>>Hey guys and girls, welcome back to Motor City, Lisa Martin here with John Furrier on the Cube's third day of coverage of Coon Cloud Native Con North America. John, we've had some great conversations over the last two and a half days. We've been talking about identity and security management as a critical need for enterprises within the cloud native space. We're gonna have another quick conversation >>On that. Yeah, we got a great segment coming up from someone who's been in the industry, a long time expert, running a great company. Now it's gonna be one of those pieces that fits into what we call super cloud. Others are calling cloud operating system. Some are calling just Cloud 2.0, 3.0. But there's definitely a major trend happening around how cloud is going Next generation. We've been covering it. So this segment should be >>Great. Let's unpack those trends. One of our alumni is back with us, O Rika Zi, co-founder and CEO of Aerio. Omri. Great to have you back on the >>Cube. Thank you. Great to be here. >>So identity move to the cloud, Access authorization did not talk to us about why you found it assertive, what you guys are doing and how you're flipping that script. >>Yeah, so back 15 years ago, I helped start Azure at Microsoft. You know, one of the first few folks that you know, really focused on enterprise services within the Azure family. And at the time I was working for the guy who ran all of Windows server and you know, active directory. He called it the linchpin workload for the Windows Server franchise, like big words. But what he meant was we had 95% market share and all of these new SAS applications like ServiceNow and you know, Workday and salesforce.com, they had to invent login and they had to invent access control. And so we were like, well, we're gonna lose it unless we figure out how to replace active directory. And that's how Azure Active Directory was born. And the first thing that we had to do as an industry was fix identity, right? Yeah. So, you know, we worked on things like oof Two and Open, Id Connect and SAML and Jot as an industry and now 15 years later, no one has to go build login if you don't want to, right? You have companies like Odd Zero and Okta and one login Ping ID that solve that problem solve single sign-on, on the web. But access Control hasn't really moved forward at all in the last 15 years. And so my co-founder and I who were both involved in the early beginnings of Azure Active directory, wanted to go back to that problem. And that problem is even bigger than identity and it's far from >>Solved. Yeah, this is huge. I think, you know, self-service has been a developer thing that's, everyone knows developer productivity, we've all experienced click sign in with your LinkedIn or Twitter or Google or Apple handle. So that's single sign on check. Now the security conversation kicks in. If you look at with this no perimeter and cloud, now you've got multi-cloud or super cloud on the horizon. You've got all kinds of opportunities to innovate on the security paradigm. I think this is kind of where I'm hearing the most conversation around access control as well as operationally eliminating a lot of potential problems. So there's one clean up the siloed or fragmented access and two streamlined for security. What's your reaction to that? Do you agree? And if not, where, where am I missing that? >>Yeah, absolutely. If you look at the life of an IT pro, you know, back in the two thousands they had, you know, l d or active directory, they add in one place to configure groups and they'd map users to groups. And groups typically corresponded to roles and business applications. And it was clunky, but life was pretty simple. And now they live in dozens or hundreds of different admin consoles. So misconfigurations are rampant and over provisioning is a real problem. If you look at zero trust and the principle of lease privilege, you know, all these applications have these course grained permissions. And so when you have a breach, and it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when you wanna limit the blast radius of you know what happened, and you can't do that unless you have fine grained access control. So all those, you know, all those reasons together are forcing us as an industry to come to terms with the fact that we really need to revisit access control and bring it to the age of cloud. >>You guys recently, just this week I saw the blog on Topaz. Congratulations. Thank you. Talk to us about what that is and some of the gaps that's gonna help sarto to fill for what's out there in the marketplace. >>Yeah, so right now there really isn't a way to go build fine grains policy based real time access control based on open source, right? We have the open policy agent, which is a great decision engine, but really optimized for infrastructure scenarios like Kubernetes admission control. And then on the other hand, you have this new, you know, generation of access control ideas. This model called relationship based access control that was popularized by Google Zanzibar system. So Zanzibar is how they do access control for Google Docs and Google Drive. If you've ever kind of looked at a Google Doc and you know you're a viewer or an owner or a commenter, Zanzibar is the system behind it. And so what we've done is we've married these two things together. We have a policy based system, OPPA based system, and at the same time we've brought together a directory, an embedded directory in Topaz that allows you to answer questions like, does this user have this permission on this object? And bringing it all together, making it open sources a real game changer from our perspective, real >>Game changer. That's good to hear. What are some of the key use cases that it's gonna help your customers address? >>So a lot of our customers really like the idea of policy based access management, but they don't know how to bring data to that decision engine. And so we basically have a, you know, a, a very opinionated way of how to model that data. So you import data out of your identity providers. So you connect us to Okta or oze or Azure, Azure Active directory. And so now you have the user data, you can define groups and then you can define, you know, your object hierarchy, your domain model. So let's say you have an applicant tracking system, you have nouns like job, you know, know job descriptions or candidates. And so you wanna model these things and you want to be able to say who has access to, you know, the candidates for this job, for example. Those are the kinds of rules that people can express really easily in Topaz and in assertive. >>What are some of the challenges that are happening right now that dissolve? What, what are you looking at to solve? Is it complexity, sprawl, logic problems? What's the main problem set you guys >>See? Yeah, so as organizations grow and they have more and more microservices, each one of these microservices does authorization differently. And so it's impossible to reason about the full surface area of, you know, permissions in your application. And more and more of these organizations are saying, You know what, we need a standard layer for this. So it's not just Google with Zanzibar, it's Intuit with Oddy, it's Carta with their own oddy system, it's Netflix, you know, it's Airbnb with heed. All of them are now talking about how they solve access control extracted into its own service to basically manage complexity and regain agility. The other thing is all about, you know, time to market and, and tco. >>So, so how do you work with those services? Do you replace them, you unify them? What is the approach that you're taking? >>So basically these organizations are saying, you know what? We want one access control service. We want all of our microservices to call that thing instead of having to roll out our own. And so we, you know, give you the guts for that service, right? Topaz is basically the way that you're gonna go implement an access control service without having to go build it the same way that you know, large companies like Airbnb or Google or, or a car to >>Have. What's the competition look like for you guys? I'm not really seeing a lot of competition out there. Are there competitors? Are there different approaches? What makes you different? >>Yeah, so I would say that, you know, the biggest competitor is roll your own. So a lot of these companies that find us, they say, We're sick and tired of investing 2, 3, 4 engineers, five engineers on this thing. You know, it's the gift that keeps on giving. We have to maintain this thing and so we can, we can use your solution at a fraction of the cost a, a fifth, a 10th of what it would cost us to maintain it locally. There are others like Sty for example, you know, they are in the space, but more in on the infrastructure side. So they solve the problem of Kubernetes submission control or things like that. So >>Rolling your own, there's a couple problems there. One is do they get all the corner cases who built a they still, it's a company. Exactly. It's heavy lifting, it's undifferentiated, you just gotta check the box. So probably will be not optimized. >>That's right. As Bezo says, only focus on the things that make your beer taste better. And access control is one of those things. It's part of your security, you know, posture, it's a critical thing to get right, but you know, I wanna work on access control, said no developer ever, right? So it's kind of like this boring, you know, like back office thing that you need to do. And so we give you the mechanisms to be able to build it securely and robustly. >>Do you have a, a customer story example that is one of your go-tos that really highlights how you're improving developer productivity? >>Yeah, so we have a couple of them actually. So there's the largest third party B2B marketplace in the us. Free retail. Instead of building their own, they actually brought in aer. And what they wanted to do with AER was be the authorization layer for both their externally facing applications as well as their internal apps. So basically every one of their applications now hooks up to AER to do authorization. They define users and groups and roles and permissions in one place and then every application can actually plug into that instead of having to roll out their own. >>I'd like to switch gears if you don't mind. I get first of all, great update on the company and progress. I'd like to get your thoughts on the cloud computing market. Obviously you were your legendary position, Azure, I mean look at the, look at the progress over the past few years. Just been spectacular from Microsoft and you set the table there. Amazon web service is still, you know, thundering away even though earnings came out, the market's kind of soft still. You know, you see the cloud hyperscalers just continuing to differentiate from software to chips. Yep. Across the board. So the hyperscalers kicking ass taking names, doing great Microsoft right up there. What's the future? Cuz you now have the conversation where, okay, we're calling it super cloud, somebody calling multi-cloud, somebody calling it distributed computing, whatever you wanna call it. The old is now new again, it just looks different as cloud becomes now the next computer industry, >>You got an operating system, you got applications, you got hardware, I mean it's all kind of playing out just on a massive global scale, but you got regions, you got all kinds of connected systems edge. What's your vision on how this plays out? Because things are starting to fall into place. Web assembly to me just points to, you know, app servers are coming back, middleware, Kubernetes containers, VMs are gonna still be there. So you got the progression. What's your, what's your take on this? How would you share, share your thoughts to a friend or the industry, the audience? So what's going on? What's, what's happening right now? What's, what's going on? >>Yeah, it's funny because you know, I remember doing this quite a few years ago with you probably in, you know, 2015 and we were talking about, back then we called it hybrid cloud, right? And it was a vision, but it is actually what's going on. It just took longer for it to get here, right? So back then, you know, the big debate was public cloud or private cloud and you know, back when we were, you know, talking about these ideas, you know, we said, well you know, some applications will always stay on-prem and some applications will move to the cloud. I was just talking to a big bank and they basically said, look, our stated objective now is to move everything we can to the public cloud and we still have a large private cloud investment that will never go away. And so now we have essentially this big operating system that can, you know, abstract all of this stuff. So we have developer platforms that can, you know, sit on top of all these different pieces of infrastructure and you know, kind of based on policy decide where these applications are gonna be scheduled. So, you know, the >>Operating schedule shows like an operating system function. >>Exactly. I mean like we now, we used to have schedulers for one CPU or you know, one box, then we had schedulers for, you know, kind of like a whole cluster and now we have schedulers across the world. >>Yeah. My final question before we kind of get run outta time is what's your thoughts on web assembly? Cuz that's getting a lot of hype here again to kind of look at this next evolution again that's lighter weight kind of feels like an app server kind of direction. What's your, what's your, it's hyped up now, what's your take on that? >>Yeah, it's interesting. I mean back, you know, what's, what's old is new again, right? So, you know, I remember back in the late nineties we got really excited about, you know, JVMs and you know, this notion of right once run anywhere and yeah, you know, I would say that web assembly provides a pretty exciting, you know, window into that where you can take the, you know, sandboxing technology from the JavaScript world, from the browser essentially. And you can, you know, compile an application down to web assembly and have it real, really truly portable. So, you know, we see for example, policies in our world, you know, with opa, one of the hottest things is to take these policies and can compile them to web assemblies so you can actually execute them at the edge, you know, wherever it is that you have a web assembly runtime. >>And so, you know, I was just talking to Scott over at Docker and you know, they're excited about kind of bringing Docker packaging, OCI packaging to web assemblies. So we're gonna see a convergence of all these technologies right now. They're kind of each, each of our, each of them are in a silo, but you know, like we'll see a lot of the patterns, like for example, OCI is gonna become the packaging format for web assemblies as it is becoming the packaging format for policies. So we did the same thing. We basically said, you know what, we want these policies to be packaged as OCI assembly so that you can sign them with cosign and bring the entire ecosystem of tools to bear on OCI packages. So convergence is I think what >>We're, and love, I love your attitude too because it's the open source community and the developers who are actually voting on the quote defacto standard. Yes. You know, if it doesn't work, right, know people know about it. Exactly. It's actually a great new production system. >>So great momentum going on to the press released earlier this week, clearly filling the gaps there that, that you and your, your co-founder saw a long time ago. What's next for the assertive business? Are you hiring? What's going on there? >>Yeah, we are really excited about launching commercially at the end of this year. So one of the things that we were, we wanted to do that we had a promise around and we delivered on our promise was open sourcing our edge authorizer. That was a huge thing for us. And we've now completed, you know, pretty much all the big pieces for AER and now it's time to commercially launch launch. We already have customers in production, you know, design partners, and you know, next year is gonna be the year to really drive commercialization. >>All right. We will be watching this space ery. Thank you so much for joining John and me on the keep. Great to have you back on the program. >>Thank you so much. It was a pleasure. >>Our pleasure as well For our guest and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching The Cube Live. Michelle floor of Con Cloud Native Con 22. This is day three of our coverage. We will be back with more coverage after a short break. See that.

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation vibrator this is Dave Volante and welcome to this special cube conversation as you know I've been running a CXO series now for several weeks really trying to understand how leaders are dealing and coping with the Cova 19 crisis today we want to switch gears a little bit and talk not only about how leadership has sort of navigated through this crisis but also start to imagine what it's going to look like coming out of it I'm going to introduce you to a company that have been talking about now for the last well six to nine months company called octave as you know from my previous breaking analysis this is a company that not only is in the security business they really kind of made their mark with identification management but also really there's a data angle normally when you think about security you thinking about auto security it means that less user flexibility it means less value from the user standpoint what what octa has done really successfully is bring together both endpoint security as well as that data angle and so the company is about six hundred million dollars in revenue they've got an eighteen billion dollar valuation which you know may sound kind of rich at 30 X a revenue multiple but as I've reported the company is growing very rapidly I've talked about the you know the rule of 40 octa is really a rule of 50 type of company you know by that definition they're with me here to talk about the product side of things as dia jolly who's the chief product officer yeah thanks so much for coming on the cube I hope you're doing okay how are things out in California things are going well good to meet you as well Dave I hope you're doing well as well yeah we're hanging in there you know the studios are rocking the cube you know continues our daily reporting I want to start with your role you're relatively new to octa you've got a really interesting background particularly understanding endpoints you're at Google Google home of Google Nest you spent some time you know worrying about looking after Xbox do you a good understanding of what's going on in the marketplace but talk about your your role and how specifically you're bringing that to enterprise sure so I drove about this I I say that I've done every kind of known product management imaginable the man at this point I'm done both Hardware Don software so dealt a lot with endpoints as you talked about that a lot with sass dealt with consumer dealt with enterprise and all over the place completely different sizes so after really my role as a chief product officer is to be able to understand and what our customers need right and what are the challenges they're facing and not just the challenges they're facing today but also what are the challenges that they'll face tomorrow that they don't even know about and then help build products to be able to overcome that both with our engineering teams as well as with our sales engineering team so that we can take it to market now my background is unique because I've seen so many identity being used in so many different ways across so many different use cases whether it's enterprise or its consumer and that given that we covered both sides spectrum I can bring that to bear yes so what I've reported previously is that that you guys kind of made your mark with with identification management but in terms of both workforce but also customer identification management which has been I think allowed you to be very very successful I want to bring up a chart and share something that I've I've shared a lot of data with our audience previously some guys if you bring that up so this is data from enterprise Technology Research our data partner and for those who follow this program you know we we generally talk in in two metrics a net score which is a measure of spending momentum and and also market share which really isn't real market share but it's it's pervasiveness in the survey and what you can see here is the latest April survey from over 1200 CIOs and IT practitioners and we're isolating on an octa and and we brought it back to July 15 survey you see a couple of points here I want to make one is it something to the right this is pervasiveness or market share so octa in the market is doing very very well it's why the valuation is so high what's driving the growth and then you can see in the green a 55% net net score very very strong it's one of the leaders in security but as I said it's more than than that so dia from a product standpoint what is powering this momentum sure so as you well know the world is working from home what after does is it provides Identity Management that allows you to connect to any technology and by any technology it primarily means technology technology that's not just on premise like your applications on-premise old-school applications or into software that's on premise but it also means technology that's in the clouds of SAS applications application infrastructure that's in the cloud etc and on the other hand it also allows companies to deploy applications where they can connect to their customers online so as more and more of the world moves to work from home you need to be able to securely and seamlessly allow your employees your partners to be able to connect from their home and to be able to do their work and that's the foundation that we provide now if you look at if you we've heard a lot in the press about companies like zoom slack people that provide online collaboration and their usage has gone up we're seeing similar trends across both octa as well as the entire security industry in general right and if you look at information recently since over to started phishing attacks have increased by six hundred and sixty seven percent and what we've seen in response is one of our products which is multi-factor authentication we've experienced in eighty percent growth in usage so really as Corvette has pushed forward there was a trend for people to be able to work remotely for people to be able to access cloud apps and but as ubered has suddenly poured gas on the fire for that we're seeing our customers reaching out to us a lot more needing more support and just the level of awareness and the level of interest raising let's talk about some of the trends that you guys see in the marketplace and like to better understand how that informs your product or you know roadmap and decisions you know obviously this cloud you guys have made a really good mark in the cloud space you know with both your your operating model your pricing model the modern stack the other is a reference that upfront which data talked a lot about digital transformation digital us data course the third is purity related to trust we've talked a lot on the cube about how the perimeter is there is no particular anymore the Queen is left her castle and so what are the big trends that you see the big waves that that you're riding and how does that inform your product directly sure so a few different things I think number one if you think about the way I've phrase this is or the way I think about it is the following any big technological trend you see today right whether it's the move the cloud whether it's mobile whether it's artificial intelligence intelligence you think about the neural nets etc or it's a personalized consumer experience all of that fundamentally depends on identity so the most important the so from a from being an identity provider the most important thing for us is to be able to build something that is flexible enough that is broad enough that it is able to span multiple uses right so we've taken from a product perspective that means we can follow two philosophies we can either the try and go solve each of these pain points one by one or we can actually try to build a platform that is more open that's more extensible and that's more flexible so that we can solve many of these use cases right and not only can we solve it because there's it extensible our customers can customize it they can build on top of it our partners can build on top of it so that's one thing that's one product philosophy that we hold dear and so we have the Octagon cloud which is a platform which provides both workforce identity as well as customer identity using the same underlying components the same multi-factor authentication we use for workforce we package up as an SDK so that our customer identity customers that's number one the second thing is you rightfully mention is data you can't really secure identity without data so we have very we have a lot of data across our customers we know when the users logging in we know what device they're logging in front we know the security posture on the device we know where they're logging in from we know their different behaviors were apps they go into or during wartime of the day etc so being able to harness all this data to say hey and apply ml model squared to say hey is the user secure or not is a very very core foundation of our product so for example we have what we call risk-based authentication you can not only do things like hey this user seems to be logging on from a location they've never logged on from but you could even do things like well you may not want to stop the user they may be traveling so instead of just asking them for a for a password you ask them for a multi-factor right so that's the other piece of it and in many ways data and security and usability are three legs of a triangle the more data you have the more you can allow a user you more security you can provide a user without creating more friction so it's sometimes helpful for the audience to understand a company in a edit Avant act in the landscape so the obvious platform out there is Active Directory now Microsoft with Azure Active Directory you know really you know trying to and and that's really been on their platforms but with api's you know Microsoft has got a thumbs in every pie how does octave differentiate from some of the other traditional platforms that are out there and and what gives you confidence that it and you can continue to do so going forward post kovat that's it that's a fantastic question Dave um so I think we divide if you think about our competitors on the workforce side we've got Microsoft and a couple of other competitors and on the customer Identity side really it's a bill versus buy story right most companies customer identity internally so let's take workforce first Microsoft is the dominant player there they've got Active Directory they've now got Azure Active Directory and from a Microsoft perspective I think Microsoft is always been great at building products or building technology that interconnected run the world is going to more there's more and more technology proliferation in the world and the way we differentiate is by becoming a neutral and independent platform so whether you're on a Microsoft stack whether you're on a Google stack whether you're on an amazon stack we are able to connect with you deeply we connect just as well with all 365 as they connect with Salesforce as we connect with AWS right and that has been our core philosophy and not only is that a philosophy for other when other vendors it's a philosophy for ourselves as well we have multi-factor authentication so do many other providers like duo if you want to use ours great if you don't want to use ours with our platform who use the one that's best for your technology and I think what we've always believed in from a product perspective is this independence this neutrality this ability to plug-and-play any technology you want into a platform to be able to do what you want and the technology that's best for your business's need so what's interesting what you said about the sort of make versus buy that's particularly relevant for the customer identification management because let's say you know I'm buying from Amazon I've got Amazon they know who I am but if I understand it correctly customers now are able to look across brands maybe cohort selling maybe make specific offers analyze the data that's an advantage that you bring that maybe do it yourself doesn't Frank maybe talk about that a little bit sure so really if you think about if you think about a bill versus buying even ten years ago life used to be relatively simple maybe 15 years ago you had a website you as your username your the password you weren't really using you don't have multiple channels you didn't have multiple devices as prevalent you didn't have multiple apps in a lot of cases connected to each other right and in that in that day and age password was fairly secure you weren't doing a lot of personalization with the user data or had a lot of sensitive user data so building a custom identity solution having your customer managing your customers identity yourself was fairly easy now it's becoming more and more hard number one I just talked about the phishing attacks they're an equal number of attacks on the customer identity side right so how do you actually secure this identity how do you actually use things like multi-factor authentication how do you keep up with all the latest in multi-factor authentication touch ID face ID etcetera and that's one the second thing we provide is scale for a number of companies we also provide the ability to scale dramatically which scaling identity and being being able to authenticate someone and keep someone authenticated in real time is actually a very big channel challenge as you get to more and more scale and then the last thing that you mentioned is this ability we provide a single view of the user which is super super powerful because now if you think about one of our customers Albertsons they have multiple different apps there are multiple different digital experiences and he don't have a siloed view of their customer across all these experiences here one identity for your customer that customer uses that one identity to log on to all your digital experiences across all channels and we're able to bring that data back together so if Albertsons wants to say hey somebody shot a in or bought something in one particular app but I know people that buy this particular object like something else that's available in another app they can give a promotion for it or they can give a discomfort that's so that makes a lot of sense I went into the PR platform get our data partner and I looked at which industries are really showing moment so remember this survey focus was run right in the heart of the the Cova 19 pandemic from from mid-march the mid April so it's a good of good current data point and there were four that stood out large companies healthcare and pharma telco which is courses this work-from-home thing and then consumer the example that you just gave from Albertsons is really you know sort of around that consumer there are a lot of industries that obviously been hit airlines restaurants hospitality but but these four really stood out as growth areas despite the kovat 19 pandemic I want to ask you about octane you just got it had your big user conference anything product specific that came out of that that our audience should know about I mean I'm an interested in access gateway I know that wasn't necessarily a new announcement but Cloud Gateway what were the highlights of some of those things from a product stamp yeah of course so we did we did made a very difficult decision to pivot octane virtually and we did this because a number of our customers are given what they're facing with the Kovach pandemic wanted to hear more around news around what our product launches are how they could use this with cetera and really I'd say there are three key product launches that I want to highlight here we had a number of different announcements and it was a very successful conference but the three that are the most relevant here one is we've always talked about being a platform and we've set this for the past four or five years I think and but over the last your and going into the next couple of years we're investing very very heavily in making our platform even more powerful even more extensible even more customizable and so that it can go across the scenarios you described right which is whether you're on Prem with Auto access gateway or you're in the cloud or in some kind of hybrid environment or you using some mix-and-match or work from home people in the office etc so really what we did this year over the last year was deepen our platform footprint and we started releasing the four components available in a platform which we call platform services so we have six components and we were directories that is customizable and and flexible so you can build your own emails except for N equals four users adds information related to them we have an integration platform that we've made available at a deep level where where our customers can use SDKs tools etc to be able to integrate with octa in a platform which we've talked a lot about and then we released three new platform services and one was what we call arc identity engine we had released we talked about this last year and this year we talked about it last year from a customer identity perspective this year we brought her into our workforce identity but also what that does is it allows you a lot more flexibility for situations like we're in right it allows you flexibility to define security policies at the parabola it so you could decide hey for my email I don't want my customers to have to use a multi-factor authentication for but for Salesforce I would definitely want them to use a multi-factor authentication if they're not in the office and it also allows you to have a lot more flexible factor recovery so for example if you forgot your password one of the biggest pain points of co-ed has been the number of helpdesk costs have been rising through the roof the phone calls are ringing nonstop right and one of the biggest reasons for helpdesk are says oh I can't login I got locked out either lost a factor or L forgot my password it helps with that um so that's one set of announcements the second set of announcements was we launched a brand new devices platform and personally this is my personal favorite but really what the devices platform allows you to do is the feature in it that we launched is called Fast Pass and what phosphorous allows you to do is it actually takes phosphorous to the next level it allows you to basically use logging into your device and us understanding the posture of the device and all the user context around you to be able to log you directly dr. then I imagine if you're on a Mac or a iOS device or an Android or a Windows device just being able to face match into your iOS or being able to touch ID into your Windows hello and you're automatically logged into lockdown right that is that and and the way we do that is we have this client on across all these operating systems that can really understand the security posture of the device it can understand of the device is managed if it's safe if it's jailbroken if it's unmanaged it can also connect with multiple signals on the device so if you have an EDR and MDM vendor we can ingest those signals and what they think of the risk we can also ingest signals directly from apps if apps things like um G suite and Salesforce actually track user behavior to determine risk they can pass those signals to us and then we can make a decision on hey we should allow the user to authenticate directly into octa because they've authenticated their device which we can make a decision that says no let's provider let's ask them to step up with a multi-factor authentication or we can say no this is too risky let's deny access and all of this is configurable by the IT admin they can decide the risk levels they're comfortable with they can decide the different risk levels by different apps so that was another major announcement and then and as a product person you rarely ever get the chance to actually increase security and usability at one time which is why it's my favorite you increase both security and usability together now the last one was action was a workflows engine we call it workflows lifecycle management and we it's really we launched a graphical no cord user interface identity is so important so many business processes for our customers there's so many business processes built an identity for example if someone joins her company you usually either have a script that allows them access to the applications they need to or you actually have an IT admin sitting in there trying to manually provide access or when they leave right what workflow lifecycle management or lifecycle management workflows allows you to do is it actually allows you to provide it actually provides you the no core graphical user interface where you can build all these flows so now you don't need someone that knows coding you can even have a business unit so for example I for me in the product for the product org I can have someone say hey building a business process similar it's something you would build in sort of like an iPad and allow everyone that comes in to be able to have access to fig mom because we use pigma a lot right those are the kinds of things you can do and it's super powerful and it takes the ability of our already existing lifecycle management product to the next level well thank you for that that's that summary dear so I want to kind of close with I mean those of you have been following the cube for a while there I think there's some similarities between octa and and and service now that obviously obvious differences but we started following you know ServiceNow pre-ipo is less than a hundred million dollar company and we've seen that company build out as a platform company and that's really what octa is doing here we're talking about a total available market that's yeah probably north of 50 billion so the the question I have he is you know what Frederic and pod started 11 years ago playing on the dynamics coming out of the financial crisis that got us to where we are today now you've got the challenge of you've achieved reached escape velocity now you've got this you know massive growth opportunity in front of you how do you see the product portfolio evolving expanding and I'm also interested in postcode with 19 you know no whiteboards no face-to-face contact not at least not for a while and how you're kind of managing through that but but how can we expect the product portfolio to expand over time what can you share with us so one of the given how pervasive identity has become and given how not just broad but at the same time deep it is there are multiple different places or product portfolio >> and a number of different places were thinking about right so one is you mentioned today we play in workforce identity and customer identity but we haven't even begun to talk about how we might play in consumer right one of the one of the biggest perk matter is consumers and consumers protecting their own identity so often an employee is not using their identity to lock the seals ports and you have an attack on a company and offered an employee actually logging into their Gmail their personal Gmail or their personal or some personal website that bank and they get and their credential get compromised in their fluency impossible so the more protective the more directly consumers the more we indirectly protect both enterprises from work from an employer as well as a customer perspective howdy we're an enterprise company so it doesn't mean that we are going to go direct to consumer there are ways to make employees more secure by what the director calls were so that's one the second thing is managing identities I think we've as the number of applications as the number of technologies are proliferate managing and an employee's life cycle who that governing that the life cycle is not administering etc is also fully stock also becoming very very challenging it was all well and good we'll never can ask and you were on that that's not true anymore an average company uses I think close to 200 applications and then if you broaden back to other resources like infrastructure there's a lot lock more so how do you actually build automated systems that based on the employee status based on their rule based on the project they're on provides them the right access for the right amount of time the third thing you mentioned is and you should pass on this initially but this is the there's this concept of zero security right and the perimeters disappeared how do you provide security so if you look at the industry at large today there are tons of different security vendors trying to provide security at each point if you talk to any see-saw out there it's really really hard to cobble all of this together and one of the things we were trying to do is we're trying to figure out how with our partners we can build a silly end-to-end solution for n - n zero trust for our customers so that's that's another area that the of the product portfolio we're pushing and then finally with the whole digital transformation and customer identity yes more and more companies want their customers to go back online yes more and more customers convenience of being able to interact online with Billy if you think about it the world has changed dramatically over the last three years with privacy laws with things like gdpr CCP etc how do you actually manage your customers obviously you actually manage their content how do you ensure that while you're using all this data from across these apps that we talked about here you and you're using for the first benefit how do you make sure that the minister private is secure and and how do you ensure your customers that's another major area that I think our customers are asking us for helping and so those are areas or so that you should be a big signature the next two to three years some of it will be through partnership that's generally that high-level directions we're headed in wealthy you so much for coming on the key on the key and sharing the product roadmap and some other details about the great company really interested in watching its continued ascendancy good luck in the marketplace and thank you for watching everybody this is Dave Villante you conversations we'll see you next time [Music]

>> From Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts, if the queue recovering Vita Winter warmer, twenty nineteen Brought to you by Silicon Angle media. >> Hi. I'm stupid men. And this is the cubes coverage of V tug Winter warmer. Twenty nineteen here. A Gillette Stadium, home of the New England Patriots. Happy to welcome to the program. A community member, Someone I've known for many years at this point. Jonathan Frappe here. Who's with V Brown bag? Thanks so much for joining us from >> Thanks for having me. >> All right, so, you know, I watched this event, and when it started, it was, you know, originally the V mug for New England. And then it became vey tug And one, there's some of the politics stuff which we don't need to go into, but part of it was virtual ization and cloud. And what's the interaction there and what will users have to do? Different. And part of that is jobs. And one of the reasons I really wanted to bring you on is, you know, you started out heavy in that virtual ization base and you've been going through those machinations. So maybe just give our audience a little bit about, you know, your background, some of the things skill sets. You've got lots of acronyms on your on your you know, resume as it is for certification. You've done. So let's start there. >> Sure. So my background. I started this help desk. I did Windows two thousand Active Directory, administration and Exchange Administration all on site and moved into Mohr server administration. And when the empire started to become a thing, I was like, Wow, this is This is a game changer and I need to sort of shift my skill set. I understand the applications of music. I've been supporting him. But virtualization is going to change change That so started to shift there and saw a similar thing with Public Cloud and automation a cz, That same sort of next step beyond infrastructure management. >> All right. And you've had a bunch of certification. The real off a few. You know what? Where are you today? What? What have you added gives a little bit of a timeline. >> My first certification was a plus which come to you seemingly has come around and joined the ranks of posting toe linked in for everybody. So a plus was my first one. EMC PM, CSC on Windows two thousand. Took a little bit of a break in back into it. Bcp five era so four, five years ago. Cem Cem. Other of'em were Certs NSX Cloud see Emma and most recently, the solution's architect associate for a Ws. >> OK, great, in when you look at the kind of virtual ization and cloud, it's not like you thirst, which one day and said, Okay, I no longer need the VM were stuff. I'm going to do the cloud tell us a little bit about you know what led you to start doing the cloud and you know how you you know how your roles that you've had and you know the skill set that you want to have for your career. You know how you look at those. >> So for me, it is about being able to support what my business is doing. And sometimes the right answer's going to be VM, where sometimes it's going to be physical. Sometimes it's going to be containers or public cloud, or, you know, new fancy buzzwords like server lists. And I've always in my career tried to support what where, what application we're delivering to get the business, the information they need. So for me to do that properly, I need to be well versed across all of that infrastructure so that when when it's time to deliver something in public cloud or time to deliver something in the container, I'm ready to go when you do that. >> Yeah. What? What? What's the push and pull for some of the training bin? Is this something that you've seen? You said, like Veum, where you saw it, like, Oh, my gosh, I need to hop on that. You know, I remember back to those early days I remember engineers I worked with that were just like, this thing is amazing. That was like preview motion, even. Yeah, but you know, just what? That that impact we've seen over the last, you know, ten to fifteen years of that growth has there been times where the business is coming said, Hey, can you go learn this? Kaixian orders have been you driving most about yourself. Uh, >> it's it's been both. There are times when the business has come and said, Hey, we would really like to take advantage of virtual ization or public cloud. And it from a technology perspective, there may have been other factors that would impact the ability to do that. So that's why for me. I tried to sort of stay ahead of it when, you know virtual ization was taking off and everything I had was on physical servers. I knew I needed to have the VM where peace in my pocket so that when the business was ready and when other things like compliance, we're ready for it. We could move forward and sort of advanced that same thing with Public Cloud. Now that that's Mohr prevalent and sort of accepted in the industry a lot more cos they're moving in that direction. >> Yeah, and you know, what tips would you give your Pierre if they're a virtual ization person? You know, how are the waters in the cloud world is there are a lot of similarities. Is it? You know, do I have to go relearn and, oh, my gosh, I need to go learn coding for two years before I understand how to do any of this stuff. >> I think it's helpful. Tto learn some level of coding, but do it in an environment that you're comfortable in today. So if you're of'em were admin today, you know there's power, see Ally and be realized orchestrator and and even if you're on via Mars Cloud platform there's there's some basic power shell on bass scripting you could do in the cloud Automation. Get comfortable with the environment, you know. And then as that comfort grows when you move Oh, look, there's power shell commandments for a ws. If that's the route, you go so oh, already understand the format and how I how I glue those things together so you could get comfortable in the environment you're in today and sort of get ready for whatever that next step is. >> Yeah, I've always found I find it interesting. Look at these ecosystems and see where the overlaps and where two things come together. You know, I actually worked with Lennox for about twenty years. So I you know, back when I worked at Emcee the storage company and I supported the Lenox Group and Lennox was kind of this side thing. And then you kind of saw that grow over time and Lennox and virtual ization. We're kind of parallel, but didn't overlap is much. And then when we get to the cloud, it feels like everybody ended up in that space and there were certain skill sets that clinics people had that made it easy to do cloud in certain things that the fertilization people had that made it easy do there. But we're kind of all swimming in the same pools. We see that now in the, you know, core bernetti space. Now I see people I know from all of those communities on, but it's kind of interesting. Curious if you have anything you've seen in kind of the different domains and overlapping careers. >> Yes, you. For me. I think what's help is focusing on how the applications the business uses consumed, what some of the trends are around, how you know whether finance or marketing teams are interacting with those applications. If I know how the application works and what I need to do something to support it, the concepts aren't going to be vastly different. If I know how Exchange's install their sequel servers install, there's some custom application is insult. I could do that across the VM, where environment native US environment and should it supported into Docker by leveraging Cooper Netease. >> All right, so you've mentioned about the time the application, can you? How has it changed your relationship with kind of the application owners as you go from, you know, physical, virtual, the cloud. >> I don't think it should change much. The problem probably the biggest shift that you have is that at some point now, things are out of your control. So when I've got a server sitting in my data center that I can walk down the hallway to if something's not working, I have access to it. If there's an application down in the public cloud, or there's an A Ws outage or any public cloud provider outage, I have to wait. And that sort of I think the thing that I've seen business struggle with the most like, well, it's down, go fix it. It's like, I can't get to it right now, and I'm probably not driving to Virginia, Oregon to go reboot that server for Amazon. >> Whoever absolutely big shift we've seen right is, you know a lot of what I is. It I am managing is now things that aren't in my environment. You know, there was my data centers. My might have had hosted data centers where I'd call somebody up, you know, you know, tell the Rex paper person to reboot the servers or it's right, it's in the public cloud. In which case it's like, OK, what tools. What can I trouble shoot myself? Or is there some, you know, out of that I'm not aware of, you know, is affecting me. Yeah, >> it's Ah, it's a good shift to have for a infrastructure person because we're really getting to the point now. I think the tails, the scales have tipped to focusing more on delivering business value versus delivering infrastructure. The CFO doesn't necessarily think or care that spinning up a new V m faster is cool. They care about getting their application to their team so that they could do their work. So I think taking, you know, going to public cloud or going to other platforms where that's removed it sort of forces you to move to supporting supporting those business applications. >> So I'm curious it every time we have one of these generational shift time. Time is like, Oh, my gosh, I'm going to be out of a job on the server ID men Virtualization is going to get rid of me. I'm a virtual ization Had been cloud's going to get rid of me. This whole server listing will probably just get rid of all the infrastructure people I've read article yesterday was called the Creeping Apocalypse a CZ what they called it. But, you know, you know what you saying is there general fear in your peers or, you know, do you just, you know, dive in and understand it and learn it? If you could stay, you know, up with or a little bit ahead of the curve, you know you're going to keep employed. >> I would say that there's a mix there. Some people, even just a few months ago, some some folks I talked to and they were just sort of breaking into automation and like how they can automate deploying their applications in their legitimate concern, was I won't have a job anymore and sort of the way I looked at that was my job's going to change. I don't spend my entire day administering Windows two thousand active directory boxes any more. So I need Yes, I need to shift that and start thinking about what's next. If I can automate the routine task, you know, deploying an application, patching and application, bringing things up and down when there's some sort of failure than I, uh, I'm going to naturally grow my career in that way by getting rid of the boring stuff. >> Yeah, and I've been here in this argument against automation for decades now, and the question I always put two people is like, Look, if I could give you an extra hour a day or an extra day a week, do you have other projects that you could be doing or things that the business is asking for? That would be better. And I've yet to find somebody that didn't say, Yeah, of course, on DH. What are the things that you're doing that it would be nice to get rid of, You know, other people is like I love the serenity of racking and stacking cabling stuff. And nothing gets people more excited than beautiful cables in Iraq. I thought yesterday I saw people like going off about here's this data center with these beautiful, you know, rack, you know? So with the cable ties and everything, but I'm like, really, you know, there's more value you can add absolutely out there. So >> automate yourself into your next job. It is sort of the way I think I like to think about it. It's not a meeting, >> so let's you know, just look forward a little bit, you know? There's all these waves, you know, Cloud been a decade data was talking to keep downs in this morning on the Cube on we said, you know, when he talks to users, it's their data that super important applications absolutely is what drives, uh, you know, my infrastructure, but it's the data that's the super important piece. So you know, whether it be, you know, you're a I or, you know, you figure various buzz word of the day I ot You know, data is in the center. So what do you looking forward to is? Are there new search or new training that that are exciting? You are areas that you think you're Pierre should be poking out to help try to stay ahead of the curve. >> Yeah, and back to my earlier point about leveraging the thing you know today and how to sort of grow your career. And that next skill set is how I can look at data and make. I understand what's going on around that. So maybe maybe today that's taking some stats from any SX. I hosted an application and correlating that data together on help. You underst Yes. And you know what that means for the applicator action before or use their calls in. And that's going to help you grow into sort of this new realm of like, machine learning and big data. And in analytics, which I think is really the next thing that we're going to need to start doing as Mohr and more of that infrastructure shifted away into surveillance platforms and things that were not worried about How can I understand? How can I take that data? Transform it, use it, correlated together to, you know, help make decisions. >> Alright, on final thing, give us update on our friends at V Brown bag. So, you know, we talked Well, I always say, you know, when we go to V m world, it's like we're there. I'm trying to help kind of balance between the business and the technology. You want to go a little deeper and really geek out and understand some of these things. That's where you know the V brown bag. You know, people are going to be able to dig in with the community in the ecosystem. There was the V and V brown bag for virtual ization. But he brown bags doing much more than just traditional virtualization today. You know what? What? What's on the docket? >> Eso upcoming This year, we're gonna have some episodes around Python so helping add men's get to know Python start to get comfortable with it, Which would be a great language to a automate things that maybe you're doing today in your application, but also to be able to take data and and use Python, too. Manage that data extract value out of that data so that you can help make decisions. So look for the throughout this year and, you know, learn new things. >> All right, Jonathan, from pure pleasure to talk with you on camera after talking to off camera for many years. Thanks so much for joining us. All right. And we appreciate you joining us at this virtual ization and cloud user event. Ve tug Winter warmer. Twenty nineteen on student a minute. Thanks for watching the cue

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from New Orleans. It's The Cube, covering VeeamON, 2017 brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to New Orleans everybody. This is The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. It's our first day of coverage at VeeamON 2017. The first time The Cube has covered VeeamON and it's quite an event. About 3,000 people here and as I say, we're being going two days of coverage talking to executives and partners and of course, the customers, we love the customer segments. Markus Marksteiner is here. He's the CTO of Baloise Group, insurance company out of Switzerland. Markus, welcome to The Cube. Thanks for coming on. >> You're welcome. >> So tell us a little bit about your company, your role and what are some of the things driving IT decisions. >> Okay, so are a life insurance and long life insurance company within Switzerland. We also have a bank in Switzerland which is included. We operate in Europe, in the country of Belgium and Germany and Luxembourg and Lichtenstein. So we are a company with about seven and a half thousand employees. And my role in there, is actually I'm a head of infrastructure and supports so I'm responsible for the data center, the user service center and the workplace environment. I also act as a group CTO because we have centralized all the data centers from the different locations to expose it to our headquarter. >> So financial services tends to be in the cutting edge of technology typically, very competitive industry and fast moving, very IT-oriented. What are some of the drivers in your business today? >> I think in the, especially in the insurance companies, we are, within Switzerland but also in Germany and Europe itself, it's a highly regulated market so. The possibility to, let's go for the public cloud is very limited because of regulation part. So therefore we have to deal with insurance companies within Europe but also within US and China, especially, which are very agile out on the market so. Therefore our business is now changing completely because from the traditional insurance which we have selled years ago, we will have to translate this into the industrialization world so meaning, we have to be more flexible on the market, to have shorter periods of production. And for me, as an IT reseller within the company, means my organization have to be agile as well. So, this is actually the most part we are changing to deal with security, that's the one part. But the other part is the agility. >> Paint a picture of your environment. What's it look like? Applications that you're supporting. What does your infrastructure look like. Your storage. Obviously, your backup, we'll talk about that. >> So we have, within Basel we have two data centers nearby. And we have now set up a third data center outside of Basel for disaster recovery because Basel is located on a earthquake area with a high risk impact so therefore our internal audit is set, it's not that good to have for the complete group data centers located on a earthquake plate so please set up a data center which is at least 100 kilometers away from our location now, so. Within the data centers, typically we have mainframes, we have servers, we have storage, all kinds of flavors. We have some centralization there. We have one with strategy in the infrastructure which a huge partnership with HP. In this area we have from storage part, we're using NetApp and DocuStorage. And as a backup software of course now, since nearly a year now, we are using Veeam for doing the backup of all the virtual machines. In the future, also the physical machines. And also we elevated Veeam because of the data implication into data center three. So this guarantees me to bring up the data at a certain time to get us into three to make the restore and the restart there. >> So you've got, two data centers within a synchronous distance and one is an asynchronous distance. Is that correct? So you have a three data center set up which is essentially is as close to zero data loss as you can get. >> Yeah, exactly. The data center three we are using not only as a cold backup standby data center, we are putting all the non-productive environment to this data center so we have all three data centers up and running and they have on a certain perspective productive level meaning for the developer, of course data center three is absolutely highly critical because they develop in data center three, all the data is there. For the productive part, we have data center one and two which is in Basel which has the availability there, so. We're using both sides and they're all connected together. >> How often do you test recovery in that set up? >> We're trying now to test it twice a year. But we cannot switch the complete data center because we have productive and-- >> Dave: It's too risky. >> It's too risky so we built up a reference model, a reference service where we have included all the environments we need to make it for the auditors visible that our infrastructure in data center three is working in case of an emergency. >> Okay. Let's talk a little bit more about the data protection strategy. So we have a high-level, we understand the data center approach but what about protecting the apps? How do you use Veeam? How did you start with Veeam and where are you now? >> I mean we came from an absolutely traditional data standards so we had a legacy backup system running based on file locks and then we started a certain time with NetApp and using snapshot technologies there. Because we had huge databases which are not able to fulfill the SLA anymore in the recovery mode so we have to switch them to them to NetApp. And then we started with data center three and then we had another problem. How can we replicate these data into data center three in a certain time to get the SLA fulfilled in case of an emergency. And there we made a revelation and Veeam was actually the one who was fulfilling all the requirements and it was easy to deal with them. So we decided, okay, let's try it Veeam. And at a certain time, we thought well, it's not only about data application with Veeam it's also about the complete backup stack, we can replace by this software. So we grow slowly with the possibilities we saw during the implementation phase. We said, okay, we can use this model and this model and then VeeamON came on so we could use the report part also for the sizing of the virtual machines and now on we just backing up almost everything with Veeam, so. >> Can you speak to organizationally, you know, how many people you have managing kind of backup and DR and what that experience has been like? >> In the past we had about three people which were responsible for the complete backup process. But they're very focused on their tooling, they could not tell me if the backup was correct. If the data was backuped correctly. They only say, yeah, my system is running and it's backuping but is it really also consistent. I don't know so we had to ask the engineers. With Veeam now, we switched completely. We do not have any responsible anymore for backup purposes itself. We took this because of the ease of use, the tool, we gave them directly to the engineers of Linux, of Citrix, or of Windows and they are now responsible for their own data. So they can now do the backups itself and they can also assure to me that this, what they do with the backup is correct and it's restartable. Because they have to check each time. >> Yeah, so you're not only operationally more efficient but you actually know that what you have works. >> Markus: Exactly. (laughing) Yeah, yeah. >> Great. I believe it's your first time at the conference. What's the experience been so far? What value have you been getting? What brought you here? >> Actually I came here with the goal to learn more about the Veeam company itself and this was actually during the networking areas and the networking part was very helpful for me to meet directly the management of Veeam to see what is their strategy and it was also in the general session, they have a story to tell and that's what, I was coming in here to get this information and in the sessions, and today also with the talks with Baronov directly and McKay, that's really, there's a spirit in this company. That's what we are looking for. Because we have so many big companies, vendors in our thing, where you do not have the connection to the management directly and for me it's very important because we try really to grow with our business and therefore I need a partner behind where I can rely on them. With Veeam, absolutely the case. >> So you mentioned supporting physical endpoints is something that interest you. Anything else from the announcements that you heard that excites you? Anything not there, that you're looking for in the future, too? >> Yeah, for the future for me it's actually the cloud connection is very important. Because we are still in the high-regulated market but I think also the insurance and the financial sector in Switzerland, there are slightly opening for the cloud services and also for us, it's the Office365 and Amazon web services, they're coming slightly into our organization and to know that there is also a possibility with the same backup software using this in a cloud, this gives me the feeling and also the assurance that I can go to my management and tell them, hey guys, we're choosing the right vendor because we can also use them for the cloud. I do not have to evaluate another product there for fulfilling this requirement. That's good to hear. >> So you sell insurance, your company does. Backup is largely insurance. How do you make the business case, what business benefits have you seen? Can you share with any metrics, maybe they're largely cost cutting. Maybe it's enabling DR. What can you share with us? >> The one thing I can share with you is actually we had a, that's not only based on Veeam by the product, by the backup itself, but it's also based on the Veeam reporter. We had in a branch office in Belgium. We have an issue where we had several active directory controllers running there. And with VeeamON, they reported that there's two controllers broken during the weekend and there's only one active directory controller available. Meaning, if this will also fail, we have to replicate the complete staff to Basel meaning 1500 users have to wait. And they are very aware about these profiles because they are using Citrix in the background. So meaning, we will probably have an issue there for about four to five almost a whole working day where a complete branch could not work. Meaning, there we just rolled up these two active controls with Veeam in a certain time period and then nothing happened. And I mean, counted in money, this would cost us at least a half a million Euro, this outage, if it occurred. >> Markus, in the key note, you know, one of the terms that gets thrown out is digital transformation. We've talked to a lot of financial service companies that, that terms resonate. What does it mean to your organization? How has it impacted your job? >> Yeah, it has a huge impact because our business lines they are now looking for other type of insurance. Meaning, in the past, we just insured the car for one year. So, the experience of the users then, also my kids is actually, I don't want to have a car insurance for a whole year because I'm only driving twice a month, a car. So they would like to have an insurance like insure what you use. >> Stu: As a service? >> As a service. And therefore we have to adapt this into completely other models because with our legacy systems, it's impossible. So what is our business doing? They're going out, looking for startup companies. Bringing them in and the startup companies, they start, typically in a cloud environment. They're very agile. And then when they bring out the product, the first thing is they ask for a connection to the legacy systems, for customer relationship management systems and stuff like this. So I have to really change my organization completely. And so I have to go away from these silos organization parts, into DevOps. And I also have to change my data center because I have to provide these services also as a cloud service, as it is possible in the public cloud, so. Meaning, the digitalization in the business has absolutely direct impact to my organization. >> I'd buy that service. I've got four kids, three driving, two at college. They really only need it a couple of months out of the year. I'll switch insurance companies. Give me a call. (laughing) All right, excellent. Thanks very much for coming on The Cube. Markus, we really appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> You're welcome, all right, keep it right there everybody. Stu and I will be back. Continuous coverage of continuous data protection, continuous content flow. VeeamON 2017. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering InterConnect 2017. Brought to you by IBM. >> Okay, welcome back everyone, we are live here at the Mandalay Bay for exclusive CUBE three-day coverage of IBM InterConnect 2017, I'm John Furrier with my co-host, Dave Vellante for all three days, we're on day three, winding down, great show, our next guest is Justin Youngblood, VP of Hybrid Cloud Management with IBM, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me. >> Great to have you on, because a lot of the talk, obviously, cloud, we could blockchain, but a lot of under-the-hood production workload stuff still needs to manage with all this stuff. You guys had an announcement on day one on the cloud automation management. Big part of the keynote, so it was kind of a primetime spot. Can you share us, well, why'd you get that great slot, how did you get the great slot, and what's the impact? >> Well, it really all starts with what's happening in the market, and the team's been working hard inside of IBM, we announced IBM Cloud Automation Manager, it was elevated to a tier-one offering, very strategic space for IBM in multi-cloud management. What we know is, every enterprise is now moving towards multi-cloud environments, cloud adoption is well into its maturity, and really, it's 71% of enterprises have three or more clouds, and they need to manage those clouds with a common management platform, and that's what cloud-- >> And it's big paying point too, it's one of those non-sexy items like blockchain, it's like, AI and blockchain took the headlines, but a lot of the blocking and tackling is going on in hybrid right now, so you see that orchestration piece between multi-cloud, little things like latency, security, workload migration, this is what you guys are doing, bringing the IT operations to a modern level, is that kind of the main thing? >> That's exactly right, and there're really two entry points to this, because on the one hand, it is that IT team, when you think of the modern enterprise, every modern enterprise is trying to move faster, trying to get applications out faster, trying to better engage with their customers, essentially trying to digitally transform, be the disruptor instead of the disrupted, and often, they'll look at their IT team and say, "You're not keeping up, you're too slow," so this is an automation and orchestration tool that allows the IT teams to rapidly deploy applications and infrastructure to the line of business and to their devops teams. >> Well, that's the thing, you got developers, not just IT, you got developers and the line of business who have a financial stakeholder, the top line revenue, to make it happen, and you got the movement to true private cloud happening. What's different now for you guys with automation? What's the key unique thing in this announcement that makes it go to the next level? >> Several things there, but no solution is complete from IBM these days without cognitive, and so bringing in those cognitive services and insights to analyze and help optimize the performance of workloads on any cloud environment, and also really to provide an advisor role, prescriptive guidance and recommendations on where to place workloads to optimize performance, cost, compliance right within company policy and security and regulatory environments. >> So we had Mohammed Farooq on earlier, and he was talking about cloud brokerage services, and I wonder, as you enter this market, if you're starting to see different KPIs emerge, the traditional IT operations KPIs, okay, the light on the server's on, it's uptime, planned downtime, unplanned downtime, percentage of my backups that fail, whatever it is, are there new KPIs emerging as people become cloud brokers? >> Yeah, absolutely, and Mohammed's a good friend, we're both Austenites, right, in the same building. >> Dave: Another Austenite! Austin's dominating theCUBE this week! >> We talk regularly, and really, we see a nice synergy because the cloud brokerage tool, which is brokering across the application readiness assessments of putting workloads onto the cloud and then planning and cost analysis and so on, and then the orchestration of actually deploying those workloads, so there's a nice synergy, and then, really, the third leg of the stool in my mind then plays into service management, and having the integration across all those pieces is really important, so being both cloud agnostic for multi-cloud environments, but then also having an open API, an ecosystem that you can enable and plug in with existing tools. >> Now, there was a period of time where IT was almost afraid of automation, but then this cloud thing sweeps over them, are we past that now? >> We are past that, and it's a great point, because sometimes, IT can be afraid of automation, 'cause they can think, "That's threatening my job." But we've got client success stories where we're running our cloud orchestration and hybrid cloud management solutions at massive scale, literally saving dozens of full-time equivalent hours, and what we're finding is these enterprisers saying, "Finally! "Now I can get to the innovation "and the transformative projects "that are on the strategic agenda "rather than working within manual IT processes," so it's really been a win-win. >> And when you talk about that average stat, the average enterprise has, you said three clouds? >> Three or more clouds, 71% of enterprises have three or more clouds. >> Are you excluding SaaS in that number? 'Cause-- >> Excluding SaaS, because you think about-- >> Dave: Alright, so that's infrastructure clouds, right? >> Absolutely, private clouds, public clouds, and a lot of departmental clouds or shadow IT where different cloud services are being consumed even if the IT team may not be managing it. >> So that brings the question, then, where does SaaS play, if I'm a cloud broker, and I've got these corporate edicts, and I've got these KPIs around running the business and transforming the business. How do I apply those edicts to SaaS, and can you help me do that? Is that futures, or is that just sort of a separate island? >> Yeah, it's a little bit futures right now, many times with the cloud management platforms in particular, these tools are used to automate the deployment of the infrastructure, and what's unique in our solution is the full stack application and even the day two operations, but the SaaS applications are tending to come in through a slightly different channel now, over time, I think what we're going to see is all applications, whether they're delivered by the IT team, or from the cloud, need to come into a common-- >> And should CIOs be worried about that? Because each SaaS provider has different infrastructure, some of the different availability profiles, different definitions, different SLAs, that's a whole 'nother problem area to be attacked, I guess. >> No, it is a concern, just the application sprawl, infrastructure sprawls, cloud sprawl, and this is why I think any time we're entering into a new industry, we're going to see that expanse and then back to a convergence, and honestly, I presented with Dave Bartoletti from Forrester this week, and a lot of his insights and things that he writes about and what I spoke about, and what my team did in our sessions was the need for a common management platform because of that sprawl, it's reining in the chaos. >> What are some of your favorite examples, customer case, the early wins? >> Yeah, so a great case study is that Swiss Re, large global insurance company, 60 global offices, this is a company that uses our cloud orchestrator solution with business process manager, their environment includes WebSphere, but also Microsoft Active Directory, ServiceNow, Puppet, et cetera. When they came and used our solution to, really, to automate the deployment of applications to put applications and IT as a service into a self-service catalog for their line of business and development users, at the end of the day, they have automated 45,000 processes executed each month, and literally dozens of offerings into the service catalog now. >> So the IT service management business has been evolving very rapidly, cloud has impacted that, the on-premise ratios are going to probably shift a little bit, but not radically, but then again, the use cases for public cloud are going to be dependent upon the workload, so that's kind of well-defined and discussed. The question I have for you is, from a customer standpoint, the number one competition we're having, and we're seeing, digitally at least, on Twitter and theCUBE is, what does enterprise readiness mean? So I'm an enterprise, and I want to go to the cloud. I have to then evaluate which cloud is best for which workload, but then I also have to put it through the prism of readiness, their table stakes, do they have the table stakes? >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Google's got some great machine learning, but the SLAs might not match up, or Amazon's got some great Kinesis for analytics, but I can't run my other thing on that. That's comes up a readiness problem. >> It is a readiness, and I would say, there is no single cloud that is purpose-built for all workloads, and a lot of the messages you heard here at InterConnect this week, even from Ginni Rometty herself, where IBM has the enterprise-ready cloud, and a lot of data points to back that up, including every enterprise that's going to be cognitive, and the way we think about that is cloud and cognitive are two sides of the same coin, a famous quote also from Ginni. But now we're getting into trusted networks and Hyperledger and blockchain, I don't want to get too far offtrack, but it's some-- >> But they'll all bent the change on the disruption side, on the innovation side, and honestly impact some of the blocking and tackling table stakes. >> The blocking and tackling, so that gets down to some of the regulatory concerns and other pieces, which is why we've invested now to have 51 data centers around the world, because of data locality and security concerns that companies have, so there's a lot-- >> Well, I love her line, she's the best, I got to say, very memorable, enterprise strong, made me think of the whole Boston strong thing instilled in my head, 'cause, being from that area. Enterprise strong, data first, cognitive to the core, those are the three pillars, you can unpack that in every different way, so you guys have to bring that into your offering, so I get the enterprise strong. Data first, how are you guys using the cognitive piece, specifically, in this? Data first, is that an architectural thing? And then where's the cognitive piece fit in? >> Yeah, perfect, so as we architected this solution, it was really important to us to put cognitive at the core. And really, two use cases, primarily, the first is around, as companies go deploying their applications and workloads on the cloud, every application is going to have its downtimes, its slowdowns, its outages, and that impacts end user experience, that's why it matters, it can impact revenue or NPS scores for the company. So the first is a cognitive operations capability, and you can think of that analytics moving from log analytics to quickly pinpoint the root cause of issues, up through predictive analytics to prevent an outage or an issue before it impacts your end users, ultimately into the cognitive domain, which is a true machine learning, and the capabilities that we're working on on our labs now, and that we demonstrated this week at InterConnect, we actually have a chat ops interface for the IT operator to come and interact with a cognitive system that's part of Cloud Automation Manager, and get prescriptive guidance and confidence levels-- >> Going to be a voice-activated Watson, basically, in the future. "Hey, move to cloud nine!" >> So that's the differentiation, right, if I were to push you on that, it's trust, everybody's going to say they have cloud, but like you said, it's a multi-cloud world, and it's the cognitive piece, is that right? It's really the trust and the cognitive piece. >> The cognitive piece is absolutely the number one piece of differentiation that no one has. >> Because a lot of big enterprise hardware and software companies are going to say, "You trust us," people do trust us, that's how they got to be multi billion dollar companies, but talk a little bit more about the differentiation with respect to cognitive. >> Yeah, so that's one aspect of it, and that's just cognitive operations management, and even that is that one level of value. Where I think there's additional value is getting into really letting Watson, and cognitive services, become an advisor to your business, so imagine your smartest IT operator in the business, if Watson can learn from that person, Sally or Jeff, whoever it is, learn from that, and help every IT operator in your business always make the best decision as smart as the smartest subject matter expert is in IT operations, and so this is the learning aspect of cognitive, and in that advisor role now, all of a sudden, a cognitive chat ops interface can begin to provide prescriptive guidance when there's an outage. Or imagine an application or workload going down, and Watson taking automatic action to redeploy the workload on a different cloud that has not been impacted, no interruption of service to the end user, and then come back and say, now let's pinpoint the root cause of the problem and fix that, but I've already address the main point, so-- >> And what's key about that is it's a learning machine model, so you have the domain expertise of the specific use cases, it's not trying to use some sort of vocabulary and map that on through an infrastructure environment or software environment. >> Very plain language, natural language understanding, and it's really, really powerful capability. >> Alright, so the question is, how do customers get access to this, Bluemix storage, is there IBM.com, what's the vehicles for getting this in the hands of customers? >> The easiest way is at IBM.biz/tryibmCAM, so if you go there, it'll take you right into our Bluemix service, and customers can get started right away, we have a free addition that allows customers to get started with the-- >> I know this is a tough personal question, but I'll ask anyway, no one likes to pick who their favorite child is, but what's most exciting about the product from your standpoint, looking at the success of the announcement, obviously, primetime on the keynote, congratulations, but what's the one thing that you get most excited about the product? >> Yeah, the most exciting thing is, it's all about the application. It's all about the application and digital transformation, so, certainly, the cognitive piece, and we've talked about that, but I want to highlight one other thing, which is, we in IBM are providing pre-built automation content from the infrastructure up through full-stack applications and getting into the day two operations, the monitoring, the backup, et cetera, we can orchestrate that end-to-end, unlike anyone in the industry. >> End-to-end is the key word. This is now big part of the architecture. End-to-end cross vendor. >> Exactly. >> And opensource. >> Yep. >> That's kind of the big-- >> Dave: That's what you call automation packs? >> These are the cloud automation packs, exactly, in the past, we called them patterns, we're moving to an open-pattern technology base, and we call 'em cloud automation packs. And I'll just say more about that, we're going to make them available in a marketplace, in the IBM cloud marketplace so clients can come, learn about, discover, try, and buy these automation-- >> Alright, so here's the hard question for you. Well, might be easy for you, hard for me, but as you go end-to-end, which is totally the right way, I believe, that's what everyone wants, end-to-end, but you're crossing horizontal and vertical specialty across multiple vendors, and new things coming, so now 5G comes enables autonomous vehicles, now you got smart cities, now you got Watson trying to learn new environments that I've never seen before in IT. How do you guys prepare for that, what are you guys doing to get out in front of that next wave? >> Yeah, so in the past, I think a lot of applications, and even management tools have been built as monolithic applications. With the Cloud Automation Manager, we built it from the ground up, it's cloud-native, microservices-based, just like a lot of applications out there in the enterprise are bring run, that allows us to be much more composable and flexible than we've ever been in the past, and we augment that with a set of open APIs to integrate with clients' existing tools, you heard me mention the example of integrating with ServiceNow, of course, we can integrate with UrbanCode or other devops tools, APM and monitoring tools, et cetera. >> That's the key, integration is the new table stake. >> That is the new table stake. >> Justin Youngblood, thanks for coming on theCUBE, great, congratulations on the success of your launch, and good luck with the adoption, and we'll see ya out in the marketplace, thanks for coming on theCUBE, Justin, the VP of Cloud Management inside theCUBE, more cloud action, more data action, more predictive content here on theCUBE, more great interviews coming, stay with us, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, we'll be right back.

joined by satya nadella no tell us what about about your your your thoughts on this event in general you know last year was about Big Data this year it's a little bit more focused a little bit broader focus on the modern enterprise as they say what's your take on kind of >> this event it's a great event on this is my first time here as well and having a chance to even see a couple of panels and just participate i think this notion of a modern enterprise is for real i think that it is re-imagination of what does infrastructure mean what do applications mean inside of the enterprise and we're going through this kak tonic shift which we participate in and so to have a forum like this to >> discuss that was just great so let's dig into that a little bit what you know what makes the what makes the moderate enterprise it's it's certainly a cloud and virtualization you've got the Big Data piece kind of the DevOps model of application development how do you kind of define what all bring to bringing together all these different elements >> what makes a modern enterprise yeah one of the things that I like to sort of make sure we focus on I work on the infrastructure business at Microsoft so >> if you're in the infrastructure business the key thing is to be in touch with the applications and it turns out in our own case today we are building a pretty diverse set of applications both consumer and enterprise so we're building vein which is an applied machine learning application real in building office 365 which is an enterprise focus collaboration communication application we're building dynamics and another enterprise crm ERP in the cloud application and what have you so that diversity of applications makes you rethink what is the infrastructure needed from storage compute as well as the network and so we are building a new operating system for the modern enterprise to be able to deploy these modern applications so that's kind of how I conceptualize I would say there are four major elements to it the first one is it's inside of the data center you have much more of a software driven by descent where you're orchestrating your compute storage and network in support of your applications either at the data center or multi data center scale because there's not a single atom rise that's not using some public cloud provider or another service provider in addition to what they already are virtualizing inside their own private cloud so that is all a software control plane and so we are really thinking about what is the modern operating system that enables you to manage the data center a second dimension would be the what is driven through consumerization of IT I like to describe it as transforming IT to be much more people century so you want end-users to adopt the devices they want and still have access to all their applications and data and yet aighty needs to be able to set compliance and policy so how do you really reimagine that is another dimension big data is something you reference there's not going to be a single application that's not a big data application and so those are the major major teams and the last thing I would say is this DevOps so not only have you built the application but it's even the life cycle around the applications being reimagined how developers and operations professionals come together in support of an ongoing improvement and continuous integration these four megatrends I think constitute a modern enterprise >> infrastructure interesting so let's dig into a little bit about what you mentioned about the use of kind of public cloud infrastructure as well as your internal data center so you've got these hybrid environments they're starting to emerge again pretty much software lead a software led infrastructure is what we're calling it a wiki bond how do you go about actually making it possible for for CIOs and their teams and to actually manage those environments in as efficient way as possible you know making decisions about which applications are deployed in the public cloud which it deployed in your data center how they interact potentially applications that are drawing on data from both spots it's obviously can get very complex so you know Microsoft is one of those public cloud providers with windows so how do you approach that product so >> if you sort of take what you just described which is if you you sort of start with the design point that there will be a public cloud there will be a private cloud and a service provider cloud then how you think about the software control is going to be defined by that design so it's not going to be narrowly defined as bring everything into my data center and I'll help you manage it but it is actually distributed so I think of this is the true fruition of distributed computing and we believe in that so then what are the things that matter first is identity so anything whenever things get distributed the most important thing that brings back things together is actually identity of users and identity for resources so active directory was a great resource for many enterprises in terms of how they came the complexity of the previous generation of client server now we have replumbed and reimagined active directory with Azure Active Directory so this consistency in directories helps IT administrators manage this complexity the next one is virtualization so not only would you be able to virtualize on your private cloud you should be able to move the same work cloud workload which is virtualized to any of these other clouds so you need a degree of guarantee that the performance characteristics of a virtualized workload get maintained across all so that's another thing that with our hyper-v investments and our add your investments we are in a making sure that happens the other one would be management so with if you can be sitting on the system center management console in the orchestrator and looking at a workload which could be in fact in 11 of these clouds or in fact the tears of a single app could be split which is the front end is on azure the back end is back in on premise and so that's also very very important to have a management tier which is the control plane that allows you to manage this complexity and lastly it's the consistency of the application platform Excel so if you're building and development you never want to be in the state where you build a great app but you can never check out so if you build it in the public cloud in the case of azure you should be able to take it and run it on a private cloud or on a service provider so these four things are on identity management virtualization and application platform I think is the core investment you've got to make to help enterprises truly adopt the cloud while you know it's >> complex but you gotta tame the complexity and then of course be what you're talking about it really is a lot of data being generated companies of course want to want to start taking an end of that data they want to analyze it they want to actually take those insights and turn them into either applications or perhaps convey them to executives and others in terms of visualization and of course one of those underlying platforms is to do talk about Microsoft's approach to Hadoop I know you're working with Hortonworks you actually kind of discontinued working on your own Big Data technology when you realize I think that you know who Duke was gonna is going to become the de facto standard so talk about how you're making it possible to bring the dip into this environment where more and more companies are looking to ring that it may be as a big data hub kind of store a lot of data and then feeds out to applications different workloads what is your approach to actually making that I guess enterprise ready yep and making it easy to get it get started and then term you know maybe science projects into really production whether the quantity I >> mean this notion of being able to take data and convert it into insights in support of enterprise goals is sort of the holy grail of this moment and so one of the things that we are actively doing is to bring a lot of the traditional value we've always had if you think about the momentum we have with our self-service bi capabilities on the edge of data which is Excel SharePoint sequel analysis services is where all data goes to in order to be able to drive in sites within and you know with it with end users because at the end of the day humans will be involved to be able to drive inside out of all of this data so now the question is how do we take that edge loop and connected with the information production which is upstream and that is where we are completing the story with having HD inside haven't even a relational interface on top of HT insight for in-memory ad-hoc query analysis like a data warehouse on top of it which i think the Hadoop community itself is adopting which is a sequel interface on Hadoop is probably one of the more talked about things nowadays and so this notion of having a complete data platform everything from MapReduce to stream processing to sequel like query interactively and then empowering end-users and workflows with data around their users which share for in Excel where we've invested in things like a power pivot and Power View which are actually powerful in-memory databases in fact I would say the most powerful in-memory database now is power view inside of Excel from where you can issue a sequel I mean basically a hive query to HD inside and populate millions of rows in a tabular column form that you're very familiar with we think that that democratization of big data is going to be very very important to acceptance of it as you said it from science projects or just being in the data science department to bring ubiquitous so we've only got time for >> one more question so just love to get your kind of future outlook what are some of the key priorities for you and your group over the next day 6 to 12 >> months I mean the key thing for us is really bootstrapping our cloud business we've got some fantastic traction with office 365 it's really doing very well in the q3 earnings we talked about how we have known a run rate basis a billion dollars in revenue going to office 365 and many customers who are to office 365 never bought an exchange server from so we're even it's not even zero something really in the short run it please and so we're very glad with that and there is a sure is just a natural complement to any customer who's already got office 365 sharepoint extensions the end user bi Active Directory administration all of these are sort of very natural extensions but agile itself now has got very very significant momentum yesterday we talked about how as urine as your services with all of our service provider partners has also got a billion dollars in revenue so that means when it comes to the core of the enterprise and their move to the cloud which is going to be complimenting a lot of what they're already doing in on premise is something that we're a pretty major player on and if anything we want to be solving the here and now practical problems with a forward-looking vision around identity around consistency of the management plane around virtualization compatibility around the application platforms and I think that that's what we're really up to in the immediate future all right yeah I think you really hit on something there with these gonna be high route deployments they're going to you know just much like in big data you know dupe isn't going to come in and replace your database your relational database and neither is the cloud whenever place your internal data center they've got to work together it sounds like you guys are working hard to kind of make that as seamless of the proposal as possible for your clients so I slept in Delaware Microsoft appreciate you coming on the cube thanks very much well hope you come back and join us about 39 thank you so much we'll be right back from the excel at Stanford symposium with our next guest writing for this