>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the AWS Public Sector Partner Awards. We're going to be digging in. This award is for the most customer obsessed migration and happy to welcome to the program two first time guests coming to us from India. First of all, from the partner with Tech Mahindra, we have Gautam Chatterjee. He is the vice president with Tech Mahindra, who's the winner of the award, and they've brought along their customer for this, that is Satyendra Gupta, who is the director of the CPWD, which is the Central Public Works Department, part of the government of India. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> All right, if we could, let's start with just a quick summary of what your organizations do. Gautam, we'll start with you. Tech Mahindra, I think most of our audience, you know, should be aware, you know, large, very well known organization. Congratulations to you and the team on the win. Tell us what your part of Tech Mahindra does. >> Okay. So, Tech Mahindra is a five billion dollar organization, and it's a part of Mahindra and Mahindra. Which is approximately at $22 billion evaluation worldwide. So, Tech Mahindra is primarily into IT services and consulting services for the information technology and information technology related works across the globe. We have got multiple offices, almost around 90 locations across the country, and we have gotten to operations worldwide in different verticals and different geographies. So, as a part of Tech Mahindra, I manage the central government that is the public sector business for Tech Mahindra, based out of New Delhi, in India. And we handle the complete large public sector organizations and different ministries which are coming into the government of India. >> Wonderful! Satyendra, obviously public works, relatively self explanatory, but, tell us a little bit about your organization, your roll, and, if you could, introduce the project that your group worked with Tech Mahindra on. >> Okay, so, Central Public Works Department is a 165 year old organization that was aided by large technology. In 1854 was when this organization started working. The primary responsibility of this organization is to build the consistent works of the government of India. Primarily in the buildings sector. We see predominantly, Tech Mahindra will see predominantly you aiding the department, is that technical add-on to the government of India regarding these concepts and matters. Right, so, this department is spread across the country, from north, and in the south, Kerala. And from Gujarat in the west to another place in the east. This department has departments across the country. We had to use, with all tech with all the top companies we had thought (indistinct) is that only the building but we created and perfected from the government of India, like, the stadiums. That is not so many, wanted something that would have been very useful regarding the tsunami. Tsunami came so the government, the projects we picked up would be constantly small houses that we'd have to give it to. And CPWD, using the info technology since long, but we have it all along (indistinct) in value. Now, last year, it had been decided that we would implement the IT system in the CPWD very hard softwares and will be implementing a single use form, and everything will be connected to each other, too. So, this is what the internet for part of the implementation is. As far as myself is concerned, I am in charge of the implementation of this year for the system in the department. From it's inception to the end, and detailing the whole of the process until all the onboarding of the Tech Mahindra, and the implementation of. And then, from there after waiting a minute to, in the department to make it adaptable, we tell everybody. These are the roles that I have. >> All right, Gautam, if you could, migration's obviously a big part of what I expect Tech Mahindra is helping customers with. Help frame up, you know, the services that you're doing, talk a little bit, if you could, the underlying AWS component of it, and, you know, specifically, give us a little bit about Tech Mahindra's role in the public works project that we were just talking about. >> Okay. So, coming to the relationship and the journey which you have started for the CPWD project, it's around a year, year and a half work when you have started interacting with CPWD. By understanding their business challenges and the business department, which is primarily automating the whole processes. And there are multiple applications, multiple processes which they wanted to automate. Now, definitely once their automation comes into the picture, you have to take place the complete automation of the applications, the complete automations of the infrastructure, and the complete automations of the UI part of it. That is the user perceptions, user interface, right? So, all three has been covered by this company to automation process. As a part of the system integrations business, our main objective is to plan and bring the respective OEMs, who are the best of the great, our technology providers, to bring them to utilize those platforms, and to utilize those course applications, so that, by utilizing those technologies and applications, we can automate the complete process and provide the complete drill down management view to CPWD for their inter-operations and application. In the process of doing that, what we have done, we have brought in SAP as an ace for HANA implementation, which is the primary business applications which will be implemented in CPWD. The inter-user log-in and user interface will be done through a portal, and that portal will be utilizing the Liferay user portal, which will be the front end user interface. There will be an eTendering application, which will be also through one of my large general partners, who will be working together for us for the eTendering applications, which is also a part of ours, and 40 of the whole automation process. And inter-application, eTendering, the portal, and all the applications, as a matter of fact, will be hosted to the cloud on AWS platform. Now, once you're talking about the AWS platform, that means it will implement the complete infrastructure of the service, and the complete platform as a service. So, all the computed storage, everything will be deploying from the AWS cloud, and necessarily all the platform in terms of your database applications, all third-party tools to do the performance testing, management, monitoring. Everything will be provided as a platform of the service by AWS. So, we, engaged AWS from the beginning itself, the AWS team, and SMP team, both major OEMs worked with us very hand and gloves from day one. And we had multiple interactions with the customer. We understood the challenges. We understood the number of users, number of iterations, number of redundancy, number of high, I mean, the kind of high availability they will require in times of the business difficulty of the applications, and based on which, together, along with AWS, Tech Mahindra, and SAP, all three of us together, and I have the complete solutions, architecture, and the optimizations of the whole solutions, so that overall impact comes to CPWD as the customer, the ultimate results, and the business output they deserve. You know? So, that is where we actually interacted. We have got the interactions with AWS solutions team, AWS architect team, along with our interface architect and the solutions team, who worked very closely along with the customers, them desizing so that it exactly matches the requirement not only for today, down the line for the next four years, because the complete implementation cycle is 18 months, and after that, Tech Mahindra is a prime service provider. We'll provide the four years after implementation support to CPWD, because we all understand that any government department, they need government understanding. These kind of business applications implementation is a transformation. Now, this transformation definitely cannot happen overnight. It has to happen through a process, through a cycle, and through a phase, because there will be the users who will be the proactive users who will start using the inter-applications from the beginning, and, gradually, the more and more success, the more and more user friendliness will come into the whole picture. Then, participation for multiple users, multiple stakeholders will come on board. The moment that comes in, the users load, the user's participation and user's load, both into the platforms, both into the infrastructure will keep on changing, keep on increasing, and that is why our role will be how to manage the complete infrastructure, how to manage the complete platform throughout the journey of this transformation of five and a half years. And that is what the exact role as a prime and large MSP Tech Mahindra will perform for the next five and a half years along with AWS, along with CPWD, and along with SAP. (coughs) >> All right, well, Satyendra, Gautam just laid out, I think, a lot of the reasons why they won the customer obsessed award from AWS on this. You know, I think back to earlier in my career and you talk about NSAP rollout, and it's not only the length of time that it takes for the rollout, and the finance involved, but what Gautam was talking about is the organizational impact and adoptions. So, I would love to hear from your side. You know, what were the goals that you had coming into this? It sounds like getting greater adoption inside the organization for using these services. Give us your insight as to, you know, how that roll-out has been going, the goals you had, how you're meeting them, any success metrics that you use internally to talk about how the project has gone so far. >> We implement the Atlas System in the CPWD, the activities going on since a long time. It was more than one and a half years had been passed, we have angers, one of them concerning our ideas and the way we transform our business processes. They have some certain ideas and that the app implementation is the last one. Most of them have been implemented and we have started, started to get ideas to implement some, but we had bad interactions with all the leading IT service providers in the country, along with all the leading cloud service providers in the country, and this, of course, all the leading EIP services, OEMs, EIP, OEMs, so and so. But, it's a long journey, we have a trial approximately half of the deadline from there. To inform returning process, Tech Mahindra has been appointed as the system integrator and they have come with all the sorts of the services that they are offering, for example, they plan to use SAP, and EIP will be in there, as well. This "one life" system for the portal, eTendering, is a primary credit, has been done. And overall everything has been hosted on the AWS cloud platform. So, it's just that, when could we have. And, everybody knows that Amazon is the leading cloud service provider with the largest of the facilities available with us, so, during this journey, we have got lots of support from the AWS via lots of the credit regarding us to get it set up with the AWS team, and continuously boosted our office and explained each of our queries on this, and now, from the march onwards, Tech Mahindra has started the implementation process we are in. More than four months have been passed since then. And we have covered a lot. The whole objective of this implementation is all our activities will be done on this EIP system, only that if somebody is working in the CPWD, you will activate that. Work in the CPWD on the EIP, or you will not be able to work at all. This is a light goal and whole system. But, all of our system is going to be automatic. Earlier, we were having a different idea because when we were working in the silos, everything we wanted to be integrated with each other, and the time that will be invested to make the entry of the different activity at a different time and with the applications, applicants are not talking to each other, they are working in the silos, but that will go away. So, what we are expecting everything will be on the EIP system, as well, and we are expecting the efficiency of the CPWD unit is going to be increased tremendously. Apart from this, they will handle a more number of the works compared to what they were handling and the time in it since. And everything will revolved around the click of the buttons and we need not to go and ask from anybody to give the reports, et cetera. So, problem management must peak, too. By the click of the button, we will also be able to get all the inputs, all the reports with what is going on across the country. And that idea. So, it is going to be really a transformation to the working of the department, and, in whole, the entire public work center of this country is going to be benefited out of this. This has been like a lighthouse today. This EIP implemented in the CPWD is the lighthouse up ahead, so there are more than 30 public work departments, said public work departments are working, so this is going to create and open a window for everybody there. Once it is a success of this implementation, we'll have it far reaching implication on the implementation of that EIP system or a similar idea for implications in the public works or in the whole country. So, so, there's lots of these stakes our there. To any and, hopefully, with the help of Tech Mahindra, with the help of SAP, AWS, and Amazon, one day they will be able to implement successfully and we will, we are going to get the benefit out of. Everybody is going benefit, not only the Central Public Works Department, but all of our stakeholders. All the stakeholders in terms of businesses, in terms of their reach to the Public Works, and there is a new door to open because the IT had not been leveraged the way in the Public Works Department in the central department or the state government. The other IT system hadn't used EIP. It is going, it's a lighthouse headed to success. We'll have a far reaching implication for everybody. >> Well, I tell you, Satyendra, that's been the promise of cloud, that we should be able to do something, and the scalability and repeatability is something that we should be able to go. Gautam, I want to give you the final word on this. You know, speak to how does cloud, how do we enable this to be able to scale throughout many groups within the organization without having to be, you know, as much work, you know. I think about traditional IT, it's, well, okay, I spend a project, I spend so much time on it, and then every time I need to repeat it, I kind of, you know, have that same amount of work. The, you know, labor should go down as we scale out in a cloud environment. Is that, what you feel, the case? You know, help us understand how this lighthouse account will expand. >> Okay. So, any cloud, you know, have initiative nowadays into any organization. It depends. It primarily benefits in both the ways. Number one, the organization doesn't require to invest up front on the capital expenditure part of it. That's very important. Number two, the organization has got the flexibility to scale up and scale down based on the customer requirements. Within a click of the mouse. It doesn't take any time. Because the inter-positioning of the infrastructure is available with the cloud infrastructure service provider. And, similarly, the scaling of the platforms, that's also available with the cloud infrastructure provider. So, once you do the complete mapping requirement and the sizing for the entire tenure of the project, then the provisioning and deprovisioning is not a matter of time, it can happen with a click of mouse. That's number one. Number two, it's become a challenging activity for any government organization to have their own IT set-up. To manage such a huge, mammoth task of the entire infrastructure, applications, services, troubleshooting, 24 by 7, everything. So, that's not expected from the large government organizations, as such, because that's not their business. Their business is to run the country, their business to run the organization, their business to grow the country's different ideas. And, the IT services organizations, like Tech Mahindra, is there to support those kind of automation processes. And, the platforms which are available on the cloud nowadays, that's the ease of inter-applications, inter-management, monitoring, availability of the entire infrastructure, that makes use of the whole, complete system. So, it all works together. It's not a thing that the system integration organizations already will do the all new reform. It has to happen in synergies. So, application has to work together, infrastructure has to be available together, the management, monitoring has to happen, scaling up, scaling down has to happen, all kinds of updates, upgrades, and badges down the line for the company, continuing of the whole contract has to happen so that the system, once up and running and benefited, it's performing at least for a period of the next five years, as the tenure of the contract, in multiple department happens. Now, what Mr. Gupta was saying, it's very very true that CPWD is the kind of motherly organizations for all public works departments in the country. And, all the public works departments in the country are eagerly looking at this project. Now, it is very important for all of us, not only for Tech Mahindra, Tech Mahindra, SAP, Liferay, and AWS, together, to work and make this project as a success, because it is not a reason that, as a simple customer, this project has to be successful. It's a flexible project for the government of India, and it's been monitored by Didac Lee, the government of India officials, and top ranking bodies on a day in and day out basis, number one. Number two, if we become successful together in this project, there will be an avenue for what Satyendra Gupta has said. That all state PWDs will be open to everybody. They will try and adopt, and they will try and implement a similar kind of system to all the respective states in the country. So it's a huge opportunity in terms of technology enhancement, automations, infrastructure, applications, and moreover, as a service provider, to provide the services to all these bodies, together, which, I feel, it's a huge huge opportunity for all of us together, and we are confident that we will work together, hand in gloves, the way we have done from the day one of this initiative, and we'll take it forward. >> All right, well Satyendra, thank you so much for sharing the details of your project, wish you the best of luck with that going forward. And, Gautam, congratulations again to Tech Mahindra for winning the most customer obsessed migration solution. Thank you both for joining. >> Both: Thank you. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you very much. >> All right, and thank you for joining. I'm Stu Miniman, this is theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards. Thanks for watching. >> Gautam: Thank you very much. (bright upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a Cube Conversation. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto Studios today, having a Cube Conversation, you know, with the COVID situation going on we've had to change our business and go pretty much 100% digital. And as part of that process, we wanted to reach out to our community, and talk to some of the leaders out there, because I think leadership in troubling times is even more amplified in it's importance. So we're excited to be joined today by two leaders in our community. First one being John Chambers, a very familiar face from many, many years at Cisco, who's now the founder and CEO of JC2 Ventures. John, great to see you. >> Jeff, it's a pleasure to be with you again. >> Absolutely. And joining him is Umesh Sachdev, he's the co-founder and CEO of Uniphore. First time on theCUBE, Umesh, great to meet you. >> Jeff, thank you for having me, it's great to be with you. >> You as well, and I had one of your great people on the other day, talking about CX, and I think CX is the whole solution. Why did Uber beat cabs, do you want to stand on a corner and raise your hand in the rain? Or do you want to know when the guy's going to come pick you up, in just a couple minutes? So anyway, welcome. So let's jump into it. John, one of your things, that you talked about last time we talked, I think it was in October, wow how the world has changed. >> Yes. >> Is about having a playbook, and really, you know, kind of thinking about what you want to do before it's time to actually do it, and having some type of a script, and some type of direction, and some type of structure, as to how you respond to situations. Well there's nothing like a disaster to really fire off, you know, the need to shift gears, and go to kind of into a playbook mode. So I wonder if you could share with the viewers, kind of what is your playbook, you've been through a couple of these bumps. Not necessarily like COVID-19, but you've seen a couple bumps over your career. >> So it's my pleasure Jeff. What I'll do is kind of outline how I believe you use an innovation playbook on everything from acquisitions, to digitizing a company, to dealing with crisis. Let's focus on the playbook for crisis. You are right, and I'm not talking about my age, (John laughing) but this is my sixth financial crisis, and been through the late 1990s with the Asian financial crisis, came out of it even stronger at Cisco. Like everybody else we got knocked down in the 2001 tech bubble, came back from it even stronger. Then in 2008, 2009, Great Recession. We came through that one very, very strong, and we saw that one coming. It's my fourth major health crisis. Some of them turned out to be pretty small. I was in Mexico when the bird pandemic hit, with the President of Mexico, when we thought it was going to be terrible. We literally had to cancel the meetings that evening. That's why Cisco built the PLAR Presence. I was in Brazil for the issue with the Zika virus, that never really developed much, and the Olympics went on there, and I only saw one mosquito during the event. It bit me. But what I'm sharing with you is I've seen this movie again and again. And then, with supply chain, which not many people were talking about yet, supply chain crisis, like we saw in Japan with the Tsunami. What's happening this time is you're seeing all three at one time, and they're occurring even faster. So the playbook is pretty simple in crisis management, and then it would be fun to put Umesh on the spot and say how closely did you follow it? Did you agree with issues, or did you disagree, et cetera, on it. Now I won't mention, Umesh, that you've got a review coming up shortly from your board, so that should not affect your answer at all. But the first playbook is being realistic, how much was self-inflicted, how much was market. This one's largely market, but if you had problems before, you got to address them at the same time. The second thing is what are the five to seven things that are material, what you're going to do to lead through this crisis. That's everything from expense management, to cash preservation. It's about how do you interface to your employees, and how do you build on culture. It's about how do you interface to your customers as they change from their top priority being growth and innovation, to a top priority being cost savings, and the ability to really keep their current revenue streams from churning and moving. And it's about literally, how do make your big bets for what you want to look like as you move out of this market. Then it's how do you communicate that to your employees, to your shareholders, to your customers, to your partners. Painting the picture of what you look like as you come out. As basic as that sounds, that's what crisis management is all about. Don't hide, be visible, CEOs should take the role on implementing that playbook. Umesh to you, do you agree? And have fun with it a little bit, I like the give and take. >> I want to see the playbook, do you have it there, just below the camera? (Jeff laughing) >> I have it right here by my side. I will tell you, Jeff, in crisis times and difficult times like these, you count all the things that go right for you, you count your blessings. And one of the blessings that I have, as a CEO, is to have John Chambers as my mentor, by my side, sharing not just the learning that he had through the crisis, but talking through this, with me on a regular basis. I've read John's book more than a few times, I bet more than anybody in the world, I've read it over and over. And that, to me, is preparation going into this mode. One of the things that John has always taught me is when times get difficult, you get calmer than usual. It's one thing that when you're cruising on the freeway and you're asked to put the brakes, but it's quite another when you're in rocket ship, and accelerating, which is what my company situation was in the month of January. We were coming out of a year of 300% growth, we were driving towards another 300% growth, hiring tremendously, at a high pace. Winning customers at a high pace, and then this hit us. And so what I had to do, from a playbook perspective, is, you know, take a deep breath, and just for a couple of days, just slow down, and calmly look at the situation. My first few steps were, I reached out to 15 of our top customers, the CEOs, and give them calls, and said let's just talk about what you're seeing, and what we are observing in our business. We get a sense of where they are in their businesses. We had the benefit, my co-founder works out of Singapore, and runs our Asia business. We had the benefit of picking up the sign probably a month before everyone else did it in the U.S. I was with John in Australia, and I was telling John that "John, something unusual is happening, "a couple of our customers in these countries in Asia "are starting to tell us they would do the deal "a quarter later." And it's one thing when one of them says it, it's another when six of them say it together. And John obviously has seen this movie, he could connect the dots early. He told me to prepare, he told the rest of the portfolio companies that are in his investment group to start preparing. We then went to the playbook that John spoke of, being visible. For me, culture and communication take front seat. We have employees in ten different countries, we have offices, and very quickly, even before the governments mandated, we had all of them work, you know, go work from home, and be remote, because employee safety and health was the number one priority. We did our first virtual all-hands meeting on Zoom. We had about 240 people join in from around the world. And my job as CEO, usually our all-hands meeting were different functional leaders, different people in the group talk to the team about their initiatives. This all-hands was almost entirely run by me, addressing the whole company about what's going to be the situation from my lens, what have we learned. Be very factual. At the same time, communicating to the team that because of the fact that we raised our funding the last year, it was a good amount of money, we still have a lot of that in the bank, so we going to be very secure. At the same time, our customers are probably going to need us more than ever. Call centers are in more demand than ever, people can't walk up to a bank branch, they can't go up to a hospital without taking an appointment. So the first thing everyone is doing is trying to reach call centers. There aren't enough people, and anyways the work force that call centers have around the world, are 50% working from home, so the capacity has dropped. So our responsibility almost, is to step up, and have our AI and automation products available to as many call centers as we can. So as we are planning our own business continuity, and making sure every single employee is safe, the message to my team was we also have to be aggressive and making sure we are more out there, and more available, to our customers, that would also mean business growth for us. But first, and foremost is for us to be responsible citizens, and just make it available where it's needed. As we did that, I quickly went back to my leadership team, and again, the learning from John is usually it's more of a consensus driven approach, we go around the table, talk about a topic for a couple of hours, get the consensus, and move out of the room. My leadership meetings, they have become more frequent, we get together once a week, on video call with my executive leaders, and it's largely these days run by me. I broke down the team into five different war rooms, with different objectives. One of them we called it the preservation, we said one leader, supported by others will take the responsibility of making sure every single employee, their families, and our current customers, are addressed, taken care of. So we made somebody lead that group. Another group was made responsible for growth. Business needs to, you know, in a company that's growing at 300%, and we still have the opportunity, because call centers need us more than ever, we wanted to make sure we are responding to growth, and not just hunkering down, and, you know, ignoring the opportunity. So we had a second war room take care of the growth. And a third war room, lead by the head of finance, to look at all the financial scenarios, do the stress tests, and see if we are going to be ready for any eventuality that's going to come. Because, you know, we have a huge amount of people, who work at Uniphore around the world, and we wanted to make sure their well being is taken care of. So from being over communicative, to the team and customers, and being out there personally, to making sure we break down the teams. We have tremendous talent, and we let different people, set of people, run different set of priorities, and report back to me more frequently. And now, as we have settled into this rhythm, Jeff, you know, as we've been in, at least in the Bay area here, we've been shelter in place for about a month now. As we are in the rhythm, we are beginning to do virtual happy hours, every Thursday evening. Right after this call, I get together with my team with a glass of wine, and we get together, we talk every but work, and every employee, it's not divided by functions, or leadership, and we are getting the rhythm back into the organization. So we've gone and adjusted in the crisis, I would say very well. And the business is just humming along, as we had anticipated, going into this crisis. But I would say, if I didn't have John by my side, if I hadn't read his book, the number of times that I have, every plane ride we've done together, every place we've gone together, John has spoken about war stories. About the 2001, about 2008, and until you face the first one of your own, just like I did right now, you don't appreciate when John says leadership is lonely. But having him by our side makes it easier. >> Well I'm sure he's told you the Jack Welch story, right? That you've quoted before, John, where Jack told you that you're not really a good leader, yet, until you've been tested, right. So you go through some tough stuff, it's not that hard to lead on an upward to the right curve, it's when things get a little challenging that the real leadership shines through. >> Completely agree, and Jack said it the best, we were on our way to becoming the most valuable company in the world, he looked me in the eye and said "John, you have a very good company." And I knew he was about to give me a teaching moment, and I said "What does it take to have a great one?" He said a near death experience. And I thought I did that in '97, and some of the other management, and he said, "No, it's when you went through something "like we went through in 2001, "which many of our peers did die in." And we were knocked down really hard. When we came back from it, you get better. But what you see in Umesh is a very humble, young CEO. I have to remember he's only 34 years old, because his maturity is like he's 50, and he's seen it before. As you tell, he's like a sponge on learning, and he doesn't mind challenging. And what what he didn't say, in his humbleness, is they had the best month in March ever. And again, well over 300% versus the same quarter a year ago. So it shows you, if you're in the right spot, i.e. artificial intelligence, i.e. cost savings, i.e. customer relationship with their customers, how you can grow even during the tough times, and perhaps set a bold vision, based upon facts and a execution plan that very few companies will be able to deliver on today. So off to a great start, and you can see why I'm so honored and proud to be his strategic partner, and his coach. >> Well it's interesting, right, the human toll of this crisis is horrible, and there's a lot of people getting sick, and a lot of people are dying, and all the estimations are a lot more are going to die this month, as hopefully we get over the hump of some of these curves. So that aside, you know, we're here talking kind of more about the, kind of, the business of this thing. And it's really interesting kind of what a catalyst COVID has become, in terms of digital transformation. You know, we've been talking about new ways to work for years, and years, and years, and digital transformation, and all these kind of things. You mentioned the Cisco telepresence was out years, and decades ago. I mean I worked in Mitsubishi, we had a phone camera in 1986, I looked it up today, it was ridiculous, didn't work. But now, it's here, right. Now working from home is here. Umesh mentioned, you know, these huge call centers, now everybody's got to go home. Do they have infrastructure to go home? Do they have a place to work at home? Do they have support to go home? Teachers are now being forced, from K-12, and I know it's a hot topic for you, John, to teach from home. Teach on Zoom, with no time to prep, no time to really think it through. It's just like the kids aren't coming back, we got to learn it. You know I think this is such a transformational moment, and to your point, if this goes on for weeks, and weeks, and months, and months, which I think we all are in agreement that it will. I think you said, John, you know, many, many quarters. As people get new habits, and get into this new flow, I don't think they're going to go back back to the old ways. So I think it's a real, you know, kind of forcing function for digital transformation. And it's, you can't, you can't sit on the sidelines, cause your people can't come to the office anymore. >> So you've raised a number of questions, and I'll let Umesh handle the tough part of it. I will answer the easy part, which is I think this is the new normal. And I think it's here now, and the question is are you ready for it. And as you think about what we're really saying is the video sessions will become such an integral part of our daily lives, that we will not go back to having to do 90% of our work physically. Today alone I've done seven major group meetings, on Zoom, and Google Hangouts, and Cisco Webex. I've done six meetings with individuals, or the key CEOs of my portfolio. So that part is here to stay. Now what's going to be fascinating is does that also lead into digitization of our company, or do the companies make the mistake of saying I'm going to use this piece, because it's so obvious, and I get it, in terms of effectiveness, but I'm not going to change the other things in my normal work, in my normal business. This is why, unfortunately, I think you will see, we originally said, Jeff, you remember, 40% maybe as high as 45% of the Fortune 500 wouldn't exist in a decade. And perhaps 70% of the start-ups wouldn't exist in a decade, that are venture capital backed. I now think, unfortunately, you're going to see 20-35% of the start-ups not exist in 2 years, and I think it's going to shock you with the number of Fortune 500 companies that do not make this transition. So where you're leading this, that I completely agree with, is the ability to take this terrible event, with all of the issues, and again thank our healthcare workers for what they've been able to do to help so many people, and deal with the world the way it is. As my parents who are doctors taught me to do, not the way we wish it was. And then get your facts, prepare for the changes, and get ready for the future. The key would be how many companies do this. On the area Umesh has responsibility for, customer experience, I think you're going to see almost all companies focus on that. So it can be an example of perhaps how large companies learn to use the new technology, not just video capability, but AI, assistance for the agents, and then once they get the feel for it, just like we got the feel for these meetings, change their rhythm entirely. It was a dinner in New York, virtually, when we stopped, six weeks ago, traveling, that was supposed to be a bunch of board meetings, customer meetings, that was easy. But we were supposed to have a dinner with Shake Shack's CEO, and we were supposed to have him come out and show how he does cool innovation. We had a bunch of enterprise companies, and a bunch of media, and subject matter expertise, we ended up canceling it, and then we said why not do it virtually? And to your point, we did it in 24 different locations. Half the people, remember six weeks ago, had never even used Zoom. We had milk shakes, and hamburgers, and french fries delivered to their home. And it was one of the best two hour meetings I've seen. The future is this now. It's going to change dramatically, and Umesh, I think, is going to be at the front edge of how enterprise companies understand how their relationship with their customers is going to completely transform, using AI, conversational AI capability, speech recognition, et cetera. >> Yeah, I mean, Umesh, we haven't even really got into Uniphore, or what you guys are all about. But, you know, you're supporting call centers, you're using natural language technology, both on the inbound and all that, give us the overview, but you're playing on so many kind of innovation spaces, you know, the main interaction now with customers, and a brand, is either through the mobile phone, or through a call center, right. And that's becoming more, and increasingly, digitized. The ability to have a voice interaction, with a machine. Fascinating, and really, I think, revolutionary, and kind of taking, you know, getting us away from these stupid qwerty keyboards, which are supposed to slow us down on purpose. It's still the funniest thing ever, that we're still using these qwerty keyboards. So I wonder if you can share with us a little bit about, you know, kind of your vision of natural language, and how that changes the interaction with people, and machines. I think your TED Talk was really powerful, and I couldn't help but think of, you know, kind of mobile versus land lines, in terms of transformation. Transforming telecommunications in rural, and hard to serve areas, and then actually then adding the AI piece, to not only make it better for the front end person, but actually make it for the person servicing the account. >> Absolutely Jeff, so Uniphore, the company that I founded in 2008. We were talking about it's such a coincidence that I founded the company in 2008, the year of the Great Recession, and here we are again, talking in midst of the impact that we all have because of COVID. Uniphore does artificial intelligence and automation products, for the customer service industry. Call centers, as we know it, have fundamentally, for the last 20, 30 years, not have had a major technology disruption. We've seen a couple of ways of business model disruption, where call centers, you know, started to become offshore, in locations in Asia, India, and Mexico. Where our calls started to get routed around the world internationally, but fundamentally, the core technology in call centers, up until very recently, hadn't seen a major shift. With artificial intelligence, with natural language processings, speech recognition, available in over 100 languages. And, you know, in the last year or so, automation, and RPA, sort of adding to that mix, there's a whole new opportunity to re-think what customer service will mean to us, more in the future. As I think about the next five to seven years, with 5G happening, with 15 billion connected devices, you know, my five year old daughter, she the first thing she does when she enters the house from a playground, she goes to talk to her friend called Alexa. She speaks to Alexa. So, you know, these next generation of users, and technology users will grow up with AI, and voice, and NLP, all around us. And so their expectation of customer service and customer experience is going to be quantum times higher than some of us have, from our brands. I mean, today when a microwave or a TV doesn't work in our homes, our instinct could be to either go to the website of the brand, and try to do a chat with the agent, or do an 800 number phone call, and get them to visit the house to fix the TV. With, like I said with 5G, with TV, and microwave, and refrigerator becoming intelligent devices, you know, I could totally see my daughter telling the microwave "Why aren't you working?" And, you know, that question might still get routed to a remote contact center. Now the whole concept of contact center, the word has center in it, which means, in the past, we used to have these physical, massive locations, where people used to come in and put on their headsets to receive calls. Like John said, more than ever, we will see these centers become dispersed, and virtual. The channels with which these queries will come in would no more be just a phone, it would be the microwave, the car, the fridge. And the receivers of these calls would be anywhere in the world, sitting in their home, or sitting on a holiday in the Himalayas, and answering these situations to us. You know, I was reading, just for everyone to realize how drastic this shift has been, for the customer service industry. There are over 14 million workers, who work in contact centers around the world. Like I said, the word center means something here. All of them, right now, are working remote. This industry was never designed to work remote. Enterprises who fundamentally didn't plan for this. To your point Jeff, who thought digitization or automation, was a project they could have picked next year, or they were sitting on the fence, will now know more have a choice to make this adjustment. There's a report by a top analyst firm that said by 2023, up to 30% of customer service representatives would be remote. Well guess what, we just way blew past that number right away. And most of the CEOs that I talked to recently tell me that now that this shift has happened, about 40% of their workers will probably never return back to the office. They will always remain a permanent virtual workforce. Now when the workforce is remote, you need all the tools and technology, and AI, that A, if on any given day, 7-10% of your workforce calls in sick, you need bots, like the Amazon's Alexa, taking over a full conversation. Uniphore has a product called Akira, which does that in call centers. Most often, when these call center workers are talking, we have the experience of being put on hold, because call center workers have to type in something on their keyboard, and take notes. Well guess what, today AI and automation can assist them in doing that, making the call shorter, allowing the call center workers to take a lot more calls in the same time frame. And I don't know your experience, but, you know, a couple of weekends ago, the modem in my house wasn't working. I had a seven hour wait time to my service provider. Seven hour. I started calling at 8:30, it was somewhere around 3-4:00, finally, after call backs, wait, call back, wait, that it finally got resolved. It was just a small thing, I just couldn't get to the representative. So the enterprises are truly struggling, technology can help. They weren't designed to go remote, think about it, some of the unique challenges that I've heard now, from my customers, is that how do I know that my call center representative, who I've trained over years to be so nice, and empathetic, when they take a pee break, or a bio break, they don't get their 10 year old son to attend a call. How do I know that? Because now I can no more physically check in on them. How do I know that if I'm a bank, there's compliance? There's nothing being said that isn't being, is, you know, supposed to be said, because in a center, in an office, a supervisor can listen in. When everyone's remote, you can't do that. So AI, automation, monitoring, supporting, aiding human beings to take calls much better, and drive automation, as well as AI take over parts of a complete call, by the way of being a bot like Alexa, are sort of the things that Uniphore does, and I just feel that this is a permanent shift that we are seeing. While it's happening because of a terrible reason, the virus, that's affecting human beings, but the shift in business and behavior, is going to be permanent in this industry. >> Yeah, I think so, you know it's funny, I had Marten Mickos on, or excuse me, yeah, Marten Mickos, as part of this series. And I asked him, he's been doing distributed companies since he was doing MySQL, before Sun bought them. And he's, he was funny, it's like actually easier to fake it in an office, than when you're at home, because at home all you have to show is your deliverables. You can't look busy, you can't be going to meetings, you can't be doing things at your computer. All you have to show is your output. He said it's actually much more efficient, and it drives people, you know, to manage to the output, manage to what you want. But I want to shift gears a little bit, before we let you go, and really talk a little bit about the role of government. And John, I know you've been very involved with the Indian government, and the French government, trying to help them, in their kind of entrepreneurial pursuits, and Uniphore, I think, was founded in India, right, before you moved over here. You know we've got this huge stimulus package coming from the U.S. government, to try to help, as people, you know, can't pay their mortgage, a lot of people aren't so fortunate to be in digital businesses. It's two trillion dollars, so as kind of a thought experiment, I'm like well how much is two trillion dollars? And I did the cash balance of the FAANG companies. Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Alphabet, just looking at Yahoo Finance, the latest one that was there. It's 333 billion, compared to two trillion. Even when you add Microsoft's 133 billion on top, it's still shy, it's still shy of 500 billion. You know, and really, the federal government is really the only people in a position to make kind of sweeping, these types of investments. But should we be scared? Should we be worried about, you know, kind of this big shift in control? And should, do you think these companies with these big balance sheets, as you said John, priorities change a little bit. Should it be, keep that money to pay the people, so that they can stay employed and pay their mortgage, and go buy groceries, and maybe get take out from their favorite restaurant, versus, you know, kind of what we've seen in the past, where there's a lot more, you know, stock buy backs, and kind of other uses of these cash. As you said, if it's a crisis, and you got to cut to survive, you got to do that. But clearly some of these other companies are not in that position. >> So you, let me break it into two pieces, Jeff, if I may. The first is for the first time in my lifetime I have seen the federal government and federal agencies move very rapidly. And if you would have told me government could move with the speed we've seen over the last three months, I would have said probably not. The fed was ahead of both the initial interest rate cuts, and the fed was ahead in terms of the slowing down, i.e. your 2 trillion discussion, by central banks here, and around the world. But right behind it was the Treasury, which put on 4 trillion on top of that. And only governments can move in this way, but the coordination with government and businesses, and the citizens, has been remarkable. And the citizens being willing to shelter in place. To your question about India, Prime Minister Modi spent the last five years digitizing his country. And he put in place the most bandwidth of any country in the world, and literally did transformation of the currency to a virtual currency, so that people could get paid online, et cetera, within it. He then looked at start-ups and job creation, and he positioned this when an opportunity or problem came along, to be able to perhaps navigate through it in a way that other countries might struggle. I would argue President Macron in France is doing a remarkable job with his innovation economy, but also saying how do you preserve jobs. So you suddenly see government doing something that no business can do, with the scale, and the speed, and a equal approach. But at the same time, may of these companies, and being very candid, that some people might have associated with tech for good, or with tech for challenges, have been unbelievably generous in giving both from the CEOs pockets perspective, and number two and three founders perspective, as well as a company giving to the CDC, and giving to people to help create jobs. So I actually like this opportunity for tech to regain its image of being good for everybody in the world, and leadership within the world. And I think it's a unique opportunity. For my start-ups, I've been so proud, Jeff. I didn't have to tell them to go do the right thing with their employees, I didn't have to tell them that you got to treat people, human lives first, the economy second, but we can do both in parallel. And you saw companies like Sprinklr suddenly say how can I help the World Health Organization anticipate through social media, where the next spread of the virus is going to be? A company, like Bloom Energy, with what KR did there, rebuilding all of the ventilators that were broken here in California, of which about 40% were, out of the stock that they got, because it had been in storage for so long, and doing it for all of California in their manufacturing plant, at cost. A company like Aspire Foods, a cricket company down in Texas, who does 3D capabilities, taking part of their production in 3D, and saying how many thousand masks can I generate, per week, using 3D printers. You watch what Umesh has done, and how he literally is changing peoples lives, and making that experience, instead of being a negative from working at home, perhaps to a positive, and increasing the customer loyalty in the process, as opposed to when you got a seven hour wait time on a line. Not only are you probably not going to order anything else from that company, you're probably going to change it. So what is fascinating to me is I believe companies owe an obligation to be successful, to their employees, and to their shareholders, but also to give back to society. And it's one of the things I'm most proud about the portfolio companies that I'm a part of, and why I'm so proud of what Umesh is doing, in both a economically successful environment, but really giving back and making a difference. >> Yeah, I mean, there's again, there's all the doctor stuff, and the medical stuff, which I'm not qualified to really talk about. Thankfully we have good professionals that have the data, and the knowledge, and know what to do, and got out ahead of the social distancing, et cetera, but on the backside, it really looks like a big data problem in so many ways, right. And now we have massive amounts of compute at places like Amazon, and Google, and we have all types of machine learning and AI to figure out, you know, there's kind of resource allocation, whether that be hospital beds, or ventilators, or doctors, or nurses, and trying to figure out how to sort that all out. But then all of the, you know, genome work, and you know, kind of all that big heavy lifting data crunching, you know, CPU consuming work, that hopefully is accelerating the vaccine. Because I don't know how we get all the way out of this until, it just seems like kind of race to the vaccine, or massive testing, so we know that it's not going to spike up. So it seems like there is a real opportunity, it's not necessarily Kaiser building ships, or Ford building planes, but there is a role for tech to play in trying to combat this thing, and bring it under control. Umesh, I wonder if you could just kind of contrast being from India, and now being in the States for a couple years. Anything kind of jump out to you, in terms of the differences in what you're hearing back home, in the way this has been handled? >> You know, it's been very interesting, Jeff, I'm sure everyone is concerned that India, for many reasons, so far hasn't become a big hot spot yet. And, you know, we can hope and pray that that remains to be the case. There are many things that the government back home has done, I think India took lessons from what they saw in Europe, and the U.S, and China. They went into a countrywide lockdown pretty early, you know, pretty much when they were lower than a two hundred positive tested cases, the country went into lockdown. And remember this is a 1.5 billion people all together going into lockdown. What I've seen in the U.S. is that, you know, California thankfully reacted fast. We've all been sheltered in place, there's cabin fever for all of us, but you know, I'm sure at the end of the day, we're going to be thankful for the steps that are taken. Both by the administration at the state level, at the federal level, and the medical doctors, who are doing everything they can. But India, on the other hand, has taken the more aggressive stance, in terms of doing a country lockdown. We just last evening went live at a University in the city of Chennai, where Uniphore was born. The government came out with the request, much like the U.S., where they're government departments were getting a surge of traffic about information about COVID, the hospitals that are serving, what beds are available, where is the testing? We stood up a voice bot with AI, in less than a week, in three languages. Which even before the government started to advertise, we started to get thousands of calls. And this is AI answering these questions for the citizens, in doing so. So it goes back to your point of there's a real opportunity of using all the technology that the world has today, to be put to good use. And at the same time, it's really partnering meaningfully with government, in India, in Singapore, in Vietnam, and here in the U.S., to make sure that happens on, you know, John's coaching and nudging, I became a part of the U.S.-India Strategic Partnership Forum, which is truly a premier trade and commerce body between U.S. and India. And I, today, co-chaired the start-up program with, you know, the top start-ups between U.S. and India, being part of that program. And I think we got, again, tremendously fortunate, and lucky with the timeline. We started working on this start-up program between U.S. and India, and getting the start-ups together, two quarters ago, and as this new regulation with the government support, and the news about the two trillion dollar packages coming out, and the support for small businesses, we could quickly get some of the questions answered for the start-ups. Had we not created this body, which had the ability to poll the Treasury Department, and say here are questions, can start-ups do A, B, and C? What do you have by way of regulation? And I think as a response to one of our letters, on Monday the Treasury put out an FAQ on their website, which makes it super clear for start-ups and small businesses, to figure out whether they qualify or they don't qualify. So I think there's ton that both from a individual company, and the technology that each one of us have, but also as a community, how do we, all of us, meaningfully get together, as a community, and just drive benefit, both for our people, for the economy, and for our countries. Wherever we have the businesses, like I said in the U.S., or in India, or parts of Asia. >> Yeah, it's interesting. So, this is a great conversation, I could talk to you guys all night long, but I probably would hear about it later, so we'll wrap it, but I just want to kind of close on the following thought, which is really, as you've talked about before John, and as Umesh as you're now living, you know, when we go through these disruptions, things do get changed, and as you said a lot of people, and companies don't get through it. On the other hand many companies are birthed from it, right, people that are kind of on the new trend, and are in a good position to take advantage, and it's not that you're laughing over the people that didn't make it, but it does stir up the pot, and it sounds like, Umesh, you're in a really good position to take advantage of this new kind of virtual world, this new digital transformation, that's just now waiting anymore. I love your stat, they were going to move X% out of the call center over some period of time, and then it's basically snap your fingers, everybody out, without much planning. So just give you the final word, you know, kind of advice for people, as they're looking forward, and Umesh, we'll get you on another time, because I want to go deep diving in natural language, I think that's just a fascinating topic in the way that people are going to interact with machines and get rid of the stupid qwerty keyboard. But let me get kind of your last thoughts as we wrap this segment. Umesh we'll let you go first. >> Umesh, you want to go first? >> I'll go first. My last thoughts are first for the entrepreneurs, everyone who's sort of going through this together. I think in difficult times is when real heroes are born. I read a quote that when it's a sunny day, you can't overtake too many cars, but when it's raining you have a real opportunity. And the other one that I read was when fishermen can't go out fishing, because of the high tide, they come back, and mend their nets, and be ready for the time that they can go out. So I think there's no easy way to say, this is a difficult time for the economy, health wise, I hope that, you know, we can contain the damage that's being done through the virus, but some of us have the opportunity to really take our products and technology out there, more than usual. Uniphore, particularly, has a unique opportunity, the contact center industry just cannot keep up with the traffic that it's seeing. Around the world, across US, across Asia, across India, and the need for AI and automation would never be pronounced more than it is today. As much as it's a great business opportunity, it's more of a responsibility, as I see it. There can be scale up as fast as the demand is coming, and really come out of this with a much stronger business model. John has always told me in final words you always paint the picture of what you want to be, a year or two out. And I see Uniphore being a much stronger AI plus automation company, in the customer service space, really transforming the face of call centers, and customer service. Which have been forced to rethink their core business value in the last few weeks. And, you know, every fence sitter who would think that digitalization and automation was an option that they could think of in the future years, would be forced to make those decisions now. And I'm just making sure that my team, and my company, and I, am ready to gear to that great responsibility and opportunity that's ahead of us. >> John, give you the final word. >> Say Jeff, I don't know if you can still hear me, we went blank there, maybe for me to follow up. >> We gotcha. >> Shimon Peres taught me a lot about life, and dealing with life the way it is, not the way you wish it was. So did my parents, but he also taught me it always looks darkest just before the tide switches, and you move on to victory. I think the challenges in front of us are huge, I think our nation knows how to deal with that, I do believe the government has moved largely pretty effectively, to give us the impetus to move, and then if we continue to flatten the curve on the issues with the pandemic, if we get some therapeutic drugs that dramatically reduce the risk of death, for people that get the challenges the worst, and over time a vaccine, I think you look to the future, America will rebound, it will be rebounding around start-ups, new job creation, using technology in every business. So not only is there a light at the tunnel, at the end of the tunnel, I think we will emerge from this a stronger nation, a stronger start-up community. But it depends on how well we work together as a group, and I just want to say to Umesh, it's an honor to be your coach, and I learn from you as much as I give back. Jeff, as always, you do a great job. Thank you for your time today. >> Thank you both, and I look forward to our next catch up. Stay safe, wash your hands, and thanks for spending some time with us. >> And I just want to say I hope and pray that all of us can get together in Palo Alto real quick, and in person, and doing fist bumps, not shake hands or probably a namaste. Thank you, it's an honor. >> Thank you very much. All right, that was John and Umesh, you're watching theCUBE from our Palo Alto Studios, thanks for tuning in, stay safe, wash your hands, keep away from people that you're not that familiar with, and we'll see you next time. Thanks for watching. (calm music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCube. Covering AWS re:Invent 2019 brought to you by Amazon Web Services and Intel, along with it's ecosystem partners. >> Hello there and welcome back to theCube's live coverage here in Las Vegas for AWS re:Invent 2019. This is theCube's seventh year covering re:Invent. They've been doing this show for eight years, we missed the first year, I'm John Furr, and my co-host David Vellante. We're here extracting the signal from the noise, and we're here with an amazing guest, our friend, she's been here with us from the beginning of theCube, since inception. Always great to get to comment with her. Sandy Carter Vice President with Amazon Web Services. >> Thank you. >> Now in the public sector handling partners. Great to see you, thanks for coming on again and sharing your content. >> So great to see you guys, so dressed up and looking good guys, I have to say. (laughs) >> You're looking good to, but I can't help but stare at our other guest here, the IoT suitcase. >> First, tell us-- >> Yes. >> About the IoT suitcase. >> Well we, in public sector we have a partner program, and that program helps entrepreneurs. And we're really keen on especially helping female entrepreneurs. So one of our entrepreneurs created this suitcase, that's an IoT based suitcase, you can put your logo's and that sort of thing on it, but more importantly for public sectors, she created this safety ring, John. And so, if I touch it I've de-activated it, but if I touch it, it will call the police for me, if I'm being assaulted. Or if I'm having an emergency, I can touch it and have an ambulance come for me as well. And the really cool thing about it is she worked backwards from the customer, figuring out like how are most people assaulted, and if you have an emergency and you fall, what's the best way to get ahold of someone. It's not your phone, because you don't always carry it, it's for a device like this. >> Or a bigger device that you can't, or you leave on the table somewhere, but that's you know it's attractive. >> It's awesome. >> And it's boom, simple. >> And it's pink. (laughs) >> What I love fast about re:Invent as an event is that there's so much innovation going on, but one of the areas that's become modernized very rapidly is the public sector. Your now in this area, there's a lot of partners, a huge ecosystem going, and the modernization effort is real. >> It is. >> Could you share some commentary on what's going on. Give people a feel for the pace of change, what's accelerating? What are people doubling down on, what are some of the dynamics in public sector? >> Yeah, so if you know public sector, public sector actually has a lot of Windows or Microsoft workloads in it. And so we're seeing a lot of public sector customers looking to modernize their Windows workloads, in fact we made several announcements just yesterday around helping more public sector customers modernize. For example, one is Windows Servers 2003, and 2008 will go out of support, and so we have a great new offering, with technology, that can help them to not re-factor, but actually abstract those layers and move quickly to 2016 and 2019, because both of those will go out of support in January. >> A lot of people don't know, and I've learned this from talking with Andy Jassy in the keynote, as well as hearing from some other folks, is that you got, Amazon runs a lot of Windows. >> Oh, we have 57% Windows workloads on AWS in terms of market segment share. Which is 2x the next nearest cloud provider, 2x. And most customers choose to run their Windows workloads on us, because we are so innovative, we move really fast. We're more reliable. The latest public data from 2018 shows that the nearest cloud provider had seven times more downtime. So if your in public sector or even commercial, who can afford to be down that long, and then finally, we have better security. So one of the things we've been focused on for public sector is FedRamp solutions. We know have over 90 solutions that are FedRamp ready. Which is four times more than the next two cloud providers. Four times more than the two combined. >> That's interesting, so I got to ask the question that's popping up in my mind, I'm sure people are curious about. >> Yeah. >> I get the Windows working on Amazon, and that makes a lot of sense, why wouldn't you want to run on the best cloud. The question I would have is, how would the licensing work, because, that's seems to be lock-in spec, Oracle does it, Microsoft does it, does license become the lock-in. So, when something expires, what happens on the licensing side. Licensing is really tricky, and in fact, October 1st, Microsoft made some new licensing changes. And so, we have some announcement to help our customers still bring their own licenses, or what we call fondly, BYOL over to AWS, so they don't have to double invest on the license. >> So you can honor that license on AWS. >> Yeah, and you have to do it on a dedicated host. Which at midnight madness, we announced new dedicated host solution, that's very cloud-like. Makes it as easy to run a dedicated host instance as it is an EC2 instance. So, wicked easy, very cost effective if your moving those on-premises workloads over. >> I just want to point out John, something that's really important here is a lot of times, software companies will use scare tactics, to your point. They'll jack up the cost of the license, to say, ah you got to stay with us, if you run on our hardware or our platform, you pay half. And then they'll put out, "Oh, Amazon's twice as expensive." But these are all negotiable. I've talked to a number of customers, particularly on the Oracle side, and said, no, no, we just went to Oracle and said look, you got a choice, I either give us the same license price or we're migrating off your database. Okay, all right. But some of it is scare tactics, and I think you know increasingly, that's not working in the marketplace. So I just wanted to point that out. >> So what's the strategy for customers to take, I guess that's the question. Because, certainly the licensing becomes again like they get squeezed, I can see that. But what do customers do, is there a playbook? >> Well there is, and so the best one is you buy your license from Microsoft, and then using BYOL, you can bring that over to AWS. It's faster, more performance, more reliable, that sort of thing. If you do get restricted though John, like they are doing for instance with their end of support, you could run that on Azure, and get all the security fixes. We are trying to provide technical solutions, like the ability to abstract Windows Server 2003 and Server 2008 as it goes out of support. >> I mean certainly in the case of Oracle, it used to be you know 10-15 years ago, you didn't have a choice. Instead of one RDBMS, and now it's so much optionality in databases. >> And I will also tell you that we have a lot of customers today, who are migrating from SQL server, or Oracle over to Aurora. Aurora, is equally as performant, and a tenth of the cost. So we actually have this team called the database freedom team that will help you do that migration. In fact I was talking to a very large customer last night, and I was explaining some of the options. And their like, "Let's do the Aurora thing." Let's do it two-step. Let's start by migrating the database over, Oracle and SQL and then I want to go to Aurora. It's like database built for the cloud, it's faster and its cheaper. So why wouldn't you do that? >> Yeah, and I think the key is, to my question about a friction. What's frictionless? How can they get it done quickly without going through the trip-wires of the licensing. >> Certain workloads are tough, right. You know if you're running your business on high transaction volume. But a lot of the analytics stuff, the data warehouse, you know look at Amazon's own experiences. You guys are just ticking it off, moving over from Oracle to Aurora, it's been fun to watch. >> I want to get you guy's perspective Dave, you and Sandy, because I think you guys might have good insight on this, because everyone knows that I'm really passionate about public sector, I've been really enamored with Teresa's business from Day one, but when she won the CIA deal, that really got my attention. As I dug into the Jedi deal, and that all went sideways, it really jumped out at me, that public sector is probably the most transformative market, because they are modernizing at a record pace. I mean this is like a glacier moving market. They don't really have old ways, they got the beltway bandits, they got old procurement, old technology, and like literally in a short period of time, they have to modernize. So they're becoming more enterprise like, can you guys, I mean pros in the enterprise, what's your take? It just seems like a Tsunami of change in the public sector, because the technology is driving it. What do you guys think about this? Am I on or off base? What are some of the trends that are going on? >> I mean I have a perspective, but please. >> No, okay. So I'll start. So I see so much transformation regardless of what industry your looking at. If you're looking at Government for example working with SAP NS2, we just actually took 26 different flavors of SAP ERP for the Navy, and helped them to migrate to the cloud. For the US Navy, which is awesome. Arkis Global, did the same thing for the UK. We actually have Amazon Connect in there, so that's like a cool call center driven by Machine Learning, and the health care system for the UK. Or you can even look at things, like here in the U.S. there's a company that really looks at how you do monitoring for the children to keep them safe. They've partnered up with a National Police Association, and they are bringing that to the cloud. So regardless of education, non-profits, government, and it's around the world, it's not just the US. We are seeing these governments education, start-ups, non-profits, all moving to the cloud, and taking their own legacy systems to Linux, to Aurora, and moving very rapidly. >> And I think Andy hit on it yesterday, it's got to start with top-down leadership. And in the government, if you can get somebody whose a leading thinker, CIO, we're going cloud first. Mandate cloud, you know you saw that years ago, but today, I think it's becoming more mainstream. I think the one big challenge is obviously the disruption in defense and that's why you talked about Jedi, in defense it's very high risk, and it needs disruption, it's like healthcare its like certain parts of financial services are very high risk industries, so they need leadership, and they need the best platform underneath in a long term strategy. >> Well Jedi actually went different. It was actually the right call, but I reported on that. But I think that what gets me is that Cerner on stage yesterday, on Yaney's keynote highlights that it's just not inefficiencies that you can solve, there's multiple win-win-win benefits so in that health care example, lower the costs, better care, better, the providers are in better shape, so in government in public sector, there's really no excuse to take the slack out of the system. >> Yeah. >> Well, there's regulation though. >> Yeah, and Dave mentioned cloud first strategies, we're also seeing a lot of movement around data. You know data is really powerful. Andy mentioned this as well yesterday, but for example in our partner keynote where I just came from. We had on stage Avis. Now, Avis, not public sector customer, but what they're doing is, the gentleman said, was that your car can now talk to you, and that data is now being given to local state officials, local city officials, they can use it for emergency response systems. So that public and private use of data, coming together, is also a big trend that we're seeing. >> I think that's a great example, because Avis I think what he said is a 70 year old company, I think the fleet was 18 billion dollar fleet. >> 600,000 vehicles. >> 600,000 vehicles, 18 billion dollars worth of assets, this is not a born in the cloud start-up, right. That's essentially transformed the entire fleet and made it intelligent. >> Right, and using data to drive a lot of their changes. Like the way they manage fuel for 600,000 cars, and the way they exchange that with local officials is helping them to you know not just be number two, but to start to take over number one. >> But to your point, data is at the core, right. >> Yeah. >> If you are the incumbent and you want to transform, you got to start with the data. >> Sandy, I want to get your reaction to two memes that have been developing on theCube this week. One is, if you take the T out of Cloud Native, and it's Cloud Naive. (Sandy laughs) The other one is, if your born in the cloud, that's great, your winning, but at the price of becoming re-born in the cloud. This is the transformation. Some are, and they're going to not have a long shelf life. So there's a real enterprise and now public sector re-birth, re-borning in the cloud, the new awakening. This is something that is happening. You're an industry veteran, you've seen a lot of waves, what's the re-born, what's this getting back on the cloud, really happening. What is going on? >> It's really interesting, because now I'm in the partner business, and one of our most successful programs is called our partner transformation program. And what that does, is it's a hundred day transformation program to get our partners drinking our own champagne, which is to be on the cloud. And one of the things, we know we first started testing it out, we didn't have a lot of takers, but now, those partners who have gone through that transformation, they're seeing 70% year to year growth, versus other apion partners, even though they're at an advanced layer, they're only seeing 34% growth. So its 2x of revenue growth having transformed to the cloud. So I think, you know back to your question, I think some of this showing the power. Like, why do you go to the cloud, it's not just about cost, it's about agility, it's about innovation, it's about that revenue growth, right. I mean 2x, 70% growth, you can't sneeze at that. That's pretty impactful. >> And you know this really hits, something of passion for me and Dave and our team is the impact on a society. This is a real focus across all generations now, not just millennials, and born in the web, into older folks like us, who have seen before the web. There's real impact, mission driven things. This is a check for good, shaping technology for good. Educate you guys have. This is a big part of what you guys are doing. >> Absolutely, this is one of the reasons why I really wanted to come work in the public sector, because it's fun helping customers make money, and we still do that. But it's really better, when you can help them make money and do great things. So you know, making with the Mayo clinic, for example, and some of these non-profit hospitals, so they can get better data. The GE example that Andy used yesterday, that data is used in public sector. Doing things, like, I know that you guys are part of re-powered tech. You know we brought a 112 unrepresented minorities and women to the conference. And I have to tell you I got goosebumps when one person came up to me and he said, it's the first time he stayed in a hotel, and he's coming here to enhance his coding. You don't realize when I go back to my country, you will have changed my life. And that's just like, don't you get goosebumps from that, versus it's great to change a company, and we want to do that, but it's really great when you can impact people, and that form or fashion. >> And the agility makes that happen faster, its a communal activity, tech for good is here. >> Absolutely, and we just announced today, right before this in the partner's session, that we now have the public safety and disaster response competency for our partners. Because when a customer is dealing with some sort of disaster or emergency they need a disconnected environment for a long periods of time. They need a cloud solution to rally the troops. So we announced that, and we had 17 partners step up immediately to sign up for that. And again, that's all about, giving back, helping in emergency situations, whether it's Ebola in Africa or Hurricane Dorene, right. >> Well, Sandy congratulations, not only have you a senior leader for AWS doing a great job. >> Thank you. >> Just a great passion, and Women in Tech, Underabridged Minorities, you do an amazing job on Tech for Good. >> Thank you. Well it's such an honor to always be on the show. I love what you guys do. I love the memes, I'm going to steal them, okay. >> Can I ask you another question? >> Absolutely. >> Before you wrap. You've had an opportunity to work with developers, you've experienced other clouds. Now you're with AWS and a couple of different roles. Can you describe, what's different about AWS, is it cultural, is it the innovation, I mean what's tangible that you can share with our audience in terms of the difference. >> I think it's a couple of things, the first one the way they we hire. So we hire builders, and you know what it really starts from that hiring. I actually interviewed Vernor the other day, and he and I had a debate about can you transform a company where you have all the same people, or do you need to bring in some new talent as well. So I think it's the way we hire. We search for people that not only meet the leadership criteria, but also are builders, are innovators. And the second one is, you know when Andy says we're customer obsessed, we're partnered obsessed. We really are. We have the mechanisms in place, we have the product management discipline. We have the process to learn from customers. So my first service I launched at AWS, I personally talked to 141 customers and another 100 partners. So think about that, that's almost two hundred almost fifty customers and partners. And at most large companies, as a senior executive you only spend about 20% of your time with customers, I spent about 80% of my time here with customers and partners. And that's a big difference. >> Well we look forward to covering the partner network this year. >> Awesome >> Your amazing, we'll see Teresa Carson on theCube here at 3:30. We are going to ask her some tough questions. What should we ask Teresa? >> What to jest Teresa? Where did you get those red pants? (everyone laughs) >> She's amazing, and again. >> She is amazing. >> We totally believe in what you're doing, and we love the impact, not only the technology advancement for modernizing the public sector across the board. But there's real opportunity for the industry to make, shape technology for betterment. >> Yeah. >> You're doing a great job. Thank you so much. >> Thank you. I think we should start another hashtag for theCube too, is #technologyforgood. >> Awesome. >> What do you think? >> Let's do it. >> I love that. >> But Jonathan been doing a lot of work in that area. >> I know he has. >> We love that. #technologyforgood, #techforgood. This is theCube here live in Las Vegas for re:Invent. I want to thank Intel and AWS, this is the big stage. We had two stages, without sponsoring our mission we wouldn't be here. Thank you AWS and Intel. More coverage after this short break. (dramatic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Splunk .conf19 , brought to you by Splunk. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. It's theCUBE's live coverage of, we're on day three of our three days of coverage of .conf from Splunk. This is their 10th anniversary, and theCUBE has been there along the way, riding the data wave with them, covering all the action. Our next guest is Jill Cagliostro, who's a product strategist at Anomali, who also has a sister in cyber. So she's got the cyber sisters going on. Jill, great to have you on. Looking forward to hearing about your story. >> Great, thanks. I'm glad to be here. I've been in the security industry for about seven years now. I started when I was 19, and my sister had started before me. She's a few years older than me, and she started out doing defense contracting on the cyber side. And she just kind of ended up in the internship looking for a summer job, and she fell in love. And as I got to kind of learn about what she was doing and how it all worked together, I started to pursue it at Georgia Tech. And I joined our on campus hacker's group club, Grey Hat. I was the first female executive. That was fun. I ended up getting an internship from there with ConocoPhillips and Bishop Fox, and moved on to the vendor side eventually with a brief stop in security operations. >> And so you have a computer science degree from Georgia Tech, is that right? >> I do, and I'm actually pursuing my master's in their online master's in cyber security program right now as well. >> Awesome. Georgia Tech, great school. One of the best computer science programs. Been following it for years. Amazing graduates come out of there. >> Yeah, we've got some pretty impressive graduates. >> So you just jumped right into cyber, okay. Male-dominated field. More women are coming in, more than ever now because there's a big surface area in security. What's your-- What attracted you to cyber? So, I love that it's evolving, and it allows you to think about problems in different ways, right. It's a new problem, there's new issues to solve, and I've been exposed to technology from a young age. I went to an all girls high school which had a really strong focus on STEM. So, I took my first computer science class at 15, and it was in an environment of all women that were incredibly supportive. I actually started a scholarship at our high school to get more women to look at technology longer term as career options, and I go back and speak and teach them that technology is more than coding. There's product management, there's, you know, customer success, there's sales engineering, there's marketing, there's so much more in the space than just coding. So, I really try to help the younger generation see that and explore their options. >> You know that's a great point, and, you know, when I was in the computer science back in the '80s, it was coding. And then it was--well, I got lucky it was systems also, a lot of operating systems, and Linux revolution was just begun coming on the scene. But it's more than that. There's data, data analytics. There's a whole creative side of it. There's a nerdy math side. >> The user experience. >> John: There's a huge area. >> Work flows and processes is something that is so needed in the security industry, right. It's how you do everything. It's how you retain knowledge. It's how you train your new staff. And even just building processes, is something that can be tedious, but it can be so powerful. And if that's something your used to doing, it can be a great field to build. >> Well, you're here. It's our third day at the .conf, our seventh year here. What's your take of Splunk, because you're coming in guns blaring in the industry. You've got your cyber sister; she's at AWS. You see Splunk now. They've got a lot of capabilities. What's the security conversations like? What are people talking about? What's the top story in your mind here at .comf for security and Splunk? >> Yeah, so I'm actually a Splunk certified architect as well. Splunk was one of the first security tools that I really got to play with, so it's near and dear to my heart. And I get to work with-- I'm over at Anomali, which is a threat intelligence company, and I get to work with our own art, Splunk integration. So, what we do is we enable you to bring your intelligence into Splunk to search against all of the logs that you're bringing there to help you find the known data in your environment. And so, that's if you're a Splunk Enterprise customer or Splunk Core. But if you're an Enterprise Security customer, they have the threat intel component of their product, which we integrate with seamlessly. So, the components are really easy to work with, and we help you manage your intelligence a little bit more effectively, so you can significantly reduce your false positive rate while working within the framework you're comfortable in. And one of the-- >> What's the problem-- What's the problems statement that you guys solve? Is there one specific thing? >> God, there's--Yes there's quite a few issues, right. I would say the biggest thing that we solve is enabling our customers to operationalize their intelligence. There's so much information out there about the known bad, and CCOs and CEOs are sending emails every day, "Are we impacted? "Are we safe?" And we enable you to answer those questions very easily and very effectively. One of the other big trends we see is there is an issue in knowledge gaps, right. The industry is evolving so quickly. There's so much to know. Data on everything, right. So, we have another way that we can work with Splunk that isn't a direct integration, and it's our product called Anomali Lens. And what it does is it uses natural language processing to interpret the page that you're on and bring the threat intelligence to you. So, if you're looking at a Splunk search page, you know, investigating an incident on brute force, and you have a seemingly random list of IPs in front of you, and you need to know what does everyone else know about these, to make your job easier, you can scan it with Lens, and it'll bring the information right there to you. You don't have to go anywhere else. You can stay in the Splunk UI that you love. >> What's some exciting things you're working on now that you think people should know about that if maybe covered in the press or in the media or in general? What is some exciting areas that are happening? >> Yeah, so Lens is pretty exciting for us. We just launched that last month. We're doing a lot. So, we also have a product called Anomali Match, which is purpose built for threat intel because often what we see is when a breach happens, the indicators that you need to know if they're in your environment, they don't come to light until six months to a year later. And then being able to go backwards in time to answer that question of were you impacted can be very difficult and very expensive, right. Anomali Match is purpose built to answer those questions. So, as the indicators become available, you know immediately was I impacted on the order of seconds. So, it just enables you to answer your CEOs a little faster, right, and get better visibility into your environment. >> So when you look at data to everything, how do you see it evolving as more volume comes in? There's more threat surface area out there. >> Right, and continues to increase it's bounds. >> How should people be thinking about it as they zoom out and think architecturally, "I got to lay out my enterprise strategy. "I bought a few tools that try to be platforms, "but I need a broader playbook. "I need something bigger to help me." >> You've got to take a step back and get a little altitude, right? >> John: Yeah, take a little step back, yeah. >> Yeah, so threat intelligence should really be driving your whole security practice. We already know, for the most part, who's attacking who and what they're trying to do. And so, threat intelligence shouldn't just be an integration into Splunk, although that is a critical component of it. It should be informing, you know, your security practices where you stand up offices. There may be locations that are higher risk for you as a particular type of entity. And all this information is available, but you have to just get access to it. You need one place to stop where you can google the threat intel, and that's what Anomali ThreatStream, our flagship product, aims to do. And Lens just makes it more accessible than ever. Rather than having to go look it up yourself, it brings it to you. And so, we're trying to augment the knowledge base without having to memorize everything. That's what we need to do is we need to find ways to bring this information and make it more accessible so you don't have to look in three tools to find it. >> So, I got to ask you and change topics. As the younger generation comes into the industry, one of the things that I'm seeing as a trend is more developers are coming in. And it's not just so much devops, whose clouds gray, we love devops, but ops, network ops and security ops, are also a big part of it. People are building applications now. So, like, you're seeing startups that have been tech for good startups coming out, where you're seeing a great examples of people literally standing up applications with data. What's the young generation-- because there's a hacker culture out there that can move fast, solve a problem, but they don't have to provision a lot of stuff. That's what cloud computing does. But now Splunk's the world. Data's becoming more accessible. Data's the raw materials to get that asset or that value. What are developers-- how do you see the developers programming with data? >> So, they're looking at their jobs and saying, "What am I bored doing "that I have to do over and over every day, "and how can I automate it?" So, there's a lot of store technology. Splunk also has Phantom, and that's enabling our developers, our younger generation who grew up around Python and coding, to quickly plug a few pieces together and automate half their jobs, which gives them the time to do the really interesting stuff, the stuff that requires human intervention and interpretation, and analysis that can't be coded. And it's just giving us more time and more resources to put-- >> What kind of things are they doing with that extra time? Creative things, pet projects, or critical problems? >> Oh, God, so many pet projects. God, what are you interested in? I've seen things being done to like mine bit coin on the side, right, to make a little extra cash. That's always fun. I've seen people automate their social media profile. I've seen threat researchers use scripting to help them find new information on the internet and reshare it to build their public brand. That's a really big component of the younger generation that I don't think was as big in previous generations, where your public brand matters more than ever. And so, we're bringing that into everything we do. It's not just a job, it's a lifestyle. >> Sharing's a big ethos, too, sharing data. How important is sharing data in the security culture? >> Oh, it's critical. So, I mean, sharing data's been happening for forever, right. Company A has always been calling up their friend at company B, "Hey, we see this thing. "You might want to take a look, "but you didn't hear it from me," right. But through intel platforms, not just ThreatStream but all of them, allow you to share information at a larger scale ever than ever before. But it also, it gives you the ability to remain anonymous. Everyone's really scared to put into writing, "Hey, we saw this at our company," 'cause there's the risk of attribution, there's legal requirements, right. But with automated sharing you can retain a little bit of-- you can be a little bit anonymous. So, you can help the others be protected without exposing yourself to additional risk. >> Jill, you're awesome to have on theCUBE. Love to get the perspective of the young, up and coming, computer science, cyber, cyber sister. >> Cyber sister. >> John: You can just, other--where does she work? Amazon? >> She's over at AWS now. She just moved over a couple of weeks ago. We actually used to work together at Anomali. She did presales, and I did post sales. It was a lot of fun. >> And she hooked you into security, didn't she? >> Oh, she did, for better or worse, although I hope she's not watching. >> She will. She'll get a clip of this, I'll make sure. Jill, final question. The Splunk this year .conf, what's your takeaway? What are you going to take back to the office with you or share with your friends if they say, "Hey, what was the big story happening at Splunk this year?" What's going on here this year? >> The big thing is the data. The data is more accessible than ever before, so we're being challenged by Splunk to find new ways to use it, to innovate new ways. And I think that's kind of been their messaging the whole time, "Hey, we're giving you the power to do what you want. "What are you going to do with it?" This is my third Splunk conference in a row, and every year it just gets more and more exciting. I can't wait to see what next year holds. >> They allow people to deal with data, messy data to good data. >> Clean it up. >> John: Clean it up >> Make it easy to search across multiple data sources from one command line. Their user experience is the most intuitive I've used in terms of the log management solutions. >> Jill, great to have you, great insights. Thanks for sharing the data >> Thanks so much, John. >> John: here on theCUBE. Sharing data on theCUBE, that's what we do. We bring the data, the guests, we try to create it for you. Of course, we're data-driven, we're a CUBE-driven. I'm John Furrier, here from .conf, the 10th anniversary. We've been here from the beginning, riding the data tsunami waves. Waves plural 'cause there's more waves coming. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> live from Mountain View, California It's the queue covering definite create twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Cisco. >> Welcome to the Cubes Live coverage here in Mountain View, California Computer History Museum for Cisco's definite create on John for your host here with Lisa Martin, she's taking a break. Is out getting stories out around for our national Paul Giblin, who's an enterprise architect at Presidio, formerly on the Q Before Cube alumni. Great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >> That's great. CIA's. Well, thank you for >> what? I was looking for this interview because last time we chat with all my cloud hybrid cloud. Now, as an enterprise architect, you're in the middle of all the conversations around how enterprises and commercial businesses are leveraging the cloud multi cloud hybrid cloud. A lot of hype, a lot of reality. But the one thing that's clear is the cloud Cos air blowing away the financial operating performances. Amazon released their earnings today. Amazing financial performance. Amazon Web services have the profit of all of Amazon Amazing. Since they only start in two thousand six, Microsoft change their business plan from being, you know, Hon premise solution software to cloud trillion dollar market cap. It goes on and on and on. But it's a tell sign of the wave that's happening in that is computing network architectures air all transforming an application. Modernization. Tsunami is coming. Renaissance of applications are happening. >> This is a big >> part of what you do when definite creates a Cisco's version of Hey, guys, we got to create the future. Sure, this is the reality. What's your take on all this thes big waves and activity? >> Yeah, I think you know, there's certainly a ton of activity going on around multi cloud, especially with, you know, Amazon. And as your GP uh definite is really a hub for it from the perspective of Cisco. So if you look at the things that people are talking about here this year is supposed to last year, it's It's totally different. Last year, people we're talking >> about Well, how >> do I D ?'Oh, my collaboration absent anyway. And how do I modernized my data center with answerable inscription? Things like that. And this year people are talking about blockchain. They're talking about multi cloud. They're talking about machine learning. There's their spokes over there talking about graft intense airflow and things like that. So what I really like about this event is the fact that it's people who are on the bleeding edge and are thinking about the new thing today before it becomes mainstream. >> Is a great point. Suzy We was on earlier. She's ahead of definite definite create and she had a great team. But one of the things that she said to me, and unless I get your reaction to this is you know she's had research roles in HP, but labs back in the day. So >> you have those research. It's the next big wave coming here. It's really >> people in the bleeding edge who were making it real. So it's not just, you know, some way that's coming. It's actually happening so far. This event really kind of points to what's really now. Your job is you make stuff real right. So you've got a kind of thread. The line between okay, bleeding edge hyper reality and kind of wire it up for customers with Presidio. So you're under a lot of pressure. You've got to do the right thing. You got architect it out. This is kind of where the game is right now. So what's the experience that you're seeing in the real world as this stuff start to become really, as customers want to create better APS better network architectures kind of retrenching happening? What's your What's your thoughts? Whats the key highlights. >> I think people are struggling with decisions around. You know what, what cloud do I put my work loads in? Do I put them in a cloud at all? What workloads do I keep on premise when I'm making these decisions, how do I get these APS to the different places they need to live? How do I have an app that might be stretched from my own premise data center to Azure or to a ws? How do I keep that secure? How doe I network that together? How do I make sure that I'm not the next big headline in the next big reach that comes around So those air, some of the challenges that are out there and they're all things that are difficult to navigate because every organizations a little bit different in terms of the skill sets that they have. So you've got some folks who are right at home. You know, doing a twelve fact, their app on going full on cloud, native and, you know, putting stuff all out on Amazon and not think twice about it. And then you've got a lot of organizations who maybe don't have mature depth shops and have a lot of legacy infrastructure. Folks who still need to retool Enrique it to get up to speed, to bring everything together. >> So skilled gap big time. >> Oh, yeah, >> that's for you guys. Come in. I want to get caught before we came on to talk here live. We're talking off camera around the Gerson Enterprise and a commercial business and the distinction between their needs Enterprise. I was in more complex, you know, multi campus multinational, potentially to commercial businesses. I won't say small music, but people were like pretty much smaller scale. Can you just par set out and talk about what we chatted about the distance between the commercial and the teens and challenging opportunities they have? Visa VI Say it. Enterprise. >> I think it comes down to a lot of the things that we do today are designed to make things simpler. That's not always the case. Sometimes, in order to make it simple. You have to do a very hard thing under the covers to get it that way in the first place. And for a small commercial organization, that's not always the easiest thing in the world. They're typically resource constrained, and their business is not running. Their business is generating revenue through whatever it is that they do now. On enterprise is a little bit different, and enterprise has multiple different revenue streams coming in from multiple different businesses. And they're typically much more invested in a much larger IT staff and have folks who are multi discipline, you know, interface with their peers. Have enough resource is to really, truly adopt a dead mobster. >> Got network team security teams the whole nine yards, I think Chief data officer, all that stuff, commercial organizations Now again, Great opportunity for cloud on both fronts, right? You got enterprises. It kind of would have nicked mixed of public cloud for cloud native work clothes, maybe clean sheet of paper brand new use case hybrid where they won't have operating on premise and then multi cloud that might have azure for three sixty five office and then run Amazon for this or they're so multi cloud seems to be a reality. On one front, commercial organizations seemed tohave cloud on their mind. But legacy apse that they've written software for that might have been written in order, entry system or, you know, some sort of work flow that's tailored for, say, the revenue. How do you advise those two scenarios? >> Yeah, I mean, if you've got a legacy app that you need to contend with, one of the first things you need to do is understand the APP itself. We're having a conversation earlier on what we talked about wass. There's organizations out there who have these applications, and the people who wrote those applications have long ago left. So you've got some new software developers who were coming in. They don't have contextual history, and then you've got infrastructure. People who are keeping the ship afloat but don't know how it floats. They don't understand displacement. >> So you've got these new folks coming in, and then we write our own. We get new ABS higher team. What do we hire ex A. You know, exactly exactly. So you know, there's a decision that >> needs to be made to do. We continue to run this on Prem, Do we consider re platforming in trying to move it out to the cloud Tio? We start fresh and try and re factor. Do we do this in the house? Do we pull in an external third party that try and do that for us? So all the challenges >> so about the relation with Cisco also your party with them you're here a definite create your also a participant in the community. They got definite, which is their core developer. Coming a couple years old. Definite create five years old, Definite creates kind of like brings in the creator's side of it. A za practitioner. Pardon Francisco here to learn and then bring that home to apply to Presidio. How does that work? Explain the folks. How does Presidio were? Francisco. How do you take stuff from definite definite create? How do you commercialize that for your business? And what's the impact of the customer? Sure. >> So it's It's more organic than you might think. So we've got a whole contention of folks here, especially, and I'm going to give a big shout out to our women intact. You were here on DH. These folks are going in there checking out the things that they're into. Is it in? And like I said, there's a diverse group of sessions that are out there spanning machine, learning to blockchain to wish there's somebody right behind us here, I think talking about, >> uh, >> hioki >> it's not a security >> threat somewhere way, air gap, That thing. Yeah, >> So these things folks are sitting in on the sessions that are of interest to them and they're going back to Presidio. And we've got internal WebEx team spaces where all of our folks who are interested in any kind of depth sit down to collaborate. And we are also, you know, maintaining our own internal code repositories where anybody who wants to go take a look at some of the intellectual property we're developing. I can go pull that asset, communicate with the person who's working on it, manipulate it, put it back all that way, also have, you know, sponsorship from the top on down. So from Thomas all the way down it, it's We know that the next generation of engineers need to understand on some level program ability, concepts, and this is a great way to adjust that, >> and this is this is a strategic and parent management behind it. Program ability gives off for some advantages. What's your take on it? I know you. You talk about in the last Cuban. If you want to just come back to the automation opportunity because, you know, let's just face it. Command line interface is how we ran things in networks over the years. But now, with program ability, that's more higher yield activities that architects and network guys and developers can work on. Then the mundane tasks go on. Now if you can program things, certainly with WiFi six and MURAKI, it's all one network. So why not have that visibility to the data? Why not program stuff to make life easier? Your thoughts on this and how it's playing out? >> I think it's, uh, it's playing out slowly and in pockets. I think there's a lot of folks who are working on these kinds of concepts, but they tend to be isolated. So from a network engineer and I come to an event like this, I'm probably going to go back to whatever my day job is, and I might write some of my own code. But unless you have some of those facilities in place that I talked about us having in Presidio, it's difficult to share what you're doing with others on. If it's difficult to share what you're doing with others, she's kind of out on an island, right, so you might have efficiencies that you're gaining. But if you are not taking that and sharing it with other people, your company may not be arriving the full benefit. Now. I think as an individual you could do a lot of good by automating things that you do, which enables you as an individual to focus on even more. But when you look at some of the cool stuff that's out there that could be shared, like the Iraqi demo for the A R looking at access points, that's just phenomenal capability That brings great benefit to a lot of different people. >> So you guys had success with a lot of sharing the collaboration internally, absolute with with the tools you've built. What's the the verdict you guys mentioned? You have some divers, folks here, women in tech, What's the president's here for city like a definite create this year what some of the key highlights from you guys. >> So I think we've got a couple of presenters way have one new definite creator, Mabel. And so she's Ah, believe second female definite creator and the first for Presidio. Jeff and I had taken those down last year and you know, she's she's fantastic. She's running weekly courses for the women and organization to teach them on these concepts. And she's a powerhouse Amazing s o way. Like I said, we have that whole contingent of women in Tech who are here. We've got a handful of gentlemen who are here as well, including Jeff eleven sailor, who you interviewed yesterday, and Greg and use Ellie, both of whom have multiple presentation's going on all standing room only s O. We're definitely invested in different >> directions on the women Tech thing. I think that's huge. I think that's the inclusion thing, that we'd love to see it again. You know, numbers, air still with the percentages, need a lot more work. I mean, just bring in more women and breathes more action. Mohr capabilities. More results. >> Absolutely. I'm all in on women in tech. I have three daughters, so I mean, naturally invested. I'm tryingto help create the world Anyway, I can where they can grow up. And I walked right into a meeting and not have Tio contend with some of the >> democratization of technology is really what it's all about. And, you know, you're not really anything in this community. Let's getem Iraqi, huh? But your house running all your surveillance cameras >> you got in fact are a camera >> app that identifies sexual predators. So I'm gonna have those hanging over my front door now. Nobody's coming anywhere near that. >> That's better than ring. Certainly go in the shark tank pitch that maybe ***. Paul, Thanks for coming on. Great to see you again and congratulate you. Sex distinct, distinct success. Distinguished engineer Now for Ciccio Great company. Give a quick point for the coming. What's going on? Presidio? What do you guys are doing? What kind of work you doing? And how'd people contact you? >> I >> need to be a formal marketeer to do any of this stuff. So, you know >> video is >> authentic and it's real. >> We're We're a three billion dollar organization. We've got three thousand some odd individuals, over half of whom are are certified engineers way. Do everything from cloud Teo I ot to traditional infrastructure collaboration. We've got a huge security practice manage services practice. We do financing s so we really try to be a one stop shop for just about anything. I related a >> lot of creation going on the community here, and I think one of the things that's great is this all about making it really taking the way. That's everyone's riding, getting it, really making it work. Congratulations. >> Thank you very much. >> Cube coverage here, here in Mountain View. I'm John Forward the Cube with Lisa Martin here covering Day two of definite create stay with more live coverage after this short break.

>> Live, from the Seattle, Washington. It's theCUBE, covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon, North America 2018, brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone. We're live here in Seattle for theCUBE's exclusive coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2018. I'm John Furrier at Stuart Miniman. Our next guest Stephan Fabel, who is the Director of Product Management at Canonical. CUBE alumni, welcome back. Good to see you. >> Thank you. Good to see you too. Thanks for having me. >> You guys are always in the middle of all the action. It's fun to talk to you guys. You have a pulse on the developers, you have pulse on the ecosystem. You've been deep in it for many, many years. Great value. What's hot here, what's the announcement, what's the hard news? Let's get to the hard news out of the way. What's happening? What's happening here at the show for you guys? >> Yeah, we've had a great number of announcements, a great number of threads of work that came into fruition over the last couple of months, and now just last week where we announced hardware reference architectures with our hardware partners, Dell and SuperMicro. We announced ARM support, ARM64 support for Kubernetes. We released our version 1.13 of our Charmed Distribution of Kubernetes, last week And we also released, very proud to release, MicroK8s. Kubernetes in a single snap for your workstation in the latest release 1.13. >> Maybe explain that, 'cause we often talk about scale, but there is big scale, and then we're talking about edge, we're talking about so many of these things. >> That's right. >> That small scale is super important, so- >> It really is, it really is, so, MicroK8s came out of this idea that we want to enable a developer to just quickly standup a Kubernetes cluster on their workstation. And it really came out of this idea to really enable, for example, AIML work clouds, locally from development on the workstation all the way to on-prem and into the public cloud. So that's kind of where this whole thing started. And it ended up being quite obvious to us that if we do this in a snap, then we actually can also tie this into appliances and devices at the edge. Now we're looking at interesting new use cases for Kubernetes at the edge as an actual API end point. So it's a quite nice. >> Stephan talk about ... I want to take a step back. There's kind of dynamics going on in the Kubernetes wave, which by the way is phenomenal, 8000 people here at KubeCon, up from 4000. It's got that hockey stick growth. It's almost like a Moore's Law, if you will, for the events. You guys have been around, so you have a lot of existing big players that have been in the space for a while, doing a lot of work around cloud, multi-cloud, whatever ... That's the new word, but again, you guys have been there. You got like the Cisco's of the world, you guys, big players actively involved, a lot of new entrants coming in. What's your perspective of what's happening here? A lot of people looking at this scratching their head saying: Okay I get Kubernetes, I get the magic. Kubernetes enables a lot of things. What's the impact to me? What's in it for me as an enterprise or a developer? How do you guys see this market place developing? What's really going on here? >> Well I think that the draw to this conference and to technology and all the different vendors et cetera, it's ultimately a multi-cloud experience, right? It is about enabling workload portability and enabling the operator to operate Kubernetes, independently of where that is being deployed. That's actually also the core value proposition of our charmed Kubernetes. The idea that a single operational paradigm allows you to experience, to deploy, lifecycle manage and administer Kubernetes on-prem, as well as any of the public clouds, as well as on other virtual substrates, such as VMware. So ultimately I think the consolidation of application delivery into a single container format, such as Docker and other compatible formats, OCI formats right? That was ultimately a really good thing, 'cause it enabled that portability. Now I think the question is, I know how to deploy my applications in multiple ways, 'cause it's always the same API, right? But how do I actually manage a lot of Kubernetes clusters and a lot of Kubernetes API end points all over the place? >> So break down the hype and reality, because again, a lot of stuff looks good on paper. Love the soundbites of people saying, "Hey, Kubernetes," all this stuff. But people admitting some things that need to be done, work areas. Security is a big concern and people are working on that. Where is the reality? Where does the rubber meet the road when it comes down to, "Okay, I'm an enterprise. What am I buying into with Kubernetes? How do I get there?" We heard Lyft take an approach that's saying, "Look, it solved one problem." Get a beachhead and take the incremental approach. Where's the hype, where's the reality? Separate that for us. >> I think that there is certainly a lot of hype around the technology aspect of Kubernetes. Obviously containerization is invoked. This is how developers choose to engage in application development. We have Microservices architecture. All of those things we're very well aware of and have been around for quite some time and in the conversation. Now looking at container management, container orchestration at scale, it was a natural fit for something like Kubernetes to become quite popular in this space. So from a technology perspective I'm not surprised. I think the rubber meets the road, as always, in two things: In economics and in operations. So if I can roll out more Kubernetes clusters per day, or more containers per day, then my competitor ... I gain a competitive advantage, that the cost per container is ultimately what's going to be the deciding factor here. >> Yeah, Stephan, when I think about developers how do I start with something and then how do I scale it out in the economics of that? I think Canonical has a lot of experience with that to share. What are you seeing ... What's the same, what's different about this ecosystem, CloudNative versus, when we were just talking about Linux or previous ways of infrastructure? >> Well I think that ultimately Kubernetes, in and of itself, is a mechanism to enable developers. It plays one part in the whole software development lifecycle. It accelerates a certain part. Now it's on us, distributors of Kubernetes, to ensure that all the other portions of this whole lifecycle and ecosystem around Kubernetes, where do I deploy it? How do I lifecycle manage it? If there's a security breach like last Monday, what happens to my existing stack and how does that go down? That acceleration is not solved by Kubernetes, it's solved for Kubernetes. >> Your software lives in lots and lots of environments. Maybe you can help clarify for people trying to understand how Kubernetes fits, and when you're playing with the public cloud, your Kubernetes versus their Kubernetes. The distinction I think is, there's a lot of nuance there that people may need help with. >> That's true, yeah. So I think that, first of all, we always distance ourself from the notion of having our Kubernetes. I think we have a distribution of Kubernetes. I think there is conformance, tests that are in place that they're in place for a reason. I think it is the right approach, and we won't install a fourth version of Kubernetes anytime soon. Certainly, that is one of the principles we adhere to. What is different about our distribution of Kubernetes is the operational tooling and the ability to really cookie-cutter out Kubernetes clusters that feel identical, even though they're distributed and spread across multiple different substrates. So I think that is really the fundamental difference of our Kubernetes distribution versus others that are out there on the market. >> The role of developers now, 'cause obviously you're seeing a lot of different personas emerging in this world. I'm just going to lay them out there and I want to get your reaction. The classic application developer, the ones who are sitting there writing code inside a company. It could be a consumer company like Lyft or an enterprise company that needs ... They're rebuilding inside, so it's clear that CIOs or enterprises, CXOs or whatever the title is, they're bringing more software in-house, bringing that competitive advantage under application development. You have the IT pro expert, practitioner kind of role, classic IT, and then you got the opensource community vibe, this show. So you got these three things inter-playing with each other, this show, to me feels a lot like an opensource show, which it is, but it also feels a lot like an IT show. >> Which it also is. >> It also is, and it feels like an app development show, which it also is. So, opportunity, challenge, is this a marketplace condition? What's you thoughts on these kind of personas? >> Well I think it's really a question of how far are you willing to go in your implementation of devops cultural change, right? If you look at that notion of devops and that movement that has really taken ahold in people's minds and hearts over the last couple of years, we're still far off in a lot of ways and a lot of places, right? Even the places who are saying they're doing devops, they're still quite early, if at all, on that adoption curve. I think bringing operators, developers and IT professionals together in a single show is a great way for the community and for the market to actually engage in a larger devops conversation, without the constraint of the individual enterprise that those teams find themselves in. If you can just talk about how you should do something better and how would that work, and there is other kinds of personas and roles at the same table, it is much better that you have the conversation without the constraint of like a deadline or a milestone, or some outage somewhere. Something is always going on. Being able to just have that conversation around a technology and really say, "Hey, this is going to be the one, the vehicle that we use to solve this problem and further that conversation," I think it's extremely powerful. >> Yeah, and we always talk about who's winning and who's losing. It's what media companies do. We do it on theCUBE, we debate it. At the end of the day we always like ... There's no magic quadrant for this kind of market, but the scoreboard can be customers. Amazon's got over 5000 reputable customers. I don't know how many CNCF has. It's probably a handful, not 5000. The customer implications are really where this is going. Multi-cloud equals choice. What's your conversations like with customers? What do you see on the customer landscape in terms of appetite, IQ, or progress for devops? We were talking, not everyone's on server lists yet and that's so obvious that's going to be a big thing. Enterprises are hot right now and they want the tech. Seeing the cloud growth, where's your customer-base? What are those conversations like? Where are they in the adoption of CloudNative? >> It's an extremely interesting question actually, because it really depends on whether they started with PaaS or not. If they ever had a PaaS strategy then they're mostly disillusioned. They came out, they thought it was going to solve a huge problem for them and save them a lot of money, and it turns out that developers want more flexibility than any PaaS approach really was able to offer them. So ultimately they're saying, "You know what, let's go back to basics." I'll just give you a Kubernetes API end point. You already know how to deal with everything else beyond that, and actually you're not cookie-cuttering out post ReSQueL- >> Kubernetes is a reset to PaaS. >> It really does. It kind of disrupted that whole space, and took a step back. >> All right, Stephan, how about Serverless. So a lot of discussion about Knative here. We've been teasing out where that fits compared to functions from AWS and Azure. What's the canonical take on this? What are you hearing from your customers? >> So Serverless is one of those ... Well it's certainly a hot technology and a technology of interest to our customers, but we have longstanding partnerships with Galactic Fog and others in place around Serverless. I haven't seen real production deployments of that yet, and frankly it's probably going to take a little bit longer before that materializes. I do think that there's a lot of efforts right now in containerization. Lots of folks are at that point where they are ready to, and are already running containerized workloads. I think they're busy now implementing Kubernetes. Once they have done that, I think they'll think a little bit more about Serverless. >> One of the things that interest me about this ecosystem is the rise of Kubernetes, the rise of choice, the rise of a lot of tools, a lot of services, trying to fend off the tsunami wave that's hit the beach out of Amazon. I've always said in theCUBE that that's ... They're going to take as much inland territory on this tsunami unless someone puts up a sea wall. I think this is this community here. The question is, is that ... And I want to get your expert opinion on this, because the behemoths, the big guys are getting richer. The innovation's coming from them, they have scale. You mentioned that as a key point in the value of Kubernetes, is scale, as one of those players, I would consider in the big size, not like a behemoth like an Amazon, you got a unique position. How can the industry move forward with disruption and innovation, with the big guys dominating? What has to happen? Is there going to change the size of certain TAMs? Is there going to be new service providers emerging? Something's got to give, either the big guys get richer at the expense of the little guys, or market expands with new categories. How do you guys look at that? Developers are out there, so is it promising look to new categories, but your thoughts. >> I think it's ... So a technology perspective certainly would be, there could be a disruptive technology that comes in and just eats their lunch, which I don't believe is going to happen, but I think it might actually be a more of a market functionality actually. If it goes down to the economics, and as they start to compete there will be a limit to the race to the bottom. So if I go in on an economical advantage point as a public cloud, then I can only take that so far. Now, I can still take it a lot further, but there's going to be a limit to that ultimately. So, I would say that all of the public clouds, we see that increasingly happening, are starting to differentiate. So they're saying, "Come to me for IML." "Come to me for a rich service catalog." "Come to me for workload portability," or something like that, right? And we'll se more differentiation as time goes on. I think that will develop in a little bit of a bubble, to the point where actually other players who are not watching, for example, Chinese clouds, right? Very large, very influential, very rich in services, they can come in and disrupt their market in a totally different way than a technology ever could. >> So key point you mentioned earlier, I want to pivot on that and get to the AI conversation, but scale is a competitive advantage. We've seen that on theCUBE, we see it in the marketplace. Kubernetese by itself is great but at scale it gets better, got nobs and policy. AI is a great example of where a dormant computer science concept that has not yet been unleashed ... Well, it gets unleashed by cloud. Now that's proliferating. AI, what else is out there? How do you see this trend around just large-scale Kubernetes, AI and machine learning coming on around the corner? That's going to be unique, and is new. So you mentioned the Chinese cloud could be a developer here. It's a lever. >> Absolutely, we've been involved with kubeflow since the early days. Early days, it's barely a year, so what early days? It's a year old. >> It's yesterday. >> So a year a ago we started working with kubeflow, and we published one of the first tutorials of how to actually get that up and running and started on Ubuntu, and with our distribution of Kubernetes, and it has since been a focal point of our distribution. We do a couple of things with kubeflow. So the first thing, something that we can bring as a unique value preposition is, because we're the operating system for almost all GKE, all of AKS, all EKS, such a strong standing as an operating system, and have strong partnerships with folks like NVIDIA. It was kind of one of the big milestones that we tried to achieve and we've since completed, actually as another announcement since last week, is the full automatic deployment of GPU enablement on Kubernetes clusters, and have that identical experience happen across the public clouds. So, GPGPU enablement on Kubernetes, as one of the key enablers for projects like kubeflow, which gives you machine learning stacks on demand, right? And then a parallel, we've been working with kubeflow in the community, very active, formed a steering committee to really get the industry perspective into the needs of kubeflow as a community and work with everybody else in that community to make sure that kubeflow releases on time, and hopefully soon, and a 1.0, which is due this summer, but right now they're focused on 0.4. That's a key area of innovation though, opportunity. >> Oh, absolutely. >> I see Amazon's certainly promoting that. What else is new? I've got one last question for you. What's next for you guys? Get a quick plugin for Canonical. What's coming around the corner, what's up? >> We're definitely happy to continue to work on GPGPU enablement. I think that is one of the key aspects that needs to stay ... That we need to stay on top of. We're looking at Kubernates across many different use cases now, especially with our IoT, open to core operating system, which we'll release shortly, and here actually having new use cases for AIML inference. For example, out at the edge looking at drones, robots, self-driving cars, et cetera. We're working with a bunch of different industry partners as well. So increased focus on the devices side of the house can be expected in 2019. >> And that's key these data, in a way that's really relevant. >> Absolutely. >> All right, Stephan, thanks for coming on theCUBE. I appreciate it, Canonical's. Great insight here, bringing in more commentary to the conversation here at KubeCon, CoudNativeCon. Large-scale deployments as a competitive advantage. Kubernetes really does well there: Data, machine learning, AI, all a part of the value and above and below Kubernatese. We're seeing a lot of great advances. CUBE coverage here in Seattle. We'll be back with more after this short break. 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>> Live from Seattle, Washington. It's theCUBE, covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North America 2018, brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and its ecosystem of partners. >> Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE. We are at CubeCon 2018 in Seattle, CloudNativeCon as well. We've been to every KubeCon and CloudNativeCon since inception. I'm John Furrier. My co-host Stu Miniman want to break down the three days of wall to wall coverage of the rise of kubernetes and the ecosystem and the industry consolidation and standardization around kubernetes for multi cloud, for hybrid cloud. We're here breaking down day one keynote, kicking everything off. Stu, it's fun to come here and watch words like expansion, Moore's law, expansive growth, doubling down. The attendance for KubeCon, CloudNativeCon, hockey stick growth chart on Twitter. 1200, 4000, 8000 up into the right. Global phenomenon, the team at CNC at KubeCon, huge presence in China this year, total expansion all to save, hold the line on the cloud tsunami that is Amazon's web services. >> Yeah. >> This is the massive cloud game going on, your thoughts. >> Yeah, John first of all. You have to start out just expansive growth and you can just feel the energy here. We're in the middle of the show floor. You were here two years ago in Seattle when I think they said, they were, was it 16? There weren't that many sponsors here. There's 180 booths at this show. The joke in the keynote this morning was if you want to replace your entire T-shirt wardrobe that's what you can do here. Everybody's got fun stickers. It's a good crowd. Those alpha geeks, this is where they are. >> And Stu, you're sporting a new T-shirt. >> Yeah, John so I want to thank our friends. >> Make sure they can see that. >> Our friends here, Women Who Go. They do the GoLang languages, the gopher is what they're doing here. So love that, if you're at the show, come by. Get our stickers. If you look up Women Who Go on thread list. They actually have an artist shop. The CNCF has their logo up there. We have their logo. There is blockchain. There's docker, there's all these and you can buy the shirts and the money for buying these shirts actually goes to bring women and underserved people to events like this. We also love John when they're supporting this. The CNCF actually, I think it was a 130 or so people that they brought to this conference through charitable donations from many of the sponsors. >> And that's one of the highlights I want to get to later is the mission driven and the social responsibility, scholarships, the money that's being donated to fund diversity inclusion in all walks of life to make CloudNative, but Stu lets get back to the core thing that's going on here at KubeCon, CloudNativeCon. A couple years ago, I said, we said on theCUBE that the Tsunami, that is Amazon Web Service is just going to just hit ashore and just wipe out the industry in IT as much as it can go unless someone builds a seawall. Builds a wall to stop that momentum. Kubernetes and KubeCon specifically has had that moment. This is the industry saying look it. Cloud is awesome. It's full validation of cloud but there is more than just AWS. This is about multi cloud, hybrid cloud, and a lot of forces are at play competitively to make sure that Amazon doesn't run the table. >> Yeah, John, it's good to do a little bit of compare and contrast here because if you go back to OpenStack, it was OpenStack is the hail Mary against Amazon, and it's going to help you get off your VMware licenses. Well that's not what kubernetes is, if you look both VMware required Heptio, and Amazon have a big presence at this show. Amazon, their hands were forced to be able to actually work with kubernetes. I remember I read an article that said, there were about 14 different ways you can run kubernetes on Amazon before they supported it. Now they fully support it. They're going even deeper, AWS Fargate. I know you spend a lot of time at re:Invent digging into some of this environment here so this isn't, portability is a piece of kubernetes. Kubernetes won the orchestrator battles out there. It is the de facto standard out there, and we're seeing how this stack can really be built up on top of it. The thing that I've been keying in on coming into this year is how Serverless plays into it. You heard a big push for Knative on the keynote which is Google, who of course brought us to kubernetes. IBM, SAP, Red Hat all there but I don't see Microsoft or AWS yet embracing how we can match up Serverless and kubernetes today with the Knative. >> I think if I'm Amazon or Microsoft, I might be a little bit afraid of this movement because when, we went through the multi vendor days. You had multi vendoring decades ago. Now, multi cloud is the multi vendoring story, and what's interesting is that choice becomes the key word in all this and a real enterprise that's out there. They got Cisco routers, they got tons of stuff that's actually running their business, powering their business. They need to integrate that so this idea that one cloud fits all certainly has been validated. I think to me the winner takes most but what this community is doing Stu around kubernetes is galvanizing around a new stack configuration with kubernetes at the center of it, and that will disintermediate services at AWS and at Microsoft. Microsoft stock price has put that company in a higher value position than Google or Apple. What has Microsoft actually done to make them go from a $26 stock price to $100 and change? What did they actually invent? What did they actually do? What did they disrupt? Was it just go in a cloud? Is it Office 365? This begs the question is it just the business model shift so certainly there is business in the cloud and it's showing here at KubeCon. >> Yeah John, there was a major cultural shift inside of Microsoft I was really excited. One of the shows I got to go to this year was Microsoft Ignite, and in many ways it's interesting. That show has been around for decades and in many ways, it was the Windows admin just getting the latest and greatest. From my standpoint, I think it was Microsoft fully embracing the move to SaaS. They're pushing everybody to Office 365. They are aggressively moving to expand their cloud that that hybrid environment Microsoft has the applications, and they're not waiting for customers to just leave them or hold onto whatever revenue stream. They're switching to that writable model. They're switching to SaaS model. They're pushing really hard on Azure. They're here in force. They're really embracing developers, all the .NET folks, they were-- >> They're moving the ball inch by inch down the fields slowly to that cadence and that in totality with social responsibility and commencement of the cloud. I think has been, there's not one thing that's happened. It's just a total transformation for Microsoft, and the results and the valuation are off the charts. Google, the same way. Diane Greene has, I think was unfairly categorized by the press in terms of her exit. She's been wanting to retire for years Stu. She has turned Google around. You look at Google where they are right now verses where they were two years ago. Two years ago, they were slinging cloud the Google way. Now they're saying hey, you know what. We know the enterprise. Jennifer Lin, Sarah Novotny, Dawn Chen. All those people over there are leading the way real enterprise just with tech and they got some big moves to make, and they're doing it. So Diane Greene did not fail. So that was one thing that's interesting in the ecosystem and in Amazon as you know just kick it out. So given all that Stu, how does that relate to this? >> Yeah, let's bring it back here. So first of all, kubernetes. It was interesting the keynote this morning. We spent a lot of time talking about things that built on top of and around what's happening with kubernetes. Talking about things like how Helm is moving forward. Onvoy, Prometheus all of these projects. There are a couple dozen incubating projects and a few of them are graduating up to be full flanked projects. We talked about the ecosystem and how many partners are here. There's around 80 service providers and about 80 platforms that have kubernetes baked in. I want to point out an interesting distinction. Some people said, it's like oh they're 75 or 80 different distributions of it. I don't think that anybody thinks that they're going to make a differentiated platform that people are going to buy what I'm doing because I have the best kubernetes. Really what the CNCF has done a good job is saying you're fully supported. You're inoperable, you meet the guidelines to say, I am kubernetes and therefore it's baked into what we're doing. So why do we have so many of them? It's well, there's a lot of clouds out there. There's service providers and even the infrastructure players are making sure that they're in there. Everybody from Intel, all the way through. Servers and storage and networking all making sure that they're doing they're pieces to make sure that they work in the kubernetes environment. >> So Stu, I got to ask you a question on the keynote. You were in the front row. I was watching online here. Kind of distraction, sold out in the keynote. I didn't get the whole gist of it. How much of the keynote was vendor or project expansion verses end user traction? Can you give some color on that? >> Yeah, so a lot of it was the projects. What's really good is there's not a lot of vendors. Sure there is here's the logo slide. Let's everybody give a big round of applause and thank you. But when they put the projects up there, many of these projects came out of a group but some of that is well Lyft. Lyft created one of these projects and who's involved in that. One of the big news announcement was FCD is being donated to the CNCS, and well that came out of CoreOS to solve a really needed problem that they had to make sure that when you're rolling upgrades that you don't reboot the entire cluster all at once, and then your application isn't able to be there. So why are they donating? Well it has reached the maturity level, and while CoreOS is inside of Red Hat, there is a broad adoption. Lots of people contributing and it just makes sense to hand it over. Red Hat, everything they've done always is 100% open source, so them making sure that they have a good relationship with the foundation and who should have the governs of that. Red Hat has a strong track record on that. I know we'll be talking a lot-- >> All right so Stu get your perspective on the big players. We saw Google up on Saint-operno. We saw VMware. Cisco is here. I saw some of the Cisco executives here earlier. You got Red Hat, you got the big dogs here, Microsoft. What's the trend on the big players and then what's the trend on the hot startups either companies and or new wave in here? You mentioned Knative. So big companies, what's the general trend there and then what are you seeing on the interests around startups. >> So John, last year when I talked to users at this show. It was most of the people that were using kubernetes were building their own stack. The exception to that was oh if I'm a Red Hat customer, open shift makes sense for me. I can built it into what my model is. Azure had just come out with their AKS support. AWS had just been figuring out their ECS verse EKS and what they had. We're going to do before Fargate was down there. Today, what I hear is maturation of the platform so I expect Amazon and Microsoft to win more, and just I'm on those platforms. I'm using it, oh I want to use their kubernetes service that's going to make sense. So the rich get richer in this a lot way. Red Hat is going to do well, IBM is a strong player here, and of course sometime in 2019, we expect that acquisition of Red Hat to close. From a start up standpoint, there are so many niches that can be filled here. The question is how many of them are going to end up as acquisitions inside some of these big ones. How much of them can monetize because as I said with kubernetes John, I don't see a company that's going to say oh, I'm going to be the kubernetes company and monetize. Mirantis for a year or so ago was pivoting to be from the OpenStack company to the kubernetes company. Heptio was an early player and they had a quick exit. They're bringing strong skill set to the VMware team to help VMware accelerate their CloudNative activities. So in many ways John, this is an evolution more than a revolution so I do not see a drastic change in the landscape. >> Well evolution is cloud computing. We know that's going to yield the edge of the network and then on premise is complete conversions. This evolution is interesting Stu because this is an open source community vibe. You have now two other things going on around it. You have the classic open source community event, and you've got on the other spectrum, normal app developers that just want to right code. Then you got this IT dynamic. So what's happening and that will be interesting and we'll be watching this is how does the CNCF KubeCon, CloudNativeCon involve, and you start to cross pollinate app developers who just want our infrastructure as code. IT people who want to take over a new IT and then pure open source community players. This has now become a melting pot. Is that an opportunity or a challenge for the CNCF and the Linux Foundation? >> The danger is that this just gets overruned by vendors. It becomes another OpenStack that people get disenfranchised through what they're doing so absolutely there's a threat here. To their credit, I think the CNCF has done a really good job of managing things. They're smart is how they're doing. They're community focused. I have to say in the keynote John, if we noticed the diversity was phenomenal. Most of the speakers were women. They were one from end users. There are a couple of dozen end users that are now members of the CNCF. >> I think they're all CUBE alumnis too. >> Absolutely, and John, we've been here since the early days been tracking the whole thing. >> It's fun to watch. My opinion on the whole the melting pot of those personas is I think the CNCF and the Linux Foundation has a winning formula by owning and nurturing the open source community side of it. I think that's where the data is going to be, that's where the action is and I think as a downstream benefit, the IT market and developers will win. I would not try to get enamored by the money, and the vendor participation hype. I don't think they are. I'm just saying I would advise them to stay the course. Make this the open source community show of course, that's what we believe and of course we're CubeNative this week. We are here at the CloudNative and now we're CubeNative. This is the first day of three days of coverage. I'm John Furrier and Stu Miniman breaking down the analysis, talking to the smartest people we can find, and also talk about some of the key players that are sponsoring the show. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break. (uptempo techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering NetApp Insight 2017. Brought to you by NetApps. >> Welcome back everyone, we are live in Las Vegas this is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE's flagship program where we go out to events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Keith Townsend. We're here at NetApp Insight 2017 here at the Mandalay Bay with two great guests, a senior executive, senior NetApp folks, are going to share some insight on what's going on. We have Mark Bregman is the Senior Vice President and CTO thanks for coming on. John Woodall VP of Engineering at Integrated Archive Systems. The first partner of NetApp going back in the day. Welcome to theCUBE thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> So we've seen that movie before, you know every cycle of innovation there's always opportunities. Interesting now we're in a cycle where you can see some new waves out there coming in. And we think we're surfing on some waves now, but the tsunami's coming. Everything from blockchain down to just cloud growth like crazy. You guys have done extremely well. You've seen them before, these transitions. People are busy right now, your customers are super busy. They've got app development going on, DevOps, they've got security unbuckling from IT becoming critical, data governance. What should they know about in this transition that they may miss or they should pay attention to. >> Well, I would say that the thing that is probably the most profound is we've gone through a couple of big transitions, as you mentioned, in the industry as a whole. 20, 30 years ago we would talk to customers and they'd start with infrastructure and they'd talk about servers and storage. 10, 15 years ago they start with applications and they'd talk about their ERP or whatever software. That would decide then the infrastructure. Today they're starting with data and companies are realizing that data is the thing that's going to transform their business. And then based on that data, what software am I going to use and then talk about infrastructure. So the conversation's kind of turned around completely from where it was 20 years ago. >> John, you've been a partner, I see the partner landscape certainly changing. You seeing resellers and VAR's and I think, does the word VAB even exist, value added business? They're actually building their own tech because there's opportunities to be a service provider. Almost like a telco, who would have thought? >> It's crazy, it's crazy. I think I think from our perspective as a longtime partner, we've been successful with NetApp through transitions. We were talking before about the resiliency of NetApp in going through transitions. They've done it again, the keynote today filled with a lot of, what I call, mic-drop moments of yet another level of innovation. But you're right things have flipped almost 180 degrees in the discussion that starting with data, starting with a business outcome, as part of the discussion. It's not about what can I sell, it's about in solving the problem, do I accelerate the pace of my business. Do I open up new ways to monetize in my business. Do I drive efficiencies in my business that translate to the bottom line. As a reseller and as a partner, we have to transition with that because the discussion changes, the skill sets change and it becomes much more of a services play on the front-end and to help through and then becomes managed services, as you know, and that. >> Mark I want to ask your a question. We were joking with the product marketing team on the cloud earlier that you know the slogan should be, I don't know NetApp could do that. It just keeps happening, oh, I didn't know they did that. While that's kind of a history NetApp, but I want to ask something specific. We see it's a success out there in the cloud, you look no further than Amazon Web Services. Now Microsoft's kind of catching up to the rear, Google's there's some other people are trying to kind of get in there. But Amazon's the winner when it comes to the number of announcements you see an event and I'm sure at Reinvent coming up is going to be a tsunami of their bigger announcements, more services so it's a plethora. And so that's an indicator of success. And also the new differentiator, at scale, as you got to keep iterating, you guys have a slew of announcements, so running engineering and being the CEO. What's going on at NetApp? What's the conversation like, you have all these roadmaps, is it just all this innovation, is it part of the plan and just give us some insight into how this all works. >> Well, I think for a long time, maybe for the first 20 years of the company, we were almost like a one product company. The innovations were all in that lane. They were all, you know, make this a better product, make ONTAP better and customers love that because they were growing with us. What's happened is it's kind of exploded in multiple dimensions. So we continue to innovate in our core. But at same time we're having to say, how can we use this capability in a completely different way, in the cloud? How can we help customers manage their data, no matter where it is, not just on our ONTAP systems. We made the acquisition of a little over a year ago, a year and a half ago, of SolidFire, to get into an area of a different approach to managing storage. And it's not sometimes people get it confused and they go that's how you got into flash. Frankly, we're already doing flash units and have flash in all of our product lines. The real reason we did that was to get into this more programmatic, scale out, API driven model of administration of storage. And we're having to do that in so many dimensions. so as we expand those dimensions, Of course we have to expand our innovation. We have to innovate at the given rate in each of threads. >> The old joke in Silicon Valley is you know get lucky once and you get rich. And it's hard, you know, the sophomore jinx whatever you want to call it, repeated successes is a sign of success and certainly as a partner you want to, you don't want to one trick pony at all. Now, I got to ask you, given the NetApp history of those successes, the data fabric is very good positioning I like that position because it's got a lot around it's super important, you think data is the new wave it's going to come bigger than cloud in terms of its impact. What from NetApp, for the customers that are watching and especially new customers, as you take new territory down with data, what is it about the NetApp portfolio, or the architecture the DNA that makes you guys relevant in this data fabric equation? Because you can't just get there overnight because of diseconomies of scale. What is it about NetApp that makes them super relevant? Couple things, one thing, what's the one thing? >> Well, I think I think it becomes back to I think you even said the term, DNA. It's what is it about NetApp, why are we one that's been around for 25 years and continue to make it through these transitions. And I think it's because, first of all, we don't rest on our laurels, we're not caught up in the innovator's dilemma of continuing to just refine what we already have. We'll do that, but we also recognize that there are emerging new customer needs. And our basic intellectual capital can be applied in different ways. So when I talk to our engineers, they don't talk about I build controllers that go into arrays that manage data. They realize that deeper down there's a kind of intellectual capital could go into a piece of software in the cloud. And there's a customer problem that we can go solve. So I think it's about being motivated by solving those customer data problems. >> So culture, some culture. >> It's culture. >> What are the products now, so you have a data, storage, storage stores data. So you don't need rocket science to figure out that you're storing data. >> I'll give you an example, there a lot of competitors in the flash storage business that have come into the market and basically gave up on us because we were late coming to that market. But we came in the market, we accelerated, we passed them, why is that? Partly, we built a good product at the flash storage layer. But more importantly we leveraged all of the storage management which we'd already built over 20 years. And so now we're suddenly out there with a very rock solid flash engine but it's supported by all the other capabilities which make it valuable to our customers. So it's not just, hey, here's a new tool, it's here's a new solution to your problem. And I think that's a big part of our DNA. And our technology side is we've been in data management for 20 years, we just never talked about it that way. >> So John, we had Dave Hitz on earlier, and he said that one of the keys to keeping away from the innovators dilemma has been that NetApp has leaned into the thing that will kill us. I tweeted that out, that's an awesome pull, that they've leaned into the things. As a partner though, that can be a bit scary. Technology is especially enterprise tech is a very stable thing. NetApp has been with ONTAP a very traditional partner even with fads and bringing those innovations to flash. How's that ride been for you guys over the past 25 years. >> It has been consistent, it has been a great partnership, and it continues to be a great partnership because as I look out and hone my portfolio of offerings and partnerships, NetApp stays very high in, that not just because we have a great run rate business, but because NetApp, in their innovation allows me to continue to solve problems with an existing partner, which makes us more efficient. Now, having said that we talked about you mentioned data fabric. That's a completely different discussion from a storage company. At first you think okay, I'm replicating data, I have a transport layer, that's fine. But what are you doing beyond that? I think you begin to see a new NetApp emerging as software defined. An organizing principle in my mind of the data fabric is it gives the customer freedom and flexibility that just buying storage doesn't give you. It gives them the flexibility to deploy in the cloud, next to the cloud, on-prem, as a virtual instance, as an AMI in the cloud, et cetera. So it allows the customer to place data and workloads where and when and how they want that makes sense for their business, not NetApp's business, or my business and so in that we're starting to see now with Anthony Lye's demo today of Cloud Orchestrator. >> Which, by the way, isn't shipping yet, but it's multi-cloud. >> Multi-cloud? >> It's multi-cloud instance. >> Yeah, that right there, and its applications, it's provisioning VM's, it's provisioning. >> If you guys get that to the market fast, it will be the first multi, True multi, orbiting call it real multi-cloud There's a lot of fake multi-cloud out there but that would be a real use case. >> And that's a completely different discussion so you know to kind of plagiarize, you can teach an old storage dog a new trick. So they transformed to meet the emerging needs of a new market, we are have to transform with them. So there's a bit of bumpiness that we're all going to experience as we learn that and do that. >> John, I just want to drill-down on that, I want to get also your both perspectives. What you're really teasing out with the Cloud Orchestrator demo in my mind, the impact of that demo significance is you guys as a storage company, now a data company, are enabling opportunities with the data. That's clearly what's happening, obviously, no debate there. But the impact is to developers. Now the developer dynamic is as these devops guys come in, there's new, there's re-skilling going on. So the biggest challenge of multi-cloud is each cloud has its own way to pipeline data or do things with data. So making that easy, I don't want to have to hire guys to program for each cloud. >> Mark: And they're hard to find. >> It's incredible, it's too hard. Abstracting that away is going to be a boon for the developer market. That's a new market, that's a different thing than NetApp. >> It's a very different market than we've been in before. >> So what are you doing? What's the plan, just continue to enable developers? >> Well, the comment you made earlier, about lean in to the thing that's going to kill you is exactly right, I wouldn't have said it quite like that but I'm not Dave Hitz. So we definitely, when we see a challenge we lean into it. And and that does two things, it's a little bit like, I don't know was it TaeKwonDo where you use the other competitors energy? >> I think it's judo. >> Think it's judo, use the other energy, the power the other opponent to win. And that's kind of what we're doing. I think when you do that it means we have to transform and our partners do, and you're a partner that's been with us long time, you've been through a lot of transitions. >> Yes we have. >> Well judo move is about leverage, and that's about having installed, you guys have that leverage with your customers. >> And the customers are moving as well, so we could try to keep them, hold them back. Or we can move with them and actually accelerate them to where they're going to our benefit, and to our partners benefit and I think that's what Dave was referring to. Well, Mark and John love to have you guys on, love to do a follow-up segment in Palo Alto, our offices are really across the yard from each other, certainly if you guys are in Sunnyvale This is a super important conversation. I'll give you guys the last word, impact to customers for NetApp with the new capabilities with data center innovation modernization, next gen data center, on-premise, true private cloud and power a horse in the cloud with data. All that working together in some cases end to end or in pieces whatever the customers is. What does it mean to the customer this new. >> I'll steal a line from our marketing teams and what it really means is it's going to enable customers to change the world with data. Transform their business, create new opportunities. >> It's a new wave in the economy. It's going to be disruptive and tumultuous for some. We have an opportunity to go into a customer and to help them find new ways, with their data, because the two key assets of company now is people and then data. So the people are there taking their data, allowing them to find new opportunities to go to market faster. NetApp's in a unique position. >> It reminds me of value creation, I mean a lot of stuff with blockchain you see the indicators, almost the Web1.0 again. You see in the new shift in architecture happening upside down it's almost reverse. >> The developer model's right. I mean you talk about Amazon, I think from 2008 until 2014 or 15 they introduced about three thousand new services on their platform. I don't see an average IT organization doing that. >> I think that rates gone up now. >> It's on an exponential growth there. >> I think we're starting to see the swim lanes, if you will, I'm calling them native clouds because they're so native. But they're also powering a new ecosystem and part of it, I wish we had more time to talk about the partner equation. There a lot of musical chairs going on in the partner ecosystem. You've been with NetApp from the beginning, congratulations. Congratulations on all the success on the platform and the product innovation. It's theCUBE bringing you the innovation and the data through our data fabric called theCUBE. We'll be back with more live coverage after this short break. >> Announcer: Coming off barrier breakers, status quo smashers, world.

>> Announcer: Live from Washington DC, it's theCUBE covering .NEXT conference. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to DC everybody. Welcome back to Nutanix NEXTConf. This is the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with Stu Miniman. Rich Napolitano is here as the CEO of Plexxi. Good friend, long time CUBE alum. Great to see you. >> Great to see you guys. Pleasure to be here with you again. >> Yeah, so you know, I love the fact that you're back in startup land. I mean, you did unbelievable things at EMC, but really this is your real love, alright, runnin' startups, you know, eating glass as we call it. So, when we first heard about Plexxi, I have to admit, Rich, we were down at Strada that time and it was kind of heavy and really geeky. I'm not a networky guy. You've really done a great job of sort of transforming the messaging and the company's vision. Share with us what's up with Plexxi. >> Yeah, I know, again thank you for inviting me here and it's a pleasure. It's an exciting time for the company. You know, we're actually breaking out, right and so it's great to see the momentum. And, the team has done a fabulous job. The challenge in the early days is, you know, you have the technology and you're trying to establish your product market fit and we've done that now. And so, it's exciting to be at this important inflection point, you know, tremendous revenue growth this year. You know, we could probably be profitable if we want to be this year which there's not many startups that can say that. And, what's happened is fundamentally we really connected now what we have built, our technology to the ping points in the marketplace and we have, you know, deep deep clarity and understanding of that now. >> So, talk a little bit more about the sort of value proposition and kind of why you guys, why Dave started the company and why you joined, what you're all about. >> Yeah, so we're building the next generation networks. We're not building additional networks and so we're very focused on the next era of computing, you know, third platform, you know, and scaled down infrastructure, cloud, where the requirements on the infrastructure are very different. You need to just build a much more agile and flexible infrastructure. You know, the choice the public cloud is there and it's going to be there forever, but how do you build an agile infrastructure for private and for hybrid infrastructure? And, what we've realized, and Dave realized this early on, is that the networking architectures haven't fundamentally changed in a very, very long time. And, you know, there's an emergence now, and this is what we've really learned in the last two years, there's an emergence of this other data center network. You know, Sysco has been dominant and done a phenomenal job in traditional data sending networking, but there's this emergence of this other network and we now we call it by a name, which is the Hyper Converge Network, HCN. And so, in very simple terms, what is Plexxi? Plexxi builds the HCN for the HEI infrastructure. >> Okay, Rich, you're just going to have to unpack this a little bit so, you know, people in the networking world will be said, we understand that it was a lot of the east, west traffic, the traffic between those, but you know, architecturally you know, we kind of got rid of the sand and now we've got this distributed software model that I've got these nodes, so where was the gap that you were lookin' to fill and you know, does Nutanix understand that this was a challenge? >> Those are all great questions and very relevant to the challenge. So, when you really look at the problems we solved, we start, we pull it up to the top for a second and we've learned a lot about this the last couple of years. What people want is simplicity. They don't want complexity. And, we built a lot of complexity into every layer of the infrastructure. Everything from the applications to the operating environments, to compute, to the storage and to the network. And so, what we really bring to the marketplace is a much simpler approach to deploy infrastructure and we do that by simplifying the network dramatically. So, and we do that by having a software definable network that's built out of industry standard components. So, Plexxi really brings three things to the table. We figured out how to build this very elastic and agile fabric to allow you to compute storage, allow you to connect storaging a few things together. And, we do that on white box switches and that's dramatically reduced our cost point and is tremendously simple to deploy, but on top of that, we built our software abstractions. And, it really is the key to us is really our software control and our integrations into operating environments. So, what we bring to market is an integrated solution with a set of switches that build this fabric, but our software controller allows you to provision this network seamlessly in the same way that Nutanix talks about being the invisible infrastructure, we're the invisible network. >> So, when Nutanix first started they were like, we're going to kill that sand 'cause you don't need some of that complexity, so when do I need this you know, fabric as you call it, as that interconnected tissue, you know, what size customer, you know, what kind of challenges does that, you know, really knock down. And So, if you're living within a rack you don't have any of these problems really. Right, I mean our integration into Nutanix is so sophisticated now that even within the rack we dramatically simplify your network provisioning so even within a rack our value proposition of simplicity and ease of use is compelling. We make the network invisible in that context. So, as you provision your VM's or your storage in a Nutanix environment, the network comes along. The value proposition just is most compelling as you go to second, third or more racks. Some of our biggest customers deploy us in tremendous configurations, you know, 10 racks in 10 rows, thousands of servers. But, we can start as small as you know, one or two switches. And so, the value proposition really is, how seamlessly can you build your infrastructure, in other words, can you make the network invisible in these infrastructures? And, that's exactly what we do. >> You have this picture in your booth, these things that you're handing out, and it's really simple. You got the old way which is storage, server and networking all that complexity. Nutanix, really kind of attacked the server and storage piece, brought those together, connect to the network. What you guys are doing is collapsing that complexity even further. Is that right, so what does that mean for a customer from a scaling standpoint? >> So, if you look at the three tier architecture as you talked about, then we're maxing multiple networks. And, the first thing anyone does whey they deploy converged infrastructure, hyperconversions in particular, is they eliminate the SAD. So, that was another network, we just never really thought about it that way. And so, effectively what we do is we allow you to have the properties of a SAD on your network. So, for a storage guy, notions of like Fibre Channel zoning are inherent now in our IP oriented network. Our network is very low latency because of our architecture. So, as you scale your latency is constant as you would things like NVME, our latency is extremely low. It's not a multi tiered network, so you don't have the complexity of building a multi tiered network as you scale your converged infrastructure. The benefit of hyperconversion is that you can deploy these racks of infrastructure and easily deploy them. The challenge is that if you don't attack the networking problem you still bump into that as you deploy this infrastructure. >> That becomes your new bottleneck. >> It's your new bottleneck for performance, but it's really for administration. And so, our integration layer ties into Nutanix and makes us aware of Nutanix operating environment, its file system, when nodes are being added or removed, when you're doing STApps or backups, et cetera and the network is shaped in the context of that application called Nutanix. It'll do the same thing for VMware. >> And, when you say it's tied into Nutanix, is that you know, the Nutanix the kind of the software between nodes is also things like AHV. Do you have awareness of that? >> So, AHV or VMware and PRISM, so you know, our management console can be launched from PRISM now so you can seamlessly have an experience. You can't tell when you're really in Nutanix or when you're in Plexxi's management domain. But, more importantly, we're aware of when nodes are added. We understand if you're rebuilding your underlying file systems, et cetera, as the requirements on the network shift, as you add more workloads, as workloads move, as applications move on the infrastructure and you need more compute over here or more storage there, our network adapts to that. >> So, explain how this is different than, just say, Nutanix bringing its platform and partnering up with UCS, for example. What's different about what you're doing? >> So, we're, for one thing, we're only the network, right. And so, the compute infrastructure, we don't do that. We don't do storage. We don't compute. And so, we're just a network that is really, think about it as the fabric for compute and storage as opposed to a data center network where you connect, you know, your printers and your desktops and your infrastructure for your, you know, multiple sites, et cetera. That's the kind of Sysco, if you will, network. We're this embedded network in these hyperconvert solutions. Put one or two switches in your rack and as you pump out this converged infrastructure you just scale that fabric seamlessly. And, it's so well integrated inside of Nutanix you don't even realize it's another network. It's just embedded in the infrastructure. >> So, sorry Stu. From a buyer's standpoint, do I get to eliminate some other or limit my growth of my traditional network or do I have to throw that out and bring this in? >> So, we're totally compatible with existing networks. So, what you do is you do two or three things. We can insert into existing networks without modifying them, but you don't need to keep adding top rack switches and spines to your existing network because our, most of the traffic stays on this other network. The Nutanix guy, sales teams, are actually starting to call this the Nutanix Network or the Nutanix Fabric because it's embedded in their solution. So, most of the traffic between Nutanix and those goes on that network which minimizes your northbound traffic to your existing network which just frankly, removes a headache from traditional network admins to deal with this other stuff. And, that same way the network admin in the past didn't worry about sand traffic. You shouldn't have to worry about this other problems too. >> So, Rich, it's interesting, talking to Nutanix customers you're right, smaller customers don't have networking issues, some larger customers it depends on how good their network is. The thing coming on the horizon that's going to dramatically change this embedded network thing is got to be NVME over fabrics, so what does that mean for Nutanix standalone and you know, I got to think that that's a huge tie to bring you into a lot of accounts. >> I mean, it is clear that the next tsunami, I mean you know, we were all involved in the early days of Flash and we saw that coming when we were at EMC, you know, I probably saw more Flash than anybody in the world actually, in terms of petabytes actually. And, NVME is that next wave, right. So, whether it's embedded in Nutanix or it's standalone bricks, you know, it's going to elevate the, this east, west, this need for this other network and you know, to pitch Plexxi a little bit, there's no better network that's tuned for this. The nature of our network is it's flat, it's extremely low latency, so we're actually awaiting the day that, you know, NVME hits the market in a big way because it will blow apart every other network, every hierarchal network will just be blown apart because the latency characteristics of a multi tiered network are just, are just clear. You can measure it. Also, we're doing a lot of stuff like that. >> Are any of your solutions ready for this today? >> We're ready for it. >> And, when you simplify the network like that, the entire infrastructure, and you provide that infrastructure with virtually no latency impact, now you can start to see the way in which application development changes and, you know, everybody's talking about digital disruption and how they going to pay for it. They're going to pay for it by, I would think, shifting labor resource from non-differentiated infrastructure to some of these more exciting areas. We've just heard that from two CIOs. >> We see this a lot. Telecom Italia is here with us. Sparkle, one of our bigger customers, we have a session this afternoon at 3 o'clock and Sparkle's going to be in the session with us and I just met a good hour with them here. And, it's all about the operating expense. It's like, Nutanix plus Plexxi reduces my operating expense and he's going to repeatedly say that. And, it's just clear that people cannot afford the complexity associated with traditional networks anymore. They can't hire programmers to build out, you know, not to pick on ACI, but complicated scripts for ACI, they can't afford to build those programs. Our integration layer makes that seamless, it takes it away. >> So, what's your relationship with Nutanix? You're obviously doing some hardcore integration. How do you describe the partnership and do you have other partnerships that you can talk about? >> So, right now we have a number of large scale, service provider customers we sell through distribution and other partners. We're partnering a lot with Nutanix now, a little bit with SimpliVity, but we're going to go after all of the HCI vendors ultimately. But, pretty clearly Nutanix is the leader and we've been developing a relationship at the top and in the field and parallel we've been recruiting Nutanix partners. AERO's our master distributor, so we're recruiting AERO partners that sell Nutanix and we're building a set of solutions. We announce our reference architecture this week with Nutanix, so we're very focused on Nutanix. They're clearly the leader in this space and they get our value proposition. Invisible infrastructure meets the invisible network. I mean, it's perfect. >> You mentioned before you could be profitable if you wanted to be. It's kind of, it's not in vogue to be profitable, Rich. People want growth, but you know, hey, this booming market's not going to last forever. >> Timing's different, timing is different. I think, actually I think it plays to our strength that you know, I looked at our financials a couple of weeks ago and I realized some about 80% of all that we've spent has been in R and D, and that's not common. Most starters at this stage have invested a lot more in the go to market and now's our time to go do that, but we have, now we have the advantage that we have such tremendous revenue growth that we can fund a bunch of it ourselves and the capital markets are different than they were two or three years ago when Nutanix was growing. So, I think it's prudent for CEOs now to be just more, more capital efficient because the markets are different and I think we're in a unique position now given all of our growth. >> Well, Rich, congratulations on the early success. We know what you're capable of. We'll be watching. I really wish you the best. >> My pleasure, thank you. >> Alright, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE. We're live from Nutanix, NEXTConf. Be right back.

>> Narrator: Live from New York City, it's theCUBE. Covering Lenovo Transform 2017. Brought to you by: Lenovo. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Lenovo Transform Event. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Stu Miniman, who is a Senior Analyst at Wikibon. We are joined by Kirk Skaugan. He is the Executive Vice President and President of Lenovo Data Group. Welcome back to theCUBE, Kirk. You're a veteran. >> Yeah, we're doing this on a monthly basis. It's great. >> So you're fresh off the keynote. The theme of this conference is transform. Lenovo has undergone a massive transformation in recent years. What is your focus, and where do you see the biggest points of change in the company? >> Well, I think we're sort of celebrating today, this transformation to the next phase of our growth. If you think about us as a company, we've kind of acquired the x86 business, server business from IBM a few years ago, and we are also building off more than a decade of our China heritage, for the ThinkServer business, so that's combining the two together. Kind of driving to our next phase of growth. The whole purpose of today is really transforming the customer experience, and starting with the customer first. We're incredibly proud that we just got ranked number one in customer satisfaction, again but we're not kind of stopping there. We're going to use this announcement today to catapult us ahead. >> Customer service has always been a strength of Lenovo, and as you said, you're going to continue to drive toward that. You said in the keynote that you're incentivizing employees around customer service. Can you talk a little bit about how you plan on maintaining the edge? >> So this year, every Lenovo employee is getting incentivized on customer experience. We're making them take a personal goal of how they can better improve the customer. Regardless of whether you're an engineer, or you're in phone support, or these kind of things, so it really starts at the grass-roots level. It gets everybody thinking customer first, which is great. Again, we're excited, because we're in 21 of the 22 categories, number one is x86 servers, but we're constantly learning and wanting to improve. That's where we're starting. >> Kirk, Y.Y. in his keynote, talked about, just the pace of change. That, forget about 18 years ago, 18 months ago we probably couldn't predict how fast things are going. How does that drive your strategy? How you work with customers, and drive the product line? >> So I think customers are asking for simplicity. It's getting so complex, and the rate of change is so much, so when we did this design of both our server storage and networking, we're kind of future-proofing it. We are actually dramatically reducing the number of products, but building to be more flexible, so you can qualify less solutions, but have them live longer in your data-center. That's been a key attribute as we look at future-proofing. Also, as we move to software-defined, that's going to be a key element as well, because people aren't looking to change out the hardware as much as they are the software part. Everything from our configuration managers to our system hardware management, and with Xclarity, the whole design experience, we're changing to simply the experience for the customer. 'Cause the change is almost getting to the point that it's too much for people to handle, from a technology transformation perspective. >> You're celebrating 25 years of the x86 server that you're offering, so explain to us the new branding. You've got two new brands that you've announced today. The kind of, thinking behind that, and walk us through what they are. >> Sure, so today, we're announcing ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile. So on the server side, we had both the ThinkServer brand from Lenovo and the SystemX brand from IBM. We're building those two together. The engineers were given the charter years ago, to say how do you stay number one in reliability, Number one in customer satisfaction, and then we have a legacy now of over 150 world-record benchmarks. So it's a brand that's highly flexible, premium, and it's going to span now, not only our server products, but server, storage, and networking. One of the surprises I had joining Lenovo is just, we have hundreds of engineers in networking that the old IBM had acquired from companies like Blade Network Technologies, and now things like hyper-converged storage. Once you've solved the storage-compute integration, networking becomes the next bottleneck. The products we're announcing today on ThinkAgile, which is our software-defined products, are helping solve not only the hyper-converge storage problems, but also some of the challenges that brings to networking, and moving traffic from a traditional north-south architecture to east-west. Simply put, ThinkSystem for network, storage, and server; and ThinkAgile for software-defined. >> On the ThinkAgile, the two partners that I saw highlighted up on screen were Nutanix, which you've had in OEM for awhile, and the Microsoft Azure, with Azure staff, we knew is coming this year. Both of those companies have a lot of partners. Why is Lenovo positioned to be a strong contender with both of those companies. >> I think that when we talk to CIOs, what we're hearing pretty constantly is that Lenovo's lack of legacy... We don't have a huge legacy router business, or a huge legacy sand business, and all the associated costs and services. We see our competitors sometimes up, pushing one more generation of the legacy technology, and so we feel like we're getting pulled in to leap ahead, not being encumbered by the past. Then I always say, little things don't mean a lot; little things mean everything. It's the thousands of Lenovo engineers that are tuning this for both of those solutions, especially for Nutonix, we've got integrated networking now, in the stack, so we're not just solving the storage problem, but we're addressing that network solution as well. There's a reason why we have 150 world-record benchmarks. It's that fine-tuning with our partners to get the last few bits of performance out of the systems. >> I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about this lack of legacy, as well as the cost-efficiencies that you referenced in the keynote, in terms of having everything in China, and you described going left to make the servers, and going right to make the PCs. Can you talk a little bit about how that helps Lenovo improve it's offerings? >> So I think that we have the benefits of being an autonomous data center group, and making our own decisions, but we're taking care of the manufacturing, taking advantage of the manufacturing capability of Lenovo. If you look at the devices inside, Lenovo's building about four devices a second. On the server side, we build a little bit over a hundred servers an hour. But if you go into, for example, we have factories in Sárvár, Hungary; Monterrey, Mexico; North Carolina; and even Shenzen. If you go into our Shenzen factory, the parts warehouse is common on the first floor. It comes up through the second floor, and actually goes left for notebooks, right for servers. So all that vendor-managed inventory, we're taking advantage of that scale of four devices a second, and we get that advantage, unlike some of our competitors. What that really means to our customers is we can compete with the best commodity costs, and the best manufacturing costs in the industry. Some of our third-party analysts are saying we have manufacturing rates that could be almost half of our competition, because some of the scale that we have. >> Kirk, one of the things that caught my attention in the keynote was talking about using the intelligence, and inside your supply-chain through the whole life-cycle of the product. Can you give us a little bit of insight as to how you're using it internally, and what customers see from that. >> So we just hired our Chief Technology Officer, was Dr. Rui, Yong, who's ex-Microsoft. He's one of the world leaders in Artificial Intelligence. Our CIO and us in the data-center group, we've all been collaborating to bring Artificial Intelligence deeper into everything we do, but even from our supply chain to our order delivery, which is why I think our customer satisfaction rates are so high, because we can predict the supply chain, the right amount of inventory, and shipping it all the way through, and predicting the dock-date to our customers incredibly well. One of the key learners we had over the last couple of years of acquiring the IBM x86 server business, it took us almost two years to get off the IT systems, right? We had over forty different databases that we had to integrate in, and now that, as of January 1, they've all become part of Lenovo, pulling those big data analytics together and using Artificial Intelligence, we can now track the aged population of all of the installed base of over about two and a half million servers that we have out there, who's coming up for warranty replacements, who's coming up for hardware replacements, and it's almost that predictive analytics that customers are really valuing. >> In terms of Lenovo and it's aspirations for the future, in terms of becoming the world's biggest super-computing company, you are the fastest growing, but let's talk about impact. This is something that Y.Y. talked about in his keynote, and really making sure that Lenovo is working, not just helping companies sell more widgets, but also with scientific breakthroughs, curing diseases, predicting the effect of climate change. How big a part is that of your job? >> I think it's something that's incredibly motivating to Lenovo employees, beyond financial return to shareholders, is every day I get internal texts or WeChats from Lenovo employees that are feeling really proud to be part of a company that's off trying to do something good for humanity, as well. I mean on the PC side, we're selling ChromeBooks and bridging the digital divide between kids in Africa and kids in the major metropolitan areas of the world, but on the data center side, things like we did with the Barcelona supercomputer, where we now have the fastest, next-generation Intel computer on the planet. It is one of the breakthroughs of predicting weather and climate change, predicting and tracking the next tsunami to evacuate coastlines faster, trying to find cures to some of the most terrible diseases on Earth. It's a huge part of the culture, of trying to do good for the world, not just make a financial return. >> Kirk, I want to go back to ThinkAgile for a second, because you dropped a hint that we couldn't let pass. Said that it's likely that we should expect M and A, from Lenovo here, now, I don't expect you to tell us who you're looking at, but what do you look for, what type of company to look for, or what would fit well into the Lenovo portfolio? >> Well, it's funny, because we're Lenovo, so we're not Huawei, or Cisco, or EMC, right? Big names, without saying traditional networking and storage. All of these startups out there that are essentially competing with those large legacy companies are coming to us saying, we want either access to China, given our strong China presence, but also global-scale. Because once they get to a couple hundred million dollars in revenue, they have a real tough time scaling, and as I said, we're participating now in over 160 countries, 50 call-centers. That's a pretty big investment, even for some of the fastest growing software-defined companies in the world, to set up. I think we want to build our own internal intellectual property, but we're also going to look at joint ventures and M and A's in the areas of software-defined networking, software-defined storage, because our customers, again, see us with that lack of legacy and are really pushing us to go even faster, which is great. >> So those are the business that you're interested in, but what are the kind of cultures that you're looking for, particularly because culture is such an important part of Lenovo? >> One of the reasons I moved from Intel to Lenovo is that they're just fierceless innovators, right? And we became number one in PC through innovation, not just cost-cutting and I see that on the data-center side as well. All of those little things that matter. So I think we want to have people who have the highest of aspirations. When we go into something, we want to be number one in it. People who are fearless, they're not afraid of companies that might be three or four times our size, but that want to make a global impact. A lot of these customers, they've already made their financial returns in a previous startup, and now they're looking at how they can go change the world, and the scale that Lenovo brings, I think is something that's pretty exciting to them. >> Kirk, on the Intel point, I think this is the fourth show that we've done theCUBE at this year, where Intel's been up on stage, arm and arm with a partner, in the cloud-space, in the server-space, talking about that next generation chipset. What's going to set Lenovo apart with this next wave, and what are your customers excited about for this next spin of the Intel chipset? >> We're seeing 59% performance improvement on things like SAP HANA, where we're number one in the world in installations. We're seeing better total cost of ownership productions. So particularly in hyper-scale and HPC, we see a step-function transition over, almost immediately on the new Intel chips. We're looking at all architectures, of course, as well, but I think with Intel, we've put in the largest omni-pass solutions on the planet. With Barcelona supercomputer, we're working not just on processors, but on the SSDs, on their accelerator, on high technology, on the fabrics. So we have a really tight innovation relationship with them, so we're selling probably more content per box, therefore we're obviously able to fine-tune the entire portfolio together with them. I think customers are excited about us continuing this world-record performance that we've had. The TCO reductions, of getting to lower power. Most of these supercomputers are still constrained by power. We have more than 25 patents now in water-cooling technology to try to be greener for the Earth. I think that those are some of the things that we're seeing from Intel. >> Those are the selling points. >> Yeah, higher performance. We have a very tight, close relationship, so there's not a lot of finger-pointing. We get into an issue, as all companies do, we can solve it very, very quickly. I think again, being number one in customer satisfaction from a third-party is our testament to that. >> Kirk, this last question I had on that, the hyperscale market. Can you just give us the update, as kind of Lenovo's position there. Heard a lot about the HPC market, we know, kind of a traditional enterprise market, but hyperscale, I think, is one of the areas you differentiate yourself. >> We obviously sell Dubai, to Alibaba, Tencent is part of China, we're one of their largest suppliers and partners, and we're now expanding, through this new segment-focus into the west coast of the United States. We don't necessarily go out and say the names of those customers, but there are multiple hyperscale customers in the top ten, many of which are based in the US that we are already now shipping into significantly more units this year than last year. It's a function of really getting cost-optimized. Again, we're taking advantage of PC economics and bringing them to hyperscale computing, so we're not afraid of low-margin, high-volume business, because that's what we're doing in the PC space every day. So, we're going to continue to expand, not just in the top-tier ones, but also moving into the tier two, tier three, kind of customer bases as well, so we're expanding that sales force. Looking at it only end-to-end, only burdening it with what it needs to be burdened with, right? Relative to the cost structure so that we can compete with the best, most cost-effective companies in the world, and still make a little bit of money for Lenovo shareholders. >> Kirk, thanks so much for joining us. It's been a pleasure having you on the show. >> Yeah, the excitement around here's been great. We appreciate you guys coming, and appreciate your time. >> Great. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, we'll be back with more of Lenovo Transform after this.