>>The Cube Presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>Hi everybody. We're back. David Ante with David Nicholson. This is UiPath Forward five from Las Vegas. We're live, you know, the customers here, they're automating all the time, sucking work and the cube. We're sucking all the information out of the experts and the customers. A bar Toban is here. He's the global business, Shared services, leading automation and AI at PepsiCo. And Para Colan is back is the chief, He's the chief product officer, UiPath longtime Cube alum. Great to see you guys. Thanks for coming on. Great to see us all day. So you guys keynote today, you know, excited to have PepsiCo on. I'm not sure I've ever interviewed PepsiCo in the Cube, but tell us about your role there. >>Absolutely. So I'm part of a PepsiCo global business shared services team. I lead automation and AI capabilities. GBS has, you know, we started GBS portfolio back about three and a half years ago, and we have a six hubs across PepsiCo. And as, as a part of my role, we deliver transformational capability across the PepsiCo. >>When did it all start? >>About three and a half years ago, 2019. So >>Prior to the pandemic. Yeah. You know, versus the pandemic was a catalyst for this. Yeah. But it was at the catalyst, but maybe it sped it up a bit. Yeah. >>PepsiCo journey started with, if, if you look at the PepsiCo, you know, the automation journey, it started back in 2017, but the GBS portfolio took shape back in 2019. So prior to that, you know, PepsiCo was definitely, you know, working on lot of, you know, the automation capabilities and automation product across, you know, PepsiCo. But with the introduction of PepsiCo global business shared services team, we are, you know, centralizing a lot of transformation capability, you know, across the functions that, that we support within the >>PepsiCo and, and UI path. Was going to part of that journey all along? Or was there sort of other activities beforehand or how >>No, no, absolutely. Starting from 2017, if I, you know, remembered, you know, with the vision of our, you know, some of our senior leadership team and recognizing the value of, you know, automation in the core, you know, capability as a transformation at that time, you know, we started with just like anybody else, right? We started with, you know, proof of concept, showed some, you know, early wins and the value back to the business, start setting up some, you know, business processes and capabilities, stood up the platform, build a complete, you know, ecosystem around that, you know, platform and partnership with, you know, UI bot team. And you know, from there, here we are five years. I mean, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a very critical component to our digital transformation capability and, and yes, leverage across >>Let's talk platform. So you, you guys have made some announcements this week. You talk about the business automation platform. I remember our first forward was, you know, RPA tool. Okay. Yeah. And then you guys made acquisitions. I was there for that. So the process process cold and then people started to really expand it and it's really come in amazingly long way in a short time. So what did you guys announce today? What'd you talk about on stage 20, 22, 10? Tell us more about it. >>Absolutely, Dave. So you've seen the journey, you've been with us since the early days. You know, we were in 2017 and RPA tool that could automate a representative task that happened over and over again in the environment. And then three years ago you were here when we announced the automation platform, we said, it's not just about a task, it's about involving humans in bots to manage end to end processes. It's about discovering what automation opportunities exist. It's about using ai. Pepsi Co was actually the pioneer of using AI along with automation. You know, we were in stage together with them in, in 2019. And where we are now is we're essentially seeing people want to take the next step with automation. They're saying that it's no longer just an automation tool, It's the way we operate. It's the way we innovate in the organization. So they're really making sure that it becomes a part of their digital transformation journey that they're on. >>And they're saying that we can do the digital transformation by consolidating multiple DRP systems and CRM systems. And that'll take us seven years to do, or we can go with UI path and we can leverage the core that we can leverage the GL system that exists today. We can leverage inventory tracking system that exists today and start to build processes on top of that that can adapt to what customers are trying to do in this digital age. And that's where, you know, we've made announcements today is, is really pivot the platform to be a business automation platform. And there's sort of three layers, you know, unique but you know, connected layers of the platform. The first one is discover. And Discover is all about finding your processes, identifying the opportunities, making sure that you are managing the return on investment. What is the process? You know, how are you getting ROI on it? >>The second one is automated, and that is really where we're applying semantic automation to identify the digital building blocks of an enterprise, which is your data, your document, your screens and communication. Like putting all of that together and saying you can automate our processes, leveraging a lot of intelligence that exist in how business processes are done. And the last one is operate, which is if you're trying to execute a business process at scale, you're processing not just, you know, a task thousand times, but you are fulfilling millions of transactions. You're, you know, you're looking at trillions of records to identify what processes you need. A scalable enterprise platform that's able to ingest a lot of data, report on metrics, reporting efficiency. So that's what we've announced today is an automation platform that companies can use to put at the center of the digital transformation >>Journey. So I about the interesting thing about PepsiCo, you guys started in 2017. Yeah. So kind of early, early on. Yeah. Yeah. And you kind of been there with the progression platform. So my question to you is end up, it was, you know, we've seen the e from primarily on-prem, now it's cloud first. Yeah. How disruptive or non disruptive was that for you? Did you have to rip and replace? Did you have to sort of retool or migrate? What was that like? >>No, I mean, significant disruption, right? I mean, I mean, as, as we started our journey back in 2017, just like, you know, PRM mentioned, right? With simple rule based, you know, the automation from then now to our journey where our continue to, you know, infuse, you know, AI capability, document understanding, conversation ai, right? As a part of our end to end portfolio. At the same time, I think the cloud is providing a fantastic opportunity for us to continue to scale, right? You know, scale at, at a large. So that I think is a fantastic, you know, fantastic platform and fantastic, you know, the opportunity that we are looking forward >>To know. So how do you affect adoption inside of the organization? Can you talk about that? What's working? What's, >>It's always value driven as you know, right? I mean, the business business has to see the value. It it, it was, I mean, I would, you know, admit it was not as easy as before, but as the mindsets have started to shift, right? As the people have started to realize the value that, you know, the automation brings to, you know, the, I mean, you know, not just the, the value for the business, but actually transforming the entire portfolio, right? And, and people have started to see now that not every automation project is going to be transformation product, but for every transformation project you will find the automation at the heart and the core of it. So I, I, I think that's what has started to shift the mindset of, of uniforms. >>So how do you know when you have end to end? What are you wake up one day and say, Wow, we've achieved it. You know, is it pieces that come together? Yeah. What do you say? >>Yeah, You know, we wanna look at customers from, you know, from an end to end perspective. It's not just about piecemealing mealing finding a problem, solving it, really what does it deliver from, from an end to end perspective. Did you actually, you know, because a lot of times companies will say, we wanna automate X number of processes, and, and they do that and they're like, Well, we've automated a lot of processes. We're not sure what value we're getting out of it. It's the ability to measure like, what impact is this automation having on your business from an operational metric, but from a business metric as built. But then going back and saying, Well, where is the biggest pain point? Where do we have the largest value that we can give to the business back? So one of the things we actually announced today is the ability to take at an look at an idea and look at what was the estimated benefits of that idea, and then map it all the way through execution to say, what are we getting? >>We estimated we were gonna save a million dollars by doing those automation, or what have we achieved till now? Have we achieved a million dollars? Have we achieved half a million dollars by having achieved? That's true. That never happens. That, and, and, and, and it's hard to do that, like the data existed, but it's really hard for people to pull that data out. So we build out the box dashboards that give you the ROI bag, and that's why it's really important to, to make sure that, you know, you look at it not just as a technology project, but more as a investment from a business side. And so you can making a business more efficient. Yeah, >>That's, I just, I know you were jumping in, but that's super important. Cause you know, you run a lot of projects. Yeah, absolutely. And each of those projects has zone roi, then you jam it into the application portfolio. Exactly. And then everybody sort of forgets about it. You can't really track what impact it had because there's always, you know, some things that are benefit, some things are sometimes a negative. And so it's that holistic picture that you >>Trying to achieve, extremely critical point, what you hit on, right? From it's measuring the benefit and measuring the continuous benefit across, and not just from start and end, Okay, what I promised I delivered or not, but, but you have to have this continuous mindset. And so I think Yeah, definitely that that's a very, very critical to our finance team and our cfo, >>They organic mechanisms. It's constantly >>Evidence. Absolutely. Yeah. So abar, yeah. Global business shared services. Yeah. When you think of PepsiCo, yeah, of course people immediately think of Sure, Pepsi. But PepsiCo is a multi tentacled absolutely beast of a company. Absolutely. In a good way. Yeah. For organizations that are in that same category, holding companies, companies that have all sorts of different entities that are working together under one umbrella, how shareable is this idea of automation and business automation process moving forward? How, how shareable is that on the share oter? Yeah. Yeah. As far as, as far as, as far as you're concerned, are you, are you talking to some people where you're saying, Hey, I'm here, I'm here from GBS and I'm here to help, and they look at you like you're crazy because you don't understand their business? Or is this something that relatively easily applies across businesses >>That No, to your point, I mean, very valid point, right? I mean, it's, that's, that's the gbs, global business shared services mindset, right? As you move the functional areas into the Pepsi, into the Pepsi, gbs, like hr, procurement, commercial sales, supply chain, right? That's where you wanna start to find those, you know, the optimization, you know, opportunity. You wanna start to ize your processes, and that's where you will, you know, as you transition this processes within the gbs, that's what create those, you know, opportunities for you. So >>What, >>What about automation opportunities? Not in the sh I know you're in the shared arena. Yeah, yeah. But each of those business units has processes that could probably be optimized and automated. Sure. Is that something that's under your purview? We've heard, we've heard a lot about citizen developers. Yeah. I don't know if that, if that >>Applies to No, that definitely. I mean, you cannot just have focus on end to end, you know, automation. I mean, that's, that's a huge portfolio for gps at the same time supporting, you know, automation through the citizen development capability. That that's where, once again, you know, you have not provided a lot of capability and solution tools that we use, right? To continue to empower the folks who are part of our, you know, GBS team inside or outside gbs, right? It, it, it's, I think it's very, very critical. It, it, it helps people transform their career even in one ways, right? And, and, and, and you have that muscle, you have that resource, and you have the power. You definitely want to utilize that. >>So let's talk about metrics for a minute. So more data, the better. Usually I like data. Yeah. But, but if you're trying to optimize for 15 metrics, I feel like you're not gonna optimize on any, So how do you deal with that from both, as par was saying, an operational standpoint and a business standpoint? What are the things about how do you sort of get the, the teams focused on the right things? >>B business, functional leadership team drive those alignment for us as a part of a global business, shared services, we, we are hip to have connected with our business, you know, functions, right? They, they have to help us prioritize those. And to your point, I mean, yeah, you cannot attack 15 metrics at once. You have to prioritize, you have to make sure that you bring the focus to the product, you know, project, right? So, so definitely, I mean, it's, it's, it's not often 15 metrics, but top three metrics, let's, let's focus, let's zoom in and ensure we are driving it. But, >>And if you think about the system, I mean, at the end of the day, the p and l manager, he or she cares about ebit, let's say. Sure, okay. But there are so many factors, you know, in that complicated organization that are gonna affect ebitda and they're gonna be different. But somebody's gotta figure out, okay, how do they fit together in a system? And can, can UiPath help me understand that, those relationships and those dependencies? >>Absolutely. I mean, I think there's a, there's an aspect of human relationships and, and making sure that you get the right level of sponsorship from the business and, and there's a business stakeholder and, and looking at every investment and, and outcomes that you're driving based on that. But, but that is something that we, from a tools perspective, we're trying to make sure that you can measure the value throughout the entire value chain. But then getting the business sponsorship, like where we've seen automation scale is always because there's a business sponsor that's essentially saying, Here's what I'm trying to achieve and here's the, here's my goal, here's a North star and go get it and let me know how you're tracking against it. And, and our job is to make sure that we can provide the visibility, the people that are operating the, the programs to make sure they get that level of visibility. >>What's the scope of automations in your, you know, organization? Is it dozens, hundreds, >>Huge. >>That is thousands. >>We are getting there. Okay. No, definitely. I mean, we have definitely, you know, realized that it's, it's a core component to our digital transformation, right? So, so there is no, there's no stopping on it. There, there, there, there's plenty of support from top down and you know, it's a fantastic time to be at PepsiCo. Right? Especially at the PepsiCo gbs. Right, >>Right. Thanks for sharing your story. Congratulations on all the progress you guys have made. It's actually quite remarkable to see where you guys have come from. So I really appreciate it. Thank you, Dave. Thanks. Thank you Dave. Okay. Thank you for watching. This is Dave Ante for Dave Nicholson. We are right middle of day two at forward five from Las Vegas. We're live, we're right back.

>>Welcome back everyone to Cube's live coverage, VMware Explorer, 2022 formerly world. I've been saying now I gotta get that out. Dave, I've been sayingm world. It just kind of comes off the tongue when I'm tired, but you know, wall to wall coverage, again, back to back interviews all day two sets. This is a wrap up here with the analyst discussion. Got one more interview after this really getting the analyst's perspective around what we've been hearing and seeing, observing, and reporting on the cube. Again, two sets blue and green. We call them here on the show floor on Moscone west with the sessions upstairs, two floors of, of amazing content sessions, keynote across ed Moscone, north and south SBI here, cloud strategists with the cube. And of course, what event wouldn't be complete without SBE weighing in on the analysis. And, and, and I'm, you know, all kidding aside. I mean that because we've had great interactions around, you know, digging in you, you're like a roving analyst out there. And what's great about what you do is you're social. You're communicating, you're touching everybody out there, but you're also picking up the puzzle pieces. And we, you know, of course we recognize that cuz that's what we do, but you're out, we're on the set you're out on the floor and you know your stuff and, and you know, clouds. So how you, this is your wheelhouse. Great to see you. Good to >>See you. I'm good guys. Thank you. Thank you for having >>Me. So I mean, Dave and I were riffing going back earlier in this event and even before, during our super cloud event, we're reminded of the old OpenStack days. If you remember, Dave OpenStack was supposed to be the open source version of cloud. And that was a great ambition. And the cloud AATI at that time was very into it because it made a lot of sense. And the vision, all the infrastructure was code. Everything was lined up. Everything was religiously was on the table. Beautiful cloud future. Okay. 20 2009, 2010, where was Amazon? Then they just went off like a rocket ship. So cloud ended up becoming AWS in my opinion. Yeah. OpenStax then settled in, did some great things, but also spawns Kubernetes. Okay. So, you know, we've lived through thiss we've seen this movie. We were actually in the trenches on the front lines present at creation for cloud computing. >>Yeah. I was at Rackspace when the open stack was open sourced. I was there in, in the rooms and discussions and all that. I think OpenStack was given to the open source like prematurely. I usually like we left a toddler on the freeway. No, the toddler >>Got behind the wheel. Can't see over the dashboard. >>So we have learned over the years in last two decades, like we have seen the open source rise of open source and we have learned quite a few lessons. And one lesson we learned from there was like, don't let a project go out in the open, tell it mature enough with one vendor. So we did that prematurely with NASA, NASA and Rackspace gave the, the code from two companies to the open source community and then likes of IBM and HPE. No. Now HPE, they kind of hijacked the whole thing and then put a lot of developers on that. And then lot of us sort of second tier startup. >>But, but, but I remember not to interject, but at that time there wasn't a lot of pushback for letting them it wasn't like they infiltrated like a, the vendors always tried to worry about vendors coming in open source, but at that time was pretty people accepted them. And then it got off the rails. Then you remember the great API debate. You >>Called it a hail Mary to against AWS, which is, is what it was, what it was. >>It's true. Yeah. Ended up being right. But the, the battle started happening when you started seeing the network perimeters being discussed, you starting to see some of the, in the trenches really important conversations around how to make essentially cross cloud or super cloud work. And, and again, totally premature it continue. And, and what does that mean today? So, okay. Is VMware too early on their cross cloud? Are they, is multi-cloud ready? >>No >>For, and is it just vaporware? >>No, they're not too early, actually on, on, on, on that side they were premature to put that out there, but this is like very mature company, like in the ops area, you know, we have been using, we VMware stuff since 2000 early 2000. I, I was at commerce one when we started using it and yeah, it was for lab manager, you know, like, you know, put the labs >>Out desktop competition. >>Yeah, yeah. Kind of thing. So it, it matured pretty fast, but now it it's like for all these years they focused on the op site more. Right. And then the challenge now in the DevOps sort of driven culture, which is very hyped, to be honest with you, they have try and find a place for developers to plug in on the left side of the sort of whole systems, life cycle management sort of line, if you will. So I think that's a, that's a struggle for, for VMware. They have to figure that out. And they are like a tap Tansu application platform services. They, they have released a new version of that now. So they're trying to do that, but still they are from the sort of get ups to the, to the right, from that point to the right on the left side. They're lot more tooling to helpers use as we know, but they are very scattered kind of spend and scattered technology on the left side. VMware doesn't know how to tackle that. But I think, I think VMware should focus on the right side from the get ups to the right and then focus there. And then how in the multi-cloud cross cloud. >>Cause my sense is, they're saying, Hey, look, we're not gonna own the developers. I think they know that. And they think they're saying do develop in whatever world you want to develop in will embrace it. And then the ops guys, we, we got you covered, we got the standards, we have the consistency and you're our peeps. You tend then take it, you know, to, to the market. Is that not? I mean, it seems like a viable strategy. I >>Mean, look at if you're VMware Dave and start, you know, this where they are right now, the way they missed the cloud. And they had to reboot that with jazzy and, and, and Raghu to do the databases deal. It's essentially VMware hosted on AWS and clients love it cuz it's clarity. Okay. It's not vCloud air. So, so if you're them right now, you seeing yourself, wow. We could be the connective tissue between all clouds. We said this from day one, when Kubernetes was hitting in the scene, whoever can make this, the interoperability concept of inter clouding and connect clouds so that there could be spanning of applications and data. We didn't say data, but we said, you know, creating that nice environment of multiple clouds. Okay. And again, in concept, that sounds simple, but if you're VMware, you could own that abstraction layer. So do you own it or do you seed the base and let it become a defacto organization? Like a super layer, super pass layer and then participate in it? Or are you the middleware yourself? We heard AJ Patel say that. So, so they could be the middleware for at all. >>Aren't they? The infrastructure super cloud. I mean, that's what they're trying to be. >>Yeah. I think they're trying, trying to do that. It's it's I, I, I have said that many times VMware is bridged to the cloud, right? >>The sorry. Say bridge to >>The cloud. Yeah. Right. For, for enterprises, they have virtualized environments, mostly on VMware stacks. And another thing is I wanna mention touch on that is the number of certified professionals on VMware stack. There it's a huge number it's in tens of thousands. Right? So people who have got these certifications, they want to continue that sort of journey. They wanna leverage that. It's like, it's a Sunco if they don't use that going forward. And that was my question to, to during the press release yesterday, like are there new certifications coming into the, into the limelight? I, I think the VMware, if they're listening to me here somewhere, they will listen. I guess they should introduce a, a cross cloud certification for their stack because they want to be cross cloud or multi-cloud sort of vendor with one sort of single pane. So does actually Cisco and so do many others. But I think VMware is in a good spot. It's their market to lose. I, I, I call it when it comes to the multi-cloud for enterprise, especially for the legacy applications. >>Well, they're not, they have the enterprise they're super cloud enabler, Dave for the, for the enterprise, cuz they're not hyperscaler. Okay. They have all the enterprise customers who come here, we see them, we speak to them. We know them will mingle, but >>They have really good relationships with all the >>Hyperscale. And so those, those guys need a way to the cloud in a way that's cloud operation though. So, so if you say enterprises need their own super cloud, I would say VMware might wanna raise their hands saying we're the vendor to provide that. Yes, totally. And then that's the middleware role. So middleware isn't your classic stack middleware it's middle tissue. So you got, it's not a stack model anymore. It's completely different. >>Maybe, maybe my, my it's >>Not a stack >>Industry. Maybe my industry super cloud is too aspirational, but so let's assume for a second. You're not gonna have everybody doing their own clouds, like Goldman Sachs and, and capital one, even though we're seeing some evidence of that, even in that case, connecting my on-prem to the cloud and modernizing my application stack and, and having some kind of consistency between your on-prem and it's just call it hybrid, like real hybrid, true hybrid. They should dominate that. I mean, who is who, if it's not it's VMware and it's what red hat who else? >>I think red hat wants it too. >>Yeah. Well, red hat and red, hat's doing it with IBM consulting and they gotta be, they have great advantage there for all the banks. Awesome. But what, what about the other 500,000 customers that are >>Out there? If VMware could do what they did with the hypervisor, with virtualization and create the new thing for super cloud, AKA connecting clouds together. That's a, that's a holy grail move right >>There. But what about this PA layer? This Tansu and area which somebody on Twitter, there was a little SNAR come that's V realized just renamed, which is not. I mean, it's, it's from talking to Raghu unless he's just totally BSing us, which I don't think he is. That's not who he is. It's this new federated architecture and it's this, their super PAs layer and, and, and it's purpose built for what they're trying to do across clouds. This is your wheelhouse. What, what do you make of that? >>I think Tansu is a great effort. They have put in lot of other older products under that one umbrella Tansu is not a product actually confuses the heck out of the market. That it's not a product. It's a set of other products put under one umbrella. Now they have created another umbrella term with the newer sort of, >>So really is some yeah. >>Two >>Umbrella on there. So it's what it's pivotal. It's vRealize it's >>Yeah. We realize pivotal and, and, and older stack, actually they have some open source components in there. So, >>So they claim that this ragus claim, it's this new architecture, this new federated architecture graph database, low latency, real time ingestion. Well, >>AJ, AJ that's AJ's department, >>It sounded good. I mean, this is that >>Actually I think the newer, newer stuff, what they announced, that's very promising because it seems like they're building something from scratch. So, >>And it won't be, it won't be hardened for, but, but >>It won't be hardened for, but, >>But those, but they have a track record delivering. I mean, they gotta say that about yeah. >>They're engineering focus company. They have engineering culture. They're their software engineers are top. Not top not, >>Yes. >>What? >>Yeah. It's all relatives. If they, if the VMware stays the way they are. Well, >>Yeah, >>We'll get to that a second. What >>Do you mean? What are you talking >>About? They don't get gutted >>The elephant in the room if they don't get gutted and then, then we'll see it happens there. But right now I love, we love VMware. We've been covering them for 12 years and we've seen the trials, not without their own issues to work on. I mean, everyone needs to work on stuff, but you know, world class, they're very proud of their innovation, but I wanna ask you, what was your observations walking around the floor, talking to people? What was the sense of the messaging? Is it real in their minds? Are they leaning in, are they like enthused? Are they nervous, apprehensive? How would you categorize the attitude of the folks here that you've talked to or observed? >>Yeah. It at the individual product level, like the people are very confident what they're building, what they're delivering, but when it comes to the telling a cohesive story, if you go to all the VMware booth there, like it's hard to find anybody who can tell what, what are all the services under tens and how they are interconnected and what facilities they provide or they can't. They, I mean, most of the people who are there, they can are walking through the economic side of things, like how it will help you save money or, or how the TCR ROI will improve. They are very focused on because of the nature of the company, right. They're very focused on the technology only. So I think that that's the, that's what I learned. And another sort of gripe or negative I have about VMware is that they have their product portfolio is so vast and they are even spreading more thinly. And they're forced to go to the left towards developers because of the sheer force of hyperscalers. On one side on the, on the right side, they are forced to work with hyperscalers to do more like ops related improvements. They didn't mention AI or, or data. >>Yeah. Data storage management. >>That that was weak. That's true. During the, the keynote as well. >>And they didn't mention security and their security story, strong >>Security. I think they mentioned it briefly very briefly, very briefly. But I think their SCO story is good actually, but no is they didn't mention it properly, I guess. >>Yeah. There wasn't prominent in the keynote. It was, you know, and again, I understand why data wasn't P I, they wanted to say about data, >>Didn't make room for the developer story. I think this was very much a theatrical maneuver for Hawk and the employee morale and the ecosystem morale, Dave, then it had to do with the nuts bolt of security. They can come back to get that security. In my opinion, you know, I, I don't think that was as bad of a call as bearing the vSphere, giving more demos, which they did do later. But the keynote I thought was, was well done as targeted for all the negative sentiment around Broadcom and Broadcom had this, the acquisition agreement that they're, they are doing, they agree >>Was well done. I mean, >>You know, if I VMware, I would've done the same thing, look at this is a bright future. We're given that we're look at what we got. If you got this, it's on you. >>And I agree with you, but the, the, again, I don't, I don't see how you can't make security front and center. When it is the number one issue for CIOs, CSOs, CSOs boards or directors, they just, it was a miss. They missed it. Yeah. Okay. And they said, oh, well, there's only so much time, but, and they had to put the application development focus on there. I get that. But >>Another thing is, I think just keynote is just one sort of thing. One moment in this whole sort of continuous period, right. They, I think they need to have that narrative, like messaging done periodically, just like Amazon does, you know, like frequent events tapping into the practitioners on regional basis. They have to do that. Maybe it's a funding issue. Maybe it is some weakness on the, no, >>I think they planning, I talked to, we talked to the CMO and she said, Explorer is gonna be a road show. They're gonna go international with, it's gonna take a global, they're gonna have a lot of wood behind the arrow. They're gonna spend a lot of money on Explorer is what, they're, what we're seeing. And that's a good thing. You got a new brand, you gotta build it. >>You know, I would've done, I would've had, I would've had a shorter keynote on day one and doing, and then I would've done like a security day, day two. I would've dedicated the whole morning, day two keynote to security cuz their stories I think is that strong? >>Yeah. >>Yeah. And I don't know the developers side of things. I think it's hard for VMware to go too much to the left. The spend on the left is very scattered. You know, if you notice the tools, developers change their tools on freaking monthly basis, right? Yeah. Yeah. So it's hard to sustain that they on the very left side and the, the, the >>It's hard for companies like VMware to your point. And then this came up in super cloud and ins Rayme mentioned that developers drive everything, the patterns, what they like and you know, the old cliche meet them where they are. You know, honestly, this is kind of what AJ says is the right they're doing. And it's the right strategy meeting that develops where they are means give them something that they like. They like self-service they like to try stuff. They like to, they don't like it. They'll throw it away. Look at the success that comes like data, dog companies like that have that kind of offering with freemium and self-service to, to continue the wins versus jamming the tooling down their throat and selling >>Totally self-serve infrastructure for the, in a way, you know, you said they missed cloud, which they did V cloud air. And then they thought of got it. Right. It kind of did the same thing with pivotal. Right. It was almost like they forced to take pivotal, you know, by pivotal, right. For 2 billion or whatever it was. All right. Do something with it. Okay. We're gonna try to do something with it and they try to go out and compete. And now they're saying, Hey, let's just open it up. Whatever they want to use, let 'em use it. So unlike and I said this yesterday, unlike snowflake has to attract developers to build on their unique platform. Okay. I think VMware's taken a different approach saying use whatever you want to use. We're gonna help the ops guys. And that, to me, a new op >>Very sensitive, >>The new ops, the new ops guys. Yes. Yes. >>I think another challenge on the right right. Is on, on the op site is like, if, if you are cloud native, you are a new company. You just, when you're a startup, you are cloud native, right. Then it's hard for VMware to convince them to, Hey, you know, come to us and use this. Right. It's very hard. It is. They're a good play for a while. At least they, they can prolong their life by innovating along the way because of the, the skills gravity, I call it of the developers and operators actually that's their, they, they have a loyal community they have and all that stuff. And by the way, the name change for the show. I think they're trying to get out of that sort of culty kind of nature of the, their communities that they force. The communities actually can force the companies, not to do certain things certain way. And I've seen that happening. And >>Well, I think, I think they're gonna learn and they already walked back their messaging. Not that they said anything overtly, but you know, the Lori, the CMO clarified this significantly, which was, they never said that they wanted to replace VM world. Although the name change implies that. And what they re amplified after the fact is that this is gonna be a continuation of the community. And so, you know, it's nuanced, they're splitting hairs, but that's, to me walking back the, you know, the, the loyalty and, and look at let's face it. Anytime you have a loyal community, you do anything of change. People are gonna be bitching and moaning. Yeah. >>But I mean, knew, worked, explore, >>Work. It wasn't bad at all. It was not a bad look. It wasn't disastrous call. Okay. Not at all. I'm critical of the name change at first, but the graphics are amazing. They did an exceptional job on the branding. They did, did an exceptional job on how they handled the new logo, the new name, the position they, and a lot of people >>Showed >>Up. Yeah. It worked >>A busy busier than all time >>It worked. And I think they, they threaded the needle, given everything they had going on. I thought the event team did an exceptional job here. I mean, just really impressive. So hats up to the event team at, at VMware pulling off now, did they make profit? I don't know. It doesn't matter, you know, again, so much going on with Broadcom, but here being in Moscone west, we see people coming down the stairs here, Dave's sessions, you know, lot of people, a lot of buzz on the content sold out sessions. So again, that's the ecosystem. The people giving the talks, you know, the people in the V brown bag, you know, got the, the V tug. They had their meeting, you know, this week here, >>Actually the, the, the red hat, the, the integration with the red hat is another highlight of, of, they announced that, that you can run that style >>OpenShift >>And red hats, not here, >>Red hat now here, but yeah, but, but, but >>It was more developers, more, you know, >>About time. I would say, why, why did it take so long? That should >>Have happened. All right. Final question. So what's the bottom line. Give us the summary. What's your take, what's your analysis of VMware explore the event, what they did, what it means, what it's gonna mean when the event's over, what's gonna happen. >>I think VMware with the VMware Explorer have bought the time with the messaging. You know, they have promised certain things with newer announcements and now it, it, it is up to them to deliver that in a very sort of fast manner and build more hooks into other sort of platforms. Right? So that is very important. You cannot just be closed system people. Don't like those systems. You have to be part of the ecosystem. And especially when you are sitting on top of the actually four or four or more public clouds, Alibaba cloud was, they were saying that they're the only VMware is only VMware based offering in mainland China on top of the Alibaba. And they, they can go to other ones as well. So I think, especially when they're sitting on top of other cloud providers, they have to build hooks into other platforms. And if they can build a marketplace of their own, that'll be even better. I think they, >>And they've got the ecosystem for it. I mean, you saw it last night. I mean, all the, all the parties were hopping. I mean, there was, there's >>A lot of buzz. I mean, I pressed, I pressed them Dave hard. I had my little, my zingers. I wanted to push the buttons on one question that was targeted towards the answer of, are they gonna try to do much more highly competitive maneuvering, you know, get that position in the middleware. Are they gonna be more aggressive with frontal competitiveness or are they gonna take the, the strategy of open collaborative and every single data point points to collaborative totally hit Culbert. I wanna do out in the open. We're not just not, we're not one company. So I think that's the right play. If they came out and said, we're gonna be this, you know? >>Yeah. The one, the last thing, actually, the, the one last little idea I'm putting out out there since I went to the Dell world, was that there's a economics of creation of software. There's economics of operations of software. And they are very good on the operation economics of operations side of things that when I say economics, it doesn't mean money only. It also means a productivity practitioner, growth. Everything is in there. So I think these vendors who are not hyperscalers, they have to distinguish these two things and realize that they're very good on the right side economics of operations. And, and that will go a long way. Actually. I think they muddy the waters by when DevOps, DevOps, and then it's >>Just, well, I think Dave, we always we've had moments in time over the past 12 years covering VMware's annual conference, formally world now floor, where there were moments of that's pat Gelsinger, spinal speech. Yeah. And I remember he was under a siege of being fired. Yeah. There was a point in time where it was touch and go, and then everything kind of came together. That was a moment. I think we're at a moment in time here with VMware Dave, where we're gonna see what Broadcom does, because I think what hop 10 and Broadcom saw this week was an EBI, a number on the table that they know they can probably get or squeeze. And then they saw a future value and net present value of future state that you could, you gotta roll back and do the analysis saying, okay, how much is it worth all this new stuff worth? Is that gonna contribute to the EBITDA number that they want on the number? So this is gonna be a very interesting test because VMware did it, an exceptional job of laying out that they got some jewels in the oven. You >>Think about how resilient this company has been. I mean, em, you know, EMC picked them up for a song. It was 640 million or whatever it was, you know, about the public. And then you, another epic moment you'll recall. This was when Joe Tuchi was like the mafia Don up on stage. And Michael Dell was there, John Chambers with all the ecosystem CEOs and there was Tucci. And then of course, Michael Dell ends up owning this whole thing, right? I mean, when John Chambers should have owned the whole thing, I mean, it's just, it's been incredible. And then Dell uses VMware as a piggy bank to restructure its balance sheet, to pay off the EMC debt and then sells the thing for $60 billion. And now it's like, okay, we're finally free of all this stuff. Okay. Now Broadcom's gonna buy you. And, >>And if Michael Dell keeps all in stock, he'll be the largest shareholder of Broadcom and own it off. >>Well, and that's probably, you know, that's a good question is, is it's gonna, it probably a very tax efficient transaction. If he takes all stock and then he can, you know, own against it. I mean, that's, that's, >>That's what a history we're gonna leave it there. Start be great to have you Dave great analysis. Okay. We'll be back with more coverage here. Day two, winding down after the short break.

>> From around the globe it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome to the theCUBE's coverage of IBM think 2021, the digital experience. I'm Lisa Martin. I've got two guests here with me next. We're going to be talking about IBM and Cisco. Please welcome Candace Tripp, a partner at Global Security Services Alliances at IBM. Kandyce, it's great to have you on theCUBE. >> Thank you. It's great to be here, Lisa. >> And Erin Jensen joins us as well. Global Partner Executive for IBM at Cisco. Erin, welcome to you as well. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. >> I love it, three women, power women on a tech panel. >> I know, I love it. >> Isn't that nice? It's rare. >> It is. >> Exciting. >> Praise God. All right, let's go ahead, Erin and we're going to start with you. Let's talk about Cisco's strategy and security and how that aligns with IBM. >> Absolutely. Thanks Lisa. So Cisco in the last seven years have made considerable amount of investment in our portfolio. And in fact, it's one reason why I joined Cisco. I've been hearing about customer problems across many security threat vectors and issues. And customers are really looking for a product portfolio that helps them across all their security needs. IBM has taken a similar approach, right? We're not just one product or one service. IBM also has a service portfolio that helps customers through the long haul and their security journey. We're both working to solve problems like Zero Trust, SAS, Cloud security, and helping all of our customers with digital transformation and moving to the cloud. And so both of us have really taken a similar long-term approach to our customer vision and security. >> We've heard a lot about security challenges and the expansion of threat vectors and surfaces and data in the last year or so. So that double-down focus from both IBM and Cisco on security is absolutely critical for customers. Kandyce, let's get your perspective now. Talk to me about IBM security services and the value that it delivers with Cisco's security portfolio, those two powerhouses together. >> Yeah. Great question. I really appreciate it. One of the things I want to point out is just that IBM security services is one of the largest MSPs in the industry. And I think it's a really exciting time and I'm very thrilled to be a part of that. And the answer to your question, we simplify security solutions, we reduce risk, we provide architectural consulting and systems integration. And we do that in support of our partnerships, just like with Cisco, with Cisco, excuse me. So I think it's a really exciting partnership and there's a lot of value provided. >> And then Kandyce also, you recently launched IBM security services Alliance program. What can you tell us about that? >> Yeah, absolutely. So I'm very excited about it. We launched it on March 1st of this year. And it is a very targeted program that's designed to promote support and reward us like set of partners. And Cisco is one of those partners that has been invited to participate. And these are the partners that are committed to doing a couple of different things. One of which is supporting the development of our offerings. It's also partners that are integrating into our technology platform and they also train and enable our engineers, our consultants as well as our sellers. So they bring a lot of value to the table. And like I said before, Cisco is one of the partners that have been invited to participate. And we're very excited. >> Yeah. >> Go ahead Erin. >> And just to add on that as Candace is saying like Cisco is really excited to participate in this program. It's really, truly about delivering an outcome to our customers. And so the program gives us tools to make investments integrations, et cetera. And the part about partnership it's an evolution of things, right? We want to work together. The landscape of the threats are changing, our world's changing, we're in a pandemic, we've got to be able to pivot and really help customers solve these problems together. And the Alliance program gives us a formal way a really kind of put in the wood behind the arrow. So we're really excited to participate. >> Thanks Erin, excited to have you. >> Great. So Kandyce, I'm curious, as Erin was saying that the threat vector, things are expanding, we've seen so much flux. They're saying we're in a dynamic market, situation is a pretty big understatement. What was the impetus of this Alliance? Was it, this Alliance program, did it have anything to do with the flux that we've been through in the last year? >> Well, I think anytime you launch a program or create a strategy, you're obviously solving a problem. And we all know that security is complex and we need to simplify it. And in today's market, there's a shortage of professionals in the industry. There's a lot of siloed processes and a lot of tools. And anytime that you can bring a strategy to the table that solves some of these challenges, it's definitely worthwhile. And our goal is to bring together advisors and integrated leading technologies vendors such as Cisco. And our goal is to help our clients obviously. And optimally, what we want to do is we want to align their security strategy. We want to make sure that we protect their digital users, their data, their assets. We also want to modernize our technology with these advisors. And ultimately, we found a partnership in Cisco in regards to this program, where we can solve some of our customer's challenges and we can leverage this partnership to the fullest. >> Can you talk to me a little bit about the difference between a technology alliances program and a security service Alliance partner at IBM security program? >> Kandyce: Absolutely. Well, I think it's to call out that Cisco is both actually. We do have a Technology Alliance partners as you mentioned, and Security Service Alliance partners and our Technology Alliance partners are purpose built integrations with IBM security products. On the opposite side, you have Security Service Alliance partners where there's kind of two aspects to it. It could be, it's an either situation where they're integrated into our security service offering or we build an offering around the partners technology. And in the case of Cisco there's many product integrations. I'll name two as examples, one being QRadar and the other being Resilient. But I think what makes the partnership so interesting is there's an extensive portfolio to choose from. And I think that makes it very exciting for our clients to kind of look at what we bring to the table jointly and create leverage out of that. Erin, do you have anything to add? >> A couple of things. So the questions we get a lot from customers is, is there overlap in some of these software solutions? And the fact is there really isn't. We are more complimentary than competitive. And one of the things that we want to do to enhance the customer experience is really give a customer the confidence, but also a full service solution. The way Cisco views IBM and security space is like the glue, right? We provide all the automation a lot of the visibility, our tools, for instance QRadar, pump all of the log information and help with instant response to how customers look at threats. And we really want them to, customers would feel confident by being together and really let's face it, IBM and Cisco are the biggest players in the market. But to Kandyce's point they're also looking for innovation from us and we giving them the roadmaps to go to the next level. So our partnership really provides that. And in fact, it's really important to note that IBM is actually a big Cisco client and has invested in some of our technologies around Umbrella, Next-Gen firewall and our IPS and AnyConnect Solution. So truly our use case is between our companies too not just for our customers. So it's part of our loyalty and commitment to each other but also to all the folks who are making investments working with IBM and Cisco. >> So there's a long history deep collaboration between IBM and Cisco here. I'm wondering if either of you and Kandyce we'll start with you, can you talk about anything that you saw in the last year. I'm thinking, from a security perspective we saw governments and schools and hospitals and healthcare organizations being attacked because they were, there was so much focus on those organizations. I'm curious if there's any industries that you guys saw in the last year or so in particular that really have benefited from your Security Services Alliance program? >> Well, I think we just launched the program in March. So we are currently in the process of rolling it out but will say, as a organization we spend a lot of time making sure that we're relevant to the community, that we're solving some of the deepest problems in the industry. And I think it's an exciting time and I know that IBM Security Services brings a lot of solutions to its clients and we'll continue to do so. >> And then Erin, tell me from Cisco's perspective and yes, Kandyce you mentioned that this is a brand new program. What are some of the things that you're looking forward to being able to help clients in industries that I mentioned and really any industry pivot as we're still in such a globally challenging situation? >> Yes. So I won't necessarily talk about verticals but let's talk about the pandemic. So many of our customers in all different kinds of verticals have had to take their business home. Securing all the remote workers, doing what we call Zero Trust and edge security making sure they are who they say they are when they're connecting to the mothership. And so we've really put a lot of effort at Cisco around addressing these problems in a fast and efficient way. And then IBM helps us manage that for customers. So if they don't have the bandwidth, once solutions go in and we turn the key on they don't have the bandwidth to manage this themselves, IBM really picks that ball up and runs with it. So that's another big value out of our partnership. But let's face it, gosh, a year and a half ago all of this changed on the dime. So we had to pivot really quickly. And because we have teams in place are already working together on how we service these solutions through IBM, this was not necessarily a very hard shift. We were able to do this quickly and provide information and kind of stay ahead of the curve while we saw our customers go through this transition. >> And I can only imagine how critical IBM and Cisco were together as you mentioned, Erin, that pivot to work from home happened so quickly for millions and millions, hundreds of millions of not more of people, and there's a good amount of us that are still in that situation that are reliant on technologies. But like IBM and Cisco are delivering, for collaboration, for communication, even to connect families I'm sure what you guys have done helping those customers pivot is just the tip of the iceberg in helping them not just survive this time but be able to thrive, maybe even focus resources on identifying new products on new services, new ways to delight their customers. >> Yeah, I think that's the other thing that's happening between our firms kind of within security and also more broadly is a lot of our customers are moving to the Cloud and they really need help with this kind of full service look and strategy and ongoing managing and the long haul from a partner. So one of the things that's also been really valuable in our partnership is we have teams of people on account level that really understand our customers and can make these recommendations based on what we're putting together behind the scenes and helping them through the journey. So security is clearly a big part of, kind of what's on everyone's mind, but as far as, can a regular IT operations and networking, it's all part of one journey. And so this layered approach is I think what differentiates our partnership absolutely in the marketplace. >> I agree with you, Erin. I think there's a lot to be excited about that. >> We'll good. Ladies, thank you for joining me today. Talking to me about this new security strategy Alliances Program, what it's offering, the power that IBM and Cisco are bringing jointly to your customers. We look forward to seeing what happens in the next year. Thanks for your time. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Thank you. >> Well, Kandyce Tripp and Erin Jensen. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think, the digital experience. (soft upbeat music)

(piano music) >> Presenter: From around the globe it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome to the theCUBE's coverage of IBM think 2021, the digital experience. I'm Lisa Martin. I've got two guests here with me next. We're going to be talking about IBM and Cisco. Please welcome Candace Tripp, a partner at Global Security Services Alliances at IBM. Kandyce, it's great to have you on theCUBE. >> Thank you. It's great to be here, Lisa. >> And Erin Jensen joins us as well. Global Partner Executive for IBM at Cisco. Erin, welcome to you as well. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. >> I love it, three women, power women on a tech panel. >> I know, I love it. >> Isn't that nice? It's rare. >> It is. >> Exciting. >> Praise God. All right, let's go ahead, Erin and we're going to start with you. Let's talk about Cisco's strategy and security and how that aligns with IBM. >> Absolutely. Thanks Lisa. So Cisco in the last seven years have made considerable amount of investment in our portfolio. And in fact, it's one reason why I joined Cisco. I've been hearing about customer problems across many security threat vectors and issues. And customers are really looking for a product portfolio that helps them across all their security needs. IBM has taken a similar approach, right? We're not just one product or one service. IBM also has a service portfolio that helps customers through the long haul and their security journey. We're both working to solve problems like Zero Trust, SAS, Cloud security, and helping all of our customers with digital transformation and moving to the cloud. And so both of us have really taken a similar long-term approach to our customer vision and security. >> We've heard a lot about security challenges and the expansion of threat vectors and surfaces and data in the last year or so. So that double-down focus from both IBM and Cisco on security is absolutely critical for customers. Kandyce, let's get your perspective now. Talk to me about IBM security services and the value that it delivers with Cisco's security portfolio, those two powerhouses together. >> Yeah. Great question. I really appreciate it. One of the things I want to point out is just that IBM security services is one of the largest MSPs in the industry. And I think it's a really exciting time and I'm very thrilled to be a part of that. And the answer to your question, we simplify security solutions, we reduce risk, we provide architectural consulting and systems integration. And we do that in support of our partnerships, just like with Cisco, with Cisco, excuse me. So I think it's a really exciting partnership and there's a lot of value provided. >> And then Kandyce also, you recently launched IBM security services Alliance program. What can you tell us about that? >> Yeah, absolutely. So I'm very excited about it. We launched it on March 1st of this year. And it is a very targeted program that's designed to promote support and reward us like set of partners. And Cisco is one of those partners that has been invited to participate. And these are the partners that are committed to doing a couple of different things. One of which is supporting the development of our offerings. It's also partners that are integrating into our technology platform and they also train and enable our engineers, our consultants as well as our sellers. So they bring a lot of value to the table. And like I said before, Cisco is one of the partners that have been invited to participate. And we're very excited. >> Yeah. >> Go ahead Erin. >> And just to add on that as Candace is saying like Cisco is really excited to participate in this program. It's really, truly about delivering an outcome to our customers. And so the program gives us tools to make investments integrations, et cetera. And the part about partnership it's an evolution of things, right? We want to work together. The landscape of the threats are changing, our world's changing, we're in a pandemic, we've got to be able to pivot and really help customers solve these problems together. And the Alliance program gives us a formal way a really kind of put in the wood behind the arrow. So we're really excited to participate. >> Thanks Erin, excited to have you. >> Great. So Kandyce, I'm curious, as Erin was saying that the threat vector, things are expanding, we've seen so much flux. They're saying we're in a dynamic market, situation is a pretty big understatement. What was the impetus of this Alliance? Was it, this Alliance program, did it have anything to do with the flux that we've been through in the last year? >> Well, I think anytime you launch a program or create a strategy, you're obviously solving a problem. And we all know that security is complex and we need to simplify it. And in today's market, there's a shortage of professionals in the industry. There's a lot of siloed processes and a lot of tools. And anytime that you can bring a strategy to the table that solves some of these challenges, it's definitely worthwhile. And our goal is to bring together advisors and integrated leading technologies vendors such as Cisco. And our goal is to help our clients obviously. And optimally, what we want to do is we want to align their security strategy. We want to make sure that we protect their digital users, their data, their assets. We also want to modernize our technology with these advisors. And ultimately, we found a partnership in Cisco in regards to this program, where we can solve some of our customer's challenges and we can leverage this partnership to the fullest. >> Can you talk to me a little bit about the difference between a technology alliances program and a security service Alliance partner at IBM security program? >> Kandyce: Absolutely. Well, I think it's to call out that Cisco is both actually. We do have a Technology Alliance partners as you mentioned, and Security Service Alliance partners and our Technology Alliance partners are purpose built integrations with IBM security products. On the opposite side, you have Security Service Alliance partners where there's kind of two aspects to it. It could be, it's an either situation where they're integrated into our security service offering or we build an offering around the partners technology. And in the case of Cisco there's many product integrations. I'll name two as examples, one being QRadar and the other being Resilient. But I think what makes the partnership so interesting is there's an extensive portfolio to choose from. And I think that makes it very exciting for our clients to kind of look at what we bring to the table jointly and create leverage out of that. Erin, do you have anything to add? >> A couple of things. So the questions we get a lot from customers is, is there overlap in some of these software solutions? And the fact is there really isn't. We are more complimentary than competitive. And one of the things that we want to do to enhance the customer experience is really give a customer the confidence, but also a full service solution. The way Cisco views IBM and security space is like the glue, right? We provide all the automation a lot of the visibility, our tools, for instance QRadar, pump all of the log information and help with instant response to how customers look at threats. And we really want them to, customers would feel confident by being together and really let's face it, IBM and Cisco are the biggest players in the market. But to Kandyce's point they're also looking for innovation from us and we giving them the roadmaps to go to the next level. So our partnership really provides that. And in fact, it's really important to note that IBM is actually a big Cisco client and has invested in some of our technologies around Umbrella, Next-Gen firewall and our IPS and AnyConnect Solution. So truly our use case is between our companies too not just for our customers. So it's part of our loyalty and commitment to each other but also to all the folks who are making investments working with IBM and Cisco. >> So there's a long history deep collaboration between IBM and Cisco here. I'm wondering if either of you and Kandyce we'll start with you, can you talk about anything that you saw in the last year. I'm thinking, from a security perspective we saw governments and schools and hospitals and healthcare organizations being attacked because they were, there was so much focus on those organizations. I'm curious if there's any industries that you guys saw in the last year or so in particular that really have benefited from your Security Services Alliance program? >> Well, I think we just launched the program in March. So we are currently in the process of rolling it out but will say, as a organization we spend a lot of time making sure that we're relevant to the community, that we're solving some of the deepest problems in the industry. And I think it's an exciting time and I know that IBM Security Services brings a lot of solutions to its clients and we'll continue to do so. >> And then Erin, tell me from Cisco's perspective and yes, Kandyce you mentioned that this is a brand new program. What are some of the things that you're looking forward to being able to help clients in industries that I mentioned and really any industry pivot as we're still in such a globally challenging situation? >> Yes. So I won't necessarily talk about verticals but let's talk about the pandemic. So many of our customers in all different kinds of verticals have had to take their business home. Securing all the remote workers, doing what we call Zero Trust and edge security making sure they are who they say they are when they're connecting to the mothership. And so we've really put a lot of effort at Cisco around addressing these problems in a fast and efficient way. And then IBM helps us manage that for customers. So if they don't have the bandwidth, once solutions go in and we turn the key on they don't have the bandwidth to manage this themselves, IBM really picks that ball up and runs with it. So that's another big value out of our partnership. But let's face it, gosh, a year and a half ago all of this changed on the dime. So we had to pivot really quickly. And because we have teams in place are already working together on how we service these solutions through IBM, this was not necessarily a very hard shift. We were able to do this quickly and provide information and kind of stay ahead of the curve while we saw our customers go through this transition. >> And I can only imagine how critical IBM and Cisco were together as you mentioned, Erin, that pivot to work from home happened so quickly for millions and millions, hundreds of millions of not more of people, and there's a good amount of us that are still in that situation that are reliant on technologies. But like IBM and Cisco are delivering, for collaboration, for communication, even to connect families I'm sure what you guys have done helping those customers pivot is just the tip of the iceberg in helping them not just survive this time but be able to thrive, maybe even focus resources on identifying new products on new services, new ways to delight their customers. >> Yeah, I think that's the other thing that's happening between our firms kind of within security and also more broadly is a lot of our customers are moving to the Cloud and they really need help with this kind of full service look and strategy and ongoing managing and the long haul from a partner. So one of the things that's also been really valuable in our partnership is we have teams of people on account level that really understand our customers and can make these recommendations based on what we're putting together behind the scenes and helping them through the journey. So security is clearly a big part of, kind of what's on everyone's mind, but as far as, can a regular IT operations and networking, it's all part of one journey. And so this layered approach is I think what differentiates our partnership absolutely in the marketplace. >> I agree with you, Erin. I think there's a lot to be excited about that. >> We'll good. Ladies, thank you for joining me today. Talking to me about this new security strategy Alliances Program, what it's offering, the power that IBM and Cisco are bringing jointly to your customers. We look forward to seeing what happens in the next year. Thanks for your time. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Thank you. >> Well, Kandyce Tripp and Erin Jensen. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think, the digital experience. (soft upbeat music)

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of an AI ops virtual forum brought to you by Broadcom. >>Welcome to the AI ops virtual forum. Finally, some Artan extended to be talking with rich lane now, senior analyst, serving infrastructure and operations professionals at Forrester. Rich. It's great to have you today. >>Thank you for having me. I think it's going to be a really fun conversation to have today. >>It is. We're going to be setting the stage for, with Richard, for the it operations challenges and the need for AI ops. That's kind of our objective here in the next 15 minutes. So rich talk to us about some of the problems that enterprise it operations are facing now in this year, that is 2020 that are going to be continuing into the next year. >>Yeah, I mean, I think we've been on this path for a while, but certainly the last eight months has, uh, has accelerated, uh, this problem and, and brought a lot of things to light that, that people were, you know, they were going through the day to day firefighting as their goal way of life. Uh, it's just not sustainable anymore. You a highly distributed environment or in the need for digital services. And, you know, one of them has been building for a while really is in the digital age, you know, we're providing so many, uh, uh, the, the interactions with customers online. Um, we've, we've added these layers of complexity, um, to applications, to infrastructure, you know, or we're in the, in the cloud or a hybrid or multi-cloud, or do you know you name it using cloud native technologies? We're using legacy stuff. We still have mainframe out there. >>Uh, you know, the, just the, the vast amount of things we have to keep track of now and process and look at the data and signals from, it's just, it's a really untenable for, for humans to do that in silos now, uh, in, in, you know, when you add to that, you know, when companies are so heavily invested in gone on the digital transformation path, and it's accelerated so much in the last, uh, year or so that, you know, we're getting so much of our business in revenue derived from these services that they become core to the business. They're not afterthoughts anymore. It's not just about having a website presence. It's, it's about deriving core business value from the services you're providing to your, through your customers. And a lot of cases, customers you're never going to meet or see at that. So it's even more important to be vigilant. >>And on top of the quality of that service that you're giving them. And then when you think about just the staffing issues we have, there's just not enough bodies to go around it in operations anymore. Um, you know, we're not going to be able to hire, you know, like we did 10 years ago, even. Uh, so that's where we need the systems to be able to bring those operational efficiencies to bear. When we say operational efficiencies, we don't mean, you know, uh, lessening head count because we can't do that. That'd be foolish. What we mean is getting the head count. We have back to burping on and higher level things, you know, working on, uh, technology refreshes and project work that that brings better digital services to customers and get them out of doing these sort of, uh, low, uh, complexity, high volume tasks that they're spending at least 20%, if not more on our third day, each day. So I think that the more we can bring intelligence to bear and automation to take those things out of their hands, the better off we are going forward. >>And I'm sure those workers are wanting to be able to have the time to deliver more value, more strategic value to the organization, to their role. And as you're saying, you know, was the demand for digital services is spiking. It's not going to go down and as consumers, if w if we have another option and we're not satisfied, we're going to go somewhere else. So, so it's really about not just surviving this time right now, it's about how do I become a business that's going to thrive going forward and exceeding expectations that are now just growing and growing. So let's talk about AI ops as a facilitator of collaboration, across business folks, it folks developers, operations, how can it facilitate collaboration, which is even more important these days? >>Yeah. So one of the great things about it is now, you know, years ago, have I gone years, as they say, uh, we would buy a tool to fit each situation. And, you know, someone that worked in network and others who will somebody worked in infrastructure from a, you know, Linux standpoint, have their tool, somebody who's from storage would have their tool. And what we found was we would have an incident, a very high impact incident occur. Everybody would get on the phone, 24 people all be looking at their siloed tool, they're siloed pieces of data. And then we'd still have to try to like link point a to B to C together, you know, just to institutional knowledge. And, uh, there was just ended up being a lot of gaps there because we couldn't understand that a certain thing happening over here was related to an advantage over here. >>Um, now when we bring all that data into one umbrella, one data Lake, whatever we want to call it, a lot of smart analytics to that data, uh, and normalize that data in a way we can contextualize it from, you know, point a to point B all the way through the application infrastructure stack. Now, the conversation changes now, the conversation changes to here is the problem, how are we going to fix it? And we're getting there immediately versus three, four or five hours of, uh, you know, hunting and pecking and looking at things and trying to try to extrapolate what we're seeing across disparate systems. Um, and that's really valuable. And in what that does is now we can change the conversation for measuring things. And in server up time and data center, performance metrics as to how are we performing as a business? How are we overall in, in real time, how are businesses being impacted by service disruption? >>We know how much money losing per minute hour, or what have you, uh, and what that translate lights into brand damage and things along those lines, that people are very interested in that. And, you know, what is the effect of making decisions either brief from a product change side? You know, if we're, we're, we're always changing the mobile apps and we're always changing the website, but do we understand what value that brings us or what negative impact that has? We can measure that now and also sales, marketing, um, they run a campaign here's your, you know, coupon for 12% off today only, uh, what does that drive to us with user engagement? We can measure that now in real time, we don't have to wait for those answers anymore. And I think, you know, having all those data and understanding the cause and effect of things increases, it enhances these feedback loops of we're making decisions as a business, as a whole to make, bring better value to our customers. >>You know, how does that tie into ops and dev initiatives? How does everything that we do if I make a change to the underlying architectures that help move the needle forward, does that hinder things, uh, all these things factor into it. In fact, there into the customer experience, which is what we're trying to do at the end of the day, w w whether operations people like it or not, we are all in the customer experience business now. And we have to realize that and work closer than ever with our business and dev partners to make sure we're delivering the highest level of customer experience we can. >>Uh, customer experience is absolutely critical for a number of reasons. I always kind of think it's inextricably linked with employee experience, but let's talk about long-term value because as organizations and every industry has pivoted multiple times this year and will probably continue to do so for the foreseeable future, for them to be able to get immediate value that let's, let's not just stop the bleeding, but let's allow them to get a competitive advantage and be really become resilient. What are some of the, uh, applications that AI ops can deliver with respect to long-term value for an organization? >>Yeah, and I think that it's, you know, you touched upon this a very important point that there is a set of short term goals you want to achieve, but they're really going to be looking towards 12, 18 months down the road. What is it going to have done for you? And I think this helps framing out for you what's most important because it'd be different for every enterprise. Um, and it also shows the ROI of doing this because there is some, you know, change is going to be involved with things you're gonna have to do. But when you look at the, the, the longer time horizon of what it brings to your business as a whole, uh it's to me, at least it all seems, it seems like a no brainer to not do it. Um, you know, thinking about the basic things, like, you know, faster remediation of, of, uh, client impacting incidents, or maybe, maybe even predictive of sort of detection of these incidents that will affect clients. >>So now you're getting, you know, at scale, you know, it's very hard to do when you have hundreds of thousands of optics of the management that relate to each other, but now you're having letting the machines and the intelligence layer find out where that problem is. You know, it's not the red thing, it's the yellow thing. Go look at that. Um, it's reducing the amount of finger pointing and what have you like resolved between teams now, everybody's looking at the same data, the same sort of, uh, symptoms and like, Oh yeah, okay. This is telling us, you know, here's the root cause you should investigate this huge, huge thing. Um, and, and it's something we never thought we'd get to where, uh, this, this is where we smart enough to tell us these things, but this, again, this is the power of having all the data under one umbrella >>And the smart analytics. >>Um, and I think really, you know, it's a boat. Uh, if you look at where infrastructure and operations people are today, and especially, you know, eight months, nine months, whatever it is into the pandemic, uh, a lot of them are getting really burnt out with doing the same repetitive tasks over and over again. Um, just trying to keep the lights on, you know, we need, we need to extract those things for those people, uh, just because it just makes no sense to do something over and over again, the same remediation step, just we should automate those things. So getting that sort of, uh, you know, drudgery off their hands, if you will, and, and get them into, into all their important things they should be doing, you know, they're really hard to solve problems. That's where the human shine, um, and that's where, you know, having a, you know, really high level engineers, that's what they should be doing, you know, and just being able to do things I >>Think in a much faster, >>In a more efficient manner, when you think about an incident occurring, right. In, in a level, one technician picks that up and he goes and triaged that maybe run some tests. He has a script, >>Uh, or she, uh, and, >>You know, uh, they open a ticket and they enrich the ticket. They call it some log files. They can look up for the servers on it. You're in an hour and a half into an incident before anyone's even looked at it. If we could automate all of that, >>Why wouldn't we, that makes it easier for everyone. Um, >>Yeah. And I really think that's where the future is, is, is, is bringing this intelligent automation to bear, to take, knock down all the little things that consume the really, the most amount of time. When you think about it, if you aggregate it over the course of a quarter or a year, a great deal of your time is spent just doing that minutiae again, why don't we automate that? And we should. So I really think that's, that's where you get to look long-term. I think also the sense of we're going to be able to measure everything in the sense of business KPIs versus just IT-centric KPIs. That's really where we going to get to in the digital age. And I think we waited too long to do that. I think our operations models were all voted. I think, uh, you know, a lot of, a lot of the KPIs we look at today are completely outmoded. They don't really change if you think about it. When we look at the monthly reports over the course of a year, uh, so let's do something different. And now having all this data and the smart analytics, we can do something different. Absolutely. I'm glad >>That you brought up kind of looking at the impact that AI ops can make on, on minutiae and burnout. That's a really huge problem that so many of us are facing in any industry. And we know that there's some amount of this that's going to continue for a while longer. So let's get our let's leverage intelligent automation to your point, because we can to be able to allow our people to not just be more efficient, but to be making a bigger impact. And there's that mental component there that I think is absolutely critical. I do want to ask you what are some of these? So for those folks going, all right, we've got to do this. It makes sense. We see some short-term things that we need. We need short-term value. We need long-term value as you've just walked us through. What are some of the obstacles that you'd say, Hey, be on the lookout for this to wipe it out of the way. >>Yeah. I, I think there's, you know, when you think about the obstacles, I think people don't think about what are big changes for their organization, right? You know, they're, they're going to change process. They're going to change the way teams interact. They're they're going to change a lot of things, but they're all for the better. So what we're traditionally really bad in infrastructure and operations is communication, marketing, a new initiative, right? We don't go out and get our peers agreement to it where the product owner is, you know, and say, okay, this is what it gets you. This is where it changes. People just hear I'm losing something, I'm losing control over something. You're going to get rid of the tools that I have, but I love I've spent years building out perfecting, um, and that's threatening to people and understandably so because people think if I start losing tools, I start losing head count. >>And then, whereas my department at that point, um, but that's not what this is all about. Uh, this, this isn't a replacement for people. This isn't a replacement for teams. This isn't augmentation. This is getting them back to doing the things they should be doing and less of the stuff they shouldn't be doing. And frankly, it's, it's about providing better services. So when in the end, it's counterintuitive to be against it because it's gonna make it operations look better. It's gonna make us show us that we are the thought leaders in delivering digital services that we can, um, constantly be perfecting the way we're doing it. And Oh, by the way, we can help the business be better. Also at the same time. Uh, I think some of the mistakes people really don't make, uh, really do make, uh, is not looking at their processes today, trying to figure out what they're gonna look like tomorrow when we bring in advanced automation and intelligence, uh, but also being prepared for what the future state is, you know, in talking to one company, they were like, yeah, we're so excited for this. >>Uh, we, we got rid of our old 15 year old laundering system and the same day we stepped a new system. Uh, one problem we had though, was we weren't ready for the amount of incidents that had generated on day one. And it wasn't because we did anything wrong or the system was wrong or what have you. It did the right thing actually, almost too. Well, what it did is it uncovered a lot of really small incidents through advanced correlations. We didn't know we had, so there were things lying out there that were always like, huh, that's weird. That system acts strange sometimes, but we can never pin it down. We found all of those things, which is good. It goes, but it kind of made us all kind of sit back and think, and then our readership are these guys doing their job. Right? >>And then we had to go through an evolution of, you know, just explaining we were 15 years behind from a visibility standpoint to our environment, but technologies that we deployed in applications had moved ahead and modernized. So this is like a cautionary tale of falling too far behind from a sort of a monitoring and intelligence and automation standpoint. Um, so I thought that was a really good story for something like, think about as Eagle would deploy these modern systems. But I think if he really, you know, the marketing to people, so they're not threatened, I think thinking about your process and then what's, what's your day one and then look like, and then what's your six and 12 months after that looks like, I think settling all that stuff upfront just sets you up for success. >>All right. Rich, take us home here. Let's summarize. How can clients build a business case for AI ops? What do you recommend? >>Yeah. You know, I actually get that question a lot. It's usually, uh, almost always the number one, uh, question in, in, um, you know, webinars like this and conversations that, that the audience puts in. So I wouldn't be surprised, but if that was true, uh, going forward from this one, um, yeah, people are like, you know, Hey, we're all in. We want to do this. We know this is the way forward, but the guy who writes the checks, the CIO, the VP of ops is like, you know, I I've signed lots of checks over the years for tools wise is different. Um, and when I guide people to do is to sit back and, and start doing some hard math, right. Uh, one of the things that resonates with the leadership is dollars and cents. It's not percentages. So saying, you know, it's, it brings us a 63% reduction and MTTR is not going to resonate. >>Uh, Oh, even though it's a really good number, you know, uh, I think what it is, you have to put it in terms of avoid, if we could avoid that 63%. Right. You know, um, what does that mean for our, our digital services as far as revenue, right. We know that every hour system down, I think, uh, you know, typically in the market, you see is about $500,000 an hour for enterprise. We'll add that up over the course of the year. What are you losing in revenue? Add to that brand damage loss of customers, you know, uh, Forrester puts out a really big, uh, casino, um, uh, customer experience index every year that measures that if you're delivering good Udall services, bad digital services, if you could raise that up, what does that return to you in revenue? And that's a key thing. And then you just look at the, the, uh, hours of lost productivity. >>I call it, I might call it something else, but I think it's a catchy name. Meaning if a core internal system is down say, and you know, you have a customer service desk of a thousand customer service people, and they can't do that look up or fix that problem for clients for an hour. How much money does that lose you? And you multiply it out. You know, average customer service desk person makes X amount an hour times this much time. This many times it happens. Then you start seeing the real, sort of a power of AI ops for this incident avoidance, or at least lowering the impact of these incidents. And people have put out in graphs and spreadsheets and all this, and then I'm doing some research around this actually to, to, to put out something that people can use to say, the project funds itself in six to 12 months, it's paid for itself. And then after that it's returning money to the business. Why would you not do that? And when you start framing the conversation, that way, the little light bulb turn on for the people that sign the checks. For sure. >>That's great advice for folks to be thinking about. I loved how you talked about the 63% reduction in something. I think that's great. What does it impact? How does it impact the revenue for the organization? If we're avoiding costs here, how do we drive up revenue? So having that laser focus on revenue is great advice for folks in any industry, looking to build a business case for AI ops. I think you set the stage for that rich beautifully, and you were right. This was a fun conversation. Thank you for your time. Thank you. And thanks for watching >>From around the globe with digital coverage. >>Welcome back to the Broadcom AI ops, virtual forum, Lisa Martin here talking with Eastman Nasir global product management at Verizon. We spent welcome back. >>Hi. Hello. Uh, what a pleasure. >>So 2020 the year of that needs no explanation, right? The year of massive challenges and wanting to get your take on the challenges that organizations are facing this year as the demand to deliver digital products and services has never been higher. >>Yeah. So I think this is something it's so close to all the far far, right? It's, uh, it's something that's impacted the whole world equally. And I think regardless of which industry you rent, you have been impacted by this in one form or the other, and the ICT industry, the information and communication technology industry, you know, Verizon being really massive player in that whole arena. It has just been sort of struck with this massive consummation we have talked about for a long time, we have talked about these remote surgery capabilities whereby you've got patients in Kenya who are being treated by an expert sitting in London or New York, and also this whole consciousness about, you know, our carbon footprint and being environmentally conscious. This pandemic has taught us all of that and brought us to the forefront of organization priorities, right? The demand. I think that's, that's a very natural consequence of everybody sitting at home. >>And the only thing that can keep things still going is this data communication, right? But I wouldn't just say that that is, what's kind of at the heart of all of this. Just imagine if we are to realize any of these targets of the world is what leadership is setting for themselves. Hey, we have to be carbon neutral by X year as a country, as a geography, et cetera, et cetera. You know, all of these things require you to have this remote working capabilities, this remote interaction, not just between humans, but machine to machine interactions. And this there's a unique value chain, which is now getting created that you've got people who are communicating with other people or communicating with other machines, but the communication is much more. I wouldn't even use the term real time because we've used real time for voice and video, et cetera. >>We're talking low latency, microsecond decision-making that can either cut somebody's, you know, um, our trees or that could actually go and remove the tumor, that kind of stuff. So that has become a reality. Everybody's asking for it, remote learning, being an extremely massive requirement where, you know, we've had to enable these, uh, these virtual classrooms ensuring the type of connectivity, ensuring the type of type of privacy, which is just so, so critical. You can't just have everybody in a go on the internet and access a data source. You have to be concerned about the integrity and security of that data as the foremost. So I think all of these things, yes, we have not been caught off guard. We were pretty forward-looking in our plans and our evolution, but yes, it's fast track the journey that we would probably believe we would have taken in three years. It has brought that down to two quarters where we've had to execute them. >>Right. Massive acceleration. All right. So you articulated the challenges really well. And a lot of the realities that many of our viewers are facing. Let's talk now about motivations, AI ops as a tool, as a catalyst for helping organizations overcome those challenges. >>So yeah. Now on that I said, you can imagine, you know, it requires microsecond decision-making which human being on this planet can do microsecond decision-making on complex network infrastructure, which is impacting end user applications, which have multitudes of effect. You know, in real life, I use the example of a remote surgeon. Just imagine that, you know, even because of you just use your signal on the quality of that communication for that microsecond, it could be the difference between killing somebody in saving somebody's life. And it's not predictable. We talk about autonomous vehicles. Uh, we talk about this transition to electric vehicles, smart motorways, et cetera, et cetera, in federal environment, how is all of that going to work? You have so many different components coming in. You don't just have a network and security anymore. You have software defined networking. That's coming, becoming a part of that. >>You have mobile edge computing that is rented for the technologies. 5g enables we're talking augmented reality. We're talking virtual reality. All of these things require that resources and why being carbon conscious. We told them we just want to build a billion data centers on this planet, right? We, we have to make sure that resources are given on demand and the best way of resources can be given on demand and could be most efficient is that the thing is being made at million microsecond and those resources are accordingly being distributed, right? If you're relying on people, sipping their coffees, having teas, talking to somebody else, you know, just being away on holiday. I don't think we're going to be able to handle that one that we have already stepped into. Verizon's 5g has already started businesses on that transformational journey where they're talking about end user experience personalization. >>You're going to have events where people are going to go, and it's going to be three-dimensional experiences that are purely customized for you. How, how does that all happen without this intelligence sitting there and a network with all of these multiple layers? So spectrum, it doesn't just need to be intuitive. Hey, this is my private IP traffic. This is public traffic. You know, it has to not be in two, or this is an application that I have to prioritize over another task to be intuitive to the criticality and the context of those transactions. Again, that's surgeons. So be it's much more important than postman setting and playing a video game. >>I'm glad that you think that that's excellent. Let's go into some specific use cases. What are some of the examples that you gave? Let's kind of dig deeper into some of the, what you think are the lowest hanging fruit for organizations kind of pan industry to go after. >>Excellent. Brian, and I think this, this like different ways to look at the lowest hanging fruit, like for somebody like revising who is a managed services provider, you know, very comprehensive medicines, but we obviously have food timing, much lower potentially for some of our customers who want to go on that journey. Right? So for them to just go and try and harness the power of the foods might be a bit higher hanging, but for somebody like us, the immediate ones would be to reduce the number of alarms that are being generated by these overlay services. You've got your basic network, then you've got your whole software defined networking on top of that, you have your hybrid clouds, you have your edge computing coming on top of that. You know? So all of that means if there's an outage on one device on the network, I want to make this very real for everybody, right? >>It's like device and network does not stop all of those multiple applications or monitoring tools from raising and raising thousands of alarm and everyone, one capacity. If people are attending to those thousands of alarms, it's like you having a police force and there's a burglary in one time and the alarm goes off and 50 bags. How, how are you kind of make the best use of your police force? You're going to go investigate 50 bags or do you want to investigate where the problem is? So it's as real as that, I think that's the first wins where people can save so much cost, which is coming from being wasted and resources running around, trying to figure stuff out immediately. I'm tied this with network and security network and security is something which has you did even the most, you know, I mean single screens in our engineering, well, we took it to have network experts, separate people, security experts, separate people to look for different things, but there are security events that can impact the performance of a network. >>And then just drop the case on the side of et cetera, which could be falsely attributed to the metric. And then if you've got multiple parties, which are then the chapter clear stakeholders, you can imagine the blame game that goes on finding fingers, taking names, not taking responsibility that don't has all this happened. This is the only way to bring it all together to say, okay, this is what takes priority. If there's an event that has happened, what is its correlation to the other downstream systems, devices, components, and these are applications. And then subsequently, you know, like isolating it to the right cost where you can most effectively resolve that problem. Thirdly, I would say on demand, virtualized resource, virtualized resources, the heart and soul, the spirit of status that you can have them on demand. So you can automate the allocation of these resources based on customer's consumption their peaks, their cramps, all of that comes in. >>You see, Hey, typically on a Wednesday, the traffic was up significantly for this particular application, you know, going to this particular data center, you could have this automated system, uh, which is just providing those resources, you know, on demand. And so it is to have a much better commercial engagement with customers and just a much better service assurance model. And then one more thing on top of that, which is very critical is that as I was saying, giving that intelligence to the networks to start having context of the criticality of a transaction, that doesn't make sense to them. You can't have that because for that, you need to have this, you know, monkey their data. You need to have multi-cam system, which are monitoring and controlling different aspects of your overall end user application value chain to be communicating with each other. And, you know, that's the only way to sort of achieve that goal. And that only happens with AI. It's not possible >>So it was when you clearly articulated some obvious, low hanging fruit and use cases that organizations can go after. Let's talk now about some of the considerations, you talked about the importance of a network and AI ops, the approach I assume, needs to be modular support needs to be heterogeneous. Talk to us about some of those key considerations that you would recommend. >>Absolutely. So again, basically starting with the network, because if there's, if the metrics sitting at the middle of all of this is not working, then things can communicate with each other, right? And the cloud doesn't work, nothing metal. That's the hardest part of this, but that's the frequency. When you talk about machine to machine communication or IOT, it's just the biggest transformation of the span of every company is going for IOT now to drive those costs, efficiencies, and had, something's got some experience, the integrity of the topic karma, right? The security, integrity of that. How do you maintain integrity of your data beyond just a secure network components? That is true, right? That's where you're getting to the whole arena blockchain technologies, where you have to use digital signatures or barcodes that machine then, and then an intelligence system is automatically able to validate and verify the integrity of the data and the commands that are being executed by those end-user told them what I need to tell them that. >>So it's IOT machines, right? That is paramount. And if anybody is not keeping that into their equation, that in its own self is any system that is therefore maintaining the integrity of your commands and your hold that sits on those, those machines. Right? Second, you have your network. You need to have any else platform, which is able to restless all the fast network information, et cetera. And coupled with that data integrity piece, because for the management, ultimately they need to have a coherent view of the analytics, et cetera, et cetera. They need to know where the problems are again, right? So let's say if there's a problem with the integrity of the commands that are being executed by the machine, that's a much bigger problem than not being able to communicate with that machine and the best thing, because you'd rather not talk to the machine or have to do anything if it's going to start doing wrong things. >>So I think that's where it is. It's very intuitive. It's not true. You have to have subsequently if you have some kind of faith and let me use that use case self autonomous vehicles. Again, I think we're going to see in the next five years, because he's smart with the rates, et cetera, it won't separate autonomous cars. It's much more efficient, it's much more space, et cetera, et cetera. So within that equation, you're going to have systems which will be specialists in looking at aspects and transactions related to those systems. For example, in autonomous moving vehicles, brakes are much more important than the Vipers, right? So this kind of intelligence, it will be multiple systems who have to sit, N nobody has to, one person has to go in one of these systems. I think these systems should be open source enough that they, if you were able to integrate them, right, if something's sitting in the cloud, you were able to integrate for that with obviously the regard of the security and integrity of your data that has to traverse from one system to the other extremely important. >>So I'm going to borrow that integrity theme for a second, as we go into our last question, and that is this kind of take a macro look at the overall business impact that AI ops can help customers make. I'm thinking of, you know, the integrity of teams aligning business in it, which we probably can't talk about enough. We're helping organizations really effectively measure KPIs that deliver that digital experience that all of us demanding consumers expect. What's the overall impact. What would you say in summary fashion? >>So I think the overall impact is a lot of costs. That's customized and businesses gives the time to the time of enterprises. Defense was inevitable. It's something that for the first time, it will come to life. And it's something that is going to, you know, start driving cost efficiencies and consciousness and awareness within their own business, which is obviously going to have, you know, it domino kind of an effect. So one example being that, you know, you have problem isolation. I talked about network security, this multi-layers architecture, which enables this new world of 5g, um, at the heart of all of it, it has to identify the problem to the source, right? Not be bogged down by 15 different things that are going wrong. What is causing those 15 things to go wrong, right? That speed to isolation in its own sense can make millions and millions of dollars to organizations after we organize it. Next one is obviously overall impacted customer experience. Uh, 5g was given out of your customers, expecting experiences from you, even if you're not expecting to deliver them in 2021, 2022, it would have customers asking for those experience or walking away, if you do not provide those experience. So it's almost like a business can do nothing every year. They don't have to reinvest if they just want to die on the line, businesses want remain relevant. >>Businesses want to adopt the latest and greatest in technology, which enables them to, you know, have that superiority and continue it. So from that perspective that continue it, he will read that they write intelligence systems that tank rationalizing information and making decisions supervised by people, of course were previously making some of those. >>That was a great summary because you're right, you know, with how demanding consumers are. We don't get what we want quickly. We churn, right? We go somewhere else and we could find somebody that can meet those expectations. So it has been thanks for doing a great job of clarifying the impact and the value that AI ops can bring to organizations that sounds really now is we're in this even higher demand for digital products and services, which is not going away. It's probably going to only increase it's table stakes for any organization. Thank you so much for joining me today and giving us your thoughts. >>Pleasure. Thank you. We'll be right back with our next segment. >>Digital applications and services are more critical to a positive customer and employee experience than ever before. But the underlying infrastructure that supports these apps and services has become increasingly complex and expanding use of multiple clouds, mobile and microservices, along with modern and legacy infrastructure can make it difficult to pinpoint the root cause when problems occur, it can be even more difficult to determine the business impact your problems that occur and resolve them efficiently. AI ops from Broadcom can help first by providing 360 degree visibility, whether you have hybrid cloud or a cloud native AI ops from Broadcom provides a clear line of sight, including apt to infrastructure and network visibility across hybrid environments. Second, the solution gives you actionable insights by correlating an aggregating data and applying AI and machine learning to identify root causes and even predict problems before users are impacted. Third AI ops from Broadcom provides intelligent automation that identifies potential solutions when problems occur applied to the best one and learns from the effectiveness to improve response in case the problem occurs. Again, finally, the solution enables organizations to achieve digit with jelly by providing feedback loops across development and operations to allow for continuous improvements and innovation through these four capabilities. AI ops from Broadcom can help you reduce service outages, boost, operational efficiency, and effectiveness and improve customer and employee experience. To learn more about AI ops from Broadcom, go to broadcom.com/ai ops from around the globe. >>It's the cube with digital coverage of AI ops virtual forum brought to you by Broadcom. >>Welcome back to the AI ops virtual forum, Lisa Martin here with Srinivasan, Roger Rajagopal, the head of product and strategy at Broadcom. Raj, welcome here, Lisa. I'm excited for our conversation. So I wanted to dive right into a term that we hear all the time, operational excellence, right? We hear it everywhere in marketing, et cetera, but why is it so important to organizations as they head into 2021? And tell us how AI ops as a platform can help. >>Yeah. Well, thank you. First off. I wanna, uh, I want to welcome our viewers back and, uh, I'm very excited to, uh, to share, um, uh, more info on this topic. You know, uh, here's what we believe as we work with large organizations, we see all our organizations are poised to get out of the, uh, the pandemic and look for a brood for their own business and helping customers get through this tough time. So fiscal year 2021, we believe is going to be a combination of, uh, you know, resiliency and agility at the, at the same time. So operational excellence is critical because the business has become more digital, right? There are going to be three things that are going to be more sticky. Uh, you know, remote work is going to be more sticky, um, cost savings and efficiency is going to be an imperative for organizations and the continued acceleration of digital transformation of enterprises at scale is going to be in reality. So when you put all these three things together as a, as a team that is, uh, you know, that's working behind the scenes to help the businesses succeed, operational excellence is going to be, make or break for organizations, >>Right with that said, if we kind of strip it down to the key capabilities, what are those key capabilities that companies need to be looking for in an AI ops solution? >>Yeah, you know, so first and foremost, AI ops means many things to many, many folks. So let's take a moment to simply define it. The way we define AI ops is it's a system of intelligence, human augmented system that brings together full visibility across app infra and network elements that brings together disparate data sources and provides actionable intelligence and uniquely offers intelligent automation. Now, the, the analogy many folks draw is the self-driving car. I mean, we are in the world of Teslas, uh, but you know, uh, but self-driving data center is it's too far away, right? Autonomous systems are still far away. However, uh, you know, application of AI ML techniques to help deal with volume velocity, veracity of information, uh, is, is critical. So that's how we look at AI ops and some of the key capabilities that we, uh, that we, uh, that we work with our customers to help them on our own for eight years. >>Right? First one is eyes and ears. What we call full stack observability. If you do not know what is happening in your systems, uh, you know, that that serve up your business services. It's going to be pretty hard to do anything, uh, in terms of responsiveness, right? So from stack observability, the second piece is what we call actionable insights. So when you have disparate data sources, tools, sprawls data coming at you from, uh, you know, uh, from a database systems, it systems customer management systems, ticketing systems. How do you find the needle from the haystack? And how do you respond rapidly from a myriad of problems as CEO of red? The third area is what we call intelligent automation. Well, identifying the problem to act on is important, and then acting on automating that and creating, uh, a recommendation system where, uh, you know, you can be proactive about it is even more important. And finally, all of this focuses on efficiency. What about effectiveness? Effectiveness comes when you create a feedback loop, when what happens in production is related to your support systems and your developers so that they can respond rapidly. So we call that continuous feedback. So these are the four key capabilities that, uh, you know, uh, you should look for in an AI ops system. And that's what we offer as well. >>Russia, there's four key capabilities that businesses need to be looking for. I'm wondering how those help to align business. And it it's, again like operational excellence. It's something that we talk about a lot is the alignment of business. And it a lot more challenging, easier said than done, right. But I want you to explain how can AI ops help with that alignment and align it outputs to business outcomes? >>Yeah. So, you know, one of the things, uh, I'm going to say something that is, uh, that is, uh, that is simple, but, but, but this harder, but alignment is not on systems alignment is with people, right? So when people align, when organizations align, when cultures align, uh, dramatic things can happen. So in the context of AI ops VC, when, when SRE is aligned with the DevOps engineers and information architects and, uh, uh, you know, it operators, uh, you know, they enable organizations to reduce the gap between intent and outcome or output and outcome that said, uh, you know, these personas need mechanisms to help them better align, right. Help them better visualize, see the, you know, what we call single source of truth, right? So there are four key things that I want to call out. When we work with large enterprises, we find that customer journey alignment with the, you know, what we call it systems is critical. >>So how do you understand your business imperatives and your customer journey goals, whether it is car to a purchase or whether it is, uh, you know, bill shock scenarios and Swan alignment on customer journey to your it systems is one area that you can reduce the gap. The second area is how do you create a scenario where your teams can find problems before your customers do right outage scenarios and so on. So that's the second area of alignment. The third area of alignment is how can you measure business impact driven services? Right? There are several services that an organization offers versus an it system. Some services are more critical to the business than others, and these change in a dynamic environment. So how do you, how do you understand that? How do you measure that and how, how do you find the gaps there? So that's the third area of alignment that we, that we help and last but not least there are, there are things like NPS scores and others that, that help us understand alignment, but those are more long-term. But in the, in the context of, uh, you know, operating digitally, uh, you want to use customer experience and business, uh, you know, a single business outcome, uh, as a, as a key alignment factor, and then work with your systems of engagement and systems of interaction, along with your key personas to create that alignment. It's a people process technology challenge. >>So, whereas one of the things that you said there is that it's imperative for the business to find a problem before a customer does, and you talked about outages there, that's always a goal for businesses, right. To prevent those outages, how can AI ops help with that? Yeah, >>So, you know, outages, uh, talk, you know, go to resiliency of a system, right? And they also go to, uh, uh, agility of the same system, you know, if you're a customer and if you're whipping up your mobile app and it takes more than three milliseconds, uh, you know, you're probably losing that customer, right. So outages mean different things, you know, and there's an interesting website called down detector.com that actually tracks all the old pages of publicly available services, whether it's your bank or your, uh, you know, tele telecom service or a mobile service and so on and so forth. In fact, the key question around outages for, from, uh, from, uh, you know, executives are the question of, are you ready? Right? Are you ready to respond to the needs of your customers and your business? Are you ready to rapidly resolve an issue that is impacting customer experience and therefore satisfaction? >>Are you creating a digital trust system where customers can be, you know, um, uh, you know, customers can feel that their information is secure when they transact with you, all of these, getting into the notion of resiliency and outages. Now, you know, one of the things that, uh, that I, I often, uh, you know, work with customers around, you know, would that be find as the radius of impact is important when you deal with outages? What I mean by that is problems occur, right? How do you respond? How quickly do you take two seconds, two minutes, 20 minutes, two hours, 20 hours, right? To resolve the problem that radius of impact is important. That's where, you know, you have to bring a gain people, process technology together to solve that. And the key thing is you need a system of intelligence that can aid your teams, you know, look at the same set of parameters so that you can respond faster. That's the key here. >>We look at digital transformation at scale. Raj, how does AI ops help influence that? >>You know, um, I'm going to take a slightly long-winded way to answer this question. See when it comes to digital transformation at scale, the focus on business purpose and business outcome becomes extremely critical. And then the alignment of that to your digital supply chain, right, are the, are the, are the key factors that differentiate winners in the, in their digital transformation game? Really, what we have seen, uh, with, with winners is they operate very differently. Like for example, uh, you know, Nike matures, its digital business outcomes by shoes per second, right? Uh, Apple by I-phones per minute, Tesla by model threes per month, are you getting this, getting it right? I mean, you want to have a clear business outcome, which is a measure of your business, uh, in effect, I mean, ENC, right? Which, which, uh, um, my daughter use and I use very well. >>Right. Uh, you know, uh, they measure by revenue per hour, right? I mean, so these are key measures. And when you have a key business outcome measure like that, you can everything else, because you know what these measures, uh, you know, uh, for a bank, it may be deposits per month, right now, when you move money from checking account to savings account, or when you do direct deposits, those are, you know, banks need liquidity and so on and so forth. But, you know, the, the key thing is that single business outcome has a Starburst effect inside the it organization that touches a single money moment from checking a call to savings account can touch about 75 disparate systems internally. Right? So those think about it, right? I mean, all, all we're doing is moving money from checking account a savings account. Now that goats into a it production system, there are several applications. >>There is a database, there is, there are infrastructures, there are load balancers that are webs. You know, you know, the web server components, which then touches your, your middleware component, which is a queuing system, right. Which then touches your transactional system. Uh, and, uh, you know, which may be on your main frames, what we call mobile to mainframe scenario, right? And we are not done yet. Then you have a security and regulatory compliance system that you have to touch a fraud prevention system that you have to touch, right? A state department regulation that you may have to meet and on and on and on, right? This is the chat that it operations teams face. And when you have millions of customers transacting, right, suddenly this challenge cannot be managed by human beings alone. So therefore you need a system of intelligence that augments human intelligence and acts as your, you know, your, your eyes and ears in a way to, to point pinpoint where problems are. >>Right. So digital transformation at scale really requires a very well thought out AI ops system, a platform, an open extensible platform that, uh, you know, uh, that is heterogeneous in nature because there's tools, products in organizations. There is a lot of databases in systems. There are millions of, uh, uh, you know, customers and hundreds of partners and vendors, you know, making up that digital supply chain. So, you know, AI ops is at the center of an enabling an organization achieve digital op you know, transformation at scale last but not least. You need continuous feedback loop. Continuous feedback loop is the ability for a production system to inform your dev ops teams, your finance teams, your customer experience teams, your cost modeling teams about what is going on so that they can so that they can reduce the intent, come gap. >>All of this need to come together, what we call BizOps. >>That was a great example of how you talked about the Starburst effect. I actually never thought about it in that way, when you give the banking example, but what you should is the magnitude of systems. The fact that people alone really need help with that, and why intelligent automation and AI ops can be transformative and enable that scale. Raj, it's always a pleasure to talk with you. Thanks for joining me today. And we'll be right back with our next segment. Welcome back to the AI ops virtual forum. We've heard from our guests about the value of AI ops and why and how organizations are adopting AI ops platforms. But now let's see AI ops inaction and get a practical view of AI ops to deep Dante. The head of AI ops at Broadcom is now going to take you through a quick demo. >>Hello. So they've gotta head off AI ops and automation here. What I'm going to do today is talk through some of the key capabilities and differentiators of Broadcom's CII ops solution in this solution, which can be delivered on cloud or on-prem. We bring a variety of metric alarm log and applauded data from multiple sources, EPM, NetApps, and infrastructure monitoring tools to provide a single point of observability and control. Let me start where our users mostly stock key enterprises like FSI, telcos retailers, et cetera, do not manage infrastructure or applications without having a business context. At the end of the day, they offer business services governed by SLS service level objectives and SLI service level indicators are service analytics, which can scale to a few thousand services, lets our customers create and monitor the services as per their preference. They can create a hierarchy of services based on their business practice. >>For example, here, the sub services are created based on functional subsistence for certain enterprises. It could be based on location. Users can import these services from their favorite CMDB. What's important to note that not all services are born equal. If you are a modern bank, you may want to prioritize tickets coming from digital banking, for example, and this application lets you rank them as per the KPI of your choice. We can source the availability, not merely from the state of the infrastructure, whether they're running or not. But from the SLS that represent the state of the application, when it comes to triaging issues related to the service, it is important to have a complete view of the topology. The typology can show both east-west elements from mobile to mainframe or not South elements in a network flow. This is particularly relevant for a large enterprise who could be running the systems of engagement on the cloud and system of records on mainframe inside the firewall here, you can see that the issue is related to the mainframe kick server. >>You can expand to see the actual alarm, which is sourced from the mainframe operational intelligence. Similarly, clicking on network will give the hub and spoke view of the network devices, the Cisco switches and routers. I can click on the effected router and see all the details Broadcom's solution stores, the ontological model of the typology in the form of a journal graph where one can not only view the current state of the typology, but the past as well, talking of underlying data sources, the solution uses best of the pre data stores for structured and unstructured data. We have not only leveraged the power of open source, but have actively contributed back to the community. One of the key innovations is evident in our dashboarding framework because we have enhanced the open source Grafana technology to support these diverse data sources here. You can see a single dashboard representing applications to infrastructure, to mainframe again, sourcing a variety of data from these sources. >>When we talk to customers, one of the biggest challenges that they face today is related to alarms because of a proliferation of tools. They are currently drowning in an ocean of hundreds and thousands of alarms. This increases the Elmont support cost to tens of dollars per ticket, and also affects LTO efficiency leading to an average of five to six hours of meantime to resolution here is where we have the state of the art innovation utilizing the power of machine learning and ontology to arrive at the root cause we not only clusterize alarms based on text, but employ the technique of 41st. We look at the topology then at the time window duplicate text based on NLP. And lastly learn from continuous training of the model to deduce what we call situations. This is an example of a situation. As you can see, we provide a time-based evidence of how things unfolded and arrive at a root cause. >>Lastly, the solution provides a three 60 degree closed loop remediation either through a ticketing system or by direct invocation of automation actions instead of firing hard-coded automation runbooks for certain conditions, the tool leverage is machine learning to rank automation actions based on past heuristics. That's why we call it intelligent automation to summarize AI ops from Broadcom helps you achieve operational excellence through full stack observability, coupled with AIML that applies across modern hybrid cloud environments, as well as legacy ones uniquely. It ties these insights with intelligent automation to improve customer experience. Thank you for watching from around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of AI ops virtual forum brought to you by Broadcom. >>Welcome to our final segment today. So we've discussed today. The value that AI ops will bring to organizations in 2021, we'll discuss that through three different perspectives. And so now we want to bring those perspectives together and see if we can get a consensus on where AI ops needs to go for folks to be successful with it in the future. So bringing back some folks Richland is back with us. Senior analysts, serving infrastructure and operations professionals at Forrester smartness here is also back in global product management at Verizon and Srinivasan, Reggie Gopaul head of product and strategy at Broadcom guys. Great to have you back. So let's jump in and rich, we're going to, we're going to start with you, but we are going to get all three of you, a chance to answer the questions. So we've talked about why organizations should adopt AI ops, but what happens if they choose not to what challenges would they face? Basically what's the cost of organizations doing nothing >>Good question, because I think in operations for a number of years, we've kind of stand stood, Pat, where we are, where we're afraid change things sometimes, or we just don't think about a tooling as often. The last thing to change because we're spending so much time doing project work and modernization and fighting fires on a daily basis. >>Problem is going to get worse. If we do nothing, >>You know, we're building new architectures like containers and microservices, which means more things to mind and keep running. Um, we're building highly distributed systems. We're moving more and more into this hybrid world, a multi-cloud world, uh, it's become over-complicate and I'll give a short anecdote. I think, eliminate this. Um, when I go to conferences and give speeches, it's all infrastructure operations people. And I say, you know, how many people have three X, five X, you know, uh, things to monitor them. They had, you know, three years ago, two years ago, and everyone's saying how many people have hired more staff in that time period, zero hands go up. That's the gap we have to fill. And we have to fill that through better automation, more intelligent systems. It's the only way we're going to be able to fill back out. >>What's your perspective, uh, if organizations choose not to adopt AI ops. Yeah. So I'll do that. Yeah. So I think it's, I would just relate it to a couple of things that probably everybody >>Tired off lately and everybody can relate to. And this would resonate that we have 5g, which is all set to transform the world. As we know it, I don't have a lot of communication with these smart cities, smart communities, IOT, which is going to make us pivotal to the success of businesses. And as you've seen with this call with, you know, transformation of the world, that there's a, there's a much bigger cost consciousness out there. People are trying to become much more, forward-looking much more sustainable. And I think at the heart of all of this, that the necessity that you have intelligent systems, which are bastardizing more than enough information that previously could've been overlooked because if you don't measure engagement, not going right. People not being on the same page of this using two examples or hundreds of things, you know, that play a part in things, but not coming together in the best possible way. So I think it has an absolute necessity to drive those cost efficiencies rather than, you know, left right and center laying off people who are like 10 Mattel to your business and have a great tribal knowledge of your business. So to speak, you can drive these efficiencies through automating a lot of those tasks that previously were being very manually intensive or resource intensive. And you could allocate those resources towards doing much better things, which let's be very honest going into 20, 21 after what we've seen with 2020, it's going to be mandate treat. >>And so Raj, I saw you shaking your head there when he was mom was sharing his thoughts. What are your thoughts about that sounds like you agree. Yeah. I mean, uh, you know, uh, to put things in perspective, right? I mean we're firmly in the digital economy, right? Digital economy, according to the Bureau of economic analysis is 9% of the U S GDP. Just, you know, think about it in, in, in, in, in the context of the GDP, right? It's only ranked lower, slightly lower than manufacturing, which is at 11.3% GDP and slightly about finance and insurance, which is about seven and a half percent GDP. So the digital economy is firmly in our lives, right. And as Huisman was talking about it, you know, software eats the world and digital, operational excellence is critical for customers, uh, to, uh, you know, to, uh, to drive profitability and growth, uh, in the digital economy. >>It's almost, you know, the key is digital at scale. So when, uh, when rich talks about some of the challenges and when Huseman highlights 5g as an example, those are the things that, that, that come to mind. So to me, what is the cost or perils of doing nothing? You know, uh, it's not an option. I think, you know, more often than not, uh, you know, C-level execs are asking head of it and they are key influencers, a single question, are you ready? Are you ready in the context of addressing spikes in networks because of the pandemic scenario, are you ready in the context of automating away toil? Are you ready to respond rapidly to the needs of the digital business? I think AI ops is critical. >>That's a great point. Roger, where does stick with you? So we got kind of consensus there, as you said, wrapping it up. This is basically a, not an option. This is a must to go forward for organizations to be successful. So let's talk about some quick wins, or as you talked about, you know, organizations and sea levels asking, are you ready? What are some quick wins that that organizations can achieve when they're adopting AI? >>You know, um, immediate value. I think I would start with a question. How often do your customers find problems in your digital experience before you do think about that? Right. You know, if you, if you, you know, there's an interesting web, uh, website, um, uh, you know, down detector.com, right? I think, uh, in, in Europe there is an equal amount of that as well. It ha you know, people post their digital services that are down, whether it's a bank that, uh, you know, customers are trying to move money from checking account, the savings account and the digital services are down and so on and so forth. So some and many times customers tend to find problems before it operations teams do. So a quick win is to be proactive and immediate value is visibility. If you do not know what is happening in your complex systems that make up your digital supply chain, it's going to be hard to be responsive. So I would start there >>Visibility this same question over to you from Verizon's perspective, quick wins. >>Yeah. So I think first of all, there's a need to ingest this multi-care spectrum data, which I don't think is humanly possible. You don't have people having expertise, you know, all the seven layers of the OSI model and then across network and security and at the application level. So I think you need systems which are now able to get that data. It shouldn't just be wasted reports that you're paying for on a monthly basis. It's about time that you started making the most of those in the form of identifying what are the efficiencies within your ecosystem. First of all, what are the things, you know, which could be better utilized subsequently you have the >>Opportunity to reduce the noise of a trouble tickets handling. It sounds pretty trivial, but >>An average you can imagine every trouble tickets has the cost in dollars, right? >>So, and there's so many tickets and there's art >>That get created on a network and across an end user application value, >>We're talking thousands, you know, across and end user >>Application value chain could be million in >>A year. So, and so many of those are not really, >>He, you know, a cause of concern because the problem is something. >>So I think that whole triage is an immediate cost saving and the bigger your network, the bigger >>There's a cost of things, whether you're a provider, whether you're, you know, the end customer at the end of the day, not having to deal with problems, which nobody can resolve, which are not meant to be dealt with. There's so many of those situations, right, where service has just been adopted, >>Which is just coordinate quality, et cetera, et cetera. So many reasons. So those are the, >>So there's some of the immediate cost saving them. They are really, really significant. >>Secondly, I would say Raj mentioned something about, you know, the user, >>Your application value chain, and an understanding of that, especially with this hybrid cloud environment, >>Et cetera, et cetera, right? The time it takes to identify a problem in an end user application value chain across the seven layers that I mentioned with the OSI reference model across network and security and the application environment. It's something that >>In its own self has massive cost to business, >>Right? That could be >>No sale transactions that could be obstructed because of this. There could be, and I'm going to use a really interesting example. >>We talk about IOT. The integrity of the IOT machine is exciting. >>Family is pivotal in this new world that we're stepping into. >>You could be running commands, >>Super efficient. He has, everything is being told to the machine really fast with sending yeah. >>Everything there. What if it's hacked? And if that's okay, >>Robotic arm starts to involve the things you don't want it to do. >>So there's so much of that. That becomes a part of this naturally. And I believe, yes, this is not just like from a cost >>standpoint, but anything going wrong with that code base, et cetera, et cetera. These are massive costs to the business in the form of the revenue. They have lost the perception in the market as a result, the fed, >>You know, all that stuff. So >>These are a couple of very immediate problems, but then you also have the whole player virtualized resources where you can automate the allocation, you know, the quantification of an orchestration of those virtualized resources, rather than a person having to, you know, see something and then say, Oh yeah, I need to increase capacity over here, because then it's going to have this particular application. You have systems doing this stuff and to, you know, Roger's point your customer should not be identifying your problems before you, because this digital is where it's all about perception. >>Absolutely. We definitely don't want the customers finding it before. So rich, let's wrap this particular question up with you from that senior analyst perspective, how can companies use make big impact quickly with AI ops? Yeah, >>Yeah, I think, you know, and it was been really summed up some really great use cases there. I think with the, uh, you know, one of the biggest struggles we've always had in operations is isn't, you know, the mean time to resolve. We're pretty good at resolving the things. We just have to find the thing we have to resolve. That's always been the problem and using these advanced analytics and machine learning algorithms now across all machine and application data, our tendency is humans is to look at the console and say, what's flashing red. That must be what we have to fix, but it could be something that's yellow, somewhere else, six services away. And we have made things so complicated. And I think this is what it was when I was saying that we can't get there anymore on our own. We need help to get there in all of this stuff that the outline. >>So, so well builds up to a higher level thing of what is the customer experience about what is the customer journey? And we've struggled for years in the digital world and measuring that a day-to-day thing. We know an online retail. If you're having a bad experience at one retailer, you just want your thing. You're going to go to another retailer, brand loyalty. Isn't one of like it, wasn't a brick and mortal world where you had a department store near you. So you were loyal to that because it was in your neighborhood, um, online that doesn't exist anymore. So we need to be able to understand the customer from that first moment, they touch a digital service all the way from their, their journey through that digital service, the lowest layer, whether it be a database or the network, what have you, and then back to them again, and we're not understanding, is that a good experience? >>We gave them. How does that compare to last week's experience? What should we be doing to improve that next week? Uh, and I think companies are starting and then the pandemic certainly, you know, push this timeline. If you listened to the, the, the CEO of Microsoft, he's like, you know, 10 years of digital transformation written down. And the first several months of this, um, in banks and in financial institutions, I talked to insurance companies, aren't slowing down. They're trying to speed up. In fact, what they've discovered is that they're, you know, obviously when we were on lockdown or what have you, they use of digital servers is spiked very high. What they've learned is they're never going to go back down. They're never going to return to pretend endemic levels. So now they're stuck with this new reality. Well, how do we service those customers and how do we make sure we keep them loyal to our brand? >>Uh, so, you know, they're looking for modernization opportunities. A lot of that that's things have been exposed. And I think Raj touched upon this very early in the conversation is visibility gaps. Now that we're on the outside, looking in at the data center, we know we architect things in a very way. Uh, we better ways of making these correlations across the Sparrow technologies to understand where the problems lies. We can give better services to our customers. And I think that's really what we're going to see a lot of the innovation and the people really clamoring for these new ways of doing things that starting, you know, now, I mean, I've seen it in customers, but I think really the push through the end of this year to next year when, you know, economy and things like that straightened out a little bit more, I think it really, people are gonna take a hard look of where they are and is, you know, AI ops the way forward for them. And I think they'll find it. The answer is yes, for sure. >>So we've, we've come to a consensus that, of what the parallels are of organizations, basically the cost of doing nothing. You guys have given some great advice on where some of those quick wins are. Let's talk about something Raj touched on earlier is organizations, are they really ready for truly automated AI? Raj, I want to start with you readiness factor. What are your thoughts? >>Uh, you know, uh, I think so, you know, we place our, her lives on automated systems all the time, right? In our, in our day-to-day lives, in the, in the digital world. I think, uh, you know, our, uh, at least the customers that I talk to our customers are, uh, are, uh, you know, uh, have a sophisticated systems. Like for example, advanced automation is a reality. If you look at social media, AI and ML and automation are used to automate away, uh, misinformation, right? If you look at financial institutions, AI and ML are used to automate away a fraud, right? So I want to ask our customers why can't we automate await oil in it, operation systems, right? And that's where our customers are. Then the, you know, uh, I'm a glass half full, uh, cleanup person, right? Uh, this pandemic has been harder on many of our customers, but I think what we have learned from our customers is they've Rose to the occasion. >>They've used digital as a key needs, right? At scale. That's what we see with, you know, when, when Huseman and his team talk about, uh, you know, network operational intelligence, right. That's what it means to us. So I think they are ready, the intersection of customer experience it and OT, operational technology is ripe for automation. Uh, and, uh, you know, I, I wanna, I wanna sort of give a shout out to three key personas in this mix. It's about people, right? One is the SRE persona, you know, site, reliability engineer. The other is the information security persona. And the third one is the it operator automation engineer persona. These folks in organizations are building a system of intelligence that can respond rapidly to the needs of their digital business. We at Broadcom, we are in the business of helping them construct a system of intelligence that will create a human augmented solution for them. Right. So when I see, when I interact with large enterprise customers, I think they, they, you know, they, they want to achieve what I would call advanced automation and AI ML solutions. And that's squarely, very I ops is, you know, is going as it, you know, when I talk to rich and what, everything that rich says, you know, that's where it's going and that's what we want to help our customers to. So, which about your perspective of organizations being ready for truly automated AI? >>I think, you know, the conversation has shifted a lot in the last, in, in pre pandemic. Uh, I'd say at the end of last year, we're, you know, two years ago, people I'd go to conferences and people come up and ask me like, this is all smoke and mirrors, right? These systems can't do this because it is such a leap forward for them, for where they are today. Right. We we've sort of, you know, in software and other systems, we iterate and we move forward slowly. So it's not a big shock. And this is for a lot of organizations that big, big leap forward where they're, they're running their operations teams today. Um, but now they've come around and say, you know what? We want to do this. We want all the automations. We want my staff not doing the low complexity, repetitive tasks over and over again. >>Um, you know, and we have a lot of those kinds of legacy systems. We're not going to rebuild. Um, but they need certain care and feeding. So why are we having operations? People do those tasks? Why aren't we automating those out? I think the other piece is, and I'll, I'll, I'll send this out to any of the operations teams that are thinking about going down this path is that you have to understand that the operations models that we're operating under in, in INO and have been for the last 25 years are super outdated and they're fundamentally broken for the digital age. We have to start thinking about different ways of doing things and how do we do that? Well, it's, it's people, organization, people are going to work together differently in an AI ops world, um, for the better. Um, but you know, there's going to be the, the age of the 40 person bridge call thing. >>Troubleshooting is going away. It's going to be three, four, five focused engineers that need to be there for that particular incident. Um, a lot of process mailer process we have in our level, one level, two engineering. What have you running of tickets, gathering of artifacts, uh, during an incident is going to be automated. That's a good thing. We should be doing those, those things by hand anymore. So I'd say that the, to people's like start thinking about what this means to your organization. Start thinking about the great things we can do by automating things away from people, having to do them over and over again. And what that means for them, getting them matched to what they want to be doing is high level engineering tasks. They want to be doing monitorization, working with new tools and technologies. Um, these are all good things that help the organization perform better as a whole great advice and great kind of some of the thoughts that you shared rich for what the audience needs to be on the lookout. For one, I want to go over to you, give me your thoughts on what the audience that should be on the lookout for, or put on your agendas in the next 12 months. >>So there's like a couple of ways to answer that question. One thing would be in the form of, you know, what are some of the things they have to be concerned about in terms of implementing this solution or harnessing its power. The other one could be, you know, what are the perhaps advantages they should look to see? So if I was to talk about the first one, let's say that, what are some of the things I have to watch out for like possible pitfalls that everybody has data, right? So yeah, there's one strategy we say, okay, you've got the data, let's see what we can do with them. But then there's the exact opposite side, which has to be considered when you're doing that analysis. What are the use cases that you're looking to drive? Right. But then use cases you have to understand, are you taking a reactive use case approach? >>Are you taking active use cases, right? Or, yeah, that's a very, very important concentration. Then you have to be very cognizant of where does this data that you have, where does it reside? What are the systems and where does it need to go to in order for this AI function to happen and subsequently if there needs to be any backward communication with all of that data in a process manner. So I think these are some of the very critical points because you can have an AI solution, which is sitting in a customer data center. It could be in a managed services provider data center, like, right, right. It could be in a cloud data center, like an AWS or something, or you could have hybrid views, et cetera, all of that stuff. So you have to be very mindful of where you're going to get the data from is going to go to what are the use cases you're trying to get out to do a bit of backward forward. >>Okay, we've got this data thing and I think it's a journey. Nobody can come in and say, Hey, you've built this fantastic thing. It's like Terminator two. I think it's a journey where we built starting with the network. My personal focus always comes down to the network and with 5g so much, so much more right with 5g, you're talking low latency communication. That's like the true power of 5g, right? It's low latency, it's ultra high bandwidth, but what's the point of that low latency. If then subsequently the actions that need to be taken to prevent any problems in application, IOT applications, remote surgeries, uh, self driving vehicles, et cetera, et cetera. What if that's where people are sitting and sipping their coffees and trying to take action that needs to be in low latency as well. Right? So these are, I think some of the fundamental things that you have to know your data, your use cases, that location, where it needs to be exchanged, what are the parameters around that for extending that data? >>And I think from that point at one word, it's all about realizing, you know, sense of business outcomes. Unless AI comes in as a digital labor that shows you, I have, I have reduced your this amount of time and that's a result of big problems or identified problems for anything. Or I have saved you this much resource in a month, in a year or whatever timeline that people want to see it. So I think those are some of the initial starting points, and then it all starts coming together. But the key is it's not one system that can do everything. You have to have a way where, you know, you can share data once you've caught all of that data into one system. Maybe you can send it to another system at make more, take more advantage, right? That system might be an AI and IOT system, which is just looking at all of your street and make it sure that Hey parents. So it's still off just to be more carbon neutral and all that great stuff, et cetera, et cetera, >>Stuff for the audience to can cigarette rush, take us time from here. What are some of the takeaways that you think the audience really needs to be laser focused on as we move forward into the next year? You know, one thing that, uh, I think a key takeaway is, um, uh, you know, as we embark on 2021, closing the gap between intent and outcome and outputs and outcome will become critical, is critical. Uh, you know, especially for, uh, you know, uh, digital transformation at scale for organizations context in the, you know, for customer experience becomes even more critical as who Swan Huseman was talking, uh, you know, being network network aware network availability is, is a necessary condition, but not sufficient condition anymore. Right? The what, what, what customers have to go towards is going from network availability to network agility with high security, uh, what we call app aware networks, right? How do you differentiate between a trade, a million dollar trade that's happening between, uh, you know, London and New York, uh, uh, versus a YouTube video training that an employee is going through? Worse is a YouTube video that millions of customers are, are >>Watching, right? Three different context, three different customer scenarios, right? That is going to be critical. And last but not least feedback loop, uh, you know, responsiveness is all about feedback loop. You cannot predict everything, but you can respond to things faster. I think these are sort of the three, three things that, uh, that, uh, you know, customers aren't going to have to have to really think about. And that's also where I believe AI ops, by the way, AI ops and I I'm. Yeah. You know, one of the points that was smart and shout out to what he was saying was heterogeneity is key, right? There is no homogeneous tool in the world that can solve problems. So you want an open extensible system of intelligence that, that can harness data from disparate data sources provide that visualization, the actionable insight and the human augmented recommendation systems that are so needed for, uh, you know, it operators to be successful. I think that's where it's going. >>Amazing. You guys just provided so much content context recommendations for the audience. I think we accomplished our goal on this. I'll call it power panel of not only getting to a consensus of what, where AI ops needs to go in the future, but great recommendations for what businesses in any industry need to be on the lookout for rich Huisman Raj, thank you for joining me today. We want to thank you for watching. This was such a rich session. You probably want to watch it again. Thanks for your time. Thanks so much for attending and participating in the AI OBS virtual forum. We really appreciate your time and we hope you really clearly understand the value that AI ops platforms can deliver to many types of organizations. I'm Lisa Martin, and I want to thank our speakers today for joining. We have rich lane from Forrester who's fund here from Verizon and Raj from Broadcom. Thanks everyone. Stay safe..

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE at ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante >> As we've reported extensively, the pandemic has affected cybersecurity markets perhaps more than any other. Remote work has caused CISOs, chief information security officers to shift spending priorities toward identity access management endpoint and cloud security. COVID has been a benefactor for next gen security companies that participate in these sectors. Notably, we believe tactical responses to the coronavirus have resulted in productivity improvements that will create permanent change in the way organizations defend themselves against cyber threats. Hello everyone and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we'll provide you with our quarterly update of the cybersecurity space and share fresh ETR data on the market. We also have some results from Eric Bradley's most recent Venn round table conducted with three senior chief information security officers. Let's start by looking at this notion of a single pane of glass. Now, despite the aspiration, there is no silver bullet to protect organizations from cyber attacks. The complexities of security, they're enormous and they require a layered defense approach. They range from securing internal networks to end points, to DMZ subnets, external traffic security, data in motion, data at rest, protecting from ransomware, dealing with web traffic, emails, phishing, not to mention threats from internal employees and contractors. As we mentioned at the open, there are three areas in particular that have seen significantly elevated spending momentum that is translated into the valuation increases for several companies, including CrowdStrike, Okta, Zscaler and several others. Zero trust security has gone from buzzword to reality. And spending shifts to these technologies have siphoned off demand from traditional hardware based firewalls. Although CISOs seem to be hedging their bets, at some point, they realized that people are actually going to come back to the office, so they have to remain agile. Lack of talent. Well, that remains one of the CISOs biggest challenges to securing applications and data. And automation while sometimes viewed as risky, is becoming increasingly important. Several companies have hit our radar this quarter and were highlighted in the CISO Panel, including Elastic which has seen momentum as an open source alternative to Splunk and notably multiple CIOs in the panel, they cited concerns related to Splunk's pricing and their sales tactics. They actually compared those of Splunk to those of EMC in the past, if anybody remembers how aggressive EMC salespeople could be. CloudFlare also broke into the top 10 in the ETR survey based on net score which is a measure of spending momentum. And that was for those companies with more than 50 mentions in the survey. CloudFlare is a CDN and provides security for websites. Also Netskope, a cloud security specialist cracked the top 10 in terms of net score and received high marks from the CISO panel, particularly with respect to it's vision and roadmap. Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks, Okta, CrowdStrike Cisco, CyberArk, SailPoint, Zscaler and Proofpoint remain focus vendors for us in the ETR survey as measured by spending momentum and their presence in the data set, what we call market share. And we'll talk more about those companies in a moment. Now finally, even CISOs that were skeptical about the permanence of the effects of COVID, they're seeing business benefits that suggest many of these shifts are circular, and not cyclical. Indeed, prior to the pandemic, ETR survey data showed that about 16% of organizations workers were primarily remote. CIOs expect that number to more than double post pandemic to 34%. Let's say you look at some of the cybersecurity vendors. We'll plot some, we don't have enough room to plot all of them, there are so many. But this chart shows one of our favorite XY views. On the Y axis, we measure net score. And that measures against spending velocity by looking at the net percentage of customers that are spending more versus those that are spending less within the ETR survey. The X axis measures market share or pervasiveness in the survey. Now we've included a select list of companies for this view and only include those with more than 50 responses, or 50 Ns, shared Ns, if you will, in the data set. In the upper right, you can see a table that shows the data sorted by both net score and shared Ns for each vendor. Now, as we indicated, Elastic has taken the top spot, just barely edging out Okta who took over from CrowdStrike in the last survey. And you can see the significant market presence of Palo Alto and Splunk and the most pervasive vendor here is Cisco. Note that Cisco also owns Umbrella and Duo which both have meaningful Ns in the survey. Now, if we were to combine these into one view, a single view of Cisco, all three of those, it would pull the company even further up into the right. Security is one of the bright spots in Cisco's portfolio and shows consistent year-on-year growth each quarter. Now having said that, some CISOs complained that Cisco's propensity to rely on acquisitions to fill gaps has caused them integration challenges in the past. Let's go back to Palo Alto for a moment. We'll make some comments later regarding their position relative to Fortinet, but we wanted to call them out here. Look, CISOs, they really liked Palo Alto. They trust the Palo Alto Networks. They consider Palo Alto as a trusted leader with a very strong portfolio and vision. Now let's turn our attention to the pack here, as we mentioned, Okta's momentum is notably elevated and it's meaningfully higher than the others. Its presence continues to increase up to the right, as does CrowdStrike's, or to the right, not necessarily up to the right, but to the right. But CrowdStrike has come off its net score high, so it's coming down actually in the vertical axis. And we're not super concerned about that because they're dramatically increasing their presence on the X axis each survey. But so is Okta, so that's something to watch. In other words, CrowdStrike's coming down in net score while it's increasing its presence, Okta is holding its net score while at the same time increasing its presence, which is really a strong sign. Now that they compete, they don't compete against each other directly, but it's they're still in the same sector. We've also included Carbon Black here because because of their VMware acquisition and VMware CEO, Pat Gelsinger, he's on a mission to fix security and the company has made a number of moves in cyber. VMware has a really good track record could of execution and while fixing Curity is highly aspirational. With its install base and history of success, we wanted to include them here because they're getting more attention of the CISOs in the ETR panel. So we're keeping an eye on VMware and Carbon Black. It's going to take some time, but we'll keep watching them. Now let's take a look at how the players have moved this year over the quarters. We're going to show you four tables here and we're going to compare the net scores and market share of the cyber companies for January, April, July, and October surveys. So pre-COVID and throughout the year. So let's look first at the pre-COVID positions. The left most chart is sorted by net score or spending momentum and the right most chart is the shared Ns, which is the number of mentions in the survey, which is what drives the horizontal axis that I showed you earlier. Now, when you go back to the January survey, you see CrowdStrike was already doing very well with an elevated net score of 68.3% and 123 mentions. By the way, please ignore those companies with less than 50 Ns, I didn't filter the data back then. I was kind of still learning how to use the ETR software platform. Okta was also elevated and you can see the others there as well. Now, last year, we came up with a method to assign stars to those companies that had both top net scores and large shared Ns in the survey. So spending momentum and strong market share. And you can see Microsoft, Splunk, Palo Alto Networks, Proofpoint, CrowdStrike, Zscaler and CyberArk made the cut and all received four stars. And we gave two stars to Cisco and Fortinet because they had strong net scores and very high presence in the survey. Now let's go forward and look at April when the lockdown was in full swing. Okay, so we tightened things up in April and on the presentation of the survey did and only included those companies with more than 50N. And we cut the top 10, that's the red line and we put in their Dell EMC which is RSA and IBM for context. And you can see CrowdStrike, they shot to the top with a 68% net score and increased it's shared N, and you can see the stars right. Now, let's just jump ahead to the July survey. So now we're well into the pandemic. Maybe things are calming down a little bit in the summer. People feeling a little bit more freedom, maybe not as concerned about the work-from-home peace, that's sort of settling in, and CISOs, they had a little time to respond here and that's kind of the picture in the summer. Okta jumped way up on the left, you see in spending momentum and CrowdStrike, they moderated a bit, although they remained elevated. And again, they're not direct competitors, but it's instructive to compare these two firms, 'cause they're both hot and growing. And you see the green lines, they show the direction of the momentum of the net score. CrowdStrike was a bit of a concern because its net score dropped and its presence in the dataset kind of moderated. But the company continued to report strong revenue during its earnings calls and the stock remain a darling. So some mixed signals in the data, one quarter doesn't necessarily make a trend. But Okta, Microsoft, Cisco, Palo Alto, Splunk and several others, they remained very, very strong. Now let's go into the most recent October survey. So again, we continue to fine tune our presentation analysis here. And you can see there are two red lines. The top one is the top 10 cutoff. And the second line is the top 20. As we said, Elastic hit the radar for net score but still not pervasive enough in the dataset on the right to earn some stars with the shared Ns. So Okta in our view continues to hold that top spot for momentum and made the top 10 cut for shared N, two very positive signs. It's shared N, for example, jumped from 139 to 185. So more and more mentions, people are increasingly relying on Okta for identity access management. Now for the green arrows here, the momentum lines, we've tried to take into consideration the shared N. So even though, for example CrowdStrike's net score dropped from 50 down to 43%, it's shared N, or again, the number of mentions, it jumped from 119 to 162. So that's a 36% increase and you might be thinking, well, why is that significant? Well, CIOs and IT buyers in the ETR survey, they're asked to choose the areas with which they are most familiar and then they answer questions on which vendors they use. So the fact that companies like Okta and Palo Alto and CrowdStrike and several others that we've highlighted are increasing their presence in the data set and still maintaining a very strong net score is a really good signal in our view. That's why, for example, take Zscaler, we still give them two stars, even though on a relative basis, it didn't make the top 10 cut. It's net score held relatively firm and it's shared N jumped by 39%. So we continue to like names like Zscaler, Okta, CrowdStrike, CyberArk, Proofpoint Fortinet and of course Microsoft, which consistently shines brightly. Let's look at a comment that underscores the CISOs sentiment and I think the market overall. Here's a comment from a CISO of a global travel and hospitality company. It's a name you would recognize and obviously this individual's business was hit hard by the pandemic. So there's an inherent bias toward hope anyway, toward a return to the normal. But look at the comment, I'll read it. "I was a skeptic on the permanence of the changes due to COVID, but I've seen firsthand, there are legitimate structural changes that are taking place, and that's going to fundamentally shift where companies are investing in cyber. Building leases are expiring, people, they're productive working from home. Products that enable work from home and that are cloud first, that trend will continue and be permanent." And you know what? We agree. Okay, here's a chart that we've been updating since right before the pandemic and it compares the performance of the S & P 500 and Nasdaq with specific security companies that are public. And we've been tracking the revenue multiples on a trailing 12 month revenue basis over time to get a sense of how these companies compare. And we prefer to use forward looking revenue, but find TTM to be more consistent and frankly easier to access quickly. So that's what we're using. Now note that Splunk, Octa, CrowdStrike and Zscaler, those are the guys I've highlighted in red, they have yet to report as of this publication. A couple of points here are worth noting. First, we've been talking a lot about the divergence in valuation between Palo Alto and Fortinet and we'll show some more data on that in a moment but we want to share some CISO comments about Fortinet. People sometimes refer to Fortinet as Forti knife, as in Swiss army knife. They're a Swiss army knife of cyber, Forti everything is what one CISO called it. Fortinet is more price attractive, especially for mid-sized companies who don't have the resources of larger firms that might gravitate toward Palo Alto Networks. And the companies around for awhile and has earned the trust of CISOs because of their portfolio and their track record. Now, the other notable item in this data is the rise in value for Okta, CrowdStrike and Zscaler which have seen values increase 78%, 128%, 124% respectively in the time period we show here. You can see the very highly elevated revenue multiples compared to some of the more mature companies. Splunk, they're a bit of an outlier here 'cause we're showing negative growth in that right-hand column. And that's because of its transition toward a subscription model. That really messes up the income statement. And we just wanted to cite that. Splunk's been doing a good job communicating to the street. There are some concerns in the ETR dataset, which we've talked about. They've sort of moderated lately. There's also concerns about pricing that CISOs have mentioned, but generally there's a real bifurcation in the market in terms of valuations. And we think that while there's a lot of discussion about the so-called stay-at-home stocks and a shift back away from those when the pandemic subsides, we believe that the productivity benefits of remote work are becoming more clear and these next gen security companies are going to continue to thrive. Now let's take a moment to look at the relative performance of Palo Alto and Fortinet. Back in February of this year, we noted that there was a valuation divergence occurring between these two companies. And we cited three factors at the time for this gap. First, we said the Palo Alto was trying to cloud proof its business, and as such, it was in transition. And second, it had some challenges with regard to the pace of that transition, including sales incentives, actually that's part of the first point. That was kind of one A. Secondly, we said that the shift away from appliance-based firewalls was accelerating and that was pressuring Palo Alto's valuation. They were kind of underperforming in that segment. And finally we said the Palo Alto was facing some very tough compares in 2019 relative to 2018. And that was causing investors to pause as Palo Alto began shifting to an annual recurring revenue model. Now we said at the time that CISOs really, they really liked Palo Alto and we felt it would... the company would deal with these issues in 2020. And this chart really shows that and they've begun to reverse this trend. The yellow line is Fortinet. The blue line is Palo Alto and it's showing this sort of relative performance here. And you can see that gap coming into 2020 which extended into the meat of 2020. But now it's starting to compress, thanks to a nice earnings report that beat EPS on revenue this month, as we're talking about Palo Alto. So we continue to believe that Fortinet has done a good job and a better job of moving to the cloud model. And Palo Alto has largely relied on acquisitions to accelerate this trend. And we'll see if they can continue to thrive during this transition to cloud. But there's little doubt that CISOs want to work with Palo Alto networks and they remain committed to having a strategic relationship with the company. Alright, let's wrap. The shift to the subscription model is well underway in the cybersecurity space and it's buoyed by cloud and next generation SAS-based security players. Splunk is in transition. Cisco and Palo Alto emphasize the importance of this trend and virtually all historically on-prem players are being forced to respond. Survey data and anecdotal information from theCUBE community supports what the ETR Venn CISOs are saying, that the internet is becoming the new private network and these trends toward cloud-based and remote worker support are delivering benefits that CEOs and CFOs are going to continue to push to operationalize. CISOs, they got to continue to take a multi-layered approach to defending their data, their applications and their users. And it's such a fragmented market with specialists is going to continue for quite some time. Now, despite these clear trends, CISOs face a real challenge, the timing of the return to semi normal, it's really uncertain. And we still don't have a clear picture of what that future will look like. As such incumbent firms with hardened networks, they're going to have to remain in a hybrid holding pattern to accommodate whatever happens. Why is that important? Well, this means that budgets are going to be stretched. Look, while security remains a top priority, you can't expect an open checkbook going to SecOps team. Throwing money at the problem wouldn't really solve it anyway. Rather CISOs have to take a balanced portfolio of investments, continuing with automation and data analytics and of course, good security practice practices. That's going to be the pattern. Alright, well, thanks everyone for watching this episode of theCUBE insights powered by ETR. There are many ways to get in touch. @dvellante on Twitter, david.vellante@siliconangle.com. You can comment on my LinkedIn posts. I publish weekly on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com and always appreciate the feedback from our community. These episodes, by the way, are all available as podcasts. So you can listen while you multitask and don't forget to check out etr.plus for all the survey action. This is Dave Vellante. Have a great Thanksgiving, be smart, stay safe and we'll see you next time. (light melodic music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. >> Welcome to this cube conversation. I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm joined by two guests from Ivanti, today. Please welcome its President, Jeff Abbot and its Chief Product Officer, Nayaki Nayyar. Jeff and Nayaki, it's so great to talk to you today. >> Pleasure to speak to you, Lisa. >> Pleasure to be here, Lisa, look forward to this. >> Me too. So Jeff, let's start with you, transformation, you got some big news that you're going to be sharing and breaking through theCUBE Conversation today which we're going to dig into but there's been a lot of transformation at the top at Ivanti, you're new, tell me about that and what's the shake up that's been going on there to really drive this company forward? >> Yeah. We have got a lot of transformation going on, Lisa. And it's been an exciting ride for the first six months of my tenure at Ivanti. I came in January as president along with our new CEO, who has been Chairman, Jim Schaper. And when Jim and I started talking about Ivanti last fall, the challenges were pretty clear. It's a company that's had outstanding employees, fantastic customers, and a real heritage of innovation. But they had leveled off a little bit. And the idea behind the new executive team was to bring in a team of veterans to take it to the next level, really to grow to a billion dollars and beyond, both organically and through acquisitions. So you're right, we brought in a fantastic team of veterans people that Jim and I have both worked with: Angie Gunter, new Chief Marketing Officer, Mary Trick, new Chief Customer Officer, we recently hired Nayaki Nayyar, who's with us today, our Chief Product Officer, John Flavin, the Head of our Industry Business Unit, and a host of others that have all come in with a single mission to take Ivanti to the next level. >> So Nayaki, let's dig into Ivanti's vision, lot of change, lot of momentum, I imagine with that change, but what's your vision? >> So let's take a step back, Lisa and you look at, what I call Ivanti's position of strength. And when you look at the entire portfolio Ivanti has, one of the key strengths Ivanti has is its ability to discover, secure, manage and service the endpoints. And if you look at the entire marketplace, there is no vendor in the market today, most of them UEM vendors don't have service management, service management don't have UEM, our ability, Ivanti's ability to do this end to end management of endpoints all the way from discovery to security to service management is what our key strength is. That's our competitive advantage, bringing these three pillars together under one umbrella and having a holistic story. Especially in this day and age of COVID and post COVID, where everyone is trying to manage those endpoints, secure those endpoints, and have almost a seamless experience as remote becomes the next normal going forward for every enterprise, Lisa. >> Yeah, the next normal. Well, there's data scatter, there's device scatter and it's now almost like so many people working from home overnight a few months ago that now will have almost a relationship with our devices because they're our lifeline. So for an organization to be able to understand where all those devices are, people are now working from home, but as you shared, Nayaki, with me the other day, there's some gartner data that demonstrates that 3.6% of the workforce before COVID was working from home. It might be 10X that post COVID So the amount of device scatter and data scatter and need to secure, that challenge is even going up. So how does Ivanti help? How do you solve that challenge? >> So Lisa, if you put yourself in any large enterprise and organization that is dealing with this post COVID or addressing the needs of a remote worker, the remote workers are going through, I would say, explosive growth where they used to be single digits 3% 4% before COVID, and now, during COVID, and after COVID, it's probably going to be I would say, 30, 40% of remote workers that every enterprise has to now provide that service, that seamless service experience as they're working from home, they could be on the move. So providing that seamless experience is, I would say, number one priority and a key challenge for every enterprise. So what we are going to be releasing and launching and announcing to the market given our position of strength in managing endpoints is how we help that seamless experience and what I call the ambient experience for an end user independent of where they are working from, they could be working from home, they could be on the move, or office. >> Which is critical these days. But before we dig into the announcement, Jeff, I wanted to ask you, some of the stats that I've been seeing in terms of the C suite and the amount of decisions that the C suite has had to make in the last four months has been more than over the last five or so years. Talk to us a little bit about how Ivanti got together this new C suite to make the decision to announce what you're going to talk about today so quickly. >> Now, that's a great point. And it's one that we had to, quite frankly, Lisa. The market is demanding a hyper-automation, it's demanding more agnostic deployment, it needs more flexibility in terms of the ability to be self driven and sense and service without a whole lot of intervention. So we knew that when we came in as a new leadership team, the first thing we had to do was get the go-to-market strategy in order, which we did. We balanced our direct sales strategy with our partner strategy. We made some changes in the marketing organization to a more contemporary content-focused demand generation style, and we reset the company's focus on customer outcomes. And in so doing, we changed the mentality to success as measured by are we meeting our customers intended business goals? And that led us very quickly to say, "Listen, the unified IT message we've been using for the last few years has been great, and our customers have responded well to it, and we've acquired a lot of new customers with that message, but the game has changed." And as Nayaki was leading up to, the expectation has changed. And the entire IT space is relatively mature but the expectations and the pressure on that space has grown tremendously, as you pointed out, in the last few years. Just think of the number of devices we all now have to manage as a company, and it's growing. And as Nayaki pointed out as she discusses our launch, it's growing almost exponentially. So we knew that we had to have a new product strategy, we had to take the unified IT message and start to think differently about how the IT leaders in the field and our various customers around the world, how their game has changed and lean in to what they need in terms of automation, AI, bot technology, and so on. And that's what we're announcing with this latest release. >> All right, Nayaki, take it away. What are you announcing? >> Yeah, so what we're super-excited about, Lisa, is to Jeff's point, to handle this explosive growth, growth of devices, growth of data that is being generated from those devices, and also this explosive growth of remote workers. Meaning the only way to handle this growth is through what we call automation and we are taking that next, advanced automation, that leap frog strategy of what we call hyper-automation, embedding that into our entire stack, into our UEM endpoint management stack, into our security stack and also service management to help customers, what we call, self-heal, discover all the devices continuously, optimize the performance, optimize any configuration drifts, and proactively predictively remediate any issues, any issues that you see on those devices, and get into a world of what we call self-healing autonomous edge. Where it's continuously detecting every issue and being able to predictively and cognitively self-heal that edge. And this is what we are launching, is what we branded as Ivanti Neurons, is the brand that we are launching for these automation, this hyper-automation bots, that every company can deploy these hyper-automation bots into their network that will constantly discover every device you have across your entire network, discover any performance issues, configuration drift issues, security issues, vulnerabilities, anomalies, and really get into what we call self-healing, self-securing and providing a service experience that we are used to in our day to day life or in our consumer world. So that's what we are announcing, super-excited about the overall launch. The fact that every enterprise, every company, and it's not tied to any single vertical, Lisa, any vertical organization can leverage these neurons and get that closer to self-healing of those devices that they have to now manage every organization that has to now manage. >> I know Ivanti has a lot of strengths and several verticals, one of them being healthcare. And I can imagine right now, the last five months, the hyper status that every hospital and clinic is in, I'm curious, though, about the name. Jeff, talk to me about in this new, the next normal that we're living in, Neurons, what does that mean and what does it mean to your customers? >> Yeah, great question. And I know this will resonate with you, Lisa, as an accomplished biologist. With the idea is with what we're providing and what we're launching with Neurons, there's a sense of hyper-scale, hyper-automation, like the synapses in your brain, handles so much information at once. So we wanted to personalize the launch of these solutions. When you see the announcement next week, you'll see a series of products across the spectrum Ivanti solutions; the ITSM, endpoint management, security and so on. And we address in each of those areas, the self-sensing, self-healing, self-servicing, each of those business processes. But like your synapses or your neurons in your brain, there'll be a lot of super-fast automation, super-fast sensing of challenges and addressing those challenges. And that's why we went with Neurons. It was actually a pretty fun contest in the company and we really believe Neurons will connect with our target market. >> I love it. And the biologist part of me is gone, "That makes sense." So Nayaki, over to you. And in terms of that connectivity perspective, there's so many disparate data sources out there, it's only growing. And Jeff, you mentioned this, how can one of your existing 25,000 customers, use, deploy, this on top of their existing infrastructure to start connecting data sources that they may not even know they can connect or that they may not know does it make even sense to connect them? >> Yeah, so the beauty of the entire Neuron network is it uses MQTT protocol, Lisa, which is the protocol that immediately detects every device, be it endpoint desktops, laptops, mobile devices, or even, I was suggesting IoT devices, that it automatically detects. And senses if there is anything happening on those devices, predicts if there is any issue that may happen, like I said, performance issues, configuration drift issues, security issues and pulls that data in real time. The beauty of this is the speed at which it pulls its data, I've seen customers who can deploy this across their entire network around the world and within seconds, it's able to pull the data into a centri console, and give ourselves a full 360 view of every device you have, every user that's using those devices all the applications that are running on those devices and the services that are being delivered to those devices. So just the power of being able to pull that much data in seconds and provide that 360 view of what we call, a Neuron Workspace, for any IT organization to have that full 360 view, and detect and predict that there's any issue and almost like get into a self-healing remediated before it interrupts your productivity or interrupts your... Any service disruption. I think you were trying to say something, go ahead. >> I was just going to add to that, Nayaki. And you asked this or made this point, Lisa, Nayaki and I are speaking to the healthcare industry almost every day. We are very in tune with the challenges they're experiencing, obviously, with what's happening right now around the world. And as Nayaki is describing, the Neurons we intend to be a very seamless improvement to their existing IT processes and so on. In fact, when I described this to some of the hospitals I've been speaking to, and certainly the IT staff and leaders within, they are fascinated and very excited about what we're describing. Because if you think about it, IT challenges down at the device level in the healthcare industry can be life critical. And they need to solve those IT challenges very fast. They need to know when their new endpoints are online, they need to know when they need servicing, and then they know when their software needs patching. We're not talking about just being at home and being frustrated if you're having an IT challenge, we're talking about life and death. So Neurons is absolutely what the healthcare industry is asking for in terms of self-healing, self-sensing, self-securing and so on, they need those attributes in their business model, now definitely more than ever. >> Absolutely, they do. So Nayaki, talking to customers in healthcare, whatnot, I can see this being a great tool for the IT analyst but also maybe even helping the IT analysts and business users have better relationships that overall help drive a business forward. >> Yeah, so you put yourself in an end user or line of business, they expect, and especially in this day and age of post COVID, Lisa, they expect a consumer grade experience to be delivered to them. They expect their service provider to know exactly where they're working from, what devices they have, how all those devices are not just secure, but understands the preferences I need as an individual and provides that service experience to me. So I mean that, I would say, a close tie in between what the business wants, the end users in those lines of business want and how IT or any service organization can provide that service to employees, customers, and consumers is what really Neurons, I would really... Helps us get closer and closer to consumer grade experience that we all are used to in our day to day life. And to Jeff's point, in addition to healthcare, which is a strong industry vertical for us, some other industries, retail is another big industry that we are very strong in, Lisa, and also supply chain rugged devices in a warehouse. So it really gives us a huge expansion opportunity beyond just managing the IT devices or endpoints to also managing the IoT devices by industry vertical, in those segments, where we already have a very, very strong foothold, because of the technology that we have that powers this whole thing in the backend. >> And we're seeing some of the numbers of 40+ Billion, connected devices in the next few years. So Jeff, let's end this with you. I know there's more coming, but you probably have a great partnership suite that you're working with to enable this, talk to us a little bit about the partners, and then what's next? >> Yeah, no, great point, Lisa. I come from a heritage of companies that have leveraged our partners. And we continue to grow our partner network. We believe strongly in the strength of the extended ecosystem, solution partners, delivery partners, global systems integrators, they all have a role in Neurons. And we're excited to continue to provide the platform for mutual growth between us and those partners. And what's really important is, these are companies that our customers really love as well. So we're going to continue to, in some cases, tie our solutions together, in some cases, extend our services organization through partners, and in some cases, we'll actually service our customers through our channel partner network. We actually went through a little bit of a rationalization to really zero in on our most strategic partners, we've done that, we've finished that in the first six months of coming on board. And now we are hitting the gas pedal and going full speed to market with a great group of partners and again, you'll see that ecosystem more and more as part of our strategy. >> Excellent. So Neurons announced, what's next? >> Well, there's quite a bit behind Neurons. So it will take us probably into at least 2021 getting all the solutions launched, and getting them ingrained with our customers out there. Well, we fully intend to continue to innovate. And if there's one thing I leave you with, Lisa, it's that that's our big announcement more than anything. I mean, Ivanti's had a history of innovation, it's a company that practically invented patching, and keeping all of the devices up to speed on the latest virus protection software and so on, there's a lot of legacy companies within our footprint that are now completely tied together and under the Neuron strategy under Nayaki's leadership we intended to put innovation out in the marketplace, quarter after quarter after quarter, but Neurons for now will keep us quite busy. So we're very excited. >> Well, congratulations on that. Ivanti, innovation, hyper-automation. Jeff, Nayaki, it's been such a pleasure talking to you. Thank you for joining me on theCUBE today. Thank you, Lisa. >> Thank you for having us. >> For my guests, I am Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE Conversation. (upbeat music)

>>Fly from Barcelona, Spain. It's the cube covering Cisco live 2020s brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >>Hi everyone. Welcome back to the QS live coverage here in Barcelona, Spain for Cisco live 2020 I'm John. My coasts do many minutes. We are in the dev net. Similar all the action is the accused third year covering where dev net has been evolving into the centerpiece of Cisco strategy. And all the sessions are here. We've got a great guest. Make D as product marketing for Cisco with umbrella is a takeover going on here. The Devin, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. So tell us about umbrella, cause that's a new brand open DNS kind of confer. What's the story with umbrella? Give us the update. >>Sure. So umbrella was first really developed an introduced in the market in 2012 under the open DNS company. We were acquired by Cisco in 2015 and rebranded it to Cisco umbrella. So we've taken the same great product that we've had for years and just continued to develop and add to it. >>And what's the main features now as that same product? Has it been integrated in, cause everything's becoming API base here. We're seeing that. What's the tweak? Is it security? What's the main linkage with the Cisco? >>Yeah, so um, umbrella really started off, uh, providing DNS layer security. So it was often an added layer or foundational layer that customers would use to reduce the amount of malware, make sure that their users were protected anywhere that they were connecting to the internet. And so we've taken that. It's, it's always been developed as an open platform and we've continued to add additional API APIs to it and a lot of additional security features too. So beyond just DNS, we now have a full secure web gateway cloud delivered firewall, uh, Cosby capabilities. So there's been a lot of new capabilities that we've built into the product. >>Can you bring us inside a little bit? We've been in the dev net zone for three years, as John said, got to dev net, create that API economy is something that is so important and that's what so many people, I mean we've seen just huge crowds all week. Help us understand how those APIs fit into Cisco and Cisco umbrella. >>Sure. So when you look at, there's a number of API APIs that we've built into umbrella. So to give you some examples, we have a, uh, a device network device API to make it easy to actually integrate different network devices that you have to umbrella. So how do you get that traffic very easily from any device to our cloud platform? So that's one example. Uh, we've rebuilt a lot of integrations but that allows you to, to help build any additional integrations that you want. Um, we have a reporting API that helps you to, you know, automate some of the, the reporting, send it and integrate it with systems that you have. Um, and then another example, even with, uh, all of the intelligence behind umbrella, we make it available through our investigate API. So we see a lot of organizations use that to enrich their Sam or threat intelligence platform. >>So being able to take all of the data that you have within umbrella and make sure that it can be integrated in the right ways. >> Any new features you guys announcing an umbrella that we should know about here this week? >> Yes. One of the big ones that we've I've been talking about at our booth and in some of the sessions is with any connect, so any connect has always been really big for a lot of Cisco customers to protect roaming users and we've had the ability to, I enable a DNS module as part of that, so that enables them to, even when users are off the VPN, their VPN isn't even turned on. They're still getting protection from umbrella and we've taken that and we've also enabled them to leverage our security gateway functionality when users are roaming as well. So that's for the use cases. >>They're on a VPN, they're doing their thing, they go to a coffee shop or go somewhere else or they're, they're moving around. Exactly. And they might not be actually connected to the VPN, so their traffic isn't actually being protected, so they might be connecting directly to the internet. That's where when they have umbrella enabled there, they can still get the right protection for those users. May talk about the dynamics going on with, with injecting hacks in DNS, because this has always been kind of a, you're always been people but always been chasing this because you are rails, they run the internet, we know some URLs could look like PayPal or this or the other bank. And so it becomes kind of a, your URL, DNS management challenge. This is something that's been fundamental for security. What's, what are some of the things that are going on that people should pay attention to? >>Sure. So I think that there's, there's a few different aspects of that that we're really delivering on today. So first of all, when it comes to just, uh, people, uh, trying to get you to click on a link that looks like PayPal, but it's actually not. Um, so there's a number of different methods that we're using in the product to detect that. So one of the things is, is we'll look at, uh, the way that the domain is actually written. A lot of times you can see some, uh, we, we look at, you know, the, the structure of the wording. And sometimes you can see little, uh, little characters or letters or numbers that are off and we can detect that that's happening. But then we also look at the infrastructure beyond behind the domain. So we look at where is that IP, uh, where is that domain actually hosted? Right? So what's the IP address? What other activity do we see happening on that IP address? Cause you can really learn a lot, right? We saw a, a, a, a PayPal, uh, domain that was supposedly a UK PayPal domain, but it was actually hosted on a Bulletproof hosting site, which no legitimate PayPal account would be or domain would be hosted on. So things like that that we're able to detect. >>Yeah. So make us this way. I saw something talked about online puny code. Is this, what we're talking about here is that there's a different topic, >>a little bit different cause that, but yeah, there, there's also, yeah, they could be embedded within puny code, things like that. But this is just some of our fundamental, what we look at when we're determining if a domain is malicious or not. >>Okay. Could you walk us through a little bit, the demos going on? We've got the takeover going on right now. What, what's the umbrella presence here in the dev net zone and throughout Cisco live? >>Yeah, so there's, there's a lot of different areas that we are. So we have a latch of Verna. Uh, the cafe. Uh, we have all of our demo stations. We have theater presentations pretty much running every 15 minutes. So you can learn more on a number of different topics. Uh, we have the dev net takeover, we have a number of breakout sessions that are happening. Um, so there's a lot of activity happening around Cisco live. >>Well the, Cisco's got a huge technical crowd here. Obviously they're their network geeks. They all know DNS. What are some of the conversations you guys are having? What are some of the cool things that are cause that's not know about programming and they getting into different formats? How is the DNS fitting into that? I've saw some cool demos. What are some of the cool tech conversations? >>Yeah, I think, I think a lot of times it's still, um, we're seeing more of a, a an uptake in people understanding that DNS can be used to actually deliver security as well. So I think, you know, those are some of the, the conversations still educating people about how they can add additional layers of security to their environment and DNS being really one of them. Um, I think what we're also seeing is just because with umbrella we're going beyond just DNS and really taking multiple security services, bringing them into a single cloud platform. And that's a lot of the conversation that we're having and that's where you're seeing the market going. So organizations starting to look at how does that fit into their environment, how can they start to architect their network differently for the future and, and how to wrap security in there. So a lot of the conversations we're having are around that. >>It's interesting the whole dynamic internet conversation kids interesting. Because DNS is, you got to resolve, you got named servers, get your resolution to the, to the destination URL and you load the page or app. As you start getting into more of the dynamic situations, the software is programming it. So it's interesting to see how DNS is evolves. You guys are leading the forefront on that. What's your view on that? What do you, how do you guys see that evolving as you got ACI intent based networking app dynamics over the top kind of programming down as DNS fit into all that? How does that, how does that all work? >>Definitely I think, I think DNS continues to be a, you know, a foundational part of how the internet works. And I, I don't see that really changing. I think, you know, some of the things that we've been, or even the different ways that you see attackers leveraging DNS, uh, you're seeing DNS tunneling for example, being one of the kind of, uh, I wouldn't say newer, but it's one of the types of techniques that nation States are using at times when they're actually embedding, you know, data to, into DNS to exfiltrate it. So, you know, things like that we're seeing, uh, come into place of trying to use DNS in, in different ways from the attack side. Yeah. But I think, you know, when you look at the overall, you know, network and, and all of that, it is a really important and kind of core part of this, >>it's interesting is that the international thing too is you submitted your hosting. A lot of these hosting sites are outside of North America, outside of Europe. They're in these countries where it's suspect, you know, and some of the foreign characters sets get interesting cause that's not ASCII, it's Unicode or you've got all kinds of things going on. So it's a complex not that easy is it? >>No, we have a lot of very, very smart people, doctors working on the, uh, the backend on the, on the engineering side to really look at that. And you know, one of the things that we tried to do, even from the beginning was take a different approach to security where we're not just looking strictly at the file hash or just the basic information, but seeing how can you take data science principles and apply them to use security in new ways to uncover attacks even before they launch. >>I gotta say one of the sessions I was walking around the hall, the couple of the main kind of clusters of people was obviously the big panoramic WebEx room was pretty popular. It looks pretty cool, but the IOT security section was packed. As you hit more devices out there, they're just internet addresses too. And there you've got destination, you got URLs over DNS there too. So you have now that edge piece that's a big security perimeter. I mean, and security surface area, I should say. That's popular. People are interested in this. >>Yes. And that's, I mean, and that's one of the big use cases that we've even seen with umbrella is you have hospitals who have all of these IOT devices and you know that are in their patients and, and it's really scary to think about where they could be connecting on the internet. And that's one of the things that we've seen with umbrella is because we're providing some of that security at the DNS layer, you don't need to have an agent or something on those devices when they're on the network. It's protected by umbrella. So that is one of the use cases that we see. >>I got to ask you, because you came from the acquisition open DNS, I know David, the founder of donut when he started. Great company, great success, congratulations to the whole team there. As you guys come into Cisco, what's it like, because startups are, you know, you're hungry, you grow in and then you get in here, it's almost an a waste of tech. He got new divisions. What's it been like at Cisco with the open DNS now? Umbrella brand, same product with some tweaks. What's it like? >>No, I mean it's been amazing. >>I mean I'm still here, uh, you know, almost five years later. Um, and I think one of the things that's been really exciting is, is the fact that we have been able to leverage a lot of the Cisco technology, right? We've embedded, you know, amp technology, threat grid technology, things that, that ultimately, because we're, you know, sharing those resources and, and embedding them, it's going to make the products more secure. It's going to allow us to share more information between products. And I think just the, you know, the investment, I think Cisco sees where the future is going and you know, how important the cloud is, you know, not only from just a, the way that businesses work, but from the security perspective. So there's been a lot of investment in it. Awesome. Well thanks for coming on sharing your insight. I got to ask you kind of an industry question because you've been on, again the startup now Cisco, most normal people like DNS, I know what a URL is, but they know security. So when they asked you a lot, they hae all this fake news, all this malware, spear fishing. I mean the average consumer, they get the security thing. When they asked you what's going on, what, what do you say to them? How do you explain what you do and your vision of how you see the world evolving? >>Sure. I think, I think for a lot of people, I mean I've, I've been in security now for for a while when I started it was really, it was still all the compliance conversation and you were still educating a lot of people on security. But now my grandma knows about it and you know, she'll ask me questions. So I think, you know, it has become so much more mainstream and you know when I, in in simplest terms, I just talked to people about the fact that we are making sure that wherever users are connecting to the internet, they're doing it securely. You know, no matter what application they're trying to access, we can help secure that. And so that's kind of the, >>and be careful what you click on. It would be, you know, the emails you get. Well you don't know what's in there exactly. Well thanks for come on. Great. Great to have you on. Thanks for the insight. Cisco umbrella. It's taking over dev net dev net zone is packed. It just gets bigger every year and this is where people are learning is very community driven. A lot of, a lot of education, a lot of great content. You're starting out or you're more experienced software certifications all here inside the cube coverage of Barcelona. We'll be right back after this short break.

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's "theCUBE." Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. (upbeat music) >> Hello everyone and welcome to this week's episode of "theCUBE Insights," powered by ETR. In this "Breaking Analysis," I want to look into Cisco. You know theCUBE is in Barcelona this week to cover Cisco Live. There's an expected attendance of about 17,000 people. Now today, Cisco is a company in transition. It remains a leader in key segments, but it's refocusing its business for the next decade, having exited a number of areas over the last several years. Allow me to briefly give you my perspective and review how we got here. Near the end of the dot-com bubble, Cisco was the most valuable company in the world, with a $500 billion market cap. It was one of the four horsemen of the internet, remember that? Along with Oracle, Sun, and EMC. Cisco really rose to prominence by betting big on ethernet. Old reliable TCP/IP was the linchpin of the internet, and allowed Cisco to power the wave that virtually decimated the mini-computer industry in the 1990s. There were many levers that Cisco pulled, brilliantly, during its ascendancy, and I want to call out two big ones. First was it created an army of network engineers. Literally hundreds of thousands of professionals trained on installing, configuring, managing, and optimizing Cisco gear. Cisco created very complex solutions and thrived on this complexity, and the Cisco Certified Inter-network Experts, or CCIEs, deeply understood the dark art of networking, and Cisco was their beacon. The second was acquisitions. Under the leadership of CEO John Chambers, Cisco completed about 180 acquisitions over a roughly 20-year period. This enabled TAM expansion, growth, and maintained Cisco's relevance to customers, who very typically and often were the generator of acquisition ideas. Cisco diversified quickly into a conglomerate with a portfolio that spanned video, set-top boxes, telepresence, compute, collaboration, security, wireless. At one point, Chambers talked about dozens of adjacent businesses, each of which would account for a billion dollars of incremental revenue for Cisco. Many, if not most, didn't pan out, and Chambers slashed and burned prior to handing the reins over to current CEO, Chuck Robbins. Now, under Robbins, Cisco was a more focused company, kind of going back to the basics. They're betting on what I would say are more sure bets, including data center, wireless, collaboration, security, and the Edge. Cisco is also evolving its model towards software subscriptions. Now today, I want to look at how some of those bets are performing. I'll discuss the impact of cloud on Cisco's business, and then I want to drill in to the performance in some areas like networking, collaboration, security, and then close on hyper-converged. And then the last thing I'm going to do is share some things that I'm watching as barometers of success, over the next 18 to 24 months. Now the first thing I want to do is give you a snapshot of Cisco's financials today. What this chart shows is some KPIs on a trailing 12-month basis. Cisco is about a $50 billion company with a $200 billion market value. That's a 4X revenue multiple, which is pretty good for a company that's generally viewed as a traditional hardware player. Now Cisco is guiding analysts on a flat to down year, and talking about a challenging macro environment, despite the stock market's seemingly insurmountable rise. Cisco is a very profitable company, with a 33% operating margin, and very nice, 66%, roughly, gross margin. Cisco throws off a lot of cash, around $15 billion annually in free cashflow. They make a big deal that 70% of its software revenue is now coming from subscriptions. And Cisco is mandating a new consumption model that is subscription-based. Now it's somewhat hard to tell exactly how large Cisco's software revenue is, as they're opaque in that detail, but I'm pegging it at between 11 and 12 billion by the end of this year. Today it's probably seven to eight billion. Cisco is riding some big waves, adding software to its portfolio, security grew at 22% last quarter, Wi-Fi 6, 5G, which by 2021 should start kicking in, it uses a chunk of its cash of course to buy back stock to keep the street happy, and it's leveraging a leadership position to compete. Now finally, I want to make some comments, later actually, on how they're approaching developers in a strategy that I really like. Now there are some headwinds that Cisco's facing, namely cloud, this macro picture that they talk about, which is not positive for them evidently, the company's overall complex portfolio, the competitive dynamics, and the perception that they have an aging, or that they are an aging hardware company, and they're really still touting, selling ports. So, let's drill into some of the spending data, and I want to start with this notion of leadership. This chart shows Cisco's position in its core networking segment. The chart depicts market share over time, which remember is a measure of pervasiveness into each ETR dataset. Now look at what happens. Look how Cisco maintains its leadership, far outpacing the others in this networking sector each quarter. I'm going to make some comments on the sector overall, but notice the net score in the blue bars, which is a measure of spending velocity. It holds firm at 25%. Not great, but holding steady. And you can see the pie chart of the public cloud's impact on the sector, and I'm going to make some comments there later as we go on. But first let's look at the networking sector overall. ETR just released its January survey, and here's what they said in their sentiment on networking. So, when you see the networking space, it's been sort of down for a while, and ETR has been somewhat negative on the entire space, but what this shows is really net score, which is spending velocity, and the January 2020 results, with previous periods within Fortune 500 buyers. And you can see there's an uptick in momentum for networking generally, and Cisco is really cited as rebounding. But now look at the blue call-out. It's from an ETR VENN discussion, with an IT buyer, who essentially says, "Look, as we move to the cloud, "we are going to spend less on networking gear." And given that Cisco is the leader, we want to understand how the public cloud is affecting Cisco's networking business. So to answer that, what I'm showing here is data from the latest ETR January spending survey. And I'm filtering the data on organizations that are spending on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud platform, and showing Cisco's performance measured in market share, or pervasiveness. You see, that's what's happening now in these big cloud accounts. There's an N of 809 cloud customers, and 480 Cisco customers within those accounts. And you can see the impact that the cloud is having on Cisco, much the same way it is affecting virtually every large supplier of on prime infrastructure. A slow, steady decline over the past 10 years. And you can see a net score, which measures spending intensity, in the upper right-hand corner, of almost 30%, which is somewhat lower than Cisco's average in the ETR dataset. But the story's not just about cloud. There are other waves in the industry, of what I've referred to in the past as innovation cocktail ingredients, namely data, plus AI, plus cloud. So the next question I want to pose is, how is Cisco doing in leveraging these waves? So here we have 916 customers in these superpower segments of data, AI, and cloud, that are combined, and we show the market share, or pervasiveness, over time, of Cisco, as compared to VMware's NSX, HPE, and Dell EMC. What the data shows is a couple of points. One is that Cisco is the most pervasive competitor shown in these customer segments. Its net score is 37%, four points higher, meaningfully, than the cloud-only chart. Actually seven points higher than I showed earlier. Only NSX has a higher net score, and relatively speaking, NSX is much newer, and should be growing much faster than Cisco, so that makes sense. So I would say that Cisco is holding its own here. Its challenge really, in my view, is to use data and AI to create better customer experiences. So, be a consumer of AI, if you will, as a means of better serving customers, and compete in the multi-cloud market directly with these players and others, none of whom own a public cloud. Okay, so I spoke earlier about Cisco's portfolio, so let's look at some of the ETR data, and see how various parts of Cisco's business are doing. This chart shows the net score, or remember, spending velocity, across Cisco's offerings, and includes Meraki, which is wireless, AppDynamics, AppD, is application performance management, we're showing here Cisco overall, Cisco Umbrella, which is cloud and DNS security, and Springpath, which comprises infrastructure for Cisco's hyper-converged offering. And as you can see, the segments in which Cisco plays, there are 10 in the ETR taxonomy, spanning analytics, security, mobile, device management, infrastructure, video conferencing, et cetera, et cetera. In the interest of time, I will say just the following. Red is bad, green is good, and gray is neutral. And again, Cisco is holding its own in these major segments, with decent spending velocity. So now, let's take a look in an area that I think is going to get a lot of attention in Cisco Live, and that's collaboration. This ETR chart that I ran shows net score, or spending velocity, for video conferencing platforms. And you can see, Cisco, they got some work to do. It's sort of teetering on the red zone. So I would expect some continued enhancements there. Now comparatively, you can see GotoMeeting losing steam, and Skype really falling off a cliff in January, but look at Microsoft Teams, that blue dot, with very very strong momentum. So what Microsoft's doing is they're migrating Skype and Lync, their install base, to Teams, and they're really really well-positioned there. And you can see as well, newcomer Zoom is right there in the mix, across this sample of 500 buyers. Now, I want to turn your attention to a really important sector, which of course is security. This chart that I'm showing here shows net score, again, spending velocity, in the cyber security sector. And Cisco is both large and credible in this space. Its security business grew 22% last quarter, as I said, and it's at a $3.2 billion run rate. So, spending momentum, maybe not as strong as Palo Alto Networks, which I'm showing here, and it's not as high as the rocket ship companies, like CrowdStrike, or Okta, or CyberArk, or SailPoint, or some of the others that I've highlighted in previous "Breaking Analysis" episodes, but Cisco's pretty solid. And you can see the likes of IBM and Symantec, by comparison, these guys are leaders in security, but their spending momentum is in the red. So once again, the steam of Cisco as a large player who has credibility, this story is playing out. And clearly this is going to be an area of focus at Cisco Live. So this next data point is kind of interesting, and looks at Cisco's data center business, and specifically, I'm trying to better understand what's going on in hyper-converged, the software-defined platforms that bring together storage, compute, and networking. Now the power of the ETR platform is that I can ask the question, how are the hyper-converged players doing inside of Cisco accounts? So what I've done is I've filtered on 458 Cisco accounts across three sectors, storage, compute, and networking, and I've isolated on Nutanix, VMware, or VMware's vSAN, Cisco itself, and Dell EMC with VxRail. And what we're doing is we're showing net score, or spending intensity, spending velocity. And the first thing to point out is that all of the vendors are in the green, and that's because this is a growing market that still has legs. Nutanix has noticeable spending momentum, ahead of vSAN, ahead of Cisco, and Dell EMC. Now here's the thing about Cisco. On the one hand, it's putting forth its own HyperFlex platform, based on the Springpath acquisition. But it has to tread carefully because it partners with converge players, like NetApp with FlexPod and IBM with VersaStack. And its HyperFlex, as an HCI play, is essentially designed to replace converge platforms like these. Now the same is true for VBlock, the business with Dell EMC, the old VCE business, but Cisco and Dell are at each other's throats, so, neither really cares that it's replacing them. Okay, long segment, a lot to cover, I got to wrap, but I want to end by saying what to look for over the next sort of 18 to 24 months as barometers. First thing is the pace of transition to software. The second thing that I'm watching is the uptake of the new core announcement that Cisco just made for big routers, silicon, and optics. This is Cisco's wheelhouse, and I expect that the 5G rollout in 2021 is really going to start to pick up and be a tailwind for Cisco. You know the macro should be a concern. Cisco is saying its business is soft, kind of across the board, there's China, there's Brexit, but the S and P is on fire. Now does that mean upside for Cisco? In other words, are they sandbagging a little bit? Or, are there more fundamental, structural, or execution issues? I think personally, Cisco may have a little bit of upside here, but they're big and exposed, so that's something to watch. The other thing is the impact of cloud on Cisco's business, and the company's ability to compete in multi-cloud, including how it embraces Kubernetes. Cisco, and I've said this before, has to position itself as the best, the most cost-effective, the most secure, and highest performance network to connect hybrid and multi-clouds. Now as well, the company's got to hold serve in networking, which I fully expect it to do. We're seeing a little uptick in Juniper, Arista's doing okay, but they're sort of smaller in the grand scheme of things relative to Cisco. Now the wild card here is VMware's NSX. So we'll be watching that and what impact it has. A lot of customers have both. Finally, I want to talk about developers. Cisco DevNet, as I've said many times, I really like what Cisco is doing there. I think they've outshone some of the traditional players. They are retraining hundred of thousands of CCIEs to code in Python, and really, code Cisco infrastructure. So Cisco has an infrastructure-as-code strategy that's going to help propel them in multi-cloud, the Edge, new Workloads, and they're leveraging this engineering force that they have. So, very long segment here. Watch the coverage at Cisco Live on theCUBE and on SiliconANGLE. It's a big chewy company, and a lot for me to swallow in one of these segments. So tweet me @DVellante if I've missed something, or comment on my LinkedIn feed, or you can email me at David.Vellante@SiliconANGLE.com. Thanks for watching, everybody. We'll see you next time on "Breaking Analysis, "theCUBE Insights," powered by ETR. (upbeat music)

>> Live from San Diego, California It's the queue covering Sisqo live US 2019 Tio by Cisco and its ecosystem. Barker's >> Welcome Back Here in the San Diego Convention Center. I'm student in my co host, David Dante, and you're watching the Cube, the leader in worldwide Tech coverage, and its Sisqo Live 2019 happening. Welcome back to the program. One of our Cuba, Lem's Russ Curie, who is the vice president Enterprise strategy at Net Scout. It's great to see you. Thanks for joining you guys. Thanks for having me. Alright, we always say, we got a bunch of Massachusetts guys that had to fly all the way across the country to talk to each other really well. So a couple hours for the beast hip, all everybody excited. But a lot of excitement here in the definite zone specifically and Sisqo live overall, 28,000 intended you've been to a lot of customer meetings, gives a little insight. What's been your take away from the show so >> far? I think that there's a lot of energy towards the multi cloud called Deployments in general Security. The whole introduction of Umbrella has got a lot of conversation started. It's amazing the amount of cos you see out there talking about just visibility in general, and that's being one of them as well. So it's been a lot of fun. >> Good show this year, Russ. I've been looking for this conversation. We heard from Chuck Robbins in the keynote. He said The network sees a lot of things, and Cisco says they're going to give customers that visibility. Of course, that ties in a lot, too. What Net scouted love, you know, give us. You know, your thoughts on Multi Cloud. How Cisco doing in the space? And how does Net Scout fit into that whole picture? >> Well, I think that one of things as Chuck talks about that, it's the cloud is the one thing, or the network is the one thing that's common for all. Coming along the devices right? I have. If I go into a different cloud, I have one set a performance metrics I might be able to gather about. You look at what device or an operating system. It's all different. But all the communications on the network T C P I. P is common. That really provides that thread that you're able to provide that level of visibility. So it really becomes one of those things that the network is a unique place to gain perspective on both the performance in the security that we're delivering to our customers. So can >> you just summarize the problem that Net Scout solves for our audience? Sure, I think that primarily it's one of these situations where I've been my own prime environment. It was pretty easy. I had access to everything. I could see what was going on. Quite readily. I started introduced visual ization and now traffic start to move much more East West and became a problem for folks. I think can Cisco recently said 85% of the traffic there seeing on the network is East West traffic, right? And then we moved to the cloud, and it's even more obvious gay that I can't see anything in new ways of network traffic. There typically live in clover and desert starting to address that, but really being able to gain that level of visibility so you can understand exactly what's happening just gaining that perspective. So let's explain it. >> I'm going to stay with the East West north seven metaphor. Why is it easier to get visibility in a column? >> Then? It is a row, I think, because in a column is everything exploding north and self. So you've got everything right there, and usually you have a place where you can look into it. But when you're flat, it starts to become really different you're looking at. But advice is talking to know the devices that don't necessarily have to traverse any part of the network it. Khun, stay within. Ah, hi provides, for example, so providing solutions lawyer game visibility into that environment is really important and the protocols that we use their change a bit so traditional tools don't necessarily fit well. So what's the general solution to >> solving that problem? And then I want to understand the Net Scouts secret sauce. But let's stop. Let's start of high level. How does the industry solved that problem? So the industry >> has been trying to solve that problem mostly by looking at the goodwill of third parties, looking at things like net blower, log events and aggregating that normalizing it. You've had solution sets that looked at network traffic, but it becomes very difficult for a lot of folks to make use of that network traffic, and what we've done is really provide the ability to look into that network. Traffic and gain gather from really anywhere it's deployed whether it's public loud, private cloud, our solution said, That's our secret sauce. Our solution. Second go anyway. >> So so add some color to that in terms of your able to inspect deeper through what just magic software you got. You got a pro you send in so >> well. Actually, we have a device. It's called a SNG, and in the virtual world we use something that we call be stream. In the physical world, we have some that we call in Finnish Stream N. G. And that leverage is a technology that we've developed, called Sai, which is adaptive service intelligence and well, also do is watch all that traffic and build meta data in real time so we can surface key indicators of performance and security events. Get that information up into a collection mechanism that doesn't have to normalize that data. It just looks at it as is way. Build it into a service Contact services context laws uses to see across a multi cloud environment in a single pane of glass. Okay, so one of >> the biggest challenges for customers is that they're changing these environment. It's what happens. Their applications, you know, applications used to be rather self contained. Even the bm They might have moved some, but now we're talking about, you know, micro services, architecture, multi cloud environment. There's there's a lot going on there, you know? What's the impact on that for your world, >> Right? That's been exactly it. Weigh three tier application was kind of pretty straight forward, even though at the point we started introducing, we thought that was a really tough stuff. Now what we're doing, as you say, it's doing micro services architectures, and I might take my presentation layer and put out in the cloud and the public cloud in particular. So I'm closer to the UN user and delivering better high performance capabilities to them lower lately, Auntie and the like and I take my application server and I split that up all over the place, and I might put some in public. Claude. I might put some in private club. I maintain some of it in the legacy. So all that interconnection, all that independency is really, really hard to get your hands around and that complexity. We looked at the street study that said 94% of the 600 respondents said that the the networks are as complex or more complex than they have been two years ago. >> Yeah, that's not surprising, unfortunately to hear that, but you know, when we talk to customers out there, it used to be, you know, the network is something You set it up. You turned all your knobs and then don't breathe on this thing because I've got a just where I want today. It can't be like that. You know, I I we know that it's very dynamic has changed. The message from Cisco has been We need to simplify things and, you know, obviously everybody wants that. But how do you make sure you ensure that application, performance and security, without having the poor admit, have to constantly, you know, be getting tickets in dealing with things >> I think are Solution really provides a common framework for visibility, and that's really what I think is really important. When you're starting to infer based upon different data sets, it becomes very difficult to put your finger on the problem and identified. That's really a problem. And it's trying to blend the organization. Let's sit this concept of the versatile list and trying to make sure that people are more capable in addressing problems in kind of a multi dimensional role that they have now in particular network and security. The organizations, they're trying to come together, God, they rely on different data sense, and that's where it kind of falls apart. If you have a common day to say, you're going to have a better perspective, Okay, >> I was just a front from that application standpoint. How much of this is just giving notification to invisibility? Intuit vs, you know? Is it giving recommendations or even taking actions along those lines? >> Yeah, I think it has. It has to give you recommendations and has to give you pinpoints. You really? You've got to be able to say there here's a problem. This is what you need to do to fix it right? I think what often when I'm talking to folks, I say it's about getting the right information to the right person at the right time to do the right thing If you're able to do that, you're going to be much more effective. Yes. OK, so you've got this early warning system, essentially, hopefully not a tulip. But that's what practitioners want. Tell me something. Tell me. Give me a a gap and tell me the action to take before something goes wrong. Ideally. And so you could do that. You could give them visibility on it, Kind of pinpoint it. And do you see the day, Russ, where you can use machine intelligence toe as Stuart suggesting start to maybe suggest remedial action or even take remedial action? Oh, absolutely. I mean, there are some things that you can really do and do quite well. Walking for security events, for example, is the primary one. We've always had the ideas in place in the early days, a lot of folks who are cautious because they wanted to have a negative impact on the business. But when we take a look at ex filtration and blocking outbound connections, if you know the bad actors and you know the bad addresses, you can stop that before it gets out of your network. So people aren't gonna have that X illustration of your information. >> All right. So, Russ, you've been meeting with a bunch of customers here at the show, What's top of mind for them And if some of the conversation I've been having this week, you know, security, you know, has been climbing that that list for many years now. But in your world, what are some of the top issues? >> Yeah, security, definitely. There's no question. I think it's one of those environments where you can almost never have enough. There is always hungry more and more and better and more accurate solutions. I I think I saw something recently. There was a top 125 security solutions that's like top 120 times really way. Doyle The Town 25 Exactly. And I think I D. C's taxonomy has 73 sub categories to the security. So security is, you know, more than a $500 word. You know, it might be a $5,000 word. It's crazy and same with club, right, because it's not like, you know, in fact, I was talking to someone recently, and it's with the club village Go. It's not a club village. A more This is everything we're doing is the cloud. So it's change in mindset. So it's It's interesting as a cloud universe. So what's next for Net Scout, you know, give us a little road map? What Khun observers expect coming from you guys more significant, pushing the security in particular. One of things we see is that our data set really has the ability to be leverage for both security and performance work. Load sport floats were integrating the products that we bought with the Harbour acquisition we bought over networks. And they have a highly curated threat intelligence feed that we're going to bring in and add to our infinite streams and have the ability to detect problems deep inside the network. You know, it's one of these things the bad actors kind of live off the land. They get in there and they know their way around slowly and methodically and drought dribble information. No. Well, the only way to catch that is like continually monitoring the network. So having that perspective so continuing to grow that out and provide again more of that, eh? I aml approach to understanding and be more predictive when we see things and be able to surf. It's that type of information. Security already used to be activists. And now it's become, you know, high crime even. Yeah, even, you know, nation states, right. And the job of ah of a security technology company is to raise the cost, lower the value right to the hacker, right to the infiltrator so that they go somewhere else. All right. Hey, make it really expensive for them. So either get through. But we ve what's like you get through, make it really hard for them to take stuff out. And that's really what you're doing. >> It was like you made sure to lock the front door now because it stopped them. But, you know, maybe I'll go somewhere else, right? It's a little bit >> different. Preventing you wanna minimize your risk, right? So if you're able to minimize the risk from performance and security problems, it's really all about understanding what you've got, what your assets are protecting them. And then when that someone's trying to look at them stopping it from happening, >> OK, last question I have for you, Russ, is being in this Cisco ecosystem out there. We're watching Cisco go through a transformation become more and more software company now, four years into the Chuckle Robin's era. So you know, how's that going in? What's it mean to partner Francisco today? >> It's going really well, and I think that we adopted a lot of way or adopted a lot of what the Sisko has done as well and really transform Nets go from what was primarily a hardware first company into a software first company. You know, it's kind of I was in a conference once and we were talking about software eating the world, right and but ultimately, its hardware. That's doing the chewing right. So I think it's one of those balancing acts. You know, it's Cisco's still of selling a ton of hardware, but it's a software solution sets so they deploy on their hardware. That makes it happen. And it's similar for us. You know, we're building out software solutions that really address the issues that people have building all these complex environments. All right, >> Russ Curie, congratulations on all the progress there and look forward to keeping up with how Netscape's moving forward in this multi cloud world. Thank you. All right, we'll be back with lots more coverage here from Cisco Live, San Diego for David Dante Obst Amendment. Lisa Martin's also here. Thanks, as always, for watching the Cube.

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE's live coverage here in Las Vegas for Dell Technologies World 2019. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, Dave Vellante. Day two of three days of wall-to-wall coverage. We got two sets called theCube Cannon. We've got the Cannon of Content, interviews all day long, out at night at the analyst briefings, meet-ups, receptions, talking to all the executives at Dell Technologies VMware and across the industry. Stu, Dave, today is product announcements on the keynotes. Yesterday was the grand vision with Michael Dell and the big reveal on the Microsoft partnership with Satya Nadella's surprise visit onstage, unveiling new Azure-VMware integrations with Dell Technologies. Dell announced the Dell Cloud, which is a little bit of Virtustream, but they're trying to position this cloud, I guess it's a cloud if you want to call it a single cloud of glass. Dave, single pane in the glass with a variety of other things, unified workspace and some other things. This is Dell trying to be a supplier end-to-end. This is the pitch from Dell Technologies. We'll be talking to Michael Dell, also Pat Gelsinger, the CO of VMware. Dave, were you impressed, were you shocked, were you surprised with yesterday's big news and as the products start coming online here, what's your analysis? >> Well yesterday, John, was all about the big strategic vision, Michael Dell laying out check for good and then the linchpin of Dell strategy which of course is VMware for cloud, multicloud, hybrid cloud, kind of VMware everywhere. I was surprised that Satya Nadella flew down from Seattle and was here on stage in person. Didn't come in from the big screen. So I thought that was pretty impressive. You had the three power players up on stage. Today of course was all about the products. Both Dell and EMC have always been very practical in terms of their engineering. Stu, you used to work there. Their R&D is a lot of D. It's sort of incremental product improvements to keep the customers happy, to keep ahead of the competition, to keep the lifecycle going. They had like 10 announcements today. I can go through 'em real quick if you want, but they range from new laptops to talking about new branding on servers, new storage devices. You had PowerProtect which is their new rebranded backup and data protection and data manage portfolio, an area where Dell EMC has been behind. So lots of announcements. Another kind of mega launch tradition and again, a lot of incremental but important tactical improvements to the product line. >> Last year, what we heard from Jeff Clarke is they're looking to simplify that portfolio. Back in the EMC days, it was oh my gosh, look at the breadth of this. Every category, they had two or three offerings and you know, the stated goal is to simplify that and that means most categories are going to get one product. It's interesting. You talk about networking just got rebranded with that Power branding. I kind of said there there's marketing behind it. If you know what that product is because it's the Power brand and they put it out there. So you know, PowerMax, has been their tiered storage. They had a good update for Unity. It's Unity XT. Doesn't have a power name yet so maybe there's still some dry powder left in the product portfolio there, but they're making progress going through this 'cause these things don't happen overnight. It's great to spin up the clouds, but in the storage world, customers, they trust, they have the code, they test it out. So going to new generations, making that change, does take time but you've seen that progress. The tail end of that integration between Dell and EMC on the product side. >> Stu, what's your analysis of the products so far 'cause again like Dave said, it's a slew of announcements. What's resonating, what's popping out, what's boiling up to the surface? >> Yeah so look, the area that I spent so much time on, John, that hyper-converged infrastructure. If you look at a lot of the pieces underneath it all, it's VxRail. One of the things we've had a little bit of a challenge squinting through is oh wait, there's this managed service stack, it's VxRail underneath. Oh wait I've taken the appliance and I put VCF. Oh that's VxRail and then I've got this other, it's like I see three or four solutions and I'm like is it all just VxRail with like a VMware stack on top of it? But it's how do I package it, what applications live on it, how is it consumed, manage service, op ex, cap ex. So they've got that a little bit of complexity when VxRail itself is you know, dirt simple and really there so they're making progress on the cloud piece. Dell is the leader in hyper-converged. I'll point out, you don't hear anybody talking about Nutanix here, but Dell still has a partnership on the XC Core. They're going to sell a lot of Dell servers into Nutanix environment so I expect you'll still have the Nutanix show. John you're going to be at that next week. They're still going to talk about Dell. I'm sure you'll talk to Dheeraj. Yes they made a partnership with HP, but that does not kill the relationship with Nutanix just like Microsoft, heck. I'm going to see Satya Nadella on stage at Red Hat Summit next week and you're like oh well VMware and Red Hat. Red Hat's here. Red Hat's a Dell-ready partner. If you want to put open shift on top of their stack, they can do that so hardware and software, everybody's got their pieces, everybody's got their pieces, everybody competes a lot, but they partner across the board. IBM Global Services is here. There's so many companies here. Dell's a broad company, deep partnerships. The question I have is Pat Gelsinger was just on stage saying that this SDDC will be the building block for the future. I said kudos to them. They've got it on AWS, they've got it announced with Azure, we announced it with Google, but that is not necessarily the end state. VMware is a piece of the puzzle. I don't know if VMware will be the leader in multicloud management. vCenter was the leader in virtualization management so how much of that will there or do I get an Amazon and then start moving some stuff over? Do I get to Azure and start modernizing my environment so that I don't need to pay VMware and I don't need virtualization. VMware and Dell are going to containerize everything so in the future, are they containerware, you know? That's the competition kind of post-it note. They are VMware at their core. VMware is centra of the strategy and there's still some work to go, but they're making some good progress. >> I want to get your thoughts, guys, on the role VMware is playing here at the show. Normally they're here, usually they're here, but this year it seems to be much more smoother integration of talking points, messaging, product integrations. The show's got a good beat to it. Pretty packed, but the role of VMware, Dave, Stu, what's your reaction and thoughts? We've seen them dance all the time. Obviously VMware, Dave as you pointed out yesterday, a big part of the valuation of Dell Technologies, but what's your observation on the presence of VMware here at Dell Technologies World? >> I mean I've said many times that this company and I said this about EMC, it's kind of a boring company without VMware. You put VMware in the mix and all of a sudden, it becomes very strategic and very interesting from a lot of standpoints. Certainly from a financial standpoint. Remember, the Class V transaction that took Dell public was the result of an $11 billion dividend because of VMware. They took VMware's cash and they said okay, we're going to give nine billion to the shareholders. Without VMware, that wouldn't have happened. As well, the multicloud strategy, the underpinning of that multicloud strategy is VMWare. What strikes me, John and Stu, is that the cultural change. You had Dell, you had EMC. They said ah yeah the companies are compatible, but they're different companies. They maybe had shared kind of goals and values, but they had different cultures and really in a short timeframe, Michael Dell and his team have put these two companies together and they have aligned in a big way. I mean they are basically saying VMware and Dell, boom. That's how we're going to market and you know, Pat's coming on later today and I'm sure he'll say hey we love NetApp, we love HBE, we love IBM, but it's clear what the preferred partnership is. >> Dave, when the acquisition happened, there was talks of synergies and we were like oh where are they going to cut everything? If I look around here, they've got the seven logos of the primary companies. It's Dell, Dell EMC, Pivotal, RSA, Secureworks, Virtustream and VMware. They're one company. Michael Dell will go on calls for any of them. Friends of mine at Pivotal says you talk to Michael quite a bit. You know, he's out there. We talked about it yesterday. Dell and VMware are closer and tighter aligned than EMC and VMware ever were. Now on the one hand, EMC kept them separate because the growth of virtualization required that. Today in this cloud environment, it's a different world and it's matured so VMware, sure, there's still work on HP and IBM and all this other stuff, but Dell leads that move as you said, Dave. >> John, you're big on culture. This is a founder culture. What's your take on what Michael Dell has accomplished and how does it stand to compare with sort of other great cultural transformations that you've seen? >> Well I think HBE is a great example of a culture that split, was uncharged there. We know what happened there and I think they're hurting, they're losing talent and they're not winning in categories across the board like Dell is. I think Michael Dell, the founder-led approach that he's having 'cause he told us years ago, if you guys remember, here on the record, also privately that I'm going to take this off the table with EMC and I'm going to do all these things. We're going to execute. So he brought his execution mojo and ecos of Dell and become Dell Technologies, as Stu pointed out, a portfolio of multiple companies under one umbrella and he brought the execution discipline and this is a theme, Dave. Last night at the analysts reception, as I was talking to other analysts and talking to some of the execs, both from VMware and Dell Technologies, that the execution performance across the board both on product integration, which was a weak spot as you know, is getting better, the business performance discipline. We're going to have the CFO on here to talk more about it, they're executing. Howard Elias is going to be on this afternoon. He called this three years ago when he was talking about the integration that they saw synergies, they saw opportunities and they were going to unpack those. They stayed relentless on that. So I think this is a great example of keeping the founders around for all the VC-backed companies. You're thinking about getting rid of founders. Never let a founder leave a company. They bring the vision, they bring also some guts and grit and they bring a perspective and you can put great talent and team around that, that attract and retain great executives like Michael's done and he's poaching HPE, other companies and pulling talent in 'cause they're executing. They pay well, it's a great place to work according to the statistics. So again, this is all because of the founder and if the founder's not around, you have all the fiefdoms and the policists who kick in and then it becomes kind of sideways. So that's kind of what I see other companies that don't have founders around and HP lost their founders obviously and then the culture kind of went a little bit sideways. So they're trying to get back in the game, seeing them go back to their roots. We'll see how they do. We don't do that show anymore and again we don't have a lot of visibility into what HP's doing but we do know, Dave, that they do not have a lot of the pieces on the board that Dell does. So if you want to have an end-to-end operating model, and you're missing key value activities of an end-to-end value chain, that's going to be hard to automate, it's hard to be a performant, it's going to be hard to be successful. So I think Dell is showing the playbook of how to be horizontally scalable operationally and offer perspectives and data-driven specialism in any industry in any vertical. >> Yeah Dave, if I can just on the cultural piece 'cause it's really interesting. You talked about EMC, East Coast hard driving versus VMware, software, Silicon Valley company. While they're working together, a lot of it, you know, I talk to VMware people and they're like well it's great the Dell force is just selling our stuff. It's not like I'm having storage shoved down my throat or we have to have our arms twisted. It's the product portfolio that they're selling, the vSAN, NSX, the management software suite and those pieces, things like SD-WAN, there's some good synergies there. So the product portfolio is a nice fit that just jointly go out to market that they just really line up well together and Dell's a very different cultural beast than EMC was. >> Well again, staying on culture for a moment, when I discussed with some of the folks that I know out of Hopkinton the narrative early on was oh Dell's ruining EMC, tearing it apart and so forth. When you talk to people today, they say, you know what, it was painful. Dell came in and said okay, you're going to be accountable, really had an accountability culture, but now they've come out the other side, the narrative is it was the right thing to do. Jeff Clarke came in and sort of forced this alignment. There's like no question about it. People, this is a guy who you know, his calendar's set for the year. People know where he's going to be, what meeting he's going to have, what's expected and they're prepared and it seems to be taking hold. I mean if a $90 billion company that's growing at 14% in revenues, in profitable revenues, that's quite astounding when you think about it and I think it's a big result of the speed at which Dell has brought in its operating model to the broader EMC and transformed itself. It's quite amazing. >> Awesome show, guys. We've got clips out there on the #DellTechWorld on Twitter. We've got a lot of videos. We've got two sets here, three days of wall-to-wall coverage. Final word on this intro for day two, guys. Thoughts on the show? It's not a boring show. It's a lot of activities, a lot of things. They've got an Alienware eSports gaming studio which I think is totally badass. A lot of kind of cool things here. It's not the glitz and glam that we've seen in other EMC Worlds before or Dell Worlds, but it's meat and potatoes and it's got a spring to its step here. I feel it's not, it feels good. That's my takeaway. >> Well the big theme is hybrid cloud and multicloud. Jon Rowe as we were leaving the room today that we were early with that multicloud. Thanks for everybody else in the industry for hopping on board. The reality is the first time I heard the sort of hybrid cloud was called private cloud. Chuck Hollis wrote a blog back in the mid to late 2000s. Now I will make an observation in the customers that I talk to. Multicloud is not thus far, has not thus far has been a deliberate strategy. In my opinion, it's been the outcropping of multivendor, shadow IT, lines of business and I think the corner office is saying hold on, we need to reign this in, we need to have a better understanding of what our cloud strategy is, build a platform that is hybrid and sure, multicloud, to build our digital transformation. We need IT to basically help us build this out to make sure we comply with the corporate edicts and that's what's happening. It is early days. There's a long way to go. >> Yeah, as Dave, as you know, I sat right down the hallway from Chuck Hollis when he wrote that piece and I went and I called up Chuck and I was like hey Chuck, this sure sounds like my next generation virtual data center stuff that I joined the CTO office to work on and he's like yeah, yeah, new marketing branding and I wrote a piece, exactly what you said, Dave, on Wikibon.com, hybrid and multicloud were a bunch of pieces, you know. It's not a cohesive strategy. The management's not there. We're starting to see maturation. Some of the point products, you know, developed really fast. When we talk about VMware on AWS, that happened really fast. I heard if you stop by the VMware booth here at the show, they're showing outposts and I said is a diagram? No, no, I've got customers in production running this. I'm like hold on, I need to hear about this. Outpost in production? But that strategy as you said, hybrid and multicloud, we're starting to get there, starting to pull it together. David Foyer wrote a phenomenal piece about hybridcloud taxonomy. We've spent a lot of time on the research side. Really what does the industry need to do, how should customers think about all of the layers? You know, data and networking and all of these components to help make not just a bunch of pieces but actually drive innovation and help be better than the sum of its parts. >> Well ironic followup on that post, the Chuck Hollis post was around they called it the private cloud and it was all about homogeneity and now multicloud is everything but homogeneous. Outpost, however, is. Same hardware, same software, same control plane, same data plane so interesting juxtaposition. >> We'll see Amazon Outpost. Guys, go to SiliconAngle.com, Wikibon.com. Great hybridcloud, multicloud analysis coverage and news. And some of the headlines hitting the net here. Dell Technologies makes VMware linchpin of hybrid cloud, data center as a service, end user strategies from Zdnet. eWEEK, Dell makes major hybrid cloud push. Obviously great analysis, guys, right on the number. Day two, CUBE coverage here in Las Vegas. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman. We've got two sets. Rebecca Knight, Lisa Martin and more. Stay tuned for more coverage of day two after the short break. (upbeat music)

(funky music) >> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE. Covering CISCO Live Europe. Brought to you by CISCO and it's ecosystem partners. >> Everyone welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here in Barcelona, Spain for Cisco Live Europe 2019, I'm John Furrier, and my co-host, Stu Miniman. Our next guest Sachin Gupta, senior vice-president of product management in Cisco's enterprise networking business, it's the crown jewels of Cisco, Sachin got the keys to the kingdom. Runs project management, so we get all the info from you, thanks for joining us. Good to see you again, good to see you again, king alumni. >> Yes, thanks. >> Thanks for coming on, I know you've got a keynote at 12 coming up shortly, thanks for spending the time, I'll get right to it. Networking is being reinvented, David Geckler said that onstage yesterday in the keynote. It's not changing, it's just shaping differently for customer needs intent-based networking, we talked briefly last year at Cisco Live in North America moving up the stack, it's here. Intent-based networking, cloud connections, IOT, all kinds of edge con activity, everything's connected, now on to the network. This is real. >> This is real, and John, look, it's been really exciting, right? We've gone through an 18 month journey here, when we first introduced in tent-based networking we talked about moving away from CLI box by box to really solving the problem at an abstracted, intent layer. Specify what user groups and what segments you want, what experience you want to deliver for those applications, and then the network feeding the data back up so you can learn from it, you can manage it, you can troubleshoot it in a much, much simpler way. We're now into this, as I said, 18 months. We have thousands of customers already using intent based networking we talked about software defining access for automated segmentation in the campus, talked about insurance, and then we've been adding capability along the way. And in just this week, David Geckler had people on stage, talked about more innovations with intent-based networking in the data center with ACI anywhere, with innovations on hyper flex. Liz came on and talked about IOT, and how that fits into the framework. And then Gordon talked about what we're doing with SD Ren, really, really exciting stuff going on there. >> Well, why don't you take a minute and quickly explain for the folks watching want to get us on the record so we can get definition. What is intent-based networking? What does it mean, what's the impact for the customers, what is it? >> Intent-based networking means that you can now express your business intent. Here's the outcome I'm looking for from the infrastructure. The system and the architecture will convert that automatically, provision, all the underlying components get the data and the context back out and prove to you that the intent you wanted was delivered. >> And what is changing now, more than ever, because applications are coming on. We see DevNet, we're in the DevNet zone. Seeing a lot of activity, developers. >> Yeah, so now you've got networks that are preventable instead of individual devices that you have to learn from the ground up, all their bells and whistles, you can now live at that intent layer, add an API layer on top of the controllers and move much more quickly. You can now start thinking about multiple domains, and how you cross those domains. >> What is the big product change, if any, especially software, is key to all of this? We've got plenty of hardware. You mentioned Liz in IOT, still runs router, she takes that software, she packages them. We interviewed her yesterday, she was talking about the synergies between code bases in which she customizes for the IOT market, then you've got the intent-based networking. What's the product look like, what's the products as they get more horizontal? >> Yes, so make no mistake, the hardware is still very important. Silicon ASIC's very important, but the magic now is in the software layer. So it starts with the operating system, and Liz talked about how we now have the Cisco IOS EXE operating system, which is modular hot patchable API driven programmable, and now runs across the entire portfolio. It runs on her ruggedized IOT infrastructure, runs on our switches, run on the wireless controller, runs on the routers and the SDWAN nodes, virtual and physical, same operating system. And then the SD controller layer on top of that. So for the campus, you've got DNA centers. So let's code DNA center, and then for the WAN you've got Cisco, the TeleV manage solution that provides a controller layer for automation, for analytics on top of the infrastructure. >> I wonder if we can unpack that SDWAN piece a bit, because WAN's been around a long time. I think back to the 90s, WAN was something that helped us get the internet. In the 2000s there was WAN optimization, I worked on a lot of replication solutions. I'm not sure that people understand the connection between SDWAN and really enabling the multi-cloud world that we need today, and the portfolio that Cisco has to attract that. >> You mentioned the 90s, I joined Cisco in 97, and I actually worked in WAN technical support. (laughing) So I've been with WAN for a very long time. And the customers aren't waking up and saying hey, I need a new WAN. That's not how the conversation starts. What's happening is it's a business transformation question. The companies, the customers are using infrastructure as a service, AWS services. They're using ACER, they're using Google Cloud platform. They're using all the SaaS products. Webex from Cisco, right, they're using Office 365. They're using all of these new applications and their data is not sitting in the data center. I mean, as we've noticed this week, the data center moves to where your data is. Well now, if your data isn't in it's data center that's conveniently connected through a WAN connection and it's all over the place. It's in the cloud, in many clouds. You have to think about, how do you get traffic in and out, how do you deliver security, and in this world where you may be using internet connections and all kinds of connections, how do you deliver the right application experience, and then oh, by the way, how do you manage all of this? That's what SDWAN is about, I need to transfer my business as I move applications or consume cloud services, I need to re-architect my WAN, and SDWAN helps me go do that. >> A big piece of that is what a network person needs to manage today, a lot of what they need to manage, they don't own. They don't control it, and some of that means I can't necessarily put a box that I can dial into and do this, so I need a software piece that I can put there as part of my overall configuration. >> Yes, you need a software piece, and you need something that scales to something that is cloud delivered. You can't be going to hundreds or thousands of sites and manually provisioning these for these services. You need to be able to have virtual services. If you're consuming a cloud service, you need your router or your service presence, your SDWAN presence in the cloud, right? So virtual network functions, virtual services become really critical in this world. >> Just on scale, you know, I've worked with Cisco on a lot of branch solutions over my career, there's lots of different components of scale that these type of solutions play into. >> Okay, people say if everything is in the cloud, does the scale requirement go down? All you think about is do I have 100 sites and I had one or two data centers. Alright, well now I have the same hundred sites, and I have hundreds of services. SaaS applications I'm consuming, and as I said, infrastructure as a service. And I still have some data centers for my legacy applications as well. So the complexity has actually increased, the scale requirement has increased. I need a much better software method, a software define method, to manage all of this. >> This is a key point, a lot of inflection points in the industry always have an abstraction layer to abstract away complexities. So you got two things going on here that are pretty clear, there's more complexity and more scale. So software's the perfect solution to manage that, is that what you're saying? >> Software's the perfect solution to manage this, and that's sort of one more level to that complexity. Because your traffic isn't neatly going from your branch through sort of a lease line or MPLS circuit that you can VPN into a data center, it's a more complicated traffic flow. I might be connecting directly to the internet securely is a huge concern. >> This is a great point, I was going to ask you the flow question, you know the old expression "follow the money and you'll find your answers." In networking, in this business, follow the traffic. Remember, north, south, east, west. That became a paradigm that helped shape a lot of network architecture. Now you have new traffic patterns. Can you give some color around the new traffic patterns and with cloud, comes with Edge, it's not just north, south, east, west, it's everywhere, so give- >> So a new traffic pattern now can be, instead of from the branch through your headquarters to your data center, now the traffic pattern is direct internet access to the SaaS application. Or go to a regional hub that I have in a co-location facility. Well, in the old world you had a security stack in your DMC. So it had your best firewall, your best IPS solution, all layered in there. Now in this new world with your traffic hitting directly, those applications and data in the cloud, you have to rethink security. So what we did in our SDWAN solution, we embed the best Cisco security technology application firewall, URL filtering, IPS solutions natively in our SDWAN software stack. And so you can deploy this across hundreds of branches now, and so you have assurance that the same level of security that you had in your data center can be delivered in a distributed way, in an easy way. And what happens is, customers also want to consume cloud security. You know, maybe I don't want to run in my branch, I actually have a SaaS application, I want to use the Cisco Umbrella service. Alright, so this is a secure internet gateway that processes this traffic, makes sure things are clean, makes sure we are safe, the customers are safe, and we can now integrate with cloud services in our SDWAN solution with just one click. >> How important is this security paradigm you just mentioned? Because there probably will be consequences. We've seen IOT become a talking point around oh, surface area, more surface area for the security breaches. This security paradigm's different. Why is it important and what are the consequences if not followed? >> If you don't follow this paradigm, I think the risk you run into that first of all, you will make a compromise on application experience because you're so worried about security. Let me give you an example, customers may choose, hey, you know what, I'll continue hair pinning all my traffic through my headquarters because I have a rich security stack there, and suffer an application experience because I'm going this way to get to the cloud asset rather than going directly, and so by enabling that rich security stack to be virtually enabled anywhere you want it, anywhere you need it, we can ensure that you can have the maximum level security that you need in your architectural design, and still get the application experience by selecting the best path for your application. >> And it's good business to be in enabling technology. We've seen that, you guys have lived that at Cisco. What is the most important story coming out of Cisco, out of this show, as you guys move forward that customers and the industry should pay attention to in your opinion? What's the most important story? >> I think the most important part of the story is, intent-based networking and the architectural shift, the reinvention that it's created isn't about any single domain, right? This is happening in the WAN to solve application experience problems, SaaS application experience problems, security problems, automations, scale. It's happening in the campus for segmentation, prevent lateral movement of threats. It's happening in the data center with ACI, and the customers want simple outcomes. What they're looking for is users, devices, things connecting to applications and data, doesn't matter where they sit, and ensuring that from a policy based model, they can automate end to end, and they can get the visibility, the telemetry end to end to solve problems and to learn and to improve the network. >> So cross domain traffic, application probability of the network, and the role of data that plays in that seems to be a common thread. >> Beautifully summarized, John, that's exactly right. >> Well, what's coming up in the keynote? What are you going to talk about at noon here in Barcelona? >> Yeah so in the keynote, I'm going to recap why have we done this, why does it matter, and why isn't CLI still going to work for you, and why did we need to reinvent networking? And then talk about the journey so far, all the new things we've announced, and then what I'm really excited about is I have a partner coming on stage with me talking about how we're delivering SDWAN solutions for our customers, how does that conversation work, and what should you really worry about as you select the service, design the architecture you're going to go with. >> Sachin, I want to go back in time, jog your memory, I remember back in the 90s, multi vendor was a big word, multi vendor improbability. Multi vendor meant working with multiple industry standard stuff. I hear multi cloud, I get a similar vibe. This seems to be the trend that people want to pay attention to just as much as hybrid cloud or maybe more on the multi cloud side, some are even saying, multi cloud is hotter than hybrid cloud. Do you agree with that, and how does multi vendor, multi cloud jive to Cisco? You guys thrived in a multi vendor world. What's your thoughts on this multi cloud? >> I think in both of those situations, customers are looking for freedom. It needs to be open, API driven. I should be able to move my traffic from one place to the other, my applications from one place to the other and not feel locked in. And so it's critical to support open protocols, open APIs and to provide customers that freedom. An SDWAN actually helps provide that. We're using open protocols open APIs, but at the same time, if I need to move my service from here to there, and I still need to deliver security, application experience, scale, automation, you can do that. So we provide that freedom to run that application in the multi cloud environment. >> One of the things that comes up all the time when we have conversations with the geeks out there at the conferences, it's microservices in containers on one side, and then on the networking side it's still latency and cost, you've still got latency issues and cost to move traffic around. Still a dynamic, how are you guys still looking there? 'Cause latency is certainly super important, and networking will be moving packets around, moving traffic around, and cost, there's still cost. Is this the concept of data center moving to the applications? How do you guys look at that cost equation and the latency equation, that's still important, can't change the laws of physics. >> The cost of latency equation is still really important, but the problem has changed, now. As your applications now, your data center is sort of moving with the cloud. Think about Office 365, we still need to help you get the best experience for Office 365 as if you were running an on-prem solution. For that we need to do things very different, we need to manage latency, to manage jitter, to manage cost overall. So what we've done is we use an API integration with Office 365 to give you 40% better performance for that fast application, and we're doing this for many applications. So I think you're right, you're solving for similar things, but now everything's changed on here. The applications are in a different place. So you just have to solve them in a fundamentally new way. >> And that's the traffic patterns, really comes down to it, and that's a tell sign of user expectation, user behavior, application behavior, this is the new normal. >> This is the new normal. >> What are you excited for looking forward as you look at your business, you look at Cisco, positioning style, I like the new position, very tight, very good, I like A Bridge to Tomorrow, A Bridge to the Future, kind of makes sense. Bridge, I like the double entendre there. But as you look at the portfolio coming together with multi cloud, what are you excited about? >> Look, and I've heard this from many customers and partners this week as well at Cisco live, we've been on this journey for many years. Building out intent-based networking for each of these domains, and now we've got thousands of customers already using it. But the conversations are going from hey, why did we need to do this? To, hey, help me perfect my design, and I now need to connect two or three domains together, how do we go do that? So we're now having richer, more mature next phase conversations. So it's working with our customers to realize that value across all of the domains from anywhere where there are users and things start anywhere with data and application sessions. >> And the network is foundational with the security architecture, you can build on that, that's where the magic will happen from your perspective, you see that. >> That's where the magic will happen, and you know what, only Cisco can pull this off. Because we have leadership in every one of those domains, and we're following the same architectural principles across all of them. >> So if someone said Sachin, this is not your grandfather's SDWAN, what do you respond to that? How do you update that narrative? What is the SDWAN new message, what's the new picture for SDWAN, what does that mean? >> The new SDWAN is about connecting to your applications and data in any cloud in a multi cloud environment, SaaS, IOS applications, it doesn't matter. Any private data center, still delivering the best security, best application experience in an automated way at the skill that you need. >> Okay, at the center of the value properties, have been saying on theCUBE for nine years, finally it's happening, a lot of stuff coming together meeting the road, congratulations on your success, and thanks for spending the time to come in. Great to see you, good luck on your keynote. This is theCUBE coverage live in Barcelona. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, back with more coverage here from Cisco Live after this short break, stay with us. (funky music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's theCube. Covering DevNet Create 2017, brought to you by Cisco. >> Hey welcome back everyone. Live here in San Francisco, exclusive coverage with theCube at Cisco's inaugural DevNet Create event. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Peter Burris. We're breaking down the new foray into the open source world with a big presence. Cisco expanding their DevNet core developer classic program and creating an open source model with collaboration, 90% of that activity is non-Cisco, really a good formula. And to help us this down is Krish Subramanian, Principal Analyst at Rishidot Research, formerly of Red Hat, formerly of a start up that was recently sold. Can't talk about it because it's not released yet. Friend of theCube, Cube alumni, part of the Clouderati, going way back. Krish, we've seen a lot of the waves of how cloud has evolved from the early days. I remember when EngineYard was a startup, Haruku was a couple guys, we were having our meetups. >> And the AWS was still like people who weren't able to make money. >> They were poo-pooing the hell out of it. It was EC2 and S3 with a couple different, I mean RightScale did everything back then, so think about the changes. And now Cisco here with the formula, they have the right formula, I got to give them props for that, doing it right. They're not trying to come in and do a land grab and sort of, "Ahh, we're Cisco", throwing their elbows around. Really doing it right, your thoughts? >> Yeah, definitely, come back to what some other legacy companies tried to do. Cisco didn't try to jump in and say, "Hey, we are going to run public cloud, compete with Amazon", and sort of take them down. They sort of waited for right moment, they initially started with the InterCloud, which will go much further, but when IoT came into picture, they were there right for that and they were there taking advantage of that. And with the increasing focus on developers, they are going right to capture the minds of developers. Especially for IoT, that is critical for Cisco to go-- >> Well, I'm really glad you're on with Peter. We have two analysts here who know the industry up and down, from every dimension. Of course, I'll add my color, but I want to ask both of you guys a couple questions. One, do you think Cisco's making the right moves by coming out and really focusing on their core competency, which is the network? They also bought AppDynamics, so that is a big purchase. So, you got apps meets infrastructure, programmable infrastructure, which means infrastructure as code. You really can't have infrastructure as code unless Cisco gets behind it, they're the leader. So, with IoT looming, this seems like a good move for Cisco. What do you think? >> Yeah, definitely, they are going in the right direction, so it's really like IoT's still in the early stages and we have to wait and see how it is going to evolve, but Cisco is very persistent. Especially I like the AppDynamics acquisition because they are clearly telling the world that we understand that applications are the future and developers need the right tools if they are to develop their apps on Cisco infrastructure. And with the emphasis on programmability, Cisco is taking right steps towards capturing developer attention and I hope with successful events like this, they will be able to get there. >> Peter, I want to go to you for a second because we just found out, in talking to Suzy, I did not know this, but in your previous life, when you ran research at META Group, folks may not know what that was, it was a big research firm at the time, you did some really similar work around the infrastructure developer. >> Yeah >> Okay, and our comment was, "What is old is now new". I got a degree in operating systems and computer science and that seems to be the model. What is this notion of an infrastructure developer? It was mentioned in the keynote today. Does that exist in this new scenario? Do you see it being viable? It seems like the messaging is tight. What is your reaction to this notion? You've done a lot of work on that. >> Well, as a way of answering the question John, and I'll play off of something you just said, when we talk about the degree with which this is relevant to Cisco, here's what I say. Everybody's always looking for what is it that's different from today, relative to yesterday? And there's a lot of things that are different. One of the most important ones is that yesterday's computing industry emphasized a priority set of models about how you do things. So, if you thought about the network, the network had a modeled structure. You sat there and you designed a network to be as relevant to as many things as possible. Same with the database. You sat there and you designed the database to be as relevant to whatever notion of applications. When we start talking about the new world, now what we're discovering is the data is going to force a reconfiguration. That's what big data is. In many respects, it's non-structured, non-modeled data, but we still want to do analytics. Same thing with the network. We want the network to evolve and emerge, have emerging characteristics that allow us to do things that we never really anticipated when we first put this stuff down. And so, the thing that an infrastructure developer, at least as we conceived it, and we were way ahead and probably wrong for that reason, but the way we conceive it is someone has to take some degree of responsibility for starting to characterize, fill that gap, characterize the services in the infrastructure that need to be made available to application developers in a way that makes coherent and consistent sense so that an application written to an infrastructure, in fact, may become a service to another application at some point in time in the future, because they make consistent assumptions about where they operate within that margin between the application and the infrastructure. >> John: Does that environment exist today, in your opinion? >> It does in certain places. It does in certain places. I think the whole notion of containers is making, in Kubernetes for example, is making some very powerful presumptions about how applications are going to interact with each other in the future. Now, we had SOA, but we also talked about Conway's law, it just never happened because the structure of the organizations that were using SOA just guaranteed you end up with monolithic, crap applications anyway. >> Explain Conway's law real quick for people who didn't-- >> Yeah, Conway's law is, it's been mentioned in theCube a couple times, basically, it's a suggestion that the structure of the application is a reflection of the structure of the organization that created it. And so, if you have a silo-based application development organization that's looking at the application for the finance group, or the marketing group, you are going to get a structured, siloed-oriented application, no matter what underlying technology you use. And that's been that way forever. >> And so, Krish, I want to get your thoughts because let's take that to the next level. So, one of the benefits of cloud was horizontally scalable model. That really kind of, to me, was the big ah-ha moment around software. And with DevOps, which is now called cloud native, which is the same thing, infrastructures code was, hey, I'm not not an infrastructure person. I just want it to be available for me and help me configure it out and programmable, as Suzy was saying. Okay, so if you take what Peter's saying about data, you've lived through the infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, SAS wars or evolution, however you want to look at it. And, now you see that kind of coalescing into SAS and infrastructure and PAS kind of folding away and kind of becoming less of a contentious conversation. But, now that same thing's happening with data, we believe. I mean I think, maybe he may disagree, but now data's now the new data layer. What's your thoughts on that? Because now, if you inject data into what was the old cloud stack, new things are really possible. >> Yeah, the thing is, data brings in a new dimensionality to what we are seeing right now. Everything from infrastructure to application, everything requires a mindset change in terms of seeing them as services. So, even if it is a physical hardware you are dealing with, you have to make it more service-like by putting an API in front of it. So, it's changing the way how we consume these services. But, data is the one that is bringing business value to customers. When you make data easily, sort of like, inter operate with the services, let's say call it, for lack of a better term, a services ocean kind of IT model you have in your enterprise. So, when you offer to bring data into it, it offers you a lot of opportunities which didn't exist in the past. It opens up new avenues in which you could manipulate data, make sense out of it and probably get more value than what you were getting in the past. >> What's interesting, if you bring micro services, if you think about Docker and Kubernetes, as you were saying, and you bring data now into the equation and the notion of microservices, you can apply all that microservices knowledge to data. That's what you were saying, from what I hear. Or concepts of-- >> Sort of like you will bring data close to take, earlier as Peter pointed out, data was in silos, representative of the organizational structure. So, by taking a more services approach and spreading the services across these siloed, PAS, siloed organization, you are bringing the entire organization into one single umbrella, sharing the data and thereby benefiting much more than what they were getting in the past. >> So John, in the opening, one of the things we talked about, and I'll repeat it here because he's probably going to see it and I'd love to hear your comments on it, is that we went to hardware-defined networking. And then we went to software-defined networking. And, Wikibon's working on a proposition and I'm sure we'll find reasons why it's not going to play out, but again, I'd like to hear your position, is what I'll call data-defined infrastructure. So, we were on theCube last week at Informatica and we heard a lot about the role that metadata's going to play in discovery of data resources and whatnot. I can imagine adding metadata when we start talking about dependencies and time and location and things that are relevant to how a network or how an infrastructure might configure itself to serve the data, becoming a feature of the programmability of the underlying infrastructure so that we end up, in five years, we do talk about data-defined infrastructure. Just as today, we're talking about software-defined infrastructure, where the infrastructure, literally, responds to the needs of the data because that, ultimately, is the most flexible way of think about this. What do you think? >> Yeah, I fully agree with you. In fact, data brings in a new dimensionality to the equation where applications, it's a morph based on what is there in the data. So, on-the-fly, the infrastructure needs to be modified. So, data sort of brings in a new way of doing infrastructure from what we have done in the past. I fully agree with the role of data in that and how, through the application, that influences how we deal with infrastructure. It does change completely. >> All right, so I got to ask you guys a question. Journeys, is journey to DevOps, journey to digital transformation, certainly has a lot of cloud, has a lot of open source involved with it. We're seeing the Ford CEO get fired, he hasn't been on the job for four years, right? So, you guys both work with end users and advise them, so what's your advise to CXOs where, hey the clock now is, I thought four years was short. It really should be seven to 10 on the transformation scale, but people are getting axed in their third year, so they got to show results. How does an executive make all this stuff happen in such a short time? Or should they just reset expectations? >> When the executive comes in, he, or she, not only should look at their core business, they should also think that they are a technology business and change the mindset completely. That mindset change needs a push from the top that's going to accelerate the change down the lane and I think the executive should think that they are becoming a CEO, or CXO, of a technology company, rather than a manufacturing company or a automobile company kind of thing. >> I think that's true, but look, we haven't studied what happened at Ford in detail because I'm sure there's some subtleties in there that we just don't fully understand, but on the surface, it sounds like he might have gotten a little bit of a raw deal, just from the pure standpoint of-- >> Well the stock was down 39%, so my guess is total Wall Street hatchet job, but -- >> Peter: Exactly. >> We don't know a lot of the politics, but Val Bercovici, who was on earlier, who has a lot of experience in organizations that net app since 97, or late 90s, brought an interesting point, you were saying earlier. Tesla creates a car that's a service. And so, to me, I hate to use the cliche, "Everything as a service", but essentially, that's what software's going to. So, where you make up a day, that's why I'm kind of poking at the data thing because I think you're on to som-- >> But it's the end of the day, Tesla still has to have a shop that bends metal, there's still some car manufacturing things that have to happen. And, in many respects, whether the old CEO is saying, well the value proposition is, someday this autonomous vehicle is going to happen, but right now, we still got to build cars that can compete in the world market. There's a lot of subtleties here. There are-- >> Yeah, but Tesla does upgrade with software over the network. >> For an 80 to $100,000 price point and there's about four billion people that are going to buy cars in the next five years that may, or may not, be able to buy a 80,000 to $100,000 car. So anyway, coming back to your core point, I think what it really means is that if you're in a situation where you don't have visibility in a how, some of these new, digital approaches are going to create value for your business, you're doomed. So, I think the first thing you got to do is you got to be very explicit. This is how digital technology's going to create value for my business, that's number one. And, be able to articulate that to, virtually, anybody that's capable of understanding it, including Wall Street. But, to do that, you have to step back and say, and what is it about that digital technology that's going to create value for my business. And the thing that's going to do it, or not, is the data. >> And the asset configuration around, the work around the assets. >> Especially the asset configuration, as it's defined by the data. And, increasingly, there's an economics terms, what we're going to see happen over the next 10 years is the asset specificities are going to go down dramatically. In other words, the ability to which, or the degree to which an asset can only be configured to a specific purpose. Software's going to change that dynamic dramatically. And that, in many respects, is one of the fundamental, underlying things that's going on here. But, at the end of the day, you have to say, what role is data going to play in my business? How am I going to articulate that role by saying that I'm going to incorporate digital in this way? And then, put in place a plan that demonstrates that you're competent about some of these things. And, if your shareholders don't like it, they're not going to like it from anybody, not just you. >> Krish, I want to get your thoughts on the Cloud Native Compute Foundation. Why it's so successful. Why, in your opinion, do you think, there just booming with vendors, a lot of cash infusion, a lot of activity, projects went from one, three, 10. We had Dan on earlier, a lot of growth in the cloud native. And then, also, Kubernetes as a, kind of as an emerging, really interesting dynamic, vis-a-vis multicloud. So why cloud native is so popular and the impact of Kubernetes. >> Cloud native is popular because of late, developers are understanding that the role we are building applications is not going to work in cloud. When containers came into picture, that really made it easy for developers to develop cloud native apps. It got them to take advantage of the more distributed nature of the underlying infrastructure. So, the containers are the main reason why cloud native has become the household term, even in the enterprises. That could be one of the reason why Cloud Native Foundation is popular. Because they came at the right time to host all these development projects and evangelize with the developers and take steps in that. As far as Kubernetes is concerned, it worked at Google's CE. If it can work at Google's CE and then solve Google's problem, it should be able to help-- >> If it's good for Google, it's good for me. That's their strategy. >> And also, people are slowly realizing that as more and more enterprises go to cloud, they are realizing that going with a single cloud provider may not solve all their problems because different cloud providers have different set of services. So, they want to take advantage of all that. But, they want a single pane of glass to manage everything. Kubernetes is this general to be that at the cloud-- >> Krish, thanks for coming on. Peter, thanks for the comments, I'll just wrap up the analyst segment by saying, in my opinion, I think Cisco's making a good move here because, to your point about Google and Kubernetes is, and that's one of many examples of great software being contributed to open source. And open source, for all the times I've been involved with it since I was in college, is this more great software coming to the table now than ever before and that's creating great innovation. So, combined with the cloud and cloud native and Kubernetes, a perfect storm of innovation is coming. And it's coming, not from vendors, it's coming from open source. And, so the smart vendors are putting their toe in the water and really figuring it out. And again, the-- >> Peter: It is coming from vendor support though. >> Well the vendors are smart by putting their people in open source as a proxy for contribution. That's the open source model. That, to me, is the new R&D. It's a new innovation strategy, coupled with some proprietary R&D. Not saying they should be going all open source. >> I agree with it completely. In fact, I would even go one step further and say open source is completely disrupting the traditional enterprise software in modern business. Think about someone like Capital One putting critical software as open source and disrupting all the vendors in the space, so it's-- >> Well, let's continue the conversation in studio or tomorrow. Again, open source is horizontally scaling as well. Great stuff, great projects. More exclusive coverage from the inaugural event for Cisco's DevNet Create after this short break. (up-tempo music) >> Hi, I'm April Mitchell and I'm the senior director of strategy--

>> Narrator: Live from San Francisco, it's the Cube. Covering Informatica World 2017. Brought to you by Informatica. (futuristic electronic music) >> Welcome back, everyone. We're here live in San Francisco. This is the Cube's exclusive coverage of Informatica World 2017. I'm John Furrier looking to angle the Cube. My co-host, Peter Burris, head of research for SiliconANGLE media, also general manager of Wikibon.com. Our next guest is Albrecht Powell who's the enterprise information management global lead at Accenture Analytics. Welcome to the Cube. >> Thanks very much. Good to be here today. >> John: See you're sporting the sideways A, not to be confused with siliconANGLE red A, which is the other way around. Great to have you on. >> That would be the accent on the future. (laughing) Our moniker. >> So, um. Great to have you on. Center analytics. A lot of people may or may not know-- huge investment in data science. You guy's are doing a lot of work, and integrating in with customers. Not just on the management consulting side, but, you know, a lot of the architecture, a lot of the delivery-- You essentially manage services across the board. >> Albrecht: Oh yeah. >> There's a lot of architecture going on, so I got to ask you about the data powered enterprise vision that you have, because that's the theme that you guys have. What does that mean, first of all? And how does it relate to Informatica World, and ultimately the customers just trying to get to the Cloud, lower their costs, increase their top line. What's the digital transformation connection? >> Boy, lots of questions in there. So, you know, to us, in the digital revolution that's happening right now, the expectations on companies are just growing exponentially. You've got customers, you've got shareholders, business partners. You've got stockholders that all have so much more insight on companies. They want more, and they're putting so many demands on companies today. So, it's causing disruption in the industry. We all know about the Uber's. We all know about going from print media to digital media. But you've got companies like John Deere; they sell tractors, right? But they're moving toward a platform based company now, where they're now working with farmers, they're working with agriculture, helping to support. So, when you've got that as a different business model, you've got that coupled with the explosion in data. So, you know, the statistics-- Amazon, I think it took six years to get their first trillion. Now it's you know, the next trillion they got in one year. By the year, I think 2020, 1.7 megabytes of data is going to be created per person per second. These are staggering numbers. And when you put those two together, I personally think that the next big wave, the next big value proposition for clients, is going to be data, and harnessing the power of that. When I look back over my 28 year career, I go back to the ERP days. That was the big wave. Right? You had to be on Oracle or SAP or PeopleSoft or JD Edwards. I think right now, we're just starting in this phenomenal wave of opportunity. >> You mentioned re-platforming, or platform approach. The word re-platforming is an industry buzzword. But that really is an impact to IT, business operations, and personnel, and ultimately the business model! I mean, this is like a serious impact. >> It really is, and that is where this data powered enterprise comes in. We're trying to work with our clients to figure out how to harness this value proposition, unlock the data that they've got stuck in their systems, the dark data wherever it may be, and unleash that and try to gain business insights from that. >> Alright. Take us through the playbook, because okay-- I buy it. I see the train coming down the tracks that is really high speed. I bet I got to move to the new model. You look at Amazon, it's a great proof point. Hockey sticks since 2010. No doubt about it. Just one tell sign. I want to move. Now, I got to be careful, if I move too fast I get over my ski's, or over-rotate-- whatever metaphor you want to use, but how do I get there? What are you guys doing with clients and what's the strategy? Playbook. >> You know, the biggest thing we try and do is the relationships we have with clients are long term, trust based relationships. And when we go in, we're not selling a product. We're trying to help them drive business value. So, what we typically do around the data space is help them figure out what's the strategy, what's the vision, where do they want to go? They may think they need a data quality solution, an MDM solution. But you know, we come in and we talk to them and we realize: what are you trying to get out of it? Where do you want to go? And lay out a vision, a set of guiding principles. And that framework often times help them drive within the next one-two years, a much more sustainable set of growth as opposed to trying to do a point solution. So typically, we'll start there. But, you know, we'll also come in if they're hemorrhaging, if they're bleeding, if they've got major problems. Or, if they're trying to hit a strategic adjective, procurement spend analytics, or growth, or disruption in the market. Those are the type of things that we'll come in and talk to them about to start with. >> Is there a mindset-- obviously, there's a mindset shift. But given that, certainly if the certain room's on fire, you take care of those first. I get the critical piece of it, 'cause sometimes it is mission critical right out of the gate. But, is there an architectural mindset? Is it a building blocks approach? Has there been a shift in how to deploy and iterate through, in an agile way, that you've seen a pattern that's emerged? >> I mean obviously Cloud is big with everybody today, and the hype out there is everybody's moving everything to Cloud. And in reality, a lot of our clients-- They've invested a lot in these data centers, so they're reticent to make the leap. So, we're working with them to help, and Informatica has been phenomenal with some of the tools and solutions that they have to help them pull over to you know, Cloud based solutions. And you know, most of our clients right now, they have a hybrid architecture. They're moving in that way. They've got some stuff that they want to keep close and tight, they've got some stuff that they want to move. But between OpenSource with the new subscription models-- For instance, and Informatica has. It's a game changer for our clients. Because now, they're able to get solutions up faster, quicker, and we do a lot of work with our liquid studios to help them pile at those type of solutions. >> But it's still got to be in service to some outcome, or to some idea? >> Albrecht: Absolutely. >> So, that suggests that one of the challenges that people have been having in the big data universe is this disconnect between what we want to do, and implementing a dupe on a cluster. And that notion of how do we actually introduce some of the concepts of design into that process so that we can see realistically, and practically, and in a way that executed, a process to go from the idea down to the actual implementation? So, use cases are a big issue. Getting developers more involved and active is a big issue. But, what is the role of design in this process? >> So one of the things that we've shifted to is we have a set of innovation centers, where we'll bring clients in, and we might start with a workshop or two, right? To talk to them about the capabilities. But very quickly we evolve that into design thinking sessions, to really draw out what's the real challenge they're trying to find? Because half the time, they think they know what the problem is, but they really don't, and we help them uncover that. And then, from a design standpoint, we do a lot more prototyping now, where we'll go through and actually build in a matter of weeks, a real time capability that they can go take and run with. We have this thing called the Accenture Insights Platform, where we've negotiated with a lot of partners, such as Informatica, to have their tools, their software, in a hot, ready Cloud-based environment, where again, in the matter of a couple of weeks, we can stand something up, and they can see it, they can touch it. It's no longer the big capital investments to go start these type of projects. >> But it has to again, be something that people can touch and can play with. >> Albrecht: Exactly. >> And start themselves, to start saying, "Well, yes, "it works here. It doesn't work here." So they can start iterating on it. It's a way of increasing the degree to which iteration is the dominant feature of how things roll out. Ties back to the use case. As you guys think about the tooling that's available, from Informatica and elsewhere, how does the tooling-- Is the tooling robust enough at this point to really support that process, or is there still some holes we have to fill? >> Yeah, you know, I almost feel like the technology is there, right? We can do so much. The challenge that I run into when I meet with the C-suite-- I always ask the question, "What's your holy grail question?" If you knew this piece of information, how would that be a game changer? Eight times out of ten, I hear, "If I knew sales by quarter by region, "and that is was accurate, "I could really do something." It's like, that's not your question. The question should be: Who should I acquire? When is a customer going to walk out of the store? What's the weather going to be? What's the minimum amount of water I need to put in a plant for it to grow? You, know, in a drought situation. And those are the kind of questions that we are trying to draw out from our clients. And again, these design thinking sessions help us drive to that. >> John: Is that liquid studio's and the innovation centers the same thing? You mentioned liquid studios. What is that? Real quick. >> They are. So, again the whole idea behind these studios is that instead of doing, you know, starting with a massive project, or driving a massive five year RFP for a program. Again, get it in a liquid fashion; very agile, very prototypical, you know, build something. >> John: Very fluid. (laughs) >> Exactly right. And so that they can see, touch, feel, and manipulate these things. And then from there, they may want to scale that up. And you know, they may do it themselves. Often times, they'll partner with us to do it. >> You're partnering in the real time requirements definition of what they're trying to do. >> Albrecht: Correct. >> Well, it must be organized. I saw on Twitter that Accenture received the Informatica Ecosystem Impact Award last evening. Congratulations. >> Albrecht: Thank you very much, I appreciate that. Very excited. >> Where did that come from, and why is it important to you guys? Obviously, the recognition with Informatica, you guys are doing well with them. >> Now, Informatica is a very strong strategic partner of ours. I mean, we've worked with them for the last 18 or so years. I personally been involved with them the whole time. The company has vision, you know, when you talk to Anel, you talk to Ahmet, who was just on-- The vision that they have for their products, they know where they want to go. The reinvention that they've done here with the new branding, and the new marketing-- A lot of our clients had traditionally thought of them as more the power center, and more the-- >> John: The plumbing. >> Exactly. >> John: I'll say it. >> And we keep challenging them. It's like, you know, why aren't you bigger? Why isn't everybody using you? Because I think the tool set is robust enough right now. And again, it's finding these use cases to be able to apply this. >> Well, they made a big bed. The joke in silicon valley right now, in infrastructure companies, is that plumbers are turning into machinists, as kind of an analogy. But now with machine learning, you're starting to see things that they've made a bed on that's flowering, and it's important. And I think they made some good bets. They'll be on the right side of history, in my opinion. But I want to ask you a personal question, because you know, you mention waves. You mention the ERP waves and the software wave of the mini computer, which then became local area networks, inter-networking, et cetera. Basically the premise of what IT has turned into. With now, the disruption that's going on, how is it different? Because Informatica seems to be on that same software cycle in a new way. What is different about this new world order that's different than those days, the glory days, of rolling out SAP implementations, or Oracle ERP and CRM's. Shorter time cycles. What are the things that you're seeing that are key things that customers should pay attention to, they need to avoid, and things they should double down on, relative to this new wave of software? And how does Informatica fit into all that? >> Sure. The ERP wave was critical. It was the way to get everything under one umbrella. Very important, right? But today, the idea of single instance, companies can't keep up. They can't do that. So it's the nimble, it's the agile. I'm really excited about Informatica is that they've got the end to end solution, which is phenomenal, but they've also got the piece parts. And there's a lot of our clients that you know, they're trying to integrate multiple ERP systems together, they're trying to integrate multiple platforms, so MDM is becoming much more important today. Data governance. Absolutely critical out there. They've had a gap, frankly, in data governance for years. And yeah their acquisition, their AXON tool-- Again, it's a game changer out there and a lot of our clients are aggressively looking at that, and trying to do that. >> Paul: How does it change the game for some of your clients? Give an example. You don't have to name the customer, but in the use case basis. >> Everybody needs, you know. We talk about the need for governance, right? And it comes into whether it's paper based, whether it's automation-- Some way to get processes standardization and so forth around governance, and get people accountable. The tools that have been out in the market-- There are some that are good, but they're not integrated. There's no interoperability between them. And what I like about AXON now is they can sell it as a single point solution. Great way to get in the door of a client. But, they can also then integrate that with all of the other platform pieces that Informatica has, and that tie is really powerful. >> Well, governance also plays a role when you think about, for example, the idea that we want greater distribution of data-- Data is going to be more distributed. We want some visibility into that data through metadata, and (mumbles) talked about that. But, we heard from healthcare conversation this morning, and others, that one of the big barriers is, do I have access? Do I have rights? Do I have privileges to this data? And governance has to follow that process where people know in advance: What rights do I have? What access do I have? Am I using it properly? Am I breaking rules? That notion of governance can't just be centered on compliance and regulation, it has to be moved into more of an asset management approach. Do you agree? >> Right. Agreed. And the way we look at governance, it's expanding now. It's not the traditional data-owner, data-steward, data-operator any more. >> Yeah, it's not the central group. It's a corporate set of responsibilities. >> Right. And we're rolling governance now out to the end-user. So, how they are looking at data and interacting with data. Because data, now, it's a utility. It is something that everybody touches, everybody uses, not just an IT thing anymore. When you take that, and again you take the expanse of that into security. You know, as you talked about-- Secured source for example. The play in tying the two of those together. Very powerful solution. And even within Accenture, you know, we're tying our data, our governance, our security practices, much more tightly together as a single, unified solution. >> John: How does the AI machine learn, 'cause we hear in Claire their new interface, see LX out there, and Amazon. I mean Google I/O's announcing neural nets that train computers! Certainly it's a lot of buzzwords out there. Does that make the master data management, and the MDM, and the data quality more relevant? Or less relevant? >> I think just as relevant as it's always been. There's a lot of people that sit and say that the traditional data stuff is a commodity now. And again, machine learning is absolutely essential, AI. We need that because we're scaling so much bigger out in industry today. But, MDM is not going away. The integration between platforms, the need for good data quality. And I think, we almost took a shift in the industry to the buzzwords. Right? It's all about big data and AI and everything, and in some ways we almost left the traditional behind. And now we're coming back to realizing that you need good data to power the different data sources you've got, the big data and everything else, that then needs to be scaled, and that's where the machine learning-- >> And freed up for developers who have a DevOps mindset don't want to get into the nuances of being a data wrangler. >> Well, the patterns of data usage are going to be important, thinking about MDM. Because at the end of the day, you're not going to have copies of everything. >> No. >> You're going to have relationships, increasingly. >> Right. >> Peter: And MDM has to be able to capture that, too. >> Exactly. >> Alright, final question I have to ask you, what's the future for you guys? What do you guys see? 'Cause you guys always got the top brains in the industry working on things. what is Accenture's view of the future? What's the most important things coming down after this wave? Or is this wave just multiple sets, and to your clients, what are the top three things, or top things that you guys see as future waves or items that you're working on? >> You know, again, this data wave right now-- Again, it's the most exciting time that I've ever had in the career. And I see the growth that we're doing. And you know at Accenture, we have a lot of investment in research and development, we've got a team of data scientists that's out trying to mine data, figure out, you know, what the insights are that are out there. The liquid studios that we're pulling together. And, you know, as we talk to our clients, it's all about the art of the possible. It's not so much trying to sell a tool or solution. That's obviously important. But, where can we take you? What are the things that the industry hasn't thought of yet that we can take you as a company and help you disrupt into a new business market? >> Re-imagining the future. Thanks for coming, Albrecht. Appreciate it. Albrecht Powell with Accenture Analytics. Exciting this time in the industry-- I would agree data is certainly intoxicating at one level, but really great value opportunity. Thanks for coming on the Cube, and sharing the data with us as we analyze. Here on the Cube, more great coverage after this short break. At Informatica World 2017, I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris. We'll be right back with more. (futuristic electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube covering Interconnect 2017, brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to Interconnect 2017 from Las Vegas everybody, this is the Cube the leader in live tech coverage. Bina Halmann is here, she's a Cube alumn and the vice president of offering management for storage and software defined at IBM and she's joined by Tahir Ali, who's the director of Enterprise Architecture at the City of Hope Medical Center. Folks, welcome to the Cube- >> Tahir: Thank you very much. >> Thanks so much for coming on. >> Bina: Thanks for having us. >> So Bina we'll start with you been on the cube a number of times. >> Yes. >> Give us the update on what's happening with IBM and Interconnect. >> Yeah, no it's a great show. Lots of exciting announcements and such. From an IBM perspective storage we've been very busy. Filling out our whole flash portfolio. Adding a complete set of hybrid cloud capabilities to our software defined storage. It's been a great 2016 and we're off to a great start in 2017 as well. >> Yeah [Inaudible] going to be here tomorrow >> That's right. so everbody's looking forward to that. So Tahir, let's get into City of Hope. Tell us about the organization and your role. >> Sure, so City of Hope if one of the forty seven comprehensive cancer centers in the nation. We deal with cancer of course, HIV, diabetes and other life threatening diseases. We are maybe 15 to 17 miles east of Los Angeles. My role in particular, I'm a Director of Enterprise Architecture so all new technologies, all new applications that land on City of Hope, we go through all the background. See how the security is going to be, how it's going to implement in our environment, if it's even possible to implement it. Making sure we talk to our business owners, figure out if there's a disaster recovery requirement if they have a HA requirement, if it's a clinical versus a non-clinical application. So we look at a whole stack and see how a new application fits into the infrastructure of City of Hope. >> So you guys to a lot of research there as well or? >> Absolutely. >> Yeah. >> So we are research, we are the small EDU and we are the medical center so- >> So a lot of data. >> A whole lot of data. Data just keeps coming and keeps coming and it's almost like never ending stream of data. Now with the data it's not only just data- Individual data is also growing. So a lot of imaging that happens for cancer research, or cancer medical center, gets bigger and bigger per patient as the three dimensional imaging is here. We look at resolution that is so much more today than it used to be five years. So every single image itself is so much bigger today than it used to be five years ago. Just a sheer difference in the resolution and the dimensions of the data. >> So what are the big drivers in your industry, and how is it affecting the architecture that you put forward? >> Right, so I think that a couple of huge things that are maybe two or three huge conversion points, or the pivot points that we see today. One of them is just the data stream as I mentioned earlier. The second is because a lot of the PHI and hipaa data that we have today- Security is a huge concern in a lot of the healthcare environment. So those two things, and it's almost like a catch 22. More data is coming in you have to figure out where you're going to put that data. But at the same time you got to make sure every single bit is secured enough. So there's a catch 22 where its going, where you have to make sure that data keeps coming and you keep securing the same data. Right so, those two things that we see pivoting the way we strategize around our infrastructure. >> It's hard, they're in conflict in way, >> Tahir: Absolutely. >> Because you've got to lock the data up but then you want to provide accessibilty... >> Tahir: Absolutely. >> as well. So paint a picture of your infrastructure and the applications that it's supporting. >> Right, so our infrastructure is mainly in-house, and our EMR is currently off-prem. A lot of clinical and non-clinical also stay in-house with us in our data center on-prem. Now we are kind of starting to migrate to cloud technologies more and more, as just things are ballooning. So we are in that middle piece where some of our infrastructure in in-house, slowly we are migrating to cloud. So we are at like at a hybrid currently. And as things progress I think more and more is going to go to the cloud. But for a medical center security is everything. So we have to be very careful where our data sits. >> So Bina when you hear that from a client >> Bina: Mm-hmm (affirmative) >> how do you respond? And you know, what do you propose? >> Bina: Yeah. >> How does it all... >> Yeah well- >> come about. >> You know as we see clients like Tahir, and some of the requirements in these spaces. Security is definitely a key factor. So as we develop our products, as we develop capabilities we ensure that security is a number one focus area for us. Whether it's for the on-prem storage, whether it's for the data that's in motion from moving from the on-prem into the cloud, and secure completely all the way through where the client has the control on the security, the keys et cetera. So a lot goes into making sure as we architect these solutions for our clients, that we focus on security. And of course some of the other requirements, industry specific requirements, are all also very important and we focus in on those as well. Whether it's regulatory or compliance requirements, right. >> So from a sort of portfolio standpoint what do you guys do when there's all kinds of innovations over that last four or five years coming in with flash, we heard about object stores this morning, we got cloud, you got block, you've got file, what are you guys doing? >> So we do a lot of different things, so from having filers in-house to doing block storage from- And the worst thing now these days with big data is, as the data is growing the security needs are growing but the end result with the researchers and our physicians the data availability needs to be fast. So now comes a bigger catch 22, where the data is so huge but at the same time they want that all of that very quickly on their fingertips. So now what do you do? That's where we bring in a lot of the flash to upfront it. 10 to 12 percent of our infrastructure has flash in the front, this way all the rendering, or all the rights that happen or- First land on the flash. So everybody who writes, feels like it's a very quick write. But there's a petabytes and petabytes behind the scene that could be on-prem, it could be on the cloud, but they don't need to know that. Its, everything lands so fast that it looks like it's just local and fast. So there's a lot of crisscross that is happening, and started maybe four five years ago with the speed of data is not going to be slow. The size of data increasing like crazy and then security is becoming a bigger and bigger concern as you know. Maybe every month or month and a half there's a breach somewhere that people have to deal with. So we have to handle all of that in one shot. So you know, it's more than just infrastructure itself. There's policies, there's procedures, there's a lot that goes around. >> So when you think about architecting, obviously you think about workloads and- >> Tahir: Of Course. >> what the workload requirement is, it's no a one size fits all. >> Tahir: Right right. >> So where do you start, do you start with- >> Tahir: Sure. >> Sort of, you know a conversation with the business? >> Sure, sure. >> How much money do you got? >> So we don't really deal with the money at all. We provide the best possible solution for that business requirement. So the conversation happens, "tell us what you're looking for." "We're looking for a very fast XYZ." "Okay tell us what exactly you need." "Here's the application, we want it available all the time, "and this is how it's going to look like, "it can't be down because our patients are depending on it". So on and so forth. We take that, we talk to our vendors. We look at exactly how it's architected. If it's- Let's just say it's three-tiered. There's a web, there's an app and then there's a database. You already know by default that if it's a database it's going to go on a high transactional IO where either it's a flash or a very fast spinning disc with a lot of spindles. From there you get the application. Could be a virtual machine, could not be a virtual machine. From there you get to a web tier. Web tiers are usually always on a virtual infrastructure. Then you realize if you want to put it on a DMZ so people from outside can get to it, or it's only for internal use. Then you draw the entire architecture diagram out. Then you price it out, you said "Okay if you want this to be "always on, maybe you need a database that is always on." Right, or you need a database that replicates 24/7. That has a cost associated to that. If you have an application- If wanted two application maybe it's a costier application it could be HA it could not be HA, so there's a cost to that. Web servers are kind of, you know cheaper tier of virtual machines. And then there's a architecture diagram, all the requirements are met in there. And there's a cost associated to that, saying business unit here is how much it's going to cost and this is what you will have. >> Okay so that's where the economics, >> Exactly >> comes into play. Okay this is what your requirements are >> Yep. >> This is, based on that what we would advise. >> Exactly, yeah. >> And then essentially it's can you afford it. >> Right right. (laughs) If you want to buy a house that is a three bedrooms and three bathrooms in Palo Alto, versus a six bedrooms and then seven bathrooms in Palo Alto it's going to be a financial impact that you might not like. (laughs) So it's one of those, right. So what you want has a financial impact on your end solution and that's what we provide. We don't force somebody to get something. We just give them- Hey how many kids do you have? Four kids, then maybe you need a five bedroom house. Right so we kind of do that. >> Is it common discussion? >> Yeah it is, it is. And that's, as you know, some of the things we do focus on. Right, as we- In addition to the security aspect of it of course, is around the automation, around driving in the efficiencies. Because at the end of the day, you know, whether as capital expands or operational expands you want to optimize for both of those. And that's where as we architect the solutions, develop the offerings, we ensure that we build-in capabilities, whether it's storage efficiency capabilities like virtualization, or de-dupe or compression. But as well as this automated tiering. Tiering off from flash to lower tier, whether it's on-prem lower, slower- >> Tahir: Could be a disc. >> speed disc or tape or even off to the cloud, right. And being able to do that, provide that I think addresses many of our clients' needs. That's a common requirement that we do hear. >> And as mentioned 10 to 12 percent of it if flash. >> Tahir: Right. >> The rest, you know ninety percent or so is something else. That's economics, correct? >> Right so- >> And how do you see that changing? >> So I think the percentage won't really change. I think the data size will change. So you have to just think about things, just in generality. Just what you do today. You know when you take a picture, maybe you look at it the first three days, even if you have a phone. After three days, maybe you look at it maybe once every two months. After three months, guess what? You will always never look at them. They're kind of moved away from even your memory banks in your head. Then you say, "Oh I was looking through it". And then maybe once in awhile you look at it. So you have to look at the behavior. A lot of the applications have the same behavior, where the new data is required right away. The older the data gets, the more archival state it gets. It gets warmer and then it gets colder. Now, as a healthcare institute we have to devise something that is great financially, also has the security, and put away in a way where we can pull it without having pain to put it back. So that's where the tiering comes to play. Doesn't matter how we do it. >> And your planning assumption is that the cost disparity between flash and other forms of storage will remain. That other- >> So- >> forms will remain cheaper. >> Right, so we are hoping, but I think the hybrid model of flash- So once you do a hybrid with flash and disc, then it becomes a little more economically suitable for a lot of the people. They do the same thing, they do tiering, but they make it look like a bigger platform. So it's like, "We can give you a petabyte "but it's going to look like flash." It doesn't work like that. They might have 300 terabyte of flash, 700- but it's so integrated quickly, that they can pull it and push it. Then there's a read-aheads write-aheads that takes that advantage to make it look like it. That will drop your pricing. The special sauce that transfer the data between slower and flash discs. >> Two questions for you. >> Sure. >> What do you look for in a supplier? And what drives you nuts about a supplier, that you don't want a supplier to do? >> Sure. So personally speaking, this is just my personal opinion. A stable environment a tried and true vendor is important. Somebody who has a core competency of doing this for a longer term is what I personally look at. There's a lot of new players who come in, they stay for a couple of years, they explode, somebody takes them over or they just kind of vanish. Or certain people outside of their core competency. So if Toyota started to make- Because they wanted to save money they said, "Hey Toyota from now on will make "the tires that are called Toyota." But Toyota is not a tire company. Other companies, Bridgestone and Michelin's have been making tires for a very long time. So the core competency of Toyota is building the cars and not the tires. So when I see these people, or the vendors saying, "Okay I can give you this this this this and this and that and the security and that. Maybe three out of those five things are not their core competency. So I start to wonder if the whole stack is worth it because there's going to be some weakness because they don't have the core competency. That's what I look at. What drives me crazy is, every single time somebody comes to meet with me they want to sell me everything and the kitchen sink under one umbrella. And the answer is one single pane of glass to manage everything. Life is not that easy, I wish it was but it really is not. (laughs) So those two things are- >> Selling the fantasy right. Now Bina we'll give you the last word. Interconnect, give us your final thoughts. What should we know about what's going on in software-defined and IBM storage. >> Yeah you know lots of announcements at Interconnect. You heard, as you talked about, cloud optic storage we've got great new pricing models and capabilities and overall software-defined storage. We're continuing to innovate, continue add capabilities like analytics and you'll see us doing more and more on cognitive. Cognitive storage management to get more out of the data, help clients get more and more information and value out of their data. >> What's the gist of the new pricing models, just um- >> Flexible pricing model depending on how the both hybrid as well as the three tiered on-prem and in between. But really cold as well as a flexible pricing model where depending on how you use the data you know you get consistent pricing so between on-prem and in the cloud. >> So more cloud-like pricing >> Yes, exactly. >> Great. >> Yep. >> Easier consumption, excellent. Well Bina Tahir thanks very much for coming to the cube. >> Yes yes thank you. >> Dave: Pleasure having you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> Dave: You're welcome. Alright keep it right there everybody we'll be back with our next guest and a wrap, right after this short break. Right back. (upbeat music)