hello and welcome to this cube conversation this is part of our continuing coverage of kubecon cloud nativecon north america 2021 i have a very special guest with us uh from a technology company that on any given day at any given moment has any number of 31 million discrete users coming in looking for a specific item or two out of 22 23 24 million who knows how many items that could be shipped from 15 16 17 000 different locations around the globe and we've got one of the key folks responsible for managing what some of us in tech would refer to by the technical term a nightmare uh gary white from wayfair welcome hey thanks for having me yeah so tell us about wayfair what is wayfair we're all going to pretend like none of us have heard of wayfair before despite billions of dollars in advertising what is wayfair what do you get what do you what do you guys do before we get into the technology and how it actually works yeah uh that's a great question wayfair it uh exists to be the destination for all things home helping everybody and create a feeling of being at home uh so that's like our primary goal from the um overall business objective specifically in the technology uh part of the company we strive to make development of tools that make the shopping process easier uh carrying one of the widest like spaces of items means that we have to have incredible resiliency in our data and access to that data and then we try to build world-class development tools to compete with uh talent market um that is some of the biggest firms in the world okay so so just so we're clear because i want to make sure you came to the right to the right place this isn't furniture con this is cloud native con and you're not an you're not an artisan crafter of bespoke end tables right so you you craft a very different thing which is the uh which is the technical infrastructure behind this tell us about your relationship with uh with cloud native technologies in the open source world oh sure absolutely so my experience at wayfair has mostly consisted of um exposing the release engineering process and making the process of developing tools easier i think most companies invest about or a lot of companies invest a significant amount of their engineering talent into being able to create a platform for their developers to work on top of uh that's the team that i'm a part of where we create a platform for our developers and a large part of how we do that is leveraging technology that comes out of the cncf so we'll be talking about uh automation tools um things that you may run in kubernetes to do batch jobs things that you may run in kubernetes to run uh regular microservices and applications and then ways to automate the building of those applications and the packaging of it so that it can ship to production reliably and so you guys you guys aren't just you know when we go back several decades there were customers and there were vendors and those lines are really blurred in the open source community they have been for a long time but i mean you're you're actually working not only to develop solutions for wayfarer but you're working hand in hand with other people to develop solutions that get propagated across industry tell us about some of those projects that that you're involved with with the open source community or at least where wayfarer is absolutely so uh wayfair has made an investment in the open source community specifically notably with the tremor project you can go to tremor.rs and i'm actually speaking about it at cubecon that's where the topic comes from tremor is a early stage and uh event processing system where you can give it a lot of data for it to be able to ingest and then spit out downstream to other systems you may want to send events and notifications out to multiple systems based on what you see you may want to throttle the amount of data that you have coming in and that was a big topic that i also mentioned at the cloud native con uh and at tremorcon where you can deal with this really massive volume that we have to do at the scale that we exist as a as a business and just um filter it so that it doesn't overwhelm everything downstream in observability's sake well you know that tremor must be cool if it has its own con right yeah that's very cool you know you've arrived when you've had a con eventually i'm i'm i'm working toward dave khan we we'd make it dave and gary khan if we need to but oh absolutely so can you can you take those concepts of events and and data flow and and kind of up level that in terms of the kinds of things that are happening between customers and wayfair on a moment-by-moment basis so so give me an example of like you know what what is an event sure yeah so events if you're familiar with the open telemetry or observability framework you might call them signals where you have something happen on your infrastructure that's processed in a way that you would want to record so you might have a log that you need to be able to trace through later in case there's something happens or you just want to be able to comb your logs you may have uh metrics that you're sending in like how many requests you've gotten or how many bytes you've been processing in your service uh you may have baggage that you associate with that data um so yeah all of these different kinds of signals as defined in the open telemetry spec are things that we support in tremor and we supported before the hotel project really made it a form it was something we did out of necessity and similar products that you might find are like log stash and elastic in that whole stack okay so if so if uh if i'm looking for something for my home office uh although you can see i've got tons of garbage already in my home office um what what happens to me as a customer if all of what you just described goes wrong what happens to my experience that's a great question so as we're talking about tremor if something were to go wrong it shouldn't impact the experience of the service itself because tremor is designed to not create any load on your service as you are executing it you have the option to run it as a standalone server where you give it the resources that it needs by itself uh if that turns out to be too much of a burden for the application and you need to do a sidecar kind of model where you actually deploy it alongside your application directly in the same pod or sometimes even in the same container as a different process it's lightweight enough that you can do that which is part of the reason why we like it and why we built it is that we found that many of the other solutions for processing these signals just simply took up too much compute to be competitive with what we were able to create ourselves how and how long have you been with wayfair uh i've been with wayfair for almost three years uh three years in october or it is october so three years hooray hey hey happy happy anniversary yeah so obviously you couldn't have predicted the you know the the massive shift in all of our lives um and maybe you didn't completely fully appreciate just how well prepared wayfare was for this crazy shift in all of our lives when you entered in um i'm not gonna let you pretend uh that uh that you know that you knew and that your your iq is 20 points higher than it actually is because you decided to go to a place that was actually prepared but what what is share with us what that has been like i mean what is it like to be somewhere where the sky appeared to be falling and then all of a sudden the demands went through the roof what was that like that was a extremely chaotic but ultimately uh successful time for the company obviously um it's shown definitely in what you can find um in our stock and how we've been doing with technology that we did very well during the pandemic we were able to use the technology that we already had and be effective in adopting some more of the cncf portfolio and some more of like cloud native practices to make the um to make our infrastructure run better than it ever did at a time where we were in a crunch to be able to do better than we ever um had as a business and i believe that those two things are related the or this is my personal philosophy for sure that i believe that the adoption of these cloud native practices uh especially being pushed from the platform team that i work on were instrumental in being able to create an environment where developers can deliver value more reliably where then the experience of shopping at wayfair becomes dramatically better and can handle the scale that you see when everybody decides to start shopping everybody decides to start furnishing their home office i was going to make a joke that i bet that at least one of those things behind you was from wakefield you could be right although although some of the things over my shoulder are very strange movie prop type items so but uh but you would be you would be guessing correctly i was very very excited to talk to you um from uh from a technology standpoint because again you guys were prepared for this you you can't respond uh in a way quickly enough that doesn't crush you unless you've prepared and you've got a framework that draws upon cloud native technologies just just as you as you outlined um so against that backdrop what are you seeing in uh from a technology standpoint in retail in general are you are you plugged into that much think of think of legacy uh furniture outlets trying to pivot into the world of cloud native native take your take your wayfarer hat off you know your partisan hat in terms of competition off for a moment and and talk to me about you know if you're advising a fill in the blank legacy retail store that's just dying right now that wanted to have an online presence from a technical standpoint how would you advise them what would you steer them in the direction of i would definitely say that um just in time engineering has actually served wayfarer extremely well where we're not over engineering the solutions and using the big fancy tools until we know that we need them so i think that when we see businesses or we see anybody any organization that decides to adopt everything first and then see whether or not it scales up they don't see the results that they wanted because they're not using something that's appropriate for the size of the problem that they're trying to solve so for example if if an experience that i can share from what we went through uh i was part of and i've spoken and have some posts about um like being able to scale up just the automation infrastructure for wayfair where we were using a solution that worked pretty well but we didn't think about what was going to happen when it grew and we didn't react when it actually did grow and so by instead reassessing okay we're a different size company now we have different size needs for automation and different flexibility requirements to be able to use it effectively we need to be able to adopt containers we need to be able to support deployment into kubernetes how can we get there and then continuing to evaluate that even during the process of building and during the process of making that available to the rest of the company i think that if you're starting that process fresh or even if you're in the middle of that process it's important to right size the solution and consider whether or not it it's if your online business isn't mid-tier but it's enterprise then you need to build a system for that if you have an online system that's actually doing not much of your business don't build for the enterprise yet build for the size and then continue to scale it up as you go um another thing that i i just have to plug about the cncf solutions is that they're incredible at being flexible to that scale that if you pick things that go from low to mid tier then you can hand off from mid to high tier and then from high tier into enterprise scale and i think that those things are available in the cncf landscape and it's part of why we're excited to to be part of it ourselves so if you had a magic wand and you could solve one headache that you experience in your daily life from a technology perspective can you can you think of anything that you would uh you would conjure up absolutely uh i i struggle and have struggled pretty much my entire career uh with being able to get like a good picture of the adoption of any given tool within the company and i know that perhaps not every engineer um that works with technology within a big enterprise firm has to think about whether or not their tool is being used a lot um folks may not think about is the person next to me using python or is the next person next to them using java um being able to have that kind of insight into what people use how frequently they're deploying and how much they use it would be an incredible gain for us to be able to make better decisions about the platform of the company yeah yeah and you know you know the uh potentially the irony there is um at the sort of tip of the spear of your business understanding the customer everything about them you possibly can is so important to give them a really really good experience and sometimes enterprises that have that know all sorts of information about me don't know what their developers are doing in a whole list in a holistic fashion uh with a few clicks i can tell you exactly how many orders i've ordered from get from a given online retailer in the last nine years um but uh but i doubt they could tell me a lot about some of their infrastructure so that's that's interesting uh well what else what else can you share with us about wayfair are there any anything that's not super proprietary and secret that you could share that's an interesting data point we were joking beforehand about yeah what is it is it 8 billion in your sales is it red staplers or uh any kind of factoids that people would be surprised about yeah i i think folks um something that's definitely not proprietary because it's literally on github.com uh we just recently started putting a lot more elbow grease into our open source repositories it's becoming hacktoberfest now and we're very excited to be able to have these kind of more polished products things that we expect people to be able to contribute to where not even a year ago it wasn't uncommon to have teams within the company that would open source their project and then they would completely lose track of it and we had like some um we had to create new organizations to actually maintain them over time so i i feel like a really exciting thing that we're doing now is contributing to open source and earnest and actually getting developers time scheduled to be able to dedicate to that effort um i think a lot of the biggest companies that are the most successful uh make time for their developers to be able to contribute back as well as being able to contribute just to the proprietary code that every company has to maintain absolutely because human as human beings we don't want to be toiling in obscurity right and uh you know at what becomes a soul-killing exercise when you can actually get out there and have that sense of community uh which is you know it's central to uh to open source it's a testament to wayfair that they know that it's in their best interest as a as an organization to nurture that kind of talent uh uh within so uh on that on that very positive note uh i'd like to thank you so much for your time gary um and i appreciate the uh the plug for uh for shoes uh over over over your shoulder uh and uh just just wanna say again thanks a lot uh best of luck with your uh with your talk for q con and with that i will sign off thanks for joining this cube conversation with gary white of wayfair in our continuing coverage of kubecon cloud native con north america 2021 i'm dave nicholson thanks for tuning in you

>>Hey everyone, welcome to the Cube's coverage of AWS Reinvent 2022. Lisa Martin here with you with Subaru ier, one of our alumni who's now the CEO of Aerospike. Sabu. Great to have you on the program. Thank you for joining us. >>Great as always, to be on the cube. Luisa, good to meet you. >>So, you know, every company these days has got to be a data company, whether it's a retailer, a manufacturer, a grocer, a automotive company. But for a lot of companies, data is underutilized, yet a huge asset that is value added. Why do you think companies are struggling so much to make data a value added asset? >>Well, you know, we, we see this across the board when I talk to customers and prospects. There's a desire from the business and from it actually to leverage data to really fuel newer applications, newer services, newer business lines, if you will, for companies. I think the struggle is one, I think one the, you know, the plethora of data that is created, you know, surveys say that over the next three years data is gonna be, you know, by 2025, around 175 zetabytes, right? A hundred and zetabytes of data is gonna be created. And that's really a, a, a growth of north of 30% year over year. But the more important, and the interesting thing is the real time component of that data is actually growing at, you know, 35% cagr. And what enterprises desire is decisions that are made in real time or near real time. >>And a lot of the challenges that do exist today is that either the infrastructure that enterprises have in place was never built to actually manipulate data in real time. The second is really the ability to actually put something in place which can handle spikes yet be cost efficient if you'll, so you can build for really peak loads, but then it's very expensive to operate that particular service at normal loads. So how do you build something which actually works for you, for both you, both users, so to speak? And the last point that we see out there is even if you're able to, you know, bring all that data, you don't have the processing capability to run through that data. So as a result, most enterprises struggle with one, capturing the data, you know, making decisions from it in real time and really operating it at the cost point that they need to operate it at. >>You know, you bring up a great point with respect to real time data access. And I think one of the things that we've learned the last couple of years is that access to real time data, it's not a nice to have anymore. It's business critical for organizations in any industry. Talk about that as one of the challenges that organizations are facing. >>Yeah. When, when, when we started Aerospike, right when the company started, it started with the premise that data is gonna grow, number one, exponentially. Two, when applications open up to the internet, there's gonna be a flood of users and demands on those applications. And that was true primarily when we started the company in the ad tech vertical. So ad tech was the first vertical where there was a lot of data both on the supply side and the demand side from an inventory of ads that were available. And on the other hand, they had like microseconds or milliseconds in which they could make a decision on which ad to put in front of you and I so that we would click or engage with that particular ad. But over the last three to five years, what we've seen is as digitization has actually permeated every industry out there, the need to harness data in real time is pretty much present in every industry. >>Whether that's retail, whether that's financial services, telecommunications, e-commerce, gaming and entertainment. Every industry has a desire. One, the innovative companies, the small companies rather, are innovating at a pace and standing up new businesses to compete with the larger companies in each of these verticals. And the larger companies don't wanna be left behind. So they're standing up their own competing services or getting into new lines of business that really harness and are driven by real time data. So this compelling pressures, one, the customer exp you know, customer experience is paramount and we as customers expect answers in, you know, an instant in real time. And on the other hand, the way they make decisions is based on a large data set because you know, larger data sets actually propel better decisions. So there's competing pressures here, which essentially drive the need. One from a business perspective, two from a customer perspective to harness all of this data in real time. So that's what's driving an inces need to actually make decisions in real or near real time. >>You know, I think one of the things that's been in short supply over the last couple of years is patients we do expect as consumers, whether we're in our business lives, our personal lives that we're going to be getting, be given information and data that's relevant, it's personal to help us make those real time decisions. So having access to real time data is really business critical for organizations across any industries. Talk about some of the main capabilities that modern data applications and data platforms need to have. What are some of the key capabilities of a modern data platform that need to be delivered to meet demanding customer expectations? >>So, you know, going back to your initial question Lisa, around why is data really a high value but underutilized or underleveraged asset? One of the reasons we see is a lot of the data platforms that, you know, some of these applications were built on have been then around for a decade plus and they were never built for the needs of today, which is really driving a lot of data and driving insight in real time from a lot of data. So there are four major capabilities that we see that are essential ingredients of any modern data platform. One is really the ability to, you know, operate at unlimited scale. So what we mean by that is really the ability to scale from gigabytes to even petabytes without any degradation in performance or latency or throughput. The second is really, you know, predictable performance. So can you actually deliver predictable performance as your data size grows or your throughput grows or your concurrent user on that application of service grows? >>It's really easy to build an application that operates at low scale or low throughput or low concurrency, but performance usually starts degrading as you start scaling one of these attributes. The third thing is the ability to operate and always on globally resilient application. And that requires a, a really robust data platform that can be up on a five, nine basis globally, can support global distribution because a lot of these applications have global users. And the last point is, goes back to my first answer, which is, can you operate all of this at a cost point? Which is not prohibitive, but it makes sense from a TCO perspective. Cuz a lot of times what we see is people make choices of data platforms and as ironically their service or applications become more successful and more users join their journey, the revenue starts going up, the user base starts going up, but the cost basis starts crossing over the revenue and they're losing money on the service, ironically, as the service becomes more popular. So really unlimited scale, predictable performance always on, on a globally resilient basis and low tco. These are the four essential capabilities of any modern data platform. >>So then talk to me with those as the four main core functionalities of a modern data platform. How does aerospace deliver that? >>So we were built, as I said, from the from day one to operate at unlimited scale and deliver predictable performance. And then over the years as we work with customers, we build this incredible high availability capability which helps us deliver the always on, you know, operations. So we have customers who are, who have been on the platform 10 years with no downtime for example, right? So we are talking about an amazing continuum of high availability that we provide for customers who operate these, you know, globally resilient services. The key to our innovation here is what we call the hybrid memory architecture. So, you know, going a little bit technically deep here, essentially what we built out in our architecture is the ability on each node or each server to treat a bank of SSDs or solid state devices as essentially extended memory. So you're getting memory performance, but you're accessing these SSDs, you're not paying memory prices, but you're getting memory performance as a result of that. >>You can attach a lot more data to each node or each server in your distributed cluster. And when you kind of scale that across basically a distributed cluster you can do with aerospike, the same things at 60 to 80% lower server count and as a result 60 to 80% lower TCO compared to some of the other options that are available in the market. Then basically, as I said, that's the key kind of starting point to the innovation. We layer around capabilities like, you know, replication change, data notification, you know, synchronous and asynchronous replication. The ability to actually stretch a single cluster across multiple regions. So for example, if you're operating a global service, you can have a single aerospace cluster with one node in San Francisco, one northern New York, another one in London. And this would be basically seamlessly operating. So that, you know, this is strongly consistent. >>Very few no SQL data platforms are strongly consistent or if they are strongly consistent, they will actually suffer performance degradation. And what strongly consistent means is, you know, all your data is always available, it's guaranteed to be available, there is no data lost anytime. So in this configuration that I talked about, if the node in London goes down, your application still continues to operate, right? Your users see no kind of downtime and you know, when London comes up, it rejoins the cluster and everything is back to kind of the way it was before, you know, London left the cluster so to speak. So the op, the ability to do this globally resilient, highly available kind of model is really, really powerful. A lot of our customers actually use that kind of a scenario and we offer other deployment scenarios from a higher availability perspective. So everything starts with HMA or hybrid memory architecture and then we start building out a lot of these other capabilities around the platform. >>And then over the years, what our customers have guided us to do is as they're putting together a modern kind of data infrastructure, we don't live in a silo. So aerospace gets deployed with other technologies like streaming technologies or analytics technologies. So we built connectors into Kafka, pulsar, so that as you're ingesting data from a variety of data sources, you can ingest them at very high ingest speeds and store them persistently into Aerospike. Once the data is in Aerospike, you can actually run spark jobs across that data in a, in a multithreaded parallel fashion to get really insight from that data at really high, high throughput and high speed, >>High throughput, high speed, incredibly important, especially as today's landscape is increasingly distributed. Data centers, multiple public clouds, edge IOT devices, the workforce embracing more and more hybrid these days. How are you ex helping customers to extract more value from data while also lowering costs? Go into some customer examples cause I know you have some great ones. >>Yeah, you know, I think we have, we have built an amazing set of customers and customers actually use us for some really mission critical applications. So, you know, before I get into specific customer examples, let me talk to you about some of kind of the use cases which we see out there. We see a lot of aerospace being used in fraud detection. We see us being used in recommendations and since we use get used in customer data profiles or customer profiles, customer 360 stores, you know, multiplayer gaming and entertainment, these are kind of the repeated use case digital payments. We power most of the digital payment systems across the globe. Specific example from a, from a specific example perspective, the first one I would love to talk about is PayPal. So if you use PayPal today, then you know when you actually paying somebody your transaction is, you know, being sent through aero spike to really decide whether this is a fraudulent transaction or not. >>And when you do that, you know, you and I as a customer not gonna wait around for 10 seconds for PayPal to say yay or me, we expect, you know, the decision to be made in an instant. So we are powering that fraud detection engine at PayPal for every transaction that goes through PayPal before us, you know, PayPal was missing out on about 2% of their SLAs, which was essentially millions of dollars, which they were losing because, you know, they were letting transactions go through and taking the risk that it, it's not a fraudulent transaction with the aerospace. They can now actually get a much better sla and the data set on which they compute the fraud score has gone up by, you know, several factors. So by 30 x if you will. So not only has the data size that is powering the fraud engine actually grown up 30 x with Aerospike. Yeah. But they're actually making decisions in an instant for, you know, 99.95% of their transactions. So that's, >>And that's what we expect as consumers, right? We want to know that there's fraud detection on the swipe regardless of who we're interacting with. >>Yes. And so that's a, that's a really powerful use case and you know, it's, it's a great customer, great customer success story. The other one I would talk about is really Wayfair, right? From retail and you know, from e-commerce. So everybody knows Wayfair global leader in really, you know, online home furnishings and they use us to power their recommendations engine and you know, it's basically if you're purchasing this, people who bought this but also bought these five other things, so on and so forth, they have actually seen the card size at checkout go by up to 30% as a result of actually powering their recommendations in G by through Aerospike. And they, they were able to do this by reducing the server count by nine x. So on one ninth of the servers that were there before aerospace, they're now powering their recommendation engine and seeing card size checkout go up by 30%. Really, really powerful in terms of the business outcome and what we are able to, you know, drive at Wayfair >>Hugely powerful as a business outcome. And that's also what the consumer wants. The consumer is expecting these days to have a very personalized, relevant experience that's gonna show me if I bought this, show me something else that's related to that. We have this expectation that needs to be really fueled by technology. >>Exactly. And you know, another great example you asked about, you know, customer stories, Adobe, who doesn't know Adobe, you know, they, they're on a, they're on a mission to deliver the best customer experience that they can and they're talking about, you know, great customer 360 experience at scale and they're modernizing their entire edge compute infrastructure to support this. With Aerospike going to Aerospike, basically what they have seen is their throughput go up by 70%, their cost has been reduced by three x. So essentially doing it at one third of the cost while their annual data growth continues at, you know, about north of 30%. So not only is their data growing, they're able to actually reduce their cost to actually deliver this great customer experience by one third to one third and continue to deliver great customer 360 experience at scale. Really, really powerful example of how you deliver Customer 360 in a world which is dynamic and you know, on a dataset which is constantly growing at north, north of 30% in this case. >>Those are three great examples, PayPal, Wayfair, Adobe talking about, especially with Wayfair when you talk about increasing their cart checkout sizes, but also with Adobe increasing throughput by over 70%. I'm looking at my notes here. While data is growing at 32%, that's something that every organization has to contend with data growth is continuing to scale and scale and scale. >>Yep. I, I'll give you a fun one here. So, you know, you may not have heard about this company, it's called Dream 11 and it's a company based out of India, but it's a very, you know, it's a fun story because it's the world's largest fantasy sports platform and you know, India is a nation which is cricket crazy. So you know, when, when they have their premier league going on, you know, there's millions of users logged onto the dream alone platform building their fantasy lead teams and you know, playing on that particular platform, it has a hundred million users, a hundred million plus users on the platform, 5.5 million concurrent users and they have been growing at 30%. So they are considered a, an amazing success story in, in terms of what they have accomplished and the way they have architected their platform to operate at scale. And all of that is really powered by aerospace where think about that they are able to deliver all of this and support a hundred million users, 5.5 million concurrent users all with you know, 99 plus percent of their transactions completing in less than one millisecond. Just incredible success story. Not a brand that is you know, world renowned but at least you know from a what we see out there, it's an amazing success story of operating at scale. >>Amazing success story, huge business outcomes. Last question for you as we're almost out of time is talk a little bit about Aerospike aws, the partnership GRAVITON two better together. What are you guys doing together there? >>Great partnership. AWS has multiple layers in terms of partnerships. So you know, we engage with AWS at the executive level. They plan out, really roll out of new instances in partnership with us, making sure that, you know, those instance types work well for us. And then we just released support for Aerospike on the graviton platform and we just announced a benchmark of Aerospike running on graviton on aws. And what we see out there is with the benchmark, a 1.6 x improvement in price performance and you know, about 18% increase in throughput while maintaining a 27% reduction in cost, you know, on graviton. So this is an amazing story from a price performance perspective, performance per wat for greater energy efficiencies, which basically a lot of our customers are starting to kind of talk to us about leveraging this to further meet their sustainability target. So great story from Aero Aerospike and aws, not just from a partnership perspective on a technology and an executive level, but also in terms of what joint outcomes we are able to deliver for our customers. >>And it sounds like a great sustainability story. I wish we had more time so we would talk about this, but thank you so much for talking about the main capabilities of a modern data platform, what's needed, why, and how you guys are delivering that. We appreciate your insights and appreciate your time. >>Thank you very much. I mean, if, if folks are at reinvent next week or this week, come on and see us at our booth. We are in the data analytics pavilion. You can find us pretty easily. Would love to talk to you. >>Perfect. We'll send them there. So Ira, thank you so much for joining me on the program today. We appreciate your insights. >>Thank you Lisa. >>I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cubes coverage of AWS Reinvent 2022. Thanks for watching.

>> And it'll be the fastest 15 minutes of your day from there. >> In three- >> We go Lisa. >> Wait. >> Yes >> Wait, wait, wait. I'm sorry I didn't pin the right speed. >> Yap, no, no rush. >> There we go. >> The beauty of not being live. >> I think, in the background. >> Fantastic, you all ready to go there, Lisa? >> Yeah. >> We are speeding around the horn and we are coming to you in five, four, three, two. >> Hey everyone, welcome to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent 2022. Lisa Martin here with you with Subbu Iyer one of our alumni who's now the CEO of Aerospike. Subbu, great to have you on the program. Thank you for joining us. >> Great as always to be on theCUBE Lisa, good to meet you. >> So, you know, every company these days has got to be a data company, whether it's a retailer, a manufacturer, a grocer, a automotive company. But for a lot of companies, data is underutilized yet a huge asset that is value added. Why do you think companies are struggling so much to make data a value added asset? >> Well, you know, we see this across the board. When I talk to customers and prospects there is a desire from the business and from IT actually to leverage data to really fuel newer applications, newer services newer business lines if you will, for companies. I think the struggle is one, I think one the, the plethora of data that is created. Surveys say that over the next three years data is going to be you know by 2025 around 175 zettabytes, right? A hundred and zettabytes of data is going to be created. And that's really a growth of north of 30% year over year. But the more important and the interesting thing is the real time component of that data is actually growing at, you know 35% CAGR. And what enterprises desire is decisions that are made in real time or near real time. And a lot of the challenges that do exist today is that either the infrastructure that enterprises have in place was never built to actually manipulate data in real time. The second is really the ability to actually put something in place which can handle spikes yet be cost efficient to fuel. So you can build for really peak loads, but then it's very expensive to operate that particular service at normal loads. So how do you build something which actually works for you for both users, so to speak. And the last point that we see out there is even if you're able to, you know bring all that data you don't have the processing capability to run through that data. So as a result, most enterprises struggle with one capturing the data, making decisions from it in real time and really operating it at the cost point that they need to operate it at. >> You know, you bring up a great point with respect to real time data access. And I think one of the things that we've learned the last couple of years is that access to real time data it's not a nice to have anymore. It's business critical for organizations in any industry. Talk about that as one of the challenges that organizations are facing. >> Yeah, when we started Aerospike, right? When the company started, it started with the premise that data is going to grow, number one exponentially. Two, when applications open up to the internet there's going to be a flood of users and demands on those applications. And that was true primarily when we started the company in the ad tech vertical. So ad tech was the first vertical where there was a lot of data both on the supply set and the demand side from an inventory of ads that were available. And on the other hand, they had like microseconds or milliseconds in which they could make a decision on which ad to put in front of you and I so that we would click or engage with that particular ad. But over the last three to five years what we've seen is as digitization has actually permeated every industry out there the need to harness data in real time is pretty much present in every industry. Whether that's retail, whether that's financial services telecommunications, e-commerce, gaming and entertainment. Every industry has a desire. One, the innovative companies, the small companies rather are innovating at a pace and standing up new businesses to compete with the larger companies in each of these verticals. And the larger companies don't want to be left behind. So they're standing up their own competing services or getting into new lines of business that really harness and are driven by real time data. So this compelling pressures, one, you know customer experience is paramount and we as customers expect answers in you know an instant, in real time. And on the other hand, the way they make decisions is based on a large data set because you know larger data sets actually propel better decisions. So there's competing pressures here which essentially drive the need one from a business perspective, two from a customer perspective to harness all of this data in real time. So that's what's driving an incessant need to actually make decisions in real or near real time. >> You know, I think one of the things that's been in short supply over the last couple of years is patience. We do expect as consumers whether we're in our business lives our personal lives that we're going to be getting be given information and data that's relevant it's personal to help us make those real time decisions. So having access to real time data is really business critical for organizations across any industries. Talk about some of the main capabilities that modern data applications and data platforms need to have. What are some of the key capabilities of a modern data platform that need to be delivered to meet demanding customer expectations? >> So, you know, going back to your initial question Lisa around why is data really a high value but underutilized or under-leveraged asset? One of the reasons we see is a lot of the data platforms that, you know, some of these applications were built on have been then around for a decade plus. And they were never built for the needs of today, which is really driving a lot of data and driving insight in real time from a lot of data. So there are four major capabilities that we see that are essential ingredients of any modern data platform. One is really the ability to, you know, operate at unlimited scale. So what we mean by that is really the ability to scale from gigabytes to even petabytes without any degradation in performance or latency or throughput. The second is really, you know, predictable performance. So can you actually deliver predictable performance as your data size grows or your throughput grows or your concurrent user on that application of service grows? It's really easy to build an application that operates at low scale or low throughput or low concurrency but performance usually starts degrading as you start scaling one of these attributes. The third thing is the ability to operate and always on globally resilient application. And that requires a really robust data platform that can be up on a five nine basis globally, can support global distribution because a lot of these applications have global users. And the last point is, goes back to my first answer which is, can you operate all of this at a cost point which is not prohibitive but it makes sense from a TCO perspective. 'Cause a lot of times what we see is people make choices of data platforms and as ironically their service or applications become more successful and more users join their journey the revenue starts going up, the user base starts going up but the cost basis starts crossing over the revenue and they're losing money on the service, ironically as the service becomes more popular. So really unlimited scale predictable performance always on a globally resilient basis and low TCO. These are the four essential capabilities of any modern data platform. >> So then talk to me with those as the four main core functionalities of a modern data platform, how does Aerospike deliver that? >> So we were built, as I said from day one to operate at unlimited scale and deliver predictable performance. And then over the years as we work with customers we build this incredible high availability capability which helps us deliver the always on, you know, operations. So we have customers who are who have been on the platform 10 years with no downtime for example, right? So we are talking about an amazing continuum of high availability that we provide for customers who operate these, you know globally resilient services. The key to our innovation here is what we call the hybrid memory architecture. So, you know, going a little bit technically deep here essentially what we built out in our architecture is the ability on each node or each server to treat a bank of SSDs or solid-state devices as essentially extended memory. So you're getting memory performance but you're accessing these SSDs. You're not paying memory prices but you're getting memory performance. As a result of that you can attach a lot more data to each node or each server in a distributed cluster. And when you kind of scale that across basically a distributed cluster you can do with Aerospike the same things at 60 to 80% lower server count. And as a result 60 to 80% lower TCO compared to some of the other options that are available in the market. Then basically, as I said that's the key kind of starting point to the innovation. We lay around capabilities like, you know replication, change data notification, you know synchronous and asynchronous replication. The ability to actually stretch a single cluster across multiple regions. So for example, if you're operating a global service you can have a single Aerospike cluster with one node in San Francisco one node in New York, another one in London and this would be basically seamlessly operating. So that, you know, this is strongly consistent, very few no SQL data platforms are strongly consistent or if they are strongly consistent they will actually suffer performance degradation. And what strongly consistent means is, you know all your data is always available it's guaranteed to be available there is no data lost any time. So in this configuration that I talked about if the node in London goes down your application still continues to operate, right? Your users see no kind of downtime and you know, when London comes up it rejoins the cluster and everything is back to kind of the way it was before, you know London left the cluster so to speak. So the ability to do this globally resilient highly available kind of model is really, really powerful. A lot of our customers actually use that kind of a scenario and we offer other deployment scenarios from a higher availability perspective. So everything starts with HMA or Hybrid Memory Architecture and then we start building a lot of these other capabilities around the platform. And then over the years what our customers have guided us to do is as they're putting together a modern kind of data infrastructure, we don't live in the silo. So Aerospike gets deployed with other technologies like streaming technologies or analytics technologies. So we built connectors into Kafka, Pulsar, so that as you're ingesting data from a variety of data sources you can ingest them at very high ingest speeds and store them persistently into Aerospike. Once the data is in Aerospike you can actually run Spark jobs across that data in a multi-threaded parallel fashion to get really insight from that data at really high throughput and high speed. >> High throughput, high speed, incredibly important especially as today's landscape is increasingly distributed. Data centers, multiple public clouds, Edge, IoT devices, the workforce embracing more and more hybrid these days. How are you helping customers to extract more value from data while also lowering costs? Go into some customer examples 'cause I know you have some great ones. >> Yeah, you know, I think, we have built an amazing set of customers and customers actually use us for some really mission critical applications. So, you know, before I get into specific customer examples let me talk to you about some of kind of the use cases which we see out there. We see a lot of Aerospike being used in fraud detection. We see us being used in recommendations engines we get used in customer data profiles, or customer profiles, Customer 360 stores, you know multiplayer gaming and entertainment. These are kind of the repeated use case, digital payments. We power most of the digital payment systems across the globe. Specific example from a specific example perspective the first one I would love to talk about is PayPal. So if you use PayPal today, then you know when you're actually paying somebody your transaction is, you know being sent through Aerospike to really decide whether this is a fraudulent transaction or not. And when you do that, you know, you and I as a customer are not going to wait around for 10 seconds for PayPal to say yay or nay. We expect, you know, the decision to be made in an instant. So we are powering that fraud detection engine at PayPal. For every transaction that goes through PayPal. Before us, you know, PayPal was missing out on about 2% of their SLAs which was essentially millions of dollars which they were losing because, you know, they were letting transactions go through and taking the risk that it's not a fraudulent transaction. With Aerospike they can now actually get a much better SLA and the data set on which they compute the fraud score has gone up by you know, several factors. So by 30X if you will. So not only has the data size that is powering the fraud engine actually gone up 30X with Aerospike but they're actually making decisions in an instant for, you know, 99.95% of their transactions. So that's- >> And that's what we expect as consumers, right? We want to know that there's fraud detection on the swipe regardless of who we're interacting with. >> Yes, and so that's a really powerful use case and you know, it's a great customer success story. The other one I would talk about is really Wayfair, right, from retail and you know from e-commerce. So everybody knows Wayfair global leader in really in online home furnishings and they use us to power their recommendations engine. And you know it's basically if you're purchasing this, people who bought this also bought these five other things, so on and so forth. They have actually seen their cart size at checkout go up by up to 30%, as a result of actually powering their recommendations engine through Aerospike. And they were able to do this by reducing the server count by 9X. So on one ninth of the servers that were there before Aerospike, they're now powering their recommendations engine and seeing cart size checkout go up by 30%. Really, really powerful in terms of the business outcome and what we are able to, you know, drive at Wayfair. >> Hugely powerful as a business outcome. And that's also what the consumer wants. The consumer is expecting these days to have a very personalized relevant experience that's going to show me if I bought this show me something else that's related to that. We have this expectation that needs to be really fueled by technology. >> Exactly, and you know, another great example you asked about you know, customer stories, Adobe. Who doesn't know Adobe, you know. They're on a mission to deliver the best customer experience that they can. And they're talking about, you know great Customer 360 experience at scale and they're modernizing their entire edge compute infrastructure to support this with Aerospike. Going to Aerospike basically what they have seen is their throughput go up by 70%, their cost has been reduced by 3X. So essentially doing it at one third of the cost while their annual data growth continues at, you know about north of 30%. So not only is their data growing they're able to actually reduce their cost to actually deliver this great customer experience by one third to one third and continue to deliver great Customer 360 experience at scale. Really, really powerful example of how you deliver Customer 360 in a world which is dynamic and you know on a data set which is constantly growing at north of 30% in this case. >> Those are three great examples, PayPal, Wayfair, Adobe, talking about, especially with Wayfair when you talk about increasing their cart checkout sizes but also with Adobe increasing throughput by over 70%. I'm looking at my notes here. While data is growing at 32%, that's something that every organization has to contend with data growth is continuing to scale and scale and scale. >> Yap, I'll give you a fun one here. So, you know, you may not have heard about this company it's called Dream11 and it's a company based out of India but it's a very, you know, it's a fun story because it's the world's largest fantasy sports platform. And you know, India is a nation which is cricket crazy. So you know, when they have their premier league going on and there's millions of users logged onto the Dream11 platform building their fantasy league teams and you know, playing on that particular platform, it has a hundred million users a hundred million plus users on the platform, 5.5 million concurrent users and they have been growing at 30%. So they are considered an amazing success story in terms of what they have accomplished and the way they have architected their platform to operate at scale. And all of that is really powered by Aerospike. Think about that they're able to deliver all of this and support a hundred million users 5.5 million concurrent users all with, you know 99 plus percent of their transactions completing in less than one millisecond. Just incredible success story. Not a brand that is, you know, world renowned but at least you know from what we see out there it's an amazing success story of operating at scale. >> Amazing success story, huge business outcomes. Last question for you as we're almost out of time is talk a little bit about Aerospike AWS the partnership Graviton2 better together. What are you guys doing together there? >> Great partnership. AWS has multiple layers in terms of partnerships. So, you know, we engage with AWS at the executive level. They plan out, really roll out of new instances in partnership with us, making sure that, you know those instance types work well for us. And then we just released support for Aerospike on the Graviton platform and we just announced a benchmark of Aerospike running on Graviton on AWS. And what we see out there is with the benchmark a 1.6X improvement in price performance. And you know about 18% increase in throughput while maintaining a 27% reduction in cost, you know, on Graviton. So this is an amazing story from a price performance perspective, performance per watt for greater energy efficiencies, which basically a lot of our customers are starting to kind of talk to us about leveraging this to further meet their sustainability target. So great story from Aerospike and AWS not just from a partnership perspective on a technology and an executive level, but also in terms of what joint outcomes we are able to deliver for our customers. >> And it sounds like a great sustainability story. I wish we had more time so we would talk about this but thank you so much for talking about the main capabilities of a modern data platform, what's needed, why, and how you guys are delivering that. We appreciate your insights and appreciate your time. >> Thank you very much. I mean, if folks are at re:Invent next week or this week come on and see us at our booth and we are in the data analytics pavilion and you can find us pretty easily. Would love to talk to you. >> Perfect, we'll send them there. Subbu Iyer, thank you so much for joining me on the program today. We appreciate your insights. >> Thank you Lisa. >> I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent 2022. Thanks for watching. >> Clear- >> Clear cutting. >> Nice job, very nice job.

(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome to theCUBE's presentation with Unstoppable Domains. It's a showcase we're featuring all the best content in Web 3 and with unstoppable showcase, I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We got a great guest here, Matt Mickiewicz who's the Chief Revenue Officer of Unstoppable Domains. Matt, welcome to the showcase, appreciate it. >> Thank you for having me. >> So the theme of this segment is the potential of the Web 3 marketplace with Unstoppable Domains. You're the Chief Revenue Officer, you guys have a very interesting concept that's going extremely well, congratulations. But you're using NFTs for access and domains, Of course through the metaverse is huge. People want their own domains, but it's not just like real estate in the sense of a website. It's bigger than that it's a lot going on. So take us through what is the value proposition and what is the product? >> Absolutely, so for the past 20 years, most of us have been interacting on the internet using usernames issued to us by big corporations like Facebook, Google, Twitter, TikTok, Snapchat, et cetera. Whenever we get these usernames for free it's because we and our data are the product. As some of the recent leaks in the media have shown incentive individual in companies are not always aligned. And most importantly individuals are not in control of their own digital identity and the data, which means they can economically benefit from the value they create online. Think of Twitter as a two-sided marketplace with 0% revenue share back to its creators. We're now having in the creator economy and we believe that individuals should see the economic rewards of what they do and create online. That's what we are trying to do in** support of domains is provide user own and control identity to four and a half billion internet users. >> It's interesting to see change that's happening with Web3 and just in cultural terms, users are expecting to be part of the creator the personality of the company, there's this almost this intermediation of the middle man whether it's an ad network or a gatekeeper of any kind people going direct, right? So if I'm an artist, I can go direct to my fans. >> Exactly, so Web3 really shifts the power away from a aggregators. Aggregators and marketplaces have been some of the best business models for the last 20 years onto the internet. But Web3 is going to dramatically change all over the next decade. Bring more power back in the hands of consumers. >> What type of companies do you guys work with and partner with that we see out there? Give us some examples of the kinds of companies you're doing business with end partnering with. >> Yeah, so let's talk about use cases first actually. Was the big use case that we identified initially for NFT domain names was around cryptocurrency transfers. Anyone who's ever bought cryptocurrency and tried to transfer it between accounts or wallets is familiar with these awkwardly long hexa decimal strings of random numbers and letters, or even if you make a single type of money is lost forever. That's a pretty scary experience that exists today. That 2 trillion asset dollar as a class with 250 million users. So the first set of partners that we worked on integrating with, we're actually crypto wallets and exchanges. So we will allow users to do is replace all their long hexa decimal wallet addresses with a single human readable name, like John.NFT or MattMickiewicz.crypto to allow for simple crypto transfers. >> And how do the exchange work with you guys on that is it a plugin, is it co-locating code together? What's the relationship between exchanges and Unstoppable Domains? >> Yeah, absolutely great question. So exchanges actually have to do a little bit of engineering list to work with us and they can do that by either using our resolution libraries or using one of our APIs in order to look up an Unstoppable Domain and figure out all the wallet addresses that's associated with that name. So today we work with dozens of the world's top exchanges and wallets ranging from OKX to Coinbase wallet, to Trust wallet, to bread wallet, and many many others. >> I got to ask you on the wallet side, is that a requirement in terms of having specific code and are the wallets that you work well with? Explain the wallet dynamic between Unstoppable Domains and wallets. >> Yeah, so wallets all have this huge usability problem for their users because every single cryptocurrency held by every single one of their users has a different hexadecimal wallet address. And once again every user is subject to the same human fallacies and errors where if they make a single type their money can be lost forever. So what we enable these wallets to do is to make crypto transfer simple and less scary than the current status quo by giving the users an Unstoppable name that they can use to attach to all the wallet addresses on the back end. So companies like Trust Wallet for example, which has 10 million user or Coinbase Wallet. When you go to the crypto transfer fields, there you can just type in an unstoppable name It'll correctly route the currency to the right person, to the right wallet, without any chance for human error. >> When these big waves coming out I got to ask this question, 'cause a lot of people in the mainstream are getting into it now. It reminds me of the web wave that hit the big thing was how many people are coming online, was one of the key metrics and how many web pages are being developed was another metric, which meant that people were building out webpages. And it's hard to look back and think, wow, that was actually a KPI. So internet users and webpages where the two proxies 'cause then search engines came out and everything else happened. So I got to ask you, there are people watching, they're seeing it on commercials on TV, they're seeing it everywhere stadiums are named after crypto companies. So, the bottom line is people want to know how NFT domains take the fear out of working with crypto and sending crypto. >> Yeah, absolutely, so imagine we had to navigate the web using IP addresses rather than typing in Google.com. You'd have to type in a random string of numbers that you'd had to memorize. That would be super painful for users and internet wouldn't have gotten to where it is today with almost 5 billion people online. The history of computer networks we have human readable naming systems built on top in every single instance, it's almost crazy that we got to a $2 trillion asset class with 250 million users worldwide. 13 years after the Satoshi white paper, without a human readable naming system other Unstoppable Domains in a few of our competitors, that's a fundamental problem that we need to solve in order to go from 250 million crypto users in 2022 to 5 billion crypto users a decade from now. >> And just to point out, not to look back and maybe make a correlation but I will, if you look at the naming system of DNS, what it did to IP addresses, that's one major innovation that enabled the web. Then you look at what keyword navigation has done on top of DNS, what that did for the industry, and that basically birthed Google keywords basically ads. So that's trillions and trillions of dollars. Again, now shifting to you guys, is that how you see it? Obviously it's decentralized, so what's different? Okay, I get, so if you compare here Google was successful, keyword advertising industry for the last of 25 years or 20 years. >> What's different now is? >> yeah >> Yeah, what's different now is the technology inflection points. So Blockchains have evolved to a point where they enable high throughput high transaction volume and true decentralized ownership. The NFTs standard, which is only a couple years old, has taken off massively around trading of profile pictures like CryptoPunks and the Bored Apes Yacht Club where the use cases extend much more than just a cool JPEG that goes up in value two or three X year over year. There is a true use case here around ownership of identity ownership over data, a decentralized login authentication and permission data sharing. One of the sad things that happened on the internet the last decade really was, that the platforms built out have now allowed developers to build on top of them in a trustless comissionless way. Developers who built applications on top of them, the early monopolies in the last decade, got the rules changed on them. APIs cut off, new fees instituted. That's not going to happen in Web3 because all permission list. Once an NFT is minted, it's custody in a user's own wallet, we cannot take the way it will continue to exist in eternity, regardless of what happens to Unstoppable Domains, which gives developers a lot more confidence in building new products for the Web3 identity standard that we're building out. >> You know what's amazing is that's a whole another generational shift. I've always been a big fan of abstractions when innovation is needed when there are problems that need to be solved, messes to be cleaned up, a good abstraction layer on top of new architecture is really, really phenomenal. I guess the key question for I have for you is, theCUBE we have all this video where's our NFT how should we implement NFTs? >> There's a couple different ways you could think about it, you could do proof of attendance protocol NFTs, which are really interesting way for users to show that they were at particular event. So just in the same way that people collect T-shirts from conferences, people will be collecting NFTs to show they were attending in person cultural moments or that they were part of an event online or offline. You could do NFTs for our employees to show that they were at your company during certain periods of the company's growth. So think of replacing their resume with a cryptographically secure resume like this on the Blockchain and perpetuity. Now more than half of all resumes contain lies, which is a pretty gnarly problem as a hiring manager that we constantly have to sort through. There's where that this can impact that side of the market as well. >> That's awesome, and I think this is a use case for everything we appreciate that. And of course we can have the most favorite cube moments, it can be a cube host NFT at Board Apes out there. Why not have a board cube host going on and then.. >> We're an auction for charity and OpenSea. >> All right, great stuff, now let's get into some of the cool tech nerd stuff, which is really the login piece which I think is fascinating. The having NFTs be a login mechanism is another great innovation, okay. So this is cool, 'cause it's like think of it as one click NFTs, if you will. What's the response been on this login with Unstoppable for that product? What's some of the use cases, can you get some examples of the momentum intraction? >> Yeah, absolutely, so we launched a product less than 90 days ago and we already have 90 committed or integrated partners live today with a login product. And this replaces login with Google, login with Facebook with a way that it's user owned and user controlled. And over time people will be attaching additional information back to their NFT domain name, such as their reputation, their history, things they've done online and be able to permission to share that with applications that they interact with in order to gain rewards. Once you own all of your data, and you can choose who you shared with . Companies will incentivize you to share data. For example, imagine you just buy a new house and you have 3000 square feet to furnish. If you could tell that fact and prove it, to a company like Wayfair, would they be incentivized to give you discounts? We're spending 10, 20, $30,000 and you'll do all of your purchasing there rather than spread across other e-commerce retailers. For sure they would, but right now when you go to that website, you're just another random email address. They have no idea who you are, what you've done, what your credit score is, whether you're a new house buyer or not. But if you could permission to share that using a log and installable product, I mean the web would just be much much different. >> And I think one of the things too, as these, I call them analog old school companies, old guard companies as referred to in theCUBE talk here. But we always call that old guard as the people who aren't innovating. You could think about companies having more community too, because if you have more sharing and you have this marketplace concept and you have these new dynamics of how people are working together, sharing will provide more or transparency but yet security on identity. Therefore things are going to be happening organically. That's a community dynamic what's your view on that? And what's your reaction. >> Communities are such an important part of Web3 and the cryptos ecosystem in general. People are very tightly knit, they all support each other. There there's a huge amount of collaboration in this space because we're all trying to onboard the next billion users into the ecosystem. And we know we have some fundamental challenges and problems to solve, whether it's complex wallet addresses, whether it's the lack of portable data sharing, whether it's just simple education, right? I'm sure, tens of million of people have gone to crypto for the first time during this year's Super Bowl based on some of those awesome ads they ran. >> Yeah, love the QR code, that's a direct response. I remember when the QR codes been around for a long time. I remember in the late 90's, it was a device at red QR code that did navigation to a webpage. So I mean, QR codes are super cool, great way to get, and we all using it too with the pandemic to ordering food. So I think QR codes are here to stay, in fact, we should have a QR code on all of our images here on the screen too. So we'll work on that, but I got to ask you on the project side, now let's get into the devs and kind of the applications, the users that are adopting unstoppable and this new way of things. Why are they gravitating towards this login concept? Can you give some examples and give some color commentary to why are these D-application, distributed application, dApps guys and gals programming with you guys? >> Yeah, they all believe that the potential for what we're trying to create around user own controlled identity. Where the only company in the market right now with a product that's live and working today. There's been a lot of promises made, and we're the first ones to actually delivered. So companies like Cook Finance for example, are seeing the benefit of being able to have their users, go through a simple process to check in and authenticate into the application using your NFT domain name rather than having to create an email address and password combination as a login, which inevitably leads to problems such as lost passwords, password resets, all those fun things that we used to deal with on a daily basis. >> Okay, so now I got to ask you the kind of partnerships you guys are looking at doing. I can only imagine the old school days you had a registry and you had registrars, you had a sales mechanism. I noticed you guys are selling NFT kind of like domain names on your website. Is that a kind of a current situation, is that going to be ongoing? How do you envision your business model evolving and what kind of partnerships do you see coming along? >> Yeah, absolutely, so we're working with a lot of different companies from browsers to exchanges, to wallets, to individual NFT projects, to more recently even exploring partnership opportunities with fashion brands for example. Monetarily, market is moving so so fast. And what we're trying to essentially do here is create the standard naming system for Web3. So a big part of that for us will be working with partners like blockchain.com and with Circle, who's behind the USDC coin on creating registry such as .blockchain and .coin and making those available to tens of millions and ultimately hundreds of millions and billions of users worldwide. We want an Unstoppable domain name to be the first asset that every user in crypto gets even before they buy their Bitcoin, Ethereum or Dogecoin. >> It makes a lot of sense to abstract the way the long hexa desal stream we all know, that we all write down, put in a safe, hopefully we don't forget about it. I always say, make sure you tell someone where your address is. So in case something happens, you don't lose all that crypto. All good stuff. I got to ask this the question around the ecosystem. Okay, can you share your view and vision of either yourself or the company when you have this kind of new market, you have all kinds of, we meant the web was a good example, right? Web pages, you need to web develop and tools. You had HTML by hand, then you had all these tools. So you had tools and platforms and things kind of came well grew together. How is the Web3 stakeholder ecosystem space evolving? What are some of the white spaces? What are some of the clearly defined areas that are developing? >> Yeah, I mean, we've seen explosion in new smart contract blockchains in the past couple of years, actually going live, which is really interesting because they support a huge number of different use cases, different trade offs on each. We recently partnered and moved over a primary infrastructure to Polygon, which is a leading EVM compatible smart chain, which allows us to provide free gas fees to users for minting and managing their domain name. So we're trying to move all obstacles around user adoption. Here you'll need to have Ethereum in your wallet in order to be an Unstoppable Domains customer or user, you don't have to worry about paying transaction fees every time you want to update the wallet addresses associated with your domain name. We want to make this really big and accessible for everybody. And that means driving down costs as much as possible. >> Yeah, it's a whole nother wave. It's a wave that's built on the shoulders of others. It's a shift in infrastructure, new capabilities, new applications. I think it's a great thing you guys do in the naming system, makes a lot of sense. It abstraction layer creates that ease of use, it simplifies things, makes things easier. I mean was the promise of these abstraction layer. Final question, if I want to get involved, say we want to do a CUBE NFT with Unstoppable, how do we work with you? How do we engage? Can you give a quick plug on what companies can do to engage with you guys on a business level? >> Yeah, absolutely, so we're looking to partner with wallet exchanges, browsers and companies who are in the crypto space already and realize they have a huge problem around usability with crypto transfers and wallet addresses. Additionally, we're looking to partner with decentralized applications as well as Web2 companies who perhaps want to offer logging with Unstoppable domain functionality. In addition to, or in replacement of the login with Google and login with Facebook buttons that we all know and love. And we're looking to work with fashion brands and companies in the sports sector who perhaps want to claim their Unstoppable name, free of charge from us. I might add in order to use that on Twitter or in other marketing materials that they may have out there in the world to signal that they're not only forward looking, but that they're supportive of this huge waves that we're all riding at the moment. >> Matt, great insight, chief revenue officer, Unstoppable Domains. Thanks for coming on the showcase, theCUBE and Unstoppable Domains share in the insights. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Okay, this CUBE's coverage here with the Unstoppable Domain showcase. I'm John Furrier, your host, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>Hello, and welcome to this cubes presentation with unstoppable domains. It's a showcase we're featuring all the best content in web three. And with unstabled a showcase I'm John furrier, your host of the cube. We've got a great guest here, Matt Miscavige. Covich who's the chief revenue officer of unstoppable domains. Matt, welcome to the showcase. Appreciate it. >>Thank you for having me. So >>The theme of this segment is the potential of the web three marketplace with unstoppable domains, the chief revenue officer, you guys have a very intriguing, interesting concept. That's going extremely well. Congratulations, but you're using NFTs for access and domains. Of course, the, the metaverse is huge. People want their own domains, but it's not just like real estate in the sense of a website. It's bigger than that. It's a lot going on. So take us through what is the value proposition and what is the product? >>Absolutely. So for the past 20 years, most of us have been interacting on the internet. Using usernames issued to us by big corporations like Facebook, Google, Twitter, tech talks, Snapchat, et cetera. Whenever we get these usernames for free it's because we in our data are the product as some of the recent leaks. And the media has shown incentives. Individuals and companies are not always aligned. And most importantly, individuals are not in control of their own digital identity and the data, which means they can economically benefit from the value they create online. Think of Twitter as a two-sided marketplace with 0% revenue share back to its creators. We're now having in the creator economy and we believe that individuals should see the economic rewards of what they do in create online. That's all we're trying to do here at unstoppable domains is provide user own take control identity to four and a half billion internet users. >>It's interesting to see change that's happening with web three. And just in cultural terms, users are expecting to be part of the creative, the personality of the company. There's this almost this disintermediation of the middleman. You know, whether it's an ad network or a gatekeeper of any kind people going direct, right? So if I'm an artist, I can go direct to my fans. >>Exactly. So web through really shifts the power away from aggregators, aggregators and marketplaces have been some of the best business models. The last 20 years onto the internet, the web three is going to dramatically change that over the next decade, paying more power back in the hands of consumers. >>What type of companies do you guys work with and partner with that we see out there, what's give us some examples of the kinds of companies you're doing business with and partnering with. >>Yeah. So let's talk about use cases. First actually is the big use case that we identified initially for NFT domain names was around cryptocurrency transfers. Anyone who's ever bought cryptocurrency and tried to transfer it between the council while it's is familiar with these awkwardly long hexadecimal strings of random numbers and letters, where if you make a single type of money is lost forever. That's a pretty scary experience that exists today in our $2 trillion asset class with 250 million users. So the first set of partners that we worked on integrating with who actually cook the wilds and exchanges. So we will allow users to do is replace all their long hexadecimal wallet addresses with a single human readable name, like John dot NFT or Maxim needs give each dot crypto to allow for simple crypto transfers. >>And how did the exchange work with you guys on that as it is? Is it a plugin? Is it co-locating code together? What's the, what's the, what's the relationship between exchanges and unstoppable domains? >>Yeah, absolutely. A great question. So exchange has actually have to do a little bit of an engineering lift to work with us, and they can do that by either using our resolution libraries or using one of our API APIs or in order to look up an unstoppable name and figure out all the wallet addresses that's associated with that name. So today we work with dozens of the world's top exchanges and wallets ranging from Oko DX to Coinbase wallet, to trust wallet, to bread wallet, and many, many others. >>I got to ask you on the wallet side, is that a requirement in terms of having specific code and are there wallets that you work well with? Explain the wallet dynamic between unstoppable domains and wallets. >>Yeah. So while it's all have this huge usability problem for their users, because every single cryptocurrency held by every single one of their users has a different hexadecimal wallet address. And once again, every user is subject to the same human fallacies and errors, where they make a single type where their money can be lost forever. So we enable these wallets to do is to make crypto transfer as simple and as less scary than the current status code by giving the users on a sub well name that they can use to attach to all the waltz addresses on the backend. So companies like trust world, for example, which has 10 million users or Coinbase wallet. When you go to the crypto transfer fields, they can just type in an unstoppable name. They'll correctly, route the currency to the right person, to the right world, without any chance for human error. >>You know, when these big waves come, I gotta ask you this question. Cause a lot of people in the mainstream are getting into it. Now reminds me of the web wave that hit the big thing was how many people are coming online. It was one of the key metrics and how many web pages are being developed was another metric, which meant that people were building out web pages. And it's hard to look back and think, wow, that was actually a KPI. So internet users and webpages were the two proxies cause then search and just came out and everything else happened. So I'm going to ask you, there are people watching, they're seeing that on commercials on TV, they're seeing it everywhere stadiums are named after crypto companies. So the bottom line is people want to know how NFT domains take the fear out of working with crypto and sending crypto. >>Yeah, absolutely. So imagine if we had to navigate the web using IP addresses rather than typing in google.com, you'd have to type in a random string of words and numbers that you'd have to memorize. That would be super painful for users. And didn't, it wouldn't have gotten to where it is today with this, you know, almost 5 billion people online, the history of computer networks. We have human readable naming systems built on top. In every single instance. It's almost crazy that we got to a $2 trillion asset class with 250 million users worldwide 13 years after this, the Toshi white paper without a human readable naming system, other than supple domains and a few of our competitors, that's a fundamental problem that we need to solve in order to go from 250 million crypto users in 2022 to 5 billion crypto users, a decade from now. >>And just to point out and not to look back and maybe make a correlation, but I will, if you look at the naming system of DNS, what it did to IP addresses, that's one major innovation that enabled the web. Then you look at what keyword navigation has done on top of DNS, what that did for the industry. And that basically birthed Googled keywords, basically ads. So that's trillions and trillions of dollars again. Now shifting to you guys, is that how you see it? Obviously it's decentralized, so what's different. Okay. I get, so if you compare, Hey, Google was successful, you know, keyword advertising industry for less than 25 years or 20 years. >>Yeah. Yeah. What's different. Now is the technology inflection points. So blockchains have evolved to a point where they enable high throughput, high transaction volume and true decentralized ownership. The NFT standard, which is only a couple of years old know, has taken off massively around trading of profile pictures like crypto punks and the boy apes yacht club where they use cases extended much more than just, you know, a cool JPEG that goes up in value two or three X year over year. There is the true use case here around ownership of identity ownership over a data set, decentralized log-in authentication and permission data sharing. One of the sad things that happened in Jeanette on the internalized decade really was that the platforms built out have now allowed developers to built on top of them and a trustless permissionless way. Developers who build applications on top of some of the early monopolies in the last decade, got the rules changed on them. APIs, cutoff, new fees instituted. That's not going to happen in web three because all permissionless custody in a user's own wallet, we cannot take the way they will continue to exist in eternity, regardless of what happens to unstoppable domains, which gives developers a lot more confidence in building new products for the web three identity standard that we're building out. >>You guys amazing is that's a whole nother generational shift. I'm always been a big fan of abstractions when innovation is needed, when they're problems that need to be solved, messes to be cleaned up. Good abstraction layer on top of new architecture is really, really phenomenal. I guess the key question for I have for you is, you know, the queue, we have all this video where where's our NFT should, how should we implement NFTs? >>There's a couple of different ways you could think about it. You could do proof of attendance, protocol NFTs, which are really interesting way for users to show that they were at particular events. So just in the same way that people collect, t-shirts some conferences, people will be collecting. And if Ts to show, there were in person attending in person cultural moments, whether they were acquired an event online or offline, you could do NFTs for employees to show that they were at your company during certain periods of the company's growth. So think of replacing the resume with a cryptographically secure resume like this on the blockchain and perpetuity. Now more than half of all the resumes contain lies, which is a pretty gnarly problem as a hiring manager, or you constantly have to sort through as ways that this can impact that side of the market as well. >>I saw some, and I think it was a use case for everything. Appreciate that. And of course we can have the most favorite, cute moments. It could be a cube host NFT at 40 apes out there. Why not have a board cube host going on and, and >>Auction for charity on open? >>All right, great stuff. Now let's get into some of the cool tech nerd stuff, which is really the login piece, which I think is fascinating. The having NFTs be a login mechanism is another great innovation. Okay. So this is cool. Cause it's like think of it as one click and FTS, if you will. What's the response been on this? Log-in with unstoppable for that product? What some of the use gates is. Can you give some examples of the momentum and traction? >>Yeah, absolutely. So we launched the product less than 90 days ago. We already have 90 committed or integrated partners live today with a login product. And this replaces login with Google login with Facebook, with a way that's user owned and user controlled. And over time, people will be capturing additional information back to their NFP domain names, such as their reputation, their history, things they've done online and be able to permission to share that with applications that they interact with in order to get any rewards, once you own all your data and you can choose to share it with companies or incentivize you to share data. For example, imagine you just bought a new house and you have 3000 square feet to furnish. You could tell that fact and prove it to a company like Wayfair. Would they be incentivized to give you discounts? We're spending 10, 20, $30,000 and you'll do all of your purchasing there rather than spread across other e-commerce retailers. For sure they would. But right now, when you go to that website, you're just another random email address. They have no idea who you are, what you've done, what your credit score is, whether you house buyer or not. But if you could permission to share that to using a log-in open software product, I mean the web would just be much, much different. >>And I think one of the things too, as these, I call them analog old school companies, old guard companies is referred to in the cube talk here, but we were still always called that old guard is the people who aren't innovating. You could think about companies having more community too, because if you have more sharing and you have this marketplace concept and you have these new dynamics of how people are working together, sharing will provide more transparency, but yet security on identity. Therefore things are going to be happening organically. That's a community dynamic. What's your view on that? And what's your reaction >>Communities are such an important part of web three and the cryptos ecosystem in general, people are very tightly knit and they all support each other. There's a huge amount of collaboration in this space because we're all trying to onboard the next billion users into the ecosystem. And we know we have some fundamental challenges and problems to solve, whether it's complex wallet addresses, whether it's the lack of portable data sharing, whether it's just simple education, right? I'm sure, you know, tens of millions of people got into crypto for the first time during the super bowl face on some of those awesome ads that ran. >>Yeah. Love the QR code. That's a direct response. I remember when the QR code has been around for a long time. I remember in the nineties, late nineties, it was a thing, a device at red QR codes that did navigation to a webpage. So I mean, QR codes are super cool, great way to get, and we all using it to, with the pandemic to ordering food. So I think QR codes are here to stay. In fact, we should have a QR code on all of our images here on the screen too. So we'll work on that, but I gotta ask you on the project side, now let's get into the devs and kind of the applications, the users that are adopting unstoppable and this new way of doing things, why are they gravitating towards this login concepts? Can you give some examples and put, give some color commentary to why are these D application distribute application guys and gals programming and with you guys? >>Yeah. They all believe that the potential for why we're trying to create a round user own the controlled identity. We're the only company in the market right now with a product that's live and working today. There's been a lot of promises made and we're the first ones to actually deliver to companies like cook finance, for example, are seeing the benefit of being able to have their users go through a simple process to check in and authenticate into the application, using your NFT domain name, rather than having to create an email address and password combination as a login, which inevitably leads to problems such as lost passwords, password resets, all those fun things that we used to deal with on a daily basis. >>Okay. So now I got to ask you the kind of partnerships you guys are looking at doing. I can only imagine the old, old school days you had a registry and you had registrars, you had a sales mechanism. I noticed you guys are selling NFT kind of like domain names on your website. Is that a kind of a current situation? Is that going to be ongoing? How do you envision your business model evolving and what kind of partnerships do you see coming along? >>Yeah, absolutely. So we're working with a lot of different companies from browsers that took changes to wallets, to individual NFT projects, to more recently even exploring partnership, partnership opportunities with fashion brands. For example, the Tyree market is moving so so fast. And what we're trying to essentially do here is create the standard naming system for web three. So a big part of that for us, we'll be working with partners like blockchain.com and with circle who's behind the DC coin on creating registries, such as dot blockchain and dot coin and making those available to tens of millions and ultimately hundreds of millions and billions of users worldwide. We want an ensemble domain name to be the first asset that every user in crypto gets, even before they buy their Bitcoin Ethereum or dovish coin. >>It makes a lot of sense obstruct the way the long hexadecimal string. We all know that we all write down putting a safe, hopefully you don't forget about it. You know, I always say, make sure you tell someone where your addresses. So in case something happens, you don't lose all that crypto. All good stuff. I got to ask the question around the ecosystem. Okay, can you share your view and vision of either your purse, yourself or the company when you have this kind of new market, you have all kinds of, and we meant the web was a good example, right? Web pages, you need web development tools. You had HTML by hand. Then you had all these tools. So you had tools and platforms and things kind of came well, grew together. How was the web three stakeholder ecosystem space evolving? What's what are some of the white spaces? What are some of the clearly defined areas that are developing? >>Yeah, I mean, we've seen an explosion in new smart contract blockchains and the past couple of years actually going live, which is really interesting because they support a huge number of different use cases, different trade-offs on each. We recently partnered and moved over a primary infrastructure to polygon, which is a leading EVM compatible smart chain, which allows us to provide free gas fees to users for maintaining and managing their domain name. So we're trying to move all obstacles around user adoption. Here. We all need to have Ethereum in your wallet. You know, it'd be an unstoppable domains customer or user. You don't have to worry about paying transaction fees. Every time you want to update the wallet, addresses associated with your domain name. We want to make this really big and accessible for everybody. And that means driving down costs as much as possible. Yeah, >>It's a whole nother wave. It's a wave that's built on the shoulders of others. It's a shift and infrastructure, new capabilities, new new applications. I think it's a, it's a great thing. You guys doing the naming system makes a lot of sense. This abstraction layer creates that ease of use. It simplifies things makes things easier. I mean, this is, was the promise of, of these abstraction layers. Final question. If I want to get involved, say we want to do a cube NFT with unstoppable. How do we work with you? How do we engage? Can you give a quick plug on what companies can do to engage with you guys on a business level? >>Yeah, absolutely. So we're looking to partner with wallets, exchanges, browsers, and companies who are in the crypto space already and realize they have a huge problem around usability with crypto transfers and wild addresses. Additionally, we're looking to partner with decentralized applications as well as web to companies who perhaps want to offer log-in with unstoppable domain functionality. In addition to, or in replacement of the login with Google and log-in with Facebook buttons that we all know and love. And we're looking to work with fashion brands and companies in the sports sector who perhaps want to claim their unstoppable names, free of charge from us. I might add in order to use that on Twitter or other marketing materials that they may have out there in the world to signal that they're not only forward looking, but that they're supportive of this huge wave that we're all riding at the most. >>May I great insight, chief revenue officer ensemble domains. Thanks for coming on the showcase, the cube and unstoppable domain share in the insights. Thanks for coming on. Okay. This cubes coverage here with the unstoppable domain showcase. I'm John furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.

>> From the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston bringing you data-driven insights from the cube in ETR. This is breaking analysis with Dave Vellante. >> There are four A players, in the IS slash pass hyperscale cloud services space, AWS, Azure, Alibaba, and alphabet, pretty clever, huh? In our view, these four have the resources, the momentum, and stamina to outperform all others virtually indefinitely. Now combined, we believe these companies will generate more than $115 billion in 2021 IaaS and PaaS revenue. That is a substantial chunk of market opportunity that is growing as a whole in the mid 30% range in 2021. Welcome to this week's Wiki bond cube insights, powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we are initiating coverage of Alibaba for our IaaS and PaaS market segments. And we'll update you on the latest hyperscale cloud market data, and survey data from ETR. Big week in hyperscale cloud land, Amazon and alphabet reported earnings and AWS CEO Andy Jassy was promoted to lead Amazon overall. I interviewed John Furrier on the cube this week. John has a close relationship with Jassy and a unique perspective on these developments. And we simulcast the interview on clubhouse, and then hosted a two hour clubhouse room that brought together all kinds of great perspectives on the topic. And then, we took the conversation to Twitter. Now in that discussion, we were just riffing on our updated cloud estimates and our numbers. And here's this tweet that inspired the addition of Alibaba. Now this gentleman is a tech journalist out of New Delhi and he pointed out that we were kind of overlooking Alibaba and I responded that no, we do not just discounting them but we just need to do more homework in the company's cloud business. He also said we're ignoring IBM, but really they're not in this conversation as a hyperscale IaaS competitor to the big four in our view. And we'll just leave it at that for now on IBM, but, back to Alibaba and the big four, we actually did some homework. So thank you for that suggestion. And this chart shows our updated IaaS figures and includes the full year 2020 which was pretty close to our Q4 projections. You know, the big change is we've added Alibaba in the mix. Now these four companies last year, accounted for $86 billion in revenue, and they grew it 41% rate combined relative to 2019. Now, notably as your revenue for the first time is more than half of that of AWS's revenue which of course hit over $45 billion. AWS's revenue, over top 45 billion last year, which is just astounding. Alibaba you'll note, is larger than Google cloud. The Google cloud platform, I should say GCP, at just over eight billion for Alibaba. Now, the reason Baba is such a formidable competitor, is because the vast majority of its revenue comes from China inside that country. And the company do have plans to continue their international expansion, so we see Alibaba as a real force here. Their cloud business showed positive EBITDA for the first time in the history of the company last quarter. So that has people excited. Now, Google, as we've often reported, is far behind AWS and Azure, despite its higher growth rates Google's overall cloud business lost 5.6 billion in 2020 which has some people concerned. We on the other hand are thrilled, because as we've reported in our view, Google needs to get its head out of its ads cloud is it's future. And we're very excited about the company pouring investments into its cloud business. Look with $120 billion essentially in the balance sheet, we can think of a better use of its cash. Now, I want to stress that these figures are our best efforts to create an apples to apples comparison across all four clouds. Many people have asked about, how much of these figures represent, for example, Microsoft office 365 or Google G suite, which by the way now is called workspaces. And the answer is our intention is $0. These are our estimates of worldwide IaaS in PaaS revenue. You know, some of said, we're too low. Some of said, we're too high. Hey, if you have better numbers, Please share them, happy to have a look. Now you maybe asking, what are the drivers of these figures and the growth that we're showing here? Well, all four of these companies, of course, they're benefiting from an accelerated shift to digital as a result to COVID, but each one has other tailwinds. You know, for example, AWS, it's Capitalizing on its a large headstart. It's created tremendous brand value. And as well, despite the fact that, while we estimate that more than 75% of AWS revenue comes from compute and storage, AWS is feature and functional differentiation combined with this large ecosystem is a very much a driving force of it's growth. In the case of Azure, in addition to its captive software application estate, the company on its earnings calls cited strong growth in its consumption based business across all of its industries and customer segments. As we've said, many times, Microsoft makes it really easy for customers to tap into Azure and a true consumption pricing model, with no minimums and cancel any time. Those kinds of terms make it extremely attractive to experiment and get hooked. We certainly saw this with AWS over the years. Now for Google it's growth is being powered by its outstanding technology, and in particular its prowess in AI and analytics. As well we suspect that much of the losses in Google cloud are coming from large go to market investments for Google cloud platform, and they're paying growth dividends. Now, as Tim Crawford said on Twitter, 6 billion, you know that's not too shabby. Also Google cited wins at Wayfair in Etsy, that Google is putting forth in our view to signal that many retailers they might be are you reluctant to do business with Amazon, was of course a big retailer competitor. These are two high profile names, we'd like to see more in future quarters and likely will. Now let's give you another view of this data and paint a picture of, how the pie is being carved out in the market. Actually we'll use bars because my, millennials sounding boards they hate pie charts. And I like to pay attention, to these emerging voices. At any rate amongst these four, AWS has more than half of the market. AWS and Azure are well ahead of the rest. And we think we'll continue to hold serve for quite some time. Now while we're impressed with Alibaba, they're currently constrained to doing business mostly in China. And we think it'll take many years for Baba and GCP to close that gap on the two leaders if they'll ever even get there. Now let's take a look at, what the customers are saying within the ETR survey data. The chart that we're showing here, this is X, Y chart that we show all the time. It's got net score or spending moments on the vertical axis, and market share or the pervasiveness in the datasets in the survey on the horizontal axis. Now on the upper right, you can see the net scores and the number of mentions for each company and the detailed behind this data. And what we've done here is cut the January survey data of 1,262 respondents, you can see that in filtered in there on the left, and we've filtered the data by cloud meaning the respondents are answering about the companies, cloud computing offerings only. So we're filtering out anything of the non-cloud spend. That's a nice little capability of the ETR platform. Azure is really quite amazing to us. It's got a net score of 72.6%, and that's across 572 responses out of the 1262. AWS is the next most pervasive in the data set with 492 shared accounts and a net score of 57.1%. Now, you may be wondering, well, why is Azure bigger in the dataset than AWS? And when we just told you that the opposite is the case in the market in the previous slide. And the answer is, like this is a survey and it's a lot of Microsoft out there, they're everywhere. And I have no doubt that the respondants notion of cloud doesn't directly map into IaaS and PaaS views of the world, but the trends are clear and consistent. Amazon and Azure, they dominate in this market space. Now for context, we've included functions in the form of AWS Lambda as your functions and Google cloud functions. Because, as you can see, there's a lot of spending momentum in these capabilities in these services. You'll also note, that we've added Alibaba to this chart, and it's got a respectable 63.6% net Score, but there are only 11 shared responses in the data. So they'll go into the bank on these numbers, but look, 11 data points, we'll take it. It's better than zero data points. We've also added VMware cloud on AWS in this chart, and you can see that, that capability that service, that has the momentum and you can see those ones that we've highlighted above the 40% red dotted line, that's where the real action in the market is. So all of those offerings have very strong or strong spending velocity in the ETR data set. Now, for context, we've put Oracle and IBM in the chart. And you can see, they both have, you know they've got a decent presence in the data set. They have 132 mentions and 81 responses respectively. So Oracle, they've got a positive net score of 16.7%, and IBM is in a negative 6.2%. Now, remember this is for their cloud offerings, as the respondents in the data set see them. So what does this mean? It says that among the 132 survey respondents answering that they use Oracle cloud, 16.7% more customers are spending more on Oracle's cloud than are spending less. In the case of IBM, it says more customers are spending less than spending more. Both companies are in the red zone, and show far less momentum than the leaders. Look, I've said many times that the good news is, that Oracle and IBM at least have clouds. But they're not direct competitors of the big four in our view, there just not. They have a large software business, and they can migrate their customers, to their respective clouds and market hybrid cloud services. Their definition of cloud is most certainly different than that of AWS, which is fine, but both companies use what I call a kitchen sink method of reporting their cloud business. Oracle includes, cloud and license support, often with revenue recognition at the time of contract, With a term that's renewable and, it also includes on-prem fees, for things like database and middleware, and if, you want to call that cloud, fine. IBM is just as bad, maybe they're worse and includes so much legacy stuff and its cloud number to hide the ball. It's just not even worth trying to unpack for this episode, I have previously and frankly, it's just not a good use of time. Now, as I've said before, both companies they're in the game that can make good money provisioning infrastructure to support their respective software businesses. I just don't consider them hyperscale class clouds which are defined by the big four, and really only those four. And I'm sure I'll get hate mail about that statement, and I'm happy to defend that position, so please reach out. Okay, but one other important thing that we want to discuss is something that came up this week in our Twitter conversation. Here's a tweet from Matt Baker who had strategic planning for Dell. He was responding to someone who commented on our cloud data, basically saying that, with all that cloud revenue who took the hit, which pockets did it come out of, and Matt was saying, look, it's coming out of customer pockets, but can we please end this zero sum game narrative. In other words, it's not a dollar for cloud that doesn't translate into a lost dollar from on-prem for the legacy companies. So let's take a look at that. For first I would agree, with Matt Baker, it's not a one for one swap of spend but there's definitely been an impact. And here's some data from ETR that can, maybe give us some insight here. What this chart shows is a cut of 915 hyperscale cloud accounts. So within those big four, and within those accounts we show the spending velocity or net score cut within further sectors representative of these on-prem players. So servers, storage and networking, so we cut the data on those three segments. And we're looking here at, VMware, Cisco, Dell, HPE, and IBM, for 2020 and into 2021. It's kind of an interesting picture, it shows the net scores for the January of 20 April, July and October 20 surveys and the January 21 surveys. Now all the on-prem players, they were of course impacted by COVID, IBM seems to be that counter trend line. Not that they weren't impacted, but they have this notable mainframe cycle thing going on. And you know, they're in a down cycle now. So it's kind of opposite of the other guys in terms of the survey momentum. And you can see pretty much, all the others are showing upticks headed into 2021, Cisco, you know kind of flattish, but stable and held up a bit. So to Matt Baker's point, despite the 35% or so growth expected for the big four and 2021 the on-prem leaders are showing some signs of positive spending momentum. So let's dig into this a little bit further, 'cause we're not saying cloud hasn't hurt on prem spending. You know, of course it has. Here's that same picture, over a 10 year view. So you're seeing this long, slow, decline occur, and it's no surprise. If you think about the prevailing model for servers, storage, and networking, on prem in particular. Servers have been perpetually under utilized, even with virtualization. You know, with the exception of like backup jobs, there aren't many workloads that can max out server utilization. So we kept buying more servers to give us performance headroom and ran at 20, 30% utilization, you know in a good day. Yes I know some folks can get up over 50%, but generally speaking servers are well under utilized in storage my gosh, it's kind of the same story, maybe even worse. Because for years it was powered by a mechanical system. So more spindles are required to gain performance, lots of copying going on, lots of, you know, pre-flash waste. And in networking it was a story of got to buy more ports. You've got to buy more ports. In the case of these segments, customers will just defense essentially, forced in this endless cycle of planning, procuring, you know, first planning. They got to get the secure the CapEx, and then they procure, and then they over-provision, and then they manage, you know, ongoing. So then along comes AWS, and says, try this on for size and you can see from that chart, the impact of cloud on those bellwether on-prem infrastructure players. Now, just to give you a little bit more insight on this topic, here's a picture of the wheel charts from the ETR data set. For AWS Microsoft, Google, and we brought in VMware to compare them. A wheel chart shows the percent of customers saying they'll either add a platform new that's the lime green. Increased spending by more than 5%, that's the forest green spend flat relative to last year. That's the gray spend less by more than 5% down, that's the pinkish or leave the platform, that's the Bright red. You subtract the red from the green and you get a percentage that represents net score, AWS with a net score of 60% is off the charts good. Microsoft remember, this includes the entire Microsoft business portfolio, not just Azure, so it's still really strong. Google, frankly, we'd like to see higher net scores and VMware's, you know, so there's a gold standard for on-prem. So we include them, so you can see for reference the strong, but notice they got a much, much bigger flat spending, which is what you would expect from some of these more mature players. Now let's compare these scores to the other, on-prem Kings. So this is not surprising to see, but the greens, they go down, the flats that gray area goes up compared to the cloud guys and the red which is virtually non-existent within AWS, goes into the high teens with the exception of Cisco which despite its exposure to virtually all industries including those hard hit by COVID shows pretty low read scores. So that's, that's good. And I got to share one other, look at this wheel chart for pure storage. We're not really not sure what's happening here, but this is impressive. We're seeing a huge rebound, and you can see we've superimposed as candlestick over comparing previous quarters surveys and, look at the huge up check in the January survey for pure that blue line. That's highlighted in that red dot at ellipse, jumps to a 63% net score from below 20% last quarter. You know, we'll see, I've never seen that kind of uptick before for an established company. And, you know, maybe it's pent up demand or some other anomaly in the data. We'll find out when pure reports in 2021, because remember these are forward looking surveys. But the point is, you still see action going on in hybrid and on-prem, and despite the freight train that is cloud, coming at the legacy players. You know, not that pure is legacy, but it's, you know, it's no longer a lanky teenager. And I think the bottom line, coming back to Matt Baker's point, is there are opportunities that the on-prem players can pursue in hybrid and multi-cloud, and we've talked about this a lot where you're building abstraction layer, on top of the hyperscale clouds and letting them build out their data center presence worldwide, spend on capex, they're going to outspend everybody. And these guys, these on-prem, and hybrid and multi-cloud folks they're going to have to add value on top of that. Now if they move fast, you no doubt there'll be acquiring startups to make that happen. They're going to have to put forth the value proposition and execute on that, in a way that adds clear value above and beyond what the hyperscalers are going to do. Now, the challenge, is picking those right spots, moving fast enough and balancing wall street promises with innovation. There's that same old dilemma. Let's face It. Amazon for years could lose tons of money and not get killed in the street. Google, they got so much cash, they can't spend it fast enough and Microsoft after years of going sideways is finally figured out and the some. Alibaba they're new to our analysis, but it's looking like you know, it's the Amazon of China, Plus ANT despite its regulatory challenges with the Chinese government. So all four of these players, are in the driver's seat in our view. And they're leading in not only cloud, but AI. And of course the data keeps flowing into their cloud. So they're really are in a strong position. Bottom line is we're still early into the cloud platform era and it's morphing. It's from a collection of remote cloud services, into this ubiquitous, sensing, thinking, anticipatory system, that's increasingly automated and working towards full automation. It's intelligent and it's hyper decentralizing toward the edge. One thing's for sure, the next 10 years, they're not going to be the same as the past 10. Okay, that's it for now. Remember I publish each week on Wikibond.com and siliconANGLE.com, these episodes they're all available as podcasts just search for breaking analysis podcast. You can always connect on Twitter. I'm @dvellante or email me at david.Vellante@siliconANGLE.com. I love the comments on LinkedIn and of course in clubhouse the new social app. So please follow me, so that you can get notified when we start a room and riff on these topics. And don't forget to check out etr.plus for all the survey action. This is Dave Vellante for the cube insights powered by ETR be well, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2020 virtual. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back I'm Stu Miniman. And this is theCUBE coverage of KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2020, the Europe virtual edition. Happy to welcome back to the program, fresh off the keynote stage, Priyanka Sharma. She's the general manager of the CNCF. Priyanka, thanks so much for joining us. Great to see you. And we all get to be together even while we're apart. >> That's absolutely right. Thank you so much for having me Stu and great energy in the interwebs today with my keynote and everybody engaging and attending KubeCon. So, very happy to be here. >> All right, so I want to dig into your keynote a little bit. I had a bunch of key themes, a lot of pieces, and of course, community at the heart of it. When I spoke with you when you first took the job, of course, you've got strong background, you know this community really well. We've loved covering it for the last five years, but you talked about the foundation of doers and how that's powering the end user driven open tour. So talk to us a little bit about that, how is this community different from everything else. You know, open source always is community, but this feels a little bit special. >> Well, I'm glad to hear you say that, it is special. Yes, so when you think about the Cloud Native Ecosystem, right? There's so many people who've come together to create this amazing field that we all get to create. The awesome technology that people use to be part of this whole technology creation and deployment process. Those people are the end users first and foremost, they utilize the technology every day. And as time has grown, as time has gone by, they have played a bigger and bigger role. Over time they've become very sophisticated, they're contributing their own projects such as you know, I mean, you all know Envoy and a Jaeger came from Lyft and Uber respectively, but there's many more like Spotify and Wayfair, the furniture company. They have all submitted projects for the sandbox. So there was a lot of momentum, but not only are they creating their own technologies very needed and donating them. They're becoming the guider. They're becoming the guidance for the project that exists. They're giving feedback, they're sharing requirements. It's a very collaborative process and that's what is end-user-driven open source. Now this end user-driven-open source cannot happen by one contributor alone by one maintainer or alone by one company. No, it takes a lot of people. I mean, CNCF, as you know, has invested in its global community since day one. That's why we have the KubeCon EU, we have China events, we have North America. And just the other day I was speaking on a virtual Brazil event. There's just the geographic diversity is amazing. And by being able to reach out to a very large ecosystem and by especially having a formal role for end users, by having an end user member program with their own special interest groups and working groups, we've created a safe space where there is a neutral IP zone, open governance, and also a clear directive and shared partnership with the end users. So that ends up being a large group of people who are all doers, everybody's collaboration matters, and together they create end user-driven-open source. >> Well, Priyanka, I'm not sure that that most people understand really the full charter of what the CNCF does. So maybe you could talk a little bit about, obviously there's all the projects involved. You just brought up some of the end users and how you get engaged. There's also help along career development, when you talk to the individual developers and participants. So help us understand beyond the big events that we gather people at any given time with the smaller events, just, you know, what the CNCF its charter as these days. >> Absolutely, so as some of you know, the CNCF stands for Cloud Native Computing Foundation. And our objective is to host and proliferate technologies that support development, infrastructure development that is cloud native. Now what does cloud native mean, cloud native is when you develop, when you utilize cloud computing, which is the big clouds you must have heard of such as, Alibaba cloud, AWS, Google cloud platform, Azure, IBM, all these hyperscalers. They provide these offerings by which you don't need to have your own server farm, and you can buy compute from them and run your applications on that. When you do that, the way you develop software changes, it should change in order to maximize the value you get. So you started developing with micro services, containerization happens once that happens you need to orchestrate the containers, which is where Kubernetes our founding project comes in. And then you go from there because you have different complexities and observability, you have different complexities and storage and all the cloud native tech comes together to support you in that journey. So from a technology perspective that's what we do. As we have been so fortunate to develop this large ecosystem that so many people joining in of all kinds, we believe it is part of our responsibility to support this community in skill development and always like knowledge sharing. So knowledge sharing community empowers education. And that's how we talked about the events, right? Like KubeCon et cetera. But also these days, we are focusing a lot on our programs with the certifications we offer such as a CKA, which stands for a Certified Kubernetes Admin and CKAD, which stands for Certified Kubernetes Application Developer. To date, 15,000 plus people have taken these certifications successfully. So we have more and more people joining in these ranks. And we are here to support people as they build their careers, as they get more knowledgeable on cloud native, from in formal ways, such as training edX and in informal ways, such as KubeCon and the Meetups and the Webinars, you name it, and we're here for you. >> Well, you used a word that I want to touch on, responsibility, obviously in 2020, there's a lot going on Priyanka. So first of all, you talk about the global pandemic. Some of my favorite interviews I've done for this shows and others talking about how open source and communities are contributing to it. One of the interviews I have coming up for the KubeCon show is out of the Pronto area with how's my flattening, which uses data and visualization, really phenomenal to see how, you know, Kubernetes and collaboration allowed people to rally fast and share data and get information from the right people. The other piece is social justice. You announced a new working group for racial terminology, talk about, how's the CNCF dealing with, all the changes and all the things that are happening in 2020. And how are you helping the community get engaged and participate? >> Absolutely. 2020s is a very unique year. It's had very unique challenges. We've all been through it out together as a global community. So in that way, it has brought us all together, but the fissures and cracks that maybe were overlooked before have gotten deeper this year. And we are committed to bringing the open source cloud native way to help support this full global push to overcome 2020 as a year. (laughs) So part of that as you said, we have a working group to eradicate racially charged tech, sorry, I am really not speaking well to that. So part of our initiatives is a working group to eradicate racially charged terminology from code we're working on it, not just on the CNCF level, but on the entire Linux foundation level, by bringing together various folks, such as companies projects, regardless of where they stand, they don't need to be an LF project or a CNCF project, but we're sharing best practices on What should be the terminology we agree upon? What is the change management look like? And soon we want to really encourage the people who are making these positive steps with and enablement and incentive programs, such as prizes, et cetera. So I'm very committed to this. I think anyone and everyone has a home in open source. This cannot be, you know, the take ground of one type of person or one type of community. And we're going to do our very best to welcome each and every one. This world of technology has been built by the blood, sweat, and tears off many people, and we honor them all. And we also open our arms to more and more of you, no matter how few of people from your ecosystem or community you see in open source, join in, we welcome you.. we are here for you and this working group and this initiative hopes to voice exactly just that. >> Well, yeah, the KubeCons absolutely. I can speak from the event I've gone to, you know, strong diversity. We've really appreciated being able to hear those voices. When you talk about the collaboration, the community activity, we'd love when we can help support those from our team's standpoint, when we can, we want to be able to help those nonprofits, help those communities get their messages and do their call to actions. All right, Priyanka so much to cover. This week when I look at all the breakouts, when I look at the interviews and the technologies, there's a lot of emerging themes also in edge computing has been something we've been talking about for the last year or two, of course, IOT, DevSecOps, what are some of the hot technologies that you're seeing and making sure that the show covers. >> Well, you send them all. (laughs) No, but these are the key themes. Yes, absolutely. As you know, devices are proliferating across the globe. So many people have cell phones, with the coming of 5G things will be even more rocket ship. And these folks need to go cloud native to support development as this change happens, and Kubernetes and CNCF is here to support. We have projects such as KubeEdge. We have k3s from Rancher and the sandbox, all these are meant for edge deployment. So there's that focus that we have. There's always going to be DevSecOps. The minute there is this complexity, the minute there's this growth, new security vulnerabilities, pop up, new interfaces become exposed. And so we have to be on a constant watch. So DevSecOps is a theme that we are going to see a lot of innovation and development in. For anyone who may not be familiar with DevSecOps, DevSecOps does for security, what DevOps did for operations, which is shifted left into the application developers workflow, so that things have got faster so that there is a better collaboration between security teams and application development team. So these are absolutely trans, I think a trend we briefly touched upon is, end-user-driven open source. I think the voice of end users is going to grow bigger and more louder and just that much more critical. The ship has left the dock. And now it's just going to gain steam and gain steam. I think we're going to see more technology contributions from them. We're going to see much more utilization of cloud native from them. And we also will get lots of feedback and advice from them. And there'll be interwoven into the fabric of cloud native in a way like never before. >> Yeah, Priyanka, you've known this community, but now you're very steeped into it. You had to work with a lot of people. I'm curious, does anything, especially from those end users, you know, a big focus of what you've been talking about. Absolutely, it's so important that they not just use the technology, but are participate in it. It's been one of those big waves we've been watching in the open source community for a number of years. So any insight you can give us as to why it is so important to those end users, what is encouraging them, not just to, use these projects, but, you know, assigned people and sponsor events and have much deeper integration with this community. >> They don't integrate with this community. They are part of this community. That's one key thing to remember. I would say, when we all, like, I mean, CNCF is relatively young, it started end of 2015. I started working on a project in it in 2016. And back then we were talking about things like, what are microservices? How to do a lift and shift to the cloud, or what are containers, things like that, right? And there was maybe a bit of a gap in the knowledge that people had to acquire to get good at deploying containers, that's using microservices, et cetera, et cetera. Now, in the last four years, huge leaps have been made by an users just because they were in the trenches, they were doing the work, right? So now their knowledge level has gone really up. And they've also started like knowing where the gaps are, what they need, because they're doing the building, they're the doers here. And so in that environment, it is a natural thing that they will have the best sense of where things should go next. They will have the best sense of what their own requirements are. And so it's an evolution of the end user community. It's an evolution of the doers. And I think that's why this trend is going to continue. And I would like to take like, not a credit, but I would say a tiny shoutout to the CNCF ecosystem program, which is run by Cheryl on my team. She's done a phenomenal job having been a developer herself to bring people and create safe spaces where the enhancers or the vendors are not like necessarily breathing down their neck and they can discuss amongst each other, the topics that matter. And I think that's gone a really long way. >> Yeah. There's, Cheryl's been doing some great work. I know I'm having a conversation with Liz Rice to talk about some of the new pooling, helping customers understand. It's such a broad ecosystem out there that, you know, we didn't even touch on. We're going to talk in many of the other interviews I have Priyanka. There's so many projects, new ways for sandbox and incubation and everything like that. It is definitely a challenge for everybody to look at this space. Want to give you the final word though. What do you want people to have as their takeaway from the event this time? >> Absolutely. Hi everybody. I am so happy. You all took the time and engaged with the community you joined in and attended KubeCon EU virtual, stay with us, partnering with us, come to our events, give us feedback, share ideas. We're all a foundation of doers. We're all team cloud native, and we're in this together. We will go through 2020, we'll come out strong. And this is just the beginning. >> Well, Priyanka, thank you so much. We love the partnership with the CNCF and definitely happy to be able to participate in the event again this year. >> Absolutely. Thank you so much Stu. >> All right, and stay tuned. Lots of coverage here from KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2020 Europe the virtual edition. I'm Stu Minimam. And thank you as always for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Everyone, welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, host of theCUBE here in our Palo Alto office for remote interviews during this time of COVID-19. We're here with the quarantine crew here in our studio. We've got a great guest here from Google, Will Grannis, managing director, head of the office of the CTO with Google Cloud. Thanks for coming on, Will. Appreciate you spending some time with me. >> Oh, John, it's great to be with you. And as you said, in these times, more important than ever to stay connected. >> Yeah, and I'm really glad you came on because a couple of things. One, congratulations to Google Cloud for the success you guys had. Saw a lot of big wins under your belt, both on the momentum side, on the business side, but also on the technical side. Meet is available now for folks. Anthos is doing very, very well. Partner ecosystem's developing. Got some nice use cases in vertical markets, so I want to get in and unpack with you. But really, the bigger story here is that the world has seen the future before it was ready for it. And that is the at-scale challenge that the COVID-19 has shown everyone. We're seeing the future has been pulled forward. We're living in a virtualized environment. It's funny to say that, virtualization (laughs). Server virtualization is a tech term, but that enabled a lot of things. We're living in a virtualized world now 'cause we have to, but this is going to set in motion a series of new realities that you guys have been experiencing and supporting for many, many years. But now as a provider of Google Cloud, you guys have to operate at scale, you have. And now the whole world realizes that scale is a big deal. And so you guys have had some successes. I want to get your thoughts on the this at scale problem that the world now realizes. I mean, everyone's at home. That's a disruption that was unforecasted. Whether it's under-provisioning VPNs in IT to a surface area for security, to just work and play. And activities are now confined, so people aren't convening anymore and it's a huge issue. What's your take on all this? >> Well, I mean, to your point just now, the fact that we can have this conversation and we can have it fluidly from our respective remote locations just goes to show you the power of information technology that underlies so many of the things that we do today. And for Google Cloud, this is not a new thing. And for Google, this is not a new thing. For Google Cloud, we had a mission of trying to help companies accelerate their transformation and enable them in these new digital environments. And so many companies that we've been working with, they've already been on the path to operating in environments that are digital, that are fluid. And when you think about the cloud, that's one of the great benefits of cloud, is that scalability in common with the business demand. And it also helps the scale situation without having to do the typical, "Oh wait, "you need to find the procurement people. "We need to find the server vendors. "We need to get the storage lined up." It really allows a much more fluid response to unexpected and unforecasted situations. Whether that's customer demand or in this case a global pandemic. >> Yeah, one of the things I want to get in with you on, you have explained what your job is there 'cause obviously Google's got a new CEO now for over a year. Thomas Kurian came from Oracle, knows the enterprise up and down. You had Diane Greene before that. Again, another enterprise leader. Google Cloud has essentially rebuilt itself from the original Google Cloud to be very enterprise centric. You guys have great momentum, and this is a world where cloud-native is going to be required. I mean, everyone now sees it. The tide has been pulled out, everything's exposed, all the gaps in business from a tech standpoint is kind of exposed. And so the smart managers and companies are looking at things and saying, "Double down on that. "Let's kill that. "We don't want to pay that supplier. "They're not core to our business." This is going to be a very rapid acceleration of what I call a vetting of the new set of players that are going to emerge because the folks who don't adapt to this new cloud-native reality, whether it's app workloads for banking to whatever are going to have to reinvent themselves now and reset and tweak to come out of this crisis. So it's going to be very cloud-native. This is a big deal. Can you share your reaction to that? >> Absolutely. And so as you pointed out, there are kind of two worlds that exist right now. Companies that are moving to become more digital and transform, and you mentioned the momentum in Google Cloud just over the last year, greater than 50% revenue growth. And in a greater than $10 billion run rate business and adding customers at a really quick clip, including just yesterday, Splunk, and along the way, Telecom Italia, Major League Baseball, Vodafone, Lowe's, Wayfair, Activision Blizzard. This transformation and this digitization is not just for a few or just for any one industry. It's happening across the board. And then you add that to the implementations that have been happening across Shopify and the Spotify and HSBC, which was a early customer of ours in the cloud and it already has a little bit of a headstart into this transformation. So you see these new companies coming in and seeing the value of digital transformation. And then these other companies that have kind of lit the path for others to consider. And Shopify is a really good example of how seeing drastic uptick in demand, they're able to respond and keep roughly half a million shops up and running during a period of time where many retailers are trying to figure out how to stay online or even get online. >> Well, what is your role at Google? Obviously, you're the managing director. Title is managing director, head of the office of the CTO. We've seen these roles before, head of the CTO, obviously a technical role. Is it partnering with the CEO on strategy? Is it you're tire kicking new things? Are you overseeing any strategic initiatives? What is your role? >> So a little bit of all of those things combined into one. So I spent the first couple of decades of my career on the other side of the fence in the non-tech community, both in the enterprise. But we were still building technology and we were still digitally minded. But not the way that people view technology in Silicon Valley. And so spending a couple of decades in that environment really gave me insights into how to take technology and apply them to a specific problem. And when I came to Google five years ago, selfishly, it was because I knew the potential of Google's technology having been on the other side. And I was really interested in forming a better bridge between Google's technology and people like me who were CTOs of public companies and really wanted to leverage that technology for problems that I was solving. Whether it was aerospace, public sector, manufacturing, what have you. And so it's been great. It's the role of a lifetime. I've been able to build the team that I wanted as an enterprise technologist for decades and the entire span of technologies at our disposal. And we do two things. One is we help our most strategic customers accelerate their path to cloud. And two, we create these signals by working with the top companies moving to the cloud and digitally transforming. We learned so much, John, about what we need to build as an organization. So it also helps balance out the Google driven innovation with our customer driven innovation. >> Yeah, and I can attest. I've been watching you guys from day one. Hired a lot of great enterprise people that I personally know. So you get in the enterprise chops and stuff and you've seen some progress. I have to ask you though, because first of all, big fan of Google at scale from knowing them from when they were just a little search engine to what they are now. There was an expression a few years ago I heard from enterprise customers. It goes along the lines like this. "I want to be like Google," because you guys had a great network, you had large scale. You had all these things that were like awesome. And then they realized, "Well, we can't be like Google. "We don't have SREs. "We don't have large scale data centers." So there was a little bit of a translation, and I want to say a little bit of a overplay of the Google hand, and you guys had since realized that it wasn't just people are going to bang at your doorstep and be adopting Google Cloud because there was a little bit of a cultural disconnect from wanting to be like Google, then leveraging Google in their business as they transform. So as you guys have moved from that, what's changed? They still want to be like Google in the sense you have great security, got a great network, and you've got that scale. Enterprises are a little bit slower to adopt that, which you're focused on now. What is the story there? Because I think that's kind of the theme that I'm hearing. Okay, Google now understands me. They know I'm not as fast as Google. They got super great people (laughs). We are training our people. We're retraining them. This is the transformation that they're going through. So you might be a little bit ahead of them certainly, but now they need to level up. How do you respond to that? >> Well, a lot of this is the transformation that Thomas has been enacting over the last year plus. And it comes in kind of three very operational or tactical pillars that I think of. First, we expanded our customer and we continue to expand our customer facing teams. Three times what they were before because we need to be there. We need to be in those situations. We need to hear from the customer. We need to learn more about the problems they're trying to solve. So we don't just take a theoretical principle and try to overlay it onto a problem. We actually get very visceral understanding of what they're trying to solve. But you have to be there to gain that empathy and that understanding. And so one is showing up, and that has been mobilizing a much larger engine of customer facing personnel from Google. Second, it's also been really important that we evolve our own. Just as Google brought SRE principles and principles of distributed systems and software design out to the world, we also had a little bit to learn about transitioning from typical customer support and moving to more customer experience. So you've seen that evolution under Thomas as well with cloud changing... Moving from talking about support to talking about customer experience, that white glove experience that our customers get and our partners get from the beginning of their journey with us all the way through. And then finally making sure that our product roadmap has the solutions that are relevant across key priority industries for us. Again, that only comes from being present from having a focus in those industries and then developing the solutions that progress those companies. This isn't about taking a principle and trying to apply it blindly. This is about adding that connection, that really deep connection to our customers and our partners and letting that connection manifest the things that we have to do as a product company to best support them over a long period of time. I mean, look at some of these deals we've been announcing. These are 10-year, five-year, multi-year strategic partnerships that go across the canvas of all of Google. And those are the really exciting scaled partnerships. But to your point, you can't just take SRE from Google and apply it to company X, but you can things like error budgets or how we think about the principles of SRE, and you can apply them over the course of developing technology, collaborating, innovating together. >> Yeah, and I think cloud-native is going to be a key thing. It's just my opinion, but I think one of those situations where the better mouse trap will win. If you're cloud-native and you have APIs and you have the kind of services, people will beat it to your doorstep. So I got to ask you, with Thomas Kurian on board, obviously, we've been following his career as well at Oracle. He knows what he's doing. Comes into Google, it's being built out. It's like a rocket ship at this point. What bet is he making and what bet are you guys making on behalf of your customers? If you had to boil it down to Google Cloud's big bet, what is the bet on the technology side? And what's the bet on the business side? >> Sure. Well, I've already mentioned... I've already hinted at the big strategy that Thomas has brought in. And that's, again, those three pillars. Making sure that we show up and that we're present by having a scaled customer facing organization. Again, making sure that we transition from a typical support mindset into more of a customer experience mindset and then making sure that those solutions are tailored and available for our priority industries. If I was to add more color to that, I think one of the most important changes that Thomas has personally been driving is he's been converting us to a partner-led business and a partner-led organization. And this means a lot of investments in large global systems integrators like Accenture and Deloitte. But this also means that... Like the Splunk announcement from yesterday, that isn't just a sell to. This is a partnership that goes deep across go-to market product and sell to. And then we also bring in very specific partners like Temenos in Europe for financial services or a CETA or a Rackspace for migrations. And as a result, already, we're seeing really incredible lifts. So for example, nearly 200% year over year increase in partner influenced revenue in Google Cloud and almost like a 13X year over year increase in new customers won by partners. That's the kind of engine that builds a real hyper-scale business. >> Interesting you mentioned Splunk. I want to get to that in a second, but I also noticed there was a deal with TELUS Group on eSIM subscriptions, which kind of leads me into the edge piece. There's a real edge component here with Google Cloud, and I think I had a conversation with Jennifer Lynn a few years ago, really digging into the built-in security and the value of the Google network. I mean, a lot of the scuttlebutt around the Valley and the industry is Google's got an amazing network. Software-defined networking is going to be a hot programmable area. So you got programmable networking and you got edge and edge security. These are killer areas that need innovation. Could you comment on what you guys are doing there and do you agree? Obviously, you have a killer network and you're leveraging it. Can you just give some insight into what's going on in those two areas? Network and then the edge. >> Yeah, I think what you're seeing is the manifestation of the progression of cloud generally. And what do I mean by that? It started out as like get everything to the data center. We kind of had this thought that maybe we could take all the workloads and we could get them to these centralized hubs and that we could redistribute out the results and drive the latency down over time so we can expand the portfolio of applications and services that would become relevant over time. And what we've seen over the last decade really in cloud is an evolution to more of a layered architecture. And that layered architecture includes kind of core data centers. It includes CDN capacity, points of presence, it includes edge. And just in that list of customers over the last year I mentioned, there were at least three or four telcos in there. And you've also probably heard and seen quite a bit of telco momentum coming from us in recent announcements. I think that's an indication that a lot of us are thinking about, how can we take technology like Anthos, for example, and how could we orchestrate workloads, create a common control plane, manage services across those three shells, if you will, of the architecture? And that's a very strategic and important area for us. And I think generally for the cloud industry, is expanding beyond the data center as the place where everything happens. And you can look at Google Fi, you can look at Stadia. You can look at examples within Google that go well beyond cloud as to how we think about new ways to leverage that kind of criteria. >> All right, so we saw some earnings come out on Amazon side as Google, both groups and Microsoft as well, all three clouds are crushing it on the cloud side. That's a tailwind, I get that. But as it continues, we're expecting post-COVID some redistribution of development dollars in projects. Whether it's IT going cloud-native or whatever new workloads. We are predicting a Cambrian explosion of new things from core to edge. And this is going to create some lifts. So I want to get your thoughts on you guys' strategy with go-to market, as well as your customers as they now have the ability to build workloads and apps with AI and data. There seems to be a trend towards the verticalization of whether it's sales and go-to market and/or specialism because you have horizontal scalability with cloud and you now have data that has distinct (chuckles) value in these verticals. So it's really seems to be... I won't say ratification, but in a way, that seems to be the norm. Whether you come into a market and you have specialization, but the data is there so apps can be more agile. Are you guys seeing that? And is that something that you guys are considering from an organization standpoint? And how do customers think about targeting vertical industries and their customers? >> Yeah, I bring this to... And where you started going there at the end of the question is exactly the way that we think about it as well. Which is we've moved from, "Here are storage offers for everybody, "and here's basic infrastructure for everybody." And now we've said, "How can we make sure "that we have solutions that are tailored "to the very specific problems that customers "are trying to solve?" And we're getting to the point now where performance and variety of technologies are available to be able to impose very specific solutions. And if you think about the substrate that has to be there, we mentioned you have to have some really great partners, and you have to have a roadmap that is focused on priority solution. So for example, at Google Cloud, we're very focused on six priority vertical areas. So retail, financial services, healthcare, manufacturing and industrials, healthcare life sciences, public sector. And as a result of being very focused in those areas, we can make more targeted investments and also align our entire go-to market system and our entire partner ecosystem... Excuse me, ecosystem around those bare specific priority areas. So for example, we work with CETA and HDA Healthcare very recently to develop and maintain a national response portal for COVID-19. And that's to help better inform communities and hospitals. We can use Looker to help with like a Commonwealth Care Alliance nonprofit and that helps monitor patient symptoms and risk factors. So we're using a very specific focus in healthcare and a partner ecosystem to develop very tailored solutions. You can also look at... I mentioned Shopify earlier. That's another great example of how in retail, they can use something like Google Meet, inherent reliability, scalability, security, to connect their employees during these interesting times. But then they can also use GCP, Google Cloud Platform to scale out. And as they come up with new apps and experiences for their shoppers, for their shops, they can rapidly deploy, to your point. And those solutions and how the database performs and how those tiers perform, that's a very tight-knit feedback loop with our engineering teams. >> Yeah, one of the things I'm seeing obviously with the virtualization of the COVID is that when the world gets back to normal, it'll be a hybrid. And it'll be a hybrid between reality, not physical and a hundred percent virtual, hybrid. And that's going to impact events too, media, to everything. Every vertical will be impacted. And I want to point out the Splunk deal and bring that back in because I want you to comment on the relevance of the Splunk deal in context to Splunk has a cloud. And they've got a great slogan, "Data for everywhere." "Data to everywhere," I think it is. But theCUBE, we have a cloud. Every company will have a cloud scale. At some level, we'll progress to having some sort of cloud because they have data. How are you guys powering those clouds? Because I think the Splunk deal is interesting. Their partner, their stock price was up out on the news of the deal. Nice bump there for Splunk, shout out to those guys. But they're a data company and now they're cross-platform. But they're not Google, but they have a cloud. So you know what I'm saying? So they need to play in all the clouds, but they need infrastructure (laughs), they need support. So how do you guys talk to that customer that says, "Hey, the next pandemic that comes, "the next crisis that's going to cause some "either social disruption or workflow disruption "or supply chain disruption. "I need to be agile. "I need to have full cloud scale. "And so I need to talk to Google." What do you say to them? What's the pitch? And does the Splunk deal mirror some of those capabilities? Or tie that together for us, the Splunk deal and how it relates to how to proof themselves for the future. Sorry. >> For example, with the Splunk cloud deal, if you take a look at what Google is already really good at, data processing at scale, log analytics, and you take a look at what Splunk is doing with their events and security incident monitoring and the rest, it's a really great mashup because they see by platforming on Google Cloud, not only do they get highly performing infrastructure. But they also get the opportunity to leverage data tools, data analytics tools, machine learning and AI that can help them provide enhanced services. So not just about capacity going up and down through periods of demand, but also enhancing services and continuing to offer more value to their customers. And we see that as a really big trend. And this gets at something, John, a little bit bigger, which is kind of the two views of the world. And we talked about very tailored, focused solutions. Splunk is an example of taking a very methodical approach to a partnership, building a solution specifically with partners. And in this case, Splunk on the security event management side. But we're always going to provide our data processing platform, our infrastructure for companies across many different industries. And I think that addresses one part of the topic, which is, how do we make sure that in periods of demand rapidly changing, and this goes back to the foundational elements of infrastructure as a service and elasticity. We're going to provide a platform and infrastructure that can help companies move through periods of... It's hard to forecast, and/or demand may rise and fall in very interesting ways. But then there's going to be times where we... Because we're not necessarily a focused use case where it may just be generalized platform versus a focused solution. So for example, in the oil and gas industry, we don't develop custom AI, ML solutions that facilitate upstream extraction, for example. But what we do do is work with renewable energy companies to figure out how they might be able to leverage some of our AI machine learning algorithms from our own data centers to make their operations more efficient and to help those renewable energy companies learn from what we've learned building out what I consider to be a world leading renewable energy strategy and infrastructure. >> It's a classic enablement model where you're enabling your platform for your customers. Okay, so I've got to ask the question. I asked this to the Microsoft guys as well because Amazon has their own SaaS stuff. But really more of end to end. The better product's usually on the ecosystem side. You guys have some killer SaaS. G Suite, we're a customer. We use the G Suite really deeply. We also use some Bigtable as well. I want to build a cloud, we have a cloud, CUBE cloud. But you guys have Meet. So I want to build my product on Google Cloud. How do I know you're not going to compete with me? Do you guys have those conversations around the trade-off between the pure Google services, which provide great value for the areas where the ecosystem needs to develop those new areas that are going to be great markets, potentially huge markets that are out there. >> Well, this is the power of partnership. I mentioned earlier that one of the really big moves that Thomas has made has been developing a sense of partners. And it kind of blurs the line between traditional, what you would call a customer and what you would call a partner. And so having a really strong sense of which industries we're in, which we prioritize, plus having a really strong sense of where we want to add value and where our customers and partners want to add that value. That's the foundational, that's the beginning of that conversation that you just mentioned. And it's important that we have an ability to engage not just in a, "Here's the cloud infrastructure piece of the puzzle." But one of the things Thomas has also done and a key strategy of his has been to make sure that the Google Cloud relationship is also a way to access all amazing innovation happening across all of Google. And also help bring a strategic conversation in that includes multiple properties from across Google so that an HSBC and Google and have a conversation about how to move forward together that is comprehensive rather than having to wonder and have that uncertainty sit behind the projects that we're trying to get out and have high velocity on because they offer so much to retail bank, for example. >> Well, I've got a couple more questions and then I'll let you go. I know you got some other things going on. I really appreciate you taking the time, sharing this great insight and updates. As a builder, you've been on the other side of the table. Now you're at Google heading up the CTO. Also working with Thomas, understanding the go-to market across the board and the product mix. As you talk to customers and they're thinking... The good customers are thinking, "Hey, "I want to come out of this COVID on an upward trajectory "and I want to use this opportunity "to reset and realign for the future." What advice do you have for those enterprises? They could be small, medium-sized enterprises to the full large big guys. And obviously, cloud-native, we've talked some of that already, but what advice would you have for them as they start to really prioritize, as some things are now exposed? The collaboration, the tooling, the scale, all these things are out there. What have you seen and what advice would you give a CXO or CSO or a leader in the industry to think about and how they should come out of this thing, how they should plan, execute, and move forward? >> Well, I appreciate the question because this is the crux of most of my day job, which is interacting with the C-suite and boards of companies and partners around the world. And they're obviously very interested to learn or get a data point from someone at Google. And the advice generally goes in a couple of different directions. One, collaboration is part of the secret sauce that makes Google what it is. And I think you're seeing this right now across every industry, and whether you're a small, medium-sized business or you're a large company, the ability to connect people with each other to collaborate in very meaningful ways, to share information rapidly, to do it securely with high reliability, that's the foundation that enables all of the projects that you might choose to... Applications to build, services to enable, to actually succeed in production and over the long haul. Is that culture of innovation and collaboration. So absolutely number one is having a really strong sense of what they want to achieve from a cultural perspective and collaboration perspective and the people because that's the thing that fuels everything else. Second piece of advice, especially in these times where there's so much uncertainty, is where can you buy down uncertainty with...? You can learn without a high penalty. This is why cloud I think is really, really finding super scale. It was already on the rise, but what you're seeing now as you've laid back to me during this conversation, we're seeing the same thing, which is a high increase in demand of, "Let's get this implemented now. "How can we do this more? "This is clearly one way to move through uncertainty." And so look for those opportunities. I'll give you a really good example. Mainframes, (chuckles) one of the classic workloads of the on-premise enterprise. There are all sorts of potential magic solves for getting mainframes to the cloud and getting out of mainframes. But a practical consideration might be maybe you just front-end it with some Java. Or maybe you just get closer to other data centers within a certain amount of milliseconds that's required to have a performant workload. Maybe you start chunking at art and treat the workload a little bit differently rather than just one thing. But there are a lot of years and investments in our workload that might run on a mainframe. And that's a perfect example of how biting off too much might be a little bit dangerous, but there is a path to... So for example, we brought in a company called Cornerstone to help with those migrations. But we also have partnerships with data center providers and others globally plus our own built infrastructure to allow even a smaller step per se for more close proximity location of the workload. >> It's great. Everything kind of has a technical metaphor connection these days when you have a internet, digitally connected world. We're living in the notion of a digital business, was a research buzzword that's been kicked around for years. But I think now COVID-19, you're seeing the virtual or digital, it's really digital, but virtual reality, augmented reality is going to come fast too. Really get people to go, "Wow. "Virtualization of my business." So we've been kind of kicking around this term business virtualization just almost as a joke, but it's really more about, okay, this is about a new world, new opportunity to think about when we come out of this, we're going to still go back to our physical world. Now, the hybrid now kicks in. This kind of connects all aspects of business in every vertical. It's not like, "Hey, I'm targeting this industry." So there might be unique solutions in those industries, but now the world is virtualized. It's connected, it's a digital environment. These are huge concepts that I think has kind of been a lunatic fringe idea, but now it's brought mainstream. This is going to be a huge tailwind for you guys as well as developers and entrepreneurs and application software. This is going to be, we think, a big thing. What's your reaction to that? Based on your experience, what do you see happening? Do you agree with it? And do you have anything you might want to add to that? >> Maybe one kind of philosophical statement and then one more... I bruised my shins a lot in this world and maybe share some of the black and blue coloration. First from a philosophical standpoint, the greater the crisis, the more open-minded people become and the more creative people get. And so I'm really excited about the creativity that I'm seeing with all of the customers that I work with directly, plus our partners, Googlers. Everybody is rallying together to think about this world differently. So to your point, a shift in mindset, there are very few moments where you get this pronounced change and everyone is going through it all at the same time. So that creates an opportunity, a scenario where you're bold thinking new strategies, creativity. Bringing people in in new ways, collaborating in new ways and offer a lot of benefits. More practically speaking and from my experience, building technology for a couple decades, it has an interesting parallel to building tightly coupled, really large maybe monoliths versus microservices and the debate around, "Do we build small things "that can be reconfigured and built out by others "or built upon by others more easily? "Or do we create a golden path and a more understood development environment?" And I'm not here to answer the question of which one's better because that's still a raging debate. But I can tell you that the process of going through and taking a service or an application or a thing that we want to deliver to a customer, that one of our customers wants to deliver to their customer. And thinking about it so comprehensively that you're able to think about it in, what are its core functions? And then thinking methodically about how to enable those core functions. That's a real opportunity, and I think technology to your point is getting to the place where if you want to run across multiple clouds, this is the Anthos conversation were recently GA'ed. Global scale platform, multicloud platform, that's a pretty big moment in technology. And that opens up the aperture to think differently about architectures and that process of taking an application service and making it real. >> Well, I think you're right on the money. I think philosophically, it's a flashpoints opportunity. I think that's going to prove to be accelerating and to see people win faster and lose faster. You're going to to see that quickly happen. But to your point about the monolith versus service or decoupled based systems, I think we now live in a world where it's a systems view now. You can have a monolith combined with decoupled systems. That's distributed computing. I think this is the trend, it's a system. It's not one thing or the other. So I think the debate will continue just like VI versus Emacs (chuckles). We don't know, right? People are going to have the debate, but if you think about it as a system, the use case defines your architecture. That's the beautiful thing about the cloud. So great insight, I really appreciate it. And how's everything going over there at Google Cloud? You've got Meet that's available. How's your staff? What's it like inside the Googleplex and the Google Cloud team? Tell us what's going on over there. People still working, working remote? How's everyone doing? >> Well, as you can tell from my scenario here, my backdrop, yes, still part at work. And we take this as a huge responsibility. These moments as a huge responsibility because there are educators, loved ones, medical professionals, critical life services that run on services that Google provides. And so I can tell you we're humbled by the opportunity to provide the backbone and the platform and the people and the curiosity and the sincere desire to help. And I mentioned a couple of ways already just in this conversation where we've been able to leverage some of our investments technology to help form people that really gets at the root of who we are. So while we just like any other humans are going through a process of understanding our new reality, what really fires us up and what really charges us up is because this is a moment where what we do really well is very, very important for the world in every geo, in every vertical, in every use case, in every solution type. We're taking that responsibility very seriously. And at the same time, we're trying to make sure that all of our teams as well as all of the teams that we work with and our customers and partners are making it through the human moment, not just the technology moment. >> Well, congratulations and thanks for spending the time. Great insight, Will. Appreciate, Will Grannis, managing director, head of technology office of the CTO at Google Cloud. This certainly brings to the mainstream what we've been in the industry been into for a long time, which is DevOps, large scale, role of data and technology. Now we think it's going to be even more acute around societal benefits. And thank God we have all those services for the frontline workers. So thank you so much for all that effort and thanks for spending the time here in theCUBE Conversation. Appreciate it. >> Thanks for having me, John. >> Okay, I'm John Furrier here in Palo Alto studios for remote CUBE Conversation with Google Cloud, getting the update. Really looking at the future as it unfolds. We are going to see this moment in time as an opportunity to move to the next level, cloud-native and change not only the tech industry but society. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> (narrator) Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering VMWorld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas everybody. You're watching the Cube, the leader in live-tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with my co-host, David Floyer. Good to see you again David. VMWorld day three, wall to wall coverage. We got sets going on. 94 guests. Patrick Osborne is here, he's the Vice President of Big Data and Secondary Storage at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Patrick, it's great to see you again. >> Always a pleasure to be on the Cube. >> Big quarter, Antonio Neri early into his tenure. >> Yes. The earnings, raise guidance, great to see that. Got to feel good. Give us the update, VMworld 2018, what's happening with you guys? >> So Q3 was bang up quarter, for all segments of the business. It was great, you know. Obviously it's the kind of earnings you want to have from a CEO in a second quarter. Steering the ship here. I think everyone's jazzed up. He's brought a lot of new life to the company, in terms of technology leadership. He's someone who's certainly grown up, from the grounds up, starting off his career at HPE. So for us who have started off as a Product Manager, an individual contributor, making your way up to CEO is definitely possible. So that's been great and I think it's favorable micro economics and we're taking advantage of that. VMworld's been awesome. I think this whole story around Multicloud and obviously we talk about hybrid IT at HPE, so it fits very well. VMware Technology, partner of the year, again. Four years running, so it's been a really good show for us. >> As last year, data protection is the single, hottest topic. Data protection, obviously Cloud, The Edge, but The Edge is kind of new and it's hot, it's sexy. But in terms of actual business that's getting done, companies that are getting funded, companies getting huge raises, throwing big parties. We saw you back to back nights at Omnia, it's a lot happening in data protection. HPE has got a whole new strategy around data protection. Maybe talk about that a little bit and how it's going. >> So it's going really well, like you said, that part of the market, it's pretty hot right now. I think there's a couple of things playing into that, certainly this new style of IT, like applied to secondary storage. We saw that with primary storage the last few years. Multicloud, the move to all flash, low-latency workloads. And then, certainly a lot of the things, in that area, are disrupting secondary storage. People want to do it different ways, they want to be able to simplify this area. It's a growing area for data, in general. They want to make that data work for them. Test, Dev, workload placement, intelligent placement of data, for secondary and even tertiary storage in the cloud. So a lot of good things happening, from an HPE perspective. >> So not just back up? >> No, not just back up. >> I want more out of my insurance policy. >> Exactly. Something in the past that was moving from purely a TCO type of conversation. My examples are always like, who likes to pay their life insurance premium, right? Because at the end of the day, I'm not going to derive any utility from that payment. So now, it's moving into more ROI. So we have things like, the Hybrid Flash Array, from Nimble, for example. It allows you to put your workloads to work. We have a great cloud service, called HPE Cloud Volumes, that we use for our customers to be able to do intelligent DR, as a service, and be able to apply Cloud compute to your data. So there's a lot of things going on, in the space, that's just outside of your traditional move data from point A to point B. Now you want to make it work for you. >> And what about the big data portfolio? You hear a lot about data. You don't hear a ton about the Big Data, Hadoop piece of the world. I know Hadoop, nobody seems to be talking about that anymore. But everybody's talking about AI, Machine-Learning, Deep-Learning. Certainly The Edge is all about data. What's the Big Data story? >> So at HPE, we're definitely focused on the whole Edge to Core analytic story. So we have a great story and you can see in the numbers from Q3, The Edge business, The Edge line servers, Aruba, driving a lot of growth in the company, where a lot of that data is being created. And then back into the Core, so for Big Data, we see a number of customers, who are using these tools to affect digital transformation. They're doing it, we're doing it to ourselves. So they're moving from batch oriented, to now fast data, so streaming analytics. And then, incorporating concepts of AI and ML to provide better service or better experience for their customers. And we're doing that with, for example, InfoSight. So we have a great product, Nimble, 3PAR. And then we provide a service, on top of that, which is a SAS based service. It has predictive analytics and Machine Learning. And we're able to do that, by using Big Data analytics. >> You're offering that as a service, as a SAS service to your customers? >> Absolutely. And the way we're able to provide those predictive analytics and be able to provide those recommendations and that Machine-Learning across a entire portfolio and be able to scale that service, because it's a service, we got tens of thousands of users using the service on a daily basis, is moving from an ERP system, data warehouse, to batch analytics, to now we're doing Elasticsearch and Kafka and all these really cool techniques, so it's really helped us unlock a lot of value for our customers. >> So, the Nimble acquisision is interesting, it's bringing that sort of Machine-Learning and AI to infrastructure. You got a lot of automation in the portfolio and you can't really talk about Cloud without talking about automations. So talk a little about automation. >> In particular, even at the show here this week, we are a premier technology partner with VMware and I think more that you see in the VMware Ecosystem is all around Cloud and automation. That's really where they're going. And we've been day-zero partners on a lot of different fronts. So VMware Cloud Foundation integration, we do things on the storage level with Vvols and SRM and all these things that allow customers to essentially program that infrastucture and get out of the mundane tasks of having to do this manually. So for us, automation is key part of our story here. Especially with VMware. >> So going a little bit further with that, what sort of examples, what benefit is this to your customers? How are they justifying putting all this in? >> It's a hybrid world, so our customers are going to expect, from us, as a portfolio vendor, the ability to provide an automated solution, on premises, as automated as what you'd get in the cloud. So for us, the ability to have a sourcing experience, that we call GreenLake, so you can buy everything from us, from a solution perspective, in a pay-as-you-go elastic model where you can flex-up, flex-down. And then being able to, essentially provide a different view, depending on what persona you're coming from. Obviously we've been focused on the infrastructure persona, more often, we're getting into the DevOps persona, the Cloud engineer persona, providing all of our infrastructure, whether it's computer networking or storage, that plugs into all these frameworks. Whether it's Ansible, Chef and all these things that we do around our automation ecosystem, it's pretty ubiquitous. >> You're touching on all the Cloud basis and you're seeing a lot of discussion around that. What are you hearing from customers? Sometimes we have to squint through this, a lot of the guys here, we always like to say, move at the speed of the CIO, which sometimes is slow. At the same time, they're all afraid they're going to get disrupted. HPE, over the last two or three years, has really brought in and partnered with some of the guys your talking about. Whether it's containers and companies that do those types of offerings. How fast do the customers actually adopting, where they adopting them, how are they handling, you talked about a hybrid world; How are they bridging the old and the new? >> That's a great question. For a lot of our customers, it's always a brown field conversation. You do have these mission critical workloads that have to run, so there's no Edge to Core without your core ERP system, right? Your Core Oracle System or for smaller customers that are running their businesses on SQL and other things. But what we're seeing is that, by shoring up that Core and we provide a set of services and products that we feel are the best in the industry for that. And then allow them to provide adjacent services on top of that, it's exactly like the same example we had with InfoSight, where those systems use to call home, right now we're taking that data, we're providing a whole ancillary set of services and functions around it and our customers are doing that. Enormous customers, like British Telecom, folks like Wayfair, for example, they're doing this on premises and their disrupting their competitors, in the mean time. >> What do you make of some of the announcements we've heard this week? Obviously VMware making a big deal with what's going on with AWS. We're seeing AWS capitulate, David Floyer you made the call. Got to have an on-prem strategy. Many said no, that'll never happen. They just want to sweep the floor. So that's a tip to the hybrid cap. What are your thoughts on what's going on there? How does HPE sort of participate in those trends? >> I'd say it's, instead of battle and capitulate, we've been very laser-focused on the customers and helping them, along their way, on the journey. So you see a lot of acquisitions we've done around services, advisory service. CTP is a perfect example. So CTP has a whole cadre of experts who understand AGER, who understand ECS and all the services and functions that go along with them And we're able to help people, right size, right place, whatever you want to call it, within their infrastructure. Because we know, we've been in business for 75+ years and have a very loyal customer base, and we're going to help them along their maturity curve and certainly everyone's not on the same path, in the same race. It's been pretty successful so far. >> You guys tend to connect the dots between your HPE Discover in U.S., in Las Vegas and HPE Discover in December. So June to December, you're on these six month cycles, U.S. focus and Europe focus, Decembers in Madrid, again. Second year of Madrid. U.S. is always Vegas, like most of these conferences, what's the cadence that your on? What was the vibe like at Discover? What should we expect leading up to Q4, calendar Q4 in Madrid? >> I'd say that Discover was a big success in Vegas, always fun to spend time here. In Madrid, you'll see a focus around the value part of our business. So we've been growing in automation, we talked about hybrid IT, certainly the Core around storage. We're really focusing and very heavily invested in, not just storage, but intelligent data management. So we really feel that our offerings, especially doubling down and offering more services around InfoSight and some of those predictive and Cloud-ready user stories for our customers is something that definitely differentiates ourselves in the market. So we'll be very focused on the data plan, the data layer and helping customers transform in that area. >> So let's talk some tenor sax. >> (David laughs) >> This is not New Orleans. When we were down in New Orleans, we were at VeeamON, I think you had your sax with you, you jumped in. >> That's right, I played with the Soul Rebels. >> Playing with the Soul Rebels, you were awesome. Leonard, a big jazz man. Love it. I'm a huge TOP fan. What's new in that world? Are you still active? Are you still playing? >> Yeah, the band's still playing. Shout out to my buddies in Jolpe, sitting in with some friends at a Dead cover band coming up, in a couple weeks. So, should be fun. We're going to reenact The Grateful Dead and Branford Marsalis. >> That's wonderful. >> It should be fun. >> We've been getting a big dose of hip-hop this week. >> Yeah. But the new thing is that, in hip-hop, it's getting back to it's original roots, so a lot of folks in the jazz world, collaborating with the folks in the hip-hop world, so not very commercial, definitely underground, but pretty cool. >> I love it. That's right Leonard, you pointing out Miles Davis was one of the first to make that transformation. >> Yeah >> Good call. >> I'm going to get the numbers wrong, but it's about five percent technique and 95 percent attitude. (multiple laughs) >> Jazz, like hip-hop, there's a lot guys just doing their own thing. And somehow it all comes together. >> Absolutely. >> Okay Patrick, great to see you. >> Great to see you guys. Thank you Dave. Yeah, good to see you guys. >> Always a pleasure, go Sox. >> We got some time for talk stocks? >> Alright. >> What do you think? It's getting a little nerve wrecking. >> #Bucky Dent is trending in my Twitter. That's my problem, so hopefully we can..., I definitely don't want to be limping into the playoffs, and still not a fan of this one team wild card playoff, but I think we'll be alright. >> If we go deep... It's a great time to be a Boston fan. >> Celtics. >> Football starting, Celtics are coming in November, so awesome. Great to see you man. >> Thanks for having me. >> Keep it right there everybody, we'll be right back with our next guest. You're watching the Cube, live. Day three at VMWorld 2018, we'll be right back. (techno music)

(upbeat music) >> This is theCUBE from Silicon ANGLE Media. I'm Paul Gillin. The cloud is all the rage these days, but as companies move to the cloud, and some of them seeking simplicity, what they find is they actually get complexity. Because they want to balance their resources, they want to hedge their bets, they don't want to get locked in, so they end up doing business with multiple cloud providers, and often with an on premise cloud as well. That creates cost complexity, and that's what Cloud Health Technologies is addressing. My guest is Tom Axbey, he's the new CEO of Cloud Health Technologies, a Boston based company, recently raised $46 million, they have software that helps companies understand their cloud costs and of course, to reduce them as well. So, Tom, just a couple weeks on the job, welcome to theCUBE. >> Right, thank you Paul, nice to be here. >> I'm sure you could tell better what Cloud Health does, than I can, so why don't you give your description. >> Actually, I mean you just did a very good set up for me. I mean Cloud Health is the de facto standard, cloud service management software. And as you quite rightly pointed out, One of the complexities now, is have a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud environment. So people aren't making a single vendor bet. That of course, increases, as you mentioned, the complexity and the costs controls, the governance, security, even more, and that's what we do. We manage all that complexity and give our customers a single pane of glass to help manage and optimize their cloud experience. >> When do customers typically come to you? Are they in a crisis, or are they coming to you earlier in the process, to avoid that crisis? >> You know, it's all over the map. It depends on their cloud maturity. So, customers, we've got, who are early customers, who were literally born in the cloud. So you think of services such as AirBnB and Pinterest, and Yelp!, you know, those services are cloud based right from the get go. What they've done is experienced tremendous growth, on global basis by offering these services, managing huge data sets, in the public cloud. But, they also had the expertise, because they were going through that right from the beginning. As soon as that scale becomes unmanageable, as it does, and that complexity becomes greater in a multi-cloud environment, they bring us in. It's just that their technical acumen was a little bit more advanced than say someone in the enterprise, who's been managing data centers and they want to migrate to the cloud. But they find that their expertise is in the data center world, and their expectations are, I want the same governance and management that I had in my data center, as I move to the cloud. So you're really embarking on the beginning of their cloud journey. Then sort of the third set of our customers are MSPs. So these are actually cloud service providers, who are basically offering their customers, and they're the trusted source for their customers, all the aggregated services that are available for them, and their experience. Mainly small-medium businesses and mid-market businesses will go through the MSPs, but they're customers for us too. >> Talk about complexity, what are some of the unique characteristics of the cloud environment that create complexity that perhaps customers don't always anticipate? >> Well the first thing is, is the pace of innovation in the cloud is at light speed. You've got these cloud vendors, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and now you got IBM, you got Oracle, and many other ones, Alibaba, and AsiaPac, they're all increasing their service offerings at a rapid pace of innovation. Just keeping up to speed with the domain expertise is very very complex. Then, when you migrate to the cloud, you're migrating services, critical business services, and just like any other environment, computing environment, whether it's distributed computing or client server, you got to manage those complexities, so your business services and applications can run smoothly. As you know from certainly your experience, there's an inordinate amount of moving parts, and even more so in the cloud. Now, you multiply that by a multi-cloud or a cloud, or a hybrid cloud experience, and certainly, being able to aggregate that data, becomes a business critical task. >> We hear a lot about multi-cloud and customers trying to hedge their bets, is that a major force in the industry right now? Do you see companies actively trying to diversify the number of providers that they work with? >> We do, yeah, absolutely, and obviously, the larger the company, and the larger their cloud spend, the more likely they are to do that. So their not reliant on one cloud provider, and also they're experiencing different paces of innovation from the cloud providers, who are jockeying for that innovation right now. We're really focused on as well is the hybrid cloud. It could be a multi-cloud environment, but it also could be their private data center they're managing, or both. So yeah, we do see a huge trend in that. >> When customers come to you for the first time, and you do an initial analysis, what are typically some of the areas where you find the greatest inefficiencies, the greatest opportunities to save costs? >> Sure, I think it depends again on where they are in their cloud journey. They may be moving to the cloud, or thinking about it, and they want is some kind of visibility because they're so used to having tight controls, visibility, and budgets within their data center, because that environment is so mature to them, and the cloud is like the wild west to them. They're going to get these monthly bills, or they got to commit to certain workloads, or resources, without really understanding what their usage patterns are going to be. So we may come in and help with the migration, capacity planning, and certainly their forecasting abilities. The more mature they are, they want to start allocating costs, maybe by department, or by geographic regions, so they're getting more and more sophisticated in terms of their cost breakdown and their usage patterns and when those usage patterns happen. But also, as they control their costs, one of the ways they can do that is to buy future visibility, if you will, into those resources or compute power from the cloud providers. Being able to figure that out from a histotical and perspective billing standpoint, can be incredibly valuable to the customers. >> So what kinds of data do you provide for them? >> Well we provide essentially a window of aggregated roll-up of any particular service that they could have. So it could be their financial data in terms of their usage information, which resources or compute loads are working, also as they've deployed stovepipe data vendors for performance management or configuration management, security management, all of that comes into play as well, so we can roll up that aggregated data source. So they got a single pane of glass into sort of their entire environment. That could be at the VP level, who's running a multi-cloud environment, it could be at the financial level, where they're looking for cost controls, or could be the DevOps level where they're looking for anomalies or performance issues, or bottlenecks, or capacity planning, so at every level, we're trying to provide visibility into sort of the function and task that our customers have. >> Of course cloud vendors aren't interested in having their customers be multi-cloud, they want them to be single cloud, how cooperative do you find the vendors are in working with you to enable your customers to hedge their bets? >> I mean I think that they're very helpful, I mean number one, we've got deep relationships with all the cloud providers because we've been doing this a long time. Also, what we're doing is, we're hastening and accelerating our customers movement to the cloud by offering them the same visibility and governance and tools that they had in their data, or private data center world. So they actually embrace it, and they know it's going to be a multi-cloud environment, especially for the larger customers, and so, absolutely, we're helping that. >> Are customers beginning to look to broker their experiences, their costs, to move workloads sort of flexibly between different cloud providers, based, perhaps on even short term savings? >> They can do, yeah, absolutely. But again, short term savings are a trade off between long term savings, in terms of how much capacity you're buying, how much visibility you've got into your usage patterns as well. Certainly, that's the world that we're getting into these days, I mean, Amazon does per second billing now. When you think about all that data, it's absolutely, the complexity of it is absolutely mind boggling. >> The cloud world as Forester pointed out in a recent report, is consolidating into basically three big players, and then sort of everybody else. Do you think that's a good trend as far as customers are concerned? >> I think we've seen it over and over again, you see the dominant providers come forth and start taking over a marketplace, but there's always going to be room for other vendors. Now IBM and Oracle certainly are not just going to lay down. People like VMware are getting into the cloud business as well. They're the dominate ones right now, absolutely. I think what's good for the business is the trend itself of people moving all these workloads to the cloud and having more control over it, so that it'd actually be transparent as to who the cloud provider is. >> You certainly had the opportunity to take executive positions in a number of companies, what was it about this opportunity that appealed to you? >> Well, that's a very good question, I'd been at Rave for quite some time, especially in the high tech world, and we had a very successful run there, and we were acquired by a private equity firm. I was looking around and perhaps making a move, and I'd been fascinated by the cloud, and what it was doing, and how transformative it was to business. It was very akin to experiences I've had in my career, selling infrastructure software. I was at IBM, Tivoli for example, I was at MicroMUSE, and they were basically undergoing exactly the same transformation, in client server and distributed computing days. I was also aware of the investors and a couple of board members of Cloud Health, and I recall their very first investment, and it was explained to me by one their investors, this is Tivoli for the cloud. And of course, that resonated with me. I thought, that's brilliant, that's so simple, 'cause you've got exactly the same complexities, and then I tracked the company, had the opportunity to meet the founders, and I saw how they had executed against their vision, I saw the caliber of the team there. So, when an opportunity came up because the CEO and co-founder Dan Phillips was moving into the Chairman role, as my partner now, I jumped at it. >> You say Tivoli for the cloud, is an interesting analogy, of course the difference with Tivoli and cloud, is that Tivoli is on premise. You control the infrastructure, you have access to all the interfaces you need, not necessarily the case with the cloud. What are some of the difficulties that you encounter with getting customers the information that they need from their cloud providers? >> Well certainly the cloud, like I said, the pace of innovation is huge. So you've really got to be up to speed with the latest offerings, and if you look at all those APIs and how they could be changing, new services that they could be coming out with, literally on week by week basis, you've got to keep track of all of those. Then you've got to have a flexible architecture so you can actually easily integrate with those data sources and also understand the necessary workflows to present all that data in a consumable way. So it really is a very fast pace of innovation right now, and I think that's why the analogy of Tivoli for the cloud was a good one because you are aggregating all that data, you're given critical insight into, certainly back then, their network and infrastructure, business services, so the analogy holds true, but I think you're right, the pace of innovation is much quicker. >> Now, talk about how you justify your cost, what kind of deliverables do you promise customers in exchange for what you charge them? >> Fortunately, the deliverables are born out of history. We've got incredible ROIs. As you know, the monthly spend as it increases, as people's cloud experience grows, those costs can spiral quickly. I think that when people talk about the cost, we always talk about the value. What value are you looking for? How are you going to optimize your environment? So the savings we can save just on their billing or utilization, and then there's the governance, and then people want to do departmental charge backs or geo charge backs, and we can help them with that cost allocation. So we tend to talk about value more than cost. >> Where do customers leave money on the table though? Where do you find some of the greatest disconnects between what they could be spending and what they really are spending? >> It all comes down to consumption. If you, just like if you're deciding which mobile phone bill you want to get based on what your projected consumption is going to be, you know, they want to lock you into the biggest one, they're going to show you lots of different values for signing you up for a three year contract. It's the same for a cloud provider. The more you're willing to prepare, the more you can lock in your costs, and of course, as you do that, the risk is, you don't fulfill all of those costs and realize those savings. On the other hand, you maybe growing so exponentially quickly, that you're actually paying more than you would be, than if you just basically consumed a different pricing model. >> In general though, do you find that customers, if they manage their cloud costs wisely, do they, in the final analysis, save money by moving to the cloud versus an on premises architecture? >> Without a doubt. The time to deploy services is so quick. The time to integrate different facets of your business services is so quick. When you think about unlimited throughput, and speed, and storage, on a global basis for your services, it's unprecedented. >> Does your service cover software as a service as well? We do, I mean, we're a SAS company ourselves. So, as you know, many SAS companies are now providing services into the cloud. We could be collecting data from those services too. >> What's the future hold then for Cloud Health? Where do you want to take this company? >> I think that in beginning, I said we're the de facto standard for cloud service management. It's hard to claim you're really the de facto standard. Especially when we're a private company. I think what we want to do is continue to provide value, continue to innovate, continue to have that domain expertise, and when you look across the whole governance spectrum, about all these different systems, all these cloud providers, all these different data sources, it's absolutely immense. I think that always having that single pane of glass so that people can really get the visibility they need to optimize their services, we're going to be a very large company just doing that. >> I understand you have some ambitious growth plans this year in terms of the number of employees and also moving your headquarters. >> We do, I mean, I've only been on board for what, two and a half weeks, and there's already been 10 people hired since I've been there, so that's the pace of hiring right now. I think we'll end the year at about 240 employees, so probably hired about 80 employees, and then we are moving early next year, we're moving Fort Point to Downtown Crossing. So we got to accommodate them all. >> For those of you who are not familiar with Boston, Downtown Crossing is the center of town, and Four Point is the hot new area where GE is building it's new headquarters. In terms of how your business category develops, do you see this as a continuing to be a major independent category, type of services you provide, or do you think cloud vendors will ultimately acquire companies like yours and offer these services on their own? >> I think both is going to happen. I think cloud vendors will acquire companies who do stovepipe, perhaps functionality, for a certain area, but no cloud vendor's going to be able to offer the cross multi-cloud or hybrid cloud experience that we do. I think you're going to see both, but absolutely, the ability to manage multi and hybrid cloud environments is the key. >> It's something I always ask our Boston based guests, what are the advantages of being based in Boston? >> Well the advantage is absolutely huge, especially in this day and age. Boston has got an immense talent pool coming out every single year from universities, and that talent pool now wants to stay in Boston as opposed to move to other places. Because the city has gone through rejuvenation, it's a vibrant city, it's an invested in city, you mentioned GE, there's other companies moving here, it's a great time to be here, you've got many success points in the high tech arena such as HubSpot and Wayfair, and LogMeIn, publicly traded companies offering great opportunities, so I think the pace of innovation here is happening at a tremendous clip, so Boston's a great place to be. >> Glad to hear it, welcome to town. Congratulations on your growth, and much success to you. >> Tom: Great, well thank you very much for having me. >> Cloud complexity, simplified. I'm Pual Gillin, this is theCUBE. (upbeat music)