of the mundane work as possible to free our customer up to do the more cerebral analysis. So in a lending context and and for the record, you know, our our biggest market opportunity is in the limbic space. Despite the fact that we started with medicating attorneys, we quickly pivoted and realized that our technology was super valuable to to lenders to help them automate the underwriting process. And our our thesis is, if we can take out all of the necessary evils like document review and allow underwriters to focus on the actual analysis of financial health, it's a win win win and creates a really fantastic, complementary relationship between us and our customers. >>Yes, I want to ask you about the pivot to financial services. You said you started well, you have the inspiration from elder law because Jimmy McGill. Okay. Saul Goodman breaking bad. You got started. An elder law. But then you made the pivot to financial services. Really pretty early on. You had really good, great product market fit, but you kind of went for it. I get early twenties. You know, you didn't have a big family at the time. I didn't have a lot of a lot of risks. So you went for it, right? But talk about that pivot because a lot of companies wouldn't do that. They get comfortable and just, you know, stay where they're at. But you made that >>call. It was a big risk, for sure. I mean, look, the product was working. We launched the paid version of our product in 2016. Pretty quickly were onboarding dozens of accountants and attorneys, you know, doing Medicaid work. Um, in mid to late 2016, we got introduced to a large small business lender in New York City called strategic funding Source. They've since renamed them their company Capital as the current name, but we met with the CEO and the head of product and showed them a demo of the technology. And they said, You know, quote unquote, we've been looking for this for years. We've been looking for something exactly like this for years, and we said back to them about how many pages of financial documents to review every single month. They pointed out to a bullpen of dozens of people sitting there tearing through bank statements, page by page, line by line. And they said, You know, it's hundreds of thousands. My eyes almost fell out of my head. I couldn't believe the volume, and it was much bigger than what the, you know, single accountants or attorneys were doing. Uh, so we made the strategic decision to pivot at that time and focus on FINTECH. Lenders continue to tailor the product and build additional features for the fintech lending space. And and, you know, lending in general had the perfect mix of short sale cycle and high average customer value that allowed a company like ours to scale and ramp our revenue quite quite quickly. Um, and then the other thing that happened is kind of as we were getting deeper and deeper into the space, the fintech space as a whole started growing massive. So we we kind of had the perfect storm of product market fit, plus the market growing that allowed us to really ramp significantly grow revenue. And, uh, you know, despite the fact that it was the risk it was, it was totally right. Decision to to focus the business on financial services >>much bigger Tam. And you could subjectively measure it by the size of the stack of papers. Um, how how does this relate to our p A. As you know, the R p. A hot space. You probably get this question a lot, and it sounds like there are some similarities with software bots. What's the similarity? What's the difference? >>Good question. It's It's totally a synergistic offering, right? So rrp a companies like UI path and automation anywhere they typically provide a horizontal toolkit to allow you know, banks and lenders to automate much of the mundane work like, for example, collecting information from emails or doing onboarding for a new employee. Or, you know, different types of tasks that a manual worker would have done but could be automated with relatively simple code. Um, what happens in our p a. Workflows is they get hung up on tasks that can't be completely automated. So, for example, a robot might be, uh, trying to complete an intend lending flow. But when a bank statement is submitted as part of that flow, the robot can't parse it. So what they do instead, is they routed to an underwriter who performs a manual analysis, keys information into a back office system that the bank is using and that information then gets handed back to a robot and continues the automation flow. What we do is we plug the gaps that used to be manual so a robot can pass US documents like bank statements or pay stubs or tax stops. We run our unique human in the loop process. We return structure Jason output directly to a robot, and it continues into the, you know, to the next step of the flow. And, you know, in in summary, the combination of robotic process automation and human in the loop, which is what we're doing, creates true and and automated flows rather than R P. A mite by itself might get you 80% of the way there. >>So do you have, like, software integrations or partnerships with those companies. How are you integrating with them? >>We do. We have software integrations with both UI path and automation anywhere in our core fintech lending business. R P A isn't as prevalent, but we are now expanding beyond fintech lenders into mortgage lending and traditional banks. And we're also expanding use cases, right? Like historically small business lending was the core of our business. More recently, we've moved into consumer auto mortgage, additional asset classes. And as we've gotten deeper with financial institutions, we've seen even more opportunity to partner and coexist with broader r p a player's >>Yeah, great. I mean, I was just staring at their s one. I guess it was came up Monday. Half over half a billion dollars in a are are they're actually cash flow positive as you iPad. So we're going to see we're going to see them hit the public market shortly. Um, hang on, folks. Uh, now it's okay. So this is you sell a sas, right? A SAS service. Even though there's that human in the loop, that's all part of the service. How do you How do you price? >>So usage based model. So we we kind of try to model are themselves nerve. A massive company is super powerful. We apply that same concept document processing, so it's a usage based model. Customers will pay us either per application per document or per page, and if they want to subscribe for, you know, one document per month or millions of documents per month, it's up to them. And we're able to flex up and flex down to meet the supply and demand. Um and that that concept that scalability and flexibility was particularly powerful in the P P P program, right? P P. P. Was kind of a very unique situation in the sense that lenders weren't able to predict the amount of loans they needed to process in normal lending. A small business lender can tell you Hey, we expect to get roughly 10,000 applications in the month of April with P P p. They could tell us, Hey, we're going to send out 200,000 marketing emails and we expect 30% of people might reply, but we really don't have any idea, right? So what happened is the big banks ended up hiring without exaggeration. Thousands of temporary employees to come in and review documents and kind of scrambled to do this in a work from home setting during the pandemic. Whereas Cross River, they took a technology first approach. They implemented our A P I in the back end, and it enabled them to instantly scale up their resources. And the result of that is Cross River ended up becoming a top three pp, a top three p p. P lender nationally, outperforming many of the big banks with a super efficient and fast document review process. Because we were able to help them on the back end with the automation. >>That's awesome. I love the pricing model you mentioned. You mentioned Amazon. Is that the cloud you use or >>we do Our Our product is hosted in AWS and we, you know, take a lot of learnings from them from a business model and and positioning point of view. >>Yeah, and and I'm thrilled to hear you say I mean, I think a lot of forward thinking startups are doing the consumption model. I mean, you certainly see that with companies like snowflake and data dog and stripe. I mean, I think that that SAS model of okay, we're gonna lock you into a one year, two year, three year term. Sorry if if you get acquired, you're stuck with some, you know, stranded licenses. That's your problem. I think that, you know, you really thought that out. Well, um, you mentioned you're sort of expanding your your your total available market now, looking at at new markets, what are some of the big trends that you want to ride over the coming decade as you scale your company? >>The biggest one for us is mortgage automation. You know, the kind of the one of fintech small business and consumer loans were optimized, and we went from a place where, uh, you know, you would deal with a loan officer and have an in person transaction to modern day. You can get a loan from small business. If you're a small business, you can get a loan from PayPal online effectively instantly. If you're a consumer, you can get a loan from Sofia or lending club super smooth digital experience and really revolutionized the way that you know, the market thinks about financial products. I think the next wave of that is mortgage, and that's what we're focused on. Uh, you know, mortgage is a massive market in the sense of thousands of lenders. The average application contains a couple 100 pages worth of financial documents, and the pain points of the back end of the mortgage process were really accentuated. During covid, right refi Valium went way up and mortgage lenders were forced to process that volume in a work from home setting. So what happened is mortgage lenders were struggling with the concept of sending personally identifiable financial information to underwriters who aren't working in an office there, working at home and, you know, kids running around a million things going on. And it's just more difficult to manage than ever before. Um, and you know, as as the the volume kind of normalized debate and mortgage lenders thought about their own future of automation, I think there was just clear recognition across the board that these these mortgage lenders needed to learn from some of the fintech and really focus on automating the back office peace and you know, to your point earlier about business model, what we think about is translating cost that used to be a fixed cost and turning them into a variable costs So now, instead of worrying about having to match supply and demand and hire or fire people, depending on the volume that's coming in on any given month, a mortgage lender can instantly flex up, reflects down and have a super fast, accurate process to handle the darks. Um, and you know, we're seeing just awesome traction in the market with that with the mortgage space and we're excited to push >>forward there. That's great. Thank you. I mean you, Sam. You describe the chaos that work from home. The financial industry is very overly officious. If you know it's very security conscious. How do you handle security? Maybe you could comment on that. How you think about that? >>Sure. I mean, we we take a compliance first approach. We built the product from the ground up with compliance in mind, knowing that we were selling into financial institutions. We have a sock to type one and type two certification, which is, you know, an industry standard. All of our our verification happens with the Oculus employees. So there's no third parties involved in our process whatsoever. Um and then lastly, But perhaps most importantly, our product in and of itself is innately, um, you know, innately drives compliance. So every data point that we process from a financial document, we not only return the data, we return an exact bounding box coordinates of where that data field appeared on the original source so that that audit trail lives with the loan throughout its life cycle. What we saw prior to Oculus is a mortgage would go through an underwriting process. They make a decision, and then that loan might be sold downstream and a diligence firm as to come in. And they don't have the resources to review all the loans. So they review 15% of the loan tape and then they say, you know, they give a rating and what we do is we proactively tackle that by creating a a perfect audit trail upon origination that can live with the loan throughout its life cycle and that that process and that traceability has been super valuable to our mortgage and banking partners. >>So you can ensure the providence there. So let me end just by talking about the company a little bit. So you incubated you nailed the product market fit the and you pivoted and re nailed the product market fit. And like a lot of companies in your position, I would imagine you saw your growth come from just having a great product. You know, initially, word gets around, but then you got a scale. Uh, maybe you could talk a little bit about how how you did that. How you're doing that. You know where your hiring how you're hiring, what your philosophy is on on scaling. >>Sure. Look, I think the key for us is just surrounding ourselves with the right people. You know, the right mentors, advisors and investors to help us really take the business to the next level. Uh, you know, we had no pride of authorship. We're building this and recognize that there are a lot of people out there who have been there, done that and can really guide us and show us the way. I know you had interviewed Marc Roberge on on the show previously. Formerly the C r. O of hubspot. Mark was someone that we you know, we we read his book and had taken sales advice from him from an early age. And over the over time, we got him a little bit more familiar with the company. And and ultimately, Mark and his partner, J Po at Stage two Capital ended up investing in Oculus and really helping us understand how to build the right go to market engine. Um, as the company got bigger, we took on investments from really reputable firms in the financial services space. So our largest investors are okay, H C F T fintech collective and and QED investors. Uh, you know, QED was was founded by Nigel Morris, who is the co founder of Capital One. They backed Sophia and Prosper and a lot of big fintech lenders and, you know, bringing the collective expertise from the fintech sector as well as you know, from a sales and go to market strategy. Point of view created the right mix of ingredients for us to to really ramp up significantly. Uh, we had an awesome run over the years. We were pretty recently recognized by magazine as the number one fastest growing fintech company. And, you know, as the momentum is increased and the market conditions have been very favorable to us, we we just want to double down and expand. Mortgage is the biggest area of opportunity for us. And what we're seeking from a hiring perspective is, you know, go to market sales account executive type resources on the mortgage side as well as you know, deeper products expertise both on the mortgage side as well as with machine learning our product. Because we have the human in the loop piece, we create massive amounts of training data on a daily basis. So it's a, I think, a really exciting place for cutting edge machine learning developers to come and and innovate. >>What can you share with our audience about, you know, your company, any metrics and whatever you're comfortable with, how much money you've raised on my head count? If you want to get some companies comfortable giving a r r others on. But what what do you What can you share with us? >>Sure. Um, you know, we we've raised about 50 million in venture capital. We have grown from one to north of 20 million in revenue in the in the last three years. So particularly since you know, 2017, 2018 is what we really started to see. The growth take off, uh, company size. We have about 800 to 900 employees globally. Now we have about 200 corporate employees who perform the, you know, the the day to day functions of Oculus. And then we have a long tail of about 600 or so verifiers who perform data verification and quality control work again, Speaking to the human in the loop piece of the bottle. Uh, we're, you know, we're focused on expanding beyond the fintech customer base, where we serve customers like plaid PayPal lending club so fi square, etcetera into the mortgage space and ultimately into the traditional banking space where you know, the problems, frankly, are extremely similar. Just on a much larger scale. >>San Bobbly. Congratulations on all the success. You You've got a great road ahead. I really appreciate you coming on the Cube, >>Dave. Thanks so much. It's been a great chat. Look forward to keeping in touch. >>Alright, Did our pleasure. Thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volonte for the Cube. We'll see you next time