from the cube studios in palo alto in boston bringing you data driven insights from the cube and etr this is breaking analysis with dave vellante at our inaugural super cloud 22 event we further refined the concept of a super cloud iterating on the definition the salient attributes and some examples of what is and what is not a super cloud welcome to this week's wikibon cube insights powered by etr you know snowflake has always been what we feel is one of the strongest examples of a super cloud and in this breaking analysis from our studios in palo alto we unpack our interview with benoit de javille co-founder and president of products at snowflake and we test our super cloud definition on the company's data cloud platform and we're really looking forward to your feedback first let's examine how we defl find super cloudant very importantly one of the goals of super cloud 22 was to get the community's input on the definition and iterate on previous work super cloud is an emerging computing architecture that comprises a set of services which are abstracted from the underlying primitives of hyperscale clouds we're talking about services such as compute storage networking security and other native tooling like machine learning and developer tools to create a global system that spans more than one cloud super cloud as shown on this slide has five essential properties x number of deployment models and y number of service models we're looking for community input on x and y and on the first point as well so please weigh in and contribute now we've identified these five essential elements of a super cloud let's talk about these first the super cloud has to run its services on more than one cloud leveraging the cloud native tools offered by each of the cloud providers the builder of the super cloud platform is responsible for optimizing the underlying primitives of each cloud and optimizing for the specific needs be it cost or performance or latency or governance data sharing security etc but those primitives must be abstracted such that a common experience is delivered across the clouds for both users and developers the super cloud has a metadata intelligence layer that can maximize efficiency for the specific purpose of the super cloud i.e the purpose that the super cloud is intended for and it does so in a federated model and it includes what we call a super pass this is a prerequisite that is a purpose-built component and enables ecosystem partners to customize and monetize incremental services while at the same time ensuring that the common experiences exist across clouds now in terms of deployment models we'd really like to get more feedback on this piece but here's where we are so far based on the feedback we got at super cloud 22. we see three deployment models the first is one where a control plane may run on one cloud but supports data plane interactions with more than one other cloud the second model instantiates the super cloud services on each individual cloud and within regions and can support interactions across more than one cloud with a unified interface connecting those instantiations those instances to create a common experience and the third model superimposes its services as a layer or in the case of snowflake they call it a mesh on top of the cloud on top of the cloud providers region or regions with a single global instantiation a single global instantiation of those services which spans multiple cloud providers this is our understanding from a comfort the conversation with benoit dejaville as to how snowflake approaches its solutions and for now we're going to park the service models we need to more time to flesh that out and we'll propose something shortly for you to comment on now we peppered benoit dejaville at super cloud 22 to test how the snowflake data cloud aligns to our concepts and our definition let me also say that snowflake doesn't use the term data cloud they really want to respect and they want to denigrate the importance of their hyperscale partners nor do we but we do think the hyperscalers today anyway are building or not building what we call super clouds but they are but but people who bar are building super clouds are building on top of hyperscale clouds that is a prerequisite so here are the questions that we tested with snowflake first question how does snowflake architect its data cloud and what is its deployment model listen to deja ville talk about how snowflake has architected a single system play the clip there are several ways to do this you know uh super cloud as as you name them the way we we we picked is is to create you know one single system and that's very important right the the the um [Music] there are several ways right you can instantiate you know your solution uh in every region of a cloud and and you know potentially that region could be a ws that region could be gcp so you are indeed a multi-cloud solution but snowflake we did it differently we are really creating cloud regions which are superposed on top of the cloud provider you know region infrastructure region so we are building our regions but but where where it's very different is that each region of snowflake is not one in instantiation of our service our service is global by nature we can move data from one region to the other when you land in snowflake you land into one region but but you can grow from there and you can you know exist in multiple clouds at the same time and that's very important right it's not one single i mean different instantiation of a system is one single instantiation which covers many cloud regions and many cloud providers snowflake chose the most advanced level of our three deployment models dodgeville talked about too presumably so it could maintain maximum control and ensure that common experience like the iphone model next we probed about the technical enablers of the data cloud listen to deja ville talk about snow grid he uses the term mesh and then this can get confusing with the jamaicani's data mesh concept but listen to benoit's explanation well as i said you know first we start by building you know snowflake regions we have today furry region that spawn you know the world so it's a worldwide worldwide system with many regions but all these regions are connected together they are you know meshed together with our technology we name it snow grid and that makes it hard because you know regions you know azure region can talk to a ws region or gcp regions and and as a as a user of our cloud you you don't see really these regional differences that you know regions are in different you know potentially clown when you use snowflake you can exist your your presence as an organization can be in several regions several clouds if you want geographic and and and both geographic and cloud provider so i can share data irrespective of the the cloud and i'm in the snowflake data cloud is that correct i can do that today exactly and and that's very critical right what we wanted is to remove data silos and and when you instantiate a system in one single region and that system is locked in that region you cannot communicate with other parts of the world you are locking the data in one region right and we didn't want to do that we wanted you know data to be distributed the way customer wants it to be distributed across the world and potentially sharing data at world scale now maybe there are many ways to skin the other cat meaning perhaps if a platform does instantiate in multiple places there are ways to share data but this is how snowflake chose to approach the problem next question how do you deal with latency in this big global system this is really important to us because while snowflake has some really smart people working as engineers and and the like we don't think they've solved for the speed of light problem the best people working on it as we often joke listen to benoit deja ville's comments on this topic so yes and no the the way we do it it's very expensive to do that because generally if you want to join you know data which is in which are in different regions and different cloud it's going to be very expensive because you need to move you know data every time you join it so the way we do it is that you replicate the subset of data that you want to access from one region from other regions so you can create this data mesh but data is replicated to make it very cheap and very performant too and is the snow grid does that have the metadata intelligence yes to actually can you describe that a little bit yeah snow grid is both uh a way to to exchange you know metadata about so each region of snowflake knows about all the other regions of snowflake every time we create a new region diary you know the metadata is distributed over our data cloud not only you know region knows all the regions but knows you know every organization that exists in our clouds where this organization is where data can be replicated by this organization and then of course it's it's also used as a way to uh uh exchange data right so you can exchange you know beta by scale of data size and we just had i was just receiving an email from one of our customers who moved more than four petabytes of data cross-region cross you know cloud providers in you know few days and you know it's a lot of data so it takes you know some time to move but they were able to do that online completely online and and switch over you know to the diff to the other region which is failover is very important also so yes and no probably means typically no he says yes and no probably means no so it sounds like snowflake is selectively pulling small amounts of data and replicating it where necessary but you also heard him talk about the metadata layer which is one of the essential aspects of super cloud okay next we dug into security it's one of the most important issues and we think one of the hardest parts related to deploying super cloud so we've talked about how the cloud has become the first line of defense for the cso but now with multi-cloud you have multiple first lines of defense and that means multiple shared responsibility models and multiple tool sets from different cloud providers and an expanded threat surface so listen to benoit's explanation here please play the clip this is a great question uh security has always been the most important aspect of snowflake since day one right this is the question that every customer of ours has you know how you can you guarantee the security of my data and so we secure data really tightly in region we have several layers of security it starts by by encrypting it every data at rest and that's very important a lot of customers are not doing that right you hear these attacks for example on on cloud you know where someone left you know their buckets uh uh open and then you know you can access the data because it's a non-encrypted uh so we are encrypting everything at rest we are encrypting everything in transit so a region is very secure now you know you never from one region you never access data from another region in snowflake that's why also we replicate data now the replication of that data across region or the metadata for that matter is is really highly secure so snow grits ensure that everything is encrypted everything is you know we have multiple you know encryption keys and it's you know stored in hardware you know secure modules so we we we built you know snow grids such that it's secure and it allows very secure movement of data so when we heard this explanation we immediately went to the lowest common denominator question meaning when you think about how aws for instance deals with data in motion or data and rest it might be different from how another cloud provider deals with it so how does aws uh uh uh differences for example in the aws maturity model for various you know cloud capabilities you know let's say they've got a faster nitro or graviton does it do do you have to how does snowflake deal with that do they have to slow everything else down like imagine a caravan cruising you know across the desert so you know every truck can keep up let's listen it's a great question i mean of course our software is abstracting you know all the cloud providers you know infrastructure so that when you run in one region let's say aws or azure it doesn't make any difference as far as the applications are concerned and and this abstraction of course is a lot of work i mean really really a lot of work because it needs to be secure it needs to be performance and you know every cloud and it has you know to expose apis which are uniform and and you know cloud providers even though they have potentially the same concept let's say blob storage apis are completely different the way you know these systems are secure it's completely different the errors that you can get and and the retry you know mechanism is very different from one cloud to the other performance is also different we discovered that when we were starting to port our software and and and you know we had to completely rethink how to leverage blob storage in that cloud versus that cloud because just of performance too so we had you know for example to you know stripe data so all this work is work that's you know you don't need as an application because our vision really is that applications which are running in our data cloud can you know be abstracted of all this difference and and we provide all the services all the workload that this application need whether it's transactional access to data analytical access to data you know managing you know logs managing you know metrics all of these is abstracted too such that they are not you know tied to one you know particular service of one cloud and and distributing this application across you know many regions many cloud is very seamless so from that answer we know that snowflake takes care of everything but we really don't understand the performance implications in you know in that specific case but we feel pretty certain that the promises that snowflake makes around governance and security within their data sharing construct construct will be kept now another criterion that we've proposed for super cloud is a super pass layer to create a common developer experience and an enabler for ecosystem partners to monetize please play the clip let's listen we build it you know a custom build because because as you said you know what exists in one cloud might not exist in another cloud provider right so so we have to build you know on this all these this components that modern application mode and that application need and and and and that you know goes to machine learning as i say transactional uh analytical system and the entire thing so such that they can run in isolation basically and the objective is the developer experience will be identical across those clouds yes right the developers doesn't need to worry about cloud provider and actually our system we have we didn't talk about it but the marketplace that we have which allows actually to deliver we're getting there yeah okay now we're not going to go deep into ecosystem today we've talked about snowflakes strengths in this regard but snowflake they pretty much ticked all the boxes on our super cloud attributes and definition we asked benoit dejaville to confirm that this is all shipping and available today and he also gave us a glimpse of the future play the clip and we are still developing it you know the transactional you know unistore as we call it was announced in last summit so so they are still you know working properly but but but that's the vision right and and and that's important because we talk about the infrastructure right you mentioned a lot about storage and compute but it's not only that right when you think about application they need to use the transactional database they need to use an analytical system they need to use you know machine learning so you need to provide also all these services which are consistent across all the cloud providers so you can hear deja ville talking about expanding beyond taking advantage of the core infrastructure storage and networking et cetera and bringing intelligence to the data through machine learning and ai so of course there's more to come and there better be at this company's valuation despite the recent sharp pullback in a tightening fed environment okay so i know it's cliche but everyone's comparing snowflakes and data bricks databricks has been pretty vocal about its open source posture compared to snowflakes and it just so happens that we had aligotsy on at super cloud 22 as well he wasn't in studio he had to do remote because i guess he's presenting at an investor conference this week so we had to bring him in remotely now i didn't get to do this interview john furrier did but i listened to it and captured this clip about how data bricks sees super cloud and the importance of open source take a listen to goatzee yeah i mean let me start by saying we just we're big fans of open source we think that open source is a force in software that's going to continue for you know decades hundreds of years and it's going to slowly replace all proprietary code in its way we saw that you know it could do that with the most advanced technology windows you know proprietary operating system very complicated got replaced with linux so open source can pretty much do anything and what we're seeing with the data lake house is that slowly the open source community is building a replacement for the proprietary data warehouse you know data lake machine learning real-time stack in open source and we're excited to be part of it for us delta lake is a very important project that really helps you standardize how you lay out your data in the cloud and with it comes a really important protocol called delta sharing that enables you in an open way actually for the first time ever share large data sets between organizations but it uses an open protocol so the great thing about that is you don't need to be a database customer you don't even like databricks you just need to use this open source project and you can now securely share data sets between organizations across clouds and it actually does so really efficiently just one copy of the data so you don't have to copy it if you're within the same cloud so the implication of ellie gotzi's comments is that databricks with delta sharing as john implied is playing a long game now i don't know if enough about the databricks architecture to comment in detail i got to do more research there so i reached out to my two analyst friends tony bear and sanji mohan to see what they thought because they cover these companies pretty closely here's what tony bear said quote i've viewed the divergent lake house strategies of data bricks and snowflake in the context of their roots prior to delta lake databrick's prime focus was the compute not the storage layer and more specifically they were a compute engine not a database snowflake approached from the opposite end of the pool as they originally fit the mold of the classic database company rather than a specific compute engine per se the lake house pushes both companies outside of their original comfort zones data bricks to storage snowflake to compute engine so it makes perfect sense for databricks to embrace the open source narrative at the storage layer and for snowflake to continue its walled garden approach but in the long run their strategies are already overlapping databricks is not a 100 open source company its practitioner experience has always been proprietary and now so is its sql query engine likewise snowflake has had to open up with the support of iceberg for open data lake format the question really becomes how serious snowflake will be in making iceberg a first-class citizen in its environment that is not necessarily officially branding a lake house but effectively is and likewise can databricks deliver the service levels associated with walled gardens through a more brute force approach that relies heavily on the query engine at the end of the day those are the key requirements that will matter to data bricks and snowflake customers end quote that was some deep thought by by tony thank you for that sanjay mohan added the following quote open source is a slippery slope people buy mobile phones based on open source android but it's not fully open similarly databricks delta lake was not originally fully open source and even today its photon execution engine is not we are always going to live in a hybrid world snowflake and databricks will support whatever model works best for them and their customers the big question is do customers care as deeply about which vendor has a higher degree of openness as we technology people do i believe customers evaluation criteria is far more nuanced than just to decipher each vendor's open source claims end quote okay so i had to ask dodgeville about their so-called wall garden approach and what their strategy is with apache iceberg here's what he said iceberg is is very important so just to to give some context iceberg is an open you know table format right which was you know first you know developed by netflix and netflix you know put it open source in the apache community so we embrace that's that open source standard because because it's widely used by by many um many you know companies and also many companies have you know really invested a lot of effort in building you know big data hadoop solution or data like solution and they want to use snowflake and they couldn't really use snowflake because all their data were in open you know formats so we are embracing icebergs to help these companies move through the cloud but why we have been relentless with direct access to data direct access to data is a little bit of a problem for us and and the reason is when you direct access to data now you have direct access to storage now you have to understand for example the specificity of one cloud versus the other so as soon as you start to have direct access to data you lose your you know your cloud diagnostic layer you don't access data with api when you have direct access to data it's very hard to secure data because you need to grant access direct access to tools which are not you know protected and you see a lot of you know hacking of of data you know because of that so so that was not you know direct access to data is not serving well our customers and that's why we have been relented to do that because it's it's cr it's it's not cloud diagnostic it's it's you you have to code that you have to you you you need a lot of intelligence while apis access so we want open apis that's that's i guess the way we embrace you know openness is is by open api versus you know you access directly data here's my take snowflake is hedging its bets because enough people care about open source that they have to have some open data format options and it's good optics and you heard benoit deja ville talk about the risks of directly accessing the data and the complexities it brings now is that maybe a little fud against databricks maybe but same can be said for ollie's comments maybe flooding the proprietaryness of snowflake but as both analysts pointed out open is a spectrum hey i remember unix used to equal open systems okay let's end with some etr spending data and why not compare snowflake and data bricks spending profiles this is an xy graph with net score or spending momentum on the y-axis and pervasiveness or overlap in the data set on the x-axis this is data from the january survey when snowflake was holding above 80 percent net score off the charts databricks was also very strong in the upper 60s now let's fast forward to this next chart and show you the july etr survey data and you can see snowflake has come back down to earth now remember anything above 40 net score is highly elevated so both companies are doing well but snowflake is well off its highs and data bricks has come down somewhat as well databricks is inching to the right snowflake rocketed to the right post its ipo and as we know databricks wasn't able to get to ipo during the covet bubble ali gotzi is at the morgan stanley ceo conference this week they got plenty of cash to withstand a long-term recession i'm told and they've started the message that they're a billion dollars in annualized revenue i'm not sure exactly what that means i've seen some numbers on their gross margins i'm not sure what that means i've seen some numbers on their net retention revenue or net revenue retention again i'll reserve judgment until we see an s1 but it's clear both of these companies have momentum and they're out competing in the market well as always be the ultimate arbiter different philosophies perhaps is it like democrats and republicans well it could be but they're both going after a solving data problem both companies are trying to help customers get more value out of their data and both companies are highly valued so they have to perform for their investors to paraphrase ralph nader the similarities may be greater than the differences okay that's it for today thanks to the team from palo alto for this awesome super cloud studio build alex myerson and ken shiffman are on production in the palo alto studios today kristin martin and sheryl knight get the word out to our community rob hoff is our editor-in-chief over at siliconangle thanks to all please check out etr.ai for all the survey data remember these episodes are all available as podcasts wherever you listen just search breaking analysis podcasts i publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com and you can email me at david.vellante at siliconangle.com or dm me at devellante or comment on my linkedin posts and please as i say etr has got some of the best survey data in the business we track it every quarter and really excited to be partners with them this is dave vellante for the cube insights powered by etr thanks for watching and we'll see you next time on breaking analysis [Music] you

>>You want us to >>Look at that camera? Okay. We're back in Boston, everybody. This is Dave ante for the cube, the leader in enterprise tech coverage. This is reinforce 2022 AWS's big security conference. We're here in Boston, the convention center where the cube started in 2010. Highend song is here. She's head of security and distributed cloud services at F five. And she's joined by Dan woods. Who's the global head of intelligence at F five. Great to see you again. Thanks for coming in the cube, Dan, first time I believe. Yeah. Happy to be here. All right. Good to see you guys. How's the, how's the event going for? Y'all >>It's been just fascinating to see all those, uh, new players coming in and taking security in a very holistic way. Uh, very encouraged. >>Yeah. Boston in, in July is, is good. A lot of, a lot of action to Seaport. When I was a kid, there was nothing here, couple mob restaurants and that's about it. And, uh, now it's just like a booming, >>I'm just happy to see people in, in person. Finally, is >>This your first event since? Uh, maybe my second or third. Third. Okay, >>Great. Since everything opened up and I tell you, I am done with >>Zoom. Yeah. I mean, it's very clear. People want to get back face to face. It's a whole different dynamic. I think, you know, the digital piece will continue as a compliment, but nothing beats belly to belly, as I like absolutely say. All right. Hi on let's start with you. So you guys do a, uh, security report every year. I think this is your eighth year, the app security report. Yeah. Um, I think you, you noted in this report, the growing complexity of apps and integrations, what did you, what are, what were your big takeaways this year? >>And so, like you said, this is our eighth year and we interview and talk to about 1500 of like companies and it decision makers. One of the things that's so prevalent coming out of the survey is complexity that they have to deal with, continue to increase. It's still one of the biggest headaches for all the security professionals and it professionals. And that's explainable in a way, if you look at how much digital transformation has happened in the last two years, right? It's an explosion of apps and APIs. That's powering all our digital way of working, uh, in the last two years. So it's certainly natural to, to see the complexity has doubled and tripled and, and we need to do something about it. >>And the number of tools keeps growing. The number of players keeps growing. I mean, so many really interesting, you know, they're really not startups anymore, but well funded new entrance into the marketplace. Were there any big surprises to you? You know, you're a security practitioner, you know, this space really well, anything jump out like, whoa, that surprised >>Me. Yeah. It's been an interesting discussion when we look at the results, right. You know, some of us would say, gosh, this is such a big surprise. How come people still, you know, willing to turn off security for the benefits of performance. And, and, and as a security professional, I will reflect on that. I said, it's a surprise, or is it just a mandate for all of us in security, we got to do better. And because security shouldn't be the one that prevents or add friction to what the business wants to do, right? So it's a surprise because we, how can, after all the breaches and, and then security incidents, people are still, you know, the three quarters of the, uh, interviewees said, well, you know, if we were given a choice, we'll turn off security for performance. And I think that's a call to action for all of us in security. How do we make security done in a way that's frictionless? And they don't have to worry about it. They don't have to do a trade off. And I think that's one of the things, you know, Dan in working our entire anti automation, uh, solution one is to PR protect. And the other thing is to enable. >>Yeah. You think about Dan, the, I always say the, the adversary is extremely capable. The ROI of cyber tech just keeps getting better and better. And your jobs really is to, to, to lower the ROI, right. It decrease the value, increase the cost, but you're, I mean, fishing continues to be prevalent. You're seeing relatively new technique island hopping, self forming malware. I mean, it's just mind boggling, but, but how are you seeing, you know, the attack change? You know, what what's the adversary do differently over the last, you know, several years maybe pre and post pandemic, we've got a different attack service. What are you seeing? >>Well, we're seeing a lot higher volume attacks, a lot higher volume and velocity. Mm-hmm, <affirmative> it isn't uncommon at all for us to go in line and deploy our client side signals and see, uh, the upper 90%, um, is automated, unwanted automation hitting the application. Uh, so the fact that the security teams continue to underestimate the size of the problem. That is something I see. Every time we go in into an enterprise that they underestimate the size of the problem, largely because they're relying on, on capabilities like caps, or maybe they're relying on two of a and while two of a is a very important role in security. It doesn't stop automated attacks and cap certainly doesn't stop automated >>Tax. So, okay. So you said 90% now, as high as 90% are, are automated up from where maybe dial back to give us a, a marker as to where it used to be. >>Well, less than 1% is typically what all of our customers across the F five network enjoy less than 1% of all traffick hitting origin is unwanted, but when we first go online, it is upper 90, we've seen 99% of all traffic being unwanted >>Automation. But Dan, if I dial back to say 2015, was it at that? Was it that high? That, that was automated >>Back then? Or, you know, I, I don't know if it was that high then cuz stuffing was just, you know, starting to kind take off. Right? No. Right. Um, but as pre stuffing became better and better known among the criminal elements, that's when it really took off explain the pays you're right. Crime pays >>Now. Yeah. It's unfortunate, but it's true. Yeah. Explain the capture thing. Cause sometimes as a user, like it's impossible to do the capture, you know, it's like a twister. Yeah. >>I >>Got that one wrong it's and I presume it's because capture can be solved by, by bots. >>Well, actually the bots use an API into a human click farming. So they're humans to sit around, solving captures all day long. I actually became a human capture solver for a short time just to see what the experience was like. And they put me to the training, teaching me how to solve, captures more effectively, which was fascinating, cuz I needed that training frankly. And then they tested to make sure I solve caps quickly enough. And then I had solved maybe 30 or 40 caps and I hadn't earned one penny us yet. So this is how bots are getting around caps. They just have human solve them. >>Oh, okay. Now we hear a lot at this event, you gotta turn on multifactor authentication and obviously you don't want to use just SMS based MFA, but Dan you're saying not good enough. Why explain >>That? Well, most implementations of two a is, you know, you enter in username and password and if you enter in the correct username and password, you get a text message and you enter in the code. Um, if you enter in the incorrect username and password, you're not sent to code. So the, the purpose of a credential stocking attack is to verify whether the credentials are correct. That's the purpose. And so if it's a two, a protected log in, I've done that. Admittedly, I haven't taken over the account yet, but now that I have a list of known good credentials, I could partner with somebody on the dark web who specializes in defeating two, a through social engineering or port outs or SIM swaps S so seven compromises insiders at telcos, lots of different ways to get at the, uh, two, a text message. >>So, wow, <laugh>, this is really interesting, scary discussion. So what's the answer to, to that problem. How, how have five approach >>It highend touched on it. We, we want to improve security without introducing a lot of friction. And the solution is collecting client side signals. You interrogate the users, interactions, the browser, the device, the network, the environment, and you find things that are unique that can't be spoof like how it does floating point math or how it renders emojis. Uh, this way you're able to increase security without imposing friction on, on the customer. And honestly, if I have to ever have to solve another capture again, I, I, I just, my blood is boiling over capture. I wish everyone would rip it out >>As a user. I, I second that request I had, um, technology got us into this problem. Can technology help us get out of the problem? >>It has to. Um, I, I think, uh, when you think about the world that is powering all the digital experiences and there's two things that comes to mind that apps and APIs are at the center of them. And in order to solve the problem, we need to really zero in where, you know, the epic center of the, the, uh, attack can be and, and had the max amount of impact. Right? So that's part of the reason from a F five perspective, we think of application and API security together with the multitier the defense with, you know, DDoS to bots, to the simple boss, to the most sophisticated ones. And it has to be a continuum. You don't just say, Hey, I'm gonna solve this problem in this silo. You have to really think about app and APIs. Think about the infrastructure, think about, you know, we're here at AWS and cloud native solutions and API services is all over. You. Can't just say, I only worry about one cloud. You cannot say, I only worry about VMs. You really need to think of the entire app stack. And that's part of the reason when we build our portfolio, there is web application firewall, there's API security there's bot solution. And we added, you know, application infrastructure protection coming from our acquisition for threat stack. They're actually based in Boston. Uh, so it's, it's really important to think holistically of telemetry visibility, so you can make better decisions for detection response. >>So leads me to a number of questions first. The first I wanna stay within the AWS silo for a minute. Yeah. Yeah. What do you, what's the relationship with AWS? How will you, uh, integrating, uh, partnering with AWS? Let's start there. >>Yeah, so we work with AWS really closely. Uh, a lot of our solutions actually runs on the AWS platform, uh, for part of our shape services. It's it's, uh, using AWS capabilities and thread stack is purely running on AWS. We just, uh, actually had integration, maybe I'm pre announcing something, uh, with, uh, the cloud front, with our bot solutions. So we can be adding another layer of protection for customers who are using cloud front as the w on AWS. >>Okay. So, um, you integrate, you worry about a APIs, AWS APIs and primitives, but you have business on prem, you have business, other cloud providers. How do you simplify those disparities for your customers? Do you kind of abstract all that complexity away what's F fives philosophy with regard then and creating that continuous experience across the states irrespective of physical >>Location? Yeah, I think you're spot on in terms of, we have to abstract the complexity away. The technology complexity is not gonna go away because there's always gonna be new things coming in the world become more disaggregated and they're gonna be best of brain solutions coming out. And I think it's our job to say, how do we think about policies for web application? And, you know, you're, on-prem, you're in AWS, you're in another cloud, you're in your private data center and we can certainly abstract out the policies, the rules, and to make sure it's easier for a customer to say, I want this particular use case and they push a button. It goes to all the properties, whether it's their own edge or their own data center, and whether it's using AWS, you know, cloud front as you using or web. So that is part of our adapt. Uh, we call it adaptive application. Vision is to think delivery, think security, think optimizing the entire experience together using data. You know, I come from, uh, a company that was very much around data can power so many things. And we believe in that too. >>We use a, we use a term called super cloud, which, which implies a layer that floats above the hyperscale infrastructure hides the underlying complexity of the primitives adds value on top and creates a continuous experience across clouds, maybe out to the edge even someday on prem. Is that, does that sound like, it sounds like that's your strategy and approach and you know, where are you today? And that is that, is that technically feasible today? Is it, is it a journey? Maybe you could describe >>That. Yeah. So, uh, in my title, right, you talked about a security and distribute cloud services and the distribute cloud services came from a really important acquisition. We did last year and it's about, uh, is called Wil Tara. What they brought to F five is the ability not only having lot of the SAS capabilities and delivery capabilities was a very strong infrastructure. They also kept have capability like multi-cloud networking and, you know, people can really just take our solution and say, I don't have to go learn about all the, like I think using super cloud. Yeah, yeah. Is exactly that concept is we'll do all the hard work behind the scenes. You just need to decide what application, what user experience and we'll take care of the rest. So that solutions already in the market. And of course, there's always more things we can do collect more telemetry and integrate with more solutions. So there's more insertion point and customer can have their own choice of whatever other security solution they want to put on top of that. But we already provide, you know, the entire service around web application and API services and bot solution is a big piece of that. >>So I could look at analytics across those clouds and on-prem, and actually you don't have to go to four different stove pipes to find them, is that >>Right? Yeah. And I think you'd be surprised on what you would see. Like you, you know, typically you're gonna see large amounts of unwanted automation hitting your applications. Um, it's, I, I think the reason so many security teams are, are underestimating. The size of the problem is because these attacks are coming from tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of IP addresses. So, you know, for years, security teams have been blocking by IP and it's forced the attackers to become highly, highly distributed. So the security teams will typically identify the attack coming from the top hundred or 1500 noisiest IPS, but they missed the long tail of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of IPS that are only used one or two times, because, you know, over time we forced the attackers to do this. >>They're scaling. >>Yeah, they are. And, and they're coming from residential IPS now, uh, not just hosting IPS, they're coming from everywhere. >>And, and wow. I mean, I, we know that the pandemic changed the way that organization, they had to think more about network security, rethinking network security, obviously end point cloud security. But it sounds like the attackers as well, not only did they exploit that exposure, but yeah, yeah. They were working from home and then <laugh> >>The human flick farms. They're now distributor. They're all working from home. >>Now we could take advantage >>Of that when I was solving captures, you could do it on your cell phone just by walking around, solving, captures for money. >>Wow. Scary world. But we live in, thank you for helping making it a little bit safer, guys. Really appreciate you coming on the queue. >>We'll continue to work on that. And our motto is bring a better digital world to life. That's what we can set out >>To do. I love it. All right. Great. Having you guys. Thank you. And thank you for watching. Keep it right there. This is Dave ante from reinforce 2022. You're watching the cube right back after this short break.

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Last year in 2020 it was good to be in tech and even better to be in the cloud, as organizations had to rely on remote cloud services to keep things running. We believe that tech spending will increase seven to 8% in 2021. But we don't expect investments in cloud computing to sharply attenuate, when workers head back to the office. It's not a zero sum game, and we believe that pent up demand in on-prem data centers will complement those areas of high growth that we saw last year, namely cloud, AI, security, data and automation. Hello everyone, and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis we'll provide our take on the latest ETR COVID survey, and share why we think the tech boom will continue, well into the future. So let's take a look at the state of tech spending. Fitch Ratings has upped its outlook for global GDP to 6.1% for January's 5.3% projection. We've always expected tech spending to outperform GDP by at least 100 to 200 basis points, so we think 2021 could see 8% growth for the tech sector. That's a massive swing from last year's,5% contraction, and it's being powered by spending in North America, a return of small businesses, and, the massive fiscal stimulus injection from the U.S led central bank actions. As we'll show you, the ETR survey data suggests that cloud spending is here to stay, and a dollar spent back in the data center doesn't necessarily mean less spending on digital initiatives, generally and cloud specifically. Moreover, we see pent up demand for core on-prem data center infrastructure, especially networking. Now one caveat, is we continue to have concerns for the macro on-prem data storage sector. There are pockets of positivity, for example, pure storage seems to have accelerating momentum. But generally the data suggests the cloud and flash headroom, continue, to pressure spending on storage. Now we don't expect the stock market's current rotation out of tech. We don't expect that that changes the fundamental spending dynamic. We see cloud, AI and ML, RPA, cybersecurity and collaboration investments still hovering above, that 40% net score. Actually cybersecurity is not quite there, but it is a priority area for CIOs. We'll talk about that more later. And we expect that those high growth sectors will stay steady in ETRs April survey along with continued spending on application modernization in the form of containers. Now let me take a moment to comment on the recent action in tech stocks. If you've been following the market, you know that the rate on the 10-year Treasury note has been rising. This is important, because the 10 years of benchmark, and it affects other interest rates. As interest rates rise, high growth tech stocks, they become less attractive. And that's why there's been a rotation, out of the big tech high flyer names of 2020. So why do high growth stocks become less attractive to investors when interest rates rise? Well, it's because investors are betting on the future value of cash flows for these companies, and when interest rates go up, the future values of those cash flows shrink, making the valuations less attractive. Let's take an example. Snowflake is a company with a higher revenue multiple than pretty much any other stock, out there in the tech industry. Revenues at the company are growing more than 100%, last quarter, and they're projected to have a revenue of a billion dollars next year. Now on March 8th, Snowflake was valued at around $80 billion and was trading at roughly 75x forward revenue. Today, toward the middle the end of March. Snowflake is valued at about 50 billion or roughly 45x forward revenue. So lower growth companies that throw off more cash today, become more attractive in a rising rate climate because, the cash they throw off today is more valuable than it was in a low rate environment. The cash is there today versus, a high flying tech company where the cash is coming down the road and doesn't have to be discounted on a net present value basis. So the point is, this is really about math, not about fundamental changes in spending. Now the ETR spending data has shown, consistent upward momentum, and that cycle is continuing, leading to our sanguine outlook for the sector. This chart here shows the progression of CIO expectations on spending over time, relative to previous years. And you can see the steady growth in expectations each quarter, hitting 6% growth in 2021 versus 2020 for the full year. ETR estimates show and they do this with a 95% confidence level, that spending is going to be up between 5.1 to 6.8% this year. We are even more up optimistic accounting for recent upward revisions in GDP. And spending outside the purview of traditional IT, which we think will be a tailwind, due to digital initiatives and shadow tech spending. ETR covers some of that, but it is really a CIO heavy survey. So there's some parts that we think can grow even faster, than ETR survey suggests. Now the positive spending outlook, it's broad based across virtually all industries that ETR tracks. Government spending leads the pack by a wide margin, which probably gives you a little bit of heartburn. I know it does for me, yikes. Healthcare is interesting. Perhaps due to pent up demand, healthcare has been so busy saving lives, that it has some holes to fill. But look at the sectors at 5% or above. Only education really lags notably. Even energy which got crushed last year, showing a nice rebound. Now let's take a look at some of the strategies that organizations have employed during COVID, and see how they've changed. Look, the picture is actually quite positive in our view. This data shows the responses over five survey snapshots, starting in March of 2020. Most people are still working from home that really hasn't changed much. But we're finally seeing some loosening of the travel restrictions imposed last year, is a notable drop in canceled business trips. It's still high, but it's very promising trend. Quick aside, looks like Mobile World Congress is happening in late June in Barcelona. The host of the conference just held a show in Shanghai and 20,000 attendees showed up. theCube is planning to be there in Barcelona along with TelcoDr, Who took over Ericsson's 65,000 square foot space, when Ericsson tapped out of the conference. We are good together we're going to lay out the future of the digital telco, in a hybrid: physical slash virtual event. With the ecosystem of telcos, cloud, 5G and software communities. We're very excited to be at the heart of reinventing the event experience for the coming decade. Okay, back to the data. Hiring freezes, way down. Look at new IT deployments near flat from last quarter, with big uptick from a year ago. Layoffs, trending downward, that's really a positive. Hiring momentum is there. So really positive signs for tech in this data. Now let's take a look at the work from home, survey data. We've been sharing this for several quarters now, remember, the data showed that pre pandemic around 15 to 16% of employees worked remotely. And we had been sharing the CIO is expected that figure to slowly decline from the 70% pandemic levels and come into the spring in the summer, hovering in the 50% range. But then eventually landing in the mid 30s. Now the current survey shows 31%. So, essentially, it's exactly double from the pre COVID levels. It's going to be really interesting to see because across the board organizations are reporting, big increases in productivity as a result of how they've responded to COVID in the remote work practices and the infrastructure that's been put in place. And look, a lot of workers are expecting to stay remote. So we'll see where this actually lands. My personal feelings, the number is going to be higher than the low 30s. Perhaps well into the mid to upper 30s. Now let's take a look at the cloud and on-prem MCS. So were a little bit out on a limb here with a can't have a cake and eat it too scenario. Meaning pent up demand for data center infrastructure on-prem is going to combine with the productivity benefits of cloud in the digital imperative. So that means that technology budgets are going to get a bigger piece of the overall spending pie, relative to other initiatives. At least for the near term. ETR asked respondents about how the return to physical, is going to impact on-prem architectures and applications. You can see 63% of the respondents, had a cloud friendly answer, as shown in the first two bars. Whereas 30% had an on-prem friendly answer, as shown in the next three bars. Now, what stands out, is that only 5% of respondents plan to increase their on-prem spend to above pre COVID levels. Sarbjeet Johal pinged me last night and asked me to jump into a clubhouse session with Martin Casado and the other guys from Andreessen Horowitz. They were having this conversation about the coming cloud backlash. And how cloud native companies are spending so much, too much, in their opinion, on AWS and other clouds. And at some point, as they scale, they're going to have to claw back technology infrastructure on-prem, due to their AWS vague. I don't know. This data, it certainly does not suggest that that is happening today. So the cloud vendors, they keep getting more volume, you would think they're going to have better prices and better economies of scales than we'll see on-prem. And as we pointed out, the repatriation narrative that you hear from many on-prem vendors is kind of dubious. Look, if AWS Azure, and Google can't provide IT infrastructure and better security than I can on-prem, then something is amiss. Now however, they are creating an oligopoly. And if they get too greedy and get hooked on the margin crack, of cloud, they'd better be careful, or they're going to become the next regulated utility? So, it's going to be interesting to see if the Andreessen scenario has (laughs) legs, maybe they have another agenda, maybe a lot of their portfolio companies, have ideas are around doing things to help on-prem? Why are we so optimistic that we'll see a stronger 2021 on-prem spend if the cloud continues to command so much attention? Well, first, because nearly 20% of customers say there will be an uptick in on-prem spending. Second, we saw in 2020, that the big on-prem players, Dell, VMware, Oracle, and SAP in particular, and even IBM made it through, okay. And they've managed to figure out how to work through the crisis. And finally, we think that the lines between on-prem and cloud, and hybrid and cross cloud and edge will blur over the next five years. We've talked about this a lot, that abstraction layer that we see coming, and there's some real value opportunities there. It'll take some time. But we do see there, that the traditional vendors, are going to attack those new opportunities and create value across clouds and hybrid systems and out to the edge. Now, as those demarcation lines become more gray, a hybrid world is emerging that is going to require hardware and software investments that reduce latency and are proximate to users buildings and distributed infrastructure. So we see spending in certain key areas, continuing to be strong across the board, will require connecting on-prem to cloud in edge workloads. Here's where it CIOs see the action, asked to cite the technologies that will get the most attention in the next 12 months. These seven stood out among the rest. No surprise that cyber comes out as top priority, with cloud pretty high as well. But interesting to see the uptick in collaboration in networking. Execs are seeing the importance of collaboration technologies for remote workers. No doubt, there's lots of Microsoft Teams in that bar. But there's some pent up demand it seems for networking, we find that very interesting. Now, just to put this in context, in a spending context. We'll share a graphic from a previous breaking analysis episode. This chart shows the net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis. And the market share or pervasiveness in the ETR data set on the horizontal axis. The big four areas of spend momentum are cloud, ML and AI, containers in RPA. This is from the January survey, we don't expect a big change in the upcoming April data, we'll see. But these four stand out above the 40% line that we've highlighted, which to us is an indicator of elevated momentum. Now, note on the horizontal axis only cloud, cloud is the only sector that enjoys both greater than 60% market share on the x axis, and is above the 40% net score line and the y axis. So even though security is a top priority as we were talking about earlier. It competes with other budget items, still right there certainly on the horizontal axis, but it competes with other initiatives for that spend momentum. Okay, so key takeaways. Seven to 8% tech spending growth expected for 2021. Cloud is leading the charge, it's big and it has spending momentum, so we don't expect a big rotation out of cloud back to on-prem. Now, having said that, we think on-prem will benefit from a return to a post isolation economy. Because of that pent up demand. But we caution we think there are some headwinds, particularly in the storage sector. Rotation away from tech in the stock market is not based on a fundamental change in spending in our view, or demand, rather it's stock market valuation math. So there should be some good buying opportunities for you in the coming months. As money moves out of tech into those value stocks. But the market is very hard to predict. Oh 2020 was easy to make money. All you had to do is buy high growth and momentum tech stocks on dips. 2021 It's not that simple. So you got to do your homework. And as we always like to stress, formulate a thesis and give it time to work for you. Iterate and improve when you feel like it's not working for you. But stay current, and be true to your strategy. Okay, that's it for today. Remember, these episodes are all available as podcasts wherever you listen. So please subscribe. I publish weekly in siliconangle.com and wikibond.com and always appreciate the comments on LinkedIn. You can DM me @dvellante or email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com. Don't forget to check out etr.plus where all the survey data science actually resides. Some really interesting things that they're about to launch. So do follow that. This is Dave vellante. Thanks for watching theCube Insights powered by ETR. Good health to you, be safe and we'll see you next time.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Dell Technologies. World Digital Experience Brought to You by Dell Technologies. >>Welcome to the Cubes Coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020. The digital coverage Find Lisa Martin And then we started to be talking with one of Dell Technologies customers. Earth Camp. Joining Me is built sharp, the senior VP of product development and strategy from Earth Camp Phil, Welcome to the Cube. >>Thank you so much. >>So talk to me a little bit. About what Earth Cam does this very interesting Web can technology? You guys have tens of thousands of cameras and sensors all over the globe give her audience and understanding of what you guys are all about. >>Sure thing. The world's leading provider of Webcam technologies and mentioned content services were leaders and live streaming time lapse imaging primary focus in the vertical construction. So a lot of these, the most ambitious, largest construction projects around the world, you see, these amazing time lapse movies were capturing all of that imagery. You know, basically, around the clock of these cameras are are sending all of that image content to us when we're generating these time lapse movies from it. >>You guys, you're headquartered in New Jersey and I was commenting before we went live about your great background. So you're actually getting to be on site today? >>Yes, Yes, that's where lives from our headquarters in Upper Saddle River, New Jersey. >>Excellent. So in terms of the types of information that you're capturing. So I was looking at the website and see from a construction perspective or some of the big projects you guys have done the Hudson Yards, the Panama Canal expansion, the 9 11 Museum. But you talked about one of the biggest focus is that you have is in the construction industry in terms of what type of data you're capturing from all of these thousands of edge devices give us a little bit of insight into how much data you're capturing high per day, how it gets from the edge, presumably back to your court data center for editing. >>Sure, and it's not just construction were also in travel, hospitality, tourism, security, architectural engineering, basically, any any industry that that need high resolution visualization of their their projects or their their performance or of their, you know, product flow. So it's it's high resolution documentation is basically our business. There are billions of files in the isil on system right now. We are ingesting millions of images a month. We are also creating very high resolution panoramic imagery where we're taking hundreds and sometimes multiple hundreds of images, very high resolution images and stitching these together to make panoramas that air up to 30 giga pixel, sometimes typically around 1 to 2 giga pixel. But that composite imagery Eyes represents millions of images per per month coming into the storage system and then being, uh, stitched together to those those composites >>the millions of images coming in every month. You mentioned Isil on talk to me a little bit about before you were working with Delhi, EMC and Power Scale. How are you managing this massive volume of data? >>Sure we had. We've used a number of other enterprise storage systems. It was really nothing was as easy to manage Azazel on really is there was there was a lot of a lot of problems with overhead, the amount of time necessary from a systems administrator resource standpoint, you to manage that, uh, and and it's interesting with the amount of data that we handle. This is being billions of relatively small files there there, you know, half a megabyte to a couple of megabytes each. It's an interesting data profile, which, which isil on really is well suited for. >>So if we think about some of the massive changes that we've all been through the last in 2020 what are some of the changes that that Earth Kemp has seen with respect to the needs for organizations? Or you mentioned other industries, like travel hospitality? Since none of us could get to these great travel destinations, Have you seen a big drive up in the demand and the need to process data more data faster? >>Yeah, that's an injury interesting point with with the Pandemic. Obviously we had to pivot and move a lot of people toe working from home, which we were able to do pretty quickly. But there's also an interesting opportunity that arose from this, where so many of our customers and other people also have to do the same. And there is an increased demand for our our technology so people can remotely collaborate. They can. They can work at a distance. They can stay at home and see what's going on in these projects sites. So we really so kind of an uptick in the in the need for our products and services. And we've also created Cem basically virtual travel applications. We have an application on the Amazon Fire TV, which is the number one app in the travel platform of people can kind of virtually travel when they can't really get out there. So it's, uh, we've been doing kind of giving back Thio to people that are having having some issues with being able to travel around. We've done the fireworks of the Washington Mall around the Statue of Liberty for the July 4th, and this year will be Webcasting and New Year's in Times Square for our 25th year, actually. So again, helping people travel virtually and be, uh, maintain can be collectivity with with each other and with their projects, >>which is so essential during these times, where for the last 67 months everyone is trying to get a sense of community, and most of us just have the Internet. So I also heard you guys were available on Apple TV, someone to fire that up later and maybe virtually travel. Um, but tell me a little bit about how working in conjunction with Delta Technologies and Power Cell How is that enabled you to manage this massive volume change you've experienced this year? Because, as you said, it's also about facilitating collaboration, which is largely online these days. >>Yeah, I mean, the the great things they're working with Dell has been just our confidence in this infrastructure. Like I said, the other systems we worked with in the past we've always found ourselves kind of second guessing. Obviously, resolutions are increasing. The camera performance is increasing. Streaming video is everything is is constantly getting bigger and better, faster. Maurits And we're always innovating. We found ourselves on previous storage platforms having to really kind of go back and look at the second guess we're at with it With with this, this did L infrastructure. That's been it's been fantastic. We don't really have to think about that as much. We just continue innovating everything scales as we needed to dio. It's it's much easier to work with, >>so you've got power scale at your core data center in New Jersey. Tell me a little bit about how data gets from thes tens of thousands of devices at the edge, back to your editors for editing and how power scale facilitates faster editing, for example. >>Basically, you imagine every one of these cameras on It's not just camera. We have mobile applications. We have fixed position of robotic cameras. There's all these different data acquisition systems were integrating with weather sensors and different types of telemetry. All of that data is coming back to us over the Internet, so these are all endpoints in our network. Eso that's that's constantly being ingested into our network and say WTO. I salon the big the big thing that's really been a timesaver Working with the video editors is, instead of having to take that content, move it into an editing environment where we have we have a whole team of award winning video editors. Creating these time lapse is we don't need to keep moving that around. We're working natively on Iselin clusters. They're doing their editing, their subsequent edits. Anytime we have to update or change these movies as a project evolves, that's all it happened right there on that live environment on the retention. Is there if we have to go back later on all of our customers, data is really kept within that 11 area. It's consolidated, its secure. >>I was looking at the Del Tech website. There's a case study that you guys did earth campaign with Deltek saying that the video processing time has been reduced 20%. So that's a pretty significant increase. I could imagine what the volumes changing so much now but on Li not only is huge for your business, but to the demands that your customers have as well, depending on where there's demands are coming from >>absolutely and and just being able to do that a lot faster and be more nimble allows us to scale. We've added actually against speaking on this pandemic, we've actually added person who we've been hiring people. A lot of those people are working remotely, as as we've stated before on it's just with the increase in business. We have to continue to keep building on that on this storage environments been been great. >>Tell me about what you guys really kind of think about with respect to power scale in terms of data management, not storage management and what that difference means to your business. >>Well, again, I mean number number one was was really eliminating the amount of resource is amount of time we have to spend managing it. We've almost eliminated any downtime of any of any kind. We have greater storage density, were able to have better visualization on how our data is being used, how it's being access so as thes as thes things, a revolving. We really have good visibility on how the how the storage system is being used in both our production and our and also in our backup environments. It's really, really easy for us Thio to make our business decisions as we innovate and change processes, having that continual visibility and really knowing where we stand. >>And you mentioned hiring folks during the pandemic, which is fantastic but also being able to do things much in a much more streamlined way with respect to managing all of this data. But I am curious in terms of of innovation and new product development. What have you been able to achieve because you've got more resource is presumably to focus on being more innovative rather than managing storage >>well again? It's were always really pushing the envelope of what the technology can do. As I mentioned before, we're getting things into, you know, 20 and 30 Giga pixel. You know, people are talking about megapixel images were stitching hundreds of these together. We've we're just really changing the way imagery is used, uh, both in the time lapse and also just in archival process. Ah, lot of these things we've done with the interior. You know, we have this virtual reality product where you can you can walk through and see in the 3 60 bubble. We're taking that imagery, and we're combining it with with these been models who are actually taking the three D models of the construction site and combining it with the imagery. And we can start doing things to visualize progress and different things that are happening on the site. Look for clashes or things that aren't built like they're supposed to be built, things that maybe aren't done on the proper schedule or things that are maybe ahead of schedule, doing a lot of things to save people, time and money on these construction sites. We've also introduced a I machine learning applications into directly into the workflow in this in the storage environment. So we're detecting equipment and people and activities in the site where a lot of that would have been difficult with our previous infrastructure, it really is seamless and working with YSL on now. >>Imagine, by being able to infuse AI and machine learning, you're able to get insight faster to be ableto either respond faster to those construction customers, for example, or alert them. If perhaps something isn't going according to plan. >>A lot of it's about schedule. It's about saving money about saving time and again, with not as many people traveling to the sites, they really just have have constant visualization of what's going on. Day to day, we're detecting things like different types of construction equipment and things that are happening on the side. We're partnering with people that are doing safety analytics and things of that nature. So these these are all things that are very important to construction sites. >>What are some of the things as we are rounding out the calendar year 2020? What are some of the things that you're excited about going forward in 2021? That Earth cam is going to be able to get into and to deliver >>it, just MAWR and more people really, finally seeing the value. I mean, I've been doing this for 20 years, and it's just it's it's It's amazing how we're constantly seeing new applications and more people understanding how valuable these visual tools are. That's just a fantastic thing for us because we're really trying to create better lives through visual information. We're really helping people with things they can do with this imagery. That's what we're all about that's really exciting to us in a very challenging environment right now is that people are are recognizing the need for this technology and really starting to put it on a lot more projects. >>Well, it's You can kind of consider an essential service, whether or not it's a construction company that needs to manage and oversee their projects, making sure they're on budget on schedule, as you said, Or maybe even just the essential nous of helping folks from any country in the world connect with a favorite favorite travel location or sending the right to help. From an emotional perspective, I think the essential nous of what you guys are delivering is probably even more impactful now, don't you think? >>Absolutely and again about connecting people and when they're at home. And recently we we webcast the president's speech from the Flight 93 9 11 observation from the memorial. There was something where the only the immediate families were allowed to travel there. We webcast that so people could see that around the world we have documented again some of the biggest construction projects out there. The new rate years greater stadium was one of the recent ones, uh, is delivering this kind of flagship content. Wall Street Journal is to use some of our content recently to really show the things that have happened during the pandemic in Times Square's. We have these cameras around the world. So again, it's really bringing awareness of letting people virtually travel and share and really remain connected during this this challenging time on and again, we're seeing a really increase demand in the traffic in those areas as well. >>I can imagine some of these things that you're doing that you're achieving now are going to become permanent, not necessarily artifacts of Cove in 19 as you now have the opportunity to reach so many more people and probably the opportunity to help industries that might not have seen the value off this type of video to be able to reach consumers that they probably could never reach before. >>Yeah, I think the whole nature of business and communication and travel on everything is really going to be changed from this point forward. It's really people are looking at things very, very differently and again, seeing the technology really can help with so many different areas that, uh, that it's just it's gonna be a different kind of landscape out there we feel on that's really, you know, continuing to be seen on the uptick in our business and how many people are adopting this technology. We're developing a lot more. Partnerships with other companies were expanding into new industries on again. You know, we're confident that the current platform is going to keep up with us and help us, you know, really scale and evolved as thes needs air growing. >>It sounds to me like you have the foundation with Dell Technologies with power scale to be able to facilitate the massive growth that you're saying and the skill in the future like you've got that foundation. You're ready to go? >>Yeah, we've been We've been We've been using the system for five years already. We've already added capacity. We can add capacity on the fly, Really haven't hit any limits. And what we can do, It's It's almost infinitely scalable, highly redundant. Gives everyone a real sense of security on our side. And, you know, we could just keep innovating, which is what we do without hitting any any technological limits with with our partnership. >>Excellent. Well, Bill, I'm gonna let you get back to innovating for Earth camp. It's been a pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much for your time today. >>Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure >>for Bill Sharp and Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes. Digital coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020. Thanks for watching. Yeah,

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE! With digital coverage of Dell Technologies World, digital experience. Brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, the digital coverage. I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm excited to be talking with one of Dell Technologies' customers EarthCam. Joining me is Bill Sharp, the senior VP of product development and strategy from EarthCam. Bill, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you so much. >> So talk to me a little bit about what EarthCam does. This is very interesting webcam technology. You guys have tens of thousands of cameras and sensors all over the globe. Give our audience an understanding of what you guys are all about. >> Sure thing. The world's leading provider of webcam technologies, you mentioned content and services, we're leaders in live streaming, time-lapse imaging, primary focus in the vertical construction. So with a lot of these, the most ambitious, largest construction projects around the world that you see these amazing time-lapse movies, we're capturing all of that imagery basically around the clock, these cameras are sending all of that image content to us and we're generating these time-lapse movies from it. >> You guys are headquartered in New Jersey. I was commenting before we went live about your great background. So you're actually getting to be onsite today? >> Yes, yes. We're live from our headquarters in upper Saddle River, New Jersey. >> Excellent, so in terms of the types of information that you're capturing, so I was looking at the website, and see from a construction perspective, some of the big projects you guys have done, the Hudson Yards, the Panama Canal expansion, the 9/11 museum. But you talked about one of the biggest focuses that you have is in the construction industry. In terms of what type of data you're capturing from all of these thousands of edge devices, give us a little bit of an insight into how much data you're capturing per day, how it gets from the edge, presumably, back to your core data center for editing. >> Sure, and it's not just construction. We're also in travel, hospitality, tourism, security, architecture, engineering, basically any industry that need high resolution visualization of their projects or their performance or their product flow. So it's high resolution documentation is basically our business. There are billions of files in the Isilon system right now. We are ingesting millions of images a month. We are also creating very high resolution panoramic imagery where we're taking hundreds and sometimes multiple hundreds of images, very high resolution images and stitching these together to make panoramas that are up to 30 gigapixel sometimes. Typically around one to two gigapixel but that composite imagery represents millions of images per month coming into the storage system and then being stitched together to those composites. >> So millions of images coming in every month, you mentioned Isilon. Talk to me a little bit about before you were working with Dell EMC and PowerScale, how were you managing this massive volume of data? >> Sure, we've used a number of other enterprise storage systems. It was really nothing was as easy to manage as Isilon really is. There was a lot of problems with overhead, the amount of time necessary from a systems administrator resource standpoint, to manage that. And it's interesting with the amount of data that we handle, being billions of relatively small files. They're, you know, a half a megabyte to a couple of megabytes each. It's an interesting data profile which Isilon really is well suited for. >> So if we think about some of the massive changes that we've all been through in the last, in 2020, what are some of the changes that EarthCam hasn't seen with respect to the needs for organizations, or you mentioned other industries like travel, hospitality, since none of us can get to these great travel destinations, have you seen a big drive up in the demand and the need to process more data faster? >> Yeah, that's an interesting point with the pandemic. I mean, obviously we had to pivot and move a lot of people to working from home, which we were able to do pretty quickly, but there's also an interesting opportunity that arose from this where so many of our customers and other people also have to do the same. And there is an increased demand for our technology. So people can remotely collaborate. They can work at a distance, they can stay at home and see what's going on in these project sites. So we really saw kind of an uptick in the need for our products and services. And we've also created some basically virtual travel applications. We have an application on the Amazon Fire TV which is the number one app in the travel platform, and people can kind of virtually travel when they can't really get out there. So it's, we've been doing kind of giving back to people that are having some issues with being able to travel around. We've done the fireworks at the Washington Mall around the Statue of Liberty for July 4th. And this year we'll be webcasting New Years in Times Square for our 25th year, actually. So again, helping people travel virtually and maintain connectivity with each other, and with their projects. >> Which is so essential during these times where for the last six, seven months, everyone is trying to get a sense of community and most of us just have the internet. So I also heard you guys were available on the Apple TV, someone should fire that up later and maybe virtually travel. But tell me a little bit about how working in conjunction with Dell Technologies and PowerScale. How has that enabled you to manage this massive volume change that you've experienced this year? Because as you said, it's also about facilitating collaboration which is largely online these days. >> Yeah, and I mean, the great things of working with Dell has been just our confidence in this infrastructure. Like I said, the other systems we've worked with in the past we've always found ourselves kind of second guessing. We're constantly innovating. Obviously resolutions are increasing. The camera performance is increasing, streaming video is, everything is constantly getting bigger and better, faster, more, and we're always innovating. We found ourselves on previous storage platforms having to really kind of go back and look at them, second guess where we're at with it. With the Dell infrastructure it's been fantastic. We don't really have to think about that as much. We just continue innovating, everything scales as we need it to do. It's much easier to work with. >> So you've got PowerScale at your core data center in New Jersey. Tell me a little bit about how data gets from these tens of thousands of devices at the edge, back to your editors for editing, and how PowerScale facilitates faster editing, for example. >> Well, basically you can imagine every one of these cameras, and it's not just cameras. It's also, you know, we have 360 virtual reality kind of bubble cameras. We have mobile applications, we have fixed position and robotic cameras. There's all these different data acquisition systems we're integrating with weather sensors and different types of telemetry. All of that data is coming back to us over the internet. So these are all endpoints in our network. So that's constantly being ingested into our network and saved to Isilon. The big thing that's really been a time saver working with the video editors is instead of having to take that content, move it into an editing environment where we have a whole team of award-winning video editors creating these time lapses. We don't need to keep moving that around. We're working natively on Isilon clusters. They're doing their editing there, and subsequent edits. Anytime we have to update or change these movies as a project evolves, that's all, can happen right there on that live environment. And the retention is there. If we have to go back later on, all of our customers' data is really kept within that one area, it's consolidated and it's secure. >> I was looking at the Dell Tech website, and there's a case study that you guys did, EarthCam did with Dell Tech saying that the video processing time has been reduced 20%. So that's a pretty significant increase. I can imagine with the volumes changing so much now, not only is huge to your business but to the demands that your customers have as well, depending on where those demands are coming from. >> Absolutely. And just being able to do that a lot faster and be more nimble allows us to scale. We've added actually, again, speaking of during this pandemic, we've actually added personnel, we've been hiring people. A lot of those people are working remotely as we've stated before. And it's just with the increase in business, we have to continue to keep building on that, and this storage environment's been great. >> Tell me about what you guys really kind of think about with respect to PowerScale in terms of data management, not storage management, and what that difference means to your business. >> Well, again, I mean, number one was really eliminating the amount of resources. The amount of time we have to spend managing it. We've almost eliminated any downtime of any kind. We have greater storage density, we're able to have better visualization on how our data is being used, how it's being accessed. So as these things are evolving, we really have good visibility on how the storage system is being used in both our production and also in our backup environments. It's really, really easy for us to make our business decisions as we innovate and change processes, having that continual visibility and really knowing where we stand. >> And you mentioned hiring folks during the pandemic, which is fantastic, but also being able to do things in a much more streamlined way with respect to managing all of this data. But I am curious in terms of innovation and new product development, what have you been able to achieve? Because you've got more resources presumably to focus on being more innovative rather than managing storage. >> Well, again, it's, we're always really pushing the envelope of what the technology can do. As I mentioned before, we're getting things into, you know, 20 and 30 gigapixels, people are talking about megapixel images, we're stitching hundreds of these together. We're just really changing the way imagery is used both in the time lapse and also just in archival process. A lot of these things we've done with the interior, we have this virtual reality product where you can walk through and see in a 360 bubble, we're taking that imagery and we're combining it with these BIM models. So we're actually taking the 3D models of the construction site and combining it with the imagery. And we can start doing things to visualize progress, and different things that are happening on the site, look for clashes or things that aren't built like they're supposed to be built, things that maybe aren't done on the proper schedule or things that are maybe ahead of schedule, doing a lot of things to save people time and money on these construction sites. We've also introduced AI and machine learning applications directly into the workflow in the storage environment. So we're detecting equipment and people and activities in the site where a lot of that would have been difficult with our previous infrastructure. It really is seamless and working with Isilon now. >> I imagine by being able to infuse AI and machine learning, you're able to get insights faster, to be able to either respond faster to those construction customers, for example, or alert them if perhaps something isn't going according to plan. >> Yeah, a lot of it's about schedule, it's about saving money, about saving time. And again, with not as many people traveling to these sites, they really just have to have constant visualization of what's going on day to day. We're detecting things like different types of construction equipment and things that are happening on the site. We're partnering with people that are doing safety analytics and things of that nature. So these are all things that are very important to construction sites. >> What are some of the things as we are rounding out the calendar year 2020, what are some of the things that you're excited about going forward in 2021, that EarthCam is going to be able to get into and to deliver? >> Just more and more people really finally seeing the value. I mean I've been doing this for 20 years and it's just, it's amazing how we're constantly seeing new applications and more people understanding how valuable these visual tools are. That's just a fantastic thing for us because we're really trying to create better lives through visual information. We're really helping people with the things they can do with this imagery. That's what we're all about. And that's really exciting to us in a very challenging environment right now is that people are recognizing the need for this technology and really starting to put it on a lot more projects. >> Well, you can kind of consider it an essential service whether or not it's a construction company that needs to manage and oversee their projects, making sure they're on budget, on schedule, as you said, or maybe even just the essentialness of helping folks from any country in the world connect with a favorite travel location, or (indistinct) to help from an emotional perspective. I think the essentialness of what you guys are delivering is probably even more impactful now, don't you think? >> Absolutely. And again about connecting people when they're at home, and recently we webcast the president's speech from the Flight 93 9/11 observation from the memorial, there was something where only the immediate families were allowed to travel there. We webcast that so people could see that around the world. We've documented, again, some of the biggest construction projects out there, the new Raiders stadium was one of the recent ones, just delivering this kind of flagship content. Wall Street Journal has used some of our content recently to really show the things that have happened during the pandemic in Times Square. We have these cameras around the world. So again, it's really bringing awareness. So letting people virtually travel and share and really remain connected during this challenging time. And again, we're seeing a real increased demand in the traffic in those areas as well. >> I can imagine some of these things that you're doing that you're achieving now are going to become permanent not necessarily artifacts of COVID-19, as you now have the opportunity to reach so many more people and probably the opportunity to help industries that might not have seen the value of this type of video to be able to reach consumers that they probably could never reach before. >> Yeah, I think the whole nature of business and communication and travel and everything is really going to be changed from this point forward. It's really, people are looking at things very, very differently. And again, seeing that the technology really can help with so many different areas that it's just, it's going to be a different kind of landscape out there we feel. And that's really continuing to be seen as on the uptick in our business and how many people are adopting this technology. We're developing a lot more partnerships with other companies, we're expanding into new industries. And again, you know, we're confident that the current platform is going to keep up with us and help us really scale and evolve as these needs are growing. >> It sounds to me like you have the foundation with Dell Technologies, with PowerScale, to be able to facilitate the massive growth that you were saying and the scale in the future, you've got that foundation, you're ready to go. >> Yeah, we've been using the system for five years already. We've already added capacity. We can add capacity on the fly, really haven't hit any limits in what we can do. It's almost infinitely scalable, highly redundant. It gives everyone a real sense of security on our side. And you know, we can just keep innovating, which is what we do, without hitting any technological limits with our partnership. >> Excellent, well, Bill, I'm going to let you get back to innovating for EarthCam. It's been a pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much for your time today. >> Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. >> For Bill Sharp, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE's digital coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020. Thanks for watching. (calm music)

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation hi Bri welcome back this is Dave Volante and welcome to this special presentation made possible by IBM we're talking about data op data ops in Acton Steve Lucas here he's the senior vice president and director of data management at Associated Bank be great to see how are things going and in Wisconsin all safe we're doing well we're staying safe staying healthy thanks for having me Dave yeah you're very welcome so Associated Bank and regional bank Midwest to cover a lot of the territories not just Wisconsin but another number of other states around there retail commercial lending real estate offices stuff I think the largest bank in in Wisconsin but tell us a little bit about your business in your specific role sure yeah no it's a good intro we're definitely largest bank at Corvis concen and then we have branches in the in the Upper Midwest area so Minnesota Illinois Wisconsin our primary locations my role at associated I'm director data management so been with the bank a couple of years now and really just focused on defining our data strategy as an overall everything from data ingestion through consumption of data and analytics all the way through and then I'm also the data governance components and keeping the controls and the rails in place around all of our data in its usage so financial services obviously one of the more cutting-edge industries in terms of their use of technology not only are you good negotiators but you you often are early adopters you guys were on the Big Data bandwagon early a lot of financial services firms we're kind of early on in Hadoop but I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about sort of the business drivers and and where's the poor the pressure point that are informing your digital strategy your your data and data op strategy sure yeah I think that one of the key areas for us is that we're trying to shift from more of a reactive mode into more of a predictive prescriptive mode from a data and analytics perspective and using our data to infuse and drive more business decisions but also to infuse it in actual applications and customer experience etc so we have a wealth of data at our fingertips we're really focused on starting to build out that data link style strategy make sure that we're kind of ahead of the curve as far as trying to predict what our end users are going to need and some of the advanced use cases we're going to have before we even know that they actually exist right so it's really trying to prepare us for the future and what's next and and then abling and empowering the business to be able to pivot when we need to without having everything perfect that they prescribed and and ready for what if we could talk about a little bit about the data journey I know it's kind of a buzzword but in my career as a independent observer and analyst I've kind of watched the promise of whether it was decision support systems or enterprise data warehouse you know give that 360 degree view of the business the the real-time nature the the customer intimacy all that in and up until sort of the recent digital you know meme I feel as though the industry hasn't lived up to that promise so I wonder if you could take us through the journey and tell us sort of where you came from and where you are today and I really want to sort of understand some of the successes they've had sure no that's a that's a great point nice I feel like as an industry I think we're at a point now where the the people process technology have sort of all caught up to each other right I feel that that real-time streaming analytics the data service mentality just leveraging web services and API is more throughout our organization in our industry as a whole I feel like that's really starting to take shape right now and and all the pieces of that puzzle have come together so kind of where we started from a journey perspective it was it was very much if your your legacy reporting data warehouse mindset of tell me tell me the data elements that you think you're going to need we'll figure out how do we map those in and form them we'll figure out how to get those prepared for you and that whole lifecycle that waterfall mentality of how do we get this through the funnel and get it to users quality was usually there the the enablement was still there but it was missing that that rapid turnaround it was also missing the the what's next right than what you haven't thought of and almost to a point of just discouraging people from asking for too many things because it got too expensive it got too hard to maintain there was some difficulty in that space so some of the things that we're trying to do now is build that that enablement mentality of encouraging people to ask for everything so when we bring out new systems - the bank is no longer an option as far as how much data they're going to send to us right we're getting all of the data we're going to we're going to bring that all together for people and then really starting to figure out how can this data now be used and and we almost have to push that out and infuse it within our organization as opposed to waiting for it to be asked for so I think that all of the the concepts so that bringing that people process and then now the tools and capabilities together has really started to make a move for us and in the industry I mean it's really not an uncommon story right you had a traditional data warehouse system you had you know some experts that you had to go through to get the data the business kind of felt like it didn't own the data you know it felt like it was imposing every time it made a request or maybe it was frustrated because it took so long and then by the time they got the data perhaps you know the market had shifted so it create a lot of frustration and then to your point but but it became very useful as a reporting tool and that was kind of this the sweet spot so so how did you overcome that and you know get to where you are today and you know kind of where are you today I was gonna say I think we're still overcoming that we'll see it'll see how this all goes right I think there's there's a couple of things that you know we've started to enable first off is just having that a concept of scale and enablement mentality and everything that we do so when we bring systems on we bring on everything we're starting to have those those components and pieces in place and we're starting to build more framework base reusable processes and procedures so that every ask is not brand new it's not this reinvent the wheel and resolve for for all that work so I think that's helped if expedite our time to market and really get some of the buy-in and support from around the organization and it's really just finding the right use cases and finding the different business partners to work with and partner with so that you help them through their journey as well is there I'm there on a similar roadmap and journey for for their own life cycles as well in their product element or whatever business line there so from a process standpoint that you kind of have to jettison the you mentioned waterfall before and move to a more being an agile approach did it require different different skill sets talk about the process and the people side of yeah it's been a it's been a shift we've tried to shift more towards I wouldn't call us more formal agile I would say we're a little bit more lean from a an iterative backlog type of approach right so what are you putting that work together in queues and having the queue of B reprioritized working with the business owners to help through those things has been a key success criteria for us and how we start to manage that work as opposed to opening formal project requests and and having all that work have to funnel through some of the old channels that like you mentioned earlier kind of distracted a little bit from from the way things had been done in the past and added some layers that people felt potentially wouldn't be necessary if they thought it was a small ask in their eyes you know I think it also led to a lot of some of the data silos and and components that we have in place today in the industry and I don't think our company is alone and having data silos and components of data in different locations but those are there for a reason though those were there because they're they're filling a need that has been missing or a gap in the solution so what we're trying to do is really take that to heart and evaluate what can we do to enable those mindsets and those mentalities and find out what was the gap and why did they have to go get a siloed solution or work around operations and technology and the channels that had been in place what would you say well your biggest challenges in getting from point A to point B point B being where you are today there were challenges on each of the components of the pillar right so people process technology people are hard to change right men behavioral type changes has been difficult that there's components of that that definitely has been in place same with the process side right so so changing it into that backlog style mentality and working with the users and having more that be sort of that maintenance type support work is is a different call culture for our organization and traditional project management and then the tool sets right the the tools and capabilities we had to look in and evaluate what tools do we need to Mabel this behavior in this mentality how do we enable more self-service the exploration how do we get people the data that they need when they need it and empower them to use so maybe you could share with us some of the outcomes and I know it's yeah we're never done in this business but but thinking about you know the investments that you've made in intact people in reprocessing you know the time it takes to get leadership involved what has been so far anyway the business outcome and you share any any metrics or it is sort of subjective a guidance I yeah I think from a subjective perspective the some of the biggest things for us has just been our ability to to truly start to have that very 60 degree view of the customer which we're probably never going to get they're officially right there's there everyone's striving for that but the ability to have you know all of that data available kind of at our fingertips and have that all consolidated now into one one location one platform and start to be that hub that starts to redistribute that data to our applications and infusing that out has been a key component for us I think some of the other big kind of components are differentiators for us and value that we can show from an organizational perspective we're in an M&A mode right so we're always looking from a merger and acquisition perspective our the model that we've built out from a data strategy perspective has proven itself useful over and over now in that M&A mentality of how do you rapidly ingest new data sets it had understood get it distributed to the right consumers it's fit our model exactly and and it hasn't been an exception it's been just part of our overall framework for how we get that data and it wasn't anything new that we had to do different because it was M&A just timelines were probably a little bit more expedited the other thing that's been interesting in some of the world that were in now right from a a Kovach perspective and having a pivot and start to change some of the way we do business and some of the PPP loans and and our business models sort of had to change overnight and our ability to work with our different lines of business and get them the data they need to help drive those decisions was another scenario where had we not had the foundational components there in the platform there to do some of this if we would have spun a little bit longer so your data ops approach I'm gonna use that term helped you in this in this kovat situation I mean you had the PPE you had you know of slew of businesses looking to get access to that money you had uncertainty with regard to kind of what the rules of the game were what you was the bank you had a Judah cape but you it was really kind of opaque in terms of what you had to do the volume of loans had to go through the roof in the time frame it was like within days or weeks that you had to provide these so I wonder if we could talk about that a little bit and how you're sort of approach the data helped you be prepared for that yeah no it was a race I mean the bottom line was it felt like a race right from from industry perspective as far as how how could we get this out there soon enough fast enough provide the most value to our customers our applications teams did a phenomenal job on enabling the applications to help streamline some of the application process for the loans themselves but from a data and reporting perspective behind the scenes we were there and we had some tools and capabilities and readiness to say we have the data now in our in our lake we can start to do some business driven decisions around all all of the different components of what's being processed on a daily basis from an application perspective versus what's been funded and how do those start to funnel all the way through doing some data quality checks and operational reporting checks to make sure that that data move properly and got booked in in the proper ways because of the rapid nature of how that was was all being done other covent type use cases as well we had some some different scenarios around different feed reporting and and other capabilities that the business wasn't necessarily prepared for we wouldn't have planned to have some of these types of things and reporting in place that we were able to give it because we had access to all the data because of these frameworks that we had put into place that we could pretty rapidly start to turn around some of those data some of those data points and analytics for us to make some some better decisions so given the propensity in the pace of M&A there has to be a challenge fundamentally in just in terms of data quality consistency governance give us the before and after you know before kind of before being the before the data ops mindset and after being kind of where you are today I think that's still a journey we're always trying to get better on that as well but the data ops mindset for us really has has shifted us to start to think about automation right pipelines that enablement a constant improvement and and how do we deploy faster deploy more consistently and and have the right capabilities in place when we need it so you know where some of that has come into place from an M&A perspective is it's really been around the building scale into everything that we do dezq real-time nature this scalability the rapid deployment models that we have in place is really where that starts to join forces and really become become powerful having having the ability to rapidly ingesting new data sources whether we know about it or not and then exposing that and having the tools and platforms be able to expose that to our users and enable our business lines whether it's covent whether it's M&A the use cases keep coming up right they we keep running into the same same concept which is how rapidly get people the data they need when they need it but still provide the rails and controls and make sure that it's governed and controllable on the way as well [Music] about the tech though wonder if we could spend some time on that I mean can you paint a picture of us so I thought what what what we're looking at here you've got you know some traditional IDI w's involved I'm sure you've got lots of data sources you you may be one of the zookeepers from the the Hadoop days with a lot of you know experimentation there may be some machine intelligence and they are painting a pic before us but sure no so we're kind of evolving some of the tool sets and capabilities as well we have some some generic kind of custom in-house build ingestion frameworks that we've started to build out for how to rapidly ingest and kind of script out the nature of of how we bring those data sources into play what we're what we've now started as well as is a journey down IBM compact product which is really gonna it's providing us that ability to govern and control all of our data sources and then start to enable some of that real-time ad hoc analytics and data preparation data shaping so some of the components that we're doing in there is just around that data discovery pointing that data sources rapidly running data profiles exposing that data to our users obviously very handy in the emanating space and and anytime you get new data sources in but then the concept of publishing that and leveraging some of the AI capabilities of assigning business terms in the data glossary and those components is another key component for us on the on the consumption side of the house for for data we have a couple of tools in place where Cognos shop we do a tableau from a data visualization perspective as well that what that were we're leveraging but that's where cloud pack is now starting to come into play as well from a data refinement perspective and giving the ability for users to actually go start to shape and prep their data sets all within that governed concept and then we've actually now started down the enablement path from an AI perspective with Python and R and we're using compact to be our orchestration tool to keep all that governed and controlled as well enable some some new AI models and some new technologies in that space we're actually starting to convert all of our custom-built frameworks into python now as well so we start to have some of that embedded within cloud pack and we can start to use some of the rails of those frameworks with it within them okay so you've got the ingest and ingestion side you've done a lot of automation it sounds like called the data profiling that's maybe what classification and automating that piece and then you've got the data quality piece the governance you got visualization with with tableau and and this kind of all fits together in a in an open quote unquote open framework is that right yeah I exactly I mean the the framework itself from our perspective where we're trying to keep the tools as as consistent as we can we really want to enable our users to have the tools that they need in the toolbox and and keep all that open what we're trying to focus on is making sure that they get the same data the same experience through whatever tool and mechanism that they're consuming from so that's where that platform mentality comes into place having compact in the middle to help govern all that and and reprovision some of those data sources out for us has it has been a key component for us well see if it sounds like you're you know making a lot of progress or you know so the days of the data temple or the high priest of data or the sort of keepers of that data really to more of a data culture where the businesses kind of feel ownership for their own data you believe self-service I think you've got confidence much more confident than the in the compliance and governance piece but bring us home just in terms of that notion of data culture and where you are and where you're headed no definitely I think that's that's been a key for us too as as part of our strategy is really helping we put in a strategy that helps define and dictate some of those structures and ownership and make that more clear some of the of the failures of the past if you will from an overall my monster data warehouse was around nobody ever owned it there was there wasn't you always ran that that risk of either the loudest consumer actually owned it or no one actually owned it what we've started to do with this is that Lake mentality and and having all that data ingested into our our frameworks the data owners are clear-cut it's who sends that data in what is the book record system for that source data we don't want a ability we don't touch it we don't transform it as we load it it sits there and available you own it we're doing the same mentality on the consumer side so we have we have a series of structures from a consumption perspective that all of our users are consuming our data if it's represented exactly how they want to consume it so again that ownership we're trying to take out a lot of that gray area and I'm enabling them to say yeah I own this I understand what I'm what I'm going after and and I can put the the ownership and the rule and rules and the stewardship around that as opposed to having that gray model in the middle that that that we never we never get but I guess to kind of close it out really the the concept for us is enabling people and end-users right giving them the data that they need when they need it and it's it's really about providing the framework and then the rails around around doing that and it's not about building out a formal bill warehouse model or a formal lessor like you mentioned before some of the you know the ivory tower type concepts right it's really about purpose-built data sets getting the giving our users empowered with the data they need when they need it all the way through and fusing that into our applications so that the applications and provide the best user experiences and and use the data to our advantage all about enabling the business I got a shove all I have you how's that IBM doing you know as a as a partner what do you like what could they be doing better to make your life easier sure I think I think they've been a great partner for us as far as that that enablement mentality the cloud pack platform has been a key for us we wouldn't be where we are without that tool said I our journey originally when we started looking at tools and modernization of our staff was around data quality data governance type components and tools we now because of the platform have released our first Python I models into the environment we have our studio capabilities natively because of the way that that's all container is now within cloud back so we've been able to enable new use cases and really advance us where we would have a time or a lot a lot more technologies and capabilities and then integrate those ourselves so the ability to have that all done has or and be able to leverage that platform has been a key to helping us get some of these roles out of this as quickly as we have as far as a partnership perspective they've been great as far as listening to what what the next steps are for us where we're headed what can we what do we need more of what can they do to help us get there so it's it's really been an encouraging encouraging environment I think they as far as what can they do better I think it's just keep keep delivering write it delivery is ping so keep keep releasing the new functionality and features and keeping the quality of the product intact well see it was great having you on the cube we always love to get the practitioner angle sounds like you've made a lot of progress and as I said when we're never finished in this industry so best of luck to you stay safe then and thanks so much for for sharing appreciate it thank you all right and thank you for watching everybody this is Dave Volante for the cube data ops in action we got the crowd chat a little bit later get right there but right back right of this short break [Music] [Music]

>>Live from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the cube covering ifs world conference 2019 brought to you by ifs. >>Well going back to Boston and everybody, this is the cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We're here day one at the ifs world conference at the Hynes convention center in Boston. Cindy shutdown is here. She's the president of America's at ifs and she's joined by to my right, K in Blackwell, who's a controller at PPC partners, one of the divisions of PPC Metro power. And rod is the CIO of PPC partners. Welcome folks. Good to see you. I said, let me start with you. So you were on last year in the cube down at Atlanta. You still kind of set some, set some goals, you're a little competitive with your other brethren within then ifs. We love it. You know, we're Americans. Okay. So how's it going in North America? >>Um, well it's, it's growing well. We've had fantastic growth and it's been, you know, a little bit of competition within ifs, but you know, certainly we were very proud. We were named region of the year last year. So we won the coveted cup, which, uh, means, uh, we, uh, we want to keep that cup. So that's some of the, some of the competition that we've got going, right? >>Yeah. Well, of course, most of us based companies, they'll do, they'll start up 79, you know, 90% of their businesses, U S if not 100%, and then they'll slowly go overseas as some of the opposite. Right? >>Very much. I mean, ifs is a European based company. We've been in the, in the U S for quite awhile and, but we've really been investing in our growth and we've had fantastic growth over the last few years. And I think, you know, one of the reasons for that growth is our customer satisfaction in the fact that we really want to listen to our customers. You know, I, um, I, I travel quite a lot as you can imagine. And when I travel, I always try to make sure I can visit customers and hear what they have to say, you know, and of course we love to hear the good things, but I also like to hear when they can give us some ideas for improvement and um, you know, then that gives us something to work on and to, you know, to keep moving forward. Um, I also think that, you know, the good thing about that is, um, it gives us a chance to listen and um, you know, I heard something really great from one of our customers, they went live two weeks ago and they called up and said, Hey, can we do a customer story? I love things like that. Yeah. >>I always love that. Uh, let me think about it. I'll get back to you. Okay. What's your relationship between ifs and PPC part? >>Well, PPC partners is one of our newer customers in there in the middle of an implementation and they're doing some great things around digital transformation. And when I had this opportunity to be here on the cube, I thought it would be great to invite rod and can with me and to, you know, tell some of the things that they're doing. >>Cool. So I kind of recruited Cindy as my cohost, your, they're going to be the defective coho. So welcome to the queue and then we're going to show you right to the fire. Okay. So, uh, can you describe your, your role, your when one of the divisions of PPC partners, right? So maybe maybe set up sort of PPC partners and then your role. >>Right. Okay. So PPC is a specialty contracting company and we have four subsidiary companies that operate in the upper Midwest and then also the Southeastern United States. And we provide, um, um, customers within a base innovative, innovative solutions in the electrical and mechanical contracting. So there are those four companies. I was one of the controllers, um, of those four companies for a lot of years. And now I'm on the core team. There's four of us, five of us now, um, that are involved in the implement. >>Okay. So you got all the numbers in your head. And then rod, you're the CIO and you guys are a service organization for all the divisions. Is that correct? That is correct. >>We sit at the holding company and we're responsible for technology across all four of those specialty contractor companies that can just mention. >>So I love these segments, Cindy, because you know, we, here you go, we go to a lot of conferences in the cube and um, you hear a lot about digital transformation, but, so I'd like to ask the practitioners, what does that mean for you guys? We've got somebody who's very close to the line of business, like I say, knows the numbers, but at the end of the day you've got to deliver the technology services. So what does digital transformation mean to you? What's the company doing in that regard? So a great question actually. >>Um, you'll find companies like ours that have been on the same platform for quite a while, uh, 50 plus years, uh, five zero five, six, zero, uh, probably North of five zero, but we'll go with five zero. Uh, and what happens over time is just, you know, with the system can't grow with the organizations, you resort to a lot of manual paper pushing a lot of file flinging, lots of Excel. And so there's just a ton of duplication of effort and those types of things going on. So from a technology standpoint, that's really the stuff that I come in and see and go, you know. Um, but overall I think that getting to the ifs platform, getting a lot of those redundant processes, a lot of the file flinging out of there, it's just going to be beneficial for all of them. >>Okay. So you guys have had to make the business, you're in the middle of the implementation, right? Is that correct? So she had to go through the business case. Um, it sounds like the business case was, you know, we're, we're basically struggling with running our business because, you know, data's all over the place. We don't have a single view of our business, our customers, et cetera. So we have to come to grips with that. But, but, so what was the business case like? I presume that you were involved as well. >>Right. So I've was really involved in building the software that we've used for that 40 plus years though I haven't used it all of them two years. Um, and, and it was really. It was built by accountants. We, you know, intended for it to meet the needs of the whole, the whole organization. But really it was built by accountants. So, um, we've found that we just really weren't able to keep up with meeting the needs of all of the users. Um, so when we started looking at that, we also had, we were running on a couple of different, um, I'm going to call them boxes. We run it on IBM. So, um, we were not able to look across the entire organization and see a consolidated view of the whole organization. So that was one of the things that we were looking to do, was to really bring all four companies under one umbrella and be able to get a picture of the whole mainframe or, yes, we had a couple of mainframes and all of that software was internally written. Um, and it was good. It was, it was good, but it met, you know, just the needs that those of us within the company saw. Um, so I think we were missing a whole lot of opportunity, um, to really, you know, see what else was out there and see new things and really get outside of our sphere of understanding, you know, >>so PPC, >>no, I was going to say as SKM pointed out and the sort of running joke within the companies is the system we have today does numbers really well. Words not so much because it was designed by accountants for accounting, tracking the financials primarily. Yeah. >>In PPC you do construction of course, or construction club, but you also do some service as well, right? You've got people out in the field that are, that are doing, doing service. So when you were looking, um, I'm assuming that you were trying to find a system that could do both, both solutions. Yeah. Did. >>Absolutely. Uh, one of the things that's been concerning to the entire core team is it's great to go out and find a system and there's plenty of them that can handle your back office. Most systems do that fairly well. But what about you feel services, uh, any in our particular industry, electrical contracting, you might have residential, you know, we could very well be working on the buck stadium or a military installation or even the school, you know, those folks have to be able to process invoices, do all sorts of things from a handheld, et cetera, et cetera. That was a big, big driving factor for us. So has a lot of COBOL code running? Is that, is there right here? So you said 50 years, I mean, um, so now I'm interested in the, in the, in the migration and, and you know what that looks like. >>Yeah, I'll bet. So do you, do you have to freeze the existing sort of systems and then sort of bring the other ones up to speed? Is this cloud-based? What does that all look like? That great question. So, uh, we are, uh, we subscribe to the managed cloud solution. Um, you know, for most construction companies, electrical contracting companies like ours, you know, technology is important, but it is not what really makes our wheels turn. It's a con. It's a competitive advantage if you use it wisely. And so, um, you know, for us it was very important to think about this holistically and try to figure out if we're gonna bring in a solution, what does that solution need to look like and will it work for all of our companies, not just one, not just residential, commercial, et cetera. Okay. All right. So, so w w what's that journey look like? I mean, um, when did, when did it start? What's your >>sort of timeline? So about two and a half years ago, we really started looking at what we had in on hand now and what we had in place and thinking about did we really want to make a move? And so, um, we had a team that came together about 15 people across the organization from operations and also the back office to really evaluate what we had evaluated our needs. Um, we decided, yes, we needed something new. And then we actually brought in a second team, um, that started looking at what that new thing would be. We had a consultant assisting us with that and uh, we kinda narrowed it down to two players if you will. And ifs was one of those. Um, and we, even though, um, one of the things that we liked was the fact that that ifs had, um, a broad reach over different types of industries and we felt like that would give us, um, something in addition to a construct and centric view know domain expertise. Yeah, >>exactly. You know, and you know, with our core industries, you know, construction is a big part of that. But one of the things that we're seeing in the construction industry today is the trend to go to what we call prefabrication. The fact that you know, you can really speed up a project if you aren't trying to build everything on site and you can also do it much more cheaper. McKinsey has a study out and they believe that over time if, if of comp of construction company will engage with prefabrication, they can reduce the project timelines 20 to 50% and lower the cost up to 20% and with ifs is heritage in manufacturing. It's really a perfect marriage for construction companies because construction companies need the project management, the installation, you know, the change management that goes along with some of those back-office things. They also a lot of time have to do service. But if you really want to get that competitive advantage, if you can take advantage of the prefab, which is really manufacturing high, if this is heritage, he could really have a, a full, complete S, you know, solution from one supplier. >>There's a huge trend in home-building actually. You would, you see, you know, modular homes and kind of the future of it. But uh, so how does that affect you guys? I mean you, you prefab something that resonates with you, is that sort of more of a generic statement across the customer base or >>it's certainly an area where we're focusing on more. Um, we also have an automation, uh, division that really focuses on, um, automation for industries. And that's an area that it's kind of a manufacturing type of thing. They build panels and those sorts of things. So we're definitely seeing it >>well. So, okay. So I got to ask you, so when you pulled out the Gartner magic quadrant, I said, okay, it always is. Ifs isn't the leader that, that, that, that might've helped. Right. Okay. So you don't get fired now, but choose the leader, but then you started peeling the onion. He had to do due diligence. So what kinds of things did you look at? What kind of tires did you kick? Piers, did you talk to and be, I'm interested in what your, what you learned. Well, I'll touch on one key element and >>we can get in as many sub elements as you like. The selection process for us took several months. Um, I think initially we really pared it down to about eight packages that we were seriously considering. Then down to four and then eventually down to two. And what really, really intrigued us about ifs was the fact that they are not construction centric. So we really had a big decision to make internally, which was do we want to just get on the bandwagon and do what everyone else in construction is doing or do we really wanna you know, risk versus reward and go after something special. So ifs, they are in, you name it, manufacturing is obviously key. Aerospace engineering, race cars I saw today, I didn't know that. So that was a big selling point for us. And the plan is to retire your mainframe and go into the cloud. >>Yes, yes, yes. So IBM got you in a headlock. >>We've been friends for a long time. Good company. Um, w what's that been like just to sort of, uh, that the thought of, you know, going to the cloud. W how, how is, you know, the it folks you know, responded to that. Um, how has that changed their sort of role brokers versus all? Again, I think in construction organizations, technology is important, but it is not what makes the wheels turn. So I'm trying to bring in all of that iron and infrastructure and build it out and configure it ourselves and then maintain it for the long haul. Just not something that was value added for us. In addition, um, if you've ever worked with Oracle, which is a close partner of ifs, but there is a lot of licensing caveats and a lot of things you've got to worry about if you're going to go it alone by going with the managed cloud solution, we're sort of partnering and trusting ifs to take that on for us so we can focus on taking care of our companies, our customers, and doing what we do best. Right? So, okay, so you're still going to be an Oracle. You just won't be, it won't be as visible. We use Oracle too. We're a Salesforce customer, so Hey, Oracle is behind there, but no offense. >>Ah, I know you guys did >>for the distinction as well, right? Because even if you are going to have portions of Oracle that are running your system, you've got to have some Oracle experts on staff. You know, if you're going to have all of the infrastructure, you gotta have infrastructure folks who understand how it all ties together. So on the surface it could seem like a simple decision to do it in house or go to the cloud. Far from it. >>Yeah. You know, I think certainly one of the things that we see in a lot of different industries, but certainly in construction, the plant had always been that you bring together different, different solutions and you try to both and together and then some of that becomes a lot more concerning. You know, some of the technology behind it. But one of the things that with the ifs solution is the fact that from one provider you can do, you know, do the whole life cycle. So then some of the have it in the managed cloud where we take care of it for you. So then that takes away some of those technology issues and then you can focus on your core competencies. So Rhonda would agree generally >>with what you're saying. I mean some probably say that for most companies that you know, the technology is not the core differentiator. Obviously this for Google, sure. For Amazon, for Facebook, but for CIO is I talked to, they go people process, technology, technology is the least of my problems. It's like I was going to come and go, it's going to change. I can deal with that. It's the, if the people in the process issues. So having said that, I'm still interested in how concerned you were about peeling the onion on the cloud, what's behind it, the security model, all that stuff in terms of your due diligence, you know, with any cloud based solution, there's some concern obviously. But, but in working with ifs, we, we asked a ton of questions and they gave us a ton of answers. So the comfort level was there. Um, the industry's been going to the cloud now for quite some time. And to be brutally honest, if you're not going there, um, you need to be strongly considered >>in Microsoft is our partner with the cloud. We're on, you know, using Microsoft Azure. So it's not like, you know, it's one of the largest cloud provider. So it's not like, you know, it's, it's something that you have to worry about. You've got the, you know, the backstop of Microsoft behind you as well. You know, I'm sorry, go, go, go. I was going to say, I think one of the things that's interesting is you talk about all your different divisions and you're really trying to bring a lot of different companies together on one system. And one of the things that I, you know, as I've seen the things that's change management becomes really something that you really have to consider. I mean, how have you seen that part of the implementation going? Has there been stepping in the easy piece for you? It's not been an easy piece and that's one of the pieces that we're still working on. >>Um, I don't know if any organization that says that they're really, really good at change. Um, but we've recognized that really the, our organization is a group of entrepreneurs and we've encouraged people to have their own business, but we're really trying to streamline and get some consistency across the organization. That's a little bit of a culture shift for us. So that change management piece is a piece that we're really trying to get our arms around now and prepare, um, the organization for that team. Just trying to get my head around your software still. You guys do change management? I TSM. Well, you'll change management is really some of the, um, consulting that goes along with it and certainly ifs and AR, we've got many partners who can, you know, help our customers go through that. Because when you're going through a digital transformation, you know, you're taking people who have been using something for 50 years, being out, especially out in the field doing those things. And now you're trying to figure out what are the right processes to put in place to get what the business needs. And in some cases they might have to do things differently. So you really have to think that through and how you're going to roll those out. >>So now, is this your first ifs world? Yes, it is. It is. What final thoughts, you know, things you've, you've taken away or you're going to bring back to your teams? >>Well, yeah, Boston is a favorite city of mine. I was just glad to be here just for that. But, and we've just been here a little bit. I've already picked up some things on leadership. I was involved the um, >>Oh, the women's leadership breakfast this morning. So there's already been some things that I think we can take back to users and share with them, particularly around change management and trying to get people comfortable and understanding why they're uncomfortable with change. You know? So it, rod, you're next on the line. So I'm sure you were taking notes, pretty attentive in the sessions and just getting started, right? >>No, you know, I have, and one of the things for me that was most, I guess rewarding is, is the partner network. All of the vendors. There's a number of things with our implementation that we're still trying to sort out OCR for example, being one of them. Are we going to go there or are we gonna wait until later? Just different technologies and maybe add ons that we may want to take advantage of. All you've got to do is walk down the hallways and there's, there's people ready to talk to you about it. So that's, that's been kind of intriguing. >>Okay. Excellent. Well yeah, I said earlier I was, I was surprised and impressed at the sort of size of the ecosystem and its great. Well good luck to you guys. Really wish you the best and thanks so much for coming on the cube and sharing your story Cindy. Great to see you. Always pleasure. All right, take care. Thank you for watching everybody. We're back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching the cube from Boston ifs world 2019 right back.

>> Live from Orlando, Florida. It's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity, and theCUBE's Ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here in the Orange County Civic Center in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Stu Miniman. We are joined by Raphael Meyerowitz, he is the VP Office of the CTO at Presidio, And Jake Smith, who is the Director Data Center Solutions and Technologies at Intel. Thank you both so much for coming back on theCUBE. You're both CUBE alums. >> Thank you for having us. >> It's great to be back. >> So, I want to start by laying out for our viewers, why you're here, and if you're part of the Microsoft ecosystem: Intel, Cisco, Dell and others. Can you explain a little bit, to our viewers, the roll you play in this ecosystem. >> Well, for us, Microsoft is a long time partner. I mean, it's pretty well documented, we don't want to go there today, but at this particular event we're announcing a bunch of new product solutions. We're announcing new technology capabilities. And at four PM we're going to announce some world record results, for performance with an operating system in an application environment. So it's a very exciting time for Intel to be a part of this event. >> Well, this is quite a tease. (giggles) Can you give us a little-- >> You're going to have to wait 'til four PM. I will say, it has to do with Windows Server. It has to do with Xeon scale of a processor family. And, our future Optane products. >> Well, so, these are all great lead ins. And, before the cameras were rolling we were talking about all of these things. You want to go through, a little bit, where we are with each of those businesses? >> Yeah, at Presidio, we've mostly been partnering with Intel for a long time. And one of the things that we've seen also, is how Intel has developed their ecosystem of partners. The software, like today, if you look at today what was in our today with desktop as a service with citrix. That's something that we have been involved in, probably, for about 10 years. And now we actually seen that come to market. We're not just, the control plane is in the cloud. But, the actual, virtual desktops are in the cloud. And, we think that that's going to be a really good viable options for our customers with Office 365. >> Raph, maybe expand on that a little bit for our audience. You know, one of the things I always say is you talk in this multi-cloud heterogeneous world. You want to follow the apps. You want to follow the data. Well, you know, the desktop is part of where those applications and data live. So, how does that, you know, tie into all the cloud stuff we've been talkin' about, the last few years? >> So, for a lot of customers, one of the reasons they move to cloud is really for simplicities sake, alright. When you look at the desktop, the desktop is really not necessarily being the most simple thing in the world. Whether it's virtual, or whether it's physical desktop. By having the control plane in the virtual desktop in the cloud, where you can consume it with Office 365. And also through Microsoft. And you can buy it through a single entity. Customers are already going to see a lot of value in that. And we think it's really going to play in the market really, really well. Upper Enterprise customers and some Healthcare customers may take a little bit more time to adapt to. >> Jake, one of the things we talk, for years, we talked about people did their upgrades based on the tick-tock of the Intel fees there. >> Correct. >> Now we're talkin' about things like, you know, Windows as a service, going Evergreen. Maybe, how does that relationship, the old traditional Wintel versus the cloud era. Upgrades. You're talkin' about the new latest generation. How do we think about that? >> You know what, I'm not going to use that, the merged term, because that's, you know. The work that Windows does on Xeon scalable processor family has been amazing. But, typically, we've done a two to three year cycle on a server release. With our new road map, which we announced in August, which you were there for, so thank you. We're actually going to release a new CPU every year. We're releasing a new CPU every year because we have to deal with the fact that cloud customers, in Azure, want to have the availability to the latest and greatest technology, right now. And partners, like Presidio and Raph's team, have developed technologies, like Concierge, which he'll talk about, that give customers the ability to manage their hybrid cloud environments, both in the cloud and on premises. When you start giving customers that flexibility they want the choice to say, I want to deploy your latest Xeon scalable processor family, Skylake processors this year, and next year, I'm going to maybe skip a year before I deploy your next version. >> Yeah, thanks Jake. One of the things that we've done at Presidio, we've tried to innovate ourselves, and we listen to our customers, and we know where our customers pain points are. So, Presidio Concierge is something that we developed from the ground up, that provides both shared space applications, provides customers with the usage on their shared space applications, how they're consuming their licenses, and also provides them with an allessor sign, so the infrastructure's a service. A lot of customers, when you talk about multi cloud, it doesn't always necessarily always mean the Harper scalers, right. It could mean shared space products, as well. So, we developed this product from the ground up in combination with Intel, and it's something that our customers are starting to use a lot, and we think that there's going to be a great grow in their first product. Some of the features that we actually give to our customers are actually for free, because we know that our customers are really battling with figuring out their usage patterns, internally. >> Well, I want to hear about those pain points. What were the problems that you were trying to solve with Concierge? >> So, some of the pain points, you know, we have customers today that get invoices from some of the public cloud companies or their service providers or with their infrastructures service. And the invoices are 50 pages long. They can never actually figure out what their true costs are. So we, through a shared space platform, that we developed from the ground up, we can provide customers with all of those metrics around their licenses. Plus, also, their usage around infrastructure as a service, as well. >> And, what has demand been like? >> The demand's been really good. Actually, when we launched product about two, three months ago, we were already at 20 customers. And we've seen a lot of interest. Presidio has about 7700 customers nationally, that we call on today. And we've grown tremendously, we have about a three billion dollar infrastructure partner today that provides both on premises and public cloud services. >> Yeah, I like, you brought up the fact that customers are looking for simplicity. Unfortunately, today, cloud is no longer simple. You know, I would say if you said, okay, If I went to my server vendor of choice and wanted to configure something, versus I went to my cloud vendor of choice and try to configure something, cloud might even be more challenging for somebody to do. But, one of the areas that we're trying to help customers get some simplicity back, is if you look at solutions like Azure Stack. So, Rebecca and I interviewed Jeffrey Snover earlier today, and that was the goal they had, was to give, kind of, that operational model and even some of the services from Azure and put them in my data center. Was wondering if Intel and Presidio are both partnering with Microsoft on this. What are you seeing, what are you hearing from customers? Any proof points as to how the roll outs are going, on there? >> We at Presidio, we are one of the first Azure Stack partners. Probably, about a year and a half ago, when it was actually announced and when it went, yeah, I think it was June of last year, and we partnered with Cisco, Dell, and also HP in the space, and we seen demand from our customers creep up. Single node solutions. We've seen demand with Single node PLC solutions are being deployed today. And then, in the public sector, we're also starting to see customers that are interested in it because it will provide them with a gateway to the public cloud in the future. >> Yeah, we're seeing the exact same thing. Obviously, we've been partnering together for some time. The beauty of Azure Stack is it's optimized for Xeon scalable processor family, as well as Intel Optane technologies, both the SSDs and in the future, our persistent memory capabilities. What we like in our work that we've done on Azure Stack and Azure Stack development, is that customers have had a lot of releases to begin to determine where Azure Stack's going to fit in their overall portfolio. And that's how you really have to look at Azure Stack, is how do you manage your portfolio between the cloud and on premises. Azure Stack is a great tool for that. >> You know, leading up to the release of Azure Stack, I talked to a number of service providers that had pent up demand. Leading up to this show, I was hearing a lot of non-North American interest. Can you give us any characterization as to how the roll out's going? >> Yeah, I think when you look at non-North American interest, there's a lot of localization, that has to take place in a lot of those countries. Maybe there's not actually an Azure, a public cloud Azure in those countries today, which is something that Microsoft is building towards. So, customers want to get used to their API's, they want to keep their data local. And when they're the same API's, on premises versus in the public cloud for all of their applications. And that's why I think you see, especially in Europe, as an example, a lot of countries in Europe where actually, data sovereignty's a big issue, alright. The data's not allowed to leave the country that they're actually in. And the demand, I think will, I always say, Microsoft, version two or version three. They always get it right. I mean, we've seen this time and time again. They've proven to us, they get this right all the time. >> I want to follow up on something you were just talking about, though with, sort of, risk management being a really big, hot opportunity. The next generation of risk management and mitigation. Can you talk a little bit about what you're doing there, and what you're hearing from customers? >> Yeah, so, Presidio developed the next generation risk management framework, called NGRM. So, we found we do a lot of security with Cisco, Palo Alto. We have a lot of security vendors out there that we deal with, but what our CIO's were really looking for is they were looking for a single dashboard that could actually provide them with a scorecard: Green, Yellow, or Red. Basically saying this is where we're at in our security strategy and this is what we need to remediate right away. They can take that to their board, they can also use that internally for all of their CSO's and also all their internal IT infrastructure personnel that they have. So, it's something that we've seen customers adopt, because it provides that analysis and the remediation and it's not necessarily tied to a specific product. Again, this is a shared space platform that we developed from the ground up, because our customers are always saying, "Well, there's always security vulnerabilities. "How can we constantly check on this?" Right? And it doesn't matter whether you're running Azure, whether you have on-premises solutions, or whether you have some other cloud provider, we can provide that holistic view for customers today. >> One of the announcements that I think surprised everyone. I mean, things like Server 2019, we all expect. The open data initiative, the commentary that we had is if you talk about digital transformation. I mean, Microsoft, Adobe and SAP. Two companies at the center of it. What does it mean? When will customers see the benefits of this? And any commentary of digital transformation in general would be great. >> Well, typically, we've been involved in a lot of these open standards, and they typically take three to five years to work their way all the way through the system and build the proper ecosystem and standards. And then work their way into the product lines. I think, in this particular instance, there is a driver. We talked about the driver of cloud and why we, we Intel, are now producing chips every year, and you're not waiting for the three year release cycle. Well, the open data initiative, I think, falls into that camp. I think you're going to see an escalated transition to the open data initiative, because people have to be able to move their workloads. Presidio recognized it very early on in the process. We've been working with them for some time. But that's one of the values that they bring to customers, is their ability to do that. But, more and more customers and more and more data are being stretched and there has to be compatibility between file systems, file format, and data classification. The open data initiative is a start in that direction. >> Yeah, I mean, one of the examples that I could give you also is we always talk about IT transformation. We have a large customer that's actually a fleet truck company that underwent IT transformation, and they came to us and they said that they actually needed telematics on the trucks in the fleet of trucks. And the reason was because a lot of these trucks are breaking down and they would send it to a mechanic and the mechanic would diagnose it. So, we actually created, in partnership with Intel and with Microsoft, this telematic platform that actually can provide the customer, in real time, with what issues they actually have with the truck. And it saves the customer a lot of money. That's the type of information that customers are looking for. This customer has on premises data, plus, also in the public cloud, and I think stretching it and providing analytics around that is really important. >> And is it possible to take away the silos? I mean, you seem to be an optimist here. >> I'm very optimistic that we can take away the silos, but I'm also realistic. The only way to take away the silos is to develop new applications, new capabilities. And as my friends in Windows Server Team will tell you, we spend a lot of time trying to figure out, how do we use virtualization and container technologies to take old legacy data and carry it forward onto new modern IT infrastructure. And when you can do that, then you can extract value from the data. If you can not take it from an old, antiquated infrastructure to a new infrastructure as Presidio has done, you stranded the data. And that's where you have those silo breakdowns. So, I think we're developing the tools, but we're not all the way there. >> Yeah, you look at Windows 2019 coming out, there's Linux support in Windows 2019. Who would ever think that Microsoft would be releasing Linux support. >> Microsoft loves Linux. >> Microsoft loves Linux now, right? >> And they will in get it. >> And they'll get it now as well. Microsoft is really developed their ecosystem. Our partners also around the open API's and what they've been doing over the past few years. And I think customers are really starting to embrace that. And you look at even another feature that's coming with Windows 2019 with Storage Spaces Direct. Right, I think Microsoft, this is really going to be their entry into the Apple convert space. Customers are going to start building, they'll have to converge platform based on Windows 2019 Data Center. >> Wondering if you can give a little more color here, Raph. You and I lived through, kind of converged and hyperconvergence, when we wrote our original research at Wikibon, it was VMware is the one that's going to get everybody talking about it, but the one eventually that will be very important here is Microsoft. 'Cause, Microsoft owns the apps. They've got the operating systems, so absolutely, they can be critical in the HCI space. What are they doing and how does Presidio and partners go to market with this? >> So, I mean, when you look at Windows 2016, Windows 2016 was really the first iteration of Storage Spaces Direct. Windows 2019 has really improved upon that, and we're starting to see customers become more interested in that. The reason is because customers want a single platform that they can easily manage with a single operating system. So, there used to be the war, as you mentioned Stu, between VMware and Harper-V. ESXi and Harper-V. I don't really see that being talked about anymore. It's more around the features and the robust features that customers can actually get on as quickly as possible. I don't know if you have anymore. >> Well Raph, you're absolutely right on. I think people have taken virtualization for granted. We added virtualization technology in Xeon in 2006 and they've sort of taken it for granted. Obviously, VMware is a big partner for both Microsoft and Intel, but the reality is is that in a hyper convergent environment, you need a file system, you need an operating system, and you need apps. And Microsoft has all that capability. As you'll hear at four o'clock, we announce world record numbers and it's spectacular. And the reason for it is in our last version of Windows Server 2016, we delivered 16 million IOP's in a hyper converged environment. That got Raph and his team off the table saying, okay, you guys are legitimate. You have a legitimate platform now. But it's not good enough. We think this new instantiation that we've already started to announce in Windows 2019, and Jeff Wolsey announced it earlier today and started talking about the features in Project Honolulu. We think those kind of transitions are what it's going to take for Enterprise customers to begin to break down those silos that you discussed, and really start to look at their data holistically, build data lakes that can scale, and build frameworks that are, I don't even want to use the term convergent anymore, but hyper scalable. >> Yeah, I mean, to tie into that, right. You look at what Intel has developed around Optane and some of the storage platforms that they've come out with. 10 years ago? Intel wasn't really known as a storage company, right? But, you look at all the storage vendors out there today, they really are putting Intel aside. And when you start looking at what Storage Spaces Direct is going to deliver and some of the robustness around Optane, we really think that it's going to be something our customers are going to embrace with Windows 2019 and future versions and sequels. >> So, Raph, I got to give Presidio a lot of credit, though. We launched a program called Intel Select Solutions, and it really allowed us to take Windows and Storage Spaces Direct and create a solution that included both the CPU, the networking, the SSD's and the memory. And Presidio has led that. And so because we have these Intel Select Solutions for Storage Spaces Direct with Presidio, we have the flexibility now to give customers package solutions that are pre-configured. >> Great. Well, Jake and Raphael, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It was great talking to you. >> Thank you very much. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Stu Miniman, we will have more of theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite coming up just in a little bit. 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