>>Okay. Thanks Adam. In the studio of Jeffery David Lonnie, back on the cube set here in the middle of all the action of mobile world Congress is cloud city telco DRG, digital revolution, Michael Speranza CEO of separate tells here with us. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on the queue. Thanks for having me, Dave and John. Appreciate it. All right. So we're in the middle of the act we were just talking about while we're waiting to come on camera, uh, east coast, I'm from California days in Boston, you're from the New York area. We're back to real life. This is what's happening here. It's a hybrid event, so not fully packed, but good showing a lot of action. So let's get to it. Yeah. What do you guys do? Take a minute to explain what you guys do real quick. And I got some specific public cloud. The questions >>Were excellent. So Zephyr tells a global provider of telecommunication solutions, uh, to everyone across the stack, tier one, tier two and tier three CSPs throughout the world. We've got 300 customers. And I think the, probably the most interesting part about us as a company is that we actually probably started our lineage in the traditional sense in terms of these on-premise legacy, large systems. And we are a provider that has jumped in feet first. So the cloud revolution, and we're taking the effort now and the investment to move all of our solutions to the public cloud. And we're super excited to be here and showcase that to everybody >>I ask you, because one of the things that we've been documenting, Dave and I for the past 10 years is the enterprise transformation. I mean the digital digital transformation has been going on for quite some time on the enterprise side. Telco now is, seems like it's getting tuned up nicely to be disrupted and transformed. You're in the middle of it. You're on bolt. You've been on both sides of the table. Now you're on the full throttle, transport transformation. What's, what's your take? What, where are we at? >>Yeah, it feels as though we're at an inflection point. I think the, you know, the last call it 12 or 18 months, maybe that's been the industry pause where we kind of look back and reflect around what their long-term strategies are and more and more just over the last 12 or 18 months, we've seen more announcements, more big names, jump in feet first, be a little bit more public. Uh, no pun intended about what their, what their intentions are, what their investments, um, that they're making into the efforts that they're trying to deploy and their networks. And we feel like we're at an inflection point and we're ready for it. >>It's interesting that Zephyr tell, had a legacy business on-prem business and you're transitioning. What was the catalyst for that transition? And what does it take into would that journey look like? >>Yeah, I think the catalyst is really figuring out how to enable our customers to compete on a ladder that has more rungs to it. Right? If you look at these legacy on premise solutions, we could pour mountains and mountains of dollars into R and D. And at the end of the day, we would still be struggling to offer them something that really creates a true competitive disadvantage or a competitive advantage for their business. And really when you make the move to the public cloud and you start leveraging some of the platforms that are out there, it changes your PR your profile dynamically in terms of what you can offer to the customer. So for us, that realization is what happened. And we jumped in feet first and just the ability to get products to market, to give them a different cost structure is something that we would have never been able to do with our traditional legacy. >>So how did you do it? Because you have a balancing act, there you go to your existing business. Did you sort of fence that off and sort of start with the cloud native approach? And what did you find was the sort of before and after, and some of the benefits that you see? >>Yeah, that's a great question. So it's, it's a difficult conversation with the customer, right? I think you have to go and engage the customer and be our, our approach has been to be very open and transparent with them. Um, we're not telling them that what they're using is doesn't have a future. We're just telling them that we believe the future is bright or somewhere else. And that's what we're choosing to invest. Yeah. >>And they won't, they shouldn't even know it. I mean, if they get, cause the cup of cloud is bringing in new things, one of the things we've been riffing on in the past year is the three RS reset, reboot phase one, you gotta reboot things. Then you replatform with the cloud. And then all the winners, once they replatform to the cloud, they refactored their operations. And so this seems to be like the secret recipe. Once you get to the refactoring, then you're introducing net new opportunities. So you do some cost recovery, you'd be platform. You get some things going and then boom, new things >>Are happening. Yes, absolutely. Yet you have to have a long-term horizon. You can't, if you're trying to make these types of transitions over quarters or even years, it, it's not something that's easy to do with the business. >>Did you move the whole house into the cloud? We're working on it. Okay. Okay. But, so when you think about the telco industry, this is to me anyway, there's clear workloads that can and should go into the cloud. Like immediately. I mean, I, I think about it like mainframe downsizing in the day. I mean, anything that could go did go fast, you know? And so is it a similar parallel here? >>we've got maybe 10 products in the portfolio. We probably have half of them really in the public cloud already. Uh, it doesn't mean every customer is using them in that dimension, but we have half of them already in the public cloud as an option. Yeah, absolutely. As an option. And then the other is it's really, I think I'm understanding this paradigm of kind of, um, when we get into more detail, I got of this no feature left behind mindset that you have to challenge where you really have to convince the customer that no industry disruption ever started by making the new, innovative product, do everything the old one did great. And they have to kind of take that journey with you and lean into the change and understand what the long-term benefits >>And, and talk about those, the business. I mean, you remember John, when we got started, John was driving to the data center and, you know, racking cabling. And then when we entered the public cloud was like, wow, we saw the light. So until you do it, sometimes you can't experience it. What are they seeing in terms of the benefits? >>Yeah. I mean the two major benefits are obviously cost and agility, right. And you know, you talk about agility and just what it enables them to do from a subscriber experience, perspective, deploying new services, adapting those services to, uh, the new business paradigms and really improving the customer experience. Right. There's no mistake. You look at this industry, it's probably got one of the most depressing statistics around customer experience and NPS of any industry in the world. >>Right. So cables up there. Yes. >>It's hard not to improve that. And the other is cost, right. And that's an undeniable discussion that you can have if you get to the right level of the customer about what the long-term benefits of the cloud are. >>Yeah. You know, it's funny as you usually hear NPS in the context of how great the MPS is, but you hear it a lot in this industry and the different contexts. >>One of the things we've been talking about, and this is the big theme we're going to get to tomorrow the next day, the open, open side of this open arrangement. And rather than ran alliances got more and more members were reporting on that. As you look at the stack, the tech stack, you got a lot of OT and it is coming in with, because it's digital a lot more IP based systems. So you have this OT legacy culture of just, okay, we have sometimes regulation drives it, but sometimes it's just old ways of doing things. Is that going to be encapsulated with, with like say containers or is it does have a di does it have to like be, let go, or could you, can you, can you nurture it like something, we still have mainframes. I mean, big banks have mainframes. You don't go away. They do one thing. So is there a coexistence between that old legacy on top and abstracting away that >>Nonsense? I think certainly there, there can be. And we've, we've employed that approach with customers where if they're looking at deploying new services or tackling a new emergent market or rolling out a new kind of tiered service offering that might be under a different brand or label from their core brand, we've certainly approached it that way. Um, the big thing for us is really approaching that discussion with the customer and really talking about what we can do, not what we can do and can't emphasize that enough. And the other piece is really having the right decision makers in the conversation. Right. And understanding that you're talking to, um, someone who understands the impact on the P and L not just on the making kind of virtuous technical decisions about the way things are >>Michael. I got to get your thoughts on the agile because obviously cloud speed agility. We just heard from Microsoft on the interview, I did with him around, um, high density chips and, you know, low power and that's going to enable more stuff. So there's more stuff coming in the hyperscale of more cloud. And you start to see them. It's like snowflake built on top of AWS, hugely successful. So this is an enablement market. And she'll be these key, how, as the CEO, you're looking at this, okay, you're refactoring, replatforming, agility is a benefit. How does that change? How you run the business, how you serve customers. >>Yeah. So really changes where our investment dollars go. Uh, that's probably the number one impact. So if you look at AWS as a platform, you know, it started 15 years ago, it had one service right today, it's got over 200. So understanding that these platforms receive billions and billions of dollars of investment every single year, regardless of which one you're, you're aligned to and leveraging that to power, the services that we provide, we don't have to build everything right. We can leverage the capabilities that they provide to us, really focus our energy and our dollars and the things that make our application unique to our customer. So that was really one major tradition as leading an organization that you have to make. And then you have to convince the organization to go in that direction. It's different and you have to be very overt and transparent with the customer. >>Well, the early days of financial service cloud was an evil word. And now every financial service organizations leaning in big time, there's obviously reticence among public telcos moved to the public cloud. There's a lot of discussion about openness. It's hard to replicate the reliability of the network, et cetera, et cetera, maybe some of that, you know, rational and founded, but w what do you see in terms of the reticence and the risks and how are you helping mitigate those? >>Yes, my perspective it's really just been this kind of cascade of excuses and explanations as to why not to go, right. And it started with, you know, things that could have been done, legitimate issues at the time of data sovereignty or security they've been solved, right? You move on and now it's, uh, you know, that, that notion of no feature, no man left behind there. We have to have feature parody. We can't go. Um, we've, you know, every other industry has debunk that myth. And now the one that I think is most important to challenge is, is organizational dysfunction, where it's really about accessing the right levels in the customer to have that conversation, to neutralize the power or importance of any one dimension of decision-making and have an overt business discussion about what are the numbers behind, um, the solution and how you're providing it. You have to include the cost discussion and it, and you have to actually get the finance person to really understand the technology and not just outsource that decision to somebody else. Um, cause that person is often faced with making a decision that, um, you know, it could be deleterious to their role, their business, uh, their own organizations. And that's something that needs to be arbitrated at a senior level. I think >>So, no, we've seen this before. I love it. It's protecting turf. Exactly. No. And just internal politics. It does that. And that's what we saw in the financial services business, and then forget it. >>It's just, well, the thing too, though, with, with the skill set is not only is it a skill retraining going on, new roles are emerging. So for instance, the SRE was, we've been covering in a lot of these big companies. You've got site reliability, engineers pioneer by Google. That's a new role dealing with infrastructure. And as infrastructure as code comes out, it gets more fuzzy. What's under the hood because now you've got Lambda, you've got serverless. So that entire program ability is going to put pressure on these old OT stacks. Yep. What's your forecast. >>And that's what I'm saying. That's what broke the barrier in a lot of these regulated industries was infrastructure go all the developers to your point, want it in. And that was like the penguins off the iceberg, >>The pressure on the OT stacks, or does the abstraction at the top driving innovation? Is it going to be disrupted down here or is it going to be at the top of the stack? What's >>Your team? Yeah. So I think, you know, I've seen that traditional financial services, et cetera, a front row seat and financial services in a different role. And the way I saw it actually unfold was having some sort of role that sits between the CFO and the CTO. Someone who's responsible for the, not only the technical evolution of the architecture, but the financial evolution of the architecture that can actually be a compatriot to the CFL, making those decisions. That's how I've seen it really traditional, unless there's buy-in from the top down, it will just be kind of pressure from the bottom up. And we'll never see it take hold >>If bottom up, bottom up will not work and less top-down. It's got it. It's gotta >>Be the top down, bottom up, as you were saying. Yeah. >>I mean, what drives that? There's the legal come in and drive that a little bit now because you've got a lot of pressure with cyber. So you've got cyber, you've got regulatory pressure with telcos. I mean, let me carry as they get more. Are they still >>Blockers? Is that the legal still a blockage? >>Yeah. Uh, w we haven't seen legal really enter the decision making process for us and, you know, for us, we probably wouldn't involve them unless we needed to. Quite honestly, I think it could be more of a blocker than then someone, uh, you know, they can always say, no, they can't really say yes. Um, is our view of that. So they're an important person to be, uh, on the journey, but probably not someone that we were, we would seek to include >>In the decision. All right, Michael, I want you to take the last minute to just take a minute to explain what you guys do. What's your vision of the company, obviously you're on the right wave, the wave big, you get your surfboards out there. You're gonna ride the wave. What are you going to do? What's the big goals. What's your plans have to put a plug in. Yeah, >>Look, we see the future as a marketplace of cloud-based solutions, right? We feel that we're, um, someone that's trying to lead that innovation. I think it's fantastic to see what's happening here right now with cloud city and giving all the disruptive vendors, a voice in the industry that they probably did not have before. And we really see the vision as that open marketplace, where things are leveraging API APIs. All these systems can communicate across the stack, and we're going to be part of that journey. Uh, we're showcasing solutions here today, around subscriber management to drive ARPU. We've got, um, solutions for managing the customer experience in the home that will increase retention. And really everybody has to just open their minds to learn about what's possible with the public cloud, and then translate it to how it can actually benefit their business. >>Are you guys looking to hire and he think you want to share plugged for >>Look, we're growing we're we we've got solutions here that we're looking at positions to customers across the SAC globally, tier one tier twos and tier threes. And please come by the booth and visit us and learn about us. >>No, John, the big difference between the cloud this decade and cloud last decade is such an ecosystem. Now that's built in that's forming that you can leverage, right? That, you know, it was kind of really immature last decade. And it's not just one company going after this. It is the ecosystem. >>Well, not the problem. The opportunity is, is that the telcos are going to get punched in the face with the edge now, driving with 5g, because now they cannot ignore the fact that you now have a cloud edge that it's explosive and functionality low costs, Silicon identity. It's just a game changer that consumer technology is coming to the edge and it's going a forcing function so that they, if they don't, if they blink, who blinks first, yeah, telcos are cloud. So public clouds, great train Blake. The freight train of public cloud is coming into the telco. And if people don't adapt to it, they're going to be toast. And I think the opportunity is for entrepreneurs and founders and CEOs to drive, drive that innovation, okay. Innovations here. And we're going to continue bringing the coverage and we're going to go right to the studio where Adam and the team are there.

>>Live from San Francisco. It's the cube covering my groin insight 2019 brought to you by micron. >>We're back at pier 27 in San Francisco. This is the cube, the leader in live tech coverage and we're covering micron insight 2019 I'm Dave Vellante with my cohost David Floyd and this event is kind of interesting. David, it basically intersperses cube interviews with big tent discussions, thought leadership, we've heard from automotive, healthcare and and 5g discussions and no Han is here. He's the vice president and CTO of the emerging business at Erickson. And you were just on a panel. Welcome to the cube. Thanks. Great to be here. You were talking about five G, we're going to talk about five G. so first of all, talking about the emerging business at Ericsson, >>your whole group, you know, so Ericsson, we, you know, 99 a lot of our business today has done what operators emerging business group, we're sort of looking at the intersection of industry, cloud computing, our traditional mobile network operator customers, and how do we, how do we put those together and look for new either products or business models. And really create something new for customers. >>So we tell him when he's talking about five G, everybody gets all excited. Certainly the technology community is excited about it. There's a whole value chain and an ecosystem that's that's pumping right along. The carriers are adopting and the users are just waiting. So what should we know about? >>So I, you know, I think there's a couple of different things. One is from a consumer perspective, you're definitely looking at faster, you know, better. All of the things we've got from the other GS at older things. You know, today, you know, faster downloads of movies. I think what we're, and I'm, I'm in the tech business, not in the prediction business, you know. So I think what we've learned from previous technologies is we almost don't know what the new applications are. We're trying to make the platform as easy as possible for developers to utilize what the network actually has to offer. So I think that's a big part of what we're trying to do. The other part is enhancing what you have today as a consumer is massive, but also industries is a huge pull on 5g. So we talked about industry four. Dot. Zero and really transforming industries and cutting the cables in production lines, allowing monitoring of systems that never happened before. >>A lot of use cases that can be out there. So a, I have a younger son of 22 and I look at my a bill every month. Yeah, I do have him downloading 10 times more data. It doesn't fill me with uh, duty or just the excise to carriers. I mean while we've seen with every, every end. And of course that was the question how much of a down, yeah, how much low is the price going to be on this baffled breeze you go to invest an awful lot. Absolutely. So I mean we're going to see it tens, 10 orders of magnitude cheaper. So even as it is now with 4g, we're seeing a lot of the unlimited plans coming available and so on. I think we're just going to see more of that. And then the question, actually a big question for five G is what will you pay for? >>You know, if we talk about age compute and low latency, if you're a gamer and I can give you X milliseconds of latency versus you know, a two X milliseconds, how much would you pay for that? So I think what we know at the moment is people will pay for that. We don't know exactly how much, and that's where you need the ecosystem and you need to get stuff out there. And actually some of the economic impact is fuzzy. But in thinking past, there's no prologue. But if you think about the other GS as they sort of were adopted, what can we learn from those? And how do you think five G will be different in terms of its adoption and economic impact? Let's say if you look at adoption, I mean just a number of contracts. We have the number of deployments we have globally, just off the charts in terms of where we are with 4g Korea launched and a few months ago, just just before the summer, within two months they had a million 5g subscribers with smart phones in their eyes and two months later they added a second million subscribers. >>I mean for a market to go from zero to that in, in that period of time with smartphones, if we go back to 4g, all of that was with dongles and sort of hotspots on routers, you know, so to jump directly to smartphones, huge adoption, it's going to happen fast. Well what do you, what are the sequence, what's the sequence of events that have to occur for adoption to really take off? >> So obviously you need to build out the networks and the operators are doing that are pretty high speed. You need to have the devices ready and all the devices. Now it's not like you have a 5g only device. It's obviously capable of all the four G things. And then it's better when you have 5g. So the devices are going to come and take and fast. So all your new devices, most of the high end devices have 5g capability already in there. >>Um, and then the networks just getting built out more and more. And then of course the application developers actually understanding how can I take advantage of those new capabilities? And then you'll start to see, okay, wow, you know, I didn't, this wasn't possible before. It's not just a faster download. It's really, there's just new experiences happening >> from a development standpoint. How much access do they have to the technology? Do they have to wait until this is all built out? Obviously not, but, but, but what's the status of sort of the devs? So we're, we're trying to, and we're working with a lot of the ecosystem. We have, we call it the D 15 studio in our Santa Clara office. We're bringing developers in there and really trying to understand, because you know, we talk Telekom as well. So we want to expose things. We want to understand, do you know what variable, if we say quality of service, what does that mean for you? You know, how do you translate that? So, and we're working with, you know, the cloud players where to developers live to some extent to bring in that ecosystem and understand how it all plays together. So >>ahead. Yup. Um, so if really, if you're looking at it longterm, obviously it's going to happen, but the experience is as I go around the States, is that you've got all these different four G three GS edges still in a very, very patchy a level of it. Is this going to be different? Is this going to actually go into different places because there's a big investment that has to be made, a lot of things very close together. Yes, yes. That seems to be a recipe for everything being or right in the cities. But as soon as you go outside the urban areas, it's going to be very patchy. How does that compare, for example, with Elon Musk's idea of a doing stuff from the sky? >>Well, everything comes down to economics. So you know, it's, it's obviously you're going to have denser deployments in the cities, then you are in the countryside and so on. One of the big advantages would 5g is am, and not to get too deep into the technical part, but you can use all the spectrum that's available. And spectrum is super important as we get, you know, when we have lower frequency spectrum, you can cover a hundred miles Wade, one base station as you get to the millimeter wave, which is you get super high bandwidth, then you're add hundreds of meters. Yeah. And so obviously one is more suitable for a rural environment, the other is more suitable for. So for an urban environment, so obviously having those working together in one technology allows you to deploy everything and get the benefits in a much broader area than we had for any of the previous. >>There's choice there in terms of how you deploy or, or leverage the spectrum. So you're saying that the higher performance end of the spectrum, it's gonna require a greater density of other components. And absolutely. When people talk about oil, there's going to be a lot more distributed, you know, pieces of the five G network that has to get built out. So who does that? Who's putting those pieces of the value chain in? So different players, obviously the mobile network operators, the 18 Ts and Verizons of the world are doing a lot of the heavy lifting and know what our support to actually put the, the radios and the towers in place. And then there's an edge compute piece as well, which is different players are putting in that. Um, so, so a lot of that infrastructure has been done. I think one thing that we've been pushing quite a lot, all our install base of radios is um, 5g upgradable via software. >>So that means that a lot of the already installed, uh, radios and infrastructure, you're just softer upgrade, you know, an hour later it's now 5g ready. So I think that's a big piece of basin. Back to your question of how quickly and and can reach all those areas, are there any specific commercial blockers that you see, um, that you're thinking through? I am I, I think the, just understanding some of the more challenging when you look at, if you're deploying edge compute and you have to invest billions and really getting that far out to the edge, I think there's some questions still there. Like I said, how much would you pay for 20 milliseconds versus 15 milliseconds. And that might sound like a lot, but that's a lot of extra infrastructure you would need to put out. So I think that's still being worked true. >>And obviously some of that will happen quicker in a downtown San Francisco than it will in a, you know, middle of Nevada plays well and the others that you've mentioned before, it's unclear what new applications are going to emerge here. And so it's almost like build it and they will come and then we'll figure it out and then we'll figure out how to charge for it. Like you say the gamers, how much will they pay for it? Yeah, so those are some of the uncertainties but they'll shake themselves out. So absolutely. I was a pretty smart about doing. What about micron and the role of memory players and storage players? How will this affect them? Eight say a huge opportunity when you ah, yeah, I mean invest no and Bardy hats. >> Yeah, I think it's a, when you look at the number of devices and, okay, what's the device? >>The devices are smartphone. Well the devices now your car, it's every IOT device and down to your toaster and all the crazy stuff people are talking about too. I mean to every industrial application tool that age, computers. So you're distributing now a lot of different compute memory storage across different parts of the network. So I mean they talked earlier in the panel about phones having terabytes of data. You know, it's in, it's just unimaginable. The amount of data storage. Remember you're going to need in a vehicle, you know, they're looking at terabytes per hour of data and then how much of that should they shift off the vehicle? How much did it keep there? So huge opportunity. >> Well, I'd be willing to pay for, um, some memory in my appliances. They tell me when they're going to break. I just got a new dishwasher and I can program it with my, my remote. I don't want to program. I just want to know that on Thanksgiving morning it was that it works. But in a week before it's going to break, I want to know so I can deal with vending and maintenance. That's a big use case. Can't wait until that happens. The last question, so >>I was going to be, I was following up on that last point you were making. Um, uh, so again, this cost of everything, this, this value that you're going to get out of it. Um, it seems to me that, um, that this is gonna take a long time to push out. Um, and, and before it actually down. And people will actually know whether they can pay for this. And then one thing in particular is there's a lot of resistance in, in the, in the States anyway, to all of these devices being put very, very close, you know, to the, to, to it for example, putting all the devices down, download a row for example, that, that, that seems to be very expensive and, and going to get a lot of reaction from consumers is, is that not the case? >>So I actually, we're not seeing it that much. I mean if you look across the globe, um, China obviously is a slightly unique situation. Massive deployments already happening there. Like I said, Southeast Asia, South Korea being among the, you know, the forefront, big deployments already there. And we're seeing big pull from industries already and the operators here in U S are announcing new cities, you know, every month practically. So they are really full on into this. And to some extent it's, it's really just, there's a capacity need to have the spectrum. They need to make the investments and they're, they're doing it as we speak. >>So I think it depends on me. Why was it a meeting the other day in Boston with a lot of city officials and folks that worked for the mayor's office? They're envisioning Boston, you know, for the next 50 years, smart cities and five G was like, if you did a word cloud 5g was that the number one topic? You know, we talked earlier about sports stadiums. You can see that being, you know, use cases going to be these >>hotspots where it's of very, very high >>of the city in this case in Boston's case are they're going to invest, right? And they're gonna think that's going to be a differentiator for cities. >>You have this amazing infrastructure, you know, five G infrastructure that allows you to take advantage of that, be it just from, they talked about traffic congestion and what the city can do and then what the businesses and the consumers can do in that area that that can end up being a differentiator for innovation companies going there and so on. >>Right. All right. We're going to go before they blow us out. No, thanks very much for coming to the queue very much. All right, great. To have you on. I keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest after this short break. You're watching the cube live from micron insight 2019 from San Francisco right back.

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam and theCUBE's Ecosystem Partner. >> Welcome back to theCUBE coverage here in Barcelona, Spain. We are live at Cisco Live 2018 Europe. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder SiliconANGLE. My co-host Stu Miniman, analyst at WikiBon.com. Our next two guests is Siva Sivakumar, who's the Senior Director Data Center Solutions at Cisco and Lee Howard, Chief Technologist, Global Industry Solutions and Alliances at NetApp. Great partnership here to talk about the tech involved in the partnership. Obviously, in the industry, it's pretty well known that NetApp's doing really well with Cisco. Congratulations. You guys have been enabling great partner dynamics lately, but all the action's been on the intersection between a raise, better, faster, cheaper storage, but also enabling software defined stuff, value. What's the check involved in the partnership? Why is it going so well? Lee, can you start? >> I think offering choice out there is the best thing that we can do. You've got data fabric from a NetApp perspective is that super interconnected highway and as many on ramps as we can build for folks to get on that highway. The more successful you're going to be able to see. I mean, the IDC numbers speak for themselves, prolific, double digit growth. I think we were at 56% last quarter, listed together on there. That's how tight this partnership's been. Leveraging that combined portfolio has given us a very competitive offering out there in the industry. >> Siva, I want to get your thoughts because actually Cisco, we've been... Stu and I love talking about networking, in Cisco in particular because the old days, provision the network and good stuff happens. Apps get built. Things get done. But with the Cloud, you see the shift where you've got DevOps culture, you got cloud-native happening. The real enabling technologies have to be beyond the network, so you guys have been successful with a variety of other things. What's the key things that's making you guys key partners in the ecosystem? What are you guys truly enabling? Is it network programmability? What's the secret sauce from Cisco's standpoint? >> If you look at the way Data Center has evolved in the last decade or so, the way customers are consuming technology is much more at a platform level. They want things simplified. They want to, as you just said, the innovation that's happening in the above layer, in terms of the software's tech and use cases, is just tremendous. They really want the platform to become simple and that's what Cloud did to you anyways. That level of simplification, that level of optimization, but still a best of breed, it is what got us together. We have continued to build world class platforms that started one way, started mainly looking at virtualization in those place over time. In the last four or five years or so, the amount of innovations we have brought on top of a FlexPod, which is a joined solution together, has been right at the cutting edge of where technology is going and where applications are landing. That, in a very large way, has become the key for the success between the two of us. >> We had talked Brandon on here earlier and he validated our thesis and WikiBon actually had a report that came out last year, in the middle of the year, called "True Private Cloud." It was the only research analyst firm that actually got this one right, in my opinion, which validated by you guys is that... Certainly any (mumbles) would argue that everything is moving to the Cloud, tomorrow. Certainly there's some cloud migration and some stuff in the Public Cloud, no problem. But what WikiBon did is they looked at the true Private Cloud numbers, meaning that the action where the spend is and where the buyers are doing the most work both refreshing and retooling is on premises. Because they're actually changing the operating model on premises now as a way, as a way, as a sequence, to hybrid and then maybe full Multi-Cloud or full Public Cloud, whatever they want to do. So that being said, Lee, what does that mean? Because certainly, I understand what a Cloud operating model is, but I'm talking about storage and networking. >> Yeah. >> What does that look like? Is that a full transformation? How long is that going to take? Your thoughts? Comment on that. >> We're seeing, you saw on the key note this morning them referencing brand new titles and new personnel, new human capital that's coming in. I think that is, both you're enabling and your barring the factor to changing how you're consuming resources on site. Cloud architects as they're coming in to prominence enterprise architects. I think we're getting to a point where there's enough of a intuition to the software that's enabling those consumption trends to shift, that it's now a way for not just those that have the inside information, but it's something that's consumable for the masses. I think 2018, you guys hit on DevOps, highly versatile model going forward and I think Multi-Cloud is going to be the right answer. >> John: The roles are changing. >> Roles are changing and we have been seeking to be that technology provider that regardless of where you're at in that journey, you're able to leverage our portfolio to be able to do it. >> John: Does the product change? >> The product, the tenets behind the product, not so much but I think the way that it's being leveraged does end up changing. >> Siva, your thoughts on this. >> You know, if you start to think about the earlier generation of Cloud, it was mainly seen as a capacity argumentation, mainly on the IS. It really started people to think that everything is moving to Cloud, but if you look at the innovation that happens in the Cloud, the Cloud in itself is a massive ecosystem and people want to go do that. So there is a huge reason why the cloud is successful, but that's not necessarily just taking everything on. That's not the trend. What you really see is customers now starting to reach that level of maturity to say hey, there is a tremendous value in what I can do and on-prim, the data gravity and the latency and those things. >> So you agree with the "True Private Cloud" report, the on-prim action is where? >> We continue to see that from our customers, you see it as option and things like that. We absolutely see that is real as well. >> Let's go back to the data center for a second because some people look at it, and it's like oh, well CI's been happening now for gosh, almost a decade now. HCI has a lot of buzz out there. We want to hear what you're hearing from customers because first of all, what we see is there's still the majority of people, still building their own. They're taking the pieces. FlexPod is a little bit different than say hyper-converged from a single skew, but you've still got to build your own CI. Big partnership >> Absolutely. >> There's a huge revenue. HCI has both Cisco and NetApp have pieces there. Where are the customers today? Why is CI still a meaningful part of the discussion today? >> I think it all comes down to scale and how you want to be able to interface. What do you want your data center to be like today? How are you staffed and proficient at implementing a solution and where do you want that data center to go tomorrow? I think CI and HCI absolutely have a place together in the data center, but as we see RFPs fundamentally shift to reflect the new way that infrastructure's being consumed, a cookie cutter approach that you get with a lot of HCIs isn't always going to be the answer. You want to have that full modularity, that full flexibility. It's in the title, it's FlexPod. You want to be able to have that versatility to address not just the initial scoping project but with Flash and able data centers, assets are staying on the books longer and longer. Those depreciation schedules are getting stretched out. Having the versatility, not just to live in today's operating environment, but the operating environment of tomorrow, I think is what's really driving that main stay of CI. >> Siva, we heard in the key notes this morning a lot of discussion about Multi-Cloud and management. Talk about Cisco and NetApp. How do you view those together? Where do you go to market together, co-engineer, things like that? >> Absolutely. If you guys look at what we did in the FlexPod, we created what we would fundamentally call or say code platform for data center. That was the biggest success. We had a lot of work loads and news cases. But in the last two to three years, what we have both done, because individually we have portfolio products that allow a Cloud journey. Cisco is a big proponent of Multi-Cloud and the journey to Cloud and proving customer the right platform so they can pick and choose when to go to Cloud and how to go to Cloud. There are similar assets from NetApp. What we have done is we have built FlexPod solutions that builds on top of on that leverage, is the Cloud Center products, NetApp's data fabric, some of their technology that's call location within the equinox and so on and so forth. What that has allowed is FlexPod as a platform has blossomed as the Cloud has grown because we now offer the choice. That also brought more customers to realize while these guys really provide me the journey to Cloud model. That is more new solution that we are building that continues to drive that mindset from both companies. >> Stu: Lee, you want to build on that? >> Yeah, providing that operational excellence to where you're able to come in and leverage these assets, not just day zero but through the entire lifespan of that asset and that's the... Quality of life improvements is a big thing from NetApp and Cisco's perspective as we're coming together and we're planning what the future state is going to look like. It's not just hey, this is the specific drive capacity you're putting in, that's yesterday's infrastructure. Tomorrow is all about what quality of life, how much time can we give back to those end users out there? >> So I have a question for you guys both. Lee, we'll start with you. You got the storage compute and switching cause you're leaders in those areas, what's next? What's driving the partnership? You talk about how you present the partnership with Cisco to customers. What's in it for me? What's new? What's fresh? What's the deal? >> The conversation we have out there a lot of times there's perception issues that we are the old guard of technology. FlexPod's been around seven going on eight years and they say what's fresh out there? Well, we're so much more than just the infrastructure piece. It's a combined portfolio. Cisco recently announced their partnership with Google Cloud. We have our NFS Native on Azure going forward. Leveraging those better together stories and each other's Rolodex to be able to come in and truly engineer next generation solutions, that's what's getting people excited. How are you going to set me up for success tomorrow, not just how are we going to be successful today on today's technology? >> Siva, how are you guys successful with that? How do you talk about the relationship because they have a unique capabilities, been around the block for awhile in the storage business? Look at the history of NetApp. Very interesting, very engineering oriented, very customer focused. >> Lee: 25 years. >> What's your position in this? >> I think you have two companies who have a tremendous technology focus in building, but what keeps this partnership going together is easily our customers. We are not young anymore in the partnership. We have over $10 billion of install based customers. We have over 8,000 customers. Just keeping up with those customers and providing them the journey however they want to go, it absolutely becomes our, it's our prerogative to make these customers successful in wherever they want to go next. That's a big driver for how we look at innovation. We continue to provide the capabilities that allows our customers to continue their journey and at the same time, we bring our innovation to make this platform successful. >> So I'm going to put you on the spot here, both of you guys. I know Stu's got a question. I got a couple minutes left. Kubernetes has put a line in the sand and separates the two worlds of developers. App developers, really just looking as a fabric of resource, they're creative, doing cool things. Then you've got the network storage software engineering going on under the hood, it's like a car. You're now an engine. You got to work together. What are you guys doing specifically to make that work, make the engine really powerful? >> In the context of Kubernetes, we are-- >> Under the hood. What's under the hood? Kubernetes is the line there, but you got to sit with that app. You got to make the engine powerful. You guys are working together. What's the sound like for the customers? Why NetApp and Cisco together? >> If you look back at our containerization, micro services that journey, we certainly again, same logic, same model. We are building an ecosystem there. We are developing joint solution that optimizes how Kubernetes and Cisco and Google have made several announcements on how we are bringing innovation and infrastructure automation level, network scale level, that allows a massively scalable container environment of Kubernetes environment to be deployed on top of a Cisco infrastructure. NetApp's innovation around Kubernetes, around building the plug-ins for how the plug-ins interact with the storage subsystem that allows us to say if you are deploying a Kubernetes environment, if you are deploying the best of breed, you certainly need the platform that understands and scales with that. >> All right, Lee. Your differentiation for that power engine under the hood with Cisco. >> It's infrastructure is code. That's what we are together and I don't think that across the competitive landscape that they are, everybody else is really embracing it in such a fashion. It's speaking the language that these developers are wanting to do and we're marrying that up with the core tenets that made us an IT powerhouse together. >> It was the developer angle John- >> All right. (laughs) >> We've been doing so many of these together. Absolutely where we wanted to go. >> Stu and I get the-- Infrastructure is code. The great shows. We do the cloud-native, got Kubernetes, we do under the hood. This is a big journey for customers. There's a lot of fud out there and they want to know one thing. Who's going to be around in the future? Having the partnerships is really key. You guys have been very successful. I'll give you guys the final word. Each of you share what customers should expect from the relationship. Siva, we'll start with you. >> I think continued greatness, continued commitment to making customers successful with the innovation that keeps them worry much more about the above the layer, the application, the business critical elements and make the infrastructure as simple and as versatile as possible is absolutely our commitment. >> I'd boil it down to the human capital out there, the human element and that is bringing conviction to your decisions. We've both been here multiple decades together in our partnership. FlexPod's coming up on a decade. It's conviction and knowing that you can rely on the lifeblood of your business being secure with us together. >> Well, congratulations. Certainly, the developers are going to be testing the hardware under the hood and we got a DevOps culture developing all on-prim and in the Cloud hybrid. It's going to be an interesting couple years. Interesting times we live in. Lee Howard, Chief Technologist with NetApp and Siva Sivakumar, Senior Director Data Center Solutions. Here on theCUBE, I'm John Furrier. Stu Miniman. Live from Barcelona. Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. More live coverage from theCUBE after this short break. (techno music)