>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> This past week we saw two of the Big 3 cloud providers present the latest update on their respective cloud visions, their business progress, their announcements and innovations. The content at these events had many overlapping themes, including modern cloud infrastructure at global scale, applying advanced machine intelligence, AKA AI, end-to-end data platforms, collaboration software. They talked a lot about the future of work automation. And they gave us a little taste, each company of the Metaverse Web 3.0 and much more. Despite these striking similarities, the differences between these two cloud platforms and that of AWS remains significant. With Microsoft leveraging its massive application software footprint to dominate virtually all markets and Google doing everything in its power to keep up with the frenetic pace of today's cloud innovation, which was set into motion a decade and a half ago by AWS. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights, powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we unpack the immense amount of content presented by the CEOs of Microsoft and Google Cloud at Microsoft Ignite and Google Cloud Next. We'll also quantify with ETR survey data the relative position of these two cloud giants in four key sectors: cloud IaaS, BI analytics, data platforms and collaboration software. Now one thing was clear this past week, hybrid events are the thing. Google Cloud Next took place live over a 24-hour period in six cities around the world, with the main gathering in New York City. Microsoft Ignite, which normally is attended by 30,000 people, had a smaller event in Seattle, in person with a virtual audience around the world. AWS re:Invent, of course, is much different. Yes, there's a virtual component at re:Invent, but it's all about a big live audience gathering the week after Thanksgiving, in the first week of December in Las Vegas. Regardless, Satya Nadella keynote address was prerecorded. It was highly produced and substantive. It was visionary, energetic with a strong message that Azure was a platform to allow customers to build their digital businesses. Doing more with less, which was a key theme of his. Nadella covered a lot of ground, starting with infrastructure from the compute, highlighting a collaboration with Arm-based, Ampere processors. New block storage, 60 regions, 175,000 miles of fiber cables around the world. He presented a meaningful multi-cloud message with Azure Arc to support on-prem and edge workloads, as well as of course the public cloud. And talked about confidential computing at the infrastructure level, a theme we hear from all cloud vendors. He then went deeper into the end-to-end data platform that Microsoft is building from the core data stores to analytics, to governance and the myriad tooling Microsoft offers. AI was next with a big focus on automation, AI, training models. He showed demos of machines coding and fixing code and machines automatically creating designs for creative workers and how Power Automate, Microsoft's RPA tooling, would combine with Microsoft Syntex to understand documents and provide standard ways for organizations to communicate with those documents. There was of course a big focus on Azure as developer cloud platform with GitHub Copilot as a linchpin using AI to assist coders in low-code and no-code innovations that are coming down the pipe. And another giant theme was a workforce transformation and how Microsoft is using its heritage and collaboration and productivity software to move beyond what Nadella called productivity paranoia, i.e., are remote workers doing their jobs? In a world where collaboration is built into intelligent workflows, and he even showed a glimpse of the future with AI-powered avatars and partnerships with Meta and Cisco with Teams of all firms. And finally, security with a bevy of tools from identity, endpoint, governance, et cetera, stressing a suite of tools from a single provider, i.e., Microsoft. So a couple points here. One, Microsoft is following in the footsteps of AWS with silicon advancements and didn't really emphasize that trend much except for the Ampere announcement. But it's building out cloud infrastructure at a massive scale, there is no debate about that. Its plan on data is to try and provide a somewhat more abstracted and simplified solutions, which differs a little bit from AWS's approach of the right database tool, for example, for the right job. Microsoft's automation play appears to provide simple individual productivity tools, kind of a ground up approach and make it really easy for users to drive these bottoms up initiatives. We heard from UiPath that forward five last month, a little bit of a different approach of horizontal automation, end-to-end across platforms. So quite a different play there. Microsoft's angle on workforce transformation is visionary and will continue to solidify in our view its dominant position with Teams and Microsoft 365, and it will drive cloud infrastructure consumption by default. On security as well as a cloud player, it has to have world-class security, and Azure does. There's not a lot of debate about that, but the knock on Microsoft is Patch Tuesday becomes Hack Wednesday because Microsoft releases so many patches, it's got so much Swiss cheese in its legacy estate and patching frequently, it becomes a roadmap and a trigger for hackers. Hey, patch Tuesday, these are all the exploits that you can go after so you can act before the patches are implemented. And so it's really become a problem for users. As well Microsoft is competing with many of the best-of-breed platforms like CrowdStrike and Okta, which have market momentum and appear to be more attractive horizontal plays for customers outside of just the Microsoft cloud. But again, it's Microsoft. They make it easy and very inexpensive to adopt. Now, despite the outstanding presentation by Satya Nadella, there are a couple of statements that should raise eyebrows. Here are two of them. First, as he said, Azure is the only cloud that supports all organizations and all workloads from enterprises to startups, to highly regulated industries. I had a conversation with Sarbjeet Johal about this, to make sure I wasn't just missing something and we were both surprised, somewhat, by this claim. I mean most certainly AWS supports more certifications for example, and we would think it has a reasonable case to dispute that claim. And the other statement, Nadella made, Azure is the only cloud provider enabling highly regulated industries to bring their most sensitive applications to the cloud. Now, reasonable people can debate whether AWS is there yet, but very clearly Oracle and IBM would have something to say about that statement. Now maybe it's not just, would say, "Oh, they're not real clouds, you know, they're just going to hosting in the cloud if you will." But still, when it comes to mission-critical applications, you would think Oracle is really the the leader there. Oh, and Satya also mentioned the claim that the Edge browser, the Microsoft Edge browser, no questions asked, he said, is the best browser for business. And we could see some people having some questions about that. Like isn't Edge based on Chrome? Anyway, so we just had to question these statements and challenge Microsoft to defend them because to us it's a little bit of BS and makes one wonder what else in such as awesome keynote and it was awesome, it was hyperbole. Okay, moving on to Google Cloud Next. The keynote started with Sundar Pichai doing a virtual session, he was remote, stressing the importance of Google Cloud. He mentioned that Google Cloud from its Q2 earnings was on a $25-billion annual run rate. What he didn't mention is that it's also on a 3.6 billion annual operating loss run rate based on its first half performance. Just saying. And we'll dig into that issue a little bit more later in this episode. He also stressed that the investments that Google has made to support its core business and search, like its global network of 22 subsea cables to support things like, YouTube video, great performance obviously that we all rely on, those innovations there. Innovations in BigQuery to support its search business and its threat analysis that it's always had and its AI, it's always been an AI-first company, he's stressed, that they're all leveraged by the Google Cloud Platform, GCP. This is all true by the way. Google has absolutely awesome tech and the talk, as well as his talk, Pichai, but also Kurian's was forward thinking and laid out a vision of the future. But it didn't address in our view, and I talked to Sarbjeet Johal about this as well, today's challenges to the degree that Microsoft did and we expect AWS will at re:Invent this year, it was more out there, more forward thinking, what's possible in the future, somewhat less about today's problem, so I think it's resonates less with today's enterprise players. Thomas Kurian then took over from Sundar Pichai and did a really good job of highlighting customers, and I think he has to, right? He has to say, "Look, we are in this game. We have customers, 9 out of the top 10 media firms use Google Cloud. 8 out of the top 10 manufacturers. 9 out of the top 10 retailers. Same for telecom, same for healthcare. 8 out of the top 10 retail banks." He and Sundar specifically referenced a number of companies, customers, including Avery Dennison, Groupe Renault, H&M, John Hopkins, Prudential, Minna Bank out of Japan, ANZ bank and many, many others during the session. So you know, they had some proof points and you got to give 'em props for that. Now like Microsoft, Google talked about infrastructure, they referenced training processors and regions and compute optionality and storage and how new workloads were emerging, particularly data-driven workloads in AI that required new infrastructure. He explicitly highlighted partnerships within Nvidia and Intel. I didn't see anything on Arm, which somewhat surprised me 'cause I believe Google's working on that or at least has come following in AWS's suit if you will, but maybe that's why they're not mentioning it or maybe I got to do more research there, but let's park that for a minute. But again, as we've extensively discussed in Breaking Analysis in our view when it comes to compute, AWS via its Annapurna acquisition is well ahead of the pack in this area. Arm is making its way into the enterprise, but all three companies are heavily investing in infrastructure, which is great news for customers and the ecosystem. We'll come back to that. Data and AI go hand in hand, and there was no shortage of data talk. Google didn't mention Snowflake or Databricks specifically, but it did mention, by the way, it mentioned Mongo a couple of times, but it did mention Google's, quote, Open Data cloud. Now maybe Google has used that term before, but Snowflake has been marketing the data cloud concept for a couple of years now. So that struck as a shot across the bow to one of its partners and obviously competitor, Snowflake. At BigQuery is a main centerpiece of Google's data strategy. Kurian talked about how they can take any data from any source in any format from any cloud provider with BigQuery Omni and aggregate and understand it. And with the support of Apache Iceberg and Delta and Hudi coming in the future and its open Data Cloud Alliance, they talked a lot about that. So without specifically mentioning Snowflake or Databricks, Kurian co-opted a lot of messaging from these two players, such as life and tech. Kurian also talked about Google Workspace and how it's now at 8 million users up from 6 million just two years ago. There's a lot of discussion on developer optionality and several details on tools supported and the open mantra of Google. And finally on security, Google brought out Kevin Mandian, he's a CUBE alum, extremely impressive individual who's CEO of Mandiant, a leading security service provider and consultancy that Google recently acquired for around 5.3 billion. They talked about moving from a shared responsibility model to a shared fate model, which is again, it's kind of a shot across AWS's bow, kind of shared responsibility model. It's unclear that Google will pay the same penalty if a customer doesn't live up to its portion of the shared responsibility, but we can probably assume that the customer is still going to bear the brunt of the pain, nonetheless. Mandiant is really interesting because it's a services play and Google has stated that it is not a services company, it's going to give partners in the channel plenty of room to play. So we'll see what it does with Mandiant. But Mandiant is a very strong enterprise capability and in the single most important area security. So interesting acquisition by Google. Now as well, unlike Microsoft, Google is not competing with security leaders like Okta and CrowdStrike. Rather, it's partnering aggressively with those firms and prominently putting them forth. All right. Let's get into the ETR survey data and see how Microsoft and Google are positioned in four key markets that we've mentioned before, IaaS, BI analytics, database data platforms and collaboration software. First, let's look at the IaaS cloud. ETR is just about to release its October survey, so I cannot share the that data yet. I can only show July data, but we're going to give you some directional hints throughout this conversation. This chart shows net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis and overlap or presence in the data, i.e., how pervasive the platform is. That's on the horizontal axis. And we've inserted the Wikibon estimates of IaaS revenue for the companies, the Big 3. Actually the Big 4, we included Alibaba. So a couple of points in this somewhat busy data chart. First, Microsoft and AWS as always are dominant on both axes. The red dotted line there at 40% on the vertical axis. That represents a highly elevated spending velocity and all of the Big 3 are above the line. Now at the same time, GCP is well behind the two leaders on the horizontal axis and you can see that in the table insert as well in our revenue estimates. Now why is Azure bigger in the ETR survey when AWS is larger according to the Wikibon revenue estimates? And the answer is because Microsoft with products like 365 and Teams will often be considered by respondents in the survey as cloud by customers, so they fit into that ETR category. But in the insert data we're stripping out applications and SaaS from Microsoft and Google and we're only isolating on IaaS. The other point is when you take a look at the early October returns, you see downward pressure as signified by those dotted arrows on every name. The only exception was Dell, or Dell and IBM, which showing slightly improved momentum. So the survey data generally confirms what we know that AWS and Azure have a massive lead and strong momentum in the marketplace. But the real story is below the line. Unlike Google Cloud, which is on pace to lose well over 3 billion on an operating basis this year, AWS's operating profit is around $20 billion annually. Microsoft's Intelligent Cloud generated more than $30 billion in operating income last fiscal year. Let that sink in for a moment. Now again, that's not to say Google doesn't have traction, it does and Kurian gave some nice proof points and customer examples in his keynote presentation, but the data underscores the lead that Microsoft and AWS have on Google in cloud. And here's a breakdown of ETR's proprietary net score methodology, that vertical axis that we showed you in the previous chart. It asks customers, are you adopting the platform new? That's that lime green. Are you spending 6% or more? That's the forest green. Is you're spending flat? That's the gray. Is you're spending down 6% or worse? That's the pinkest color. Or are you replacing the platform, defecting? That's the bright red. You subtract the reds from the greens and you get a net score. Now one caveat here, which actually is really favorable from Microsoft, the Microsoft data that we're showing here is across the entire Microsoft portfolio. The other point is, this is July data, we'll have an update for you once ETR releases its October results. But we're talking about meaningful samples here, the ends. 620 for AWS over a thousand from Microsoft in more than 450 respondents in the survey for Google. So the real tell is replacements, that bright red. There is virtually no churn for AWS and Microsoft, but Google's churn is 5x, those two in the survey. Now 5% churn is not high, but you'd like to see three things for Google given it's smaller size. One is less churn, two is much, much higher adoption rates in the lime green. Three is a higher percentage of those spending more, the forest green. And four is a lower percentage of those spending less. And none of these conditions really applies here for Google. GCP is still not growing fast enough in our opinion, and doesn't have nearly the traction of the two leaders and that shows up in the survey data. All right, let's look at the next sector, BI analytics. Here we have that same XY dimension. Again, Microsoft dominating the picture. AWS very strong also in both axes. Tableau, very popular and respectable of course acquired by Salesforce on the vertical axis, still looking pretty good there. And again on the horizontal axis, big presence there for Tableau. And Google with Looker and its other platforms is also respectable, but it again, has some work to do. Now notice Streamlit, that's a recent Snowflake acquisition. It's strong in the vertical axis and because of Snowflake's go-to-market (indistinct), it's likely going to move to the right overtime. Grafana is also prominent in the Y axis, but a glimpse at the most recent survey data shows them slightly declining while Looker actually improves a bit. As does Cloudera, which we'll move up slightly. Again, Microsoft just blows you away, doesn't it? All right, now let's get into database and data platform. Same X Y dimensions, but now database and data warehouse. Snowflake as usual takes the top spot on the vertical axis and it is actually keeps moving to the right as well with again, Microsoft and AWS is dominant in the market, as is Oracle on the X axis, albeit it's got less spending velocity, but of course it's the database king. Google is well behind on the X axis but solidly above the 40% line on the vertical axis. Note that virtually all platforms will see pressure in the next survey due to the macro environment. Microsoft might even dip below the 40% line for the first time in a while. Lastly, let's look at the collaboration and productivity software market. This is such an important area for both Microsoft and Google. And just look at Microsoft with 365 and Teams up into the right. I mean just so impressive in ubiquitous. And we've highlighted Google. It's in the pack. It certainly is a nice base with 174 N, which I can tell you that N will rise in the next survey, which is an indication that more people are adopting. But given the investment and the tech behind it and all the AI and Google's resources, you'd really like to see Google in this space above the 40% line, given the importance of this market, of this collaboration area to Google's success and the degree to which they emphasize it in their pitch. And look, this brings up something that we've talked about before on Breaking Analysis. Google doesn't have a tech problem. This is a go-to-market and marketing challenge that Google faces and it's up against two go-to-market champs and Microsoft and AWS. And Google doesn't have the enterprise sales culture. It's trying, it's making progress, but it's like that racehorse that has all the potential in the world, but it's just missing some kind of key ingredient to put it over at the top. It's always coming in third, (chuckles) but we're watching and Google's obviously, making some investments as we shared with earlier. All right. Some final thoughts on what we learned this week and in this research: customers and partners should be thrilled that both Microsoft and Google along with AWS are spending so much money on innovation and building out global platforms. This is a gift to the industry and we should be thankful frankly because it's good for business, it's good for competitiveness and future innovation as a platform that can be built upon. Now we didn't talk much about multi-cloud, we haven't even mentioned supercloud, but both Microsoft and Google have a story that resonates with customers in cross cloud capabilities, unlike AWS at this time. But we never say never when it comes to AWS. They sometimes and oftentimes surprise you. One of the other things that Sarbjeet Johal and John Furrier and I have discussed is that each of the Big 3 is positioning to their respective strengths. AWS is the best IaaS. Microsoft is building out the kind of, quote, we-make-it-easy-for-you cloud, and Google is trying to be the open data cloud with its open-source chops and excellent tech. And that puts added pressure on Snowflake, doesn't it? You know, Thomas Kurian made some comments according to CRN, something to the effect that, we are the only company that can do the data cloud thing across clouds, which again, if I'm being honest is not really accurate. Now I haven't clarified these statements with Google and often things get misquoted, but there's little question that, as AWS has done in the past with Redshift, Google is taking a page out of Snowflake, Databricks as well. A big difference in the Big 3 is that AWS doesn't have this big emphasis on the up-the-stack collaboration software that both Microsoft and Google have, and that for Microsoft and Google will drive captive IaaS consumption. AWS obviously does some of that in database, a lot of that in database, but ISVs that compete with Microsoft and Google should have a greater affinity, one would think, to AWS for competitive reasons. and the same thing could be said in security, we would think because, as I mentioned before, Microsoft competes very directly with CrowdStrike and Okta and others. One of the big thing that Sarbjeet mentioned that I want to call out here, I'd love to have your opinion. AWS specifically, but also Microsoft with Azure have successfully created what Sarbjeet calls brand distance. AWS from the Amazon Retail, and even though AWS all the time talks about Amazon X and Amazon Y is in their product portfolio, but you don't really consider it part of the retail organization 'cause it's not. Azure, same thing, has created its own identity. And it seems that Google still struggles to do that. It's still very highly linked to the sort of core of Google. Now, maybe that's by design, but for enterprise customers, there's still some potential confusion with Google, what's its intentions? How long will they continue to lose money and invest? Are they going to pull the plug like they do on so many other tools? So you know, maybe some rethinking of the marketing there and the positioning. Now we didn't talk much about ecosystem, but it's vital for any cloud player, and Google again has some work to do relative to the leaders. Which brings us to supercloud. The ecosystem and end customers are now in a position this decade to digitally transform. And we're talking here about building out their own clouds, not by putting in and building data centers and installing racks of servers and storage devices, no. Rather to build value on top of the hyperscaler gift that has been presented. And that is a mega trend that we're watching closely in theCUBE community. While there's debate about the supercloud name and so forth, there little question in our minds that the next decade of cloud will not be like the last. All right, we're going to leave it there today. Many thanks to Sarbjeet Johal, and my business partner, John Furrier, for their input to today's episode. Thanks to Alex Myerson who's on production and manages the podcast and Ken Schiffman as well. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight helped get the word out on social media and in our newsletters. And Rob Hof is our editor in chief over at SiliconANGLE, who does some wonderful editing. And check out SiliconANGLE, a lot of coverage on Google Cloud Next and Microsoft Ignite. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcast wherever you listen. Just search Breaking Analysis podcast. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. And you can always get in touch with me via email, david.vellante@siliconangle.com or you can DM me at dvellante or comment on my LinkedIn posts. And please do check out etr.ai, the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for the CUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time on Breaking Analysis. (gentle music)

>>Okay, welcome back everyone to Supercloud 22, this is the cube studio's live performance. We streaming virtually@siliconangledotcomandthecube.net. I'm John for host the cube at Dave Alane with a distinguished panel talking about securing the Supercloud all cube alumni G written house was the CEO of Skyhigh security, Peter Sharma founder of, of QX sold to tenable and Tony qua who's investor. Co-founder former head of product at VMware chance. Thanks for coming on and to our, in all girls super cloud pilot event. >>Good to see you guys big topic. >>Okay. So before we get into secure in the cloud, one of the things that we were discussing before we came on camera was how cloud, the relationship between cloud and on premise and multi-cloud and how Supercloud fits into that. At the end of the day, security's driving a lot of the conversations at the op side and dev shift left is happening. We see that out there. So before we get into it, how do you guys see super cloud Tony? We'll start with you. We'll go down the line. What is Supercloud to you? >>Well, to me, super cloud is really the next evolution, the culmination of the services coming all together, right? As a application developer today, you really don't need to worry about where this thing is. Sit sitting or what's the latency cuz cuz the internet is fast enough. Now I really wanna know what services something provides. What, how do I get access to it now? Security. We'll talk about that later. That that becomes a, a big issue because of the fragmentation of how security is implemented across all the different vendors. So to me it's an IP address I program to it and you know, off we go, but there's a lot of >>You like that pipe happens >>Iceberg chart, right? Like I'm the developer touching the APIs up there. There's a bunch of other things. BU service. >>Okay. Looking forward again. Gee, what's your take? Obviously we've had many conversations on the cube. What's your super cloud update. >>Yeah, so I, I view it as just an extension of what we see today before like maybe 10 years ago we were mashing up applications built on other SAS applications and whatnot. Now we're just extending that down to further primitives, not, we don't really care where our mashup resides, what cloud platform, where it sits to Tony's point, as long as you have an IP address. But beyond that, we're just gonna start to get little micro services and deeper into the applications. >>BP, what should you take? >>I think, I think super cloud to me is something that don't don't exist. It exists only on my laptop. That's the super cloud means to me. I know it takes a lot behind the scene to get that working of and running. But, but essentially, essentially that the everything having be able to touch physically versus not being able to touch anything is super cloud to me. >>So we, what Victoria was saying. Yeah, we see serverless out there, all these cool things happening. Exactly. And you look at the, some of the successful companies that have come in, I call V two cloud. Some are, some are saying the next gen, they're all building on top of the CapEx. I mean, if, why would you not wanna leverage all that work AWS is doing and now Azure, and obviously Google's out there and you got other, other, other clouds out there. But in terms of AWS as a hyperscaler, they're spending all the money and they're getting better. They're getting lower level. We're talking about some of that yesterday, data bricks, snowflake, Goldman Sachs there's industry clouds that could be powerhouse service providers to themselves and their vertical. Then you got specialty clouds. Like there could be a data cloud, there could be an identity cloud. So yeah. How does this sort itself out? How do you guys see that? Because can they coexist? >>But I think they have to right, because I, I think, you know, eventually organizations will get big enough where they can be strong and really market leading in multiple segments. But if you think about what it takes to really build a massive scaled out database company that, that DNA doesn't just overnight translate to identity or translate to video, it takes years to build that up. So in the meantime, all these guys have to understand that they are one part of the service stack to power the next gen solutions. And if they don't play well with each other, then you're gonna have a problem. >>So security, I think is one of the hardest problems of, of super cloud. And not only do you have too many tools and a lack of talent, but you've now got this new first line of defense, which is the cloud. And the problem is you've got multiple clouds. So you've got multiple first lines of defense with multiple cloud provider tools. And then the CISO, I guess, is the next line of defense with the application development team. You know, there to be the pivot point between strategy and execution. And I guess audit is the third line of the defense. So it's an even more complicated environment. So gee, how do you see that CSO role changing and, and can there actually be a unified security layer in Supercloud? >>Yeah, so I believe that that they can be, the role is definitely changing because now a CSO actually has to have a basic understanding of how clouds work, the dependency of clouds on the, on the business that they serve. And, and this is to your point, not only do we have these new lines and opening up in a tax surface, but they're coupled together. So we have supply chain type connections between this. So there's a coherence across these systems that a CISO has to kind of think about not only these Bo cloud boundaries, but the trust boundaries between them. So classic example visibility, wh what, where are these things and what are the dependencies in my business then of course you mentioned compliance. Am I regulatory? And then of course protecting and responding to this, >>You know? Yeah. The, the, the supply chain piece that you just mentioned. I mean, I feel like there's like these milestones stocks, net was a milestone, you know, obvious obviously log four J was another one, the supply chain hack with solar winds. Yep. You know, it's just, the adversary just keeps getting stronger and stronger and, and, and more agile. So, so is this a data? Do we solve this as a data problem? Is it, you know, you can't just throw more infrastructure at it. What are your thoughts >>For it? I think, you know, great, great point that you're brought up. We need to look at things very fundamentally. What is happening is security has the most difficult job in the cloud, especially super cloud. The poor guys are managing some, managing something or securing something that they can't govern, right? Your, your custodian of the cloud as your developers and DevOps, they are the ones who are defining, creating, destroying things in the cloud. And that guy sitting at the end of the tunnel, looking at things that what he gets and he has to immediately respond. That's why it has to be fundamentally solve. Number one, we talked about supply chain. We talked about the, the, the stuck net to wanna cry, to sort of wins, to know the most recent one on the pipeline. Once the interesting phenomena is that the way industry has moved super cloud, the attackers are also moving them super attackers, right? They have stopped. They have not stopped, but they have started slowly moving to the left, which is the governance part. So they have started attacking your source code, you know, impersonating the codes, replacing the binary, finding one is there. So if they can, if the cloud is built so early, why can't I go early and, and, and inject myself. >>So super hackers is coming to super thinking Hollywood right now. I mean, that brings up a good point. I mean, this whole trust thing is huge. I mean, I hear zero trust. I think, wait a minute, that's not the conference I was just at, we went to, we managed, we work with DockerCon and they were talking about trust services. Yeah. So supply chain source code has trust brokering going on. And yet you got zero trust, which is which are they contextually different? I mean, what, what, >>What, from my perspective, though, the same in that zero trust is a framework that starts with minimum privileges and then build up those privileges over time. Normally in today's dialogue, zero trust is around access. I'm not having a broad access. I'm having a narrow access around an application, but you can also extend those principles to usage. What can, how much privilege do I have within an application? I have to build up my trust to enhance and, and get extended privileges within an application. Of course you can then extend this naturally to applications, APIs, applications, talking with each other. And so by you, you have to restrict the attack surface that is based on a trust model fundamentally. And then to your point, I mean, there's always this residual that you have to deal with afterwards. >>So, so super cloud implies more surface area. You're talking about private. So here we go. So how, and by the way, the AWS was supposed to be at this conference. They said they couldn't make it. They had a schedule issue, but they wanted to be here, but I would ask them, how do you differentiate AWS going forward? Do you go IAS all the way? Do you release the pass layer up? How does this solve? Because you have native clouds that are doing great, the complexity on super cloud, and multi-cloud has to be solved. >>Let me offer maybe a different argument. So if you think about we're all old enough to see the history sort of re pendulum shift and it shifting back in a way, if you're arguing that this culmination of all these services in the form of cloud today, essentially moving up stack, then really this is a architectural pattern that's emerging, right? And therefore there needs to be a super cloud, almost operating system. So operating systems, if you build one before you need a scheduler, you need process handler, you need process isolation, you need memory storage, compute all that together. Now that is our sitting in different parts of the internet. And, and there is no operating system. Yes. And that's the gap, right? And so if you don't even have an operating system, how do you implement security? And that's the pain. Yeah, because today it's one off, directly from service to service. Like how many times can you set up SAML orchestration? You can have an entire team doing that, right. If that's, that's what you have to do. So I think that's ultimately the gap and, and we're sort of just revolving around this concept that there's missing an operating system for superpower. >>It's like Maribel Lopez said in the previous panel that Lord of the rings, there will be no one ring rule the ball. Right. Probably there is needs one. Oh yeah. But, but, but, so what happens? So again, security's the hardest problem. So Snowflake's gotta implement its security, you know, data bricks with an open source model has to implement its security. So there's these multiple security models. You talk about zero trust, which I, if, if I infer what you said, gee, it's essentially, if you don't have privilege access, you don't get access. Yeah. Right. If you, okay. Okay. So that's the framework. Fine. And then you gotta earn it over time. Yeah. Now companies like Amazon, they have the, the talent and the skills to implement that zero trust framework. Exactly. So, so the, the industry, you, you guys with the R and D have to actually ultimately build that, that super cloud framework, don't you? >>Yeah. But I would just look all of the major cloud providers, the ones you mentioned and more will have their own framework within their own environment. Right? Yeah. The problem is with super cloud, you're extending it across multiple ones. There's no standards. There's no easy way to integrate that. So now all of that is left to the developer who is like throwing out code as fast as they can >>Is their, their job is to abstract that, I mean, they've gotta secure the, the run time, they gotta secure the container. >>You have to >>Abstract it. Right. Okay. But, but they're not security pros or ops. >>Exactly. They're haves. >>But to, but to G's point, right. If everyone's implementing their own little Z TNA, then inherently, there's a blind trust between two vendors. Right. That has to >>Be, >>That has to be >>Established. That's implicit. You're saying, >>Yeah. But, but it's, it's contractual, it's not technology. Right. Because I'm turning something out in my cloud, you're turning out something in your cloud that says we've got something, some token exchange, which gives us trust. But what happens if that breaks down and whatever happens to the third party comes in? I think that's the problem. >>Yeah. In fact, in fact, the, if I put the, you know, combine one of those commons, the zero trust was build, keeping identity authentication, then authorization in mind, right? Yeah. This needs to be extended because the zero test definition now probably go into integrity. Yeah, exactly. Right. Yeah. I authenticated. I worked well with Tony in the past, but how do I know that something has changed on the Tony's side? Yeah, exactly. Right, right. That, that integrity is going to be very, very foundational. Given developers are building those third party libraries, those source code pumping stuff. The only way I can validate is, Hey, what has changed? >>And then throw edge into the equation, John and IOT and machine to machine. Exactly. It's just, >>Well, >>Yeah. I think, I think we have another example to build on Tony's operating system model. Okay. And that is the cloud access service broker model for SAS. So we, we have these services sitting out there, we've brokered them together. They're normally on user policies. What I can have access to what I can do, what I can't do, but that can be extended down to services and have the same kind of broker arrangement all through APIs. You have to establish that trust and the, and the policies there, and they can be dynamic and all of this stuff. But you can from an, either an operating system or a SAS interaction and integration model come to these same kind of points. So who >>Builds the, the, the secure Supercloud? Is it new guys like you? Is it your old company giants like Palo Alto? Who, who actually builds the and secures the Supercloud it sounds like it's an ecosystem. >>Yeah. It is an ecosystem. Absolutely. It's an ecosystem. >>Yeah. There's no one security Supercloud >>As well. No, but I, I do think there's one, there's one difference in that historically security has always focused on that shiny object. The, the, the, a particular solution to a particular threat when you're dealing with a, a cloud or super cloud, like the number of that is incalculable. So you have to come into some sort of platform. And so you will see if it's not one, you know, a finite number of platform type solutions that are trying to solve this on behalf of the >>Customer. That to your point, then get connected. >>I think it's gonna be like Unix, right? Like how many flavors of Unix were there out there? All of them 'em had a scheduler. All of them had these processes. All of them had their little compilers. You can compile to that system, target to that system. And for a while, it's gonna be very fragmented until multiple parties decide to converge. >>Right? Well, this is, this is the final question we have one minute left. I wish we had more time. This is a great panel. We'll we'll bring you guys back for sure. After the event, what one thing needs to happen to unify or get through the other side of this fragmentation than the challenges for Supercloud. Because remember the enterprise equation is solve complexity with more complexity. Well, that's not what the market wants. They want simplicity. They want SA they want ease of use. They want infrastructure risk code. What has to happen? What do you think each of you? >>So I, I can start and extending to the previous conversation. I think we need a consortium. We need, we need a framework that defines that if you really want to operate in super cloud, these are the 10 things that you must follow. It doesn't matter whether you take AWS slash or GCP, or you have all, and you will have the on-prem also, which means that it has to follow a pattern. And that pattern is what is required for super cloud. In my opinion, otherwise security is going everywhere. They're like they have to fix everything, find everything and so on. So forth, it's not gonna be possible. So they need a, they need a framework. They need a consortium. And it, this consortium needs to be, I think, needs to led by the cloud providers, because they're the ones who have these foundational infrastructure elements and the security vendor should contribute on providing more severe detections or findings. So that's, in my opinion is, should be the model. >>Well, thank you G >>Yeah, I would think it's more along the lines of a business model we've seen in cloud that the scale matters. And once you're big, you get bigger. We haven't seen that coals around either a vendor, a business model, whatnot, to bring all of this and connect it all together yet. So that value proposition in the industry I think is missing, but there's elements of it already available. >>I, I think there needs to be a mindset. If you look again, history repeating itself, the internet sort of came together around set of I ETF, RSC standards, everybody embraced and extended it. Right. But still there was at least a baseline. Yeah. And I think at that time, the, the largest and most innovative vendors understood that they couldn't do it by themselves. Right. And so I think what we need is a mindset where these big guys like Google, let's take an example. They're not gonna win at all, but they can have a substantial share. So how do they collaborate with the ecosystem around a set of standards so that they can bring, bring their differentiation and then embrace everybody >>Together. Guys, this has been fantastic. I mean, I would just chime in back in the day, those was proprietary nosis proprietary network protocols. You had kind of an enemy to rally around. I'm not sure. I see an enemy out here right now. So the clouds are doing great. Right? So it's a tough one, but I think super OS super consortiums, super business models are gonna emerge. Thanks so much for spending the time. Great conversation. Thank you for having us to bring, keep going hour superclouds here in Palo Alto, live coverage stream virtually I'm John with Dave. Thanks for watching. Stay with us for more coverage. This break.

>>Hello, everyone. Welcome to this cube conversation. I'm here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John furrier, host of the cube, and we have a great guest here. Barack Shuster. Who's in Tel-Aviv senior director of chief architect at bridge crew, a part of Palo Alto networks. He was formerly the co-founder of the company, then sold to Palo Alto networks Brock. Thanks for coming on this cube conversation. >>Thanks John. Great to be here. >>So one of the things I love about open source, and you're seeing a lot more of the trend now that talking about, you know, people doing incubators all over the world, having open source and having a builder, people who are starting companies, it's coming more and more, you you're one of them. And you've been part of this security open source cloud infrastructure infrastructure as code going back a while, and you guys had a lot of success. Now, open source infrastructure as code has moved up to the stack, certainly lot going down at the network layer, but developers just want to build security from day one, right? They don't want to have to get into the, the, the waiting game of slowing down their pipelining of code in the CIC D they want to move faster. And this has been one of the core conversations this year is how to make developers more productive and not just a cliche, but actually more productive and not have to wait to implement cloud native. Right. So you're in the middle of it. And you've got you're in, tell us, tell us what you guys are dealing with that, >>Right? Yeah. So I hear these needles working fast, having a large velocity of releases from many of my friends, the SRAs, the DevOps, and the security practitioners in different companies. And the thing that we asked ourselves three years ago was how can we simplify the process and make the security teams an enabler instead of a gatekeeper that blocks the releases? And the thing that we've done, then we understood that we should do is not only doing runtime scanning of the cloud infrastructure and the cloud native clusters, but also shift left the findings and fixings the remediation of security issues to the level of the code. So we started doing infrastructure is good. We Terraform Kubernetes manifests cloud formation, server less, and the list goes on and we created an open source product around it, named checkup, which has an amazing community of hundreds of contributors. Not all of them are Palo Alto employees. Most of them are community users from various companies. And we tried to and succeeded to the democratic side is the creation of policy as code the ability to inspect your infrastructure as code and tell you, Hey, this is the best practice that you should use consider using it before applying a misconfigured S3 bucket into production, or before applying a misconfigured Kubernetes cluster into your production or dev environment. And the goal, >>The goal, >>The goal is to do that from the ID from the moment that you write code and also to inspect your configuration in CGI and CD and in runtime. And also understand that if there is any drift out there and the ability to fix that in the source code, in the blueprint itself. >>So what I hear you saying is really two problems you're solving. One is the organizational policies around how things were done in a environment before all the old way. You know, the security teams do a review, you send a ticket, things are waiting, stop, wait, hurry up and wait kind of thing. And then there's the technical piece of it, right? Is that there's two pieces to that. >>Yeah, I think that one thing is the change of the methodologies. We understood that we should just work differently than what we used to do. Tickets are slow. They have priorities. You have a bottleneck, which is a small team of security practitioners. And honestly, a lot of the work is repetitive and can be democratized into the engineering teams. They should be able to understand, Hey, I wrote the code piece that provision this instance, I am the most suitable person as a developer to fix that piece of code and reapply it to the runtime environment. >>And then it also sets the table for our automation. It sets the table for policies, things that make things more efficient scaling. Cause you mentioned SRS are a big part of this to dev ops and SRE. Those, those folks are, are trying to move as fast as possible at scale, huge scale challenge. How does that impact the scale piece become into here? >>So both themes Esri's and security teams are about a link to deploying application, but new application releases into the production environment. And the thing that you can do is you can inspect all kinds of best practices, not only security, best practices, but also make sure that you have provision concurrencies on your serverless functions or the amount of auto-scaling groups is what you expect it to be. And you can scan all of those things in the level of your code before applying it to production. >>That's awesome. So good, good benefits scales a security team. It sounds like too as well. You could get that policy out there. So great stuff. I want to really quickly ask you about the event. You're hosting code two cloud summit. What are we going to see there? I'm going to host a panel. Of course, I'm looking forward to that as well. You get a lot of experts coming in there. Why are you having this event and what topics will be covered? >>So we wanted to talk on all of the shifts, left movement and all of the changes that have happened in the cloud security market since inception till today. And we brought in great people and great practitioners from both the dev ops side, the chaos engineering and the security practitioners, and everybody are having their opinion on what's the current status state, how things should be implemented in a mature environment and what the future might hold for the code and cloud security markets. The thing that we're going to focus on is all of the supply chain from securing the CCD itself, making sure your actions are not vulnerable to a shut injection or making sure your version control system are configured correctly with single sign-on MFA and having branch protection rules, but also open source security like SCA software composition analysis infrastructure as code security. Obviously Ron thinks security drifts and Kubernetes security. So we're going to talk on all of those different aspects and how each and every team is mitigating. The different risks that come with. >>You know, one of the things that you bring up when you hear you talking is that's the range of, of infrastructure as code. How has infrastructure as code changed? Cause you're, you know, there's dev ops and SRS now application developers, you still have to have programmable infrastructure. I mean, if infrastructure code is real realize up and down the stack, all aspects need to be programmable, which means you got to have the data, you got to have the ability to automate. How would you summarize kind of the state of infrastructure as code? >>So a few years ago, we started with physical servers where you carried the infrastructure on our back. I, I mounted them on the rack myself a few years ago and connected all of the different cables then came the revolution of BMS. We didn't do that anymore. We had one beefy appliance and we had 60 virtual servers running on one appliance. So we didn't have to carry new servers every time into the data center then came the cloud and made everything API first. And they bill and enabled us to write the best scripts to provision those resources. But it was not enough because he wanted to have a reproducible environment. The is written either in declarative language like Terraform or CloudFormation or imperative like CDK or polluted, but having a consistent way to deploy your application to multiple environments. And the stage after that is having some kind of a service catalog that will allow application developer to get the new releases up and running. >>And the way that it has evolved mass adoption of infrastructure as code is already happening. But that introduces the ability for velocity in deployment, but also new kinds of risks that we haven't thought about before as security practitioners, for example, you should vet all of the open source Terraform modules that you're using because you might have a leakage. Our form has a lot of access to secrets in your environment. And the state really contains sensitive objects like passwords. The other thing that has changed is we today we rely a lot on cloud infrastructure and on the past year we've seen the law for shell attack, for example, and also cloud providers have disclosed that they were vulnerable to log for shell attack. So we understand today that when we talk about cloud security, it's not only about the infrastructure itself, but it's also about is the infrastructure that we're using is using an open source package that is vulnerable. Are we using an open source package that is vulnerable, is our development pipeline is configured and the list goes on. So it's really a new approach of analyzing the entire software bill of material also called Asbell and understanding the different risks there. >>You know, I think this is a really great point and great insight because new opera, new solutions for new problems are new opportunities, right? So open source growth has been phenomenal. And you mentioned some of those Terraform and one of the projects and you started one checkoff, they're all good, but there's some holes in there and it's open source, it's free, everyone's building on it. So, you know, you have, and that's what it's for. And I think now is open source goes to the next level again, another generational inflection point it's it's, there's more contributors there's companies are involved. People are using it more. It becomes a really strong integration opportunity. So, so it's all free and it's how you use it. So this is a new kind of extension of how open source is used. And if you can factor in some of the things like, like threat vectors, you have to know the code. >>So there's no way to know it all. So you guys are scanning it doing things, but it's also huge system. It's not just one piece of code. You talking about cloud is becoming an operating system. It's a distributed computing environment, so whole new area of problem space to solve. So I love that. Love that piece. Where are you guys at on this now? How do you feel in terms of where you are in the progress bar of the solution? Because the supply chain is usually a hardware concept. People can relate to, but when you bring in software, how you source software is like sourcing a chip or, or a piece of hardware, you got to watch where it came from and you gotta track track that. So, or scan it and validate it, right? So these are new, new things. Where are we with? >>So you're, you're you're right. We have a lot of moving parts. And really the supply chain terms of came from the automobile industry. You have a car, you have an engine engine might be created by a different vendor. You have the wheels, they might be created by a different vendor. So when you buy your next Chevy or Ford, you might have a wheels from continental or other than the first. And actually software is very similar. When we build software, we host it on a cloud provider like AWS, GCP, Azure, not on our own infrastructure anymore. And when we're building software, we're using open-source packages that are maintained in the other half of the war. And we don't always know in person, the people who've created that piece. And we do not have a vetting process, even a human vetting process on these, everything that we've created was really made by us or by a trusted source. >>And this is where we come in. We help you empower you, the engineer, we tools to analyze all of the dependency tree of your software, bill of materials. We will scan your infrastructure code, your application packages that you're using from package managers like NPM or PI. And we scan those open source dependencies. We would verify that your CIC is secure. Your version control system is secure. And the thing that we will always focus on is making a fixed accessible to you. So let's say that you're using a misconfigured backup. We have a bot that will fix the code for you. And let's say that you have a, a vulnerable open-source package and it was fixed in a later version. We will bump the version for you to make your code secure. And we will also have the same process on your run time environment. So we will understand that your environment is secure from code to cloud, or if there are any three out there that your engineering team should look at, >>That's a great service. And I think this is cutting edge from a technology perspective. What's what are some of the new cloud native technologies that you see in emerging fast, that's getting traction and ultimately having a product market fit in, in this area because I've seen Cooper. And you mentioned Kubernetes, that's one of the areas that have a lot more work to do or being worked on now that customers are paying attention to. >>Yeah, so definitely Kubernetes is, has started in growth companies and now it's existing every fortune 100 companies. So you can find anything, every large growler scale organization and also serverless functions are, are getting into a higher adoption rate. I think that the thing that we seeing the most massive adoption off is actually infrastructure as code during COVID. A lot of organization went through a digital transformation and in that process, they have started to work remotely and have agreed on migrating to a new infrastructure, not the data center, but the cloud provider. So at other teams that were not experienced with those clouds are now getting familiar with it and getting exposed to new capabilities. And with that also new risks. >>Well, great stuff. Great to chat with you. I want to ask you while you're here, you mentioned depth infrastructure as code for the folks that get it right. There's some significant benefits. We don't get it. Right. We know what that looks like. What are some of the benefits that can you share personally, or for the folks watching out there, if you get it for sure. Cause code, right? What does the future look like? What does success look like? What's that path look like when you get it right versus not doing it or getting it wrong? >>I think that every engineer dream is wanting to be impactful, to work fast and learn new things and not to get a PagerDuty on a Friday night. So if you get infrastructure ride, you have a process where everything is declarative and is peer reviewed both by you and automated frameworks like bridge and checkoff. And also you have the ability to understand that, Hey, once I re I read it once, and from that point forward, it's reproducible and it also have a status. So only changes will be applied and it will enable myself and my team to work faster and collaborate in a better way on the cloud infrastructure. Let's say that you'd done doing infrastructure as code. You have one resource change by one team member and another resource change by another team member. And the different dependencies between those resources are getting fragmented and broken. You cannot change your database without your application being aware of that. You cannot change your load Bonser without the obligation being aware of that. So infrastructure skullduggery enables you to do those changes in a, in a mature fashion that will foes Le less outages. >>Yeah. A lot of people getting PagerDuty's on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and on the old way, new way, new, you don't want to break up your Friday night after a nice dinner, either rock, do you know? Well, thanks for coming in all the way from Tel-Aviv really appreciate it. I wish you guys, everything the best over there in Delhi, we will see you at the event that's coming up. We're looking forward to the code to cloud summit and all the great insight you guys will have. Thanks for coming on and sharing the story. Looking forward to talking more with you Brock thanks for all the insight on security infrastructures code and all the cool things you're doing at bridge crew. >>Thank you, John. >>Okay. This is the cube conversation here at Palo Alto, California. I'm John furrier hosted the cube. Thanks for watching.

>>Everyone wants a cloud operating model. Since the introduction of the modern cloud. Last decade, the entire technology landscape has changed. We've learned a lot from the hyperscalers, especially from AWS. Now, one thing is certain in the technology business. It's so competitive. Then if a faster, better, cheaper idea comes along, the industry will move quickly to adopt it. They'll add their unique value and then they'll bring solutions to the market. And that's precisely what's happening throughout the technology industry because of cloud. And one of the best examples is Amazon's nitro. That's AWS has custom built hypervisor that delivers on the promise of more efficiently using resources and expanding things like processor, optionality for customers. It's a secret weapon for Amazon. As, as we, as we wrote last year, every infrastructure company needs something like nitro to compete. Why do we say this? Well, Wiki Bon our research arm estimates that nearly 30% of CPU cores in the data center are wasted. >>They're doing work that they weren't designed to do well, specifically offloading networking, storage, and security tasks. So if you can eliminate that waste, you can recapture dollars that drop right to the bottom line. That's why every company needs a nitro like solution. As a result of these developments, customers are rethinking networks and how they utilize precious compute resources. They can't, or won't put everything into the public cloud for many reasons. That's one of the tailwinds for tier two cloud service providers and why they're growing so fast. They give options to customers that don't want to keep investing in building out their own data centers, and they don't want to migrate all their workloads to the public cloud. So these providers and on-prem customers, they want to be more like hyperscalers, right? They want to be more agile and they do that. They're distributing, networking and security functions and pushing them closer to the applications. >>Now, at the same time, they're unifying their view of the network. So it can be less fragmented, manage more efficiently with more automation and better visibility. How are they doing this? Well, that's what we're going to talk about today. Welcome to changing the game for cloud networking made possible by pluribus networks. My name is Dave Vellante and today on this special cube presentation, John furrier, and I are going to explore these issues in detail. We'll dig into new solutions being created by pluribus and Nvidia to specifically address offloading, wasted resources, accelerating performance, isolating data, and making networks more secure all while unifying the network experience. We're going to start on the west coast and our Palo Alto studios, where John will talk to Mike of pluribus and AMI, but Donnie of Nvidia, then we'll bring on Alessandra Bobby airy of pluribus and Pete Lummus from Nvidia to take a deeper dive into the technology. And then we're gonna bring it back here to our east coast studio and get the independent analyst perspective from Bob Liberte of the enterprise strategy group. We hope you enjoy the program. Okay, let's do this over to John >>Okay. Let's kick things off. We're here at my cafe. One of the TMO and pluribus networks and NAMI by Dani VP of networking, marketing, and developer ecosystem at Nvidia. Great to have you welcome folks. >>Thank you. Thanks. >>So let's get into the, the problem situation with cloud unified network. What problems are out there? What challenges do cloud operators have Mike let's get into it. >>Yeah, it really, you know, the challenges we're looking at are for non hyperscalers that's enterprises, governments, um, tier two service providers, cloud service providers, and the first mandate for them is to become as agile as a hyperscaler. So they need to be able to deploy services and security policies. And second, they need to be able to abstract the complexity of the network and define things in software while it's accelerated in hardware. Um, really ultimately they need a single operating model everywhere. And then the second thing is they need to distribute networking and security services out to the edge of the host. Um, we're seeing a growth in cyber attacks. Um, it's, it's not slowing down. It's only getting worse and, you know, solving for this security problem across clouds is absolutely critical. And the way to do it is to move security out to the host. >>Okay. With that goal in mind, what's the pluribus vision. How does this tie together? >>Yeah. So, um, basically what we see is, uh, that this demands a new architecture and that new architecture has four tenants. The first tenant is unified and simplified cloud networks. If you look at cloud networks today, there's, there's sort of like discreet bespoke cloud networks, you know, per hypervisor, per private cloud edge cloud public cloud. Each of the public clouds have different networks that needs to be unified. You know, if we want these folks to be able to be agile, they need to be able to issue a single command or instantiate a security policy across all those locations with one command and not have to go to each one. The second is like I mentioned, distributed security, um, distributed security without compromise, extended out to the host is absolutely critical. So micro-segmentation and distributed firewalls, but it doesn't stop there. They also need pervasive visibility. >>You know, it's, it's, it's sort of like with security, you really can't see you can't protect what you can't see. So you need visibility everywhere. The problem is visibility to date has been very expensive. Folks have had to basically build a separate overlay network of taps, packet brokers, tap aggregation infrastructure that really needs to be built into this unified network I'm talking about. And the last thing is automation. All of this needs to be SDN enabled. So this is related to my comment about abstraction abstract, the complexity of all of these discreet networks, physic whatever's down there in the physical layer. Yeah. I don't want to see it. I want to abstract it. I wanted to find things in software, but I do want to leverage the power of hardware to accelerate that. So that's the fourth tenant is SDN automation. >>Mike, we've been talking on the cube a lot about this architectural shift and customers are looking at this. This is a big part of everyone who's looking at cloud operations next gen, how do we get there? How do customers get this vision realized? >>That's a great question. And I appreciate the tee up. I mean, we're, we're here today for that reason. We're introducing two things today. Um, the first is a unified cloud networking vision, and that is a vision of where pluribus is headed with our partners like Nvidia longterm. Um, and that is about, uh, deploying a common operating model, SDN enabled SDN, automated hardware, accelerated across all clouds. Um, and whether that's underlying overlay switch or server, um, hype, any hypervisor infrastructure containers, any workload doesn't matter. So that's ultimately where we want to get. And that's what we talked about earlier. Um, the first step in that vision is what we call the unified cloud fabric. And this is the next generation of our adaptive cloud fabric. Um, and what's nice about this is we're not starting from scratch. We have a, a, an award-winning adaptive cloud fabric product that is deployed globally. Um, and in particular, uh, we're very proud of the fact that it's deployed in over a hundred tier one mobile operators as the network fabric for their 4g and 5g virtualized cores. We know how to build carrier grade, uh, networking infrastructure, what we're doing now, um, to realize this next generation unified cloud fabric is we're extending from the switch to this Nvidia Bluefield to DPU. We know there's a, >>Hold that up real quick. That's a good, that's a good prop. That's the blue field and video. >>It's the Nvidia Bluefield two DPU data processing unit. And, um, uh, you know, what we're doing, uh, fundamentally is extending our SDN automated fabric, the unified cloud fabric out to the host, but it does take processing power. So we knew that we didn't want to do, we didn't want to implement that running on the CPU, which is what some other companies do because it consumes revenue generating CPU's from the application. So a DPU is a perfect way to implement this. And we knew that Nvidia was the leader with this blue field too. And so that is the first that's, that's the first step in the getting into realizing this vision. >>I mean, Nvidia has always been powering some great workloads of GPU. Now you've got DPU networking and then video is here. What is the relationship with clothes? How did that come together? Tell us the story. >>Yeah. So, you know, we've been working with pluribus for quite some time. I think the last several months was really when it came to fruition and, uh, what pluribus is trying to build and what Nvidia has. So we have, you know, this concept of a Bluefield data processing unit, which if you think about it, conceptually does really three things, offload, accelerate an isolate. So offload your workloads from your CPU to your data processing unit infrastructure workloads that is, uh, accelerate. So there's a bunch of acceleration engines. So you can run infrastructure workloads much faster than you would otherwise, and then isolation. So you have this nice security isolation between the data processing unit and your other CPU environment. And so you can run completely isolated workloads directly on the data processing unit. So we introduced this, you know, a couple of years ago, and with pluribus, you know, we've been talking to the pluribus team for quite some months now. >>And I think really the combination of what pluribus is trying to build and what they've developed around this unified cloud fabric, uh, is fits really nicely with the DPU and running that on the DPU and extending it really from your physical switch, all the way to your host environment, specifically on the data processing unit. So if you think about what's happening as you add data processing units to your environment. So every server we believe over time is going to have data processing units. So now you'll have to manage that complexity from the physical network layer to the host layer. And so what pluribus is really trying to do is extending the network fabric from the host, from the switch to the host, and really have that single pane of glass for network operators to be able to configure provision, manage all of the complexity of the network environment. >>So that's really how the partnership truly started. And so it started really with extending the network fabric, and now we're also working with them on security. So, you know, if you sort of take that concept of isolation and security isolation, what pluribus has within their fabric is the concept of micro-segmentation. And so now you can take that extended to the data processing unit and really have, um, isolated micro-segmentation workloads, whether it's bare metal cloud native environments, whether it's virtualized environments, whether it's public cloud, private cloud hybrid cloud. So it really is a magical partnership between the two companies with their unified cloud fabric running on, on the DPU. >>You know, what I love about this conversation is it reminds me of when you have these changing markets, the product gets pulled out of the market and, and you guys step up and create these new solutions. And I think this is a great example. So I have to ask you, how do you guys differentiate what sets this apart for customers with what's in it for the customer? >>Yeah. So I mentioned, you know, three things in terms of the value of what the Bluefield brings, right? There's offloading, accelerating, isolating, that's sort of the key core tenants of Bluefield. Um, so that, you know, if you sort of think about what, um, what Bluefields, what we've done, you know, in terms of the differentiation, we're really a robust platform for innovation. So we introduced Bluefield to, uh, last year, we're introducing Bluefield three, which is our next generation of Bluefields, you know, we'll have five X, the arm compute capacity. It will have 400 gig line rate acceleration, four X better crypto acceleration. So it will be remarkably better than the previous generation. And we'll continue to innovate and add, uh, chips to our portfolio every, every 18 months to two years. Um, so that's sort of one of the key areas of differentiation. The other is the, if you look at Nvidia and, and you know, what we're sort of known for is really known for our AI artificial intelligence and our artificial intelligence software, as well as our GPU. >>So you look at artificial intelligence and the combination of artificial intelligence plus data processing. This really creates the, you know, faster, more efficient, secure AI systems from the core of your data center, all the way out to the edge. And so with Nvidia, we really have these converged accelerators where we've combined the GPU, which does all your AI processing with your data processing with the DPU. So we have this convergence really nice convergence of that area. And I would say the third area is really around our developer environment. So, you know, one of the key, one of our key motivations at Nvidia is really to have our partner ecosystem, embrace our technology and build solutions around our technology. So if you look at what we've done with the DPU, with credit and an SDK, which is an open SDK called Doka, and it's an open SDK for our partners to really build and develop solutions using Bluefield and using all these accelerated libraries that we expose through Doka. And so part of our differentiation is really building this open ecosystem for our partners to take advantage and build solutions around our technology. >>You know, what's exciting is when I hear you talk, it's like you realize that there's no one general purpose network anymore. Everyone has their own super environment Supercloud or these new capabilities. They can really craft their own, I'd say, custom environment at scale with easy tools. Right. And it's all kind of, again, this is the new architecture Mike, you were talking about, how does customers run this effectively? Cost-effectively and how do people migrate? >>Yeah, I, I think that is the key question, right? So we've got this beautiful architecture. You, you know, Amazon nitro is a, is a good example of, of a smart NIC architecture that has been successfully deployed, but enterprises and serve tier two service providers and tier one service providers and governments are not Amazon, right? So they need to migrate there and they need this architecture to be cost-effective. And, and that's, that's super key. I mean, the reality is deep user moving fast, but they're not going to be, um, deployed everywhere on day one. Some servers will have DPS right away, some servers will have use and a year or two. And then there are devices that may never have DPS, right. IOT gateways, or legacy servers, even mainframes. Um, so that's the beauty of a solution that creates a fabric across both the switch and the DPU, right. >>Um, and by leveraging the Nvidia Bluefield DPU, what we really like about it is it's open. Um, and that drives, uh, cost efficiencies. And then, um, uh, you know, with this, with this, our architectural approach effectively, you get a unified solution across switch and DPU workload independent doesn't matter what hypervisor it is, integrated visibility, integrated security, and that can, uh, create tremendous cost efficiencies and, and really extract a lot of the expense from, from a capital perspective out of the network, as well as from an operational perspective, because now I have an SDN automated solution where I'm literally issuing a command to deploy a network service or to create or deploy our security policy and is deployed everywhere, automatically saving the oppor, the network operations team and the security operations team time. >>All right. So let me rewind that because that's super important. Get the unified cloud architecture, I'm the customer guy, but it's implemented, what's the value again, take, take me through the value to me. I have a unified environment. What's the value. >>Yeah. So I mean, the value is effectively, um, that, so there's a few pieces of value. The first piece of value is, um, I'm creating this clean D mark. I'm taking networking to the host. And like I mentioned, we're not running it on the CPU. So in implementations that run networking on the CPU, there's some conflict between the dev ops team who owned the server and the NetApps team who own the network because they're installing software on the, on the CPU stealing cycles from what should be revenue generating. Uh CPU's. So now by, by terminating the networking on the DPU, we click create this real clean DMARC. So the dev ops folks are happy because they don't necessarily have the skills to manage network and they don't necessarily want to spend the time managing networking. They've got their network counterparts who are also happy the NetApps team, because they want to control the networking. >>And now we've got this clean DMARC where the DevOps folks get the services they need and the NetApp folks get the control and agility they need. So that's a huge value. Um, the next piece of value is distributed security. This is essential. I mentioned earlier, you know, put pushing out micro-segmentation and distributed firewall, basically at the application level, right, where I create these small, small segments on an by application basis. So if a bad actor does penetrate the perimeter firewall, they're contained once they get inside. Cause the worst thing is a bad actor, penetrates a perimeter firewall and can go wherever they want and wreak havoc. Right? And so that's why this, this is so essential. Um, and the next benefit obviously is this unified networking operating model, right? Having, uh, uh, uh, an operating model across switch and server underlay and overlay, workload agnostic, making the life of the NetApps teams much easier so they can focus their time on really strategy instead of spending an afternoon, deploying a single villain, for example. >>Awesome. And I think also from my standpoint, I mean, perimeter security is pretty much, I mean, they're out there, it gets the firewall still out there exists, but pretty much they're being breached all the time, the perimeter. So you have to have this new security model. And I think the other thing that you mentioned, the separation between dev ops is cool because the infrastructure is code is about making the developers be agile and build security in from day one. So this policy aspect is, is huge. Um, new control points. I think you guys have a new architecture that enables the security to be handled more flexible. >>Right. >>That seems to be the killer feature here, >>Right? Yeah. If you look at the data processing unit, I think one of the great things about sort of this new architecture, it's really the foundation for zero trust it's. So like you talked about the perimeter is getting breached. And so now each and every compute node has to be protected. And I think that's sort of what you see with the partnership between pluribus and Nvidia is the DPU is really the foundation of zero trust. And pluribus is really building on that vision with, uh, allowing sort of micro-segmentation and being able to protect each and every compute node as well as the underlying network. >>This is super exciting. This is an illustration of how the market's evolving architectures are being reshaped and refactored for cloud scale and all this new goodness with data. So I gotta ask how you guys go into market together. Michael, start with you. What's the relationship look like in the go to market with an Nvidia? >>Sure. Um, I mean, we're, you know, we're super excited about the partnership, obviously we're here together. Um, we think we've got a really good solution for the market, so we're jointly marketing it. Um, uh, you know, obviously we appreciate that Nvidia is open. Um, that's, that's sort of in our DNA, we're about open networking. They've got other ISV who are gonna run on Bluefield too. We're probably going to run on other DPS in the, in the future, but right now, um, we're, we feel like we're partnered with the number one, uh, provider of DPS in the world and, uh, super excited about, uh, making a splash with it. >>I'm in get the hot product. >>Yeah. So Bluefield too, as I mentioned was GA last year, we're introducing, uh, well, we now also have the converged accelerator. So I talked about artificial intelligence or artificial intelligence with the Bluefield DPU, all of that put together on a converged accelerator. The nice thing there is you can either run those workloads. So if you have an artificial intelligence workload and an infrastructure workload, you can warn them separately on the same platform or you can actually use, uh, you can actually run artificial intelligence applications on the Bluefield itself. So that's what the converged accelerator really brings to the table. Uh, so that's available now. Then we have Bluefield three, which will be available late this year. And I talked about sort of, you know, uh, how much better that next generation of Bluefield is in comparison to Bluefield two. So we will see Bluefield three shipping later on this year, and then our software stack, which I talked about, which is called Doka we're on our second version are Doka one dot two. >>We're releasing Doka one dot three, uh, in about two months from now. And so that's really our open ecosystem framework. So allow you to program the Bluefields. So we have all of our acceleration libraries, um, security libraries, that's all packed into this STK called Doka. And it really gives that simplicity to our partners to be able to develop on top of Bluefield. So as we add new generations of Bluefield, you know, next, next year, we'll have, you know, another version and so on and so forth Doka is really that unified unified layer that allows, um, Bluefield to be both forwards compatible and backwards compatible. So partners only really have to think about writing to that SDK once, and then it automatically works with future generations of Bluefields. So that's sort of the nice thing around, um, around Doka. And then in terms of our go to market model, we're working with every, every major OEM. So, uh, later on this year, you'll see, you know, major server manufacturers, uh, releasing Bluefield enabled servers. So, um, more to come >>Awesome, save money, make it easier, more capabilities, more workload power. This is the future of, of cloud operations. >>Yeah. And, and, and, uh, one thing I'll add is, um, we are, um, we have a number of customers as you'll hear in the next segment, um, that are already signed up and we'll be working with us for our, uh, early field trial starting late April early may. Um, we are accepting registrations. You can go to www.pluribusnetworks.com/e F T a. If you're interested in signing up for, um, uh, being part of our field trial and providing feedback on the product, >>Awesome innovation and network. Thanks so much for sharing the news. Really appreciate it. Thanks so much. Okay. In a moment, we'll be back to look deeper in the product, the integration security zero trust use cases. You're watching the cube, the leader in enterprise tech coverage, >>Cloud networking is complex and fragmented slowing down your business. How can you simplify and unify your cloud networks to increase agility and business velocity? >>Pluribus unified cloud networking provides a unified simplify and agile network fabric across all clouds. It brings the simplicity of a public cloud operation model to private clouds, dramatically reducing complexity and improving agility, availability, and security. Now enterprises and service providers can increase their business philosophy and delight customers in the distributed multi-cloud era. We achieve this with a new approach to cloud networking, pluribus unified cloud fabric. This open vendor, independent network fabric, unifies, networking, and security across distributed clouds. The first step is extending the fabric to servers equipped with data processing units, unifying the fabric across switches and servers, and it doesn't stop there. The fabric is unified across underlay and overlay networks and across all workloads and virtualization environments. The unified cloud fabric is optimized for seamless migration to this new distributed architecture, leveraging the power of the DPU for application level micro-segmentation distributed fireball and encryption while still supporting those servers and devices that are not equipped with a DPU. Ultimately the unified cloud fabric extends seamlessly across distributed clouds, including central regional at edge private clouds and public clouds. The unified cloud fabric is a comprehensive network solution. That includes everything you need for clouds, networking built in SDN automation, distributed security without compromises, pervasive wire speed, visibility and application insight available on your choice of open networking switches and DP use all at the lowest total cost of ownership. The end result is a dramatically simplified unified cloud networking architecture that unifies your distributed clouds and frees your business to move at cloud speed, >>To learn more, visit www.pluribusnetworks.com. >>Okay. We're back I'm John ferry with the cube, and we're going to go deeper into a deep dive into unified cloud networking solution from Clovis and Nvidia. And we'll examine some of the use cases with Alessandra Burberry, VP of product management and pullovers networks and Pete Bloomberg who's director of technical marketing and video remotely guys. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >>Yeah. >>So deep dive, let's get into the what and how Alexandra we heard earlier about the pluribus Nvidia partnership and the solution you're working together on what is it? >>Yeah. First let's talk about the water. What are we really integrating with the Nvidia Bluefield, the DPO technology, uh, plugable says, um, uh, there's been shipping, uh, in, uh, in volume, uh, in multiple mission critical networks. So this advisor one network operating systems, it runs today on a merchant silicone switches and effectively it's a standard open network operating system for data center. Um, and the novelty about this system that integrates a distributed control plane for, at water made effective in SDN overlay. This automation is a completely open and interoperable and extensible to other type of clouds is not enclosed them. And this is actually what we're now porting to the Nvidia DPO. >>Awesome. So how does it integrate into Nvidia hardware and specifically how has pluribus integrating its software with the Nvidia hardware? >>Yeah, I think, uh, we leverage some of the interesting properties of the Bluefield, the DPO hardware, which allows actually to integrate, uh, um, uh, our software, our network operating system in a manner which is completely isolated and independent from the guest operating system. So the first byproduct of this approach is that whatever we do at the network level on the DPU card that is completely agnostic to the hypervisor layer or OSTP layer running on, uh, on the host even more, um, uh, we can also independently manage this network, know that the switch on a Neek effectively, um, uh, managed completely independently from the host. You don't have to go through the network operating system, running on x86 to control this network node. So you throw yet the experience effectively of a top of rack for virtual machine or a top of rack for, uh, Kubernetes bots, where instead of, uh, um, if you allow me with the analogy instead of connecting a server knee directly to a switchboard, now you're connecting a VM virtual interface to a virtual interface on the switch on an ache. >>And, uh, also as part of this integration, we, uh, put a lot of effort, a lot of emphasis in, uh, accelerating the entire, uh, data plane for networking and security. So we are taking advantage of the DACA, uh, Nvidia DACA API to program the accelerators. And these accomplished two things with that. Number one, uh, you, uh, have much greater performance, much better performance. They're running the same network services on an x86 CPU. And second, this gives you the ability to free up, I would say around 20, 25% of the server capacity to be devoted either to, uh, additional workloads to run your cloud applications, or perhaps you can actually shrink the power footprint and compute footprint of your data center by 20%, if you want to run the same number of compute workloads. So great efficiencies in the overall approach, >>And this is completely independent of the server CPU, right? >>Absolutely. There is zero code from running on the x86, and this is what we think this enables a very clean demarcation between computer and network. >>So Pete, I gotta get, I gotta get you in here. We heard that, uh, the DPU is enabled cleaner separation of dev ops and net ops. Can you explain why that's important because everyone's talking DevSecOps right now, you've got net ops, net, net sec ops, this separation. Why is this clean separation important? >>Yeah, I think it's a, you know, it's a pragmatic solution in my opinion. Um, you know, we wish the world was all kind of rainbows and unicorns, but it's a little, a little messier than that. And I think a lot of the dev ops stuff and that, uh, mentality and philosophy, there's a natural fit there. Right? You have applications running on servers. So you're talking about developers with those applications integrating with the operators of those servers. Well, the network has always been this other thing and the network operators have always had a very different approach to things than compute operators. And, you know, I think that we, we in the networking industry have gotten closer together, but there's still a gap there's still some distance. And I think in that distance, isn't going to be closed. And so, you know, again, it comes down to pragmatism and I think, you know, one of my favorite phrases is look good fences, make good neighbors. And that's what this is. >>Yeah. That's a great point because dev ops has become kind of the calling card for cloud, right. But dev ops is as simply infrastructure as code and infrastructure is networking, right? So if infrastructure is code, you know, you're talking about, you know, that part of the stack under the covers under the hood, if you will, this is super important distinction. And this is where the innovation is. Can you elaborate on how you see that? Because this is really where the action is right now. >>Yeah, exactly. And I think that's where, um, one from, from the policy, the security that the zero trust aspect of this, right? If you get it wrong on that network side, all of a sudden you, you can totally open up that those capabilities. And so security is part of that. But the other part is thinking about this at scale, right? So we're taking one top of rack switch and adding, you know, up to 48 servers per rack. And so that ability to automate, orchestrate and manage at scale becomes absolutely critical. >>I'll Sandra, this is really the why we're talking about here, and this is scale. And again, getting it right. If you don't get it right, you're going to be really kind of up, you know what you know, so this is a huge deal. Networking matters, security matters, automation matters, dev ops, net ops, all coming together, clean separation, um, help us understand how this joint solution with Nvidia fits into the pluribus unified cloud networking vision, because this is what people are talking about and working on right now. >>Yeah, absolutely. So I think here with this solution, we're attacking two major problems in cloud networking. One is, uh, operation of, uh, cloud networking. And the second is a distributing security services in the cloud infrastructure. First, let me talk about the first water. We really unifying. If we're unifying something, something must be at least fragmented or this jointed and the, what is this joint that is actually the network in the cloud. If you look holistically, how networking is deployed in the cloud, you have your physical fabric infrastructure, right? Your switches and routers, you'll build your IP clause fabric leaf in spine typologies. This is actually a well understood the problem. I, I would say, um, there are multiple vendors, uh, uh, with, uh, um, uh, let's say similar technologies, um, very well standardized, whether you will understood, um, and almost a commodity, I would say building an IP fabric these days, but this is not the place where you deploy most of your services in the cloud, particularly from a security standpoint, two services are actually now moved into the compute layer where you actually were called builders, have to instrument the, a separate, uh, network virtualization layer, where they deploy segmentation and security closer to the workloads. >>And this is where the complication arise. These high value part of the cloud network is where you have a plethora of options that they don't talk to each other. And they are very dependent on the kind of hypervisor or compute solution you choose. Um, for example, the networking API to be between an GSXI environment or an hyper V or a Zen are completely disjointed. You have multiple orchestration layers. And when, and then when you throw in also Kubernetes in this, in this, in this type of architecture, uh, you're introducing yet another level of networking. And when Kubernetes runs on top of VMs, which is a prevalent approach, you actually just stacking up multiple networks on the compute layer that they eventually run on the physical fabric infrastructure. Those are all ships in the nights effectively, right? They operate as completely disjointed. And we're trying to attack this problem first with the notion of a unified fabric, which is independent from any workloads, whether it's this fabric spans on a switch, which can be con connected to a bare metal workload, or can span all the way inside the DPU, uh, where, um, you have, uh, your multi hypervisor compute environment. >>It's one API, one common network control plane, and one common set of segmentation services for the network. That's probably the number one, >>You know, it's interesting you, man, I hear you talking, I hear one network month, different operating models reminds me of the old serverless days. You know, there's still servers, but they call it serverless. Is there going to be a term network list? Because at the end of the day, it should be one network, not multiple operating models. This, this is a problem that you guys are working on. Is that right? I mean, I'm not, I'm just joking server listen network list, but the idea is it should be one thing. >>Yeah, it's effectively. What we're trying to do is we are trying to recompose this fragmentation in terms of network operation, across physical networking and server networking server networking is where the majority of the problems are because of the, uh, as much as you have standardized the ways of building, uh, physical networks and cloud fabrics with IP protocols and internet, you don't have that kind of, uh, uh, sort of, uh, um, um, uh, operational efficiency, uh, at the server layer. And, uh, this is what we're trying to attack first. The, with this technology, the second aspect we're trying to attack is are we distribute the security services throughout the infrastructure, more efficiently, whether it's micro-segmentation is a stateful firewall services, or even encryption. Those are all capabilities enabled by the blue field, uh, uh, the Butte technology and, uh, uh, we can actually integrate those capabilities directly into the nettle Fabrica, uh, limiting dramatically, at least for east-west traffic, the sprawl of, uh, security appliances, whether virtual or physical, that is typically the way the people today, uh, segment and secure the traffic in the cloud. >>Awesome. Pete, all kidding aside about network lists and serverless kind of fun, fun play on words there, the network is one thing it's basically distributed computing, right? So I love to get your thoughts about this distributed security with zero trust as the driver for this architecture you guys are doing. Can you share in more detail the depth of why DPU based approach is better than alternatives? >>Yeah, I think what's, what's beautiful and kind of what the DPU brings. That's new to this model is a completely isolated compute environment inside. So, you know, it's the, uh, yo dog, I heard you like a server, so I put a server inside your server. Uh, and so we provide, uh, you know, armed CPU's memory and network accelerators inside, and that is completely isolated from the host. So the server, the, the actual x86 host just thinks it has a regular Nick in there, but you actually have this full control plane thing. It's just like taking your top of rack switch and shoving it inside of your compute node. And so you have not only the separation, um, within the data plane, but you have this complete control plane separation. So you have this element that the network team can now control and manage, but we're taking all of the functions we used to do at the top of rack switch, and we're just shooting them now. >>And, you know, as time has gone on we've, we've struggled to put more and more and more into that network edge. And the reality is the network edge is the compute layer, not the top of rack switch layer. And so that provides this phenomenal enforcement point for security and policy. And I think outside of today's solutions around virtual firewalls, um, the other option is centralized appliances. And even if you can get one that can scale large enough, the question is, can you afford it? And so what we end up doing is we kind of hope that of aliens good enough, or we hope that if the excellent tunnel is good enough and we can actually apply more advanced techniques there because we can't physically, you know, financially afford that appliance to see all of the traffic. And now that we have a distributed model with this accelerator, we could do it. >>So what's the what's in it for the customer. I real quick, cause I think this is interesting point. You mentioned policy, everyone in networking knows policy is just a great thing and it adds, you hear it being talked about up the stack as well. When you start getting to orchestrating microservices and whatnot, all that good stuff going on there, containers and whatnot and modern applications. What's the benefit to the customers with this approach? Because what I heard was more scale, more edge deployment, flexibility, relative to security policies and application enablement. I mean, is that what what's the customer get out of this architecture? What's the enablement. >>It comes down to, uh, taking again the capabilities that were in that top of rack switch and asserting them down. So that makes simplicity smaller blast radiuses for failure, smaller failure domains, maintenance on the networks, and the systems become easier. Your ability to integrate across workloads becomes infinitely easier. Um, and again, you know, we always want to kind of separate each one of those layers. So just as in say, a VX land network, my leaf and spine don't have to be tightly coupled together. I can now do this at a different layer. And so you can run a DPU with any networking in the core there. And so you get this extreme flexibility. You can start small, you can scale large. Um, you know, to me, the, the possibilities are endless. Yes, >>It's a great security control plan. Really flexibility is key. And, and also being situationally aware of any kind of threats or new vectors or whatever's happening in the network. Alessandra, this is huge upside, right? You've already identified some successes with some customers on your early field trials. What are they doing and why are they attracted to the solution? >>Yeah, I think the response from customers has been, uh, the most, uh, encouraging and, uh, exciting, uh, for, uh, for us to, uh, to sort of continue and work and develop this product. And we have actually learned a lot in the process. Um, we talked to tier two tier three cloud providers. Uh, we talked to, uh, SP um, software Tyco type of networks, uh, as well as a large enterprise customers, um, in, uh, one particular case. Um, uh, one, uh, I think, um, let me, let me call out a couple of examples here, just to give you a flavor. Uh, there is a service provider, a cloud provider, uh, in Asia who is actually managing a cloud, uh, where they are offering services based on multiple hypervisors. They are native services based on Zen, but they also are on ramp into the cloud, uh, workloads based on, uh, ESI and, uh, uh, and KVM, depending on what the customer picks from the piece on the menu. >>And they have the problem of now orchestrating through their orchestrate or integrating with the Zen center with vSphere, uh, with, uh, open stack to coordinate these multiple environments and in the process to provide security, they actually deploy virtual appliances everywhere, which has a lot of costs, complication, and eats up into the server CPU. The problem is that they saw in this technology, they call it actually game changing is actually to remove all this complexity of in a single network and distribute the micro-segmentation service directly into the fabric. And overall, they're hoping to get out of it, uh, uh, tremendous, uh, um, opics, uh, benefit and overall, um, uh, operational simplification for the cloud infrastructure. That's one potent a use case. Uh, another, uh, large enterprise customer global enterprise customer, uh, is running, uh, both ESI and hyper V in that environment. And they don't have a solution to do micro-segmentation consistently across hypervisors. >>So again, micro-segmentation is a huge driver security looks like it's a recurring theme, uh, talking to most of these customers and in the Tyco space, um, uh, we're working with a few types of customers on the CFT program, uh, where the main goal is actually to our Monet's network operation. They typically handle all the VNF search with their own homegrown DPDK stack. This is overly complex. It is frankly also as low and inefficient, and then they have a physical network to manage the, the idea of having again, one network, uh, to coordinate the provision in our cloud services between the, the take of VNF, uh, and, uh, the rest of the infrastructure, uh, is extremely powerful on top of the offloading capability of the, by the bluefin DPOs. Those are just some examples. >>That was a great use case, a lot more potential. I see that with the unified cloud networking, great stuff, feed, shout out to you guys at Nvidia had been following your success for a long time and continuing to innovate as cloud scales and pluribus here with the unified networking, kind of bring it to the next level. Great stuff. Great to have you guys on. And again, software keeps driving the innovation again, networking is just a part of it, and it's the key solution. So I got to ask both of you to wrap this up. How can cloud operators who are interested in, in this, uh, new architecture and solution, uh, learn more because this is an architectural shift. People are working on this problem. They're trying to think about multiple clouds of trying to think about unification around the network and giving more security, more flexibility, uh, to their teams. How can people learn more? >>Yeah, so, uh, all Sandra and I have a talk at the upcoming Nvidia GTC conference. Um, so that's the week of March 21st through 24th. Um, you can go and register for free and video.com/at GTC. Um, you can also watch recorded sessions if you ended up watching us on YouTube a little bit after the fact. Um, and we're going to dive a little bit more into the specifics and the details and what we're providing in the solution. >>Alexandra, how can people learn more? >>Yeah, absolutely. People can go to the pluribus, a website, www boost networks.com/eft, and they can fill up the form and, uh, they will contact durables to either know more or to know more and actually to sign up for the actual early field trial program, which starts at the end of April. >>Okay. Well, we'll leave it there. Thanks. You both for joining. Appreciate it up next. You're going to hear an independent analyst perspective and review some of the research from the enterprise strategy group ESG. I'm John ferry with the >>Cube. Thanks for watching. >>Okay. We've heard from the folks at networks and Nvidia about their effort to transform cloud networking and unify bespoke infrastructure. Now let's get the perspective from an independent analyst and to do so. We welcome in ESG, senior analysts, Bob LA Liberte, Bob. Good to see you. Thanks for coming into our east coast studios. >>Oh, thanks for having me. It's great to be >>Here. Yeah. So this, this idea of unified cloud networking approach, how serious is it? What's what's driving it. >>Yeah, there's certainly a lot of drivers behind it, but probably the first and foremost is the fact that application environments are becoming a lot more distributed, right? So the, it pendulum tends to swing back and forth. And we're definitely on one that's swinging from consolidated to distributed. And so applications are being deployed in multiple private data centers, multiple public cloud locations, edge locations. And as a result of that, what you're seeing is a lot of complexity. So organizations are having to deal with this highly disparate environment. They have to secure it. They have to ensure connectivity to it and all that's driving up complexity. In fact, when we asked in one of our last surveys and last year about network complexity, more than half 54% came out and said, Hey, our network environment is now either more or significantly more complex than it used to be. >>And as a result of that, what you're seeing is it's really impacting agility. So everyone's moving to these modern application environments, distributing them across areas so they can improve agility yet it's creating more complexity. So a little bit counter to the fact and, you know, really counter to their overarching digital transformation initiatives. From what we've seen, you know, nine out of 10 organizations today are either beginning in process or have a mature digital transformation process or initiative, but their top goals, when you look at them, it probably shouldn't be a surprise. The number one goal is driving operational efficiency. So it makes sense. I've distributed my environment to create agility, but I've created a lot of complexity. So now I need these tools that are going to help me drive operational efficiency, drive better experience. >>I mean, I love how you bring in the data yesterday. Does a great job with that. Uh, questions is, is it about just unifying existing networks or is there sort of a need to rethink kind of a do-over network, how networks are built? >>Yeah, that's a, that's a really good point because certainly unifying networks helps right. Driving any kind of operational efficiency helps. But in this particular case, because we've made the transition to new application architectures and the impact that's having as well, it's really about changing and bringing in new frameworks and new network architectures to accommodate those new application architectures. And by that, what I'm talking about is the fact that these new modern application architectures, microservices, containers are driving a lot more east west traffic. So in the old days, it used to be easier in north south coming out of the server, one application per server, things like that. Right now you've got hundreds, if not thousands of microservices communicating with each other users communicating to them. So there's a lot more traffic and a lot of it's taking place within the servers themselves. The other issue that you starting to see as well from that security perspective, when we were all consolidated, we had those perimeter based legacy, you know, castle and moat security architectures, but that doesn't work anymore when the applications aren't in the castle, right. >>When everything's spread out that that no longer happens. So we're absolutely seeing, um, organizations trying to, trying to make a shift. And, and I think much, like if you think about the shift that we're seeing with all the remote workers and the sassy framework to enable a secure framework there, this it's almost the same thing. We're seeing this distributed services framework come up to support the applications better within the data centers, within the cloud data centers, so that you can drive that security closer to those applications and make sure they're, they're fully protected. Uh, and that's really driving a lot of the, you know, the zero trust stuff you hear, right? So never trust, always verify, making sure that everything is, is, is really secure micro-segmentation is another big area. So ensuring that these applications, when they're connected to each other, they're, they're fully segmented out. And that's again, because if someone does get a breach, if they are in your data center, you want to limit the blast radius, you want to limit the amount of damage that's done. So that by doing that, it really makes it a lot harder for them to see everything that's in there. >>You know, you mentioned zero trust. It used to be a buzzword, and now it's like become a mandate. And I love the mode analogy. You know, you build a moat to protect the queen and the castle, the Queens left the castles, it's just distributed. So how should we think about this, this pluribus and Nvidia solution. There's a spectrum, help us understand that you've got appliances, you've got pure software solutions. You've got what pluribus is doing with Nvidia, help us understand that. >>Yeah, absolutely. I think as organizations recognize the need to distribute their services to closer to the applications, they're trying different models. So from a legacy approach, you know, from a security perspective, they've got these centralized firewalls that they're deploying within their data centers. The hard part for that is if you want all this traffic to be secured, you're actually sending it out of the server up through the rack, usually to in different location in the data center and back. So with the need for agility, with the need for performance, right, that adds a lot of latency. Plus when you start needing to scale, that means adding more and more network connections, more and more appliances. So it can get very costly as well as impacting the performance. The other way that organizations are seeking to solve this problem is by taking the software itself and deploying it on the servers. Okay. So that's a, it's a great approach, right? It brings it really close to the applications, but the things you start running into there, there's a couple of things. One is that you start seeing that the DevOps team start taking on that networking and security responsibility, which they >>Don't want to >>Do, they don't want to do right. And the operations teams loses a little bit of visibility into that. Um, plus when you load the software onto the server, you're taking up precious CPU cycles. So if you're really wanting your applications to perform at an optimized state, having additional software on there, isn't going to, isn't going to do it. So, you know, when we think about all those types of things, right, and certainly the other side effects of that is the impact of the performance, but there's also a cost. So if you have to buy more servers because your CPU's are being utilized, right, and you have hundreds or thousands of servers, right, those costs are going to add up. So what, what Nvidia and pluribus have done by working together is to be able to take some of those services and be able to deploy them onto a smart Nick, right? >>To be able to deploy the DPU based smart SMARTNICK into the servers themselves. And then pluribus has come in and said, we're going to unify create that unified fabric across the networking space, into those networking services all the way down to the server. So the benefits of having that are pretty clear in that you're offloading that capability from the server. So your CPU's are optimized. You're saving a lot of money. You're not having to go outside of the server and go to a different rack somewhere else in the data center. So your performance is going to be optimized as well. You're not going to incur any latency hit for every trip round trip to the, to the firewall and back. So I think all those things are really important. Plus the fact that you're going to see from a, an organizational aspect, we talked about the dev ops and net ops teams. The network operations teams now can work with the security teams to establish the security policies and the networking policies. So that they've dev ops teams. Don't have to worry about that. So essentially they just create the guardrails and let the dev op team run. Cause that's what they want. They want that agility and speed. >>Yeah. Your point about CPU cycles is key. I mean, it's estimated that 25 to 30% of CPU cycles in the data center are wasted. The cores are wasted doing storage offload or, or networking or security offload. And, you know, I've said many times everybody needs a nitro like Amazon nugget, but you can't go, you can only buy Amazon nitro if you go into AWS. Right. Everybody needs a nitro. So is that how we should think about this? >>Yeah. That's a great analogy to think about this. Um, and I think I would take it a step further because it's, it's almost the opposite end of the spectrum because pluribus and video are doing this in a very open way. And so pluribus has always been a proponent of open networking. And so what they're trying to do is extend that now to these distributed services. So leverage working with Nvidia, who's also open as well, being able to bring that to bear so that organizations can not only take advantage of these distributed services, but also that unified networking fabric, that unified cloud fabric across that environment from the server across the switches, the other key piece of what pluribus is doing, because they've been doing this for a while now, and they've been doing it with the older application environments and the older server environments, they're able to provide that unified networking experience across a host of different types of servers and platforms. So you can have not only the modern application supported, but also the legacy environments, um, you know, bare metal. You could go any type of virtualization, you can run containers, et cetera. So a wide gambit of different technologies hosting those applications supported by a unified cloud fabric from pluribus. >>So what does that mean for the customer? I don't have to rip and replace my whole infrastructure, right? >>Yeah. Well, think what it does for, again, from that operational efficiency, when you're going from a legacy environment to that modern environment, it helps with the migration helps you accelerate that migration because you're not switching different management systems to accomplish that. You've got the same unified networking fabric that you've been working with to enable you to run your legacy as well as transfer over to those modern applications. Okay. >>So your people are comfortable with the skillsets, et cetera. All right. I'll give you the last word. Give us the bottom line here. >>So yeah, I think obviously with all the modern applications that are coming out, the distributed application environments, it's really posing a lot of risk on these organizations to be able to get not only security, but also visibility into those environments. And so organizations have to find solutions. As I said, at the beginning, they're looking to drive operational efficiency. So getting operational efficiency from a unified cloud networking solution, that it goes from the server across the servers to multiple different environments, right in different cloud environments is certainly going to help organizations drive that operational efficiency. It's going to help them save money for visibility, for security and even open networking. So a great opportunity for organizations, especially large enterprises, cloud providers who are trying to build that hyperscaler like environment. You mentioned the nitro card, right? This is a great way to do it with an open solution. >>Bob, thanks so much for, for coming in and sharing your insights. Appreciate it. >>You're welcome. Thanks. >>Thanks for watching the program today. Remember all these videos are available on demand@thekey.net. You can check out all the news from today@siliconangle.com and of course, pluribus networks.com many thanks diplomas for making this program possible and sponsoring the cube. This is Dave Volante. Thanks for watching. Be well, we'll see you next time.

>> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Tech spending is poised to rebound as the economy reopens in 2021. CIOs and IT buyers, they expect a 4% increase in 2021 spending based on ETR's latest surveys. And we believe that number will actually be higher, in the six to 7% range even. The big drivers are continued fine tuning of, and investment in digital strategies, for example, cloud security, AI data and automation. Application modernization initiatives continue to attract attention, and we also expect more support with work from home demand, for instance laptops, et cetera. And we're even seeing pent-up demand for data center infrastructure and other major risks to this scenario, they remain the pace of the reopening, of course, no surprise there, however, even if there are speed bumps to the vaccine rollout and achieving herd immunity, we believe tech spending will grow at least two points faster than GDP, which is currently forecast at 4.1%. Hello and welcome to this week's (indistinct) on Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we want to update you on our latest macro view of the market, and then highlight a few key sectors that we've been watching, namely cloud with a particular drill down on Microsoft and AWS, security, database, and then we'll look at Dell and VMware as a proxy for the data center. Now here's a look at what IT buyers and CIOs think. This chart shows the latest survey data from ETR and it compares the December results with the year earlier survey. Consistent with our earlier reporting, we see a kind of a swoosh-like recovery with a slower first half and accelerating in the second half. And we think that CIOs are being prudently conservative, 'cause if GDP grows at 4% plus, we fully expect tech spending to outperform. Now let's look at the factors that really drive some of our thinking on that. This is data that we've shown before it asks buyers if they're initiating any of the following strategies in the coming quarter, in the face of the pandemic and you can see there's no change in work from home, really no change in business travel, but hiring freezes, freezing new deployments, these continue to trend down. New deployments continue to be up, layoffs are trending down and hiring is also up. So these are all good signs. Now having said that, one part of our scenario assumes workers return and the current 75% of employees that work from home will moderate by the second half to around 35%. Now that's double the historical average, and that large percentage, that will necessitate continued work from home infrastructure spend, we think and drive HQ spending as well in the data center. Now the caveat of course is that lots of companies are downsizing corporate headquarters, so that could weigh on this dual investment premise that we have, but generally with the easy compare in these tailwinds, we expect solid growth in this coming year. Now, what sectors are showing growth? Well, the same big four that we've been talking about for 10 months, machine intelligence or AI/ML, RPA and broader automation agendas, these lead the pack along with containers and cloud. These four, you can see here above that red dotted line at 40%, that's a 40% net score which is a measure of spending momentum. Now cloud, it's the most impressive because what you see in this chart is spending momentum or net score in the vertical axis and market share or pervasiveness in the data center on the horizontal axis. Now cloud it stands out, as it's has a large market share and it's got spending velocity tied to it. So, I mean that is really impressive for that sector. Now, what we want to do here is do a quick update on the big three cloud revenue for 2020. And so we're looking back at 2020, and this really updates the chart that we showed last week at our CUBE on Cloud event, the only differences Azure, Microsoft reported and this chart shows IaaS estimates for the big three, we had had Microsoft Azure in Q4 at 6.8 billion, it came in at 6.9 billion based on our cloud model. Now the points we previously made on this chart, they stand out. AWS is the biggest, and it's growing more slowly but it throws off more absolute dollars, Azure grew 48% sent last quarter, we had it slightly lower and so we've adjusted that and that's incredible. And Azure continues to close that gap on AWS and we'll see how AWS and Google do when they report next week. We definitely think based on Microsoft result that AWS has upside to these numbers, especially given the Q4 push, year end, and the continued transition to cloud and even Google we think can benefit. Now what we want to do is take a closer look at Microsoft and AWS and drill down into those two cloud leaders. So take a look at this graphic, it shows ETR's survey data for net score across Microsoft's portfolio, and we've selected a couple of key areas. Virtually every sector is in the green and has forward momentum relative to the October survey. Power Automate, which is RPA, Teams is off the chart, Azure itself we've reported on that, is the linchpin of Microsoft's innovation strategy, serverless, AI analytics, containers, they all have over 60% net scores. Skype is the only dog and Microsoft is doing a fabulous job of transitioning its customers to Teams away from Skype. I think there are still people using Skype. Yes, I know it's crazy. Now let's take a look at the AWS portfolio drill down, there's a similar story here for Amazon and virtually all sectors are well into the 50% net scores or above. Yeah, it's lower than Microsoft, but still AWS, very, very large, so across the board strength for the company and it's impressive for a $45 billion cloud company. Only Chime is lagging behind AWS and maybe, maybe AWS needs a Teams-like version to migrate folks off of Chime. Although you do see it's an uptick there relative to the last survey, but still not burning the house down. Now let's take a look at security. It's a sector that we've highlighted for several quarters, and it's really undergoing massive change. This of course was accelerated by the work from home trend, and this chart ranks the CIO and CSO priorities for security, and here you see identity access management stands out. So this bodes well for the likes of Okta and SailPoint, of course endpoint security also ranks highly, and that's good news for a company like CrowdStrike or Forescout, Carbon Black, which was acquired by VMware. And you can see network security is right there as well, I mean, it's all kind of network security but Cisco, Palo Alto, Fortinet are some of the names that we follow closely there, and cloud security, Microsoft, Amazon and Zscaler also stands out. Now, what we want to do now is drill in a little bit and take a look at the vendor map for security. So this chart shows one of our favorite views, it's getting net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis and market share on the horizontal. Okta, note in the upper right of that little chart there that table, Okta remains the highest net score of all the players that we're showing here, SailPoint and CrowdStrike definitely looming large, Microsoft continues to be impressive because of its both presence, you can see that dot in the upper right there and it's momentum, and you know, for context, we've included some of the legacy names like RSA and McAfee and Symantec, you could see them in the red as is IBM, and then the rest of the pack, they're solidly in the green, we've said this before security remains a priority, it's a very strong market, CIOs and CSOs have to spend on it, they're accelerating that spending, and it's a fragmented space with lots of legitimate players, and it's undergoing a major change, and with the SolarWinds hack, it's on everyone's radar even more than we've seen with earlier high profile breaches, we have some other data that we'll share in the future, on that front, but in the interest of time, we'll press on here. Now, one of the other sectors that's undergoing significant changes, database. And so if you take a look at the latest survey data, so we're showing that same xy-view, the first thing that we call your attention to is Snowflake, and we've been reporting on this company for years now, and sharing ETR data for well over a year. The company continues to impress us with spending momentum, this last survey it increased from 75% last quarter to 83% in the latest survey. This is unbelievable because having now done this for quite some time, many, many quarters, these numbers are historically not sustainable and very rarely do you see that kind of increase from the mid-70s up into the '80s. So now AWS is the other big call out here. This is a company that has become a database powerhouse, and they've done that from a standing start and they've become a leader in the market. Google's momentum is also impressive, especially with it's technical chops, it gets very, very high marks for things like BigQuery, and so you can see it's got momentum, it does not have the presence in the market to the right, that for instance AWS and Microsoft have, and that brings me to Microsoft is also notable, because it's so large and look at the momentum, it's got very, very strong spending momentum as well, so look, this database market it's seeing dramatically different strategies. Take Amazon for example, it's all about the right tool for the right job, they get a lot of different data stores with specialized databases, for different use cases, Aurora for transaction processing, Redshift for analytics, I want a key value store, hey, some DynamoDB, graph database? You got little Neptune, document database? They've got that, they got time series database, so very, very granular portfolio. You got Oracle on the other end of the spectrum. It along with several others are converging capabilities and that's a big trend that we're seeing across the board, into, sometimes we call it a mono database instead of one database fits all. Now Microsoft's world kind of largely revolves around SQL and Azure SQL but it does offer other options. But the big difference between Microsoft and AWS is AWS' approach is really to maximize the granularity in the technical flexibility with fine-grained access to primitives and APIs, that's their philosophy, whereas Microsoft with synapse for example, they're willing to build that abstraction layer as a means of simplifying the experiences. AWS, they've been reluctant to do this, their approach favors optionality and their philosophy is as the market changes, that will give them the ability to move faster. Microsoft's philosophy favors really abstracting that complexity, now that adds overhead, but it does simplify, so these are two very interesting counter poised strategies that we're watching and we think there's room for both, they're just not necessarily one better than the other, it's just different philosophies and different approaches. Now Snowflake for its part is building a data cloud on top of AWS, Google and Azure, so it's another example of adding value by abstracting away the underlying infrastructure complexity and it obviously seems to be working well, albeit at a much smaller scale at this point. Now let's talk a little bit about some of the on-prem players, the legacy players, and we'll use Dell and VMware as proxies for these markets. So what we're showing here in this chart is Dell's net scores across select parts of its portfolio and it's a pretty nice picture for Dell, I mean everything, but Desktop is showing forward momentum relative to previous surveys, laptops continue to benefit from the remote worker trend, in fact, PCs actually grew this year if you saw our spot on Intel last week, PCs had peaked, PC volume at peaked in 2011 and it actually bumped up this year but it's not really, we don't think sustainable, but nonetheless it's been a godsend during the pandemic as data center infrastructure has been softer. Dell's cloud is up and that really comprises a bunch of infrastructure along with some services, so that's showing some strength that both, look at storage and server momentum, they seem to be picking up and this is really important because these two sectors have been lagging for Dell. But this data supports our pent-up demand premise for on-prem infrastructure, and we'll see if the ETR survey which is forward-looking translates into revenue growth for Dell and others like HPE. Now, what about Dell's favorite new toy over at VMware? Let's take a look at that picture for VMware, it's pretty solid. VMware cloud on AWS, we've been reporting on that for several quarters now, it's showing up in the ETR survey and it is well, it's somewhat moderating, it's coming down from very high spending momentum, so it's still, we think very positive. NSX momentum is coming back in the survey, I'm not sure what happened there, but it's been strong, VMware's on-prem cloud with VCF VMware Cloud Foundation, that's strong, Tanzu was a bit surprising because containers are very hot overall, so that's something we're watching, seems to be moderating, maybe the market says okay, you did great VMware, you're embracing containers, but Tanzu is maybe not the, we'll see, we'll see how that all plays out. I think it's the right strategy for VMware to embrace that container strategy, but we said remember, everybody said containers are going to kill VMware, well, VMware rightly, they've embraced cloud with VMware cloud on AWS, they're embracing containers. So we're seeing much more forward-thinking strategies and management philosophies. Carbon Black, that benefits from the security tailwind, and then the core infrastructure looks good, vSAN, vSphere and VDI. So the big thing that we're watching for VMware, is of course, who's going to be the next CEO. Is it going to be Zane Rowe, who's now the acting CEO? And of course he's been the CFO for years. Who's going to get that job? Will it be Sanjay Poonen? The choice I think is going to say much about the direction of VMware going forward in our view. Succeeding Pat Gelsinger is like, it's going to be like following Peyton Manning at QB, but this summer we expect Dell to spin out VMware or do some other kind of restructuring, and restructure both VMware and Dell's balance sheet, it wants to get both companies back to investment grade and it wants to set a new era in motion or it's going to set a new era in motion. Now that financial transaction, maybe it does call for a CFO in favor of such a move and can orchestrate such a move, but certainly Sanjay Poonen has been a loyal soldier and he's performed very well in his executive roles, not just at VMware, but previous roles, SAP and others. So my opinion there's no doubt he's ready and he's earned it, and with, of course with was no offense to Zane Rowe by the way, he's an outstanding executive too, but the big questions for Dell and VMware's what will the future of these two companies look like? They've dominated, VMware especially has dominated the data center for a decade plus, they're responding to cloud, and some of these new trends, they've made tons of acquisitions and Gelsinger has orchestrated TAM expansion. They still got to get through paying down the debt so they can really double down on an innovation agenda from an R&D perspective, that's been somewhat hamstrung and to their credit, they've done a great job of navigating through Dell's tendency to take VMware cash and restructure its business to go public, and now to restructure both companies to do the pivotal acquisition, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera and clean up it's corporate structure. So it's been a drag on VMware's ability to use its free cash flow for R&D, and again it's been very impressive what it's been able to accomplish there. On the Dell side of the house, it's R&D largely has gone to kind of new products, follow-on products and evolutionary kind of approach, and it would be nice to see Dell be able to really double down on the innovation agenda especially with the looming edge opportunity. Look R&D is the lifeblood of a tech company, and there's so many opportunities across the clouds and at The Edge we've talked this a lot, I haven't talked much about or any about IBM, we wrote a piece last year on IBM's innovation agenda, really hinges on its R&D. It seems to be continuing to favor dividends and stock buybacks, that makes it difficult for the company to really invest in its future and grow, its promised growth, Ginni Rometty promised growth, that never really happened, Arvind Krishna is now promising growth, hopefully it doesn't fall into the same pattern of missed promises, and my concern there is that R&D, you can't just flick a switch and pour money and get a fast return, it takes years to get that. (Dave chuckles) We talked about Intel last week, so similar things going on, but I digress. Look, these guys are going to require in my view, VMware, Dell, I'll put HPE in there, they're going to require organic investment to get back to growth, so we're watching these factors very, very closely. Okay, got to wrap up here, so we're seeing IT spending growth coming in as high as potentially 7% this year, and it's going to be powered by the same old culprits, cloud, AI, automation, we'll be doing an RPA update soon here, application modernization, and the new work paradigm that we think will force increased investments in digital initiatives. The doubling of the expectation of work from home is significant, and so we see this hybrid world, not just hybrid cloud but hybrid work from home and on-prem, this new digital world, and it's going to require investment in both cloud and on-prem, and we think that's going to lift both boats but cloud, clearly the big winner. And we're not by any means suggesting that their growth rates are going to somehow converge, they're not, cloud will continue to outpace on-prem by several hundred basis points, throughout the decade we think. And AWS and Microsoft are in the top division of that cloud bracket. Security markets are really shifting and we continue to like the momentum of companies in identity and endpoint and cloud security, especially the pure plays like CrowdStrike and Okta and SailPoint, and Zscaler and others that we've mentioned over the past several quarters, but CSOs tell us they want to work with the big guys too, because they trust them, especially Palo Alto networks, Cisco obviously in the mix, their security business continues to outperform the balance of Cisco's portfolio, and these companies, they have resources to withstand market shifts and we'll do a deeper drill down at the security soon and update you on other trends, on other companies in that space. Now the database world, it continues to heat up, I used to say on theCUBE all the time that decade and a half ago database was boring and now database is anything but, and thank you to cloud databases and especially Snowflake, it's data cloud vision, it's simplicity, we're seeing lots of different ways though, to skin the cat, and while there's disruption, we believe Oracle's position is solid because it owns Mission-Critical, that's its stronghold, and we really haven't seen those workloads migrate into the cloud, and frankly, I think it's going to be hard to rest those away from Oracle. Now, AWS and Microsoft, they continue to be the easy choice for a lot of their customers. Microsoft migrating its software state, AWS continues to innovate, we've got a lot of database choices, the right tool for the right job, so there's lots of innovation going on in databases beyond these names as well, and we'll continue to update you on these markets shortly. Now, lastly, it's quite notable how well some of the legacy names have navigated through COVID. Sure, they're not rocketing like many of the work-from-home stocks, but they've been able to thus far survive, and in the example of Dell and VMware, the portfolio diversity has been a blessing. The bottom line is the first half of 2021 seems to be shaping up as we expected, momentum for the strongest digital plays, low interest rates helping large established companies hang in there with strong balance sheets, and large customer bases. And what will be really interesting to see is what happens coming out of the pandemic. Will the rich get richer? Yeah, well we think so. But we see the legacy players adjusting their business models, embracing change in the market and steadily moving forward. And we see at least a dozen new players hitting the radar that could become leaders in the coming decade, and as always, we'll be highlighting many of those in our future episodes. Okay, that's it for now, listen, these episodes remember, they're all available as podcasts, all you got to do is search for Breaking Analysis Podcasts and you'll you'll get them so please listen, like them, if you like them, share them, really, I always appreciate that, I publish weekly on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com, and really would appreciate your comments and always do in my LinkedIn posts, or you can always DM me @dvellante or email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com, and tell me what you think is happening out there. Don't forget to check out ETR+ for all the survey action, this is David Vellante, thanks for watching theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Stay safe, we'll see you next time. (downbeat music)

>> Male's Voice: From around the globe, its theCUBE. With digital coverage of a special announcement, brought to you by Nutanix. (soft music) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And welcome to this special announcement for Nutanix, about some new product releases in the public cloud. To help us kick this off for the Asia Pacific and Japan region. Happy to welcome to the program Jordan Reizes, who's the vice president of marketing, for APJ and Nutanix. Jordan, help us introduce it. Thanks Stu. So today we're really pleased to announce Nutanix Clusters, availability in Asia Pacific and Japan, at the same time as the rest of the world. And we think this technology is really important to our geographically dispersed customers, all across the region, in terms of helping them, On-Ramp to the cloud. So, we're really excited about this launch today. And Stu, I can't wait to see the rest of the program. And make sure you stay tuned at the end, for our interview with our CTO, Justin Hurst. Who's going to be answering a bunch of questions that are really specific to the APJ region. >> All right, thank you so much Jordan, for helping us kick this off. We're now going to cut over to my interview with Monica and Tarkan, with the news. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And I want to welcome you to this special event that we are doing with Nutanix. Of course, in 2020 many things have changed. And that has changed some of the priorities, for many companies out there. Acceleration of cloud adoption, absolutely have been there. I've talked to many companies that were dipping their toe, or thinking about, where they were going to cloud. And of course it's rapidly moved to accelerate to be able to leverage work from home, remote contact centers, and the like. So, we have to think about how we can accelerate what's happening, and make sure that our workforce, and our customers are all taken care of. So, one of the front seats of this, is of course, companies working to help modernize customers out there. And, Nutanix is part of that discussion. So, I want to welcome to join us for this special discussion of cloud and Nutanix. I have two of our CUBE alumnus. First of all, we have Monica Kumar. She's the senior vice president of product, with Nutanix. And Tarkan Maner, who's a relative newcomer. Second time on theCUBE, in his new role many time guests. Previously, Tarkan is the chief commercial officer with Nutanix. Monica and Tarkan, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you so much. So happy to be back on theCUBE. >> Yeah, thank you. >> All right. So, Tarkan as I was teeing up, we know that, IT staffs in general, CIO specifically, and companies overall, are under a lot of pressure in general. But in 2020, there are new pressures on them. So, why don't you explain to us, the special cloud announcement. Tell us, what's Nutanix launching, and why it's so important today. >> So, Stu first of all, thank you. And glad to be here with Monica. And basically you and I, spend some time with a few customers in the past few weeks and months. I'll tell you, the things in our industry are changing at a pace that we never seen before. Especially with this pandemic backdrop, as we're going through. And obviously, all the economic challenges that creates beyond the obviously, health challenges and across the world, all the pain it creates. But also it creates some opportunities for our customers and partners to deliver solutions to our enterprise customers, and commercial customers, and in a public sector customers, in multiple industries. From healthcare, obviously very importantly, to manufacturing, to supply chains, and to all the other industries, including financial services and public sector again. So in that context, Monica knows as well as she's our leader. You know, our strategy, we're putting lots of effort in this new multi-class strategy as a company. As you know, is too well, Nutanix wrote the book, in digital infrastructures with its own private, (mumbles) infrastructure story. Now they're taking that next level, via our data center solutions, via DevOps solutions, and end user computer solutions. Now, the multicloud fashion, working with partners like AWS. So, in this launch, we have our new, hybrid cloud infrastructure, Nutanix Clusters product now available in the AWS. We are super excited. We have more than 20 tech firms, and customers, and partners at sealable executive level support in this big launch. Timing is usually important, because of this pandemic backdrop. And the goal is obviously to help our customers save money, focus what's important for them, save money for them, and making sure they streamlined their IT operation. So it's a huge launch for us. And we're super excited about it. >> Yeah. And the one thing I would add too, what Tarkan said too is, look, we talk to a lot of customers, and obviously cloud is the constant, in terms of enabling innovation. But I think more with COVID, what's on top of mind is also how do we use cloud for innovation? But really be intelligent about cost optimization. So with this new announcement, what we are excited about is we're bringing, making really a hybrid cloud reality, across public and private cloud. But also making sure customers, get the cost efficiency they need, when they're deploying the solution. So we are super excited to bring true hybrid cloud offering with AWS to the market today. >> Well, I can tell you Nutanix cluster is absolutely one of the exciting technologies I've enjoyed, watching and getting ready for. And of course, a partnership with the largest public cloud player out there AWS, is really important. When I think about Nutanix from the earliest days, the word that we always used for the HI Space and Nutanix specifically, was simplicity. Anybody in the tech space know that, true simplicity is really hard to do. When I think about cloud, when I think about multicloud, simplicity is not the first thing that I think of. So, Tarkan has helped us connect, how is Nutanix going to extend the simplicity that it's done, for so long now in the data center, into places like AWS with this solution? >> So, Stu you're spot on. Look, Monica and I spend a lot of time with our customers. One thing about Nutanix executive team, you're very customer-driven. And I'm not just saying this to make a point. We really spent tons of time with them because our solutions are basically so critical for them to run their businesses. So, just recently I was with a senior executive, C level executive of an airline. Right before that, Monica and I spent actually with one of the largest banks in the world in France, in Paris. Right before the pandemic, we were actually traveling. Talking to, not all the CIO, the chief operating officer on one of these huge banks. And the biggest issue was, how these companies are trying to basically adjust their plans, business plans. I'm not talking about tech plans, IT plans, the business plans around this backdrop with the economic stress. And obviously, now pandemic is in a big way. One of the CIOs told me, he was an airline executive. "Look Tarkan, in the next four months, my business might be half of what it is today. And I need to do more with less, in so many different ways, while I'm cutting costs." So it's a tough time. So, in that context is to... Your actually right. Multicloud is in a difficult proposition, but it's critical, for these companies to manage their cost structures across multiple operating models. Cloud to us, is not a destination, it's a means to an ends. It is an operating model. At the end of the day, the differentiation is still the software. The unique software that we provide from digital infrastructures, to deliver, end to end discreet data center solutions, DevOps solutions for developers, as well as for end user computing individuals, to making sure to take advantage of, these VDI decibels service topic capability. So in that context, what we are providing now to this CIOs who are going through, this difficult time is, a platform, in which they can move their workloads from cloud to cloud, based on their needs, with freedom of choice. Look, one of these big banks that Monica and I visited in France, huge global bank. They have a workloads on AWS, they have workload on Azure, they have workloads on Google, workloads on (indistinct), the local XP, they have workloads in Germany. They have workloads providers in Asia, in Taiwan, and other locations. On top of that, they're also using Nutanix on-prem as well as Nutanix cloud, our own cloud services for VR. And then, this is not just in this nation. This is an operating model. So the biggest request from them is, look, can you guys make this cost effective? Can we use, all these operating models and move our data, and applications from cloud to cloud? In simple terms, can we get, some kind of a flexibility with commits as well as we pay credits they paid for so far? And, those are things we're working on. And I'm sure Monica is going to get a little bit more into detail, as we talk to this. You are super excited, to start this journey with AWS, with this launch, but you're not going to stop there. Our goal is, we just kind of discussed with Monica earlier, provide freedom of choice across multiple clouds, both on-prem and off-prem, for our customers to cut costs, and to focus on what's important for them. >> Yeah, and I would just add, to sum it up, we are really simplifying the multicloud complexity for our customers. And I can go into more detail, but that's really the gist of it. Is what Nutanix is doing with this announcement, and more coming up in the future. >> Well, Monica, when I think about customers, and how do they decide, what stays in their data center, what goes into the public cloud? It's really their application portfolio. I need to look at my workloads, I need to look at my skillset. So, when I look at the cluster solution, what are some of the key use cases? What workloads are going to be the first ones that you expect, or you're having customers use with it today? >> Sure. And as we talk to customers too, this clearly few key use cases that they've been trying to, build a hybrid strategy around. The first few ones are bursting into cloud, right? In case of, a demand of sudden demand, how do I burst and scale my, let's say a VDI environment. or database environment into the cloud? So that's clearly one that many of our customers want to be able to do simply, and without having to incur this extreme complexity of managing these environments. Number two, it's about DR, and we saw with COVID, right? Business continuity became a big deal for many organizations. They weren't prepared for it. So the ability to actually spin up your applications and data in the cloud seamlessly, in case of a disaster, that's another big use case. The third one, of which many customers talk about is, can I lift and shift my applications as is, into the cloud? Without having to rewrite a single line of code, or without having to rewrite all of it, right? That's another one. And last but not least, the one that we're also hearing a lot about is, how do I extend my current applications by using cloud native services, that's available on public cloud? So those are four, there's many more, of course. But in terms of workloads, I mentioned two examples, right? VDI, which is Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, and is a computing, and also databases. More and more of our customers, don't want to invest in again having, on-premises data center assets sitting there idly. And, wait for when the capacity surges, the demand for capacity surges, they want to be able to do that in the cloud. So I'd say those are the few use cases and workloads. One thing I want to go back to what Tarkan was talking about, really their three key reasons, why the current hybrid cloud solutions, haven't really panned out for customers. Number one, it's having a unified management environment across public and private cloud. There's a few solutions out there, but none of them have proved to be simple enough, to actually put into real execution. You know, with Nutanix, the one thing you can do is literally build a hybrid cloud within, under an hour. Under an hour, you can spin up Nutanix Clusters, which you have on-premises, the same exact cluster in Amazon, under one hour. There you go. And you have the same exact management plan, that we offer on-prem, that now can manage your AWS Nutanix Clusters. It's that easy, right? And then, you can easily move your data and applications across, if you choose to. You want to move and burst into public cloud? Do it. You want to keep some stuff on-prem? Do it. If you're going to develop in the cloud, do it. Want to keep production on-prem, do it. Single management plan, seamless mobility. And the third point is about cost. Simplicity of managing the costs, making sure you know, how you're going to incur costs. How about, if you can hibernate your AWS cluster when you're not using it? We allow the... We have the capability now in our software to do that. How about knowing, where to place which workload. Which workload goes into public cloud, which stays on-premises. We have an amazing tool called beam, that gives the customers that ability to assess, which is the right cloud for the right workload. So I can go on and on about this. You know, we've talked to so many customers, but this is in a nutshell. You know, the use cases and workloads that we are delivering to customers right out the gate. >> Well, Monica, I'd love to hear a little bit about the customers that have had early access to this. What customer stories can you share? Understand of course? You're probably going to need to anonymize. But, I'd like to understand, how they've been leveraging clusters, the value that they're getting from it. >> Absolutely. We've been working with a number of customers. And I'll give you a few examples. There's a customer in Australia, I'll start with that. And they basically run a big event that happens every five years for them. And that they have to scale something to 24 million people. Now imagine, if they have to keep capacity on site, anticipating the needs for five years in a row, well, they can't do that. And the big event is going to happen next year for them. So they are getting ready with now clusters, to really expand the VDI environments into the cloud, in a big way with AWS. So from Nutanix on-prem to AWS, and expand VDI and burst into the cloud. So that's one example. That's obviously when you have an event-driven capacity bursting into the cloud. Another customer, who is in the insurance business. For them, DR is of course very important. I mean, DR is important for every industry in every business. But for them, they realize that they need to be able to, transparently run the applications in the case of a disaster on the cloud. So they've been using non Nutanix Clusters with AWS to do that. Another customer is looking at lifting and shifting some of the database applications into, AWS with Nutanix, for example. And then we have yet another customer who's looking at retiring, their a part of the data center estate, and moving that completely to AWS, with Nutanix as a backbone, Nutanix Clusters as a backbone. I mean, and we have tons of examples of customers who during COVID, for example, were able to burst capacity, and spin up hundreds and thousands of remote employees, using clusters into AWS cloud. Using Citrix also by the way, as the desktop provider. So again, I can go on, we have tons of customers. There's obviously a big demand for the solution. Because now it's so easy to use. We have customers, really surprised going, "Wait, I now have built a whole hybrid card within an hour. And I was able to scale from, six nodes, to 60 nodes, just like that, on AWS cloud from on-prem six nodes, to 16 in AWS cloud. Our customers are really, really pleasantly surprised with the ease of use, and how quickly they can scale, using clusters in AWS. >> Yeah. Tarkan I have to imagine that, this is a real change for the conversation you have with customers. I mean, Nutanix has been partner with AWS for a number of years. I remember the first time that I saw Nutanix, at the reinvent show. But, cloud is definitely front and center, in a lot of your customer's conversations. So, with your partners, with your customers, has to be just a whole different aspect, to the conversations that you can have. >> Actually Stu, as you heard from Monica too. As I mentioned earlier, this is not just a destination for the customers, right? I know you using these buzzwords, at the end of day, there's an open end model. If it's an open end model they want to take advantage of, to cut costs and do more with less. So in that context, as you heard, even in this conversation, there is many pinpoint in this. Like again, being able to move the workloads from location to location, cost optimize those things, provide a streamlined operations. Again, as Monica suggested, making the apps, and the data relating those apps mobile, and obviously provide built-in networking capabilities. All those capabilities make it easier for them to cut costs. So we're hearing constantly, from the enterprises is small and large, private sector and public sector, nothing different. Clearly they have options. They want to have the freedom of choice. Some of these workloads are going to run on-prem, some of them off prem. And off prem is going to have, tons of different radiations. So in that context, as I mentioned earlier, we have our own cloud as well. We provide 20 plus skews to 17,000 customers around the world. It's a $2 billion software business run rate is as you know. And, a lot of those questions on-prem customers now, also coming to our own cloud services. With cloud partners, we have our own cloud services, with our own billing, payments, logistics, and service capabilities. With a credit card, you can actually, you can do DR. (mumbles) a service to Nutanix itself. But some of these customers also want to go be able to go to AWS, or Azure, or to a local service provider. Sometimes it's US companies, we think US only. But think about this, this is a global phenomenon. I have customers in India. We have customers in Australia as Monica talked about. In China, in Japan, in Germany. And some of these enterprise customers, public sector customers, they want to DR, Disaster Recovery as a service to a local service provider, within the country. Because of the new data governance, laws and security concerns, they don't want the data and us, to go outside of the boundaries of the country. In some cases, in the same continent, if you're in Switzerland, not even forget about the country, the same city. So we want to make sure, we give capabilities for customers, use the cloud as an operating model the way they want. And as part of this, just you know Stu, you're not alone in this, we can not do this alone. We have, tremendous level of partner support as you're going to see in the new announcements. From HP as one of our key partners, Lenovo, AMD, Intel, Fujitsu, Citrix for end user computing. You're partnering with Palo Alto networks for security, Azure partners, as you know we support (indistinct). We have partners like Red Hat, whose in tons of work in the Linux front. We partnered with IBM, we partner with Dell. So, the ecosystem makes it so much easier for our customers, especially with this pandemic backdrop. And I think what you're going to see from Nutanix, more partners, more customer proof points, to help the customers innovate the cut costs, in this difficult backdrop. Especially for the next 24 months, I think what you're going to see is, tremendous so to speak adoption, of this multicloud approach that you're focusing on right now. >> Yeah, and let me add, I know our partner list is long. So Tarkan also, we have the global size, of course. The WebPros, and HCL, and TCS, and Capgemini, and Zensar, you name it all. We're working with all of them to bring clusters based solutions to market. And, for the entire Nutanix stack, also partners like Equinix and Yoda. So it's a long list of partnerships. The one thing I did want to bring up Stu, which I forgot to mention earlier, and Tarkan reminded me is a superior architecture. So why is it that Nutanix can deliver this now to customers, right? I mean, our customers have been trying to build hybrid cloud for a little while now, and work across multiple clouds. And, we know it's been complex. The reason why we are able to deliver this in the way we are, is because of our architecture. The way we've architected clusters with AWS is, it's built in native network integration. And what that means is, if your customer and end user who's a practitioner, you can literally see the Nutanix VMs, in the same space as Amazon VMs. So for a customer, it's in the exact same space, it's really easy to then use other AWS services. And we bypass any, complex and latency issues with networking, because we are exactly part of AWS VPC for the customer. And also, the customers can use by the way, the Amazon credits, with the way we've architected this. And we allow for bringing your own license, by the way. That's the other true part about simplicity is, same license that our customers use on-premises today for Nutanix, can be brought exactly the same way to AWS, if they choose to. And now of course, we do also offer other licensing models that are cloud only. But I want to point out that DVIOL is something that we are very proud of. It's truly enabling, bring your own license to AWS cloud in this case. >> Well, it's interesting, Monica. Of course, one of the things everybody's watched of Nutanix over the last few years is that move, from an appliance primarily to a software model. And, as an industry as a whole, it's much more moving to the cloud model for pricing. And it sounds like, that's the primary model with some flexibility and options that you have, when you're talking about the cluster solution here, is that correct? >> Yeah, we also offer the pay as you go model of course, and cloud as popular. So, customers can decide they just want to pay for the amount they use, that's fine. Or they can bring their existing on-prem license, to AWS. Or we also have a commit model, where they commit for a certain capacity for the year, and they go with that. So we have two or three different kinds of models. Again, going with the freedom of choice for our customers. We offer them different models they can choose from. But to me, the best part is to bring your own license model. That's again, a true hybrid pricing model here. They can choose to use Nutanix where they want to. >> Yeah. Well, and Monica, I'm glad you brought up some of the architectural pieces here. 'Cause you talked about all the partners that you have out there. If I'm sitting in the partner world, I've been heard nothing over the last few years, but I've been inundated by all of the hybrid solutions. So, every public cloud provider, including AWS now, is talking about hybrid solutions. You've got virtualization players, infrastructure players, all talking out there. So, architecture you talked a bit about. Anything else, key differentiators that you want people to understand, as what sets Nutanix apart from the crowd, when it comes to hybrid cloud. >> Well, like I said, it's because of our architecture, you can build a hybrid cloud in under an hour. I mean, prove to me if you can do with other providers. And again, I don't mean that, having that ego. But really, I mean, honestly for our customers, it's all about how can we, speed up a customer's experience to cloud. So, building a cloud under an hour, being able to truly manage it with a single plan, being able to move apps and data, with one click in many cases. And last but not least, the license portability. All of that together. I think the way, (indistinct) I've talked about this as, we may not have been the first to market, but we believe they are the best to market in this space today. That's what I would say. >> Tarkan and I'd love to hear a little bit of the vision. So, with Monica kind of alluded to, anybody that kind of digs underneath the covers is, it's bare metal offerings from the cloud providers that are enabling this technology. There was a certain partnership that AWS had, that enabled this, and now you're taking advantage of it. What do you feel when you look at clusters going forward, give us a little bit what should we be looking for, when it comes to AWS and maybe even beyond. >> Thank you Stu. Actually, is spot on question. Most companies in the space, they follow these buzzwords, right? (indistinct) multicloud. And when you killed on, you and you find out, okay, you support two cloud services, and you actually own some kind of a marketplace. And you're one of the 19,000 services. We don't see this as a multicloud. Our view is, complete freedom of choice. So our vision includes a couple of our private clouds, government clouds success with our customers. We've got enterprise commercial and public sector customers. Also delivered to them choice, with Nutanix is own cloud as I mentioned earlier. With our own billing payment, we're just as capable starting with DR as a service, Disaster Recovery as a service. But take that to next level, the database as a service, with VDI based up as a service, and other services that we deliver. But on top of that also, as Monica talked about earlier, partnerships we have, with service providers, like Yoda in India, a lot going on with SoftBank in Japan, Brooklyn going on with OBH in France. And multiple countries that we are building this XSP (indistinct) telco relationships, give those international customers, choice within that own local region, in their own country, in some cases in their city, where they are, making sure the network latency is not an issue. Security, data governance, is not an issue. And obviously, third leg of this multilayer stool is, hyperscalers themselves like AWS. AWS has been a phenomenal partner, working with Doug (indistinct), Matt Garmin, the executive team under Andy Jassy and Jeff Bezos, biggest super partners. Obviously, that bare metal service capability, is huge differentiator. And with the typical AWS simplicity. And obviously, with Nutanix simplicity coming together. But given choice to our customers as we move forward obviously, our customer set a multicloud strategy. So I'm reading an amazing book called Silk Roads. It's an amazing book. I strongly suggest you all read it. It's all talking about partnerships. Throughout the history, those empires, those countries who have been successful, partnered well, connect the dots well. So that's what we're trying to learn from our own history. Connecting dots with the customers and partners as we talked about earlier. Working with companies that with Wipro. And we over deliver to the end user computer service called, best of a service door to desk. Database as a service, digital data services get that VA to other new services started in HCL and others. So all these things come together as a complete end to end strategy with our partners. So we want to make sure, as we move forward in upcoming weeks and months, you're going to see, these announcements coming up, one partner at a time. And obviously we are going to measure success, one customer at a time as we more forward with the strategy. >> All right. So Monica, you mentioned that if you were an existing Nutanix customer, you can spin up in the public cloud, in under an hour. I guess final question I have for you is, number one, if I'm not yet a Nutanix customer, is this something I could start in the public cloud. and leverage some capabilities? And, whether I'm an existing customer or a prospect, how do I get started with Nutanix Clusters? >> Absolutely. We are all about making it easy for our customers to get started. So in fact, I know seeing is believing. So if you go to nutanix.com today, you'll see we have a link there for something called a test drive. So we are giving our prospects, and customers the ability to go try this out. Either just take a tour, or even do a 30 day free trial today. So they can try it out. They can just get spun up in the cloud completely, and then connect to on-premises if they choose to. Or just, if they choose to stay in public cloud only with Nutanix, that's absolutely the customer choice. And I would say this is really, only the beginning for us as Tarkan was saying. I mean, I'm just really super excited about our future, and how we are going to enable customers, to use cloud for innovation going forward. In a really simple, manner that's cost efficient for our customers. >> All right. Well, Monica and Tarkan, thank you so much for sharing the updates. Congratulations to the team on bringing this solution out. And as you said, just the beginning. So, we look forward to, talking to you, your partners, and your customers going forward. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you Stu. Thank you, Monica. >> Hi, and welcome back. We've just heard Nutanix's announcement about Nutanix Clusters on AWS, from Monica and Tarkan, And, to help understand some of the specific implications for the Asia Pacific and Japan region. Happy to welcome Justin Hurst, who is the CTO, for APJ with Nutanix. Justin, thanks for joining us. >> Well, thanks Stu. Thanks for having me. >> Absolutely. So, we know Justin of course, 2020, has had a lot of changes, for everyone globally. Heard some exciting news from your team. And, wondering if you can bring us inside the APJ region. And what will the impact specifically be for your customers in your region? >> Yeah, let's say, that's a great question. And, it has been a tremendously unusual year, of course, for everyone. We're all trying, to figure out how we can adapt. And how we can take this opportunity, to not only respond to the situation, but actually build our businesses in a way, that we can be more agile going forward. So, we're very excited about this announcement. And, the new capabilities it's going to bring to our customers in the region. >> Justin, one of the things we talk about is, right now, there's actually been an acceleration of how customers are looking to On-Ramp to the cloud. So when you look at the solution, what's the operational impact of Nutanix Clusters? And that acceleration to the cloud? >> Well, sure. And I think that, is really what we're trying to accomplish here, with this new technology is to take away a lot of the pain, in onboarding to the public cloud. For many customers I talk to, the cloud is aspirational at this point. They may be experimenting. They may have a few applications they've, spun up in the cloud or using a SaaS service. But really getting those core applications, into the public cloud, has been something they've struggled with. And so, by harmonizing the control plan and the data plan, between on-premises and the public cloud, we just completely remove that barrier, and allow that mobility, that's been, something people have really been looking forward to. >> All right, well, Justin, of course, the announcement being with AWS, is the global leader in public cloud. But we've seen the cluster solution, when has been discussed in earlier days, isn't necessarily only for AWS. So, what can you tell us about your customer's adoption with AWS, and maybe what we should look at down the road for clusters with other solutions? >> Yeah, for sure. Now of course, AWS is the global market leader, which is why we're so happy to have this launch event today of clusters on AWS. But with many of our customers, depending on their region, or their regulatory requirements, they may want to work as well, with other providers. And so when we built the Nutanix cluster solution, we were careful not to lock in, to any specific provider. Which gives us options going forward, to meet our customer demands, wherever they might be. >> All right. Well, when we look at cloud, of course, the implications are one of the things we need to think about. We've seen a number of hybrid solutions out there, that haven't necessarily been the most economical. So, what are the financial considerations, when we look at this solution? >> Yeah, definitely. I think when we look at using the public cloud, it's important not to bring along, the same operational mindset, as traditional on-premise infrastructure. And that's the power of the cloud, is the elasticity. And the ability to burst workloads, to grow and to shrink as needed. And so, to really help contain those costs, we've built in this amazing ability, to hibernate workloads. So that customers can run them, when they need them. Whether it's a seasonal business, whether it's something in education, where students are coming and going, for different terms. We've built this functionality, that allows you to take traditional applications that would normally run on-premises 24/7. And give them that elasticity of the public cloud, really combining the best of both worlds. And then, building tooling and automation around that. So it's not just guesswork. We can actually tell you, when to spin up a workload, or where to place a workload, to get the best financial impact. >> All right, Justin, final question for you is, this has been the works on Nutanix working on the cluster solution world for a bit now. What's exciting you, that you're going to be able to bring this to your customers? >> Yeah. There's a lot of new capabilities, that get unlocked by this new technology. I think about a customer I was talking to recently, that's expanding their business geographically. And, what they didn't want to do, was invest capital in building up a new data center, in a new region. Because here in APJ, the region is geographically vast, and connectivity can vary tremendously. And so for this company, to be able to spin up, a new data center effectively, in any AWS region around the world, really enables them to bring the data and the applications, to where they're expanding their business, without that capital outlay. And so, that's just one capability, that we're really excited about. And we think we'll have a big impact, in how people do business. And keeping those applications and data, close to where they're doing that business. >> All right. Well, Justin, thank you so much for giving us a look inside the APJ region. And congratulations to you and the team, on the Nutanix Clusters announcement. >> Thanks so much for having me Stu. >> All right. And thank you for watching I'm Stu Miniman. Thank you for watching theCUBE. (soft music)

>> From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of a special announcement, brought to you by Nutanix. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And I want to welcome you to this special event that we are doing with Nutanix. Of course, in 2020 many things have changed and that has changed some of the priorities for many companies out there, acceleration of cloud adoption, absolutely has been there. I've talked to many companies that were dipping their toe or thinking about where they were going to the cloud and of course it's rapidly moved to accelerate to be able to leverage work from home, remote contact centers and the like. So we have to think about how we can accelerate what's happening and make sure that our workforce and our customers are all taken care of. So at one of the front seats of this is of course companies working to help modernize customers out there and Nutanix is part of that discussion. So I want to welcome to join us for this special discussion of cloud and Nutanix, I've two of our CUBE alumnis. First of all, we have Monica Kumar, she's the Senior vice President of Product with Nutanix and Tarkan Maner, who's a relative newcomer, second time on theCUBE in his new role, many-time guest previously. Tarkan is the Chief Commercial Officer with Nutanix. Monica and Tarkan, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you so much. So happy to be back on theCUBE. >> Yeah, Thank you. >> All right, so Tarkan as I was teeing up, we know that IT staffs in general, CIO specifically, and companies overall, are under a lot of pressure in general, but in 2020, there are new pressures on them. So why don't you explain to us the special cloud announcement, tell us what's Nutanix's launching and why it's so important today. >> So first of all, thank you. Glad to be here with Monica. Basically, you and I spent some time with a few customers in the past few weeks and months. I'll tell you the things in our industry are changing at a pace that we've never seen before, especially with this pandemic backdrop as we're going through. And obviously all the economic challenges that creates beyond the obviously health challenges and across the globe, all the pain it creates, but also create some opportunities for our customers and partners to deliver solutions to our enterprise customers and commercial customers and public sector customers in multiple industries. From healthcare, obviously very importantly, to manufacturing, to supply chains and to all the other industries, including financial services and public sector again. So in that context and Monica knows this well as she's our leader in our strategy, we're putting lots of effort in this new multi-cloud strategy as a company. As you know Stu well, Nutanix wrote the book in digital infrastructures with its own hyperconverged infrastructure story. Now they're taking that next level via our data center solutions, via DevOps solutions and end user computer solutions now in multi-cloud fashion, working with partners like AWS. So in this launch, we have our new hybrid cloud infrastructure, Nutanix Clusters product now available on AWS. We are super excited. We have more than 20 tech firms and customers and partners at senior executive level support in this big launch. Timing is usually important because of this pandemic backdrop. And the goal is obviously to help our customers save money, focus on what's important for them, save money for them and making sure they streamline their IT operations. So it's a huge launch for us and we're super excited about it. >> Yeah, and the one thing I would add to what Tarkan said Stu is, look, we talked to a lot of customers and obviously cloud is the constant in terms of enabling innovation. But I think more with COVID, what's on top of mind is also how do we use cloud for innovation, but really be intelligent about cost optimization. So with this new announcement, what we're excited about is we're making really a hybrid cloud a reality across public and private cloud, but also making sure customers get the cost efficiency they need when they're deploying the solution. So we are super excited to bring true hybrid cloud offering with AWS to the market today. Well, I can tell you Nutanix Clusters is absolutely one of the exciting technologies I've enjoyed watching and getting ready for. And of course, a partnership with the largest public cloud player out there, AWS, is really important. When I think about Nutanix from the earliest days, the word that we always used for the HCI space in Nutanix specifically, was simplicity. Anybody in the tech space know that true simplicity is really hard to do. When I think about cloud, when I think about multi-cloud, simplicity's not the first thing that I think of. So Tarkan, help us connect, how is Nutanix going to extend the simplicity that it's done for so long now in the data center into places like AWS with this solution? >> So, Stu, you're right on, spot on. Look, Monica and I spend a lot of time with our customers. One thing about an Nutanix executive team we're very customer driven, and I'm not just saying this to make a point. We really spent tons of time with them because our solutions are basically so critical for them to run their businesses. So just recently, I was with a senior executive of an airline right before that Monica and I spent time with one of the largest banks in the world in France, in Paris, right before pandemic, we were actually traveling, talking to not only the CIO, the Chief Operating Officer on one of these huge banks, and the biggest issue was how these companies are trying to basically adjust their plans, business plans. I'm not talking about tech plans, IT plans, the business plans around this backdrop that the economic stress and obviously now pandemic is in a big way. One of the CIOs told me, it was an airline executive, "Look, Tarkan, in the next 12 months, my business might be half of what it is today. And I need to do more with less in so many different ways, while I'm cutting cost." So it's a tough time. So in that context is to, you're actually right, multi-cloud is a difficult proposition, but it's critical for these companies to manage their cost structures across multiple operating models. Cloud to us is not a destination. It's a means to an end. It is an operating model. At the end of the day, the differentiation is through the software. The unique software that we provide from digital infrastructures to deliver end to end discreet data center solutions, DevOps solutions for developers, as well as for end user computing individuals, to make you sure to take advantage of these VDI desktop-as-a-service capability. So in that context, what we're providing now, to these CIOs who are going through this difficult time is a platform in which they can move their workloads from cloud to cloud based on their needs, the freedom of choice. Look, one of these big banks that Monica and I visited in France, huge global bank, they have a workloads on AWS, they have workloads on Azure, they have workloads on Google, they have workloads on Trans Telecom, the local SP, they have workloads in Germany, they have workloads on cloud service providers in Asia, in Taiwan and other locations, On top of that, they're also using Nutanix on-prem as well as Nutanix cloud, our own cloud services for DR. And for them, this is not just a destination, this is an operating model. So the biggest request from them is, "Look, can you guys make this cost effective? Can we use all these operating models and move our data and applications from cloud to cloud?" In simple terms, can we get some flexibility with commits as well as with the credits they paid for so far? And those are the things we're working on, and I'm sure Monica is going to get a little bit more into detail as we talk though this. We're super excited to start this journey with AWS with this launch, but we're not going to stop there. Our goal is, we just discussed it with Monica earlier, provide freedom of choice across multiple clouds both on-prem and off-prem for our customers to cut costs and to focus on what's important for them. >> Yeah, and I would just add to sum it up, we are really simplifying the multi-cloud complexity for our customers. And I can go into more details but that's really the gist of it. Is what Nutanix is doing with this announcement and more coming up in the future. >> Well, Monica, when I think about customers and how do they decide what stays in their data center, what goes into the public cloud, it's really their application portfolio. I need to look at my workloads, I need to look at my skillset. So when I look at the Cluster solution, what are some of the key use cases? What workloads are going to be the first ones that you expect or you're having customers use with it today? >> Sure, and as we talk to customer too, there's clearly few key use cases that they've been trying to build a hybrid strategy around. The first few ones are bursting into cloud. In case of sudden demand, how do I burst and scale my, let's say, VDI environment or database environment into the cloud? So that's clearly one that many of our customers want to be able to do simply and without having to incur this extreme complexity of managing these environments. Number two, it's about DR. And we saw it with COVID, business continuity became a big deal for many organizations. They weren't prepared for it. So the ability to actually spin up your applications and data in the cloud seamlessly in case of a disaster, that's another big use case. The third one, which many customers talk about is can I lift and shift my applications as is into the cloud without having to rewrite a single line of code or without having to rewrite all of it? That's another one. And last but not least, the one that we're also hearing a lot about is how do I extend my current applications by using cloud native services that are available on public cloud? So those are four, there's many more, of course, but in terms of workloads, I mentioned two examples, VDI, which is virtual desktop infrastructure, end user computing and also databases. More and more of our customers don't want to invest, in again, having on premises data center assets, sitting there idly and wait for when the capacity surges, the demand for capacity surges, they want to be able to do that in the cloud. So I'd say those are the few use cases and workloads. One thing I want to go back to, what Tarkan was talking about, really there are three key reasons why the current hybrid cloud solutions haven't really panned out for customers. Number one, it's having a unified management environment across public and private cloud. There's a few solutions out there, but none of them have proved to be simple enough to actually put into real execution. With Nutanix, the one thing you can do is literally build a hybrid cloud within under an hour. Under an hour, you can spin up Nutanix Clusters which you have on premises, the same exact Cluster in Amazon. Under one hour. There you go. And you have the same exact management plane that we offer on-prem that now can manage your AWS Nutanix Clusters. It's that easy, right? And then you can easily move your data and applications across, if you choose to. You want to move and burst into cloud, public cloud? Do it. You want to keep some stuff on-prem? Do it. If you want to develop in the cloud, do it. Want to keep production on-prem, do it. Single management plane, seamless mobility. And the third point is about cost. Simplicity of managing the costs making sure you know how are you going to incur costs? How about if you can hibernate your AWS cluster when you're not using it? We have the capability now in our software to do that. How about knowing where to place, which workload, which workload goes into public node, which stays on-premises. We have an amazing tool called Beam that gives the customers that ability to assess which is the right cloud for the right workload. So I can go on and on about this, we've talked to so many customers, but this is in a nutshell, the use cases and workloads that we are delivering to customers right out the gate. >> Well, Monica, I'd love to hear a little bit about the customers that have had an early access to this. What customer stories can you share? Understand, of course, you're probably going to need to anonymize, but I'd like to understand how they've been leveraging Clusters, the value that they're getting from it. >> Absolutely. We've been working with a number of customers. And I'll give you a few examples. There's a customer in Australia. I'll start with that. And they basically run a big event that happens every five years for them. And that they have to scale something to 24 million people. Now imagine if they have to keep capacity on site, anticipating the needs for five years in a row. Well, they can't do that. And the big event is going to happen next year for them. So they're getting ready with our Clusters to really expand the VDI environments into the cloud in a big way with AWS. So from Nutanix on-prem to AWS and expand VDI and burst into the cloud. So that's one example. That's obviously when you have an event driven capacity bursting into the cloud. Another customer who is in the insurance business. For them DR Is of course very important. I mean, DR is important for every industry and every business, but for them they realize that they need to be able to transparently run their applications in the case of a disaster on the cloud. So they've been using Nutanix Clusters with AWS to do that. Another customer is looking at lifting and shifting some of their database applications into AWS with Nutanix, for example. And then we have yet another customer who's looking at retiring a part of the data center estate and moving that completely to AWS with Nutanix as a backbone, Nutanix Clusters as the backbone. I mean, and we have tons of examples of customers who during COVID, for example, were able to burst capacity and spin up remote, hundreds and thousands of remote employees using Clusters into AWS cloud, using Citrix also by the way, as the desktop provider. So again, I can go on, we have tons of customers. There's obviously a big demand for this solution because now it's so easy to use. We have customers really surprised going, "Wait, I have built a whole hybrid cloud within an hour? And I was able to scale from six nodes to 16 nodes just like that on AWS cloud from on prem six nodes to 16 and AWS cloud? Our customers are really, really pleasantly surprised with the ease of use and how quickly they can scale using Clusters in AWS. >> Yeah, Tarkan, I have to imagine that this is a real change for the conversations that you have with customers. I mean, Nutanix has been partnering with AWS for a number of years. I remember the first time that I saw Nutanix at the re:Invent show, but cloud is definitely front and center in a lot of your customer's conversations. So with your partners, with your customers, has to be just a whole different aspect to the conversations that you can have. >> Absolutely, Stu. As you heard from Monica too, as I mentioned earlier, this is not just a destination for the customers. I know you using these buzzwords, at the end of day, it's an operating model. It's an operating model they want to take advantage of to cut costs and do more with less. So in that context, as you heard even in this conversation, there isn't any pain point in this. Like, again, being able to move the workloads from location to location, cost-optimize those things, provide a streamlined operations, again, as Monica suggested, making the apps and the data related to those apps mobile, and obviously provide built-in networking capabilities, all those capabilities make it easier for them to cut costs. So what we're hearing constantly from the enterprises is, small and large, private sector and public sector, nothing different, clearly they have options, they want to have the freedom of choice, some of these workloads are going to run on-prem, some of them off-prem and off-prem is going to have tons of different variations. So in that context, as I mentioned earlier, we have our own cloud as well. We provide 20 plus SKUs to 17,000 customers around the world. There's a $2 billion software business run rate as you know and a lot of those customers, on-prem customers, now are also coming to our own cloud services with cloud partners we have our own cloud services with our own billing, payments, logistics, and service capabilities, fit a credit card, you can do DR it's actually come with this service to Nutanix itself. But some of these customers also want to be able to go to AWS or Azure or to a local service provider. Sometimes as US companies we think US only, but think about this, this is a global phenomenon. I have customers in India. We have customers in Australia as Monica talked about. In China, in Japan, in Germany. And some of these enterprise customers, public sector customers, they want a DR, Disaster Recovery as a service to a local service provider within the country. Because of the new data governance laws and security concerns, they don't want the data and apps to go outside of the boundaries of the country, in some cases in the same town. If you're in Switzerland, forget about the country, the same city. So we want to make sure we give capabilities to customers, use the cloud as an operating model the way they want. And as part of this, Stu, we're not alone on this. We can not do this alone. We have tremendous level of partner support as you're going to see the announcements from HP as one of our key partners, Lenovo, AMD, Intel, Fujitsu, Citrix for end user computing, we're partnering with Palo Alto Networks for security, a slew of partners, as you know we support VMware ESXi. We have partners like Red Hat who's done tons of work in the Linux front, we partnered with IBM, we partnered with Dell. So the ecosystem makes it so much easier for our customers, especially in this pandemic backdrop. And I think what you're going to see from Nutanix, more partners, more customer proof points to help the customers at end of the day to cut costs in this typical backdrop. Especially for the next 24 months, I think what you're going to see is tremendous, so to speak, adoption of this multi-cloud approach that we're focusing on right now. >> Yeah. And let me add, I know a partner list is long. So, Tarkan also we have the global size, of course, the Wipro and HCL and TCS and Capgemini and Zensar, you name it all. We're working with all of them to bring Clusters based solutions to market. And for the entire Nutanix stack, also partners like Equinix and Yotta. So it's a long list of partnerships. The one thing I did want to bring up Stu which I forgot to mention earlier and Tarkan reminded me, is our superior architecture. So why is it that Nutanix can deliver this now to customers? I mean, our customers have been trying to build hybrid cloud for a little while now and work across multiple clouds and we know it's been complex. The reason why we are able to deliver this in the way we are, is because of our architecture. The way we've architected Clusters with AWS it's a built-in native network integration. And what that means is if your customer and end user who's a practitioner, you can literally see the Nutanix VMs in the same space as Amazon VMs. So for a customer, it's in the exact same space, it's really easy to then use other AWS services and we bypass any complex and latency issues with networking because we're exactly part of AWS VPC for the customer. And also, the customers can use by the way, their Amazon credits with the way we've architected this. We allow for bringing your own license, by the way, that's the other true part about, simplicity is same license that our customers use on-premises today for Nutanix can be brought exactly the same way to AWS, if they choose to. And, of course, we do also offer other licensing models that are cloud only, but I want to point out that BYOL is, is something that we're very proud of. It's truly enabling bring your own license to AWS cloud in this case. >> Well, it's interesting, Monica. Of course, one of the things everybody's watched of Nutanix over the last few years is that move from an appliance primarily to a software model and as an industry as a whole, it's much more moving to the cloud model for pricing. And it sounds like that's the primary model with some flexibility and options that you have when you're talking about the Clusters solution here, is that correct? >> Yeah, we also offer the pay as you go model of course, on cloud it's popular. So customers can decide they just want to pay for the amount they use, that's fine, or they can bring their existing on-prem license to AWS, or we also have a commit model where they commit for a certain capacity for the year and they go with that. So we have two or three different kinds of models. Again, going with the freedom of choice for our customers, we offer them different models they can choose from. But to me, the best part is to bring own license model. That's again, a true hybrid pricing model here. They can choose to use Nutanix where they want to. >> Yeah, well, and, and Monica, I'm glad you brought up some of the architectural pieces here. Because you talked about all the partners that you have out there, if I'm sitting in the partner world, I've been heard nothing over the last few years, but I've been inundated by all the hybrid solutions. So every public cloud provider, including AWS now, is talking about hybrid solutions. You've got virtualization players, infrastructure players, all talking out there. So architecture, you talked a bit about, anything else, key differentiators that you want people to understand as what sets Nutanix apart from the crowd when it comes to hybrid cloud? >> Well, like I said, it's because of our architecture, you can build a hybrid cloud in under an hour. I mean, prove to me if you can do with other providers. And again, I don't mean that, having that ego, but really, honestly for our customers, it's all about how can we speed up a customer's experience to cloud. So building a cloud under an hour, being able to truly manage it with a single plane, being able to move apps and data with one click in many cases and last but not least the license portability, all of that together, I think the way, Dheeraj our CEO sums it and Tarkan have talked about this is, we may not have been the first to market, but we believe we're the best to market in this space today. That's what I would say. >> Now, Tarkan, I'd love to hear a little bit of the vision. So as Monica alluded to, anybody that digs underneath the covers it's bare metal offerings from the cloud providers that are enabling this technology. There was a certain partnership that AWS had that enabled this and now you're taking advantage of it. When you look at Clusters going forward, give us a little bit, what should we be looking for when it comes to AWS and maybe even beyond? >> Thank you, Stu, actually spot on question. Most companies in this space, they follow these buzzwords like, "Oh, multi-cloud." And when you drill-down and you find out, okay, you support two cloud services and you actually own some kind of a marketplace and you're one of the 19,000 services, you don't see this as a multi-cloud. Our view is complete freedom of choice. So our vision includes a couple of our private clouds, government cloud success with our customers, with enterprise, commercial and public sector customers also delivered to them choice with Nutanix's own cloud, as I mentioned earlier, with our own billing payment, logistics capabilities starting with DR as a service, disaster recovery as a service. But take that next level, the database as a service, VDI, desktop as a service and other services that we deliver. But on top of that, also as Monica talked about earlier, partnerships we have with service providers like Yotta in India, work going on with SoftBank in Japan, work going on with OVH in France and multiple countries that we're building this XSP service provider- customer relationships, give those international customers choice within their own local region in their own country, in some cases, even in their city where they are making sure the network latency is not an issue, security, data governance is not an issue. And obviously, third leg of this multi legged stool is hyperscalers themselves, like AWS. AWS has been a phenomenal partner working with Doug Hume, Matt Garmin, the executive team under Andy Jassy and Jeff Bezos they're just super partners, obviously that bare metal service capability is huge differentiator and typical AWS simplicity, and obviously data simplicity coming together, but giving choice to our customers has we move forward, obviously our customers have a multi-cloud strategy. So I'm reading an amazing book called "Silk Roads." It's an amazing book. I strongly suggest you all read it. It's all talking about partnerships. Throughout history, those empires, those countries who've been successful, partnered well, connect dots well. So that's what we're trying to learn from our own history, connecting the dots with the customers and partners as we talked about earlier, working with companies like Wipro and we all deliver an end user computing service called desktop-as-a-service virtual desk, database as a service, digital data services we have, few other new services started in HCL and others. So all these things come up together as a complete end to end strategy with our partners. So we want to make sure as we move forward, in upcoming weeks and months, your going to see these announcements coming up one partner at a time and obviously we're going to measure success one customer at a time as we move forward with this strategy. >> All right, so Monica, you mentioned that if you were an existing Nutanix customer, you can spin up in the public cloud in under an hour, I guess final the question I have for you is number one, if I'm not yet a Nutanix customer, is this something I could start in the public cloud and leverage some capabilities and whether I'm an existing customer or a prospect, how do I get started with Nutanix Clusters? >> Absolutely, we're all about making it easy for our customers to get started. So in fact, I know seeing is believing, so if you go to nutanix.com today, you'll see we have a link there for something called a test drive. So we are giving our prospects and customers the ability to go try this out, either just take a tour or even do a 30 day free trial today. So they can try it out, they can just get spun up in the cloud completely and then connect on premises if they choose to, or if they just sustain public cloud only with Nutanix, that's absolutely the customer choice. And I would say, this is really only the beginning for us as Tarkan saying. Our future, I mean, I'm just really super excited about our feature and how we're going to enable customers to use cloud for innovation going forward in a really simple manner that's cost efficient for our customers. >> All right. Well, Monica and Tarkan, thank you so much for sharing the updates. Congratulations to the team on bringing this solution out. And as you said, just the beginning so we look forward to talking to you, your partners and your customers going forward. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you, Stu, thank you, Monica. >> All right, for Tarkan and Monica, I'm Stu Miniman with theCUBE. Thank you as always for watching this special Nutanix announcement. (upbeat music)

>> From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage, have a special announcement, brought to you by Nutanix. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And I want to welcome you to this special event that we are doing with Nutanix. Of course, in 2020 many things have changed and that has changed some of the priorities for many companies out there, acceleration of cloud adoption, absolutely have been there. I've talked to many companies that were dipping their toe or thinking about where they were going to the cloud and of course it's rapidly moved to accelerate to be able to leverage work from home, remote contact centers and the like. So we have to think about how we can accelerate what's happening and make sure that our workforce and our customers are all taken care of. So at one of the front seats of this is of course companies working to help modernize customers out there and Nutanix is part of that discussion. So I want to welcome to join us for this special discussion of cloud and Nutanix, I've two of our CUBE alumnis. First of all, we have Monica Kumar, she's the Senior vice President of Product with Nutanix and Tarkan Maner, who's a relative newcomer, second time on theCUBE in his new role, many-time guest previously. Tarkan is the Chief Commercial Officer with Nutanix. Monica and Tarkan, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you so much. So happy to be back on theCUBE. >> Yeah, Thank you. >> All right, so Tarkan as I was teeing up, we know that IT staffs in general, CIO specifically, and companies overall, are under a lot of pressure in general, but in 2020, there are new pressures on them. So why don't you explain to us the special cloud announcement, tell us what's Nutanix's launching and why it's so important today. >> So first of all, thank you. Glad to be here with Monica. Basically, you and I spent some time with a few customers in the past few weeks and months. I'll tell you the things in our industry are changing at a pace that we've never seen before, especially with this pandemic backdrop as we're going through. And obviously all the economic challenges that creates beyond the obviously health challenges and across the globe, all the pain it creates, but also create some opportunities for our customers and partners to deliver solutions to our enterprise customers and infomercial customers and public sector customers in multiple industries. From healthcare, obviously very importantly, to manufacturing, to supply chains and to all the other industries, including financial services and public sector again. So in that context and Monica knows this well as she's our leader in our strategy, we're putting lots of effort in this new multi-cloud strategy as a company. As you know too well, Nutanix wrote the book in digital infrastructures with its own hybrid infrastructure story. Now they're taking that next level via our data center solutions, via DevOps solutions and end user computer solutions now in multi-cloud fashion, working with partners like AWS. So in this launch, we have our new multi-cloud infrastructure, clusters product now available on AWS. We are super excited. We have more than 20 tech firms and customers and partners at senior executive level support in this big launch. Timing is usually important because of this pandemic backdrop. And the goal is obviously to help our customers save money, focus on what's important for them, save money for them and making sure they streamline their IT operations. So it's a huge launch for us and we're super excited about it. >> Yeah, and the one thing I would add to what Tarkan said too is, look, we talked to a lot of customers and obviously cloud is the constant in terms of enabling innovation. But I think more with COVID, what's on top of mind is also how do we use cloud for innovation, but really be intelligent about cost optimization. So with this new announcement, what we're excited about is we're making really a hybrid cloud a reality across public and private cloud, but also making sure customers get the cost efficiency they need when they're deploying the solution. So we are super excited to bring true hybrid cloud offering with AWS to the market today. >> Well, I can tell you Nutanix cluster is absolutely one of the exciting technologies I've enjoyed watching and getting ready for. And of course, a partnership with the largest public cloud player out there, AWS, is really important. When I think about Nutanix from the earliest days, the word that we always used for the HI space in Nutanix specifically, was simplicity. Anybody in the tech space know that true simplicity is really hard to do. When I think about cloud, when I think about multi-cloud, simplicity's not the first thing that I think of. So Tarkan, help us connect, how is Nutanix going to extend the simplicity that it's done for so long now in the data center into places like AWS with this solution? >> So, Stu, you're right on, spot on. Look, Monica and I spend a lot of time with our customers. One thing about an Nutanix executive team we're very customer driven, and I'm not just saying this to make a point. We really spent tons of time with them because our solutions are basically so critical for them to run their businesses. So just recently, I was with a senior executives of an airline right before that Monica and I spent actually with one of the largest banks in the world in France, in Paris, right before pandemic, we were actually traveling, talking to not only the CIO, the Chief Operating Officer on one of these huge banks, and the biggest issue was how these companies are trying to basically adjust their plans, business plans. I'm not talking about tech plans, IT plans, the business plans around this backdrop that the economic stress and obviously now pandemic is in a big way. One of the CIOs told me, it was an airline executive, "Look, Tarkan, in the next 12 months, my business might be half of what it is today. And I need to do more with less in so many different ways, while I'm cutting cost." So it's a tough time. So in that context is to, you're actually right, multi-cloud is a difficult proposition, but it's critical for these companies to manage their cost structures across multiple operating models. Cloud to us is not a destination. It's a means to an end. It is an operating model. At the end of the day, the differentiation is to the software. The unique software that we provide from digital infrastructures to deliver end to end discreet data center solutions, DevOps solutions for developers, as well as for end user computing individuals, to make you sure to take advantage of these EDI disability service topic capability. So in that context, what we're providing now, to these CIOs who are going through this difficult time is a platform in which they can move their workloads from cloud to cloud based on their needs, the freedom of choice. Look, one of these big banks that Monica and I visited in France, huge global bank, they have a workloads on AWS, they have workloads on Azure, they have workloads on Google, they have workloads on (mumbles), the local XP, they have workloads in Germany, they have workloads on cloud service providers in Asia, in Taiwan and other locations, On top of that, they're also using Nutanix on Prem as well as Nutanix cloud, our own cloud services for BR. And for them, this is not just a destination, this is an operating model. So the biggest request from them is, "Look, can you guys make this cost effective? Can we use all these operating models and move our data and applications from cloud to cloud?" In simple terms, can we get some flexibility with commits as well as with the credits they paid for so far? And those are the things we're working on, and I'm sure Monica is going to get a little bit more into detail as we talk though this. We're super excited to start this journey with AWS with this launch, but we're not going to stop there. Our goal is, we just discussed it with Monica earlier, provide freedom of choice across multiple clouds both on Prem and off Prem for our customers to cut costs and to focus on what's important for them. >> Yeah, and I would just add to sum it up, we are really simplifying the multi-cloud complexity for our customers,. And I can go into more details but that's really the gist of it. Is what Nutanix is doing with this announcement and more coming up in the future. >> Well, Monica, when I think about customers and how do they decide what stays in their data center, what goes into the public cloud, it's really their application portfolio. I need to look at my workloads, I need to look at my skillset. So when I look at the cluster solution, what are some of the key use cases? What workloads are going to be the first ones that you expect or you're having customers use with it today? >> Sure, and as we talk to customer too, there's clearly few key use cases that they've been trying to build a hybrid strategy around. The first few ones are bursting into cloud. In case of sudden demand, how do I burst and scale my let's say a VDI environment or database environment into the cloud? So that's clearly one that many of our customers want to be able to do simply and without having to incur this extreme complexity of managing these environments. Number two, it's about DR. And we saw it with COVID, business continuity became a big deal for many organizations. They weren't prepared for it. So the ability to actually spin up your applications and data in the cloud seamlessly in case of a disaster, that's another big use case. The third one, which many customers talk about is can I lift and shift my applications as is into the cloud without having to rewrite a single line of code or without having to rewrite all of it? That's another one. And last but not least, the one that we're also hearing a lot about is how do I extend my current applications by using cloud native services that's available on public cloud? So those are four, there's many more, of course, but in terms of workloads, I mentioned two examples, VDI, which is virtual desktop infrastructure, and there's a computing and also databases. More and more of our customers don't want to invest, in again, having on premises data center assets, sitting there idlely and wait for when the capacity surges, the demand for capacity surges, they want to be able to do that in the cloud. So I'd say those are the few use cases and workloads. One thing I want to go back to, what Tarkan was talking about, really there're three key reasons why the current hybrid cloud solutions haven't really panned out for customers. Number one, it's having a unified management environment across public and private cloud. There's a few solutions out there, but none of them have proved to be simple enough to actually put into real execution. With Nutanix, the one thing you can do is literally build a hybrid cloud within under an hour. Under an hour, you can spin up new data clusters which you have on premises, the same exact cluster in Amazon. Under one hour. There you go. And you have the same exact management plan that we offer on Prem that now can manage your AWS Nutanix clusters. It's that easy, right? And then you can easily move your data and applications across, if you choose to. You want to move and burst into cloud, public cloud? Do it. You want to keep some stuff on prem? Do it. If you want to develop in the cloud, do it. Want to keep production on prem, do it. Single management plan, seamless mobility. And the third point is about cost. Simplicity of managing the costs making sure you know how are you going to incur costs? How about if you can hibernate your AWS cluster when you're not using it? We have the capability now in our software to do that. How about knowing where to place, which workload, which workload goes into public node, which stays on premises. We have an amazing tool called beam that gives the customers that ability to assess which is the right cloud for the right workload. So I can go on and on about this, we've talked to so many customers, but this is in a nutshell, the use cases and workloads that we are delivering to customers right out the gate. >> Well, Monica, I'd love to hear a little bit about the customers that have had an early access to this. What customer stories can you share? Understand, of course, you're probably going to need to anonymize, but I'd like to understand how they've been leveraging clusters, the value that they're getting from it. >> Absolutely. We've been working with a number of customers. And I'll give you a few examples. There's a customer in Australia. I'll start with that. And they basically run a big event that happens every five years for them. And that they have to scale something to 24 million people. Now imagine if they have to keep capacity on site, anticipating the needs for five years in a row. Well, they can't do that. And the big event is going to happen next year for them. So they're getting ready with our clusters to really expand the VDI environments into the cloud in a big way with AWS. So from Nutanix on prem to AWS and expand VDI and burst into the cloud. So that's one example. That's obviously when you have an event driven capacity bursting into the cloud. Another customer who is in the insurance business. For them DR Is of course very important. I mean, DR is important for every industry and every business, but for them they realize that they need to be able to transparently run their applications in the case of a disaster on the cloud. So they've been using Nutanix clusters with AWS to do that. Another customer is looking at lifting and shifting some of their database applications into AWS with Nutanix, for example. And then we have yet another customer who's looking at retiring a part of the data center estate and moving that completely to AWS with Nutanix as a backbone, Nutanix clusters as the backbone. I mean, and we have tons of examples of customers who during COVID, for example, were able to burst capacity and spin up remote, hundreds and thousands of remote employees using clusters into AWS cloud, using Citrix also by the way, as the desktop provider. So again, I can go on, we have tons of customers. There's obviously a big demand for this solution because now it's so easy to use. We have customers really surprised going, "Wait, I have built a whole hybrid cloud within an hour? And I was able to scale from six nodes to 16 nodes just like that on AWS cloud from on prem six nodes to 16 and AWS cloud? Our customers are really, really pleasantly surprised with the ease of use and how quickly they can scale using clusters in AWS. >> Yeah, Tarkan, I have to imagine that this is a real change for the conversations that you have with customers. I mean, Nutanix has been partnering with AWS for a number of years. I remember the first time that I saw Nutanics at the re:Invent show, but cloud is definitely front and center in a lot of your customer's conversations. So with your partners, with your customers, has to be just a whole different aspect to the conversations that you can have. >> Absolutely, Stu. As you heard from Monica too, as I mentioned earlier, this is not just a destination for the customers. I know you using these buzzwords, at the end of day, it's an operating model. It's an operating model they want to take advantage of to cut costs and do more with less. So in that context, as you heard even in this conversation, there's any pain point in this. Like, again, being able to move the workloads from location to location, cost-optimize those things, provide a streamlined operations, again, as Monica suggested, making the apps and the data related to those apps mobile, and obviously provide built-in networking capabilities, all those capabilities make it easier for them to cut costs. So what we're hearing constantly from the enterprises is, small and large, private sector and public sector, nothing different, clearly they have options, they want to have the freedom of choice, some of these workloads are going to run on prem, some of them off prem and off prem is going to have tons of different reactions. So in that context, as I mentioned earlier, we have our own cloud as well. We provide 20 plus skells to 17,000 customers around the world. There's a $2 billion software business run rate as you know and a lot of those customers, prem customers, now are also coming to our own cloud services with cloud partners we have our own cloud services with our own billing, payments, logistics, and service capabilities, fit a credit card, you can do DR it's actually come with this service to Nutanix itself. But some of these customers also want to go be able to go to AWS or Azure or to a local service provider. Sometimes as US companies we think US only, but think about this, this is a global phenomenon. I have customers in India. We have customers in Australia as Monica talked about. In China, in Japan, in Germany. And some of these enterprise customers, public sector customers, they want a DR, Disaster Recovery as a service to a local service provider within the country. Because of the new data governance laws and security concerns, they don't want the data and us to go outside of the boundaries of the country, in some cases in the same town. If you're in Switzerland, forget about the country, the same city. So we want to make sure we give capabilities to customers, use the cloud as an operating model the way they want. And as part of this, Stu, we're not alone on this. We can not do this alone. We have tremendous level of partner support as you're going to see the announcements from HP as one of our key partners, Lenovo, AMD, Intel, Fujitsu, Citrix for end user computing, we're partnering with Palo Alto Networks for security, a slew partners, as you know we support VMware is excited, We have partners like Red Hat who's done tons of work in the Linux front, we partnered with IBM, we partnered with Dell. So the ecosystem makes it so much easier for our customers, especially in this pandemic backdrop. And I think what you're going to see from Nutanix, more partners, more customer proof points to help the customers at of the day to cut costs in this typical backdrop. Especially for the next 24 months, I think what you're going to see is tremendous, so to speak, adoption of this multi-cloud approach that we're focusing on right now. >> Yeah. And let me add, I know a partner list is long. So Tarkan also, we have the global size, of course, the WebPros and FCL and TCS and Capgemini and Zinsser, you name it all. We're working with all of them to bring clusters based solutions to market. And for the entire Nutanix stack, also partners like Equinix and Yoda. So it's a long list of partnerships. The one thing I did want to bring up still, which I forgot to mention earlier and Tarkan reminded me, is our superior architecture. So why is it that Nutanix can deliver this now to customers? I mean, our customers have been trying to build hybrid cloud for a little while now and work across multiple clouds and we know it's been complex. The reason why we are able to deliver this in the way we are, is because of our architecture. The way we've architected clusters with AWS it's built-in native network integration. And what that means is if your customer and end user who's a practitioner, you can literally see the Nutanix VMs in the same space as Amazon VMs. So for a customer, it's in the exact same space, it's really easy to then use other AWS services and we bypass any complex and latency issues with networking because we're exactly part of AWS VPC for the customer. And also, the customers can use by the way, their Amazon credits with the way we've architected this. We allow for bringing your own license, by the way, that's the other true part about, simplicity is same license that our customers use on premises today for Nutanix can be brought exactly the same way to AWS, if they choose to. And, of course, we do also offer other licensing models that are cloud only, but I want to point out that (indistinct) is, is something that we're very proud of. It's truly enabling bring your own license to AWS cloud in this case. >> Well, it's interesting, Monica. Of course, one of the things everybody's watched of Nutanix over the last few years is that move from an appliance primarily to a software model and as an industry as a whole, it's much more moving to the cloud model for pricing. And it sounds like that's the primary model with some flexibility and options that you have when you're talking about the cluster solution here, is that correct? >> Yeah, we also offer the pay as you go model of course, on cloud it's popular. So customers can decide they just want to pay for the amount they use, that's fine, or they can bring their existing on prem license to AWS, or we also have a commit model where they commit for a certain capacity for the year and they go with that. So we have two or three different kinds of models. Again, going with the freedom of choice for our customers, we offer them different models they can choose from. But to me, the best part is to bring own license model. That's again, a true hybrid pricing model here. They can choose to use Nutanix where they want to. >> Yeah, well, and, and Monica, I'm glad you brought up some of the architectural pieces here. 'Cause you talked about all the partners that you have out there, if I'm sitting in the partner world, I've been heard nothing over the last few years, but I've been inundated by all the hybrid solutions. So every public cloud provider, including AWS now, is talking about hybrid solutions. You've got virtualization players, infrastructure players, all talking out there. So architecture, you talked a bit about, anything else, key differentiators that you want people to understand as what sets Nutanix apart from the crowd when it comes to hybrid cloud? >> Well, like I said, it's because of our architecture, you can build a hybrid cloud in under an hour. I mean, prove to me if you can do with other providers. And again, I don't mean that, having that ego, but really, honestly for our customers, it's all about how can we speed up a customer's experience to cloud. So building a cloud under an hour, being able to truly manage it with a single plane, being able to move apps and data with one click in many cases and last but not least the license portability, all of that together, I think the way, Durage RCO sums it and Tarkan have talked about this is, we may not have been the first to market, but we believe we're the best to market in this space today. That's what I would say. >> Now, Tarkan, I'd love to hear a little bit of the vision. So as Monica alluded to, anybody that digs underneath the covers it's bare metal offerings from the cloud providers that are enabling this technology. There was a certain partnership that AWS had that enabled this and now you're taking advantage of it. When you look at clusters going forward, give us a little bit, what should we be looking for when it comes to AWS and maybe even beyond? >> Thank you, Tsu, actually is spot on question. Most companies in this space, they follow these buzzwords like, "Oh, multi-cloud." And when you (indistinct) down and you find out, Okay, you support two cloud services and you actually own some kind of a marketplace and you're one of the 19,000 services, you don't see this as a multi-cloud. Our view is complete freedom of choice. So our vision includes a couple of our private clouds, government cloud success with our customers, with enterprise, commercial and public sector customers also delivered to them choice with Nutanix's own cloud, as I mentioned earlier, with our own billing payment, we'll just escapable these started with DR as a service, disaster recovery as a service. But take that next level, the database as a service, VDI, desktop as a service and other services that we deliver. But on top of that, also as Monica talked about earlier, partnerships we have with service providers like Yoda in India, work going on with SoftBank in Japan, work going on with OVH in France and multiple countries that we're building this XSP service provider- customer relationships, give those international customers choice within their own local region in their own country, in some cases, even in their city where they are making sure the network latency is not an issue, security, data governance is not an issue. And obviously, third leg of this multi legged stool is hyperscalers themselves, like AWS. AWS has been a phenomenal partner working with Hume, Matt Garmin, the executive team under Andy Jassy and Jeff Bezos they're just super partners, obviously that bare metal service capability is huge differentiator and typical AWS simplicity, and obviously data simplicity coming together, but giving choice to our customers has we move forward, obviously our customers have a multi-cloud strategy. So I'm reading an amazing book called "Silk Roads." It's an amazing book. I strongly suggest you all read it. It's all talking about partnerships. Throughout history, those empires, those countries who've been successful, partnered well, connect dots well. So that's what we're trying to learn from our own history, connecting the dots with the customers and partners as we talked about earlier, working with companies like WebPro and we all deliver an end user company service called database service go to desk, database as a service, digital data services with MBA, few other new services started in HCL and others. So all these things come up together as a complete end to end strategy with our partners. So we want to make sure as we move forward, in upcoming weeks and months, your going to see these announcements coming up one partner at a time and obviously we're going to measure success one customer at a time as we move forward with this strategy. >> All right, so Monica, you mentioned that if you were an existing Nutanix customer, you can spin up in the public cloud in under an hour, I guess final the question I have for you is number one, if I'm not yet a Nutanix customer, is this something I could start in the public cloud and leverage some capabilities and whether I'm an existing customer or a prospect, how do I get started with Nutanix clusters? >> Absolutely, we're all about making it easy for our customers to get started. So in fact, I know seeing is believing, so if you go to nutanix.com today, you'll see we have a link there for something called a test drive. So we are giving our prospects and customers the ability to go try this out, either just take a tour or even do a 30 day free trial today. So they can try it out, they can just get spun up in the cloud completely and then connect on premises if they choose to, or if they just sustain public cloud only with Nutanix, that's absolutely the customer choice. And I would say, this is really only the beginning for us as Tarkan saying. Our future, I mean, I'm just really super excited about our feature and how we're going to enable customers to use cloud for innovation going forward in a really simple manner that's cost efficient for our customers. >> All right. Well, Monica and Tarkan, thank you so much for sharing the updates. Congratulations to the team on bringing this solution out. And as you said, just the beginning so we look forward to talking to you, your partners and your customers going forward. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you, Stu, thank you, Monica. >> All right, for Tarkan and Monica, I'm Stu Miniman with theCUBE. Thank you as always for watching this special Nutanix announcement. (upbeat music)

>> Male narrator: From around the globe, it's the CUBE with digital coverage of DockerCon Live 2020 brought to you by Docker and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back everyone to the DockerCon Virtual Conference. DockerCon 20 being held digitally online is the CUBE's coverage. I'm John for your host of the CUBE. This is the CUBE virtual CUBE digital. We're getting all the remote interviews. We're here in our Palo Alto studio, quarantined crew, all getting the data for you. Got Peter Guangeti who's the Chief Marketing Officer Cockroach Labs, a company that we became familiar with last year. They had the first multicloud event in the history of the industry last year, notable milestone. Hey first, it's always good you're still around. So first you got the first position, Peter. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on the CUBE for DockerCon 20. >> Thank you, John. Thanks for having me. >> So it's kind of interesting, I mentioned that tidbit to give you a little bit of love on the fact that you guys ran or were a part of the first multicloud conference in the industry. Okay, now that's all everyone's talking about. You guys saw this early. Take a minute to explain Cockroach Labs. Why you saw this trend? Why you guys took the initiative and took the risk to have the first ever multicloud conference last year? >> So that's news to me that we were the first, actually. That's a bit of a surprise, cause for us we see multicloud and hybrid cloud as the obvious. I think the credit really for this belongs with folks like Gartner and others who took the time to listen to their customer, right? Took the time to understand what was the need in the market, which, you know, what I hear when I talk to CEOs is cloud is a capability, not a place, right? They're looking at us and saying, "yes, I have a go to cloud strategy, "but I also have made massive investments in my data center. "I believe I don't want to be locked in yet again "to another vendor with proprietary PIs, "proprietary systems, et cetera." So, what I hear when I talk to customers is, "I want to be multicloud show me how, "show me how to do that in a way "that isn't just buying from multiple vendors, right?" Where I've cost arbitrage, show me a way where I actually use the infrastructure in a creative way. And that really resonates with us. And it resonates with us for a few reasons. First is, we built a distributed SQL database for a reason, right? We believed that what you really need in the modern age for global applications is something that is truly diverse and distributed, right? You can have a database that behaves like a single database that lives in multiple locations around the world. But then you also have things like data locality. It's okay with German data stays in Germany because of German law. But when I write my application, I never write each of these things differently. Now, the other reason is, customers are coming to us and saying, "I want a single database that I can deploy "in any of the cloud providers." Azure SQL, and that is a phenomenal product. Google Spanner is a phenomenal product. But once I do that, I'm locked in. Then all I have is theirs. But if I'm a large global auto manufacturer, or if I'm a startup, that's trying to enter multiple markets at the same time. I don't want that. I want to be able to pick my infrastructure and deploy where I want, how I want. And increasingly, we talk to the large banks and they're saying, "I spent tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars "on data centers. "I don't want to throw them out. "I just want better utilization. "And the 15 to 20% that I get "from deploying software on bare metal, right? "I want to be able to containerize. "I want to be able to cloudify my data center "and then have ultimately what we see more and more "as what they call a tripod strategy "where your own data center and two cloud providers "behaving as a single unit "for your most important applications." >> That's awesome. I want to thank you for coming on to, for DockerCon 20, because this is an interesting time where developers are going to be called to the table in a very aggressive way because of COVID-19 crisis is going to accelerate until they pull the future forward ahead of most people thought. I mean, we, in the industry, we are inside the ropes, if you will. So we've been talking about stainless applications, stateful databases, and all the architectural things that's got that longer horizon. But this is an interesting time because now companies are realizing from whether it's the shelter in place at scale problems that emerge to the fact that I got to have high availability at a whole nother level. This kind of exposes a major challenge and a major opportunity. We're expecting projects to be funded, some not to be funded, things to move around. I think it's going to really change the conversation as developers get called in and saying, "I really got to look at my resources at scale. "The database is a critical one because you want data "to be part of that, this data plane, if you will, "across clouds." What's your reaction to this? Do you agree with that, the future has been pulled forward? And what's Cockroach doing to help developers do manage this? >> Yeah, John, I think you're exactly right. And I think that is a story that I'm glad that you're telling. Because, I think there's a lot of signal that's happening right now. But we're not really thinking about what the implications are. And we're seeing something that's I think quite remarkable. We're seeing within our existing customer base and the people we've been talking to, feast or famine. And in some cases, feast and famine in the same company. And what does that really mean? We've looked at these graphs for what's going to happen, for example, with online delivery services. And we've seen the growth rates and this is why they're all so valued. Why Uber invested so big in Uber eats and these other vendors. And we've seen these growth rates the same, and this is going to be amazing in the next 10 years, we're going to have this adoption. That five, 10 years happened overnight, right? We were so desperate to hold onto the things that are what mattered to us. And the things that make us happy on any given day. We're seeing that acceleration, like you said. It's all of that, the future got pulled forward, like you had said. >> Yeah. >> That's remarkable, but were you prepared for it? Many people were absolutely not prepared for it, right? They were on a steady state growth plan. And we have been very lucky because we built an architecture that is truly distributed and dynamic. So, scaling and adding more resilience to a database is something we all learned to do over the last 20 years, as data intensive applications matter. But with a distributed SQL and things like containerization on the stateless side, we know we can just truly elastically scale, right? You need more support for the application of something like Cockroach. You literally just add more nodes and we absorb it, right? Just like we did with containerization, where you need more concurrency, you just add more containers. And thank goodness, right, because I think those who were prepared for those things need to be worked with one of the large delivery services. Overnight, they saw a jump to what was their peak day at any point in time now happening every single day. And they were prepared for that because they already made these architectural decisions. >> Yeah. >> But if you weren't in that position, if you were still on legacy infrastructure, you were still trying to do this stuff manually, or you're manually sharding databases and having to increase the compute on your model, you are in trouble and you're feeling it. >> That's interesting Peter to bring that up and reminds me of the time, if you go back in history a little bit, just not too far back, I mean, I'm old enough to go back to the 80s, I remember all the different inflection points. And they all had their key characteristics as a computer revolution, TCP IP, and you pick your spots, there's always been that demarcation point or lions in where things change. But let's go back to around 2004 and then 2008. During that time, those legacy players out there kind of was sitting around, sleeping at the switch and incomes, open-source, incomes, Facebook, incomes, roll your own. Hey, I'm going to just run. I'm going to run open-source. I'm going to build my own database. And that was because there was nothing in the market. And most companies were buying from general purpose vendors because they didn't have to do all the due diligence. But the tech-savvy folks could build their own and scale. And that changed the game that became the hyperscale and the rest is history. Fast forward to today, because what you're getting at is, this new inflection point. There's going to be another tipping point of trajectory of knowledge, skill that's completely different than what we saw just a year ago. What's your reaction to that? >> I think you're exactly right. We saw and I've been lucky enough, same like you, I've been involved in the web since the very early days. I started my career at the beginning. And what we saw with web 1.0 and the shift to web 2.0, web 2.0 would not have happened without source. And I don't think we give them enough credit if it wasn't for the lamp stack, if it wasn't for Linux, if it wasn't for this wave of innovation and it wasn't even necessarily about rolling around. Yeah, the physics of the world to go hire their own engineers, to go and improve my SQL to make it scale. That was of course a possibility. But the democratization of that software is where all of the success really came from. And I lived on both sides of it in my career, as both an app developer and then as a software executive. In that window and got to see it from both sides and see the benefit. I think what we're entering now is yet another inflection point, like you said. We were already working at it. I think, the move from traditional applications with simple logic and simple rules to now highly data intensive applications, where data is driving the experience, models are driving the experience. I think we were already at a point where ML and AI and data intensive decision-making was going to make us rewrite every application we had and not needed a new infrastructure. But I think this is going to really force the issue. And it's going to force the issue at two levels. First is the people who are already innovating in each of these industries and categories, were already doing this. They were already cloud native. They were already built on top of very modern third generation databases, third generation programming languages, doing really interesting things with machine learning. So they were already out innovating, but now they have a bigger audience, right? And if you're a traditional and all of a sudden your business is under duress because substantial changes in what is happening in the market. Retailers still had strength with footprint as of last year, right? We don't be thinking about e-commerce versus traditional retail. Yeah, it was on a slow decline. There were lots of problems, but there was still a strength there, that happened changed overnight. Right now, that new sources have dried up, so what are you going to do? And how are you going to act? If you've built your entire business, for example, on legacy databases from folks like Oracle and old monolithic ways of building out patients, you're simply not adaptable enough to move with changing times. You're going to have to start, we used to talk about every company needed to become a software company. That mostly happened, but they weren't all very good software companies. I would argue that the next generation used to to be a great software company and great data scientists. We'll look at the software companies that have risen to prominence in the last five to 10 years. Folks like Facebook, folks like Google, folks like Uber, folks like Netflix, they use data better than anyone else in their category. So they have this amazing app experience and leverage data and innovate in such a way that allow them to just dominate their category. And I think that is going to be the change we see over the next 10 years. And we'll see who exits what is obviously going to be a jail term. We'll see who exits on top. >> Well, it's interesting to have you on. I love the perspective and the insights. I think that's great for the folks out there who haven't seen those ways before. Again, this wave is coming. Let's go back to the top when we were talking about what's in it for the developer. Because I believe there's going to be not a renaissance, cause it's always been great, but the developers even more are going to be called to the front lines for solutions. I mean, these are first-generation skill problems that are going to be in this whole next generation, modern era. That's upon us. What are some of the things that's going to be that lamp stack, like experience? What are some of the things that you see cause you guys are kind of at a tail sign, in my opinion, Cockroach, because you're thinking about things in a different construct. You're thinking about multicloud. You're thinking about state, which is a database challenge. Stateless has kind of been around restful API, stateless data service measures. Kubernetes is also showing a cloud native and the microservices or service orientation is the future. There's no debate on that. I think that's done. Okay, so now I'm a developer. What the hell am I going to be dealing with for the next five years? What's your thoughts? >> Well, I think the developer knows what they're already facing from an app perspective. I think you see the rapid evolution in languages, and then, in deployment and all of those things are super obvious. You need just need to go and say I'm sure that all the DockerCon sessions to see what the change to deployment looks like. I think there are a few other key trends that developers should start paying attention to, they are really critical. The first one, and only loosely related to us, is ML apps, right? I think just like we saw with dev and ops, suddenly come together so we can actually develop and deploy in a super fast iterative manner. The same things now are going to start happening with data and all of the work that we do around deploying models. And I think that that's going to be a pretty massive change. You think about the rise of tools like TensorFlow, some of the developments that have happened inside of the cloud providers. I think you're seeing a lot there as a developer, you have to start thinking as much like a data scientist and a data engineer as simply somebody writing front end code, right? And I think that's a critical skill that the best developers already building will continue. I think then the data layer has become as important or more important than any other layer in the stack because of this. And you think about once again, how the leaders are using data and the interesting things that they're doing, the tools you use matter, right? If you are spending a lot of your time trying to figure out how to shard something how to make it scale, how to make it durable when instead you should be focused on just the pure capability, that's a ridiculous use of your time, right? That is not a good use of your time. We're still using 20 to 25 year old open-source databases for many of these applications when they gave up their value probably 10 years ago. Honestly, you know, we keep all paper over it, but it's not a great solution. And unfortunately, no SQL will fix some of the issues with scaling elasticity, it's like you and I starting a business and saying, "okay, everyone speaks English, "but because we're global, "everyone's going to learn Esperanto, right?" That doesn't work, right? So works for a developer. But if you're trying to do something where everyone can interact, this is why this entire new third generation of new SQL databases have risen. We took the distributed architecture SQL. >> Hold up for a second. Can you explain what that means? Cause I think a key topic. I want to just call that out. What is this third generation database mean? Sorry, I speak about it. Like everyone sees it. >> I think it's super important. It's just a highlight. Just take a minute to explain it and we can get into it. There is an entire new wave of database infrastructure that has risen in the last five years. And it started actually with Google. So it started with Google Spanner. So Google was the first to face most of these problems, right? They were the first to face web scale. At least at the scale, we now know it. They were the first to really understand the complexity of working with data. They have their own no SQL. They have their own way of doing things internally and they realized it wasn't working. And what they really needed was a relational database that spoke traditional ANSI SQL, but scaled, like there are no SQL counterparts. And there was a white paper that was released. That was the birth of Spanner. Spanner was an internal product for many, many years. They released the thinking into the wild and then they just started this way with innovation. That's where our company came from. And there were others like us who said, "you're right. "Let's go build something that behaves," like we expect a database to behave with structure and this relational model and like anyone can write simple to use it. It's the simplest API for most people with data, but it behaves like all the best distributed software that we've been using. And so that's how we were born. Our company was founded by ex Googlers who had lived in this space and decided to go and scratch the itch, right? And instead of doing a product that would be locked into a single cloud provider, a database that could be open-source, it could be deployed anywhere. It could cross actual power providers without hiccups and that's been the movement. And it's not just us, there were other vendors in this space and we're all focused on really trying to take the best of the both worlds that came before us. The traditional relational structure, the consistency and asset compliance that we all loved from tools like Oracle, right? And Microsoft who we really enjoyed. But then the developer friendly nature and the simple elastic scalability of distributed software and, that's what we're all seeing. Our company, for example, has only been selling a product for the last two years. We found it five years ago, it took us three years just to rank in the software that we would be happy selling to a customer. We're on what we believe is probably a 10 to 15 year product journey to really go and replace things like Oracle. But we started selling the product two years ago and there is 300% growth year over year. We're probably one of the fastest growing software companies in America, right? And it's all because of the latent demand for this kind of a tool. >> Yeah, that's a great point. I'm a big fan of this third wave. Can I see it? If you look at just the macro tailwinds in the industry, billions of edged devices, immersion of all kinds of software. So that means you can't have one database. I always said to someone, in (mumbles) and others. You can't have one database. It's physically impossible. You need data and whatever database fits the scene, wherever you want to have data being stored, but you got to have it real time. You got to have actionable, you have to have software intelligence into how to manage the data. So I think the data control plane or that layer, I think it's the next interoperability wave. Because without data, nothing really works. Machine learning doesn't really work well. You want the most data. I think cybersecurity is a great early use case because they have to leverage data fast. And so you start to see some interesting financial services, cyber, what's your thoughts on this? Can you share from the Cockroach Labs perspective, from your database, you've got a cloud. What are some of the adoption use cases? Who are those leaders? You can name names if you have them, if not, name the use case. What's the Cockroach approach? Who's winning with it? What's it look like? >> Yeah, that's a great question. And you nailed it, right? The data volumes are so large and they're so globally distributed. And then when you start layering again, the data streaming in from devices that then have to be weighed against all of these things. You want a single database. But you need one that will behave in a way that's going to support all of that and actually is going to live at the edge like you're saying. And that's where we have been shining. And so our use cases are, and unfortunate, I can't name any names, but, for example, in retail. We're seeing retailers who have that elasticity and that skill challenge with commerce. And what they're using us for is then, we're in all of the locations where they do business, right? And so we're able to have data locality associated with the businesses and the purchases in those countries. And however, only have single apps that actually bridge across all of those environments. And with the distributed nature, we were able to scale up and scale down truly elastically, right? Because we spread out the data across the nodes automatically. And, what we see there is, you know, retailers do you have up and down moments? Can you talk about people who can leverage the financial structure of the cloud in a really thoughtful way? Retail is a shining example of that. I remember having customers that had 64 times the amount of traffic on cyber Monday that they had on the average day. In the old data center world, that's what you bought for. That was horrendous. In a cloud environment, still horrendous, even public cloud providers. If you're having to go and change your app to ramp every time, that's a problem with something like a distributed database. and with containerization, you could scale much more quickly and scale down much more. That's a big one for streaming media, is another one. Same thing with data locality in each of these countries, you think about it, somebody like Netflix or Hulu, right? They have shows that are unique to specific countries, right? They haven't have that user behavior, all that user data. You know data sovereignty, you know, what you watch on Netflix, there's some very rich personal data. And we all know how that metadata has been used against people. Or so it's no surprise that you now have countries that I know there's going to be regulation around where that data can live and how it can. And so once again, something like Cockroach where you can have that global distribution, but take a locality, or we can lock data to certain nodes in certain locations. That's a big one. >> There's no doubt in my mind. I think there's such a big topic. We probably do more interviews just on the COVID-19 data problem that they have. The impact of getting this right, is a nerd problem today. But it is a technology solution for society globally in the future. Zero doubt in my mind on that. So, Peter, I want you to get the last word and to give a plugin to the developers that are watching out there about Cockroach. Why should they engage with you guys? What can you offer? Is there anything new you want to share about the company to the audience here at DockerCon 2020? Take us home in the next segment. >> Thank you, John. I'll keep the sales pitch to a minimum. I'm a former developer myself. I don't like being sold, so I appreciate it. But we believe we're building, what is the right database for the coming wave of cognitive applications. And specifically we've built what we believe is the ideal database for distributed applications and for containerized applications. So I would strongly encourage you to try it. It is open-source. It is truly cloud native. We have free education, so you can try it yourself. And once you get into it, it is traditional SQL that behaves like Postgres and other tools that you've already known of. And so it should be very familiar, you know, if you've come up through any of these other spaces will be very natural. Postgres compatible integrates with a number of ORM. So as a developer, just plugged right into the tools you use and we're on a rapid journey. We believe we can replace that first generation of technology built by the Oracles of the world. And we're committed to doing it. We're committed to spending the next five to 10 years in hard engineering to build that most powerful database to solve this problem. >> Well, thanks for coming on, sharing your awesome insight and historical perspective. get it out of experience. We believe and we want to share the audience in this time of crisis, more than ever to focus on critical nature of operations, because coming out of this, it is going to be a whole new reality. And I think the best tech will win the day and people will be building new things to grow, whether it's for profit or for societal benefit. The impact of what we do in the next year or two will determine a big trajectory and new technology, new approaches that are dealing with the realities of infrastructure, scale, working at home , sheltering in place to coming back to the hybrid world. We're coming virtualized, Peter. We've been virtualized, the media, the lifestyle, not just virtualization in the networking sense, but, fun times it was going to be challenging. So thanks for coming on. >> Thank you very much, John. >> Okay, we're here for DockerCon 20 virtual conferences, the CUBE Virtual Segment. I want to thank you for watching. Stay with me. We've got stream all day today and check out the sessions. Jump in, it's going to be on demand. There's a lot of videos it's going to live on and thanks for watching and stay with us for more coverage and analysis. Here at DockerCon 20, I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching >> Narrator: From the CUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is the CUBE conversation.

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation [Music] hi buddy this is Dave Volante and welcome to this cute conversation you know the we've been following a company called Activia for quite some time now they they've really popularized the concept of copy data management really innovative Boston based Waltham based company and with me Brian Regan who's the chief marketing officer and all 40 who's the newly minted chief revenue officer of actifi Oh guys great to see you I wish we were face to face that you're you're you're June event but this will have to do yeah you bet yeah so you know Brian you've been on the cube a bunch I'm gonna start with Paul if that's okay Paul you know just let's talk a little bit about your your background you've you've done a number of stance at a variety of companies you know big companies like IBM and others as well what attracted you to Activia in all honesty I've been a software guy and candidly a data specific leader for many many years and so IT infrastructure particularly associated around data has always been sort of my forte for fun on words there and and so Activia was just smack dab in the middle of that right and so when I was looking for my next adventure you know I had an opportunity to to meet with a shower CEO and Founder and describe and discuss kind of what activity was all about and candidly the the number of connections that we had that were the same a lot of our OEM relationships with people that I actually worked with and for and some that worked for me historically so it was almost this perfect world right and I'm a Boston guy so it was in my in my old backyard and it was just a perfect yeah it was a perfect match for what I was looking for which was really a small growth company that was trying to you know get to the next level that had compelling technology in a space that I was super familiar with and understanding and articulate the value proposition well as we're saying in Boston Paulie we got to get you back here I know I pack my cock let's talk about the let's talk about the climate right now I mean nobody expected this of course I mean it's funny I was I saw ash and an event in in Boston last fall we were talking like hey what do you expected for next year yeah a little bit of softening but you know nobody expected this sort of Black Swan but you guys I just got your press release you put out you had a good you had a good quarter you had a record first quarter um what's going on in the marketplace how you guys doing yeah well I think that today more than than ever businesses are realizing that data is what is actually going to carry them through this crisis and that data whether it's changing the nature of how companies interact with their customers how they manage through their supply chain and in frankly how they take care of their employees is all very data-centric and so businesses that are protecting that data that are helping businesses get faster access to that data and ultimately give them choice as to where they manage that data on-premises in the cloud and hybrid configuration those are the businesses that are really going to be top of a CIOs mind I think our q1 is a demonstration that customers voted with their wallets in their confidence in ectopy Oh has an important part of their data supplied nopal I want to come back to you first of all your your other people know you're next you're next Army Ranger so thank you for your service that's awesome you know I was talking to Frank's lute man we interviewed me other day and he was sharing with me sort of how he manages and and he says the other managed by a playbook he's a situational manager and that's something that he learned in the military well this is weird this is a situation okay and that really is kind of how you're trained and and of course we've never seen anything like this but you're trained to deal with things that you've never seen before so how are you seeing organizations generally actifi Oh specifically going to manage through this process what are some of the moves that you're advising recommending give us some insight there yeah so I'm it's really interesting it's a it's funny that you mentioned my military background I was just having this discussion with one of my leaders the other day that you know one of the things that they trained for in the military is the eventualities of chaos right and so when you when you do an exercise they we will literally tap the leader on the shoulder and say okay you're now dead and without that person being allowed to speak they take a knee and the unit has to go on and so what happens is you you learn by muscle memory like how to react in time suffice it or and you know this is a classic example of leadership and crisis and so um so it's just it's just interesting like so to me you have a playbook I think everybody needs to start with a playbook and then start with a plan I can't remember if it was Mike Tyson but one of them one of my famous quotes was you know let you know plan is good until somebody punches you in the face that's the reality of what just happened the business across the globe is it just got punched in the face and so you got a playbook that you rely on and then you have to remain nimble and creative and candidly opportunistic and from a leadership perspective I think you can't lose your confidence right so I've watched some of my friends and of what some other businesses crippled in the midst of this and I'm because they're afraid instead of instead of looking at this in my first commentary that our first staff meeting Brian if I remember it was this okay so what makes active feel great in disembark like not why is it not great right and so we didn't get scared we jumped right into it we you know we adjusted our playbook a little bit and candidly we just had a record quarter and we just down here the honestly date we took down deals in every single geography around the globe to include Italy I mean so it was insane it was really fun okay so this wasn't just one monster deal that gave you that record Porter is really a broad-based the demand yeah so if you you know if you dug underneath the covers you would see that we had the largest number of transactions ever in the first quarter we had the largest average selling price in the first quarter ever we had the largest contribution from our panel partners and our OEM partners ever and we had the highest number ever and so it was a it was really a nice truly balanced performance across the globe and across the size of deal sets and candidly across industries interesting I mean you use the term opportunistic and and I think you're right on I mean you obviously you don't want to be chasing ambulances at the same time you know we've talked to a lot of CEOs and essentially what they're doing and I'd like to get your feedback on this Brian you you you're kind of reassessing the ideal profile of a customer you're reassessing your value proposition in the context of the current pandemic and and I noticed that you guys in your press release talked about cyber resiliency you talked about digital initiatives you know data center transformations etc so maybe you could talk a little bit about that Brian did you do those things how did you do those things what kind of pace were you guys at how did you do it remotely with everybody working from home give us some color on that sure and you know Ashley if you were here you would probably remind us that Activia was born in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis so we we have essentially been bookended by two black swans over the last decade the and the lessons we learned in 2008 are every bit as as relevant today everything starts with cost containment in hospital and in protection of the business and so cio is in the midst of this shock to the system I think we're very much looking at what are the absolutely vital critical initiatives and what is a nice to have and I'm going to pause on my step and invest entirely in the critical mission and the critical initiatives tended to be around getting people safely working for remotely getting people safe access to their systems and their applications in their data and then ultimately it also became about protecting the systems from malicious individuals and state actors up unfortunately as we've seen in other times of crisis this is when crime and cyber crime particularly tends to spike particularly against industries that don't have the strong safeguards in place to to really ensure the resiliency their applications so we very much went a little bit back to the 2008 playbook around helping people get control of their costs helping people continue to do the things they need to do at a much more infrastructure light manner but also really emphasize the fact that if you are under attack or if you are concerned that you're infected but you don't know when you know instant access to data and a time machine that can take you back and forth to those points in time is something that is incredibly valuable so so let's >> cyber resiliency so specifically what is aekta video doing for its customers from a product standpoint capabilities maybe it's part of the the 10 see announcement as well but but can you can you give us some specifics on where you fit in let's take that use case cyber resiliency yeah absolutely so I think there's there's a staff of capabilities when it comes to cyber resiliency at the lowest level you need a time machine because most people don't know when they're in fact and so the ability to go back in time test the recoverability of data test the validity of the data is step one step two is once you've found the clean point being able to resume operations being able to resume the applications operation instantly or very rapidly is the next phase and that's something that Activia was founded on this notion of instant access to data and then the third phase and this is really where our partnerships really shine is you probably want to go back and mitigate that risk you want to go back and clean that system you want to go back and find the infection and eliminate it and that's where our partnership with IBM freezing resiliency services and their cyber incident recovery solution which takes the activity of platform and then rappers and a complete managed services around it so they can help the customer not only get their their systems and applications back on their feet but clean the systems and allow them to resume operations normally on a much safer and more stable okay so so that's interesting so Paul Paul was it kind of new adoptions was it was it increases from existing customers kind of a combination and you talk to that yeah totally so like ironically to really come clean we are the metrics that we had in the first quarter were very similar through the metrics that we see historically so the mix need our existing customer base and then our new customer acquisition were very similar to our historical metrics which candidly we were a little surprised by we anticipated um that the majority of our business would come from that safe harbor of your existing customer base but candidly we had a really nice split which was great which meant that you know a value proposition was resonating not only with our existing customer base where you would expect it but also in in any of our new customers as well who had been evaluating us that either accelerated or or just continue down the path of adoption during the time frame of Koba 19 across industries I would say that again um there was there were there were some industries I would say that pushed pause and so the ones that you can imagine that accelerated during during this past period were the ones you would think of right so financial institutions primarily as well as some some of the medical so some of those transactions healthcare and medical they accelerated along with financial institutions and then I would say that that we did have some industries that push pause and you can probably guess what some of those are a majority of those were the ones that we're dealing with the small and mid-sized businesses or consumer facing businesses things like retail stuff like that where we typically do have a pretty nice residence in a really nice value proposition but there were there were definitely some transactions that we saw basically just pause like we're going to come back but overall the yeah the feedback was just in general it felt like any other quarter and it felt like just pretty normal as strange as that sounds because I know speaking to a lot of my friends and gear companies your software companies they didn't have that experience but we did pretty well that's interesting I mean you're right I mean certain industries Airlines I'm interviewing a cio of major resort next week you know really interested to hear how they're you know dealing with this but those those are obviously depressed and they've dialed everything down but but we've we were one of the first to report that work from home pivot it didn't it didn't you know buffer the decline in IT spending that were expecting to be down you know maybe as much as 5% this year but it definitely offset it what about cloud we're seeing elevated levels in cloud demand guys you know have offerings there what are you seeing in cloud guys you want that yeah I'll start and then fall please please weigh in I think that'd be the move to the cloud that we've been witnessing and the acceleration of the MOOC table that we've been whipped over the past several years probably ramped up in intensity over the last two months The Improv been on the you know 18 to 24 month road map have all of a sudden been accelerated into maybe this year but in terms of the wholesale you know everything moves to cloud and I abandoned my on-premises estate I I don't think we've seen that quite yet I think the the world is still hybrid when it comes to cloud although I do think that the beneficiaries of this are probably the the non number one or number two cloud providers but the rest of the hyper scalers who are fighting for market share because now they have an opportunity to perhaps google for example a strategic partner of ours has a you know a huge offering when it comes to enabling work home and remote work so leveraging that as a platform and then extending into their enterprise offerings I think gives them a wedge that the you know Amazon might not have so this it's an acceleration of interest but I think it's just a continuation of the trend of seeing four years yeah and I would add a little bit if the you know IBM held their think conference this past week I don't know if you had an opportunity to participate there one of our OEM partners and oh yeah because you know when our the CEO presented his kind of opening his opening remarks it was really about digital transformation and he really he really kind of put it down to two things and said you know any business that's trying to transform is either talking about hybrid cloud but they're talking about AI and machine learning and that's kind of it right and so every digital business is talking in one of those categories and so when I look 2q1 it's interesting that we really didn't see anything other than as brian talked about all the cloud business which is some version of an acceleration but outside of that the customers that are in those industries that are in position to accelerate and double down during this opportunity didn't so and those that did not you know kind of just peeled back a little bit but overall I still I would agree with with ibm's assessment of the market that you know those are kind of the two hot spots and have a cloud is hot and the good news is we've got a nice guy operating Molloy yeah Arvind Krista talked about the the in and it has it maybe not I think but he talked earlier in his remarks on the earnings call just in Publix Davis that IBM must win the battle the architectural battle the hybrid cloud and also that he wants to lead with a more technical sell essentially which is submitted to me those those two things are great news for you guys obviously you know Red Hat is the linchpin of that I want to ask you guys about your your conference data-driven so we were there last year it was a great really great intimate event of course you know you hand up the physical events anymore so you've pushed to September you're going all digital would give us the update on on that program we're um we're eager to have the cube participate in our September event so I'm sure we'll be talking more about that in the coming weeks but awesome we love it we exactly so you can tell Frank to put that so we we've been participating in some of the other conferences I think most notably last week learning a lot and and really trying to cherry pick the best ideas and the best tactics for putting on a digital event I think that as we look to September and as we look to put on a really rich digital event one of the things that is I think first and foremost in our minds is we want to actually produce more on-demand digital content particularly from a technology standpoint our technology sessions last year were oversubscribed the digital format allows people to stream whenever they can and frankly as many sessions as they as they might so I think we can be far more efficient in terms of delivering technical content or the users of our technology and then we're also eager to have as we've done with data driven in the years past our customers tell the story of how they're using data and this year certainly I think we're going to hear a lot of stories about in particular how they use data during this incredible you know crisis and and hopefully renewal from crisis well one of my favorite interviews last year your show is the the guys from draft King so hopefully they'll be back on it will have some football to talk about let's hope I mean I want it I want to end with just sort of this notion of you know we've been so tactical the last eight weeks right I'm you guys too I'm sure just making sure you're there for customers making sure your employees are ok but as we start to think about coming out of this you know into a post probe Adaro it looks like it's gonna be with us for a while but we're getting back the you know quasi opening so I'm hearing you know hybrid is here to stay we agree for sure cyber resiliency is very interesting I think you know one of the things we've said is that that companies may sub optimize near-term profitability to make sure that they've got the flexibility and resilience business resiliency in place you know that's obviously something that is I think good news for you guys but but I'll start with Paul and then maybe Brian you can bring us home how do you see this sort of emergence from this lockdown and into the post ghovat era yeah so this is a really interesting topic for me in fact I've had many discussions over the last couple weeks with some of our investors as well as our executive staff and so my personal belief is that the way buying and selling has occurred for IT specifically at the enterprise level is about to go through a transformation no different than we watched the transformation of SAS businesses when you basically replace the cold-calling salesperson with an inside and you know inbound marketing kind of effort followed up with SDR and vdr because what we're finding is that our clients now are able to meet more frequently because we don't have the friction of airplane ride or or physical building to go through and so like that that whole thing has been removed from the sales process and so it's interesting to me that one of the things that I'm starting to see is that the amount of activity that our sales organization is doing and the amount of physical calls that were going on they happen to be online however you couple that with the cost savings of not traveling around the globe and not being in offices and and I really think that those companies that embrace this new model are gonna find ways to penetrate more customers in a less expensive way and I do believe that the professional sales enterprise salesperson of tomorrow is gonna look at then it looks today and so I'm super excited to be in a company that is smack dab in the middle of selling to enterprise clients and and watching us learn together how we're gonna buy sell and market to each other in this post public way because I I'm the only thing I really do know it's just not gonna be the way it used to be what is it gonna look like I think all of us are placing bets and I don't think anybody has the answer yet but it's gonna look different for sure they're very very thoughtful comments and so Brian you know our thinking is the differentiation and the war yes it gets one in digital how is that affecting you know sort of your marketing and your thing around that we we fortunately decided coming into 2020 our fiscal 21 that we were actually going to overweight digital anyway we felt that it was far more effective we were seeing far better conversion rates we saw you know way better ROI in terms of very targeted tentative digital campaigns or general-purpose ABM type of efforts so our strategy had essentially been set and and what this provided us is the opportunity to essentially redirect all of the other funds individually so you know we have essentially a two-pronged marketing you know attack Frank now which is you know digital creating inbounds and B DRS that are calling on those in bounds that are created digital and so it's a you know it's going to be a really interesting transition back when physical events if and when they do actually come back into form you know how much we decide to actually go back into that that been I think that you know to someone to some extent we've talked about this in the past II you know the physical events and the the sheer spectacle and this year you know audacity of having to spend a million dollars just to break through that was an unsustainable model and so I think this is this is hastening perhaps the decline or demise of really silly marketing expense and getting back to telling telling customers what they need to know to help their an assist their buying journey in their investigation journey into a new technology I mean the IT world is hybrid and I think the events world is also going to be hybrid to me nice intimate events you know they're gonna live on but they're also gonna have a major digital component to them I'm very excited that you know we're a lot of learnings now in digital especially around events and by September the a lot of the the bugs are gonna be worked out you know we've been going to it so it feels like 24/7 but really excited to have you guys on thanks so much really looking forward to working with you in in September it's data-driven so guys thanks a lot for coming on the cube oh my gosh thank you Dave so nice it's so nice to be here thank you alright pleasure you did thank you everybody thank you and thanks for watching this is Dave Volante for the cube and we'll see you next time [Music]

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, it's theCUBE covering, empowering the Autonomous Enterprise brought to you by Oracle Consulting. >> Welcome back everybody to this special presentation of theCUBE where we're covering The Rebirth of Oracle Consulting. It's a digital event where we're going out, we're extracting the signal from the nose. We happen today to be in Chicago which is obviously, the center of the country, a lot of big customers here, a lot of consultants and consulting organizations here, a lot of expertise. Mike Owens is here, he's a group V.P. for cloud advisory and a general manager of Oracle Elevate. Mike, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Hi, I appreciate it, I'm glad to be here. >> So I got to ask you, Elevate in your title, what is Oracle Elevate? >> Yeah, Oracle Elevate was actually announced Oracle Open World last year, and it's the partnership that we really had to actually take our scale the next level. So it's actually did it with Deloitte Consulting. So the goal is to actually take the capabilities of both organizations, Deloitte really has functional capabilities and expertise with an oracle practice, and obviously, Oracle has Oracle technical expertise. The combination of the two really allows us to scale, provide, what I call the one plus one equals three effort for customers. >> Now, you've got a decent timeline or observation over the past several years. I think you joined three years ago? >> Yeah. >> You were at some brand name companies. First of all, what attracted you to come to Oracle Consulting? >> Yeah, absolutely. So Oracle was in the point where they were doing a lot of stuff around on-prem, on-premise software. The old ERP type stuff, they were doing cloud, they sort of had to had this sort of transformational moment. I was asked to come in on Oracle Consulting in the early days and say, hey look, we're trying to transform the organization from on-prem consulting over to cloud consulting, come in and help us with the stuff that you've worked from your prior two cloud companies and help us really move the organization forward and look at things differently. So it's definitely been a journey over the last three years. I've taken it from really 85 percent of, the 90 percent of our revenue around on-prem type of engagements to now actually split in the organization being dedicated 100 percent on Cloud, which is a huge transformation in the last three years. >> What really, what's the underpinning of Gen 2 cloud? Can you give us sort of the bumper sticker on that? >> Yeah, all about the underpinning the Gen 2 cloud is really, if you look at the gen 1 cloud was purely just an infrastructure layer. Gen 2 is really based on a segmenting security which is a huge problem out in the marketplace. >> Mm-hmm. >> So we actually have a sort of a world-class where we take segment security outside of the actual environment itself, it's completely segment which is awesome, right? But then they also, when you actually move it forward, the capability of the entire thing is built on sort of the Autonomous Enterprise or autonomous capabilities, everything is sort of self-healing, self-funding, or not, sorry, self-healing and self-aware, that continually moves it forward. So, the goal with that is, is if you have something that takes mundane tasks back to that you have people that are no longer doing those capabilities today. So the underpinning of that, and what that allows you to do, is actually take that business case and you reduce that because you're no longer having a bunch of people do things that are no value add. Those people can actually move on to do it back to that innovation and doing those higher level components. >> So the business case is really about, I mean, primarily, I would imagine about labor cost, right? I.T., labor costs that we're very labor intensive, we're doing stuff that doesn't necessarily add differentiation of value to the business, you're shifting that to other tasks, right? >> Yeah, so the big components are really the overall cost of the infrastructure, what it takes to maintain the infrastructure and that's broken up into kind of two components. One of it is typical power, physical location, a building, all those kinds of things, and then the people that do the automations that take care of that at the lower level. The third level is, as you continue to sort of process and automation going forward, the people capability that actually maintains the applications becomes easier because you can actually extend those capabilities out into the application, then require fewer people to actually do the typical day-to-day things whether it's DBAs, et cetera, like that. So it kind of becomes a continuous stream. There's various elements of the business case, you could sort of start with just the pure infrastructure cost and then get some of the process and automations going forward and then actually go that even further. And then as organizations as a CIO, one of the questions I always have is, where do you want to end on this? And they say, well what are you talking about? It is really-- >> Dave: We're never done! >> You're on a journey, you're on a transformation, I go, this is the big-boy, big-girl conversation. Do you want to have an organization that actually, it stays the same from a headcount standpoint? Are you trying to look to a partner to do the... Were you trying to get in your operating model? What is your company trying to get you to look at, right? Because all those inflection points takes a different step in the cloud journey. So as the advisor, as the trusted advisor, I ask those half a dozen or so questions, I would kind of walk your organization through on sort of a cloud strategy and I'll pick the path, to kind of works with them and if they want to go to a managed service provider at the end, we would actually prepare someone either bring the partner in or have associated partner we put it off to. But we put the right pieces in place to make sure that that business cake works. >> Well that's interesting, that's a really important point because a lot of customers would say, I don't want to reduce head count, I'm starving for people, I want to retrain people. You know, some companies may want to say, hey, okay, I got to reduced headcount, it's a mandate. But most, at least in these boom times are saying, I want to shift. So my point to the business case is, if you're not going to, you know, cut people, then you have to have those people be more productive. >> Correct. >> The example that you gave in terms of making the application developers more productive is relevant. And I want to explain this, is that, for example, very simple example, I'm inferring you're going to be able to compress the time to value, you're going to reduce, lower your break even, you know, accelerate the time to positive cash flow, if you will. >> Absolutely. That's an example of a value component to the business, and part of the business case. Do people look at that and is that real? >> Absolutely, that's what it is. Definitely, the business case and when you call the... You know, when you get your rate of return, right? >> Mm-hmm. >> The more that we can compress that, and I would say back to the conversation we had earlier about Elevate and some of the partnerships we have with Deloitte around that, a lot of that is to actually come up with enough capabilities that we can actually take the business case and actually reduce that and have special other things we can do for our customers around financing and things like that to make it easier for them. We have options to make customers and actually help that business case. Some of the business cases we've seen are entire I.T. organization saving 30 plus percent. Well, if you multiply that on a, you know, a large Fortune 100 that may have a billion dollar budget, that's real money. >> Okay, yes, no doubt. But then, when you translate that into the business impact, like you talked about the I.T. impact, but if you look at the business impact now it becomes telephone numbers. And actually the CFOs often times just don't even believe it, but it's true. >> Yes. >> Because if you can make the entire organization just you know, a half a percentage point more productive and you got 100,000 employees, I mean, that is, that overwhelms, actually, the I.T. business case. >> Yeah, and that's where back to sort of the steps in the business case is on the business and application side is making those folks actually more productive in the business case and saving them, and adding, you know, whether it's a financial services getting an application out to market that actually generates revenue. So that's, it's sort of the trickle effect. So when I look at it, I definitely look at it from a I.T. all the way through business. I am technically a business architect that does I.T. pretty damn good. >> Yeah, and I.T enables that sort of business transformation. >> Absolutely. >> How do you... Let's talk about this notion of continuous improvement. How are people thinking about that, 'cause you're talking a lot about just sort of self-funding, and self-progressing, sort of an organic entity that you're describing. How are people thinking about that? >> Yeah, I would say they're kind of a little bit all over the map. But I would say that the goal is what we're trying to embed back to the operating model, what we want to really embed is sort of a concept of the cloud set of excellence in as part of that at the end, you have to have a set of functionality of folks that's constantly looking at the applications and or services of the different cloud providers, their capabilities you have across the board, everyone's got to multicloud environment. How do they take those services they're probably already paying for anyways, and as the components get released, how can you continually put little pieces in there and do little micro-releases quarterly? I'm sorry, weekly? You know, every month versus a big bang twice a year. Those little automation pieces continually add innovation in smaller chunks and that's really the goal of cloud computing, you know, is you can actually break it up, it's no longer the big bang theory. And I love that concept, embedding that, whether you actually have a partner with some of the stuff that we're doing that actually embed, what we call, like a day two services that that's what it is, it's to support them but us constantly, look for different ways to include capabilities that were just released, to add value on an ongoing basis. You don't have to go, hey, they're great, that capability came out, it'll be on next year's release. No, it could be next week, it could be next month. >> Well, so the outcome should be dramatically lowering costs, really accelerating your time to value. It really is, what you're describing and we've been talking about in terms of the Autonomous, you know, Enterprise. Is really a prerequisite for scale, isn't it? >> It is, absolutely. And so, when we use the term Autonomous Enterprise too, I love that because that's actually the term I've been using for a few years even before Larry started talking about the autonomous database, I talk about that environment of constantly looking at a cloud capability and everything that you can put from the machine earlier into A.I., under to basically let it run itself. The more that you can do that, the higher the value, and you can put those people off into higher level tasks. That's been going on every provider for a while. Oracle just has the capability now within the database that takes it to the next level. So we still are the only organization with that, put that on top of our Gen 2 cloud where all that is built in, as part of it going forward. That's where we have the upper level really at the enterprise computing level. We can work on all types of workload but where we are niches, is really those big enterprise workloads 'cause that's where we started from data enterprise. >> I don't want to make it a technology discussion. We said they're the only organization, you mean the only technology company with that autonomous database capabilities, is that correct? >> Yes, sir, yes. >> Okay, so I know others sort of talk about it, but, you know, Oracle I think talks about it more forcefully? >> Yes. >> We'll dig into that and report back. Mike, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Really, I appreciate it, good stuff. >> Anytime, thank you very much. >> All right, and thank you for watching. We're right back with our next guest, you're watching theCUBE. We're here in Chicago covering, The Rebirth of Oracle Consulting. I'm Dave Vellante, we'll be right back.

(upbeat music) >> >> Welcome back everybody to this special presentation of theCUBE where we're covering the rebirth of Oracle Consulting. It's a digital event, where we're going out, we're extracting the signal from the noise. We happen today to be in Chicago, which is obviously the center of the country, a lot of big customers here, a lot of consultants and consulting organizations here, a lot of expertise. Mike Owens is here. He is the group VP for Cloud Advisory and the General Manager of Oracle Elevate. Mike, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> I appreciate it. Glad to be here. >> So I'm got to ask you, elevate, in your title, what is Oracle Elevate? >> Yeah, Oracle Elevate was actually announced Oracle OpenWorld last year. And it's the partnership that we really had to actually take our scale to the next level. So we actually did it with Deloitte Consulting. So the goal is to actually take the capabilities of both organizations. Deloitte really has functional capabilities and expertise, with an Oracle practice and obviously Oracle has, Oracle technical expertise. The combination the two really allows us to scale, provide sort of what I call the one plus one equals three, effort for customers. >> Now you've got a decent timeline or observation over the past several years. I think you joined three years ago, you were at some brand name companies. First of all, what attracted you to come to Oracle Consulting? >> Yeah, absolutely. So Oracle was in the point where they were doing a lot of stuff around on-prem, on-premise software, right? The old ERP type stuff, they were doing cloud, they sort of had to had this sort of transformational moment. I was asked to come in Oracle Consulting in the early days and say, "Hey, look, "we're trying to transform the organization "from on-prem consulting over to cloud consulting. "Come in and help us with this stuff "that you've worked from your prior two cloud companies, "and help us really move the organization forward "and look at things differently." So it's definitely been a journey over the last three years. I've taken it from nearly 85% of the 90% of our revenue around on-prem type of engagements, to now actually splitting the organization, being dedicated 100% on cloud, which is the huge transformation in the last three years. >> Yeah and so of course Oracle is a product company and your then CTO, Larry Ellison said, "We're going cloud first." And that happened during your tenure. You came in, I believe prior to that. What kind of effect did that have on the organization? I mean, we know from a product standpoint, but just culturally and just the mindset. >> Yeah, absolutely. It had a huge effect on the organization. They started splitting the organization to actually have be dedicated organizations, whether it's sales on product, whether it's support for product, pre sales support or our engineering and solutions architecture, and our consulting. So we've now split the organizations to primarily support those different lines of business, and what that allows us to do is actually focus that and put a lot of the stuff on cloud and moving the company a cloud first at this point. We still have a lot of organizations that do either on-prem type of work and things like that, they can't move over, that's supported, but you're going to see a larger shift of the cloud first, right? To actually move our customers and our organizations and back to what you hear a bunch of our executives talk about. We also actually use our own capabilities as well too. Whether it's AI or machine learning and the way we actually use it in our own HR systems. If I do my expense reporting, there's actually an AI bot that I can actually put stuff in there and automatically pulls it in. We actually take those capabilities and consume them ourselves because we have to believe in what we actually create as well. >> Your definition of cloud, of course, is different from the hyperscale cloud providers would say, "Hey, our cloud is hyperscale. "Put it in our cloud. "On-prem doesn't equal cloud." You guys don't buy into that obviously. Your definition is, it's the experience, wherever your data is, we're going to bring that cloud experience. Clarify that if you would. >> Yeah, I'll kind of give the Oracle version and what I've talked about for years for Oracle, or for cloud consultancy as a whole or cloud capabilities, right? So Oracle really looks at true enterprise capabilities. And it's kind of what I've been talking about for years publicly as well too. Cloud is really, when they say cloud, it's not just 100% in cloud, it's a combination that you pull from on-prem your systems and engagement. Your systems of record all get created together. Sometimes it's an ecosystem with another company, right? So the more connected we are, so cloud is really an enabler to sort of pull everything together, right? Oracle is really focused on a lot on the enterprise capabilities. Some of the other cloud providers do great on some of the systems of engagement, the smaller applications, what's sitting in someone's cell phone or hands all the time. Oracle is really around foundation of the database in data. So we start with that enterprise and come up versus creating that really snazzy application coming down to make it enterprise level. So we take at that approach. I look at cloud computing, and my definition is really different than most people and it's really around a way of doing business. And what I mean by that is, it's a business that's technology enabled specifically, right? So you have to change the way that you do business. The way that you engage with your customers, with their customers, right? The actual customer on the end line. Cloud capabilities really aren't changing your operating model, it's change the way that you organize, you govern. You can't just, if you take a great capability and move it forward, and then turn around and do it in the same way in process, that's where you lose the efficiency. If you talk about things like business case, where we see the technology itself as a standalone, will give 30% of that business case, changing the way that you operate and engage people, will actually give you the bigger benefit, right? So if you actually go forward and as we talked about a cloud transformation, not only is around changing the capabilities from the tool standpoint, it's your people and your skills and your operating model, right? So if you look at an operating model potentially has seven or eight dimensions depending on what organization you kind of talk to, right? Gartner or whatever. If you don't hit every single and understand the impacts of every portion of the operating model and make the change, you will not reap the benefits. >> And my litmus test is that experience has to be the same whether it's in your public cloud, whether it's on-prem, whether it's in a partner, multicloud, and that you guys actually came up with the notion of same, same. It took some time to actually deliver that, but do you feel like you're there now with customers that buy in and lean in? >> Yeah, absolutely. And so the concept of what I call your mess for less or picking it up and moving it over there, has no value. It could be the first step. So a cloud journey, it may give you incremental value, but it should be the first step in your journey. So if we talk about like cloud journeys, if you're going to say, no, it's the same, same, you're going to move it over there, that may give you back to the sort of the slope on the business case. That's going to give you an increment of that which should self fund then it to go okay, I'm going to take that, I'm going to decompose that. Okay, great. Now, I'm going to expand on that, I'm going to take that money to actually reinvest in automation, right? So if you move it over to infrastructure, right? Where are you going to get the automation, is really on the path's layer. All the services, the monitoring, the autonomous capabilities, all those kind of things, that's where you drive efficiency and scale. So you basically self fund with the infrastructure transformation with potentially, typical journey we see customers with right? As let's move it, let's use that funding to actually automate it, it gets more savings, we use that more for innovation. So it's kind of a continuous stream. You want to get to the point where you can actually have a continuous innovation stream. And what I mean by that is, you have a mechanism or a capability. If you look at our Gen 2 Cloud versus our Gen 1 Cloud. Gen 2 cloud actually can take advantage of all the capabilities that we have from the past layer through automation, right? And then as you do that, we actually want to have a continuous process where you constantly look for innovation and incrementally add pieces over time. It's no longer, it's a bing bing. It's just a continuous stream of innovation. >> So okay, so you've made the statement that the business case for Oracle Gen 2 Cloud is overwhelming. First of all, what really, what's the underpinning of Gen 2 Cloud? Can you give us sort of the bumper sticker on that? >> Yeah, well, the underpinning the Gen 2 Cloud is really, if you look at the Gen 1 Cloud was purely just an infrastructure layer. Gen 2 is really based on a segmenting security, which is a huge problem out in the marketplace, right Dave? So we actually have a sort of a world class way where we take this segments security outside of the actual environment itself. It's completely segmented. Which is awesome, right? But then they also, when you actually move it forward, the capability of the entire thing is built on sort of the autonomous enterprise or autonomous capabilities. Everything is sort of self healing, self funding, or no sorry, self healing and self aware that continually moves it forward. So the goal with that is, is if you have something that takes mundane tasks back to that, you have people that are no longer doing those capabilities today. So the underpinning of that, and what that allows you to do is actually take that business case, and you reduce that because you're no longer having a bunch of people do things that are no value add. Those people can actually move on to do back to the innovation and doing those higher level components. >> So the business case is really about, I mean, primarily, I would imagine about labor cost, right? IT labor costs, we're very labor intensive, we're doing stuff that doesn't necessarily add differentiation of value to the business. You're shifting that to other tasks, right? >> Yeah. So the big components are really the overall cost of the infrastructure, what it takes to maintain the infrastructure and that's broken up into kind of two components. One of it is typical power, physical location, a building, all those kinds of things. And then the people that do the automations that take care of that right? At the lower level. The third level is, as you continue to sort of process in automation going forward, the people capability that actually maintains the applications becomes easier because you can actually extend those capabilities out into the application. Then you require fewer people to actually do the typical day to day things, whether it's DBAs, et cetera, like that. So it kind of becomes a continuous stream. There's various elements of the business case, you could sort of start with just the pure infrastructure cost, and then get some of the process and automations going forward, and then actually go that even further, right? And then as organizations, as a CIO, one of the questions I always have is, where do you want to end on this? And they say, "What are you talking about?" All right? (Dave chuckles) And it's really-- >> You're never done. >> You're on a journey, you're on a transformation I go, this is the big boy, big girl conversation, right? Do you want to have an organization that actually, it stays the same from a headcount standpoint? Or are you trying to look to a partner to do the-- Where are you trying to get your operating model? What is your company trying to get you to look at, right? Because all those inflection points takes a different step in the cloud journey. So as an advisor, right? As a trusted adviser, I ask those a half a dozen or so questions, I would kind of walk your organization through on sort of a cloud strategy, and I'll pick the path that kind of works with them. And if they want to go to a managed service provider, at the end, we would actually prepare someone either bring the partner in or have an associated partner we paired it off too, but we put the right pieces in place to make sure that that business case works. >> Well, that's interesting. That's a really important point because a lot of customers would say, "I don't want to reduce headcount. "I want to, I'm starving for people. "I want to retrain people." Some companies may want to say, "Hey, okay, "I got to reduce headcount. "It's a mandate." But most at least in these boom times are saying, "I want to shift." So my point to the business case is, if you're not going to cut people, then you have to have those people be more productive. And so the example that you gave in terms of making the application developers more productive is relevant. And I want to explain this is that, for example, very simple example, I'm inferring, you're going to be able to compress the time to value, you're going to reduce, lower your breakeven, accelerate the time to positive cash flow, if you will. >> That's an example. >> Absolutely. >> Of a value component to the business and part of the business case. Do people at look is that real? >> Absolutely, that's what it is. Definitely in the business case and I want you to call it the, when you hit your rate of return, right? The more that we can compress that and I would say back to the conversation we had earlier about elevate and some of the partnerships we have with Deloitte around that, a lot of that is to actually come up with enough capabilities that we can actually take the business case and actually reduce that and have special other things we can do for our customers, we're on financing and things like that to make it easier for them, right? We have options to make customers and actually help that business case. Some of the business cases we've seen, our entire IT organization saving 30% plus. Well, if you multiply that on a large fortune 100, that may have a billion dollar budget, that's real money. >> Yeah, but and-- Okay, yes, no doubt. But then, when you translate that into the business impact, you talked about the IT impact, but if you look at the business impact now it becomes telephone numbers. And actually CFOs oftentimes just don't even believe it, but it's true. Because if you can make the entire organization just, a half a percentage point more productive and you got 100,000 employees I mean, that overwhelms actually the IT business case. >> Sure. Yeah, and that's where that back to the sort of the steps in the business case is on the business and application side is making those folks actually more productive in the business case and saving them and adding whether it's a financial services and you're getting an application out to market that actually generates revenue, right? So that's, it's sort of the trickle effect. So when I look at I definitely look at it from a IT all the way through business. I am technically a business architect that does IT pretty damn good. >> Yeah and IT enables that sort of business. >> Absolutely. >> How do you, let's talk about this notion of continuous improvement, how are people thinking about that? Because you're talking a lot about just sort of self funding, and self progressing, sort of an organic entity that you're describing. How are people thinking about that? >> Yeah, I would say they're kind of a little bit over their map, right? But I would say that the goal is what we're trying to embed back to the operating model, we want to really embed is, sort of the concept of the cloud center of excellence. And as part of that, at the end, you have to have a set of functionality of folks that's constantly looking at the applications and our services of the different cloud providers or capabilities you have across the board. Everyone's got a multicloud environment, right? How do they take those services? They're probably already paying for it anyways, and as the components get released, how can you continually put little pieces in there and do little micro releases quarterly or in sorry, weekly, every month versus a big bang twice a year, right? Those little automation pieces continually add innovation in smaller chunks. And that's really the goal of cloud computing. And as you can actually break it up. It's no longer the Big Bang Theory, right? And I love that concept. Embedding that, whether you actually have a partner, with some of the stuff that we're doing that actually embed what we call like a day two services, that that's what it is. It's to support them, but also constantly look for different ways to include capabilities that were just released to add value on an ongoing basis. You don't have to go, "Hey, great, that capability came out. "It'll be on next year's release." No, it could be next week, next month, right? >> Well, so the outcome should be dramatically lowering costs. Really accelerating your time to value. It really is what you're describing and we've been talking about in terms of the autonomous enterprise. It's really a prerequisite for scale, isn't it? >> It is, absolutely, right? And so, when we use the term autonomous enterprise, I love that because that's actually a term I've been using for a few years, even before Larry started talking about the autonomous database. I talk about that environment of constantly look at a cloud capability and everything that you can put from a machine earlier into AI under to actually, basically let it run itself. The more that you can do that, the higher the value. And you put those people off in a higher level tasks, right? That's been going on every provider for a while. Oracle just has the capabilities now within the database that takes it to the next level, right? So we still are the only organization with that. Put that on top of our Gen 2 Cloud where all that is built in, as part of it going forward, that's where we have the upper level really at the enterprise computing level, right? We can work at all types of workload, but where we are niches, is really those big enterprise workloads, because that's where we started from data enterprise. >> I don't want to make it a technology discussion but said the only organization. You mean the only technology company with that autonomous database capabilities. Is that correct? >> Mike: Yes sir, yes. >> Okay, so I know I should have sort of talk about it, but Oracle I think talks about it more forcefully. We'll dig into that and report back. Mike, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. I really appreciate it. Good stuff. >> Thank you very much. >> And thank you for watching. We'll be right back with our next guest. You're watching theCUBE. We're here in Chicago covering the rebirth of Oracle Consulting. I'm Dave Vellante. We'll be right back. (soft 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: From Boston, Massachusetts it's The Cube. Covering AWS re:Inforce 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. This is The Cube's live coverage of AWS re:Inforce in Boston, Massachusetts. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vallante. This is re:Inforce. This is the inaugural conference for AWS on the security and Cloud security market. A new category being formed from an events standpoint around Cloud security. Our next guest is Cube alumni guest analyst Corey Quinn, and Cloud Economist with the Duckbill Group. Good to see you again. Great to have you on. Love to have you come back, because you're out in the hallways. You're out getting all the data and bringing it back and reporting. But this event, unlike the other ones, you had great commentary and analysis on. You were mentioned onstage during the Keynote from Stephen Smith. Congratulations. >> Thank you. I'm still not quite sure who is getting fired over that one, but somehow it happened, and I didn't know it was coming. It was incredibly flattering to have that happen, but it was first "Huh, awesome, he knows who I am." Followed quickly by "Oh dear, he knows who I am." And it, at this point, I'm not quite sure what to make of that. We'll see. >> It's good news, it's good business. All press is good press as they say, but let's get down to it. Obviously, it's a security conference. This is the inaugural event. We always love to go to inaugural events because, in case there's no second event, we were there - >> Corey: Oh yes >> for one event. So, that's always the case. >> Corey: Been there since the beginning is often great bragging rights. And if there isn't a second one, well, you don't need to bring it up ever again. So, they've already announced there's another one coming to Houston next year. So that'll be entertaining. >> So a lot of people were saying to us re:Inforce security event, some skepticism, some bullish on the sector. obviously, Cloud is hot. But the commentary was, oh, no one's really going to be there. It's going to be more of an educational event. So, yeah, it's more of an educational event for sure. That they're talking about stuff that they can't have time to do and reinvent. But there's a lot of investment going on there. There are players here from the companies. McAfee, you name the big name companies here, they're sending real people. A lot of biz dev folks trying to understand how to build up the sector. A lot of technical technologists here, as well. Digging in to some of the deep conversations. Do you agree? What's your thoughts of the event? >> I'm surprised, I was expecting this to be a whole bunch of people trying to sell things to other people, who were trying to sell them things in return, and it's not. There are, there are people who are using the Cloud for interesting things walking around. And that's fantastic. One thing that's always struck me as being sort of strange, and why I guess I feel sort of spiritually aligned here if nothing else. Is cost and security are always going to be trailing functions. No company is excited to invest in those things, until immediately after they really should have been investing in those things and weren't. So with time to market, velocity are always going to be something much valuable and important to any company strategically. But, we're seeing people start to get ahead of the curve in some ways. And that's, it's refreshing and frankly surprising. >> What is the top story in your mind? Top three stories coming out of re:Inforce. From industry standpoint, or from a product standpoint, that you think need to be told or amplified, or not being told, be told? >> Well there's been the stuff that we've seen on the stage and that's terrific. And, I think that you've probably rehashed those a fair bit with other guests. For me, what I'm seeing, the story that resonates as I walk around the Expo Hall here. Is we're seeing a bunch of companies that have deep roots in data centered environments. And now they're trying to come up with stories that resonate with Cloud. And if they don't, this is a transformational moment. They're going to effectively, likely find themselves in decline. But, they're not differentiating themselves from one another particularly well. There are a few very key things that we're seeing people operate within. Such as, with the new port mirroring stuff coming out of NVPC Traffics. You're right. You have a bunch of companies that are able to consume those, or flow logs. If you want to go back in time a little bit, and spit out analysis on this. But you're not seeing a lot of differentiation around this. Or, Hey we'll take all your security events and spit out the useful things. Okay, that is valuable, and you need to be able to do that. How many vendors do you need in one company doing the exact same thing? >> You know, we had a lot of sites CSO's on here and practitioners. And one of the comments on that point is Yeah, he's like, "Look I don't need more alerts." "I need things fixed." "Don't just tell me what's going on, fix it." So the automation story is also a pretty big one. The VCP traffic mirror, I think, is going to be just great for analytics. Great for just for getting that data out. But what does it actually impact In the automation piece? And the, okay there's an alert. Pay attention to it or ignore it. Or fix it. Seems to be kind of the next level conversation. Your thoughts around that piece. >> I think that as we take a look at the space and we see companies continuing to look at things like auto remediation. Automation's terrific, until the first time it does something you didn't want it to do and takes something down. At which point no one trusts it ever again. And that becomes something hard to tend to. I also think we're starting to see a bit of a new chapter as alliance with this from AWS and it's relationship with partners. I mean historically you would look at re:Invent, and you're sitting in the Expo Hall and watching the keynote. And it feels like it's AWS Red Wedding. Where, you're trying to see who's about to get killed by a feature that just comes out. And now were seeing that they've largely left aspects of the security space alone. They've had VPC flow logs for a long time, but sorting through those yourself was always like straining raw sewage with your teeth. You had to find a partner solution or build something yourself out of open source tooling from spit and duct tape. There's never been a great tool there. And it almost feels like they're leaving that area, for example, alone. And leaving that as an area rife for partners. Now how do you partner with something like AWS? That's a hard question to answer. >> So one of the other things we've heard from practitioners is they don't want incrementalism. They're kind of sick of that. They want step functions, that do as John said, remediate. >> Corey: Yeah. So, like you say, you called it the Red Wedding at the main stage. What does a partner have to do to stay viable in this ecosystem? >> Historically, the answer to that has always been to continue innovating ahead of the bow wave of AWS's own innovation. The problem is you see that slide that they put on in every event, that everyone who doesn't work at AWS sees. That shows the geometric increase in number of feature and service releases. And we all feel this sinking sensation of not even the partner side. But, they're releasing so much that I know some of that is going to fix things for my company, but I'll never hear it. Because it's drowned in the sheer volume of what they're releasing. AWS is rapidly increasing their pace of innovation to the point where companies that are not able to at least match that are going to be in for a bad time. As they find themselves outpaced by the vendor they're partnering with. >> And you heard Liberty Mutual say their number one challenge was actually the pace of Cloud. Being able to absorb all these new features >> Yes. >> And so, you mentioned the partner ecosystem. I mean, so it's not just the partners. It's the customers as well. That bow is coming faster than they can move. >> Absolutely. I can sit here now and talk very convincingly about services that don't exist. And not get called out on them by an AWS employee who happens to be sitting here. Because no one person can have all of this in their head anymore. It's outpaced most people's ability to wrap their heads around that and contextualize it. So people specialize, people focus. And, I think, to some extent that might be an aspect of why we're seeing re:Inforce as its own conference. >> So we talked a lot of CSO's this trip. >> Yeah. >> John: A lot of one on ones. We had some interviews. Some private meetings. I'm going to read you a list of key areas that they brought up as concern. I want to get you're reaction to. >> Sure. >> You pick the ones out you think are very relevant. >> Sure. >> Speedily, very fast. Vendor lock in. Spend. >> Not concerned. Yep. Security Native. >> Yeah. >> Service provider supplier relationship. Metrics, cloud securities, different integration, identity, automation, work force talent, coding security, and the human equation. There were all kind of key areas that seemed to glob and be categorically formed. Your thoughts to those. Which ones do you think jump out as criticalities on the market? >> Sure. I think right now people talking about lock in are basically wasting their time and spinning their wheels. If you, for example, you go with two cloud providers because you don't want to be locked into one. Well now there's a rife partner ecosystem. Because translating things like IAM into another provider's environment is completely foreign. You have to build an entire new security model on top of things in order to do that effectively. That's great. In security we're seeing less of an aversion to lock in than we are in other aspects of the business. And I think that is probably the right answer. Again, I'm not partisan in this battle. If someone wants to go with a different Cloud provider than AWS, great! Awesome! Make them pick the one that makes sense for your business. I don't think that it necessarily matters. But pick one. And go all in on that. >> Well this came up to in a couple of ways. One was, the general consensus was, who doesn't like multi Cloud? If you can seamlessly move stuff between Clouds. Without having to do the modification on all this code that has to be developed. >> Who wouldn't love that? But the reality is, doesn't exist. >> Corey : Well. To your point, this came up again, is that workplace, workforce talent is on CSO said "I'm with AWS." "I have a little bit of Google. I could probably go Azure." "Maybe I bought a company with dealing some stuff over there." "But for the most part all of my talent is peaked on AWS." "Why would I want to have three separate security teams peaking on different things? When I want everyone on our stack." They're building their own stacks. Then outsourcing or using suppliers where it supports it. >> Sure. >> But the focus of building their own stacks. Their own security. Coding up was critical. And having a split competency on code bases just to make it multi, was a non starter. >> And I think multi Cloud has been a symptom. I mean, it's more than a strategy. I think it's in a large part a somewhat desperate attempt by a number of vendors who don't have their own Cloud. To say Hey, you need to have a multi Cloud strategy. But, multi Cloud has been really an outcome of multiple projects. As you say, MNA. Horses for courses. Lines of business. So my question is, I think you just answered it. Multi Cloud is more complex, less secure, and probably more costly. But is it a viable strategy for things other than lock in? >> To a point. There are stories about durability. There's business reasons. If you have a customer who does not want their data living one one particular Cloud provider. Those are strategic reasons to get away from it. And to be clear, I would love the exact same thing that you just mentioned. Where I could take what I've built and run that seamlessly on other providers. But I don't just want that to be a pile of VM's and maybe some disc. I want those to be the higher level services that take care of massive amounts of my business for me. And I want to flow those seamlessly between providers. And there's just no story around that for anything reasonable or modern. >> And history would say there won't really ever be. Without some kind of open source movement to - >> Oh yes. A more honest reading of some of the other cloud providers that are talking about multi cloud extensively translates that through a slight filter. To, we believe you should look into Multi Cloud. Because if you're going all in on a single provider there is no way in the world it's going to be us. And that's sort of a challenge. If you take a look at a number of companies out here. If someone goes all in on one provider they will not have much, if anything, to sell them of differentiated value. And that becomes the larger fixture challenge for an awful lot of companies. And I empathize with that, I really do. >> Amazon started to do a lot of channel development. Obviously their emphasis on helping people make some cash. Obviously their vendors are, ecosystems a fray. Always a fray. So sheer responsibility at one level is, well we only have one security model. We do stuff and you do stuff. So obviously it's inherently shared. So I think that's really not a surprise for me. The issue is how to get successful monetization in the ecosystem. Clearly defining lines of, rules of engagement, around where the white spaces are. And where the differentiation can occur. Your thoughts on how that plays out. >> Yeah. And that's a great question. Because I don't think you're ever going to get someone from Amazon sitting in a room. And saying Okay, if you build a tool that does this, we're never, ever, ever going to build a thing that does that. They just launched a service at re:Invent that talks to satellites in orbit. If they're going to build that, I don't, there's nothing that I will say they're never going to get involved with. Their product strategy, from the outside, feels like it's a post it note that says Yes on it. And how do you wind up successfully building and scaling a business around that? I don't have a clue. >> Eddie Jafse's on the record here in The Cube and privately with me on my reporting. Saying never say never. >> Never say never. >> We'll never say never. So that is actually an explicit >> Take him at his word on that one. >> Right. And I'm an independent consultant. Where my first language is sarcasm. So, I basically make fun of AWS in the newsletter and podcast. And that seems to go reasonably well. But, I'm never going to say that they're not going to move into self deprecation as a business model. Look at some of their service names. They're clearly starting to make inroads in that space. So, I have to keep innovating ahead of that bow wave. And for now, okay. I can't fathom trying to build a business model with a 300 person company and being able to continue to innovate at that pace. And avoid the rapid shifts as AWS explores on new offers. >> And I what I like about why, well, we were always kind of goofing on AWS. But we're fanboys as well, as you know. But what I love about AWS is that they give the opportunity for their partners. They give them plenty of head's up. It's pretty much the rules of engagement is never say never. But if they're not differentiating, that's their job. >> Corey: Yeah. >> Their job is to be better. Now one thing Amazon does say is Hey we might have a competing service, but we're always going to favor the customer. So, the partner. If a customer wants an Amazon Cloud trail. They want Cloud trail for a great example. There's been requests for that. So why wouldn't they do it? But they also recognize it's bus - people in the ecosystem that do similar things. >> Corey: Yeah. >> And they are not going to actively try to put them out of business, per se. >> Oh yeah! One company that's done fantastically well partnering with everyone is PagerDuty. And even if AWS were to announce a service that wakes you up in the middle of the night when something breaks. It's great. Awesome. How about you update your status page in a timely fashion first? Then talk about me depending on the infrastructure that you run to tell me when the infrastructure that you run is now degraded? The idea of being able to take some function like that and outsource worked well enough for them to go public. >> So where are the safe points in the ecosystem? So obviously a partner that has a strong on-prem presence that Amazon wants to get access to. >> That's a short term, or maybe even a mid term strategy. Okay. Professional services. If you're Accenture, and Ernie Young, and Deloitte, PWC, you're probably okay. Because that's not a business that Amazon really wants to be in. Now they might want to, they might want to automate as much to that as possible. But the world's going to do that anyway. But, what's your take where it's safe? >> I would also add cost optimization to that. Not from a basis of technical capability. And I think that their current tooling is disappointing. I'd argue that cost explorer and the rest of their billing situation is the asterisk next to customer obsession if we're being perfectly honest. But there's always going to be some value in an external party coming in from that space. And what form that takes is going to change. But, it is not very defensible internally to say our Cloud spend is optimized, because the vendor we're writing those large checks to tells us it is. There's always going to be a need for some third-party validation. And whether that can come through software? >> How big is that business? >> It's a great question. Right now, we're seeing that people are spending over 30 billion dollars a year on AWS and climbing. One thing we can say with a certainty in almost every case is that people's Cloud bills are not getting smaller month over month. >> Yep. >> So, it's a growing market. It's one that people feel incredibly acutely. And when you get a few drinks into people and they start complaining about various aspects of Cloud, one of the first most common points that comes up is the bill. Not that it's too high, but that it is inscrutable. >> And so, just to do a back of napkin tam, how much optimization potential is there? Is it a ten percent factor? More? >> It depends on the level of effort you're willing to invest. I mean, there's a story for almost environments where you can save 70% on your Cloud bill. All you have to do is spend 18 months of rewriting everything to use serverless primitives. Six of those months you'll be hard down across the board. And then, wait where did everyone go? Because no one's going to do that. >> Dave: You might be out of business. So it's always a question of effort spent doing optimization, versus improving features, speeding time to market and delivering something that will generate for more revenue. The theoretical upside of cost optimization is 100% of your Cloud bill. Launching the right service or product can bring in multiples of that in revenue. >> I think my theory on differentiation, Dave, is that I think Amazon is basically saying in so many words, not directly. But it's my interpretation. Hold on to the rocket ship of AWS as long as you can. And if you can get stable, hold on. If you fall off that's just your fault, right? So, what that means is, to me, move up the stack. So Amazon is clearly going to continue to grow and create scale. So the benefits to the companies create a value proposition that can extract rents out of the marketplace from value that they create on the Amazon growth. Which means, they got to lock step with Amazon on growth. And cost leap, pivot up to where there's space. And Amazon is just a steam roller that will come in. The rocket ship that's going so fast. Whatever metaphor. And so people who just say We made a deal with Amazon, we're in. And then kind of sit idle. Will probably end up getting spun off. I mean, cause it's like they fall off and Amazon will be like All right so we did that. You differentiate enough, you didn't innovate enough. But, they're going to give everyone the opportunity to take a place with the growth. So the strategy, management wise, is just constantly push the envelope. >> So that's implicit in the Amazon posture. What's explicit in Amazon's posture is build applications on our platform. And you should be okay. You know? For a while. >> Yeah. And again, I think that a lot of engineers get stuck in a trap of building something and spending all their time making their code quality as best as possible. But, that's not going to lead to a business outcome one way or another. We see stories of companies hitting success with a tire fire of an infrastructure all the time. Twitter used to display massive downtime until they were large enough to justify the time and expense of a massive rewrite. And now Twitter is effectively up all the time. Whether that's good or not is a separate argument. But, they're there. So there's always going to be time to fix things. >> Well the Twitter example is a great example. Because they built it on rails. >> Yes. >> And they put it on Amazon Cloud. It was just kind of a hack, and then all of the sudden Boom, people loved it. And then, that's to me, the benefit of Cloud. One you get the scape velocity, the investment to start Twitter was fairly low, given what the success was. And then they had to rewrite, because the scale was bursting up. That's called prototyping. >> Oh yeah. >> That's what enterprises have to do. This is the theme of, agile. Get started as a theme, just dig in. Do a hack up font. But don't get confuse that with scale. That's where the rubber meets the road. >> Right and the, Oh Cloud isn't for us because we're an exception case. There are very few companies for whom that statement is true in the modern era. And, do an honest analysis first, before deciding we're going to build our own data centers because we can do it for cheaper. If you're Dropbox, putting storage in, great. Otherwise you're going to end up in this story where Oh, well, we have 20 instances now, so we can do this cheaper in Iraq somewhere. I will bet you a house you're wrong. But okay. >> Yeah. People are telling me that. Okay final question for you. As you've wandered around and been in the sessions, been in the analyst thing. What are some slice of life commentary stories you've bumped into that you found either funny, clever, insulting, or humorous? What's out on the floor? What are some of the conversations? >> One of the best ones was a company I'm not going to name, but the story they told was fantastic. They have, they're primarily on Azure. But they also have a strong secondary presence with AWS, and that's fascinating to me. How does that work internally? It turns out their cloud of choice is Azure. And they have to mandate that with guardrails in place. Because if you give developers a choice they will all go and build on AWS instead. Which is fascinating. And there are business reasons behind why they're doing what they're doing. But that story was just very humorous. I can't confirm or deny whether it was true or not. Because it was someone with way too much to drink telling an awesome story. But the idea of having to forcibly drag your developers away from a thing in a favor of another thing? >> That's like being at a bad party. It's like Oh, the better party is over there. All my friends are over there. >> But they have a commitment to Microsoft software estate. So, that's likely why they're. >> They just deal with Microsoft. >> And I'm not saying this is necessarily the wrong approach. I just find it funny. >> Might be the right business decision, but when you ask the developers, we see that all the time, John. >> All the time. I mean I had a developer one time come to me and start, he like "Look, we thought it would be great to build on Azure. We were actually being paid. They were writing checks to incent us. And I had a revolt. Engineers were revolting. Because the reverse proxies as there was cobbled together services. And they weren't clean native services and primitives. So the engineers were revolting. So they, we had to turn down the cash from Microsoft and go back to Amazon." >> Azure is much better now, but they have to outrun that legacy shadow of at first, it wasn't great. And people try something once, "That was terrible!" Well would you like to try it again now? "Why would I do that? It was terrible!" And it takes time to overcome that knee-jerk reaction. >> Well, but to your point about the business decision. It might make business sense to do that with Microsoft. It's maybe a little bit more predictable than Amazon is as a partner. >> Oh the way to optimize your bill on another Cloud provider that isn't AWS these days is to call up your account rep and yell at them. They're willing to buy business in most cases. That's not specific to any one provider. That's most of them. It's challenging to optimize free, so we don't see the same level of expensive bill problems in most companies there as well. >> Well the good news is on Microsoft, and I was a really big critic of Azure going back a few years ago. Is that they absolutely have changed their philosophy going back, I'd say two, three years ago. In the past two years, particular 24 months, they really have been cranking. They've been pedaling as fast as they can. They're serious. There's commitment from the top. And then they tell us, so there's no doubt. They're doing it also with the Kubernetes. What they're seeing, as they're doing is phenomenal. So... >> Great developer jobs at Microsoft. >> They're in for the long game. They're not going to be a fad. No doubt about it. >> No. And we're not going to see for example the Verizon public Cloud the HP public Cloud. Both of which were turned off. The ones that we're seeing today are largely going to be to stay of the big three. Big four if we include Alibaba. And it's, I'm not worried about the long term viability of any of them. It's just finding their niche, finding their market. >> Yeah, finding their lanes. Cory. Great to have you on. Good to hear some of those stories. Thanks for the commentary. >> Thank you. >> As always great guest analyst Cube alumni, friend, analyst, Cory Quinn here in the Cube. Bringing all the top action from AWS re:Inforce. Their first inaugural security conference around Cloud security. And Cube's initiation of security coverage continues, after this break. (upbeat electronic music)

Live from New York, it's theCUBE. Covering theCUBE, New York City 2018. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media and its ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE live in New York City for our CUBE NYC event, #cubenyc. This is our ninth year covering the big data ecosystem going back to the original Hadoop world, now it's evolved to essentially all things AI, future of AI. Peter Burris is my cohost. He gave a talk two nights ago on the future of AI presented in his research. So it's all about data, it's all about the cloud, it's all about live action here in theCUBE. Our next guest is David Richards, who's been in the industry for a long time, seen the evolution of Hadoop, been involved in it, has been a key enabler of the technology, certainly enabling cloud recovery replication for cloud, welcome back to theCUBE. It's good to see you. >> It's really good to be here. >> I got to say, you've been on theCUBE pretty much every year, I think every year, we've done nine years now. You made some predictions and calls that actually happened. Like five years ago you said the cloud's going to kill Hadoop. Yeah, I think you didn't say that off camera, but it might (laughing) maybe you said it on camera. >> I probably did, yeah. >> [John] But we were kind of pontificating but also speculating, okay, where does this go? You've been right on a lot of calls. You also were involved in the Hadoop distribution business >>back in the day. Oh god. >> You got out of that quickly. (laughing) You saw that early, good call. But you guys have essentially a core enabler that's been just consistently performing well in the market both on the Hadoop side, cloud, and as data becomes the conversation, which has always been your perspective, you guys have had a key in part of the infrastructure for a long time. What's going on? Is it still doing deals, what's? >> Yes, I mean, the history of WANdisco's play and big data in Hadoop has been, as you know because you've been with us for a long time, kind of an interesting one. So we back in sort of 2013, 2014, 2015 we built a Hadoop-specific product called Non-Stop NameNode and we had a Hadoop distribution. But we could see this transition, this change in the market happening. And the change wasn't driven necessarily by the advent of new technology. It was driven by overcomplexity associated with deploying, managing Hadoop clusters at scale because lots of people, and we were talking about this off-camera before, can deploy Hadoop in a fairly small way, but not many companies are equipped or built to deploy massive scale Hadoop distributions. >> Sustain it. >> They can't sustain it, and so the call that I made you know, actions speak louder than words. The company rebuilt the product, built a general purpose data replication platform called WANdisco Fusion that, yes, supported Hadoop but also supported object store and cloud technologies. And we're now seeing use cases in cloud certainly begin to overtake Hadoop for us for the first time. >> And you guys have a patent that's pretty critical in all this, right? >> Yeah. So there's some real IP. >> Yes, so people often make the mistake of calling us a data replication business, which we are, but data replication happens post-consensus or post-agreement, so the very heart of WANdisco of 35 patents are all based around a Paxos-based consensus algorithm, which wasn't a very cool thing to talk about now with the advent of blockchain and decentralized computing, consensus is at the core of pretty much that movement, so what WANdisco does is a consensus algorithm that enables things like hybrid cloud, multi cloud, poly cloud as Microsoft call it, as well as disaster recovery for Hadoop and other things. >> Yeah, as you have more disparate parts working together, say multi cloud, I mean, you're really perfectly positioned for multi cloud. I mean, hybrid cloud is hybrid cloud, but also multi cloud, they're two different things. Peter has been on the record describing the difference between hybrid cloud and multi cloud, but multi cloud is essentially connecting clouds. >> We're on a mission at the moment to define what those things actually are because I can tell you what it isn't. A multi cloud strategy doesn't mean you have disparate data and processes running in two different clouds that just means that you've got two different clouds. That's not a multi cloud strategy. >> [Peter] Two cloud silos. >> Yeah, correct. That's kind of creating problems that are really going to be bad further down the road. And hybrid cloud doesn't mean that you run some operations and processes and data on premise and a different siloed approach to cloud. What this means is that you have a data layer that's clustered and stretched, the same data that's stretched across different clouds, different on-premise systems, whether it's Hadoop on-premise and maybe I want to build a huge data lake in cloud and start running complex AI and analytics processes over there because I'm, less face it, banks et cetera ain't going to be able to manage and run AI themselves. It's already being done by Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Alibaba, and others in the cloud. So the ability to run this simultaneously in different locations is really important. That's what we do. >> [John] All right, let me just ask this directly since we're filming and we'll get a clip out of this. What is the definition of hybrid cloud? And what is the definition of multi cloud? Take, explain both of those. >> The ability to manage and run the same data set against different applications simultaneously. And achieve exactly the same result. >> [John] That's hybrid cloud or multi cloud? >> Both. >> So they're the same. >> The same. >> You consider hybrid cloud multi cloud the same? >> For us it's just a different end point. It's hybrid kind of mean that you're running something implies on-premise. A multi cloud or poly cloud implies that you're running between different cloud venues. >> So hybrid is location, multi is source. >> Correct. >> So but let's-- >> [David] That's a good definition. >> Yes, but let's unpack this a little bit because at the end of the day, what a business is going to want to do is they're going to want to be able to run apply their data to the best service. >> [David] Correct. >> And increasingly that's what we're advising our clients to think about. >> [David] Yeah. >> Don't think about being an AWS customer, per se, think about being a customer of AWS services that serve your business. Or IBM services that serve your business. But you want to ensure that your dependency on that service is not absolute, and that's why you want to be able to at least have the option of being able to run your data in all of these different places. >> And I think the market now realizes that there is not going to be a single, dominant vendor for cloud infrastructure. That's not going to happen. Yes, it happened, Oracle dominated in relational data. SAP dominated for ERP systems. For cloud, it's democratized. That's not going to happen. So everybody knows that Amazon probably have the best serverless compute lambda functions available. They've got millions of those things already written or in the process of being written. Everybody knows that Microsoft are going to extend the wonderful technology that they have on desktop and move that into cloud for analytics-based technologies and so on. The Google have been working on artificial intelligence for an elongated period of time, so vendors are going to arbitrage between different cloud vendors. They're going to choose the best of brood approach. >> [John] They're going to go to Google for AI and scale, they're going to go to Amazon for robustness of services, and they're going to go to Microsoft for the Suite. >> [Peter] They're going to go for the services. They're looking at the services, that's what they need to do. >> And the thing that we'll forget, that we don't at WANdisco, is that that requires guaranteed consistent data sets underneath the whole thing. >> So where does Fusion fit in here? How is that getting traction? Give us some update. Are you working with Microsoft? I know we've been talking about Amazon, what about Microsoft? >> So we've been working with Microsoft, we announced a strategic partnership with them in March where we became a tier zero vendor, which basically means that we're partnered with them in lockstep in the field. We executed extremely well since that point and we've done a number of fairly large, high-profile deals. A retailer, for example, that was based in Amazon didn't really like being based in Amazon so had to build a poly cloud implementation to move had to buy scale data from AWS into Azure, that went seamlessly. It was an overnight success. >> [John] And they're using your technology? >> They're using our technology. There's no other way to do that. I think the world has now, what Microsoft and others have realized, CDC technology changed data capture. Doesn't work at this kind of scale where you batch up a bunch of changes and then you ship them, block shipping or whatever, every 15 minutes or so. We're talking about petabyte scale ingest processes. We're talking about huge data lakes, that that technology simply doesn't work at this kind of scale. >> [John] We've got a couple minutes left, I want to just make sure we get your views on blockchain, you mentioned consensus, I want to get your thoughts on that because we're seeing blockchain is certainly experimental, it's got, it's certainly powering money, Bitcoin and the international markets, it's certainly becoming a money backbone for countries to move billions of dollars out. It's certainly in the tank right now about 600 million below its mark in January, but blockchain is fundamentally supply chain, you're seeing consensus, you're seeing some of these things that are in your realm, what's your view? >> So first of all, at WANdisco, we separate the notion of cryptocurrency and blockchain. We see blockchain as something that's been around for a long time. It's basically the world is moving to decentralization. We're seeing this with airlines, with supermarkets, and so on. People actually want to decentralize rather that centralize now. And the same thing is going to happen in the financial industry where we don't actually need a central transaction coordinator anymore, we don't need a clearinghouse, in other words. Now, how do you do that? At the very heart of blockchain is an incorrect assumption. So must people think that Satoshi's invention, whoever that may be, was based around the blockchain itself. Blockchain is pieced together technologies that doesn't actually scale, right? So it takes game-theoretic approach to consensus. And I won't get, we don't have enough time for me to delve into exactly what that means, but our consensus algorithm has already proven to scale, right? So what does that mean? Well, it means that if you want to go and buy a cup of coffee at the Starbucks next door, and you want to use a Bitcoin, you're going to be waiting maybe half an hour for that transaction to settle, right? Because the-- >> [John] The buyer's got to create a block, you know, all that step's in one. >> The game-theoretic approach basically-- >> Bitcoin's running 500,000 transactions a day. >> Yeah. That's eight. >> There's two transactions per second, right? Between two and eight transactions per second. We've already proven that we can achieve hundreds of thousands, potentially millions of agreements per second. Now the argument against using Paxos, which is what our technology's based on, is it's too complicated. Well, no shit, of course it's too complicated. We've solved that problem. That's what WANdisco does. So we've filed a patent >> So you've abstracted the complexity, that's your job. >> We've extracted the complexity. >> So you solve the complexity problem by being a complex solution, but you're making and abstracting it even easier. >> We have an algorithmic not a game-theoretic approach. >> Solving the scale problem Correct. >> Using Paxos in a way that allows real developers to be able to build consensus algorithm-based applications. >> Yes, and 90% of blockchain is consensus. We've solved the consensus problem. We'll be launching a product based around Hyperledger very soon, we're already in tests and we're already showing tens of thousands of transactions per second. Not two, not 2,000, two transactions. >> [Peter] The game theory side of it is still going to be important because when we start talking about machines and humans working together, programs don't require incentives. Human beings do, and so there will be very, very important applications for this stuff. But you're right, from the standpoint of the machine-to-machine when there is no need for incentive, you just want consensus, you want scale. >> Yeah and there are two approaches to this world of blockchains. There's public, which is where the Bitcoin guys are and the anarchists who firmly believe that there should be no oversight or control, then there's the real world which is permission blockchains, and permission blockchains is where the banks, where the regulators, where NASDAQ will be when we're trading shares in the future. That will be a permission blockchain that will be overseen by a regulator like the SEC, NASDAQ, or London Stock Exchange, et cetera. >> David, always great to chat with you. Thanks for coming on, again, always on the cutting edge, always having a great vision while knocking down some good technology and moving your IP on the right waves every time, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Always on the next wave, David Richards here inside theCUBE. Every year, doesn't disappoint, theCUBE bringing you all the action here. Cube NYC, we'll be back with more coverage. Stay with us; a lot more action for the rest of the day. We'll be right back; stay with us for more after this short break. (upbeat music)

(intense orchestral music) >> Hello everyone and welcome to theCUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto, at theCUBE studios. I'm John Furrier, we're here with a special conversation with Fortinet's John Maddison, senior vice president of products and solutions with Fortinet. Welcome to theCUBE Conversation. >> Good to be here again. >> So you guys have some hard new today hitting, it's called the FortiNAC, Forti, like Fortinet, Forti, N-A-C, network access control. >> Right. >> Significant announcement for your guys, take a minute to explain the announcement. >> Yeah, so about two months ago we acquired a company called Bradford Networks. They compete, provide products in the network access control arena. Other companies in that space, so people like ForeScout or Cisco or HP. We think it's a very important space because it's going to be the foundations for IOT security. You probably heard a lot of buzz around IOT security. And there's different levels of IOT security. There's that for the enterprise, there's that for cloud, et cetera and so, for us, this is an important announcement because it gives us that added visibility now to IOT devices via the fabric. >> And the product, is it an appliance? Is it software? What's the product making? >> It's both. You can do a virtual machine version. It's also an appliance. It comes in different levels. The key for it though is the scalability because with IOT devices, we're not talking 100 devices anymore, we're talking millions of devices so what it's able to do is look across many different protocols and devices and provide that visibility of just about any device attaching to your network. >> Who's the target audience for FortiNAC? Is it the data center? Is it the cloud? Is it the remote? Where's the product actually sit? >> Well it's more by industry, so certain industries will have lots more of these types of devices attaching. So think of manufacturing for example. The medical industry as well. And so those are the real, education's another one, so it's more by vertical and it's really focused on campuses, large campuses or remote offices or even manufacturing plants where, again, these devices are attaching to your network. >> And they'll sit at the edge, monitoring what's coming in and out? Is that the purpose? >> Well that's the neat thing about it, it doesn't have to sit at the edge and see all the traffic. What it does is interrogate existing devices at the edge. It could be a switch, it could be a router, it could be an access point, and from that information it can make an assessment of what the device is attaching and then apply a policy. >> So this is part of a bigger holistic picture? We've have conversations with Fortinet in the past, a few conversations certainly around security, with cloud it's the top conversation, on premise it's the top conversation. You guys also have some complimentary products involved like the security fabric and the connectors. Does this fit into that? Take a minute to explain the relevance of how FortiNAC works with the security fabric and the connectors? >> Yeah, last time I was here I explained our fabric and so the fabric is basically something, is a set of Fortinet products, solutions in a way, that are very tightly integrated into the network or into the customer's ecosystem, and then once you've built that you then provide automation systems across for protection, detection and response. And the whole idea is to make sure you're covering what we call the digital attack surface. The digital attack surface now includes, obviously IOT devices, so gaining this visibility from FortiNAC, making sure the information is available to our fabric is crucial for us to make sure we can protect the digital attack surface. >> And for customer's the fabric is a holistic view, the NAC is a product that sits in the campuses or within the network that kind of communicates in the fabric? Is that right? >> Right. So the NAC can see all the IOT devices attaching and then it integrates back into the fabric. The fabric can then apply a policy, so the fabric can see everything now From IOT to the campus, to the WAN, to the data center, to the cloud and if, for example, those IOT devices are communicating with something in the cloud the fabric can see end to end and apply, for example, a segmentation policy, end to end, all the way through the infrastructure. >> You know what I love about having conversations with Fortinet is that you guys spark two types of conversations, use cases and then product technology conversation. This obviously is an IOT kind of product. It makes a lot of sense, you got a little SD-WAN in there. This is the top conversation around enterprises and people looking at cloud an/or looking at re-platforming around cloud operations, it's the cloud architect, it's the network architect. >> Yeah. >> These guys are really being asked to redo things, so how does the IOT fit into this? What is the product? What is the FortiNAC do for IOT from a use case standpoint and then product and technology? >> That's a good conversation because recently, maybe the last 18 months, instead of talking about a point solution, instead of talking about a specific use case, customers want to put all those use cases together and then produce a longer term, more holistic architecture. So now they have a cyber security architect, security architects as well as networking architects. And they want to look at their infrastructure, because that's the things that's changing the most right now. Sure, the threat landscape's out there and the cyber criminals are changing and stuff, et cetera but it's really that infrastructure that's changing the most because they've moving to flexible WAN systems or cloud and so they want it integrated, end to end, over a long time period. So what they want to be able to do is to automate, that's the key word, is automation. It's to make sure all these devices attaching are part of the security automation architecture and then they comply that security policy automatically to that device. >> You know one of the things that's a big trend in the industry is having network guys and people who are managing infrastructure, move from a command line interface, DLI, to automation. >> Mm. >> You mentioned that. How does the FortiNAC extend the security fabric? Because you guys essentially have that holistic view with the fabric. So now you have this IOT capability. How is that device extending the security fabric and what's the benefits to the buyer? >> Yeah, so the fabric has visibility obviously at the next generation firewall, we also have deployment of access points and switches. But obviously there are other companies with vast deployments of switches, I can name a few, and access points and so if they weren't our switches we couldn't necessarily see those devices attaching. And so what FortiNAC does, it comes in and provides us that now complete visibility. It doesn't matter if it's our infrastructure switches and APs, it can be somebody else's. FortiNAC can interrogate and talk to those devices and not only gain that visibility but if we decide there's a certain security posture we want to apply to some IOT device, we don't know what it is, we want it segmented, restrict it's access. Then the fabric can then tell the FortiNAC device to provide control and segmentation back to it. >> So they're working together? >> Working together and it gives us now complete visibility of the IOT devices. >> Let's talk about some the trends around segmentation. We heard, certainly recently at VMworld about micro segmentation's been one of the key things. A lot of top architects, both network and cloud and software are looking at micro segmentation or segmentation in general around the network. Why is it important and what are some of the use cases that you guys are seeing around segmentation? >> It's extremely important but it's a very complex problem in that even though our customer's have bought a lot of different security products from different vendors and different infrastructure, one of the things they don't always realize is they bought a lot of different orchestration systems, a lot of command and control systems and those are key in the future because those systems determine what the infrastructure looks like. You NAC system is kind of an orchestration system, allowing different devices to come on/off the network. SD-WAN has it's own orchestration system. You talked about micro segmentation, things like VMware and NSX and Cisco ACI, all the clouds have their own orchestration systems as well. AWS, Azure, and so what's interesting is none of them really talk to each other. They're more focused on looking after their part of the infrastructure. Now to do segmentation end to end you really need to have end to end orchestration across all those systems. If I want to orchestrate, as I said, that IOT communication with a select application in the cloud, I need to orchestrate all the way through those orchestration systems. >> You need an orchestration or the orchestration system that you have in the cloud. (laughing) >> You need a mother of all orchestrators in some way but I don't think that's ever going to happen and so what's going to happen, really, is your security architecture and segmentation will be specific to a platform or fabric as we're building and then your fabric has to connect into the orchestration systems to tell it what's going on within that section of the orchestration. Again, if it's a NAC system, I can just explain, I know these IOT devices are attaching, let me apply a policy to those. If I know the WAN links are a certain type then I apply that policy. >> And this is the benefit of a holistic fabric because that's kind of where it ties together, right? >> It is, so you build a holistic security fabric and then you let the different infrastructure orchestrators, like VMware, or an SD-WAN vendor or a NAC vendor, do their job, really focus on the infrastructure. >> And you guys help those guys out, big time, with the orchestration side of it? >> Well we can connect into the orchestration systems and we just use it to make sure the security component is doing well. They're more focused on making sure the infrastructure delivers the applications to the end user. >> They do their job, you do your job. >> Exactly. >> Take a minute to explain for the folks out there, explain segmentation and what it is and why is it important for networks? >> A very simple example of segmentation, a couple of years ago there was a bank that got hacked in one of the countries, I think it was the Philippines or something like that, and what they found out was that in that particular country they didn't have the same security infrastructure in place so they got in through that particular branch and came all the way back into the core network and so a very simple segmentation policy they put in place was that, I'm going to segment by countries. So I'm not going to let this country's network access the core data center, if I give it a certain trust level. Segmentation can mean physical countries. It can mean I'm going to segment my intellectual property off. I could be segmenting by functions. Don't let those sales people anywhere near the intellectual property. You can also segment by identity. So segmentation means many different things, you have to apply, I think different levels of segmentation depending on your applications. >> And this is proven, too? We've heard this in many conversations in theCUBE. We had one guy from the US government saying, "We have these critical infrastructure pieces in the United States, why would we let anyone outside the United States access it?" >> Yeah. >> That's a great example. >> I mean if you go to critical infrastructure, you're even more dangerous. I mean most of the infrastructure's been air gapped. It's been totally air gapped, you can't get at it but that's changing as more of those devices become IOT and you have to let some access that. >> And this is where IOT is a challenge that we're seeing. This is one of the problems? >> It's IOT. You know that category is often referred to these days as OT, operational technology. >> Talk about end points, we're hearing endpoints being discussed, like hey, you connect the endpoints, your endpoint strategy, network strategy. Kind of elusive for some, describe why networking the endpoints is an important feature or is it? When people think of the endpoint of the network what are they really talking about? >> Well I think it's become more important. It's interesting if you go back 10 years or so even 15 years, you have a lot of endpoint vendors. Semantics, MacAfees, Trend Micros, Microsoft, I think, is now the largest endpoint security vendor. Then you have a different set of networking vendors, ourselves and some other names out there I can't remember. But, they're totally separated and so to look at your network, give you visibility to policy and segment, you need to be able to see the endpoints and the network together. The security fabric makes sure that you can at least see the endpoint. You may not provide the full stack of security, you may leave that to your endpoint vendor still but your network should be able to see your endpoint and vice versa, and you should be able to see what's communicating between the two. >> I'd like to talk about SD-WAN, but before we go there, just to kind of close out IOT, talk about Fortinet's differentiation and advantages when you talk about convergence between IOT and access technology. >> So the base technology's NAC, network access control, which is in place there but our advantage really is now scale, we can see huge amounts of IOT devices which are attaching and then take action not only at the access level but all the way into the cloud. >> SD-WAN has become a really hot topic. It's a huge market. >> Yeah. >> It's in the billions in terms of spend, it connects devices, campuses and devices but cloud's had a big renaissance within the SD-WAN market. Talk about what's going on with SD-WAN and how the security fabric and the FortiNAC fit into that because it's not your grandfather's SD-WAN market anymore as the expression goes. >> No. Well it's in that class of everything's being software defined, fair enough. But I think this marketplace, if you go even three years ago, was dominated because all the, you've got two marketplaces. You've got what I call the retail, which is distribute enterprise, thousands and thousands inside which already went to a UTM infrastructure. And then you had the branch office, which was more connected, in fact, it just had a simple router in there, it was connected back to the data center which then would go into the internet. And so what's happened is these branch offices they need more and more access to the cloud, more cloud applications are running. You need to provider QOS against those applications and then also these large corporations have decided they don't want to pay, it's a lot of money to get certain, high quality EPLS circuits, when they can get faster circuits through DSL and other mechanisms and so they wanted more flexibility around the wide area network. >> So commodity network access which is, you know, cloud non and EPLS, were high priced, secure. You get now more cloud access, this is translating to more traffic or is it? Is that the driver in all this? >> Well that's what happens and then you get more traffic going through there, it's the same with the next gen firewall right now and people saying, "There's a refresh going, we don't know why." the reason for it is, when you're in your office you're more than likely communicating with the cloud versus your local databases and so the same for the branch office, there's more traffic going through there, it's more encrypted, they want flexibility, they want HA modes, if that goes down now, you've got a big productivity problem with your employees there. And so this whole market sprung from nowhere only three or four years ago and is already in, as you say, in the billions of dollars. There's a lot of acquisition's already happened, consolidation. In our mind it's very important but what's just a important as all those elements is security. If I open up my branch office now to an internet connection, I need best of breed securities on that device and so we've been building SD-WAN, what I call core functionality, for some time, inside our fabric. It's quite a natural integration now of security into that. In fact some recent tests we did with SS Labs, we got highly recommended, for not only the SD-WAN features but that core security. Today SD-WAN vendors will say, well I'll just go and get some security solution from somewhere and bolt it on or attach it on, provide it through the cloud and that's fine but longterm, again, if you come back to that coordination, that orchestration, across two different systems, it's going to become hard. >> And the other complicating factor in this, aside from the infrastructure component, is that a lot of the SAS applications that people are buying, whether it's shadow IT or just off the shelf, or there's Dropbox or any of these services that are SAS based, cloud based, that's creating less of a perimeter. >> Yeah, when it all comes back, technology called CASB is providing that interface into that world through APIs and it all comes back to making sure that all your mechanisms of protection, detection, control are available to all your systems. If I've got some SD-WAN device somewhere and I need to check where this is going, I can use my application database or if I need to check if I'm going to this cloud, I use my CASB API. And so it comes back to a platform approach, a fabric approach. >> John, what's the SD-WAN approach for Fortinet? How do you guys do it? Why should people care? What's the differentiation? Why Fortinet for SD-WAN? What's the approach? >> Integrated in one word. That is, you don't need two boxes, you don't need two VMs, you don't need a box plus a cloud, it's all integrated on the system, best of breed SD-WAN functionality, best of breed tested by third party security which allows you then to have a much more cost effective solution. I think our TCO in the test as a 10th, or a 100th of some of the leading vendors outside there because you're bringing two vendors together and it's gets very costly. >> Alright, I'm going to put you on spot, I'm going to put my cynical hat on. So you're saying integrate security with SD-WAN? I'm going to say, hey, why not just keep it separate? Why integrate? >> Because the two functions need to work together. Where's the firewall going to go? Is it going to go in the cloud or is it going to go here? Who decides on the policy? If something happens, segmentation, who's deciding on segmentation policy? Usually two different companies, they don't really talk apart from maybe, there's an API leak in the security capabilities but to our mind, again, it comes back to that end to end segmentation and that's what a lot of the, I would say, the larger infrastructure vendors are trying to do. I want infrastructure all the way to devices being added, through my campus, through my SD-WAN, data center and cloud and if you've got multiple vendors, again, all over the place, there's no way you're going to be able to coordinate that. >> Alright, so I'll put my IT practitioner hat on. Okay, so I get that, so probably less security manual risk for human error, but I really want to automate. My goal is to automate some of these IT functions, get better security end to end, does this fit that requirement? >> Yeah, so from an automation perspective, we're building in some tools of our own but what we're finding more and more is that from an IT, as you said, they've gone out and built some dev ops capability. Ansible's a good example there. So what we're doing is making sure that, in fact, a lot of our partners and our SEs have already built these scripts and put them on GitHub, well now Microsoft Hub or whatever you want to call it. So we're taking those in and we're QAing them, making sure they're a high quality and then making them available to our customers and our partners through there. So this dev ops world, especially with cloud moving so fast, has become very important and to us it's a very important area we want to make available to our partners and customers. >> One of the things that's talked about a lot is SSL inspection, is that important? What do you guys do there? >> I think it's extremely important in that, a lot of enterprises have switched it off. The reason they switched it off is because when you switch it on it almost kills your performance. There was a recent, again an SS Labs test that was doing next gen firewall testing for SSL and some vendors' performance decreased by 90% and basically it was useless, you had to turn it off. A lot of enterprises want to switch it on. To switch it on, you need a system that has the performance capabilities. I think we decreased around 15%. The law of physics say you've got to decrease in some way but 15%'s a lot better than 90%. And you've got to switch that on because otherwise it's just a giant hole in your firewall. >> John, talk about the cloud because cloud now has multiple tracks to it. Used to be straight public cloud. Obviously on premise is this hot hybrid cloud, multi cloud is the center of the controversies, it's been validated. We see Amazon Web Services announcing something with VMware validation that you're going to start to see an on premises and cloud and some cloud native, born in the cloud companies will be out there. How do you guys extend the security fabric for those two cloud use cases? How does the Fortinet products scale to the cloud? >> Yeah, two good points. Again, a few years ago, I'd ask customers about cloud and say, "Yeah we're going to takes some steps in AWS." Now it's I've got four clouds, what's the next cloud I'm going to put inside there? I've got global clouds around the world. It's kind of interesting that there is this mad rush and it's still going on into public cloud but then I still see some people trying to do hybrid cloud and put some stuff inside their data centers. Some customers don't want that data leaving, regardless. Some people can't move mainframe applications out there so there's always going to be a hybrid world for some time but the key is multi cloud security in that, more than likely, your AWS security systems are not going to work inside a Google cloud, are not going to work inside your Azure cloud, are not going to work inside some of the data center pieces. And so hybrid cloud and multi cloud security Are really important, so for us the ability to support all those clouds, and it's not just saying, well I can put my firewall VM inside AWS. There's a whole set of deep integrations you need to do, to make sure you're inside their automation systems, you can see visibility, there's a lot of practices around compliance, et cetera, so it's actually a big task for each of us to make sure that we're compliant across the set of functions for each of those clouds. >> My final question is going to be around customer impact. If we zoom out, look at the marketplace and I'm a CIO or CXO, I'm a big time, busy enterprise architect or CIO, I'm so busy, I've got all this stuff going on, why Fortinet? Explain to me why are you important in my world? What should I be thinking about? What are some of the opportunities and challenges that I might face? What should I look at? I want to go to the cloud as much as possible because there's some benefits there. I want on premises to be as seamless as possible to the public cloud. I want rock solid security. I want to have the ability to use SAS apps. >> Right. >> Have programmable networks and have a great development team building top line revenue for my business. How can you help me? >> Is that all? (laughing) I think CIOs and CXOs are happier dealing with less vendors. The trouble is with some very large vendors, they just slow down the development side. I think what we bring to the table and by the way we're not the third largest cyber security company out there, what we try and bring is a broad approach, a broad product set so you can have different things from us as well at integrate into your current set but we try to keep very agile and fast with our developments because otherwise you'll fall behind the infrastructure, you'll fall behind the cyber threats. You know, GDPR, for example, over the last year, you've got to keep up with that. What we bring to the table is now a reasonably large company, we're five and a half thousand employees. A very large R and D budget, we try and move very fast. A large product set, all integrated through our fabric but again, we try and stay as agile and as fast moving as possible. Where we can't do it organically, we try and do it organically so our system integrate very well, where we can't do it, then we'll go and make smaller acquisitions, Bradford Networks was an example of that for IOT but I think we're building now a much better relationship with the CIO and CXO level and becoming one of their strategic partners going forward. >> Talk about the community that you guys have built because I've noticed, and I've seen you guys, certainly over the past couple years, that RSA I think a year and half, two years ago, you're working with a lot of industry partners. It's not just Fortinet by themselves, you work within the industry itself. >> Yeah, because people are building their ecosystem and they've made some decisions and hey want you to integrate inside those so we have about 50 partners now where they use our API to provide integration so they built our API and although we've mentioned FortiNAC today, we have APIs, for example, for ForeScout and other NAC vendors so if they've chosen that specific vendor, then we're fine, we'll integrate that inside our fabric. Will it have the level of integration that we have? Probably not, but at least you can see, have visibility, for example. I think the technology we've been building in the last year or so is something called fabric connectors which is a much, much deeper integration into the platforms so we have connectors for VMware NSX, for Cisco ACI, for AWS, and this provides a two way communication and that two way communication is important for one word, and that's automation. So once you can see things, once you direct policy backwards then you can start stitching together these objects and provide that end to end automation. >> Final question for you, a lot of the leading enterprises and businesses out there that are using technology to build digital business, whether it's from developers all the way down under the hood into the network, are all betting on multi cloud. Clearly that's obvious to us and that's pretty much being picked up by mainstream now. So early adopters that are leading the charge are multi cloud. If I'm betting on multi cloud, why Fortinet? Why should I be working with you guys? >> Because we're committed to supporting all those clouds. And as I said, it's no easy task to support, I think we support six clouds now, to go through all the different items and integrations across that, we're committed to that. We've got probably the most expansive integration across the most security products inside the industry and we'll continue to do that going forward. >> John, thanks for spending the time. John Maddison, senior vice president products and solutions at Fortinet here inside the special CUBE Conversation with the big news today, the FortiNAC new product integrating with the security fabric, IOT, SD-WAN, cloud solutions for multi cloud and IT. As automation comes down the road really fast, we're here in theCUBE bringing it to you. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (intense orchestral music)