(electronic music) >> Welcome back to our studios in Palo Alto, California. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with John Furrier, who is taking a quick break. You know, in one of the early examples that we used of so called super cloud was Snowflake. We called it a super data cloud. We had, really, a lot of fun with that. And we've started to evolve our thinking. Years ago, we said that data was going to form in the cloud around industries and ecosystems. And Benoit Dogeville is a many time guest of theCube. He's the co-founder and president of products at Snowflake. Benoit, thanks for spending some time with us, at Supercloud 22, good to see you. >> Thank you, thank you, Dave. >> So, you know, like I said, we've had some fun with this meme. But it really is, we heard on the previous panel, everybody's using Snowflake as an example. Somebody how builds on top of hyper scale infrastructure. You're not building your own data centers. And, so, are you building a super data cloud? >> We don't call it exactly that way. We don't like the super word, it's a bit dismissive. >> That's our term. >> About our friends, cloud provider friends. But we call it a data cloud. And the vision, really, for the data cloud is, indeed, it's a cloud which overlays the hyper scaler cloud. But there is a big difference, right? There are several ways to do this super cloud, as you name them. The way we picked is to create one single system, and that's very important, right? There are several ways, right. You can instantiate your solution in every region of the cloud and, you know, potentially that region could be AWS, that region could be GCP. So, you are, indeed, a multi-cloud solution. But Snowflake, we did it differently. We are really creating cloud regions, which are superimposed on top of the cloud provider region, infrastructure region. So, we are building our regions. But where it's very different is that each region of Snowflake is not one instantiation of our service. Our service is global, by nature. We can move data from one region to the other. When you land in Snowflake, you land into one region. But you can grow from there and you can, you know, exist in multiple cloud at the same time. And that's very important, right? It's not different instantiation of a system, it's one single instantiation which covers many cloud regions and many cloud provider. >> So, we used Snowflake as an example. And we're trying to understand what the salient aspects are of your data cloud, what we call super cloud. In fact, you've used the word instantiate. Kit Colbert, just earlier today, laid out, he said, there's sort of three levels. You can run it on one cloud and communicate with the other cloud, you can instantiate on the clouds, or you can have the same service running 24/7 across clouds, that's the hardest example. >> Yeah. >> The most mature. You just described, essentially, doing that. How do you enable that? What are the technical enablers? >> Yeah, so, as I said, first we start by building, you know, Snowflake regions, we have today 30 regions that span the world, so it's a world wide system, with many regions. But all these regions are connected together. They are meshed together with our technology, we name it Snow Grid, and that makes it hard because, you know, Azure region can talk to a WS region, or GCP regions, and as a user for our cloud, you don't see, really, these regional differences, that regions are in different potentially cloud. When you use Snowflake, you can exist, your presence as an organization can be in several regions, several clouds, if you want, geographic, both geographic and cloud provider. >> So, I can share data irrespective of the cloud. And I'm in the Snowflake data cloud, is that correct? I can do that today? >> Exactly, and that's very critical, right? What we wanted is to remove data silos. And when you insociate a system in one single region, and that system is locked in that region, you cannot communicate with other parts of the world, you are locking data in one region. Right, and we didn't want to do that. We wanted data to be distributed the way customer wants it to be distributed across the world. And potentially sharing data at world scales. >> Does that mean if I'm in one region and I want to run a query, if I'm in AWS in one region, and I want to run a query on data that happens to be in an Azure cloud, I can actually execute that? >> So, yes and no. The way we do it is very expensive to do that. Because, generally, if you want to join data which are in different region and different cloud, it's going to be very expensive because you need to move data every time you join it. So, the way we do it is that you replicate the subset of data that you want to access from one region from other region. So, you can create this data mesh, but data is replicated to make it very cheap and very performing too. >> And is the Snow Grid, does that have the metadata intelligence to actually? >> Yes, yes. >> Can you describe that a little? >> Yeah, Snow Grid is both a way to exchange metadata. So, each region of Snowflake knows about all the other regions of Snowflake. Every time we create a new region, the metadata is distributed over our data cloud, not only region knows all the region, but knows every organization that exists in our cloud, where this organization is, where data can be replicated by this organization. And then, of course, it's also used as a way to exchange data, right? So, you can exchange data by scale of data size. And I was just receiving an email from one of our customers who moved more than four petabytes of data, cross region, cross cloud providers in, you know, few days. And it's a lot of data, so it takes some time to move. But they were able to do that online, completely online, and switch over to the other region, which is very important also. >> So, one of the hardest parts about super cloud that I'm still trying to struggling through is the security model. Because you've got the cloud as your sort of first line of defense. And now we've got multiple clouds, with multiple first lines of defense, I've got a shared responsibility model across those clouds, I've got different tools in each of those clouds. Do you take care of that? Where do you pick up from the cloud providers? Do you abstract that security layer? Do you bring in partners? It's a very complicated. >> No, this is a great question. Security has always been the most important aspect of Snowflake sense day one, right? This is the question that every customer of ours has. You know, how can you guarantee the security of my data? And, so, we secure data really tightly in region. We have several layers of security. It starts by creating every data at rest. And that's very important. A lot of customers are not doing that, right? You hear of these attacks, for example, on cloud, where someone left their buckets. And then, you know, you can access the data because it's a non-encrypted. So, we are encrypting everything at rest. We are encrypting everything in transit. So, a region is very secure. Now, you know, from one region, you never access data from another region in Snowflake. That's why, also, we replicate data. Now the replication of that data across region, or the metadata, for that matter, is really our least secure, so Snow Grid ensures that everything is encrypted, everything is, we have multiple encryption keys, and it's stored in hardware secure modules, so, we bit Snow Grid such that it's secure and it allows very secure movement of data. >> Okay, so, I know we kind of, getting into the technology here a lot today, but because super cloud is the future, we actually have to have an architectural foundation on which to build. So, you mentioned a bucket, like an S3 bucket. Okay, that's storage, but you also, for instance, taking advantage of new semi-conductor technology. Like Graviton, as an example, that drives efficiency. You guys talk about how you pass that on to your customers. Even if it means less revenue for you, so, awesome, we love that, you'll make it up in volume. And, so. >> Exactly. >> How do you deal with the lowest common denominator problem? I was talking to somebody the other day and this individual brought up what I thought was a really good point. What if we, let's say, AWS, have the best, silicon. And we can run the fastest and the least expensive, and the lowest power. But another cloud provider hasn't caught up yet. How do you deal with that delta? Do you just take the best of and try to respect that? >> No, it's a great question. I mean, of course, our software is extracting all the cloud providers infrastructure so that when you run in one region, let's say AWS, or Azure, it doesn't make any difference, as far as the applications are concerned. And this abstraction, of course, is a lot of work. I mean, really, a lot of work. Because it needs to be secure, it needs to be performance, and every cloud, and it has to expose APIs which are uniform. And, you know, cloud providers, even though they have potentially the same concept, let's say block storage, APIs are completely different. The way these systems are secure, it's completely different. There errors that you can get. And the retry mechanism is very different from one cloud to the other. The performance is also different. We discovered that when we starting to port our software. And we had to completely rethink how to leverage block storage in that cloud versus that cloud, because just off performance too. And, so, we had, for example, to stripe data. So, all this work is work that you don't need as an application because our vision, really, is that application, which are running in our data cloud, can be abstracted for this difference. And we provide all the services, all the workload that this application need. Whether it's transactional access to data, analytical access to data, managing logs, managing metrics, all of this is abstracted too, so that they are not tied to one particular service of one cloud. And distributing this application across many region, many cloud, is very seamless. >> So, Snowflake has built, your team has built a true abstraction layer across those clouds that's available today? It's actually shipping? >> Yes, and we are still developing it. You know, transactional, Unistore, as we call it, was announced last summit. So, they are still, you know, work in progress. >> You're not done yet. >> But that's the vision, right? And that's important, because we talk about the infrastructure, right. You mention a lot about storage and compute. But it's not only that, right. When you think about application, they need to use the transactional database. They need to use an analytical system. They need to use machine learning. So, you need to provide, also, all these services which are consistent across all the cloud providers. >> So, let's talk developers. Because, you know, you think Snowpark, you guys announced a big application development push at the Snowflake summit recently. And we have said that a criterion of super cloud is a super paz layer, people wince when I say that, but okay, we're just going to go with it. But the point is, it's a purpose built application development layer, specific to your particular agenda, that supports your vision. >> Yes. >> Have you essentially built a purpose built paz layer? Or do you just take them off the shelf, standard paz, and cobble it together? >> No, we build it a custom build. Because, as you said, what exist in one cloud might not exist in another cloud provider, right. So, we have to build in this, all these components that a multi-application need. And that goes to machine learning, as I said, transactional analytical system, and the entire thing. So that it can run in isolation physically. >> And the objective is the developer experience will be identical across those clouds? >> Yes, the developers doesn't need to worry about cloud provider. And, actually, our system will have, we didn't talk about it, but a marketplace that we have, which allows, actually, to deliver. >> We're getting there. >> Yeah, okay. (both laughing) I won't divert. >> No, no, let's go there, because the other aspect of super cloud that we've talked about is the ecosystem. You have to enable an ecosystem to add incremental value, it's not the power of many versus the capabilities of one. So, talk about the challenges of doing that. Not just the business challenges but, again, I'm interested in the technical and architectural challenges. >> Yeah, yeah, so, it's really about, I mean, the way we enable our ecosystem and our partners to create value on top of our data cloud, is via the marketplace. Where you can put shared data on the marketplace. Provide listing on this marketplace, which are data sets. But it goes way beyond data. It's all the way to application. So, you can think of it as the iPhone. A little bit more, all right. Your iPhone is great. Not so much because the hardware is great, or because of the iOS, but because of all the applications that you have. And all these applications are not necessarily developed by Apple, basically. So, we are, it's the same model with our marketplace. We foresee an environment where providers and partners are going to build these applications. We call it native application. And we are going to help them distribute these applications across cloud, everywhere in the world, potentially. And they don't need to worry about that. They don't need to worry about how these applications are going to be instantiated. We are going to help them to monetize these applications. So, that unlocks, you know, really, all the partner ecosystem that you have seen, you know, with something like the iPhone, right? It has created so many new companies that have developed these applications. >> Your detractors have criticized you for being a walled garden. I've actually used that term. I used terms like defacto standard, which are maybe less sensitive to you, but, nonetheless, we've seen defacto standards actually deliver value. I've talked to Frank Slootman about this, and he said, Dave, we deliver value, that's what we're all about. At the same time, he even said to me, and I want your thoughts on this, is, look, we have to embrace open source where it makes sense. You guys announced Apache Iceberg. So, what are your thoughts on that? Is that to enable a developer ecosystem? Why did you do Iceberg? >> Yeah, Iceberg is very important. So, just to give some context, Iceberg is an open table format. >> Right. >> Which was first developed by Netflix. And Netflix put it open source in the Apache community. So, we embraced that open source standard because it's widely used by many companies. And, also, many companies have really invested a lot of effort in building big data, Hadoop Solutions, or DataX Solution, and they want to use Snowflake. And they couldn't really use Snowflake, because all their data were in open format. So, we are embracing Iceberg to help these companies move through the cloud. But why we have been reluctant with direct access to data, direct access to data is a little bit of a problem for us. And the reason is when you direct access to data, now you have direct access to storage. Now you have to understand, for example, the specificity of one cloud versus the other. So, as soon as you start to have direct access to data, you lose your cloud data sync layer. You don't access data with API. When you have direct access to data, it's very hard to sync your data. Because you need to grant access, direct access to tools which are not protected. And you see a lot of hacking of data because of that. So, direct access to data is not serving well our customers, and that's why we have been reluctant to do that. Because it is not cloud diagnostic. You have to code that, you need a lot of intelligence, why APIs access, so we want open APIs. That's, I guess, the way we embrace openness, is by open API versus you access, directly, data. >> iPhone. >> Yeah, yeah, iPhone, APIs, you know. We define a set of APIs because APIs, you know, the implementation of the APIs can change, can improve. You can improve compression of data, for example. If you open direct access to data now, you cannot evolve. >> My point is, you made a promise, from governed, security, data sharing ecosystem. It works the same way, so that's the path that you've chosen. Benoit Dogeville, thank you so much for coming on theCube and participating in Supercloud 22, really appreciate that. >> Thank you, Dave. It was a great pleasure. >> All right, keep it right there, we'll be right back with our next segment, right after this short break. (electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone in live coverage here at theCUBE, Boston, Massachusetts, for AWS re:inforce 22 security conference for Amazon Web Services. Obviously reinvent the end of the years' the big celebration, "re:Mars" is the new show that we've covered as well. The res are here with theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, host with a great guest, Ameesh Divatia, co-founder, and CEO of a company called "Baffle." Ameesh, thanks for joining us on theCUBE today, congratulations. >> Thank you. It's good to be here. >> And we got the custom encrypted socks. >> Yup, limited edition >> 64 bitter 128. >> Base 64 encoding. >> Okay.(chuckles) >> Secret message in there. >> Okay.(chuckles) Secret message.(chuckles) We'll have to put a little meme on the internet, figure it out. Well, thanks for comin' on. You guys are goin' hot right now. You guys a hot startup, but you're in an area that's going to explode, we believe. >> Yeah. >> The SuperCloud is here, we've been covering that on theCUBE that people are building on top of the Amazon Hyperscalers. And without the capex, they're building platforms. The application tsunami has come and still coming, it's not stopping. Modern applications are faster, they're better, and they're driving a lot of change under the covers. >> Absolutely. Yeah. >> And you're seeing structural change happening in real time, in ops, the network. You guys got something going on in the encryption area. >> Yes >> Data. Talk about what you guys do. >> Yeah. So we believe very strongly that the next frontier in security is data. We've had multiple waves in security. The next one is data, because data is really where the threats will persist. If the data shows up in the wrong place, you get into a lot of trouble with compliance. So we believe in protecting the data all the way down at the field, or record level. That's what we do. >> And you guys doing all kinds of encryption, or other things? >> Yes. So we do data transformation, which encompasses three different things. It can be tokenization, which is format preserving. We do real encryption with counter mode, or we can do masked views. So tokenization, encryption, and masking, all with the same platform. >> So pretty wide ranging capabilities with respect to having that kind of safety. >> Yes. Because it all depends on how the data is used down the road. Data is created all the time. Data flows through pipelines all the time. You want to make sure that you protect the data, but don't lose the utility of the data. That's where we provide all that flexibility. >> So Kurt was on stage today on one of the keynotes. He's the VP of the platform at AWS. >> Yes. >> He was talking about encrypts, everything. He said it needs, we need to rethink encryption. Okay, okay, good job. We like that. But then he said, "We have encryption at rest." >> Yes. >> That's kind of been there, done that. >> Yes. >> And, in-flight? >> Yeah. That's been there. >> But what about in-use? >> So that's exactly what we plug. What happens right now is that data at rest is protected because of discs that are already self-encrypting, or you have transparent data encryption that comes native with the database. You have data in-flight that is protected because of SSL. But when the data is actually being processed, it's in the memory of the database or datastore, it is exposed. So the threat is, if the credentials of the database are compromised, as happened back then with Starwood, or if the cloud infrastructure is compromised with some sort of an insider threat like a Capital One, that data is exposed. That's precisely what we solve by making sure that the data is protected as soon as it's created. We use standard encryption algorithms, AES, and we either do format preserving, or true encryption with counter mode. And that data, it doesn't really matter where it ends up, >> Yeah. >> because it's always protected. >> Well, that's awesome. And I think this brings up the point that we want been covering on SiliconAngle in theCUBE, is that there's been structural change that's happened, >> Yes. >> called cloud computing, >> Yes. >> and then hybrid. Okay. Scale, role of data, higher level abstraction of services, developers are in charge, value creations, startups, and big companies. That success is causing now, a new structural change happening now. >> Yes. >> This is one of them. What areas do you see that are happening right now that are structurally changing, that's right in front of us? One is, more cloud native. So the success has become now the problem to solve - >> Yes. >> to get to the next level. >> Yeah. >> What are those, some of those? >> What we see is that instead of security being an afterthought, something that you use as a watchdog, you create ways of monitoring where data is being exposed, or data is being exfiltrated, you want to build security into the data pipeline itself. As soon as data is created, you identify what is sensitive data, and you encrypt it, or tokenize it as it flows into the pipeline using things like Kafka plugins, or what we are very clearly differentiating ourselves with is, proxy architectures so that it's completely transparent. You think you're writing to the datastore, but you're actually writing to the proxy, which in turn encrypts the data before its stored. >> Do you think that's an efficient way to do it, or is the only way to do it? >> It is a much more efficient way of doing it because of the fact that you don't need any app-dev resources. There are many other ways of doing it. In fact, the cloud vendors provide development kits where you can just go do it yourself. So that is actually something that we completely avoid. And what makes it really, really interesting is that once the data is encrypted in the data store, or database, we can do what is known as "Privacy Enhanced Computation." >> Mm. >> So we can actually process that data without decrypting it. >> Yeah. And so proxies then, with cloud computing, can be very fast, not a bottleneck that could be. >> In fact, the cloud makes it so. It's very hard to - >> You believe that? >> do these things in static infrastructure. In the cloud, there's infinite amount of processing available, and there's containerization. >> And you have good network. >> You have very good network, you have load balancers, you have ways of creating redundancy. >> Mm. So the cloud is actually enabling solutions like this. >> And the old way, proxies were seen as an architectural fail, in the old antiquated static web. >> And this is where startups don't have the baggage, right? We didn't have that baggage. (John laughs) We looked at the problem and said, of course we're going to use a proxy because this is the best way to do this in an efficient way. >> Well, you bring up something that's happening right now that I hear a lot of CSOs and CIOs and executives say, CXOs say all the time, "Our", I won't say the word, "Our stuff has gotten complicated." >> Yes. >> So now I have tool sprawl, >> Yeah. >> I have skill gaps, and on the rise, all these new managed services coming at me from the vendors who have never experienced my problem. And their reaction is, they don't get my problem, and they don't have the right solutions, it's more complexity. They solve the complexity by adding more complexity. >> Yes. I think we, again, the proxy approach is a very simple. >> That you're solving that with that approach. >> Exactly. It's very simple. And again, we don't get in the way. That's really the the biggest differentiator. The forcing function really here is compliance, right? Because compliance is forcing these CSOs to actually adopt these solutions. >> All right, so love the compliance angle, love the proxy as an ease of use, take the heavy lifting away, no operational problems, and deviations. Now let's talk about workloads. >> Yeah. >> 'Cause this is where the use is. So you got, or workloads being run large scale, lot a data moving around, computin' as well. What's the challenge there? >> I think it's the volume of the data. Traditional solutions that we're relying on legacy tokenizations, I think would replicate the entire storage because it would create a token wall, for example. You cannot do that at this scale. You have to do something that's a lot more efficient, which is where you have to do it with a cryptography approach. So the workloads are diverse, lots of large files in the workloads as well as structured workloads. What we have is a solution that actually goes across the board. We can do unstructured data with HTTP proxies, we can do structured data with SQL proxies. And that's how we are able to provide a complete solution for the pipeline. >> So, I mean, show about the on-premise versus the cloud workload dynamic right now. Hybrid is a steady state right now. >> Yeah. >> Multi-cloud is a consequence of having multiple vendors, not true multi-cloud but like, okay, they have Azure there, AWS here, I get that. But hybrid really is the steady state. >> Yes. >> Cloud operations. How are the workloads and the analytics the data being managed on-prem, and in the cloud, what's their relationship? What's the trend? What are you seeing happening there? >> I think the biggest trend we see is pipelining, right? The new ETL is streaming. You have these Kafka and Kinesis capabilities that are coming into the picture where data is being ingested all the time. It is not a one time migration. It's a stream. >> Yeah. >> So plugging into that stream is very important from an ingestion perspective. >> So it's not just a watchdog. >> No. >> It's the pipelining. >> It's built in. It's built-in, it's real time, that's where the streaming gets another diverse access to data. >> Exactly. >> Data lakes. You got data lakes, you have pipeline, you got streaming, you mentioned that. So talk about the old school OLTP, the old BI world. I think Power BI's like a $30 billion product. >> Yeah. >> And you got Tableau built on OLTP building cubes. Aren't we just building cubes in a new way, or, >> Well. >> is there any relevance to the old school? >> I think there, there is some relevance and in fact that's again, another place where the proxy architecture really helps, because it doesn't matter when your application was built. You can use Tableau, which nobody has any control over, and still process encrypted data. And so can with Power BI, any Sequel application can be used. And that's actually exactly what we like to. >> So we were, I was talking to your team, I knew you were coming on, and they gave me a sound bite that I'm going to read to the audience and I want to get your reaction to. >> Sure. >> 'Cause I love this. I fell out of my chair when I first read this. "Data is the new oil." In 2010 that was mentioned here on theCUBE, of course. "Data is the new oil, but we have to ensure that it does not become the next asbestos." Okay. That is really clever. So we all know about asbestos. I add to the Dave Vellante, "Lead paint too." Remember lead paint? (Ameesh laughs) You got to scrape it out and repaint the house. Asbestos obviously causes a lot of cancer. You know, joking aside, the point is, it's problematic. >> It's the asset. >> Explain why that sentence is relevant. >> Sure. It's the assets and liabilities argument, right? You have an asset which is data, but thanks to compliance regulations and Gartner says 75% of the world will be subject to privacy regulations by 2023. It's a liability. So if you don't store your data well, if you don't process your data responsibly, you are going to be liable. So while it might be the oil and you're going to get lots of value out of it, be careful about the, the flip side. >> And the point is, there could be the "Grim Reaper" waiting for you if you don't do it right, the consequences that are quantified would be being out of business. >> Yes. But here's something that we just discovered actually from our survey that we did. While 93% of respondents said that they have had lots of compliance related effects on their budgets. 75% actually thought that it makes them better. They can use the security postures as a competitive differentiator. That's very heartening to us. We don't like to sell the fear aspect of this. >> Yeah. We like to sell the fact that you look better compared to your neighbor, if you have better data hygiene, back to the. >> There's the fear of missing out, or as they say, "Keeping up with the Joneses", making sure that your yard looks better than the next one. I get the vanity of that, but you're solving real problems. And this is interesting. And I want to get your thoughts on this. I found, I read that you guys protect more than a 100 billion records across highly regulated industries. Financial services, healthcare, industrial IOT, retail, and government. Is that true? >> Absolutely. Because what we are doing is enabling SaaS vendors to actually allow their customers to control their data. So we've had the SaaS vendor who has been working with us for over three years now. They store confidential data from 30 different banks in the country. >> That's a lot of records. >> That's where the record, and. >> How many customers do you have? >> Well, I think. >> The next round of funding's (Ameesh laughs) probably they're linin' up to put money into you guys. >> Well, again, this is a very important problem, and there are, people's businesses are dependent on this. We're just happy to provide the best tool out there that can do this. >> Okay, so what's your business model behind? I love the success, by the way, I wanted to quote that stat to one verify it. What's the business model service, software? >> The business model is software. We don't want anybody to send us their confidential data. We embed our software into our customers environments. In case of SaaS, we are not even visible, we are completely embedded. We are doing other relationships like that right now. >> And they pay you how? >> They pay us based on the volume of the data that they're protecting. >> Got it. >> That in that case which is a large customers, large enterprise customers. >> Pay as you go. >> It is pay as you go, everything is annual licenses. Although, multi-year licenses are very common because once you adopt the solution, it is very sticky. And then for smaller customers, we do base our pricing also just on databases. >> Got it. >> The number of databases. >> And the technology just reviewed low-code, no-code implementation kind of thing, right? >> It is by definition, no code when it comes to proxy. >> Yeah. >> When it comes to API integration, it could be low code. Yeah, it's all cloud-friendly, cloud-native. >> No disruption to operations. >> Exactly. >> That's the culprit. >> Well, yeah. >> Well somethin' like non-disruptive operations.(laughs) >> No, actually I'll give an example of a migration, right? We can do live migrations. So while the databases are still alive, as you write your. >> Live secure migrations. >> Exactly. You're securing - >> That's the one that manifests. >> your data as it migrates. >> Awright, so how much funding have you guys raised so far? >> We raised 36 and a half, series A, and B now. We raised that late last year. >> Congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Who's the venture funders? >> True Ventures is our largest investor, followed by Celesta Capital, National Grid Partners is an investor, and so is Engineering Capital and Clear Vision Ventures. >> And the seed and it was from Engineering? >> Seed was from Engineering. >> Engineering Capital. >> And then True came in very early on. >> Okay. >> Greenspring is also an investor in us, so is Industrial Ventures. >> Well, privacy has a big concern, big application for you guys. Privacy, secure migrations. >> Very much so. So what we are believe very strongly in the security's personal, security is yours and my data. Privacy is what the data collector is responsible for. (John laughs) So the enterprise better be making sure that they've complied with privacy regulations because they don't tell you how to protect the data. They just fine you. >> Well, you're not, you're technically long, six year old start company. Six, seven years old. >> Yeah. >> Roughly. So yeah, startups can go on long like this, still startup, privately held, you're growing, got big records under management there, congratulations. What's next? >> I think scaling the business. We are seeing lots of applications for this particular solution. It's going beyond just regulated industries. Like I said, it's a differentiating factor now. >> Yeah >> So retail, and a lot of other IOT related industrial customers - >> Yeah. >> are also coming. >> Ameesh, talk about the show here. We're at re:inforce, actually we're live here on the ground, the show floor buzzing. What's your takeaway? What's the vibe this year? What if you had to share what your opinion the top story here at the show, what would be the two top things, or three things? >> I think it's two things. First of all, it feels like we are back. (both laugh) It's amazing to see people on the show floor. >> Yeah. >> People coming in and asking questions and getting to see the product. The second thing that I think is very gratifying is, people come in and say, "Oh, I've heard of you guys." So thanks to digital media, and digital marketing. >> They weren't baffled. They want baffled. >> Exactly. >> They use baffled. >> Looks like, our outreach has helped, >> Yeah. >> and has kept the continuity, which is a big deal. >> Yeah, and now you're a CUBE alumni, welcome to the fold. >> Thank you. >> Appreciate you coming on. And we're looking forward to profiling you some day in our startup showcase, and certainly, we'll see you in the Palo Alto studios. Love to have you come in for a deeper dive. >> Sounds great. Looking forward to it. >> Congratulations on all your success, and thanks for coming on theCUBE, here at re:inforce. >> Thank you, John. >> Okay, we're here in, on the ground live coverage, Boston, Massachusetts for AWS re:inforce 22. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE with Dave Vellante, who's in an analyst session, right? He'll be right back with us on the next interview, coming up shortly. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome to theCUBE's presentation of the a AWS startup showcase, data as code is the theme. This is season two episode two of the ongoing series covering the exciting startups from the AWS ecosystem and we talk about data analytics. I'm your old John Furrier with the cube, and we have Javier De La Torre. who's the founder and chief strategy officer of Carto, which is doing some amazing innovation around geographic information systems or GIS. Javier welcome to the cube for this showcase. >> Thank you. Thank you for having me. >> So, you know, one of the things that you guys are bringing to the table is spatial analytic data that now moves into spatial relations, which is, you know, we know about geofencing. You're seeing more data coming from satellites, ground stations, you name it. Things are coming into the market from a data perspective, that's across the board and geo's one of them GIS systems. This is what you guys are doing in the rise of SQL in particular with spatial. This is a huge new benefit to the world. Can you take a minute to explain what Carto's doing and what spatial SQL is? >> Sure. Yeah. So like you said, like data, obviously we know is growing very fast and as you know now, being leveraged by many organizations in many different ways. There's one part of data, one dimension that is location. We like to say that everything happens somewhere. So therefore everything can be analyzed and understood based on the location. So we like to put an example, if all your neighbors get an alarm in their homes, the likelihood that you will get an alarm increases, right? So that's obvious we are all affected by our surroundings. What is spatial analytics, this type of analytics does is try to uncover those spacial relations so that you can model, you can predict where something is going to happen, or, you know, like, or optimize it, you know, like where else you want it to happen, right? So that's at the core of it. Now, this is something that as an industry has been done for many years, like the GIS or geographic information systems have existed for a long time. But now, and this is what Carto really brings to the table. We're looking at really the marketizing it, so that it's in the hands of any analyst, our vision is that you need to go five years, to a geography school to be able to do this type of spatial analysis. And the way that we want to make that happen is what we call with the rise of a spatial SQL. We add these capabilities around spatial analytics based on the language that is very, very popular for a analysts, which is SQL. So what we do is enables you to do this spatial analysis on top of the well known and well used SQL methods. >> It's interesting the cloud native and the cloud scale wave and now data as code has shown that the old school, the old guard, the old way of doing things, you mentioned data warehousing, okay, as one. BI tools in particular have always been limited. And the scope of the limitation was the environment was different. You have to have domain expertise, rich knowledge of the syntax. Usually it's for an application developer, not for like real time and building it into the CICD pipeline, or just from a workflow standpoint, making it available. The so-called democratization, this is where this connects. And so I got to ask you, what are you most excited about in the innovations at Carto? Can you share some of the things that people might know about or might not know about that's happening at Carto, that takes advantage of this cloud native wave because companies are now on this bandwagon. >> Yeah, no, it is. And cloud native analytics is probably the most disruptive kind of like trend that we've seen over the few years, in our particular space on the spatial it has tremendous effects on the way that we provide our service. So I'd like to kind of highlight four main reasons why cloud analytics, cloud native is super important to us. So the first one is obviously is a scalability, the working with the sizes of data that we work now in terms of location was just not possible or before. So for someone that is performing now analysis on autonomous car, or you're like that has any sensorized GPS on a device and is collecting hundreds of billions of points. If you want to do analysis on that type of data, cloud native allows you to do that in a scalable way, but it also is very cost effective. That is something that you'll see very quickly when your data grows a lot, which is that this computing storage separation, the idea that is store your data at cloud prices, but then use them with these data warehouses that we work in this private, makes for a very, very cost effective solution. But then, you know, there is other two, obviously one of them being SQL and spatial SQL that like means we like to say that SQL is becoming the lingua franca for analytics. So it's used by many products that you can connect through the usage of SQL, but I think like you coming towards why I think it's even more interesting it's like, in the cloud the concept like we all are serving, we are all living in the same infrastructure enables us that we can distribute a spatial data sets to a customer that they can join it on their database on SQL without having to move the data from one another, like in the case of Redshift or Amazon Redshift car connects and you using something called a spectrum, we can connect live to data that is stored on S3. And I think that is going to disrupt a lot the way that we think about data distributions and how cost effective it is. I think, it has a lot of your like potential on it. And in that sense what Carto is providing on top of it in the format of formats like parquet, which is a very popular with big data format. We adding geo parquet, we are specializing this big data technology for doing the spatial analysis. And that to me it is very exciting because it's putting some of the best tools at the hands of doing the space analytics for something that we're not able to do before. So to me, this is one area that I'm very, very excited. >> Well, I want to back up for a second. So you mentioned parquet and the standards around that format. And also you mentioned Redshift, so let me get this right. So you just saying that you can connect into Redshift. So I'm a customer and I have Redshift I'm using, I got my S3, I'm using Redshift for analysis. You're saying you can plug right into Redshift. >> Yes. And this is a very, very, very important part because what Carto does is leverage Redshift computing infrastructure to essentially kind of like do all the analysis. So what we do is we bring a spatial analysis where the data is, where Redshift is versus in the past, what we will do is take the data where the analysis was and that sense, it's at the core of cloud native. >> Okay. This is really where I see the exciting shift where data as code now becomes a reality is that you bring the... It redefines architecture, the script is flipped. The architecture has been redefined. You're making the data move to the environments that needs to move when it has to, if it doesn't have to move you bring compute to it. So you're seeing new kinds of use cases. So I have to ask you on the use cases and examples for Carto AWS customers with spatial analytics, what are some of the examples on how your clients are using cloud native spatial analytics or Carto? >> Yeah. So one, for example, that we've seen a lot, on the AWS ecosystem, obviously because of its suites and its position. We work together with another service in the AWS ecosystem called Amazon Location. So that actually provides you access to maps and SDKs for navigation. So it means that you are like a company that is delivering food or any other goods in the city. We have like hundreds or thousands of drivers around the city moving, doing all these deliveries. And each of these drivers they have an app and they're collecting actively their location, their position, right? So you get all the data and then it gets stored on something like a Redshift data cluster on S3 as well. There's different architectures in there, but now you essentially have like a full log of the activity that is happening on the ground from your business. So what Carto does on top of that data is you connect your data into Carto. And now you can do analysis, for example, for finding out where you user may be placed, another distribution center, you know, for optimizing your delivering routes, or like if you're in the restaurant business where you might want to have a new dark kitchen, right? So all this type of analysis based on, since I know where you're doing your operations, I can post analyze the data and then provide you a different way that you can think about solving your operation. So that's an example of a great use case that we're seeing right now. >> Talk to me about about the traditional BI tools out there, because you mentioned earlier, they lack the specific capabilities. You guys bring that to the table. What about the scalability limitations? Can you talk about where that is? Is there limitations there, obviously, if they don't have the capabilities, you can't scale that's one, but you know, as you start plugging into Redshift, scale and performance matters, what's the issue there? Can you unpack that a little bit real quick? >> Yeah. It goes back to the particulars of the spacial data, location data, like in the use case, like I was describing you very quickly are going to end up with really a lot of your like terabytes, if not petabytes of data very quickly, if you're start aggregating all this data, because it gets created by sensors. So volumes in our world kind of tends to grow a lot now. So when you work with BI tools, there's two things that you have to take in consideration. BI tools are great for seeing things like for example, if all you want to see is where your customers are, a BI tool is great. Seeing, creating a map and seeing your customers. That's totally in the world of BI. But if you want to understand why your customers are there, or where else could they be, you're going to need to perform what we call a spatial analysis. You're going to have to create a spatial model. You're going to have to, and for that BI tools will not give you that that's one side, the other it talks about the volumes that I was describing. Most of these BI tools can handle certain aggregations. Like, for example, if you are reading, if you're connecting your, let's say 10 billion data set to a BI tool, the BI tool will do some aggregations because you cannot display 10,000 rows on a BI tool and that's okay, you get aggregations and that works. But when it comes to a map, you cannot aggregate the data on the map. You actually want to see all the data on the map, and that's what Carto provides you. It allows you to make maps that sees all the data, not just aggregated by county or aggregated by other kind of like area, you see all your data on the map. >> You know, what's interesting is that location based service has been around for a long time. You know, when mobile started even hitting the scene, you saw it get better mashups, Google Maps, all this Google API mashups, things like that. You know, developers are used to it, but they could never get to the promised land on the big data side, because they just didn't have the compute. But now you add in geofencing, geo information, you now have access to this new edge like data, right? So I have to ask you on the mobile side, are you guys working with any 5G or edge providers? Because I can almost imagine that the spatial equation gets more complicated and more data full when you start blowing out edge data, like with 5G, you got more, more things happening at the edge. It's only going to fill in more data points. Can you share that's how that use case is going with mobile, mobile carriers or 5G? >> Yeah, that's totally, yeah. It's totally the case. Well, first, even before, you know, like we are there, we actually helping a lot of telcos on actually planning the 5G deployment. Where do you place your antennas is a very, very important topic when you're like talking about 5G. Because you know, like 5G networks require a lot of density. So it's a lot about like, okay, where do I start deploying my infrastructure to ensure the customers like meet, like have the best service and the places where I want to kind of like go first So like... >> You mean like the RF maps, like understanding how RF propagates. >> Well, that's one signal, but the other is like, imagine that your telco is more interested on, you know, let's say on a certain kind of like consumer profile, like young people that are using the one type of service. Well, we know where these demographics kind of lives. So you might want to start kind of like deploying your 5G in those areas, right. Versus if you go to more commercial and more kind of like residential areas, there might be other demographics. So that's one part around market analysis. Then the second part is once these 5G networks are in place, you're right. I mean, one of the premises that kind of like these news technologies give us is because the network is much smarter. You can have all these edge cases, there's much more location data that can be collected. So what we see now is a rise on the amount of what we call telemetry. That for example, the IOT space can make around location. And that's now enabled because of 5G. So I think 5G is going to be one of those trends that are going to make like more and more data coming into, I mean, more location, data available for analysis. >> So how does that, I mean, this is a great conversation because everyone can realize they're at a stadium and they see multiple bars but they can't get bandwidth. So they got a back haul problem or not enough signal. Everyone knows when they're driving their car, they know they can relate to the consumer side of it. So I get how the spatial data grows. What's the impact to Carto and specifically the cloud, because if you have more data coming in, you need the actionable insight. So I can see the use case, oh, put the antenna here. That's an actionable business decision, more content, more revenue, more happy customers, but where else is the impact to you guys and the spatial piece of it? >> Yeah. Well, I mean like there's many, many factors, right? So one of them, for example, on the telco, one of the things where we realize impact is that it gives the visibility to the operator, for example, around the quality of service. Like, okay, are my customers getting the quality of services where I want? Or like you said, like if there sitting outside a concert the quality of service in one particular area is dropping very fast. So the idea of like being able to now in real time, kind of like detect location issues, like I'm having an issue in this place. That means that then now I can act, I can drive up bandwidth, put more capacity et cetera right. So I think the biggest impact that we are seeing we are going to see on the upcoming years is that like more and more use cases going towards real time. So where, like before it was like, well, now that it has happened, I'm going to analyze it. I'm going to look at, you know, like how I could do better next time towards a more of like an industry where Carto ourselves, we are embedded in more real time type of, you know, like analytics where it's okay, if this happens, then do that, right. So it's going to be more personalized at the level that like in the code environment, it has to be art of a full kind of like pipeline kind of like type of analysis. That's already programmatically prepared to act on real time. >> That's great and it's a good segue. My next question, as more and more companies adopt cloud native analytics, what trends are you seeing out of the key to watch? Obviously you're seeing more developers coming on site, on the scene, open sources growing, what's the big cloud native analytics trends for Carto and geographic information. >> Yeah. So I think you know like the, we were talking before the cloud native now is unstoppable, but one of the things that we are seeing that is still needs to be developed and we are seeing progress is around a standardization, for example, around like data sets that are provided by different providers. What I mean with that is like, you as an organization, you're going to be responsible for your data like that you create on your cloud, right. On S3, or, you know and then you going to have a competing engine, like Redshift and you're going to have all that set up, but then you also going to have to think about like, okay, how do I ingest data from third party providers that are important for my analysis? So for example, Carto provides a lot of demographics, human mobility. we aggregate and clean up and prepare lot of spacial data so that we can then enrich your business. So for us, how we deliver that into your cloud native solution is a very important factor. And we haven't seen yet enough standardization around that. And that's one of the things, what we are pushing, you know, with the concept of geo Parquet of standardizing that body. That's one, then there is another, this is more what I like to say that you know, we are helping companies figure out their own geographies. What we mean by that is like most companies, when they start thinking about like how they interact, on the space, on the location, some of them will work like by zip codes and other by cities, they organize their operations based on a geography in a way, or technically what we call a geographic support system. Well, nowadays, like the most advance companies are defining their geographies in a continuous spectrum in what we call global grid system or spatial indexes that allows them to understand the business, not just as a set of regions, but as a continuous space. And that is now possible because of the technologies that we are introducing around spatial indexes at the cloud native infrastructure. And it provides a great a way to match data with resources and operate at scale. To me those two trends are going to be like very, very important because of the capabilities that cloud native brings to our spatial industry. >> So it changes the operation. So it's data as ops, data as code, is data ops, like infrastructures code means cloud DevOps. So I got to ask you because that's cool. Spatial index is a whole another way to think of it, rather than you go hyper local, super local, you get local zones for AWS and regions. Things are getting down to the granular levels I see that. So I have to ask you, what does data as code mean to you and what does it mean to Carto? Because you're kind of teasing at this new way because it's redefining the operation, the data operations, data engineering. So data as code is real. What does that mean to you? >> No, I think we already seeing it happening to me and to Carto what I will describe data as code is when an organization has moved from doing an analysis after the fact, like where they're like post kind of like analysis in a way to where they're actually kind of like putting analytics on their operational cycle. So then they need to really code it. They need to make these analysis, put them and insert them into the architecture bus, if you want to say of the organization. So if I get a customer, happens to be in this location, I'm going to trigger that and then this is going to do that. Or if this happens, I'm need to open up. And this is where if an organization is going to react in more real time, and we know that organizations need to drive in that direction, the only way that they can make that happen is if they operationalize analytics on their daily operations. And that can only happen with data as code. >> Yeah. And that's interesting. Look at ML ops, AI ops, people talk about that. This is data, so developers meets operations, that's the cloud, data meets code that's operations, that's data business. >> You got it. And add to that, the spacial with Carto and we go it. >> Yeah, because every piece of data now is important. And the spatial's key real quick before we close out, what is the index thing? Explain the benefit real quick of a spatial index. >> Yes. So the spatial index is well everybody can understand how we organize societies politically, right? Our countries, you have like states and then you have like counties and you have all these different kind, what we call administrative boundaries, right? That's a way that we organize information too, right? A spatial index is when you divide the world, not in administrative boundaries, but you actually make a grid. Imagine that you just essentially make a grid of the world. right? And you make that grid so that in every cell you can then split it into, let's say for example, four more cells. So you now have like an organization. You split the world in a grid that you can have multiple resolutions think like Google maps when you see the entire world, but you can zoom in and you end up seeing, you know, like one particular place, so that's one thing. So what a spatial indexes allows you is to technically put, you know like your location, not based coordinate, but actually on one grid place on an index. And we use that then later to correlate, let's say your data with someone else data, as we can use what we call this spatial indexes to do joints very, very fast and we can do a lot of operations with it. So it is a new way to do spatial computing based on this type of indexes, but for more than anything for an organization, what spatial index allows is that you don't need to work on zip codes or in boundaries on artificial boundaries. I mean, your customer doesn't change because he goes from this place to the road, to the other side of the road, this is the same place. It's an arbitrary in location. It's a spatial index break out all of that. You're like you break with your zip codes, you break. And you essentially have a continuous geography, that actually is a much closer look up to the reality. >> It's like the forest and the trees and the bark of the tree. (Javier laughing) You can see everything. >> That's it, you can get a look at everything. >> Javi, great to have you on. In real quick closing give a quick plug for the company, summarize what you do, what you're looking into, how many people you got, when you're hiring, what's the key goals for the company? >> Yeah, sure. So Carto is a company, now we are around 200 people. Our vision is that spatial analytics is something that every organization should do. So we really try to enable organizations with the best data and analysis around spatial. And we do all that cloud native on top of your data warehouse. So what we are really in enabling these organizations is to take that cloud native approach that they're already embracing it also to spatial analysis. >> Javi, founder, chief strategy officer for Carto. Great to have you on data as code, all data's real, all data has impact, operational impact with data is the new big trend. Thanks for coming on and sharing the company story and all your key innovations. Thank you. >> Thanks to you. >> Okay. This is the startup showcase. Data as code, season two episode two of the ongoing series. Every episode will explore new topics and new exciting companies pioneering this next cloud native wave of innovation. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>Good morning. Welcome to the cubes. Continuous coverage of AWS reinvent 2021. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Nicholson morning, Dave. Good morning. Here we are two sets, two live sets, two remote sets, a hundred guests on the program this week. This is day, second full day for us. We were here. Exactly. The number of announcements has my head spinning typical for AWS. So many. We won't even recap all the pre, but really from a thematic perspective. One of the things that I think we've both noticed is that the theme here is if you're not a data-driven company, if you don't have a data company at your core, you're going to be left behind. >>Yeah, yeah. That was that. That came through in a Swami's keynote this morning. That was the key setup for the announcements of all of the tools that are being rolled out to be able to achieve those goals. >>And we talked to, you know, we've had a number of AWS folks on the program this week, customers partners, and from another theme is this customer obsession, this customer centricity, really working backwards from the customer first to help them understand how do we, how do we build a data core? How do we build our redefine reinvent, Hubba reinvent our business around a data strategy because there is a competitor in the rear view mirror in every industry waiting to take place. If somebody doesn't have. And they really were very clear with, if you don't, if you're not a data company, now you're going to be left behind. >>Yeah, absolutely. The whole, it, especially the keynote this morning, it felt like a, it felt like they were very, very careful to set up the pins and then knock them all down. Talking about exactly what customers want to do, what customers have said in surveys they need to do. Uh, and then, oh, by the way, we have all of these tools. So exactly what you mentioned, not talking about technology first, but talking about the requirements the customers have, where customers say they want to be, where customers need to be, and then proving out that in fact, AWS has the entire tool kit. Uh, I, I mean it is mind boggling. Uh, I, uh, I wouldn't want to be another cloud this morning, waking up and seeing that it looks like I fell months behind somehow. Why not? While I was sleeping. >>One of the things that you and I were talking about as we walked over here this morning is that it's no wonder AWS. And they say they don't look in their rear view mirror. They don't need to. One of the things the magically that Adam talked about in his keynote yesterday was I kept saying the phrase, but you wanted more, you being, the customer did this, but you wanted more. So we did this, but you wanted more. So we did this, the fact that they start backwards, that customer flywheel. The thing that another theme that got me is all of the innovation that's coming out of AWS that comes from the customers, enables AWS to do so much more enables customers across every industry to do so much more and to competitively differentiate themselves if they truly lean in to the power of AWS and the partnership that can deliver. >>Yeah, no, no completely agree. And you know, from, from sort of an analysis perspective, um, I think it's interesting, uh, part of the theme this morning had to do with artificial intelligence and, um, and I, I just personally like to think of it more as augmented intelligence, uh, cause essentially what they're doing is they're building tools that are powerful, that, uh, that amplify human intelligence, it's not that AI replaces human intelligence, maybe it does for certain things, but machine learning, most of that is really machine training, humans, training the machines. Yeah. We'll get to a point. Yes. There are science experiments where, um, where the computer has learned on its own. Uh, but essentially all of the pieces that Swami was talking about putting together today, sources of data, various databases, everything together that equals an amazing amount of opportunity for human beings moving forward. So this isn't about machine technology, replacing the value of what people do, data scientists. I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm texting my kids data science used to be plastics right during their graduate. Now it's all about data science be a data scientist. Well, >>Another thing from a data perspective is the idea of data democratization. We've talked. We talk about that all the time. It's interesting. We were, I was talking about data mesh yesterday as, as a really facilitator and unlocking technical debt facilitating the democratization. So that because data is so scattered these days, I mean, it's one of the things that we saw when the pandemic stuck was people scattered. We're still scattered data sources are only proliferating data volume is only proliferating. Customers need to be able to harness the value of it in real time. I think another thing we learned in the pandemic is of there is no real-time is no longer a nice to have. It is absolutely essential. We've also seen the acceleration and talked a lot in the last couple of days about the acceleration of cloud adoption. And just thinking about the sheer volume of announcements. The last couple of days that AWS has achieved during a global pandemic is phenomenal. Obviously we saw every business have no choice, but to go digital and those that aren't here anymore, weren't able to do that fast enough. And with the scale at which they need to know, meet customer demand. >>Yeah. When you talk democratization often, it's a question of not only can you do it technically, but what is the cost associated with doing it? So when you lower the barrier to entry and you lower the friction associated with all sorts of transactions, not just financial transactions, but a transaction being teasing important information out of a pile of otherwise meaningless data, when you lower the cost of that, like what AWS is doing with all of these tools. I mean, really that's the, that's the end result of this? Uh, I look at these things through the lens of an economist and uh, and it's about decreasing friction and increasing efficiency. And when you do that, you can't imagine what the effect of that is on the entire world, just by lowering the cost of teasing out important information from otherwise useless data. Yeah. >>And another thing that we talked about the vision of this company, this is a 10th reinvent, 15 years of AWS, but the 10th reinvent and wanted to get your take on the last, you know, the first 15 years we'll say of AWS division, obviously this is the first year with a new head, new CEO, Adam. So Lipski, and, uh, we're, we're used to the, the JASSI era. This is now we're looking at like, what's the next 10 years of cloud innovation gonna look like at AWS? >>Yeah. I get a chill when you ask that question. I like, I was there working with Amazon before there was an AWS. So in the early two thousands, uh, working at a very large data storage company and we're working with then Amazon to help them figure out how they might someday put together something that they could not only use for themselves, but also rent out to others, sort of this novel idea. Um, and so that feels like yesterday to me, um, the idea that AWS was ECE to S3 science experiment, not ready for enterprise. All of that feels like yesterday. Those claims most people at the time realized that they were going to be disruptive. I don't think a lot of people realized how relatively quickly it was going to happen. And I don't think anyone could have predicted that in 2021, they would be as dominant as they are with such a small share of the overall it market. >>So onstage, they'll say five to 15% of it is in the cloud, right? Not five to 15% is in AWS, right. Five to 15% is in the cloud. So you think that AWS is a large organization firing on all cylinders. Now they're just at the beginning of addressing the total addressable market. So I, you know, um, uh, Dave Vellante, uh, had a great article on the subject of the natural inclination for people to worry when certain things get to a certain size. Um, I think that that's going to be a part of the conversation moving forward. Uh, uh, you know, just what does it mean when so much critical infrastructure is being handled by a single entity? Uh, from a user's perspective though, Hey, it's all good. The more they integrate, the more they bring things together, the easier they make my life as an it practitioner. So I, I don't, I have no idea five years from now what we're going to be looking at. >>No, and they, you know, one of the things that, that I think I've done maybe three or four reinvents and the, one of the themes always, or, or really kind of taglines is early innings. We're S we're still early days. You talked about, you know, when the 15% of it spending, being in the cloud, they have their, and they're so massive, but there's so much the Tam is, is enormous, absolutely enormous. And we're seeing, you know, the need for as data volumes, we're only going to continue to proliferate. We have to have the artificial intelligence and the machine learning to help the humans process the data, to be able to unlock all that value. Otherwise organizations, risk being left behind when they simply cannot get value out of the data either at all, or fast enough. >>Well, you know, you know, let me make one prediction actually. Okay. Okay. Um, I think that the definition of cloud, which is different in a lot of people's minds already is increasingly going to be broad broadened out to include what AWS at a certain period of time said, didn't matter. And that was what's going on on premises. It was clear that in the early days, AWS adopted an attitude that their, their stratospheric growth could be maintained on the back of net. New stuff. Only let the stuff on, on premises die. The stickiness associated with that on premises stuff has caused them to change direction over time in a very, very smart way. And so my prediction is that in five years, we might not be using the term cloud at all. We might be back to just calling it all it, because when you think about it, cloud represents this idea that the physical location isn't important, it's all virtualized. >>So if that's the case, why does it matter if it's in a data center that I own, or a colo or data center that AWS owns, it doesn't matter. So when you look at things like snowball and outpost and all of these other things where they're taking essentially AWS, and they're sticking it wherever it needs to be fit for function, you have latency, sovereignty, govern governance issues, fine. We'll run it as a black box in your data center. You don't touch it, you consume it, you interact with it just like it's in an AWS data center. So, so that's my prediction is that it's not that, you know, w we're going to start thinking about this comment that X percentage is in the cloud as being sort of like a, well, what do you even mean by that? That's a good point. Is it in the cloud? If it's in an outpost in my data center, right. Is that included in the 15% or does it not? Is that on-prem or isn't it? I think, I think within five years, we're all going to agree that it just doesn't matter. It's all it. And I think AWS will be still dominating the it space. >>Interesting prediction. I liked that you were bold in that, you know it, but it also shows what you talked about, shows how focused AWS is on the customer, really leaning into everything in the public cloud, you know, no more on-prem years ago. And, and then what, what is outpost announced two years ago? So it's, I think it's been a couple years to, >>Yeah, I confused. I can. I confuse announcements with deployments and things like that, but it's been years it's been years now. And I guarantee you that inside the halls of AWS, there were people who said, no, no, no, we are not going to be involved with boxes being shipped to raise data center floors. But like you said, customer it's about the customer, what the customer needs. And the reason why there is, you know, if the number is 85%, whatever the number is, um, there, there's a reason why that still remains in on premises data centers. And it's not primarily because it, people are stupid slash fearful. There are good reasons for it. You know, it has to do with the ROI of going through modernization and migration. And so what does AWS do? They figure out how to make the math work so that it makes sense for people to do things. >>And we've been talking for the last couple of days with a lot of the really, really important we'll continue to the really, really important service providers that are partners because AWS and the rest of the cloud providers can come up with as much technology as they want to, but they need partners to bridge the divide, right? To tease out the human value, the business value from the technology they provide. So again, opportunity people who look at AWS and say, wow, that's scary. They're so big. No, no, no, no, no. They're creating an ecosystem of opportunity around them. So that's just, >>Yeah, no, their ecosystem is huge. We talked about this cube being sponsored by AMD. What we talked about, the ecosystem of partners at the beginning of the segment, it's, it's, it's massive. We've talked with a lot of different partners, huge partners, smaller partners, overall, at the end of the day, what we see, what they create, all of the technologies that they're creating in response to customer needs. You know, we have to address it there. That the more data we have, the more things grow, the more complex and complexity has to be dealt with. And there's a lot of their ecosystem partners that are really have business models designed around helping customers. What does seamless actually mean? How do you actually become efficient? How do we do this in a frictionless way? Those are all great marketing terms, but they need this ecosystem of partners to help the customers actually make those reality. Right? And otherwise they're just words on a, on a piece of paper >>And it's not easy. Implementation is not easy. Sales is easy, implementation, not easy, right. And, uh, you know, the, the, the risk associated with failure can be very, very high, especially from a financial perspective. You know, the endless project that you're sinking money into that doesn't deliver any ROI just doesn't work. No, you can't, you can't do it. So, yeah, I, I I'm, I'm blown away by just today. Today's keynote going through knocking down those pins one just one after the other. Oh, CQL got it now, you know, for, for, for certain environments where before, yeah. We've got Oracle database support for this function. Now we have SQL also, it's just, you know, it's like this thousand by thousand grid check box, right? Check, check, check, check, check. And I can imagine all of those service providers just salivating, because they're thinking, oh my gosh, practice new practice that we need to spin up to be able to do this. Yep. Which points to a huge challenge. And that is actual practitioners where the rubber meets the road. All of these things require smart people to be able to implement. >>And the good news is a lot of those smart people are on the program this week here, you're going to be able to get, to hear so much more about the innovations that AWS and its ecosystem of partners are doing. We have a LA a full day again today, Dave, and again, tomorrow looking forward to hearing about the conversations that you had, I'm looking forward to interviewing guests and we look forward to having you continue to watch the cube, the global leader in live tech coverage.

(bright music) >> Announcer: From around the globe, it's "theCUBE", with digital coverage of VMworld 2020, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is "theCUBE's" coverage of VMworld 2020. Of course, such a broad ecosystem in the VMware environment. Been talking a lot, of course, this year, about what's happened in the Cloud Native space. vSphere 7 has Kubernetes coming into the virtualized environment. And one of those key pieces of doing cloud is you need to make sure data protection still works. And, of course, VMware has a long history working with lots of companies. In this segment, we're going to be digging into the VMware, and Dell, also, solution for data protection. So, happy to welcome to the program. First, I have, from VMware, Tom Spoonemore. He is a product line manager for Modern Application Platform with VMware, and welcome back to the program, one of our CUBE alumnis, Efri Nattel-Shay, who is with Dell technologies, Director of Data Protection and Cloud Native apps. Efri, welcome back, Tom, welcome to the program. >> Thank you very much, it's good to be here. >> So, Tom, I kind of teed it up in my intro. VMware, for the longest time, for as long as I can remember, we've really talked about that ecosystem, those joint solutions. I remember, back when we started "theCUBE", in 2010, you'd go there and it would be, oh, there's $15, no, $20, for every dollar that you spend on VMware that the ecosystem kind of pulls along. When VMware started building the VMware Cloud Foundation and the VMware cloud solutions, data protection really went along with it. So, the integrations that they done with vSphere hold them in there as the environment. Tanzu Kubernetes, there's a lot of new pieces. But I think some of those principles have stayed the same. So, why don't you start us off. Tell us a little bit, philosophically, how is VMware treating this space, and how data protection fills into it, and then, Efri, we'll get your take on it, too. >> Yeah, sure, absolutely. So, from the perspective of VMware and the ecosystem, as you say, we want to be very inclusive. We want to bring the ecosystem and our partners along with what we're doing, regardless of what space it is, and in the Modern Applications Platform and Cloud Native tooling, we're very much thinking along the same lines. And as it relates to data protection in specific, Cloud Native is a place where, mainly it's been thought of as a place for stateless applications. but what we're seeing in people's deployments is more and more stateful applications are beginning to move to Kubernetes and into containers. And so the question then becomes, what do you do for data protection of those applications that are deployed into Kubernetes? And so, with Tanzu, and specifically Tanzu Mission Control, we have included a data protection capability, along with the other capabilities that come with Mission Control, that allows you to provide data protection for your fleet of Kubernetes clusters, regardless of which distribution, regardless of which cloud they're running on, and regardless of how many teams you might have running on a particular cluster or set of clusters. And so, for this reason, we have introduced a data protection capability that is focused around our open source project called Velero and Mission Control operates Velero in your clusters from a central UI API and CLI. That allows you to do data protection, initiating schedules of backups, doing restores, and even migration from cloud to cloud, from a single control point. And part of this vision is not only providing an API that we can handle directly with our own Velero-based implementation, but also opening that up to partners. And this is where we're working with Dell, specifically, to be able to provide that single API, but yet have Dell, for instance, with their PowerProtect solution, be able to plug in and be a data protection provider underneath Tanzu Mission Control. And so, that's the work that we're doing together to help satisfy this vision that we have for data protection in the Cloud Native space. >> Yeah, agree 100% with Tom. Like Tom has said, when we looked at customer environments three years ago, people talk mainly about stateless applications, but over time, when more storage solutions, persistent data solutions came along, there came the need to, not only provision the data, but also protect it, and be able to do backups, and restores, and cyber recovery solutions, and disaster recovery, and the whole set of use cases that allow a full life cycle of data along the Cloud Native set of applications, not just a traditional one. And what we've seen, we're talking, obviously, with a lot of customers, joint customers with VMware, customers that use our storage solutions, as well as others, on-prem and in the cloud. And what they have shown, to say, there, is that you have the IT infrastructure people on one hand, which have certain needs, and there is the new set of users, the DevOps people, who are writing applications in a new way, and they need to communicate and they need a solution that fits both of them. So, with VMware, with the community, with Velero, we are introducing a solution that is capable of doing both management for the DevOps people, as well as for the other team infrastructure. And, a year ago, we have talked about this coming up, and now it's really there, and it's doing great. >> Oh, Efri, I'm so glad you brought up some of those organizational issues, because it's not just, oh, we have some new applications, and, of course, we need to do data protection. Can you bring us inside a little bit? Your customers, are they aware of what they need to do? Is it central IT that's coming over and telling the DevOps team, hey, don't forget, security, data protection, still super important. How does that engagement go, and what change does that have for the Dell field and the channel? >> Yeah, I think that the more successful organizations really have that kind of dialogue. So, the developers are not operating in silos. They're not doing things themselves. They do, some of the use cases, they do need to copy data for their own use, but they understand that there are also organizational needs. Someone needs to sign the audit pass, the SLAs are in compliance, the regulations are met. So, all of these things, someone needs to do them. And there is a mutual recognition that there is a role for these people and for these people, for these use cases and for these use cases. >> Yeah, I would agree with that. One of the things that we're seeing, particularly as you think about Kubernetes as a multitenant kind of platform, what we're seeing is that central IT operations still wants to make sure that backups are happening with stateful applications, but more and more they're relying on and providing self-service capabilities to line of business and DevOps, to be able to back up their applications in the way that's best for those applications. It's a recognition of domain expertise for a particular application. So, what we've done with Mission Control is allowed central IT to define policy. And those policies then give the framework, or guidelines, if you will, that then allow the DevOps teams to make the best choices within their own field of expertise and for their own applications. >> Yeah, and what we've seen is some of the organizations really like full control over central IT, and some customers have told us, don't give anything to the developers, but most of them are asking for some self-service capabilities for the developers. But then, who is setting the policy? Who is saying, okay, I have a gold policy data protection? Does it mean I replicate to another side? Does it mean I do longterm retention for a month, or for a year? That is for someone in central IT to set up. So, saying what the policy means, or what it actually is, is the job of a central IT, whereas, this application needs application consistency, and it is of gold policy, that oftentimes is the best knowledge and domain expertise of the developer. >> So, Tom, you mentioned Tanzu Mission Control, which is the management solution. Tanzu is a portfolio. Can you help walk us through the relevant pieces here that are part of this joint solution? >> Yeah, sure. So, Tanzu is really a portfolio of applications, or a portfolio of solutions, as you've said. It's really along three main pillars. It's what we call, build, run and manage. Tanzu Mission Control fills in, along with our Tanzu Observability and Tanzu Service Mesh, in our manage pillar. The build pillar is more along the lines of supporting developing of modern applications, developing and deploying modern applications. So, many of the technologies that have come from our acquisitions of Pivotal, as well as Bitnami, make up that pillar, and these are technologies that are coming to fore, and you'll hear more and more about at this VM world and going forward. Our run pillar is really where you'll find Tanzu Kubernetes Grid. Now, this is our distribution, but it's more than just a distribution of Kubernetes. It's a distribution of Kubernetes, along with all the tools that you would need to be able to deploy modern applications. So, all of these three pillars come together, along with services provided by Pivotal labs, to really give you a full, multifaceted platform for deploying and operating modern applications. >> Great, and Efri, where are there integrations there? How does the storage fit in has been a discussion we've been having for a few years% when it comes to Kubernetes. >> Yeah, basically, PowerProtect integrates with all of these levels that Tom has mentioned, starting with the lowest levels of integration. With the storage, VMware has Cloud Native storage solutions, which allow things like incremental snapshots to be taken from the environment. And we're using this mechanism in order to copy data efficiently from TKG, Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, environment, out of the cluster, into a space-efficient data domain, as a target site. So, that's a storage integration. Then, there is qualification and support for the various run environments that Tom has mentioned, the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated, as well as things that we're working with VMware in order to enable protection for what has been called the Project Pacific, which really allows you very sophisticated capabilities of running multiple Kubernetes clusters using the Kubernetes cluster API capabilities. So, you can spin up a cluster very, very quickly by VMware. And then, we can take backups of this environment up to data domain target site. And, finally, working with Tom for tons of amount of time and effort to do the integration between Tanzu Mission Control and PowerProtect. So, allowing cloud, multicloud, multilocation environments to be provisioned and monitoring by Tanzu Mission Control, but also protected using PowerProtect. >> Yeah, so, Tom, we talked about supporting the ecosystem, and it's a much faster cadence now than it was in the past. It used to be, it felt like every other year at VMworld, we got together and talked about the major vSphere release. Of course, in the container, in Kubernetes world, we're having a much faster cadence. So, could you just help us understand, what of this is generally available today? We saw vSphere 7 back in the spring. The update, right ahead of VMworld, that really extended Kubernetes beyond just VCF, to be able to be an all vSphere 7 environment. So, we know some of this is here on the roadmap, so help map this out for us, what's here today from VMware and what the timeline is we expect for all of these pieces we've been discussing. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, Mission Control shipped in March. So we're still relatively new, but as you say, we run Cloud Native ourselves, and so we're releasing new features, new capabilities. literally every week. We have a weekly cadence for release. Our data protection capability was just introduced at the end of June, so it's fairly new, and we are still introducing capabilities, like bring your own storage, doing scheduling of backups, and this kind of thing. You'll see us adding more and more cloud providers. We have been working to open up the platform to make it available to partners. And this is, just generally, with Mission Control, across the board, but specifically, when it comes to Dell, and PowerProtect, the data protection capability, this is something that we are still actively working on, and it is past the architecture stage, but it's probably still a little ways out before we can deliver on it, but we are working on it diligently, and definitely expect to have that in the product, and available, and really providing a basis for integrations with other providers as well. >> Yeah, and in terms of PowerProtect, we have told the audience about a tech preview a year ago, and since then we have released a number of releases. We are having a quarterly cadence. So, it is available for the general consumption for quite some time. Talking about the integration layers that we have mentioned before, we are the first stack to protect VMs and Kubernetes and applications using the same platform, the same UI, the same policies, everything looks the same. And we have recently introduced capabilities such as application consistency for a number of applications. The support for TKG is available for now. And, as Tom has said, we are working on further integrations, such as the integration with Tanzu Mission Control with VMware. >> Wonderful, I want to get a final word from both of you. Efri, we'll start with you. We've got this regular cadence coming up. We know we're only a couple of weeks away from DTWE, the Dell Technology World Experience, where, of course, theCUBE will be there. What should we look for the rest of 2020, or any final comments that you have for customers that might be looking at this environment? >> Sure, I think that, two trends that I'm seeing, and they're just getting stronger over the years. The first thing is multicloud, and multicloud means many things to different people, but, basically, every customer that we are speaking to is talking about, I want to run things on-prem, but I also need to run these workloads in the hyperscaler. And I need to move from one hyperscaler region to another, or between hyperscalers, and they want to run this distribution here, and the other distribution there. And there are many combinations of stacks and Database-as-a-Service and other components of the infrastructure that different developers are using on-prem and in the cloud. So, I expect this to go even further, and solutions like PowerProtect and TKG can help customers to do that job, and, of course, Tanzu Mission Control, to monitor and manage this environment. Secondly, I think that protection is going to follow more the workloads. So, application is no longer the VM. Obviously, it's becoming many different components that are starting to span across locations and across environments. And again, the protection nature of these is going to change according to where and how these workloads are being provisioned. >> Yeah, and I would say the same thing about Mission Control, very much multicloud-focused, Today it's largely an AWS-focused solution. We're changing to add more flexible storage options, more clouds. Azure is something that we'll be doing in the short term, Google Cloud platform and Google Cloud Storage after that, as well as just the ability to use your own on-prem storage for your backup targets. Also, we're going to be focusing on driving more policy-driven backup. So, being able to define policies for groups of clusters, define RTO and RPO for groups of clusters, allowing Mission Control to help determine what the individual backup policy should be for that particular asset. And continuing to work with Dell and other partners to help extend our platform and open it up for other data protection providers. >> Tom and Efri, thanks so much for the updates. Tom, welcome to being a CUBE alumni, and Efri, I'm sure we'll be seeing you in the team, in the near future. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much. >> Stay with us for more coverage from VMworld 2020. I'm Stu Miniman, and as always, thank you for watching theCUBE. (bright music)

(soft music) >> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And we're digging in with VMware with the latest update of the VMware cloud, on AWS definitely technology solution set that the ecosystem has been very interesting into. And to help us do that deep dive happy to welcome back to the program, Kit Colbert. He is the Vice President and CTO of the cloud platform business unit with VMware. Kit, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me Stu. >> All right, so you brought along some slides said if people want to watch we've done an executive interview to give kind of the general business update, but when it comes to the technology, you know I guess we start with VMware, Amazon partnership is a deep integration we've heard both from Andy Jassy and for Pat Gelsinger, on how much engineering work and how critically important it is. Anybody from the technical side understand that one of the interesting things in cloud is that Amazon created bare metal instances to support this solution. So one of the items here is that there is a new bare metal instance. So why don't you bring us inside, you know What the updates are and what this means to the user base? >> Yeah, absolutely. Yeah so the bare metal support is something that we worked very closely with AWS on when we were first launching VMware cloud on AWS. And the idea there was that bare metal support is that it very similarly models, EC2 virtual machines, in the sense of each of these Vms VM types or instance types, as they say, are various kinds of T short sizes, right? And so they have a lot of these different instance types. And so similarly speaking, on the bare metal side, we're also seeing a lot of different instance types there. So we started out with an i3.metal instance, and we added an r5.metal instance and now we're really excited to add what we're we're calling i3en.metal. And so lets bring about slide to talk more about all the new capabilities there with i3en. You know, we have found when we talk to customers is that they love the simplicity of the hyper converged model that i3 brings. What they said was, hey, we've got a lot of workloads that are storage capacity battle. And so that meant that, you know they had the issue there is workloads, they use some amount usually a good amount of CPU memory, but they have a lot of storage capacity requirements. What that meant with i3, is they had to get a lot of these i3 hosts to get enough storage capacity to support those workloads. And obviously, they have some extra compute capacity lying around. And so you know what we've done here with i3en, is dramatically increase the amount of storage capacity. So we can see here, what is it about 45 terabytes or so so much, much larger than what you can get about four x larger than we can get on i3en. metal today. So this is again, very targeted to those very large workloads that needed beefy underlying server and, just trying to better align the customer needs and workload needs with the underlying physical capabilities. And so this is just going to be one of many that we'll bring out. We've got, a whole pipeline of these actually. And, you know, again, you can imagine all the different types of VM instance types, right? There's GPU ones, there's FPGA based ones, you know, so there's all sorts of different shapes and sizes. And, you know as we get more and more feedback from customers, as they're running more and more applications, we'll get more and more of these instance types out there as well. >> Yeah, it's really interesting Kit it give, it gives me flashbacks. I'm thinking back to your 10 or even 15 years ago, when you talked in the early days of, did I just deploy VMware on the servers I had? Or did I buy servers that had the configuration, so I could optimize and take advantage of the feature functionality that's needed? All right, when I heard some of the things you talked about there, about the, you know, being able to use certain workloads and the like, one of the feedbacks I've gotten from users is, you know, the overall price of this, let's just say it's not the least expensive solution to start with. So, so, what, what are, what are some of the new entry level options that you have with the VMC on AWS? How does this update help? >> Yeah, yeah, first of all on the price side what we have found is that this is actually extremely price efficient price competitive. if you're able to utilize all the underlying physical and variable capacity. But you know, as you just mentioned, Stu, you know, the default configuration is three nodes of those i3 hosts, and that those three hosts aren't small either, right? They're pretty beefy and if you just want to get started, just try something small. Well, today, we do have actually a OneNote instance. But that OneNote instance, is just a temporary is kind of a testbed, if you will a proof of concept type of environment. It's not a long term, long running a production environment. And so customers kind of have this OneNote on the one hand or three notes on other and, you know, obviously they're saying, "Hey, why can't we just start with two nodes, "make it super simple, "reduce that price point again "for a very small footprint deployment, "and then allow us to scale up." So we bring up the next slide, what you can see is that that's exactly what we've done here as well, supporting two nodes now. And the idea here is this is a full production environment. You get all the great VMware technology, you can do motion stuff, HA, you get availability, and so forth, stores policies, as you see here. So again, this is meant to be a long lived, fully supported production environment that can also scale up if need be, right? You might start out with two nodes, but then find, "Hey, I want to add three or four or more." And you can certainly fully do that and fully support that. So again, this is just giving customers more optionality, more flexibility for where they want to to come in. What we've been doing thus far is talking with a lot of customers that had, you know, pretty large footprints and saying, "Hey, I want to move a good chunk of my data center, "or I've got a lot of workloads I want to burst." And of those cases, three or more nodes made a lot of sense. What we're finding now is that a lot of customers do want that flexibility to start smaller, just with two nodes really simple, kind of put their toe in the water, if you will and get a feel for the service and then expand from there. >> Yeah, okay, Kit, one, one quick follow up on this, you mentioned that if customers are maximizing, you know, leveraging the full environment they I have there, it's very cost competitive. You know, how are we hearing from data from from customers? What is their, their growth pattern? Are they getting good utilization? Do, do they have a good feel for, how to manage that economics in the AWS space, a lot of talk about things like FinOps these days, and how to make sure that the technical group and the Financial Group are working close together. >> Yeah, such a great question, actually. And the whole notion of the economics around this is a huge focus area for us. We have a whole Cloud Economics group, as a matter of fact, that we frequently bring in to talk with customers to help them think through all these different things. There's, there's a number of different considerations there. You know, a lot of look from, going from on-prem into the Cloud to the VMC on AWS. And, you know, with VMC on AWS, our prices are just public cloud in general, it's very easy to understand the price 'cause it's right up front, you're getting charged, right? On Premise a bit more difficult to understand that you've got a lot of capital expenses, you got a lot of other sort of operational expenses, you know, power electricity, people, and how do you, how do you make all the right computations there? So we have whole teams to help people think through that. But usually, what we have found is that price is not the main thing, right? Price is kind of a secondary or tertiary type of consideration. The main thing is always one of our primary use cases, it's like, man, I need to get out of my data centers, or my data center is that capacity, I want to keep it but I really need to be able to burst to the cloud, maybe some sort of test dev* like test in the cloud and production on pram or vice versa. Those are the key use cases that bring customers in, and then it's really a question of, okay, now that you know, you want to do this, how do we do this as effectively, efficiently from a cost perspective as well as possible, right? And that's where that sort of economic discussion starts to happen. And then you get into more of the details like, okay, which kind of instance type do I want? What are the cost metrics of that? Can I actually fill it to capacity? That's where we start getting into those more specific situations for each customer. >> Excellent, we have that. That really tees up for me kit, when, when I think about the, you know early customers that I've talked to that are using VMC on AWS, they tend to be your enterprise customers, they're big VMware customers, they've enterprise license agreements, and the like. VMware has got a strong history working across the board. And you talk about Cloud in previous solutions. You've had close partnerships with the, with the managed service providers. >> Yeah. >> So my understanding is you're actually looking to help connect between what you've done with a managed service project in the past and this VMware on AWS solution. So bring us inside, you know this, this, this option >> Sure. Yeah, let me let me break it down for you 'cause we do work with a lot of partners. You know, obviously from VMware, its inception partners have been, you know, core to our strategy and core to our success, right? What we've actually been doing, actually somewhat kind of quietly over the past 15 years anyway, isn't really building out, what we call our VMware Cloud Provider Partner Program, and the VCPP program. And, you know, the idea there is that we do have a lot of these managed service providers that can take our software and run it on behalf of their customers, essentially, delivering our software as a service to their customers. And that's been great. We've seen a lot of success stories there. And we have about 4200 of these folks now, like a tremendous amount spread all around the world, all sorts of different geographies, and also all sorts of different industry verticals. And so you see a lot of these folks getting really specific, you know, let's say to the finance, vertical, you know, in and around Wall Street, running all sorts of great services for the financial services firms. Well, these folks are looking to evolve as well and what they're saying and seeing is like, hey, you know, just this basic idea of running infrastructure. Well, I can do that. But it doesn't necessarily differentiate me right? I need to move up the stack and start offering more services, and really trying to be a very, you know, sort of boutique and targeted solution for their customers. And so a lot of these customers, you know, obviously want to run on VMC on AWS. And so what we've been doing is enabling these partners to, you know, sell through essentially VMC on AWS that to sell these servers to their customers. But one of the challenges there is that they're only able to sell the full sort of bare-metal server, they weren't able to break that up or split that across customers as they can do today within their own environments. In fact, today, within their environments, they use something called VMware Cloud Director. And this is software that we give them. And you know, it's really nice that you can take a vSphere environment, software-defined data center and break it apart or kind of carve it up, if you will, into multiple smaller tenants, then, the, you know, each of these customers can, can take part of. And so but we didn't have that functionality for VMware Cloud on AWS. And so that's for the announcements all about, so let's pull up the slide to talk about that. The basic idea here is we can now enable the same software defined data centers that are running inside of AWS as part of VMware Cloud on AWS to be accessed by VMware Cloud Director. And so what we've done is actually made, we call it VCD, for short made VCD, a service that we now operate, and it runs there alongside VMC on AWS. And so now these managed service providers can leverage the VCD as a service to rule out access and, and carve up these SDDC that they get. And, you know, the takeaway here is that we're just giving these partners much greater flexibility and optionality in terms of how they consume, the underlying bare-metal infrastructure on VMC on AWS, and then give that out to their own customers again, giving greater customer choice and options, those customers. >> All right kit, so the other big thing that we've covered this year with VMware, of course, is the launch of vSphere 7. What that means the cloud native-space, the whole Tanzu portfolio line. So help us understand how all the application modernization Kubernetes and like ties into now the solution that we're talking about. >> Yeah, absolutely. It's about a huge focus for us, as you know. Yeah, we launched Tanzu last year at Vmworld. And have, then launched the product set earlier this year, it's finally ready to GA. It's in great customer interest and has customer traction there. And obviously, one of the big questions people had was like, "Hey, how can I get this for VMC on AWS?" And so the specific product they were looking at there was called Tanzu Kubernetes Grid. And so the idea with Tanzu Kubernetes Grid is that it enables a customer to provision and manage Kubernetes clusters across any cloud, right? And you can do this on AWS, you can do this on-prem, on vSphere, or other clouds and so forth. And, so obviously, this technology needed to come to BMC. You know, the thing we talk about with customers, when it comes to VMC on AWS is this notion of migrate the modernize, that we can migrate you off of your on-prem infrastructure to this modernized cloud infrastructure that is VMC on AWS. And once you have that modernized infrastructure, it makes it much easier to modernize your applications, you've got all sorts of great AWS services sitting there. So now the application itself can start taking advantage of all these things, as well as these new type of capabilities. So let's pull up the slide for this one. So what we're announcing here is Tanzu Kubernetes Grid plus on VMC on AWS. And what this gives you is all that great functionality, the ability to get Kubernetes seamlessly running on top of your VMC environment right next to all of your existing apps. So it's not one of those situations where you need, you know, separate clusters or different environments. You can have a single environment, they can have both your traditional applications and your more modern ones. And Tanzu Kubernetes Grid takes care of all the management of that Kubernetes environment. It ensures that it's up to date, properly lifecycle manage, manage local security, you get a Container Registry there, can elastically scale based on demand. And of course, you get all that great consistency as well. And we do a lot of customers that are multicloud that, that are doing things across different environments. And so TKG can replicate itself and give you that consistent management across any of those environments on-prem and the cloud between clouds. So that's really what the power of this is. And again, it's really taking VMC from just being a platform from migrating your existing workloads to really being a platform for modernizing those workloads as well. >> Yeah, it's interesting Kit, you know if when I think about traditionally, VMware, it was, you know, let me take my app and I'm going to shove it into the end and I'll never think about it again. So what's the change in mindset? How do you make sure that it's not just, you know, stick it in there and forget about it, but, you know, can move in change which is, you know, really the, the call for today is that I need to be more agile, I need to be able to respond to change? >> That's a great question. And we actually spend a lot of time talking about this with customers. So if we take a step back, you know, it's important to understand the traditional journey most customers are looking at when they're moving to the cloud. I talked about this notion of migrating then modernizing. Oftentimes, you know, before the advent of VMC on AWS, you didn't have the ability to take those two apart, you had to migrate and modernize simultaneously. In order to move to the cloud, you actually had to do a bunch of refactoring and retooling and so forth to your application. And obviously, that created a lot of challenges because it slowed how quickly customers can move up to the cloud. And so what we've done, which I think is really, really powerful is kind of broken those two apart. To say, you know what, you may have a business imperative to get out of the data center, we can help you do that, we can move, you know, some customers moved hundreds of workloads a week, up to VMC on AWS. And then once you've done that, you're now a little bit more breathing room, right? You've gotten out of your immediate business problem, and let's say in this case, closed-ended data center. And now you can sort of focus on okay, how do I think about modernizing these applications? How do I think about the interior points to opening them up and actually getting inside of them? And so I think, you know, the most valuable aspect of the approach that we've taken here is that ability to, to separate out those two to get the quick business wins that you need. And then to take the time to think about, okay, how do I actually modernize this? How do I want to? What sort of technologies do I want to use? How should I do this right, rather than just need to do this quickly? And so I think that's a really, really powerful aspect of our approach, and that we can give customers more optionality in terms of how they approach their modernization efforts. >> Yeah, so, so Kit, the final question I have for you, the VMware AWS partnership has been around for a couple years now. >> Yeah. >> What would you say is the biggest change technically, from when the solution was first announced, just to where we are today with all the new updates that you've talked about? >> Yeah, that's a great question. Look, it's hard to pick one, right? I think the biggest thing in general, is just the increasing maturity of this offering. And that goes really across the board, technical maturity, operational maturity, compliance, certification maturity, right? Getting more and more of those under our belt, global reach maturity, right? We started off in one region, but now we're all over the world, pretty much every region that AWS has. You see more and more features, you know, we're constantly releasing new features, new hardware types. And so I think that's really the biggest thing. It's not been like one singular thing, what has been is just a lot of work by the team across 1000 different areas, and moving all those in parallel. And that's really been the heavy lift that we've had to do with the past few years. You know, as we talked about, it was a lot of work just to get this thing out in the first place, right? We had to do a lot of technical work with AWS to enable this bare metal-capability. And so we got that one out, we got it out and had that initial service. There have been a lot of limitations, right? We just had one instance type, only one region, you know, didn't have as many compliance certifications. So obviously that limited the number of customers initially, right? Just because there are some restrictions around that. So our goal has really been to open this up to as many customers, in fact, every customer, all of our 500,000 odd vSphere customers to be able to move to VMS on AWS. And so we're slow, you know, slowly but surely, every month knocking down more and more barricades to that, right? And so what you're seeing is just a tremendous explosion of innovation and effort across the entire team. And so it's really it's kudos to the team for their continued effort day in day out of these past three years or so, to get VMC on AWS to where it is today. >> Excellent, well, thank you so much, Kit. Great to talk to you. Congratulation to the VMware and AWS team. And of course, looking forward to talking to more of the customers down the road, as they take advantage of this, hopefully at Vmworld, and some of the Amazon shows too. Thanks so much for joining us Kit. >> Thank yous Stu. >> All right, stay with us for lots more coverage, of course VMware Cloud on AWS really exciting and interesting topic we've been covering since day one. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. >>Alright, welcome back. Jeff Frick here. And we're excited for this next segment. We're joined by Jeremy Raider. He is the GM digital transformation and scale solutions for Intel Corporation. Jeremy, great to see you. Hey, thanks for having me. I love I love the flowers in the backyard. I thought maybe you ran over to the Japanese, the Japanese garden or the Rose Garden. Right To very beautiful places to visit in Portland. >>Yeah. You know, you only get for a couple Ah, couple weeks here, so we get the timing just right. >>Excellent. All right, so let's jump into it. Really? And in this conversation really is all about making Ai Riel. Um, and you guys are working with Dell and you're working with not only Dell, right? There's the hardware and software, but a lot of these smaller a solution provider. So what is some of the key attributes that that needs to make ai riel for your customers out there? >>Yeah. So you know, it's a It's a complex space. So when you can bring the best of the Intel portfolio, which is which is expanding a lot. You know, it's not just the few anymore you're getting into memory technologies, network technologies and kind of a little less known as how many resources we have focused on the software side of things optimizing frameworks and optimizing and in these key ingredients and libraries that you can stitch into that portfolio to really get more performance in value, out of your machine learning and deep learning space. And so you know what we've really done here with Dell? It has started to bring a bunch of that portfolio together with Dell's capabilities, and then bring in that ai's V partner, that software vendor where we can really take and stitch and bring the most value out of a broad portfolio. Ultimately using using the complexity of what it takes to deploy an AI capability. So a lot going on. They're bringing kind of the three legged stool of the software vendor hardware vendor dental into the mix, and you get a really strong outcome, >>right? So before we get to the solutions piece, let's stick a little bit into the intel world, and I don't know if a lot of people are aware that obviously you guys make CPUs and you've been making great CPS forever. But there's a whole lot more stuff that you've added, you know, kind of around the core CPU, if you will. In terms of of actual libraries and ways to really optimize the seond processors to operate in an AI world. I wonder if you can kind of take us a little bit below the surface on how that works. What are some of the examples of things you can do to get more from your Gambira Intel processors for AI specific applications of workloads? >>Yeah, well, you know, there's a ton of software optimization that goes into this. You know that having the great CPU is definitely step one. But ultimately you want to get down into the libraries like tensor flow. We have data analytics, acceleration libraries. You know, that really allows you to get kind of again under the covers a little bit and look at how do we have to get the most out of the kinds of capabilities that are ultimately used in machine learning in deep learning capabilities, and then bring that forward and trying and enable that with our software vendors so that they can take advantage of those acceleration components and ultimately, you know, move from, you know, less training time or could be a cost factor, right? Those are the kind of capabilities we want to expose to software vendors do these kinds of partnerships >>on, and that's terrific. And I do think that's a big part of the story that a lot of people are probably not as aware of that. There are a lot of these optimization opportunities that you guys have been leveraging for a while. So shifting gears a little bit right AI and machine learning is all about the data. And in doing a little research for this, I found actually you on stage talking about some company that had, like, 350 of road off 315 petabytes of of data, 140,000 sources of those data, and I think probably not great quote of six months access time to get it right and actually work with it. And the company you're referencing was intel. So you guys know a lot about debt data, managing data, everything from your manufacturing and and obviously supporting a global organization for I, t and Brian and, ah, a lot of complexity and secrets and good stuff. So you know what have you guys leveraged as intel in the way you work with data and getting a good data pipeline that's enabling you to kind of put that into these other solutions that you're providing to the customers, >>right? Well is, you know, it's absolutely a journey, and it doesn't happen overnight, and that's what we've you know. We've seen it at Intel on We see it with many of our customers that are on the same journey that we've been on. And so you know, this idea of building that pipeline it really starts with what kind of problems that you're trying to solve. What are the big issues that are holding you back that company where you see that competitive advantage that you're trying to get to? And then ultimately, how do you build the structure to enable the right kind of pipeline of that data? Because that's that's what machine learning and deep learning is that data journey. So really a lot of focus around you know how we can understand those business challenges bring forward those kinds of capabilities along the way through to where we structure our entire company around those assets. And then ultimately, some of the partnerships that we're gonna be talking about these companies that are out there to help us really squeeze the most out of that data as quickly as possible because otherwise it goes stale real fast, sits on the shelf, and you're not getting that value out of right. So, yeah, we've been on the journey. It's ah, it's a long journey. But ultimately we could take a lot of those those kind of learnings and we can apply them to our silicon technology. The software optimization is that we're doing and ultimately, how we talk to our enterprise customers about how they can solve overcome some of the same challenges that we did. >>Well, let's talk about some of those challenges specifically because, you know, I think part of the the challenge is that kind of knocked big data, if you will in Hadoop, if you will kind of off the rails. Little bit was, there's a whole lot that goes into it. Besides just doing the analysis There's a lot of data practice data collection, data organization, a whole bunch of things that have to happen before You can actually start to do the sexy stuff of AI. So you know, what are some of those challenges? How are you helping people get over kind of these baby steps before they can really get into the deep end of the pool? >>Yeah, well, you know, one is you have to have the resource is so you know, do you even have the resource is if you can acquire those Resource is can you keep them interested in that kind of work that you're doing? So that's a big challenge on and actually will talk about how that fits into some of the partnerships that we've been establishing in the ecosystem. It's also you get stuck in this poc do loop, right? You finally get those resource is and they start to get access to that data that we talked about. They start to play out some scenarios a theorize a little bit. Maybe they show you some really interesting value, but it never seems to make its way into a full production mode. And I think that is a challenge that is facing so many enterprises that are stuck in that loop. And so that's where we look at who's out there in the ecosystem That can help more readily move through that whole process of the evaluation that proved they are a why the POC and ultimately move that thing that capability into production mode as quickly as possible that you know that to me is one of those fundamental aspects of if you're stuck in the POC. Nothing's happening from this. This is not helping your company. We want to move things more quickly, >>right? Right. And let's just talk about some of these companies that you guys are working with that you've got some reference architectures is data robot a Grid Dynamics H 20 just down the road in Antigua. So a lot of the companies we've worked with with Cube and I think you know another part that's interesting. It again we can learn from kind of old days of big data is kind of generalized. Ai versus solution specific. Ai and I think you know where there's a real opportunity is not AI for a sake, but really it's got to be applied to a specific solution. A specific problem so that you have, you know, better chatbots. Better customer service experience, you know, better something. So when you were working with these folks and trying to design solutions or some of the opportunities that you saw to work with, some of these folks to now have an applied a application slash solution versus just kind of AI for ai's sake, >>Yeah. I mean, that could be anything from fraud, detection and financial services, or even taking a step back and looking more horizontally like back to that data challenge. If if you're stuck at the AI built a fantastic data lake, but I haven't been able to pull anything back out of it, who are some of the companies that are out there that can help overcome some of those big data challenges and ultimately get you to where you know, you don't have a data scientist spending 60% of their time on data acquisition pre processing? That's not where we want them, right? We want them on building out that next theory. We want them on looking at the next business challenge. We want them on selecting the right models, but ultimately they have to do that as quickly as possible so that they can move that that capability forward into the next phase. So, really, it's about that that connection of looking at those those problems or challenges in the whole pipeline. And these companies like Data robot in H 20 because you know, they're all addressing specific challenges in the end to end. That's why they've kind of bubbled up as ones that we want to continue to collaborate with, because it can help enterprises overcome those issues more fast. You know more readily. >>Great. Well, Jeremy, thanks for taking a few minutes and giving us the Intel side of the story. Um, it's a great company. Has been around forever. I worked there many, many moons ago. That's Ah, that's a story for another time. But really appreciate it and >>I'll interview you >>will go there. Alright, So super Thanks a lot. So he's Jeremy. I'm Jeff Frick. So now it's time to go ahead and jump into the crowd chat. It's crowdchat dot net slash make ai Really, Um, we'll see you in the chat. And thanks for watching. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

>> Live from Orlando, Florida It's the Cube covering Enterprise Connect twenty nineteen brought to you by five nine. >> Hello from Orlando. We are at Enterprise Connect twenty nineteen, and we're being very graciously hosted by five nine, which is the intelligent Cloud Contact center. We had a great few days, two minute minute myself talking with customers, partners, vendors on this massive change and enterprise, communication and collaboration. We're excited to welcome back to the key one of our alumni, Zs Caravella, the founder and principal analyst at Zeke Research. These It's great to have you here, >> Dawson. To me. Here >> you are. You should have the i p status at Enterprise Connect because you have been to this event some twenty times. >> I believe it's my twentieth. >> Can't imagine. So they didn't They should have rolled out the red carpet. Maybe we'll put a note >> in next year, >> but Yeah. There you go. I >> want to get my own booth. >> There you go. But I can't imagine how much this event has changed. And just your perspectives on Day three here of e. C nineteen and some of the vendors that you're like, Wow. A few years ago, you would never have seen a so and so here. >> Yeah, the shows massive compared to what it used to be the Remember when I first started coming to the show floor was maybe if I was a quarter the size, I mean generous, and it was really dominated by just a handful of companies. But since then, it's gone through several transitions the i p to software to the cloud on. That's gotten a lot more companies interested. And I think also, finally, businesses starting understand that if you're going to transform digitally right, communications has to be part of that fact. If you look at any piece of research right that I know there's a walker study throwing around saying by twenty twenty customer experience to be the number one brand differentiator, that's that's already happening. It's already the number one brand differentiator. And so because of that, more and more companies are now interested in communications. So, you know, ten years ago, fifteen years ago, we didn't have Amazon here. We didn't have Microsoft here. We didn't have Oracle here, but it's been a great thing for the show to see all these other companies that really have really great presidents validate what we've been saying for a long time, and it's a much different show today than it was. >> Yeah, it's really interesting that the thing that opened my eye is some of the companies that air here. I wish I knew which brand used these technologies so that if and when I do have an issue, I'm not gonna have that horrible customer experience that you know we've had in the past. It's like, you know, if I wanted to make a call, it's like, Can I even make a call? And, you know, do I actually get through the I V R. Things like that? I like how you set it up there. Some of these pendulums swings some of these waves of technology. Um, let's talk a little bit about voice because this used to be called Voice Khan, and it went through a rebranding because, you know, voice was in a little bit of kind. But, you know, we know voices. It's still very important. How does that fit in the hall >> when I went through that rebound, Frankly, voice wasn't sexy anymore. Everyone is talking about unified communications. No one was going to call anybody ever again. We're just gonna message or social each other to death and what's happened is voice is kind of important, right? And I think one of the undersea and friends to look at is that voice is becoming simultaneously less important and more important. What I mean by that is that they sound like a little bit of an oxymoron. But if you look across all age demographics right there, everybody has a prefered mode of communications, and it's rarely voice to start a conversation with the company. You message them your social, um, send them an e mail. But somewhere in there, you you eventually want to talk to somebody, and a that moment s o to start the conversation voices less important. But at that moment, you now want to have a conversation with uneducated agent who knows what your problem is and can help you quickly. And so now voices Mohr important than it's ever been before where, but I think the buried entry wasn't all that high, but voices, you know, it's it's important, it's sexy, and especially when people are dealing with emotional issues, they're dealing with money problems right in front of get a refund. If I'm trying to check on the status of my health, I want to talk to somebody. But when I want to talk to somebody, I want to get that conversation with over. It's possible. I think the bar's been raised as you mentioned to. You used to think that the dreaded Ivy are. If you have a dread and ivy are experience, you just want to business that company anymore, right? And so the stakes are higher than the bar's been raised on. What voices >> are you saying that the customers that you were talking to are now starting to get much more prescriptive in terms of understanding their customer journeys and their preferences? You know, before they used to go, we assume we're talking to millennials. They only want they only want ASA Master. Our company's starting to get more focused on. Alright, let's actually do analysis and determine if a voice only one of the next channels that we need to enable, >> uh, well, I wish they were. I think we're really in the early early innings that I think the best companies in the world are doing that. If you look at companies with very high, uh, NPS scores and customer SAT scores there doing that thing already and I think it's a good lesson for the rest of the industry. If you're not doing that, you're gonna fall behind pretty quickly. And I think that is driving companies more to the Saami Channel experience Where, uh, from, uh, from an analytic standpoint, you really have to understand your customer, not at the demographic level, but almost at a custom level because everyone's different, right? I think that's, uh, that's never been possible before. But today, because we've got bigger data sets. Things were in the cloud rise of artificial intelligence. It's made all the stuff possible. So companies like I said, the best cos the world to taken advantage of and they're having a, you know, big differences. That's why there's been such a huge swings in the market leadership right there cos we never heard of before. Market leaders and brands we trusted loved before they're gone. >> Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up, because every company we talked to this week that that CX is at the center of what they're talking about. So, in your research, what is differentiating though those new leaders and, you know, causing some of those swings in the market place hot out of the customer. Look at these and help differentiate and and ever changing marketplace. >> Well, it's what's going on today. It's really about being more contextual, having a deeper understanding a wire. Customers calling, uh, how you could help him faster understanding maybe what products they own. You know what? What are some of the adjacent ones? Ah, no. I think that's going very quickly, become table stakes. And I think where we're moving to is we're going to shift customer service from being largely inbound, driven and reactive. And that's where they I can help react faster to being Mohr, outbound driven and pearl active. Right? So, for instance, let's say I buy a connected refrigerator and my water filter needs changing. Well, right now, I still have to recognize that. And maybe I call that refrigerator company and they can proactively help me because they understand what I have. And they've got a great arm, the Channel contact center. But ultimately that should be a reverse. They should contact me, maybe through a text message saying, Hey, you're we noticed your water filter needs changing. Can we send you one? Yes, it comes and then maybe I call the agent and say, Can you help me install it? Right? So I think within the next three, four years, we're going to see a lot of customer service, Uh, where contextual is the table stakes and then the ability to predict what your customer wants. That's going to be the differentiator. And frankly, that's really exciting. I mean, if you think we've seen change of this industry as you mentioned in the last five years, wait for the next five. >> When you're talking with customers or even doing research and and other venues, it's to mention CX. We talk. We've been talking about it all week, but I get curious when I hear the customer experience and the agent experience just think, How are they not how they separate because of the Asian isn't empowered to be able to, whether it's no the right channel. But I want to be communicated with or have the information where the context about why I'm calling, then the customer experience, right? >> Yeah, well, they're very tightly linked together. You can't have a good customer experience that a good agent experience and you may have the best trained agents in the world that are the most empathetic that are incredibly sensitive with what people want. But if they don't have the data, you're going frustrate your customer. And everybody's been through that situation where you get transferred to somebody else and you gotta start that whole conversation over again and eventually you just hang up and say, I don't want ever to business. So I think you're right. Agent experience Customer experience are very tightly interwoven, and they're they're really dependent on one another. You can't you can't do without the data. And again, that's where all these friends of a I come into play because they're able to send better information to the agents faster, really, through an assistive technology versus replacement. Right? >> So when we came into this show, we knew that the wave of cloud had made a big transformation. We're starting to hear a I is the next wave everybody's talking about. I believe I read something that that you had written that was talking about, you know, whether that is something just internal the company build in versus how it interacts with the customer. Where do you see I having the biggest impact kind of in the short term, and nowhere is that more long. >> It's a great question because I ask my customers all the time. Should we be using intelligence bots? Or if you saw the Google Duplex Nemo, where they have on a I call in order pizza I think it was or something like that. So is a I ready to talk to people? And I think if you think of the entire world of interactions on a two by two grid is an analyst would like to buy two grids, right? And you put complexity of conversation on one axis and frequency of interactions if it's hiking, or if it's low complexity, high frequency, that might be okay to try and automate through a But other than that, everything should flipped. Agent. And I think right now we're very early in the cycle, and so is a business. I'm not sure I trust today. I tow always have the right answer, but it makes a great assistant technology to recommend to the agent. This is what you should say, and the great thing about that is, if the agent says no, that's stupid and says that wasn't helpful. That becomes the input to the learning mechanism for the A I so overtime will get smarter and smarter. But if you if you want to think about just the role of it now, I always use the analogy is like a self driving car. I'm not sure if either one of you would want to jump in a car that has no driver, no steering wheel, no controls. But there's a lot of great aye aye technology in a car like lane change assist, parallel parking assist things like that that can make you a better driver. So let's make our agents better drivers by giving him those assistive technologies. And that's the the short term vision long term. Who knows? But I But I think oh, if company's heir to aggressively they II, they're actually gonna create a nod. The opposite effect, where they hurt customer experience. It's the people that make a difference, so let's make those people better. >> That's one of the things that we've heard consistently throughout this event is the empathy factor machines can't bring. That's really got to be the humans with the A I to deliver on idea, hopefully optimal experience, too. Whatever customer has whatever issue on the back end. >> Yeah, in fact, Roman always talks about that as well. The CEO of five nine and I think he's right from that. Regarded is about having the knowledge of the customer in the empathy to understand. Put yourself in the customer's position and this to your point. Lisa, about CX. In Asian experience, we tied a couple together. If the Asian distressed because they don't have the right information and they're trying a message, this person, or look something up in the database, that frustration is going to come through to the customer. And that further frustrates the customer, right? So of the agents, armed with the right information, they can spend more time focused on the customer and less time trying to find the data that, frankly, they should have at their fingertips all the time. >> So speaking of five nine, you recently attended their analyst event. >> I did >> on. We've had the executives on the team. You know, Jonathan on earlier this week, you know, rock star background. We're goingto throwing on a little bit later. We know him from his Cisco days without breaking any India's, you know, give us a little bit of the insight as to, you know, five nine. You know, what have they been doing? Well, what's what's the new team driving them forward towards? >> Well, I mean, if you look at their stock price from Roland joined, it's it's more than doubled. So obviously there's, um, some good growth there. I think. What? I've always believed that it's very difficult to compete on product alone, right? And if you believe this whole world of it is this customer experience, that's what they do really well, the customers, their customers have a great experience here with five nine, they have a great service organization that makes sure that when you buy five nine, you have a good on boarding experience that set up the way you want it, and that services business makes a big difference. Now they've always had that. Now, where I think the new executive team has made a difference is helping the company understand the scale, move upmarket, more enterprises because the needs their different than down market. And so I think you know, they're gonna have a big impact on the future of five nine. Frankly, I think a lot of what you've seen for growth in the last year has been stuff that was put in place. But I know they're working on a lot of the AI capabilities. We're not breaking in the NBA's. I can tell you that the demonstrations that Jonathan Rosenberg, who's in there incredibly smart guy, I mean he might be the smartest guy in this industry was giving around. How a I can impact customer experience was the best set of concrete examples that I've seen today because it's really easy to give me a pie in the sky hypothetical things. But he really boiled it down in a very grand your level of this possible. This is possible and I'm expecting over the next year, five nine customers will see those things. >> They've done really well in the enterprise market. I think last year in twenty eighteen, they closed very, very strongly. Also, a lot of growth in there. Custom enterprise customers with a Million and Ahrar plus What are you seeing, though, in terms of some of the smaller businesses that probably are facing a lot of the same challenges that enterprises are? Is this an area where they can also leverage five nine two really dial up and deliver Great CX, >> Yeah, but the line has moved up right of people interested in cloud services that used to be too small businesses, and now it's all kinds. But I think for a small business, you can look like a much larger business. I think there's a lot of companies people sometimes think that's a little risky deal the small company. But five nine is a very, very valuable tool because by having that information right away that agents fingertips, they're able to actually replicates, uh, large company experience and on almost validate that the customer made the right decision using them. So I think up and down the stack it for five nine. They provide value tow companies of all sizes. Today, one of them, you know, the interesting aspects of what I've seen two is everybody talks about this twenty four billion dollars tam for Contact Center. I know I've been in that eye, and may I say that because that twenty four billion dollars tam is based on giving contact, Senator people contact center tools, but what I've been noticing over the last years, when people buy five nine, often it's not contact center people using that using it. It's sales people in marketing people, field service. Anybody that needs customer info is using it. And I'll give an example. One of the customers that was at the five nine day I can't see you. They say who they are. They migrated all fifty contacts and regions five nine. And since then they've added one hundred mohr sales people using the tools. So now we've got one hundred fifty people using five nine when there was only fifty contacts. Generations you can see the value is starting to spread across the company, and I think that's a pretty exciting thing. >> It's been interesting we've seen at the show. And in some of the interviews, that line between kind of unified communications and contact center seems to be blurring. It seems to be that >> well, everybody needs that data on the customer info. I actually cameras closer to forty. Forty five billion. To be frank, really, every anybody who uses a serum tool should have five nine capabilities. >> Zia's Thank you so much for sharing your insights and your energy on Day three. If Enterprise connect nineteen, we appreciate your time Thank you. First two minute, man. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube?

>> Live from San Francisco. It's the Cube covering artists. A conference twenty nineteen brought to you by for scout. >> Hey, welcome back already, Geoffrey here with the Cube were in downtown San Francisco at the brand new Open. I think it's finally complete. Mosconi Center for our conference. Twenty nineteen were really excited this year. For the first time ever in the four Scout booth, we've been coming to our say for a long time. We had Mike on last last year by Caesar. President Seo >> for scout. I appreciate you having me >> because we had the last year and you're so nice. You You invited us to the way we must both done something right? Absolutely it Also, before we get too far into it, Congratulations. Doing some homework. The stock is going well. You're making acquisitions, You said it's the anniversary of going out in public. So things are things are looking good for Four. Scout >> things have been good. We've been public company now for four quarters. We've beaten, raised on every metric we had out there. So we're feeling good about >> life. So I don't think the security threats are going down. I don't think you're Tamas is shrinking by any stretch of the imagination. Definitely >> does not feel like the threat landscape is getting less challenging these days, right? I mean, when you look at all the geopolitical stuff going on between the US and China and Russia, that that usually spills into the cybersecurity world and kind of makes things a little bit more tense, >> right? So the crazy talk and all confidence now is machine learning an a I and obviously one of the big themes that came up, we had a great interview. A googol is you just can't hire enough professionals regardless of the field, especially in this one to take care of everything So automation, really key. Hey, I really key. But the same time the bad guys have access to many of the same tools so that you're in the middle of this arm raise. How are you? You kind of taken a strategic view of machine learning an A I in this world. >> So what's amazing about cyber security in two thousand nineteen is the fact that the pace of innovation is exploding at an unprecedented rate, Right? I mean, we're bringing Maur devices online every quarter now, then the first ten years of the Internet combined. So the pace of adoption of new technologies is really what is driving the need for machine learning and a I a human being. Historically, in the cybersecurity world, most corporations approach was, I'm gonna have a whole bunch of different cyber products. They all have their own dashboards. I'm going to build this thing called a cyber Operations Center of Sock. That is going to be the input of all those. But a human being is going to be involved in a lot of the research and prioritization of attacks. And I think just the volume and sophistication of the breaches these days and attacks is making those same companies turn towards automation. You have to be willing to let your cyber security products take action on their own and machine learning in a I play a very large roll back. >> Yeah, it's really interesting because there's very few instances where the eye in the M L actually generate an action. Oftentimes will generate a flag, though they'll bring in a human to try to make one of the final analysis. But it's not, not often that way, actually give them the power to do something. Is that changing? Do you see that changing are people more accepting of that when you can't give it up that >> control when you when you look at for scouts kind of core value Proposition the category that were in his device. Visibility in control device visibility. What's on the network control? When I find something that shouldn't be, there are customers. Want to block that so way? Have a front row seat on watching customers that for decades have been unwilling to allow cybersecurity products to actually take action, turning our product on everyday and allowing us to do exactly that. So when we look at the way that they approached the breaches in every one of these scenarios, they're trying to figure out how they can augment the personal staff they have with products that can provide that level of intelligence >> on nothing to >> see over and over is that people are so falih. Fallible interview to Gala Grasshopper A couple of years he was one hundred percent a social engineering her way into any company that she tried. She had a kind of cool trick. She looked at Instagram photos. He would see the kind of browser that you had, and you know the company picnic. Paige won't let me in. Can you please try this? You're one hundred percent success. So you guys really act in a very different way. You're kind of after the breaches happened. You're sensing and taking action, not necessarily trying to maintain that that print Big Mo >> we're actually on the front end were before the breach takes place. So the way our product works is way plug into the network and then we turned that network ten years ago. A CEO would would would control everything on their networks. They would buy servers and load them with products and put them in their data centers. And they bite, you know, end points and they give those to their to their employees. Those same CEOs now need to allow everything to connect and try to make sense of this growing number of devices. So both the role that we play is preventative. We are on the front end. When a device first joins that network, you need to make sure that device is allowed to be there. So before we worry about what credentials that device is trying to log in with, let's make sure that's a device that the company wants to be on the network to begin with. So to your point, exactly your right. I mean, I think my CFO and I probably every week have some very sophisticated email that makes it sound like one of us asked the other to approve a check request. But it's but they're getting good and you're right. They go on the They know that I went to Villanova, where I'm a Phish fan, and they'll leverage some form of thing. All Post online has tried to make that seem a little bit more personalized, but our philosophy is a company is very basic, which is you need situational awareness of what devices are allowed to be on that network to begin with. If you get that in place, there's a lot less examples that what you described a couple of minutes >> ago and that you said to really instinct philosophy, having kind of an agent list methodology to identify and profile everything that's connected to the network, as opposed to having having you know an OS or having a little bug on there, Which would put you in good shape for this operations technology thing, which is such a critical piece of the i O. T and the I O T transfer >> there. Now there's there's no doubt, You know, that's one of the most fourth sight ful things that, for Scout has ever done is we made the decision to go Agent Lis ten years ago, Way saw that the world was moving from you, Nick and and Lenox and Windows and all of these basic operating systems that were open and only a few of them to the world that we're in today, where every TV has a different operating system, every OT manufacturer has their own operating system, right? It's example I uses that is the Google, you know, the nest thermostat where you you, you buy that, you put it on the wall of your house, you pair with your network, and it's sitting right on line next to your work laptop, right? And and there's been Brit breaches shown that attacks can come in through a device like that and get on to a more more trusted asset, right? So just having that situational awareness is a big part to begin with. But, oh, teams, let's talk about OT for a couple of seconds is almost in front of us post Wanna cry? I am seeing almost every sea, so in the world not having had but the cyber responsibilities for OT being pulled into the O. T part of the business. And it makes sense. You know that the when you watch it a cry, a breach like Wanna cry? Most companies didn't think they bought something from Windows. They thought they bought a controller from Siemens or Gear, one of the larger manufacturers. What they realized on wanna cry was that those controllers have embedded versions of an old operating system from Microsoft called X that had vulnerabilities. And that's how it was exploited so that the approach of devices being online, which changing in front of us, is not just the volume of devices. But they're not open anymore. So the Agent Lis approach of allowing devices to connect to the network and then using the network to do our thing and figure out what's on it makes us a really relevant and big player in that world of coyote and don't. So >> do you have to hold their hand when they when they break the air gap and connect the TV into the Heidi to say it'll be okay. We'll be able to keep an eye on these things before you go. You know, you talk about air gaps all the time is such a kind of fundamental security paradigm in the old way. But now the benefits of connectivity are outweighing, you know, the potential cost of very >> difficult, right? I mean, one of the examples I always uses. PG and E are local power company here. We're up until a few years ago, they'd have a human being. A band would come to your house and knock on your door, and all they wanted to do is get in your garage to read your meter, right? So they could bill you correctly. And then they put smart meters on the side of our houses. And I'm sure the roo I for them was incredible because they got rid of their entire fleet as a result, but recognized that my house is Theo T grid, now connected back to the side, which is Billy. So there's just so many examples in this connected world that we're in. Companies want to do business online, but online means interconnectivity. Interconnectivity means OT and connected so Yes, you're absolutely right. There's many companies believe they have systems air gapped off from each other. Most of those same cos once they get for Scout Live recognized they actually were not air gapped off from each other to begin with. That's part of the role that we play. >> This cure is to get your >> take. You talk to a lot of sizes about how kind of the the types of threats you know have evolved more recently. You know, we saw the stuff with presidential campaign. The targets and what they're trying to do has changed dramatically over the last several years in terms of what the bad guys actually want to do once they get in where they see the value. So how has that changed? No, it's not directly because you guys don't worry about what they're trying to do bad. You want to protect everything. But how is that kind of change from the size of perspective? >> Our customers are government's financial service companies, health care companies, manufacturing companies. Because every one of those companies, I mean, it sounds basic. But if you knew the bad thing was plugged into your network, doing something bad you would've blocked it. You didn't know it was there to begin with. So we actually have a role in all types of threats. But when you look at the threat landscape, it's shifted your right. I mean, ten years ago, it was mostly I p theft. You were hearing examples of somebody's blueprints being stolen before they got their product into the market. WeII. Then soft financial threat shifted. That's still where the bulk of it is today, right? No, they ransomware attacks. I mean, they're all money motivated. The swift breaches. They're all about trying to get a slice of money and more money moves online that becomes a good hunting ground for cybersecurity attackers. Right? But what? What is now being introduced? A CZ? Well, as all the geopolitical stuff. And I think you know with, with our commander in chief being willing to be online, tweeting that with other organism governments worldwide having a more social footprint, now that's on the table. And can you embarrass somebody? And what does that mean? And can you divide parties? But, yeah, there's there's a lot of different reasons for people to be online. What's amazing is the attacks behind them are actually fairly consistent. The mechanisms used right toe actually achieve those that you know that you know the objectives are actually quite similar. >> I'm curious from the site's perspective >> and trying to measure r A Y and, you know, kind of where they should invest in, not a vest, How the changing kind of value proposition of the things that they that are at risk really got to change the dynamic because they're not just feeling a little bit of money. You know, these air, these are much more complex and squishy kind of value propositions. If you're trying to influence our election or you're trying to embarrass somebody or you know, >> that's kind of different from anything. If it's state funded sheriff, it's believed to be state funded. It typically has a different roo. I model behind it, right, and there's different different organizations. But, you know, like on the OT side that you described a second ago, right? Why is OT so hot right now? Because it's one thing to have a bunch of employees have their laptops compromised with something you don't want to be on their right. It's embarrassing. Your emails get stolen it's embarrassing. It's a very different thing when you bring down a shipping line. When a company can't shift, you know can't ship their products. So the stakes are so high on the OT side for organizations that you know, they are obviously put a lot of energy and doing these days. >> You need talk about autonomous vehicles, you know, misreading signs and giving up control. And you know what kinds of things in this feature? Right, Mike? So if we let you go, you're busy. Guy, get thanks >> for having us in the booth. What do your superiors for twenty nineteen, you know for us at Four Scout, the priorities are continuing to execute. You know, we grow our business thirty three percent. Last year. We achieved free cash flow profitability, which is the first time in the company's history. So way of obligation to our investment community. And we intend to run a good, solid business from a product perspective. Our priorities are right in the category of device visibility and control its one of things. When you look around this conferences, you know cos cos had to be careful. They don't increase their product size too quickly. Before they have the financial means to do so. And we just see such a large market in helping answer that question. What is on my network? That's our focus, and we want to do it across the extent that enterprise at scale. >> Yeah, I've sought interesting quote from you on one of their earnings calls that I thought was was needed. A lot of people complain What, you go public. You're on the ninety day shot clock in that that becomes a focus. But your your take on it was now that everything's exposed country spending an already how much spinning a marketing I'm in shipping, it sails that it forces you to really take a deeper look and to make tougher decisions and to make sure you guys are prioritizing your resource is in the right way, knowing that a lot of other people now are making those judgments. >> You know, Listen, the process of raising money and then going public is that you have to be willing to understand that you have an investment community, but you have an obligation to share a lot of detail about the business. But from the other side of that, I get a chance to sit in front of some of the smartest people on the planet that look att my peer companies and me and then provide us input on areas that they're either excited about are concerned about. That's amazing input for me and helps me drive the business. And again, we're trying to build this into a big, organically large cybersecurity business, which is a rare thing these days. And we're quite were very how aboutthe trajectory that we're on. >> Right? Well, Mike, thank you. Like just out with smart people like, you know, I appreciate it and learned a lot. So you congrats on this very much. >> Sorry. He's Mike. I'm Jeff. You're watching The Cube were in the Fourth Scout booth at RC North America. Mosconi Center. Or in the north North Hall. Just find the Seibu. Thanks for watching. >> We'LL see you next time.

>> Live from Washington D.C., it's theCUBE covering Inforum DC 2018. Brought to you by Infor. >> Welcome back to Washington D.C., we are live here at theCUBE at Inforum '18. I'm John Walls along with Dave Vallante and it's a pleasure now to welcome to the show from Capgemini couple of folks, Rachel Myers, who's Director of Alliances at Capgemini. (laughing) And John Clark, who's the VP of info-practice at Capgemini and Dave put your phone away, would you please. >> We're off to a good start. >> We are. (laughing) >> Who are you guys again? >> I think it was givin' him directions for dinner tonight. I think what you're doing. It's down at K Street take a right. >> Don't drive scooters without a helmet. >> That's right. Inside story. Rachel and John, thanks for being with us. We appreciate the time here. >> Thanks for having us. >> Let's talk about the partnership with Infor. Where it's coming from. What you are adding to that. How you view it and what you're gettin' out of it. And John, if you would? >> Yeah absolutely. First, hello from D.C., he said. The relationship that Capgemini has had with Infor goes back over 20 years. But we formalized it really two years ago and had a strategic partnership defined around several of the products that Infor has with a big focus on digital and cloud. So Capgemini sees that Infor is really leading the charge in a lot of native cloud products out there and we know that, that is certainly something our clients are looking for. So formalized relationship and extremely excited to be lead partners and sponsors here at Inforum. >> And so Rachel, where do you come into play here then as far as Director of Alliances goes? I think the job title probably speaks for itself, but in terms of how the Infor relationship works and where it comes in to your portfolio onto your plate, how does that work? >> So I manage the relationship with Infor as our customers are looking at cloud and all the options out there. I manage the relationship into Infor bringing the right folks to bear to our customers and joining at the hip where we need to in support of our customers. >> Okay, so you mentioned John, that its been a 20 year relationship. So that means it goes back probably to the loss and software days, right? The whole early days of ERP. Now we come into the modern era, cloud. We're hearing all about AI. We're also hearing about, sort of, micro-verticals and industry expertise. >> Yes, yes. >> So square that circle for me because you guys have deep industry expertise. How do you mesh with Infor? >> Yeah great question. We absolutely, as you said, go to market from a sector perspective, so everything we do has some tent of an industry or a sector verticalisation and it matches exactly well with how Infor goes to market with last model functionality. So what we do for example, is look at where Infor and our sector team see gaps like on food processing companies and we'll build out that solution and take that to market. So really kind of extending the last malfunctionality with Infor and having Capgemini's solutions as well. >> So does that functionality ultimately make it back into Infor code or not necessarily? >> Not necessarily. >> Okay, all right. So it's like last inch function-- >> Right exactly. That's a pretty good analogy for it. >> Okay so, well, it's always the hardest part, right? I mean you think of cable, you think of all the-- >> Telephone whatever. >> Sort of examples, right? So, you know the old story is if you're here and you want to get to the wall and you go half way, you never get there, right? >> Exactly. >> So that's kind of the process that you're in. There's always more to do, right? >> Right. >> Okay, so what's hot these days in your space? >> Well we're here at Inforum talking to customers and our partners about many things. But we actually are speaking about Industry 4.0 which is a big hot topic. Supply chain and EAM, Enterprise Asset Management. We have practices and expertise in all of those, so we can bring the best to our customers from a system integration partner capability which would be us along with Infor and the products that they bring to bear. >> So what's the 101 on 4.0? Presumably a lot of automation, more efficiency, driving business value. How would you describe Industry 4.0 Next Gen? >> It's the next evolution, I would say, to automation of processees. We're getting closer, I would think, and people are definitely piloting to get there, but building a road map and helping them really see the value is what we're trying to do with our customers these days and making it real and really producing some ROI beyond that with automation. >> So AI is a piece of that? How about, have you seen like blockchain hit yet? Or is that sort of on people's road maps? >> I think it's definitely a road map item. I think there's some experimentation, but what we're definitely seeing become real is robotics process automation, RPA. We're doin' a lot of that with our customers and taking it beyond experimentation to actual ROI. >> And the RPA is exploding. I was actually impressed and surprised to hear so much RPA talk this morning. I didn't realize that Infor had quasi out of the box capbilities there. So what are you seeing? A lot of, sort of back office functions getting automated, software robots getting trained to do mundane tasks? What's the experience there? >> I think as we are implementing ERPs like Infor's, there is a need to take processes that customers are doing today manual and automate those to see the extension and the ROI beyond just the ERP software. >> We do see a lot of it start in the back office, so a lot of finance and HR functions is kind of the first place that companies look for 'cause on thing that we do see on RPA projects is don't try to tackle everything, but get focused and get some quick wins, if you will and that's really where we built our library and where we work with Infor. >> Is it fair the automation of it is coming from the lines of business which is kind of your wheelhouse, right? >> Right. >> It's not, sort of an IT thing so much. IT is probably a little afraid of it, but is that the way you see it? >> Yes it is. >> Okay and so talk about Capgemini's strategy as the world sort of evolves. You know, you always hear small projects, small wins are the way to go and for years it was like the big SAP implementation >> Yeah. >> Or the big Oracle implementation. How are you guys changing your business to accommodate that new thinking? >> So really on several fronts. One is definitely the methodology that we have and we see on projects is shifting from a waterfall to an agile. So much quicker iterations and cycles on the projects themselves and usually the scope. It will start off with a line of business and again, if it's looking for, hey, I just need to improve the digital relationship I have with my customer. Which can a lot of times just mean start a digital relationship with my customer. So it's really, you kind of keep a tight focus on the scope and just have an agile approach which, again, is what we have changed our methodologies for. >> So digital obviously is real. I mean, every CEO that we talk to is trying to get digital right. A lot of experimentation going on. Like you said a lot of, hey we have to have a digital strategy then you throw AI into the mix. You throw things like blockchain. It's a complicated situation for a lot of firms. What are the discussions like with customers? Where are you seeing the most success or early traction? >> I think having the vision and the scope of where you want to go three years, five years down the road and being able to prioritize against that road map what's going to give you the biggest benefit first, so that it's not just haphazardly trying out these technology enablers like RPA and AI, it is a clear vision and strategy of where we're trying to go and solely hitting some of that ROI and seeing value. >> Are you seeing more of a save money, make money kind of a mix? What are you seeing there? I would say probably a mix, save money for the right reasons and spend money to get the ROI that we're planning for in that road map. >> Just to amplify on the point that you're making Dave. Just from the customer side of the fence on this, for people who aren't, you're just introducing them to the cloud, right? To begin with and they're trying to embrace or understand a concept that they don't have any experience with and now you think of all these other capabilities you have down the road or all these other opportunities whether it's artificial intelligence or whether it's RPA, whatever it is. It's got to be mind-blowing. A little bit, doesn't it? And how do you, I guess, calm 'em down if they realize we are that far behind. We're never going to get there. We're always going to be three, five, 10 years behind because we're that far behind right now. So how do you, I guess, allay their concerns and then get them up to speed at such a way that they feel like they can catch up? >> Yeah, say one of the key things that we can provide is various maturity models. So we have kind of a keepin' it simple of a two by two grid of where do you fall from digital enablement? A, do you even know what that means? Do you do it within divisions or certain lines of business? And then, is that a part of the strategy for your customer acquisition, customer retention, employee retention, et cetera. And start with kind of a fit there and then we basically have offerings that then go from okay, if you're starting out then the approach can be let's go through what cloud is. Like I said, there are absolutely still discussions that we have now on, hey what is the difference between cloud and on-prem? Is it the same software version? Is it a different software? What are the security features and the data center? Some of those questions are still out there as you said and we've got to look at the maturity model to get 'em there. >> So let's go through the simple, I like simple, the two dimensional, one of the buckets, so it's like, hey, we're not even thinkin' about it, it's kind of lower left. Upper left would be line of business focus sort of narrow. Lower right would be at strategic, but we're not acting on it yet. >> Right, in a division or a single line of business or I may have a cross functional solution with a great digital road map, but it's in one plant, you know, 'cause then you get into, okay, well that's probably because you either had a champion locally or you had some trigger such as some customer issues or production issues or something that forced the issue, so to speak, there. And then the top right is, yeah, it's part of the strategy. It's built in to where the budget is allocated as well and it's a part of all the conversations we're having with business and IT. >> Were you guys seeing particular, thinking about sticking on digital for a minute, you think particular industry uptake, I mean, obviously retail's been disrupted, publishing, you know the music industry's been disrupted. But there's certain industries that really haven't been dramatically disrupted yet, financial services, healthcare, defense, really to date, these high risk businesses. What are you guys seeing and kind of where's the greatest familiarity or affinity to digital? >> Where we're starting and where we've been focused with Infor and the market place is consumer products and distribution as well as manufacturing. That's really been a focus area for us and we didn't get into this, but John's team has capability in Infor and is skilled in Infor and there are some focus areas for us with the customers in those industry segments. >> Do you think that automation, AI, improvements in the supply chain, you know robotics even software robots will reverse the trend toward offshore manufacturing tariffs, I guess maybe help too, but I mean, are you seeing any evidence of that automation sort of making the pendulum swing back or are the cost advantages so attractive and is the supply chain so intrenched? >> I'll let John elaborate, but I would say that there is still a fit for purpose for offshoring certain things and for automating certain things and that's why I think it's important to build a plan and a strategy for which things will be solved for in which ways. >> Yeah and the one thing I want to add is as you see some plant go from, it took 200, 300 people to operate a facility to I can do it with 10. That changes the economics of now the labor cost and labor arbitrage isn't as much a function, but yes, what about the rent, facilities and transportation? So we are seeing the economic calculation change a bit from the point of just go offshore for labor. Well if labor is not a big a point, we are seeing a shift there. >> Right, so the labor component's shrinking. And then you can automate that. Is there a quality aspect or is that kind of a myth? >> We think that's a myth from what we're seeing. >> Quality can improve a little bit. >> Exactly. >> Won't go down. Won't go down. >> You're saying coming back on-shoring? Or are you saying offshoring? >> Or automating. Automating whether it's on or off. >> Oh regardless of the location, right? >> Right. >> Automation's going to drive quality up. Lower re-work, right? Okay. >> Robots do it a little bit better than us especially if it's repetitive. >> They don't get tired. (laughing) How about some of your favorite kind of joint examples with Infor, any kind of customer wins you can talk about? >> We're actually working together in a lot of spaces, but one of the biggest ones that we are actually talking about a case study here on the floor at Inforum is at Coke Industries, one of it's companies Flint Hills Resources. We're actually in the middle of an EAM implementation with Flint Hills and working together collaboratively with Infor at the client. >> And is that the or bigger picture, you said 20 year relationship formalized much more recently than that. Ultimately what does that deliver for the client? You think at the end of the day? What's the power of that partnership? >> So I think that there's several things, one is that with the experience and history of a Capgemini with 50 years of consulting experience and strategy work. We now specifically bring Infor and Infor's technology into the conversations that it was not a structure before two years ago. So now we specifically have, where does Infor fit in the road map from a software agnostic industry perspective? And then from a just a plain and simple support and keeping your customer's Infor environment running that's additional strength that we have that we didn't have before. >> So you guys are known for being technology agnostic even though you've got an affinity of going to market with a company in this case Infor. How are they doing? What's on the to do list? If you're talking to customers saying, hey this is the sweet spot," here's where some of the items we want them to improve on. What would you say? >> I'd say for, I can at least say tactically with my team we are looking to enhance our solution is around burst and analytics. So that's definitely a best debris tool in the marketplace and so where we can integrate that into more products 'cause it's, Infor acquired it year and a half ago. So we're trying to fold it in with each product and keeping that trajectory. Where again a customer only has one platform to support for-- >> So that's kind of infusing that modern BI into the platforms. Functionally you're kind of happy with it. >> Oh absolutely. >> And it's just a matter of getting the function into-- >> Right. >> The sweet. >> Have it the defacto. >> Right. >> That's where we want to get. >> Right, right. >> But honestly if you just look at the floor out there, you know from our perspective, the great showing and the excitement and just the conversations that we have around Infor. There's been some confusion, I would say, from, without naming names, other competitors of Infor's on what is our cloud and digital road map and then when we look at Infor with cloud native, you know from the ground up, it makes that back to one of the questions you had on, depending on where customers are starting, if you can go from the beginning like Infor has done with some of their products, natively built cloud up. Then those are great conversations and we're seeing more of that in the market right now. >> When we talk to customers, when you talk to the sort of, traditional vendors, they'll say it's a hybrid world, which seems to be. >> It's true. >> When you talk to other cloud guys, it's like, cloud, cloud, cloud. Now even AWS has somewhat capitulated, they've made some announcements to do stuff on-prem. But logically it makes sense that if the data is in some data center location, it's probably going to stay there for a while if it's working and it's a lot of it and you don't necessarily want to move it to the cloud, so do you buy that? Is it a hybrid world? Will it stay a hybrid world? Or do you feel like the pendulum really is swinging into the cloud or not because of IoT, it's more sort of a decentralized world. What do you guys think? >> I think it's a customer choice. Sometimes we have some federally regulated customers that are concerned about data and security and not necessarily there yet in terms of the cloud and we have some customers that are wanting to go 100% cloud so I think it is definitely customer choice and we are there to advise them whether cloud is the right answer and even to help them implement and support them on their journey. So I think we've seen all, every which flavor of cloud, hybrid. >> From your stand point, whatever you want, you're going to-- >> Yeah, I'd say in the past two or three years there's definitely more clients, I would say most now will look at some, when they're doing their TCO and software selection, they absolutely will lead with, hey at least the core part, ERP part, for example, what can I do for cloud with that? 'Cause there's just so much-- >> Considerationalities. >> Yeah the consideration versus three, five years ago no you wouldn't look at that, but I do think there absolutely will be a hybrid foot print going forward. >> Well, if there's an affinity to cloud, presumably Infor has an advantage there, 'cause they're born on the cloud, or at least for that part of the business and other entrenched ERP is not going to be so easy to move to the cloud. In fact that's what you want to do. >> And I think we share the vision with Infor and talking to customers with the cloud first approach. It makes sense to move to the cloud. There is value in the cloud and we can help build that story for them. >> Charles Philips pretty smooth spokesperson, he's a clear thinker, he laid out the strategy. The strategy of, this is my fourth Inforum, I mean, it's grown, but it's consistent, you know, he presents it in a manner that I think is pretty compelling, so that's got to make you feel good, right? You got a leader that's committed, been here for a while. >> Yeah absolutely and one other thing that I really do like about coming to Inforum to see Charles is he actually gets it. If you think of it from CEO of a large software company with hundreds of products, he knows where they actually fit and can go through kind of the road map and the story. So very credible. >> The partnership's a win-win for sure. It certainly sounds like you've painted a very good picture and we appreciate the time. >> Yeah. >> Thanks for being with us and good luck the next couple of days here at the show. Have fun. >> Thank you. >> Appreciate the time. >> Should be, right? (laughing) Back with more live in Washington D.C., you're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

(techno music) >> Live, from Washington DC, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Public Sector Summit, 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone, this is the live CUBE coverage here in Washington DC for AWS Public Sector Summit 2018. This is the, kind of like the reinvent for Public Sector. I'm John Furrier, f my co-host Stu Miniman, our next guest is Hardik Bhatt, Smart Cities Vertical Lead for Amazon Web Services, been a former CIO, knows the state and local governments cold. This is a very key area around Internet of Things and technology with cloud, because smart cities have to do not only technology roll outs for some of the new capabilities, but all manage some of the societal changes, like self-driving cars and a variety of other things, from instrumenting sensors and traffic lights and video cam ... I mean, this is a little, just a little ... Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much, John. Good to see you, Stu, good morning. Looking forward to having a great conversation. >> So, smart cities obviously is really hot, but we love it, because it brings life, and work, life, and play together, because we all live in towns, and we live in cities, and the cities provide services to the residents, transportation, sidewalks, and things that we take for granted in the analog world. Now there's a whole digital set of services coming big time. So, are they prepared? (laughs) It used to be buy a mainframe, then move it to a minicomputer, get a Local Area Network, buy some PCs, buy some network tablets, now the cloud's here. What's your assessment of the smart cities landscape for state and local governments? Because it really is something that's on the front burner, in terms of figuring it out. What's the architecture? Lot of questions. What's your, what's the state of the union, if you will, for-- >> You know it has been, like, how the governments have been for many years, right? Governments exist so that they can provide better services, they can provide better quality of life, they can create an environment where businesses thrive, jobs can be created, education can be given, and you can build a workforce and talent, et cetera. And smart cities is just, I'd say, a trend where, you know, you're using multitudes of technology to kind of help the government get its mission accomplished in a smoother, faster, better, cheaper manner. And a lot of times, I've seen, because how smart cities movement started a decade ago, we kind of compare smart cities with the Internet of Things or the sensors, but smart cities is much more than just the IoT, or the Internet of Things, I mean if you're talking about creating a new stream of data that is real-time, whether coming in from sensors, coming from video, you already as a government, I used to be a CIO for the City of Chicago, we used petabytes of data that was already sitting in my data center, and then there's also this whole third-party data. So smart cities is a lot about how do you as a city are aggregating this different sources of data and then making some action from it, so that ultimately, going back to the city's priorities, you are giving better public safety, or you're providing better public health, or you're providing better education or you're providing, better providing government services. So that's what we are seeing. Our customers are, when we say smart cities, they jump right into, "What problems are you solving?" And that, to me, is the core for Amazon, core for Amazon Web Services. We want to know our customers' problems and then work backwards to solve them. >> What are some of the problems right now that are low-hanging fruit? Because obviously it's an evolution. You set the architecture up, but ultimately governments would love to have some revenue coming in from businesses. You mention that. Education is certainly there. What are some of the challenges there? Is it pre-existing stuff, or is it new opportunities? What are some of the trends you're seeing for use cases? It is actually both pre-existing stuff that they are trying to solve, as well the new stuff, the new opportunities that are getting created, because the technology is much different than what it used to be 10 years ago. The cloud, especially, is creating a lot more new opportunities, because of the nimbleness it brings, the agility it brings. So, in transportation side, we are seeing on one hand, multiple departments, multi-jurisdictional, so state transportation department, as well as a local transportation department, working together to create kind of a virtual information sharing environment or a virtual command center, so that they can detect an accident, a traffic incident, much quicker and respond to that, because now they can aggregate this data. And they're also now adding to that some public safety information. So whether it is a police department, fire department, EMS, so that they can address that incident quickly and then not only clear the traffic and clear the congestion, or reduce the congestion time, but they can also address the, any public safety issue that may have arisen out of that incident that has happened. So, the Department of Transportation, the USDOT, through the Federal Highway Administration, has been giving out $60 million worth of grants to six to ten recipients. The grant, this year's grant period, just closed on Monday, and we worked with multiple customers who are looking to kind of respond to that. So on one hand, it is that. So this is an age-old problem, but new technology can help you solve that. On the other hand, another customer that we worked with is looking for on-demand micro-transit solutions. As you can see, all the ride-sharing applications are making easier to jump in a car and move to one place to the other. It is causing a dip in transit ridership. So the public transit agents, they are looking for solutions to that. So they are looking at, "Can we build an on-demand microtransit "so you can pool your friends and jump into a transit van, as opposed to a private car?" And then you can go from point A to point B in a much more affordable manner. So they are looking at that. On the public health side, you know, we have the DC Benefits Exchange, Health Benefits Exchange, is on AWS, and they have seen significant savings. They have seen $1.8 million of annual savings because they are using cloud and cloud services. On the other hand, you have State of Georgia, which is using Alexa. So they have built Alexa Skills where you can ask, as a resident of State of Georgia getting SNAP benefit, the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance, the food-stamp program, you can say, "Alexa, what's my SNAP balance?" So based on the answer then, based on the balance you know, you can plan your, you know, where you're going to use that money. So we are seeing large volume of data now coming on the cloud where the governments are looking to move kind of the needle. We are also seeing this nimble, quick solutions that can start going out. And we are seeing a lot of driver behind the innovation is our City on a Cloud challenge. So we have seen the City on a Cloud winners, since last so many years, are kind of the ones who are driving innovation and they're also driving a lot of collaboration. So I can, there are three trends that I can jump into as we kind of talk more. >> Yeah, it's interesting. I think back a decade ago, when you talk smarter cities, you'd see this video, and it would look like something out of a science fiction. It's like, you know, "Oh, the flying taxi'll come, "and it will get you and everything." But what I, the stories I have when I talk to CIOs in cities and the like, it's usually more about, it's about data. It's about the underlying data, and maybe it's a mobile app, maybe it's a thing like Alexa Skills. So help us understand a little bit, what does the average citizen, what do they see? How does their, you know, greater transparency and sharing of information and collaboration between what the agencies are doing and, you know, the citizenship. >> I think that's a great question. I mean that is what, as a former CIO, I always had to balance between, what I do creates internal government efficiency, but the citizens don't feel it, don't see it, they don't, it doesn't get in the news media. And on the other hand, I also have to, to my governor, to my mayor, to the agency directors, have to give them visible wins. So, I'll give you an example, so City of Chicago, back in the day, in 2010 when I was the CIO. We did a contract with our AWS, currently AWS Partner Socrata, to open up the data. So that was kind of the beginning of the Open Data Movement, and eventually, I left the city, I went work for Cisco, and the city government continued to kind of build on top of Socrata. And they build what they called the Windy Grid, which is basically bringing all of their various sets of data, so 311, code violations, inspections, crime, traffic, and they built an internal data analytics engine. So now, agencies can use that data. And now, what they did, two years ago, they were one of the City on a Cloud Challenge winners, and they, Uturn Data Solutions is our partner that was the winner of that, and they built Chicago Open Grid. So they basically opened that up on a map-based platform. So now as a citizen of Chicago, I can go on Chicago Open Grid, and I can see which restaurants in, surrounding my area, have failed inspections. Have they failed inspection because of a mice infestation, or was it something very minor, so I can decide whether I want to go to that restaurant or not. I can also look at the crime patterns in my area, I can look at the property values, I can look at the education kind of quality in the schools in my neighborhood. So, we have seen kind of now, and it's all on AWS cloud. >> This open data is interesting to me. Let's take that to another level. That's just the user side of it, there's also a delivery value. I saw use cases in Chicago around Health and Human Services, around being more efficient with either vaccines, or delivery of services based on demographics and other profile, all because of open data. So this brings up a question that comes up a lot, and we're seeing here is a trend, is Amazon Web Services public sector has been really good. Teresa Carlson has done an amazing job leaning on partners to be successful. Meaning it's a collaboration. What's that like in the state and local government? What's the partner landscape look like? What are the benefits for partners to work with AWS? Because it seems obvious to me, it might not be obvious to them. But if they have an innovative idea, whether it's to innovate something on the edge of the network in their business, they can do it, and they can scale with Amazon. What is the real benefits of partnering with AWS? >> You hit a key point on there. Teresa has done a fantastic job in customer management as well as building our partners. Similarly, we have a great leader within the state and local government, Kim Majerus. She leads all of our state and local government business. And her focus is exactly like Teresa: How can we help the customers, and also how can we enable partners to help customers? So I'll give you and example. The City of Louisville in Kentucky. They were a City on a Cloud winner, and they, basically what they're building with a partner of ours, Slingshot, they (laughs) get, I was, I used to be in Traffic Management Authority, back in my days, and we used to do traffic studies. So, basically, they send an intern out with clicker or have those black strips to count the number of cars, and based on that, we can plan whether we want to increase the signal timing on this approach, or we can plan the detours if we close the street, what's the, and it's all manual. It used to take, cost us anywhere from 10 to 50 thousand dollars, every traffic study. So what Louisville did with Slingshot is they got the free Waze data that they get gives all of the raw traffic information. Slingshot brought that on to a AWS platform, and now they are building a traffic analysis tool, which now you can do like a snap of a finger, get the analysis and you can manage the signal-approach timing. The cool thing about this is, they're building it in open source code. And the code's available on GitHub, and I was talking to the Chief Data Officer of Louisville, who's actually going to be speaking at this event later today. 12 other cities have already looked into this. They've started to download the code, and they are starting to use it. So, collaboration through partners also enables collaboration amongst all of our customers. >> And also, I'd just point out, that's a great example, love that, and that's new for me to hear that. But also, to me the observation is, it's new data. So being able to be responsive, to look at that opportunity. Now, it used to be in the old world, and I'm sure you can attest to this, being a CIO back in the day, is okay, just say there's new data available, you have to provision IT. >> Oh my God, yeah. >> I mean, what, old way, new way. I mean, compare and contrast the time it would take to do that with what you can do today. >> It's a big, huge difference. I'll tell you as the CIO for the State of Illinois, when I started in early 2015, in my first performance management session, I asked my Infrastructure Management Team to give me the average days it takes to build a server, 49 days. I mean, you're talking seven weeks or maybe, if you talk, 10 business weeks. It's not acceptable. I mean the way the pace of innovation is going, with AWS on cloud, you are talking about minutes you can spin up that server. And that's what we are seeing, a significant change, and that's why Louisville-- >> And I think you got to think it's even worse when you think about integration, personnel requirements, the meetings that have to get involved. It's a nightmare. Okay, so obviously cloud, we know cloud, we love cloud, we use cloud ourselves. So I got to ask you this could, City in a Cloud program, which we've covered in the past, so last year had some really powerful winners. This has been a very successful program. You're involved in it, you have unique insights, you've been on both sides of the table. How is that going? How is it inspiring other cities? What's the camaraderie like? What's the peer review? Is there a peer, is there a network building? How is that spreading? >> That is actually enabling collaboration in a significant manner. Because, you know, you are openly telling what you want to do, and then you are doing that. Everybody is watching you. Like Louisville is a perfect example where they built this, they're building this, and they're going to share it through open source code to all the cities. 12 is just the beginning. I'd not be surprised if there are 120 cities that are going to do this. Because who doesn't want to save two hundred, three hundred thousand dollars a year? And also lots of time to do the traffic studies. Same thing we have seen with, as Virginia Beach is building their Early Flood Warning System. There are other cities who are looking into, like how do we, New Orleans? And others are looking at, "How do we take what Virginia Beach has built? "And how can we use it for us?" And yesterday, they announced this year of the winners that includes Las Vegas, that includes LA Information Technology Department, that includes the City of Philadelphia, and I've been in conversations with all of the CIOs, CDOs, and the leaders of these agencies. The other thing, John, I have seen is, there's a phenomenal leadership that's out there right now in the cities and states that they want to innovate, they want to collaborate, and they want to kind of make a big difference. >> Hold on, hold on, so one more question, this is a really good question, want to get, follow-up on that. But this, what you're talking about to me signifies really the big trend going on right now in this modern era. You've got large cloud scale. You have open source, open sharing, and collaboration happening. This is the new network effect. This is the flywheel. This is uniquely different. This kind of categorizes cloud. And this wasn't available when IT systems and processes were built, 20, 30 years ago. I mean, this is the big shift, you, I mean do you agree? >> Absolutely, this is the big shift, the availability of the cloud, the ubiquitous nature of mobile platform that people have. The newer way of, like, the natural language processing, use of Alexa is becoming so prevalent in government. I mean, in City of Chicago, 50% of the 311 calls that we used to get in 2010, 3 1/2 million of those were informational in nature. If I could offload that on to my Alexa Skills, I can free up my workforce, the 311 call-takers, to do much better, higher-level, you know, call-taking, as opposed to this. So you're absolutely right. I've seen the trends we are seeing is, there is lots of collaboration going on between the governments and partners. I'm also seeing the governments are going at modernization from different points based on their pain points. And I'm also seeing a definite acceleration in modernization. Government, because the technology, AWS, the cloud, our services that we are seeing. And the pace of innovation that AWS brings is also enabling the acceleration in governments. >> Yeah, to help put a point on the, on the conversation here, there's been for years discussion about, "Well, what is the changing role of the CIO?" You've sat on that side of the table, you know, worked with lots of COs, what do you see is the role of the future for the CIO when, specifically when you talk state and local governments? >> I would say CIO is the kind of has to be an enabler of government services. Because if I go back to my city days and working with a mayor, or my state days, working with a governor, at the end of the day, the governor or the mayor is looking at creating better quality of life, providing better health, better education, better safety, et cetera. And CIO is kind of the key partner in that metrics to enable what the governor, what the mayor, the agency directors want to do. And because now data enables the CIO to kind of quickly give solutions, or AI services, Alexa and Polly and Rekog ... All of these things give you, give me as a CIO, ability to provide quick wins to the mayor, to the governor, and also very visible wins. We are seeing that, you know, CIO is becoming a uniquely positioned individual and leader to kind of enable the government. >> All right, thanks so much for comin' on theCUBE. Love the insight, love to follow up. You bring a great perspective and great insight and Amazon's lucky to have you on the team. Lot of great stuff goin' on in the cities and local governments. It's a good opportunity for you guys. Thanks for coming on, appreciate it. >> Thank you very much. >> It's theCUBE live here in Washington DC for AWS, Amazon Web Services Public Sector Summit, I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, again second year of live coverage. It's a packed house, a lot of great cloud action. Again, the game has changed. It's a whole new world, cloud scale, open source, collaboration, mobile, all this new data's here. This is the opportunity, this is what theCUBE's doing. We're doin' our part, sharing the data with you. Stay with us, more coverage from day two, here in Washington, after this short break. (techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Boston Massachusetts it's theCUBE covering ZertoCON 2018. Brought to you by Zerto. >> This is theCUBE, I'm Paul Gillin. We're here in Boston for ZertoCON and with me is Rob Strechay. He's the Senior Vice President of Product for Zerto and Rob, I understand here you have one of the big items of news is Zerto 7 is being announced. Tell us about what's new in Zerto 7. >> Yeah, so we're announcing Zerto 7, it'll be out in Q1 of 2019. We're real excited because really it's the first time that the IT Resiliance Platform that we've put out will also include in the convergence of backup, disaster recovery and cloud mobility all into one singular platform. We've been building upon this platform for years. People have come to know us for continuous data protection and our journal-based data protection. And now we're extending that over time to give people a better view and better resiliancy across near-term and the long-term. >> Alright now I think of back up as being kind of table stakes in the resiliance game, but the backup features are actually new for you in this release. Is that right? >> Absolutely. What we've done is enhance what we had. We had some backup features in there already. We already got used for recovering for things like ransom-ware used in our journal level file recovery where people can go back like a DVR, a few seconds before they got hit. Be able to pull the file, folder, or entire virtual machine back and pull that out like if you were using a backup. In fact, much quicker our customers tell us than Legacy Backup. But table stakes is having enhanced indexing and search capabilities across all of your different platforms. Having dedicated workflows that are integrated into the current recovery workflows. Things of that nature, that really are in Zerto 7 that would take us to the next level. >> Now backup is a fairly painful process for most IT Admins though, what is Zerto doing to make that simpler? >> Yeah, I think the great thing is we have over 6,000 customers already that utilize us and trust us for data protection on a daily basis. We're extending those workflows to say okay, I need a weekly, a monthly, a quarterly, or a daily even and I want to keep that for a certain amount of time. Right now they would see maybe one day to 30 days back in what we call our Journal. And now we're extending that so they see the points in time beyond that and helps to simplify those workflows for those customers. Because, really the complexity comes from I have a media server, I have single points of failure, I have to worry about did I get that backup or not. The journal technology we have actually alleviates that. Plus, we've been doing this at scale for many years with many thousands of customers and we know that that's been one of the pain points for our customers around backup too. We didn't take this lightly to go further into this market. We thought that, really, the market was ripe for convergence of these products. >> Alright, now go one layer deeper on journaling. I mean that's a technology that's been around for a long time, but really not so much in the backup space. What are you doing that's different with your approach to journaling? >> Yeah, so we actually brought this out back in 2011, so we've been doing it for about seven years now. And we took a different approach to disaster recovery. Allows for a lot more granular recovery in seconds. So you have recovery point objectives that are very near and then you get quicker recovery time objectives, as well. So, a lot of this journaling technology was how do you have the right order fidelity of all of these systems as an application? Now doing that and saying okay I want to take a point in time and I want to keep it as my gold copy for three months because I have a business or a corporate mandate that says this is the retention periods that I have. Really brings together what we've been doing in journaling for years as we went from being the first to put out a hypervisor-based replication and journaling system. Then we took it to what they call the DR as a surface market when we took customers to public cloud in 2014 and back from public cloud in 2016 and now we really have any-to-any technology across those different platforms all using that same underlying journaling technology. But it does it in different ways in clouds versus say VMware's hypervisor. >> Now how do you coordinate the complexity of that environment? You've got customers who have some backup on prims, some backup in the cloud that maybe have multiple clouds. How do you coordinate all that backup? >> Yeah, I think it's been really one of the things we've been working on for some amount of time already. So they're starting to see the fruits of our labor about how you have a distributed, scalable system that automatically does that. So, we're not just a replication engine or just a journaling system, we actually embed the orchestration in automation into the system. That way it's wrapped in. It's kind of like having an engine and having the steering wheel at the same time. Then we wrap a nav system, which is our analytics product, around that to give people guidance on how to utilize it. So, to your point, we try to make it easy. In fact one of our pillars is it better be simple, like real simple, otherwise we don't ship it. >> There are a lot of vendors in the various aspects backup, DR market, how is Zerto differentiating itself? >> Yeah, I think that we're not doing backup. We're doing a completely different way of taking this. Backup has been done typically either with agents or with snapshot technology. Maybe you go back four hours in time if you get hit with ransom-ware. Because we already have and can see that data, in the journal, seconds of granularity. So say somebody's loading a database on a Friday night and doing an ETL into the database, of a terabyte of data. We'll see that terabyte go in and all those changes happen. You could actually utilize the journal after you've actually done the load so you can take a pre and a post copy of that. So I have before I made the changes and after I made the changes which really helps customers in a unique way. >> You get into some very large file sizes, I would imagine, when you're doing that many copies of data How do you manage the volumes? >> Yeah, we have some technology inside the product that is space efficient, uses things such as compression and other types of technology. For doing the backup and in Zerto 7 for long-term retention or secondary storage we're partnering with people like HPE and their StoreOnce product set. We have other partners of ours like Exit Grid here and their NFS enabled secondary storage. Plus we'll use some of the typical S3, SMB, as well as cloud-based as targets because we think that they have some of that built-in hardware and built-in technology that really does a better job of doing the compaction. We're not trying to be a purpose built appliance for everybody, we look at being a software company and leveraging those really good secondary storage devices and clouds as the targets. >> One of the themes of the conference we heard John Morency of Gartner talking about this morning was resilience and really moving beyond backup and disaster recovery to business resilience. How well are your customers taking to that message? >> It's amazing, I think that when I go out and talk to our customer CIOs and VPs of Infrastructure or even just to Sys Admins, they're looking for resiliancy. They're looking for a single product that can bring together backup, disaster recovery and that cloud mobility. I think, you heard one of our customers up on stage with Morency, Jamie from Takata, that really has embraced that. They're actually, kind of, I would say pushing the cutting edge of seven different cloud providers and utilizing us as that platform. >> Paul: By design seven different cloud providers. >> Yeah, by design and part of that is if you look at GVPR and all the different regulations across the world they have to deal with, it's easier for them. But they know that they utilizes us as an IT Resilience platform that enables them to go those different places. >> You mentioned ransom-ware earlier, have you seen the growth of ransom-ware continue or is that now slowing down finally being displaced by crypto-mining and some other. >> I think that it's always there. I think that it flares up from time to time. And it's not a, as Ziv, our CEO and Founder, said yesterday, it's not if you're going to get hit by ransom-ware, it's when. And I think that being resilient and having a resiliency in depth type of approach really is important for that as well. >> So, in the time that we've got left talk about the future. What's the road map for Zerto going forward the next couple of years? >> Yeah, so this year we're laying out the IT Resilience platform, building it out and continuing to build upon what we've done as we see and where we see a lot of our customers going. Containers are a big thing and we see that infusion of containers in our customer base is growing rapidly. So we'll be looking at some new approaches to that. And we think we're uniquely positioned based on our underlying technology to take advantage of that. Cloud-born apps are a big one, as well. But because we're already in the cloud working with Azure as one of our key partners and Amazon, as well, we get to see how these all come together. And we have a unique seat at the table for going forward. >> Rob, I can't let you go without asking you to stand up please and show the camera the official Zerto colors. If anyone is walking the walk here it's Rob Strechay wearing pants of the official Zerto color. Where do you find pants of that color? >> You can find them, the great thing is being in Massachusetts there's a lot of different companies that make Nantucket Red, which is not really Nantucket Red, it's more like a Fire Engine Red, but these in particular I had made for me for this conference this week, so. >> I figure you can find anything in the Boston area. >> Absolutely. >> Rob Strechay, thank you very much for joining us. >> Rob: Much appreciate it, thanks for having me on. >> I'm Paul Gillin, this is theCUBE. (tech music)

>> Narrator: Live from Nassau in the Bahamas. It's The Cube. Covering Polycon 18, brought to you by Polymath. >> Welcome back, everyone, this is The Cube exclusive coverage at Polycon 18, put on by Grid Capital and Polymath, of course The Cube is independent publishing, digital TV and research. Of course we're covering all the action this year in the crypto-space blockchain, crypto-currency token economics. Big news here with Polymath is announcing a partnership. We've got Trevor Koverko is the CEO of Polymath Amir Kaltak, CEO at Lexit. You guys just came off stage and announced a partnership. Your ecosystem is growing, you guys are enabling platform. Talk about the relationship. >> You want to start? >> Please, I insist. >> Alright, fine. So awhile ago we just realized that what Trevor and his team are doing is just fitting right in what we do. We, the marketplace for M&A, helping to liquidize assets, and a security token, in its purest form, is an asset. So we want to help, we want to work together and create an ecosystem in the future between Polymath and Lexit, that is basically the thing that we want to figure out and how to do it. >> Yeah, no, we're big fans of the project, and more importantly the team behind the project. That's always what we look for when it comes to any investment, or purchase, or partnership. We're really excited. >> This is really a great sign for you guys. Congratulations, Polymath and Lexit, you guys are growing companies. This is the magic of platforms, right? You guys have collaboration, ecosystem partners really become instrumental for you guys, so it's a good sign. You get the leverage, the platform, you get some time to market faster, time to value, this is what it's all about, right? >> I believe that security tokens are going to be a big part of our future revenue on Lexit itself, and I can't miss out on that one, and I'm happy that we meet at that early stage, so to say, where everything happens. Where we set the path into the future. So let's see what happens. >> Amir I want to ask you, as someone who's partnered (inaudible), why Polymath? What was compelling for you? What was the reason? Obviously they have a secure token, so it's a platform, and it's a trend that's your friend right now. So why Polymath? >> There are multiple ones. Trend isn't that right, but the thing is, I'm old school, right? If somebody I know and trust tells me this is a great person I need to talk to, this is a great project, then I do it. So, Tim Frost of Taurus Solutions was the guy who connected us in New York on a brief meeting, and now more and more, and so this is how we started. And I go with my gut feeling. If I see a sincere man, I see a sincere man, and I would like to work with him. >> Great. Platform-wise, API's, how's it going to work? You guys, can you share any details? I missed the announcement because we were doing Cube interviews. What was announced on stage? >> For me, this is kind of what I've been echoing all week. It's all about building the components of this ecosystem. We're trying to, literally, re-imagine Wall Street, and to do that it requires new forms of structure formation of capital. So we have private equity, we have mergers and acquisitions, we have venture capital, and with Polymath we're just trying to be the base layer that other exciting projects like Lexit can build on top of. >> What are some of the most important things in the platform, Amir, that you like? Just get under the hood a little bit. What's, what about Polymath is going to be a good deal for you guys? What's the key? Is it saving time, is it the certain things on the platform? What specifically about these guys- >> Free t-shirts? >> Free t-shirts definitely. And after that, the free t-shirt contest. What contest? I'm kidding. No, to me it's like, look, you want to have a security token, right? And then there are multiple jurisdictions, and there's a lot of legal compliance. It's a mountain of work in front of you. Those guys figured out how to do this simple and reliable for all of us. >> Kind of like what you're doing on the M&A side, except they do it for the security token. >> Sort of. >> Always breaking down barriers, that's the name of the game. That's the definition of an entrepreneur. >> Removing the blockers in front of you is the key, and not to waste time on management cycles, on things that someone else's doing. That, to me, it good partnership. Sounds like that's what you guys are offering, right? >> Absolutely. >> Absolutely. >> Alright, guys, well thank you for sharing the news. A final word, >> John, thank you. >> What do you see as the outlook, partnerships, you guys going to make some money together, you've got to build the product out first? How's the sequence, the order of operations of the partnership? Share the quick overview, then we'll end the segment. >> So we have a lot of work ahead of us. And right now it's about getting Polymath, the demo is out, the alpha is out, it's live, you can use it. And my biggest party right now is getting the application layer to the market, and that simply means a user interface, drag and drop, point and click, and that is my life right now. So once we get that out the door, these guys are ready. >> The thing is we are launching globally, full developed, since two years away in develop, in June. And soon after that, we will hopefully be ready for their platform. But, speaking of that, it's public now, but we will work closely right away to figure out how to optimize everything in between our systems. So it's going to be an ongoing process where we to be careful with resources, of course, but it's going to happen during this year, I hope. >> Amen. >> Well congratulations on the building blocks of success, you've got to start with the core. This is The Cube bringing a live coverage from the Bahamas. Big news here on the partnerships of the two companies, Polymath and Lexit. Look for more coverage. We'll be right back with more coverage after this short break. (techno music)

>> Hi welcome to Wikibon's weekly Friday research meeting. Here on the queue. (tech music) >> I'm Peter Burris. We've assembled a gus team of analysts to discuss a very very important topic. Block chain. Now block chain means a lot of things to a lot of different people. Partly because there hasn't been a lot of practical utilization of it. We've talked a lot about bitcoin and ethereum and some other applications of block chain related technologies. But it's very clear that what block chain will become is more than what it is. And to try to unpack that and really understand block chain from the perspective of business decision makers, CIOs and IT. And the IT industry, we want to talk a little bit about what block chain is. What some of the key applications are. And what's it's going to mean from a technology design and investment standpoint over the next few years. Now to kick us off, we've asked David Floyer to start with a little observation on. Let's talk a bit about what is block chain David? >> Okay well block chain is a very exciting set of new technologies. But at heart it's the shared immutable ledger. So lets us go down one level from that. It allows consensus, it allows all of the participants to agree on its validity. It allows provenance to know exactly what has happened. The history of what's happened. It allows immutability so that no participant can tamper with a transaction or an asset value. And is now allows finality. A single shared ledger provided in one place. So that they can track the ownership of an asset or the completion of transaction. So the second concept's really important. Where are we applying this? And where need to apply this in any sort of business network. Assets can be real or they can be virtual. They can be widgets that you count or they can be IP for example. So the core of it is a business network. So what's the problem that it solves? The key problem that it solves is that in order to have those characteristics. Of consensus, provenance, immutability, finality. You, society had to put together very complex systems indeed. So give a few example of those, stock exchanges need to be created. Around the value of stocks then they were sold and the transactions. Credit card companies, the Swift banking system. Diamond dealers for example have to had a system by which they could know the provenance and value of these assets. These systems were essentially centralized. They were centralized and controlled centrally. Or there was a very very sophisticated complex trust and honor system. Some of the systems that have been put in place particularly in the Middle East. And they're expensive. The transaction cost is high for doing that. And companies that have allowed themselves to be in control of these, can take a high percentage. A large amount of money out of this. But they make a lot of money by owning this right to manage. This provenance, this immutable ledger. So the value of block chain is that we can cut down that cost and we can create many more smaller business networks. Which can us focus on a small area and get the same result as this big complex thing we had before. >> But a crucial feature is that David, is going to be the question of design. We're going to have to set these things up and design them right. And that's going to have a lot of implications for how businesses work. So John if I take a look at some of the applications of this. David talked about immutability, finality, provenance etc. And how it's going to take transaction costs out of the system. Where do we envision block chain's going to end up within the application framework? >> I think the key thing that on the application. There's a many series of use. Cause there's low hanging fruit today and then ones that people are connecting the dots in the future. The fundamental application impact really comes down to. Where the confusion and clarity come from. The difference between decentralized and distributed. That's often confused and I think applications purpose. The outcome of applications is really how people work and engage and create value. And the measure of that is how authority and control are provisioned. Distributed and decentralized has a unique difference there. That's a fundamental architectural thing that David pointed out. When it comes to block chain people get confused. They think bitcoin, they think ethereum. That's kind of on the currency side and the crypto side. But the momentum around decentralization goes much farther than that. So you're seeing things like energy systems. Grid Plus had a presale that was over $40 million. They're changing the game on how energy may be used and managed. The government, political sovereignty is changing. A breakthrough in science for instance. Crypser and other labs make opportunities for decentralized labs. Crowdfunding is an obvious one. You see that really get a lot of traction. Space exploration is one. Open source software, you're going to see a lot of activity there. Personal health monitoring, online educational systems, security. These are tell signs that the game will shift in terms of the new architecture. And then the impact will be the creative destruction around that. And how things are done so we were talking before we went on. About the role of horse and buggy verses a car. A mechanic on a car is not the same person managing the horse and buggy. That's the role of the service provider market. A lawyer is going to be very instrumental or legal but in new context. So the applications are going to morph around that, you're going to see people who deal with. Used cases like tokens, example that's hence the token sale. But applications that are already solving some of these problems with their business. Block chain opens up the door for a lot more head room for competitive advantage and value creation. I think that's where the action is. >> So Dave Valente, I want to bring you into this conversation very quickly. And try to build upon what John just talked about, this notion of the difference between distributed and decentralized. Distributed is kind of where things are. Decentralized is more of a state about authority. What kind of observations do we initially make about how block chain is going to impact the whole concept of authority within communities and markets? >> I think that's right I do think there are some subtle but important differences between distributed and decentralized. If you look at the internet initially and today. It's distributed but power increasingly has become centralized and that's problematic. Because it exposes us to a number of things. High value breaches if that power is centralized. Manipulation, surveillance risks, etc. I think there are you know some characteristics to look at that are relevant here. The distributive nature of that block chain, the immutability, and the lack of need or no need for single trusted third parties. So the distributed nature of the block chain verses that decentralized internet if you will. To use that as an analogy dramatically decreases those exposures. And it's much more inclusive. >> So when you think about that notion of inclusivity. We do have to come back to the idea that, we have certain ways. David you mentioned about how we're doing things today. Relatively high transaction cost but a few parties making an enormous amount of money but administering those transaction costs. And now we're talking about going to something that does inherently look more like a peer to peer but requires an enormous amount of upfront design. James Kobielus, talk a little bit about how we envision the transition. From where we are today to where certain attributes of these applications are going to be in the future. Are we going to need things like PKI? What is going to be the near term implications at a business level? >> Yeah. You know I agree with everything that Dave and John said about the business environment. Word going is that, what's fundamentally innovative about block chain. The evolution of distributive collaboration is a really clever commerce. It builds upon immutable distributive public identity. PKI, that's what PKI is all about. PKI has been around for a while. And adds to it an immutable distributed public ledger. And in the public ledger itself then the block chain becomes the foundation for distributed decentralized market places. With that said. Where it's going is that, increasingly there will be. Layered onto block chain, more standard interchange formats to enable various types of collaboration or interaction amongst various types of entity. And various types of business networks. I guess it's just the foundation for really a truly distributed peer to peer environment. At it's very heart there is still. As it were more centralized infrastructure called PKI with certification authorities and root CAs. That's not going away. That's becoming ever more fundamental the whole PKI infrastructure that's been build up. >> So David Foyer if I were to listen to this conversation as a CIO. I might think that this is going to be somebody else's problem. Lets take this down inside the business. What is it that a CIO needs to think about? This notion of distributed networks of data that both represent data and it can represent other assets? And what're some of the things that I need to start thinking about, inside my business? Is block chain really just at an economy level? Or is it going to have an impact on how I think about architecting, building, conceiving, deploying, and managing systems? >> So there's no shortcut to good systems design. People design very complex centralized systems. And they're going to need to design systems that work together. Especially when you go real time. So it's relatively simple to have batch systems which can catch up and things like that. But if you want to get the real value of block chain, it's going to be doing things in real time. So it's for example, if you're in a car and you want to get data from other cars. And you want to be able to feed data into that, to optimize on where you should have lunch or the best route to take. All of that data has to be done in real time. So what needs to be done is to make sure. As in any design of system that you have sufficient power, you have the network which is fast enough. And these types of systems because of their encryption because there's a lot of work that needs to be done to make them immutable and all the other characteristics. These systems take a lot more power to drive. >> David let me, let me jump in for a second. So one of the key differences just so we're clear. Is that we build these centralized systems and historically we've created a data store. That in a centralized system is under centralized control. And we serialize all access to that data through that centralized control. Fundamentally what we're talking, and that creates latency. Both on what's on the wire but also latency in terms of the path link. Of handling that serialization software through the system. What we're fundamentally talking about here is decentralizing that control. Putting the data everywhere but decentralizing that control. So we're not serializing anything through a central authority. That's fundamentally what we're doing right? >> Yes but a little caution there. You still got to have processed it in all of the nodes and for you to be able to get it. And you still got to make sure that all of that work's been done. >> That's all decentralized. >> It is decentralized but you still if people aren't keeping up to date up to time. You will still have a serialization impact. Eventually yes. >> So George think about from a peer to peer standpoint. What does this mean from thinking not just about designing systems at a grand scale but on a smaller scale. Can envision how block chain might be used to better marry identity, authority, and incentives as we think about building systems within a business? >> Well you had talked about the upfront design requirements. You talked about the upfront design requirements in organizational design enabled by this. At the risk of sounding big picture, this technology makes it easier to have an ecosystem of peer to peer companies that cooperate. Typically in the past we've had like supply chain masters. And they've sort of disseminated demand signals and collective supply signals. That was the central coordination, central trust sort of clearing house. And having the data distributed. The data distributed but this one system of record which essentially is logically centralized. Makes it easier to have a new sort of a new ecosystem design. >> So fundamentally we're talking about the idea of design very very large. In the sene of the degree to which we have to diminish the expectation that we'll fix design problems later on. We're going to have to do a lot of design work upfront. So David I want to close this conversation by bringing it down to the middle so to speak. Because when we think about unigrid and the idea of highly elastic, highly plastic systems. Where data's flying around and five milliseconds away from any other data kind of thing. There's going to be a need to envision how we can manage all of those applications or user problems within a system. In a way that sustains integrity of the data. Does block chain have a role to play inside the system and how we allocate resources? How we allocate data? What do you think? >> I think that's a very astute observation because one of the issues at heart here is ensuring that the system itself is not tampered with. The chips or the any part of it. So there is a role here potentially for block chain to be the arbiter of truth within the system itself. Or within the systems themselves. Now that is not here yet and that's got to be something which works super suer fast. It has to work in a way which allows the rest of the system to do its work. So it's going to be extremely interesting technology change to put it in there. But the value of it would be enormous. If you can trust then that the system itself. The chips, all of the. Everything within that system. For example you can take a snapshot these days which are very quick indeed. And if you can track that track all of the activities. You will have much greater confidence in the system itself. But that's not here yet and I suspect that's going to be quite a few years before those are put into the microcode etc. >> So John Furrier. That has an implication where we start thinking about control, authority. What's this going to mean? >> I mean David talks about the network aspect in the system's level. >> The systems of control you guys are getting at. But the edge of the network is where the action is, if you look at all the accessible block chain. You're seeing the edge of the network really be the economies of scale. And that's where, people call this the future of work. All this nonsense out there is true but the action for the people getting value are the ones that have economies of scale that go beyond their current economies of scale centralized systems. So you're seeing edge of the network type things. Crowdsourcing, edge of the network, of autonomous vehicles. You mentioned that used case. So the edge of the network paradigm that we've been researching at Wikibon. In covering on SiliconANGLE and on the cube of the events. Fundamental in this new exploration area. So for CIOs and for businesses trying to grab block chain. Which is different than the crypto currency piece, working together with tokens and block chain, is an edge of the network value proposition. As you go beyond centralization. Hence decentralization and distributed working together that's where the action is. The people that are realizing the benefits there and so companies that are evaluating their position. These of the block chain and crypto should be evaluating. Our we exploring these kinds of things? And that's where the filter is. >> Yeah so I'd say here's what I'd say just before I summarize gentlemen. I think you're right, I think that block chain that we as we've written on our Wikibon research. Folks have to design around the edge whether block chain's there or not. But block chain is going to ultimately make it easier to enact those designs over a period of time. Okay let me summarize guys. Great conversation today about block chain and our objective here is to bring it down from the level of magic, the level of potential. The level of someday into the level of practical. And I think what we've done is we've talked about block chain in a couple of different ways. First off, block chain is an immutable ledger that is decentralized in the sense that. A lot of different agents can gain control of a piece of data in a way that everybody else knows where it is and who has it. And that opens up an enormous amount of new application forms. We talked about what some of those application forms are. They can be open source software having an enormous new way of thinking about it. How they monetize work day performed. We've talked about how business networks can be established at a large and small scale That are capable of now but having a centralized authority that becomes the clearing house but rather reduce the transaction cost of deploying and running those networks. However all this means ultimately that the issue of design becomes that much more important. Block chain is not a magic technology. You just don't establish a block chain. It absolutely requires upfront thinking about what is it that you're trying to perform what is the work, what is the context that the block chain is trying to manage from an overall security standpoint? That's going to require a lot of very collaborative work between the CIO, the IT organization, the business and very importantly the lawyers. And that's not going to go away. We will see near term a number of interesting efforts from existing authorities. Folks who are handling public infrastructure, Swift and other types of networks try to use block chain as a mechanism. And that's likely to have some important queues as to how this is going to play out. But ultimately what CIOs need to do is they need to turn to somebody and they need to say, go understand block chain in an architectural level. So we can think about how we're going to build applications for communities that operate differently. Now the final point that I want to make here is that it's likely that we will block chain or block chain like technologies. Actually go deeper into systems as a way of arbitrating access to data and other resources within some of these highly elastic very a large scale unigrid like systems that we're talking about building. Definitely something to watch, not here today but likely something that's going to start hitting the market next few years. What's the action item? CIOs need to understand that block chain is not magic, it's not something that somebody else is going to do. You have to get someone on the issue of block chain architecture right now. Understand block chain design issues right now so that you can deploy block chain in small ways. But absolutely participate in the process of your business starting to enter into business networks that are likely to be mediated by block chain like technologies. Don't worry so much about bitcoin or ethereum. Watch those currencies, they're going to be important. But that's not really where the action is going to be over the next few years. The action is going to be how we think about bringing data and authority and identity closer to the work that's going to be performed increasingly at the edge. Utilizing a decentralized authority mechanism. And block chain right now is the best option we have. Thanks very much for observing us once again have an open conversation about a crucial research matter. This is Wikibon's research meeting on the cube. Until next time. (techy music)