(bright music) >> Hello everyone and welcome back to AWS re:Invent, here in wonderful Las Vegas, Nevada. We're theCUBE. I am Savannah Peterson. Joined with my co-host, Dave Vellante. Day four, you look great. Your voice has come back somehow. >> Yeah, a little bit. I don't know how. I took last night off. You guys, I know, were out partying all night, but - >> I don't know what you're talking about. (Dave laughing) >> Well, you were celebrating John's birthday. John Furrier's birthday today. >> Yes, happy birthday John! >> He's on his way to England. >> Yeah. >> To attend his nephew's wedding. Awesome family. And so good luck, John. I hope you feel better, he's got a little cold. >> I know, good luck to the newlyweds. I love this. I know we're both really excited for our next guest, so I'm going to bring out, Lena Smart from MongoDB. Thank you so much for being here. >> Thank you for having me. >> How's the show going for you? >> Good. It's been a long week. And I just, not much voice left, so. >> We'll be gentle on you. >> I'll give you what's left of it. >> All right, we'll take that. >> Okay. >> You had a fireside chat, at the show? >> Lena: I did. >> Can you tell us a little bit about that? >> So we were talking about the Rise, The developer is a platform. In this massive theater. I thought it would be like an intimate, you know, fireside chat. I keep believing them when they say to me come and do these talks, it'll be intimate. And you turn up and there's a stage and a theater and it's like, oh my god. But it was really interesting. It was well attended. Got some really good questions at the end as well. Lots of follow up, which was interesting. And it was really just about, you know, how we've brought together this developer platform that's got our integrated services. It's just what developers want, it gives them time to innovate and disrupt, rather than worry about the minutia of management. >> Savannah: Do the cool stuff. >> Exactly. >> Yeah, so you know Lena, it's funny that you're saying that oh wow, the lights came on and it was this big thing. When when we were at re:Inforced, Lena was on stage and it was so funny, Lena, you were self deprecating like making jokes about the audience. >> Savannah: (indistinct) >> It was hilarious. And so, but it was really endearing to the audience and so we were like - >> Lena: It was terrifying. >> You got huge props for that, I'll tell you. >> Absolutely terrifying. Because they told me I wouldn't see anyone. Because we did the rehearsal the day before, and they were like, it's just going to be like - >> Sometimes it just looks like blackness out there. >> Yeah, yeah. It wasn't, they lied. I could see eyeballs. It was terrifying. >> Would you rather know that going in though? Or is it better to be, is ignorance bliss in that moment? >> Ignorance is bliss. >> Yeah, yeah yeah. >> Good call Savannah, right? Yeah, just go. >> The older I get, the more I'm just, I'm on the ignorance is bliss train. I just, I don't need to know anything that's going to hurt my soul. >> Exactly. >> One of the things that you mentioned, and this has actually been a really frequent theme here on the show this week, is you said that this has been a transformative year for developers. >> Lena: Yeah. >> What did you mean by that? >> So I think developers are starting to come to the fore, if you like, the fore. And I'm not in any way being deprecating about developers 'cause I love them. >> Savannah: I think everyone here does. >> I was married to one, I live with one now. It's like, they follow me everywhere. They don't. But, I think they, this is my opinion obviously but I think that we're seeing more and more the value that developers bring to the table. They're not just code geeks anymore. They're not just code monkeys, you know, churning out lines and lines of code. Some of the most interesting discussions I've had this week have been with developers. And that's why I'm so pleased that our developer data platform is going to give these folks back time, so that they can go and innovate. And do super interesting things and do the next big thing. It was interesting, I was talking to Mary, our comms person earlier and she had said that Dave I guess, my boss, was on your show - >> Dave: Yeah, he was over here last night. >> Yeah. And he was saying that two thirds of the companies that had been mentioned so far, within the whole gamut of this conference use MongoDB. And so take that, extrapolate that, of all the developers >> Wow. >> who are there. I know, isn't that awesome? >> That's awesome. Congrats on that, that's like - >> Did I hear that right now? >> I know, I just had that moment. >> I know she just told me, I'm like, really? That's - >> That's so cool. >> 'Cause the first thing I thought of was then, oh my god, how many developers are we reaching then? 'Cause they're the ones. I mean, it's kind of interesting. So my job has kind of grown from, over the years, being the security geek in the back room that nobody talks to, to avoiding me in the lift, to I've got a seat at the table now. We meet with the board. And I think that I can see that that's where the developer mindset is moving towards. It's like, give us the right tools and we'll change your world. >> And let the human capital go back to doing the fun stuff and not just the maintenance stuff. >> And, but then you say that, you can't have everything automated. I get that automation is also the buzzword of the week. And I get that, trust me. Someone has to write the code to do the automation. >> Savannah: Right. >> So, so yeah, definitely give these people back time, so that they can work on ML, AI, choose your buzzword. You know, by giving people things like queriable encryption for example, you're going to free up a whole bunch of head space. They don't have to worry about their data being, you know harvested from memory or harvested while at rest or in motion. And it's like, okay, I don't have to worry about that now, let me go do something fun. >> How about the role of the developer as it relates to SecOps, right? They're being asked to do a lot. You and I talked about this at re:Inforce. You seem to have a pretty good handle on it. Like a lot of companies I think are struggling with it. I mean, the other thing you said said to me is you don't have a lack of talent at Mongo, right? 'Cause you're Mongo. But a lot of companies do. But a lot of the developers, you know we were just talking about this earlier with Capgemini, the developer metrics or the application development team's metrics might not be aligned with the CSO's metrics. How, what are you seeing there? What, how do you deal with it within Mongo? What do you advise your customers? >> So in terms of internal, I work very closely with our development group. So I work with Tara Hernandez, who's our new VP of developer productivity. And she and her team are very much interested in making developers more productive. That's her job. And so we get together because sometimes security can definitely be seen as a blocker. You know, funnily enough, I actually had a Slack that I had to respond to three seconds before I come on here. And it was like, help, we need some help getting this application through procurement, because blah, blah, blah. And it's weird the kind of change, the shift in mindset. Whereas before they might have gone to procurement or HR or someone to ask for this. Now they're coming to the CSO. 'Cause they know if I say yes, it'll go through. >> Talk about social engineering. >> Exactly. >> You were talking about - >> But turn it around though. If I say no, you know, I don't like to say no. I prefer to be the CSO that says yes, but. And so that's what we've done. We've definitely got that culture of ask, we'll tell you the risks, and then you can go away and be innovative and do what you need to do. And we basically do the same with our customers. Here's what you can do. Our application is secure out of the box. Here's how we can help you make it even more, you know, streamlined or bespoke to what you need. >> So mobile was a big inflection point, you know, I dunno, it seems like forever ago. >> 2007. >> 2007. Yeah, iPhone came out in 2007. >> You remember your first iPhone? >> Dave: Yeah. >> Yeah? Same. >> Yeah. It was pretty awesome, actually. >> Yeah, I do too. >> Yeah, I was on the train to Boston going up to see some friends at MIT on the consortium that I worked with. And I had, it was the wee one, 'member? But you thought it was massive. >> Oh, it felt - >> It felt big. And I remember I was sitting on the train to Boston it was like the Estella and there was these people, these two women sitting beside me. And they were all like glam, like you and unlike me. >> Dave: That's awesome. >> And they, you could see them like nudging each other. And I'm being like, I'm just sitting like this. >> You're chilling. >> Like please look at my phone, come on just look at it. Ask me about it. And eventually I'm like - >> You're baiting them. >> nonchalantly laid it on the table. And you know, I'm like, and they're like, is that an iPhone? And I'm like, yeah, you want to see it? >> I thought you'd never ask. >> I know. And I really played with it. And I showed them all the cool stuff, and they're like, oh we're going to buy iPhones. And so I should have probably worked for Apple, but I didn't. >> I was going to say, where was your referral kickback on that? Especially - >> It was a little like Tesla, right? When you first, we first saw Tesla, it was Ray Wong, you know, Ray? From Pasadena? >> It really was a moment and going from the Blackberry keyboard to that - >> He's like want to see my car? And I'm like oh yeah sure, what's the big deal? >> Yeah, then you see it and you're like, ooh. >> Yeah, that really was such a pivotal moment. >> Anyway, so we lost a track, 2007. >> Yeah, what were we talking about? 2007 mobile. >> Mobile. >> Key inflection point, is where you got us here. Thank you. >> I gotchu Dave, I gotchu. >> Bring us back here. My mind needs help right now. Day four. Okay, so - >> We're all getting here on day four, we're - >> I'm socially engineering you to end this, so I can go to bed and die quietly. That's what me and Mary are, we're counting down the minutes. >> Holy. >> That's so sick. >> You're breaking my heart right now. I love it. I'm with you, sis, I'm with you. >> So I dunno where I was, really where I was going with this, but, okay, there's - >> 2007. Three things happened. >> Another inflection point. Okay yeah, tell us what happened. But no, tell us that, but then - >> AWS, clones, 2006. >> Well 2006, 2007. Right, okay. >> 2007, the iPhone, the world blew up. So you've already got this platform ready to take all this data. >> Dave: Right. >> You've got this little slab of gorgeousness called the iPhone, ready to give you all that data. And then MongoDB pops up, it's like, woo-hoo. But what we could offer was, I mean back then was awesome, but it was, we knew that we would have to iterate and grow and grow and grow. So that was kind of the three things that came together in 2007. >> Yeah, and then Cloud came in big time, and now you've got this platform. So what's the next inflection point do you think? >> Oh... >> Good question, Dave. >> Don't even ask me that. >> I mean, is it Edge? Is it IOT? Is there another disruptor out there? >> I think it's going to be artificial intelligence. >> Dave: Is it AI? >> I mean I don't know enough about it to talk about it, to any level, so don't ask me any questions about it. >> This is like one of those ignorance is bliss moments. It feels right. >> Yeah. >> Well, does it scare you, from a security perspective? Or? >> Great question, Dave. >> Yeah, it scares me more from a humanity standpoint. Like - >> More than social scared you? 'Cause social was so benign when it started. >> Oh it was - >> You're like, oh - I remember, >> It was like a yearbook. I was on the Estella and we were - >> Shout out to Amtrak there. >> I was with, we were starting basically a wikibond, it was an open source. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Kind of, you know, technology community. And we saw these and we were like enamored of Facebook. And there were these two young kids on the train, and we were at 'em, we were picking the brain. Do you like Facebook? "I love Facebook." They're like "oh, Facebook's unbelievable." Now, kids today, "I hate Facebook," right? So, but social at the beginning it was kind of, like I say, benign and now everybody's like - >> Savannah: We didn't know what we were getting into. >> Right. >> I know. >> Exactly. >> Can you imagine if you could have seen into the future 20 years ago? Well first of all, we'd have all bought Facebook and Apple stock. >> Savannah: Right. >> And Tesla stock. But apart from, but yeah apart from that. >> Okay, so what about Quantum? Does that scare you at all? >> I think the only thing that scares me about Quantum is we have all this security in place today. And I'm not an expert in Quantum, but we have all this security in place that's securing what we have today. And my worry is, in 10 years, is it still going to be secure? 'Cause we're still going to be using that data in some way, shape, or form. And my question is to the quantum geniuses out there, what do we do in 10 years like to retrofit the stuff? >> Dave: Like a Y2K moment? >> Kind of. Although I think Y2K is coming in 2038, isn't it? When the Linux date flips. I'll be off the grid by then, I'll be living in Scotland. >> Somebody else's problem. >> Somebody else's problem. I'll be with the sheep in Glasgow, in Scotland. >> Y2K was a boondoggle for tech, right? >> What a farce. I mean, that whole - >> I worked in the power industry in Y2K. That was a nightmare. >> Dave: Oh I bet. >> Savannah: Oh my God. >> Yeah, 'cause we just assumed that the world was going to stop and there been no power, and we had nuclear power plants. And it's like holy moly. Yeah. >> More than moly. >> I was going to say, you did a good job holding that other word in. >> I think I was going to, in case my mom hears this. >> I grew up near Diablo Canyon in, in California. So you were, I mean we were legitimately worried that that exactly was going to happen. And what about the waste? And yeah it was chaos. We've covered a lot. >> Well, what does worry you? Like, it is culture? Is it - >> Why are you trying to freak her out? >> No, no, because it's a CSO, trying to get inside the CSO's head. >> You don't think I have enough to worry about? You want to keep piling on? >> Well if it's not Quantum, you know? Maybe it's spiders or like - >> Oh but I like spiders, well spiders are okay. I don't like bridges, that's my biggest fear. Bridges. >> Seriously? >> And I had to drive over the Tappan Zee bridge, which is one of the longest, for 17 years, every day, twice. The last time I drove over it, I was crying my heart out, and happy as anything. >> Stay out of Oakland. >> I've never driven over it since. Stay out of where? >> Stay out of Oakland. >> I'm staying out of anywhere that's got lots of water. 'Cause it'll have bridges. >> Savannah: Well it's good we're here in the desert. >> Exactly. So what scares me? Bridges, there you go. >> Yeah, right. What? >> Well wait a minute. So if I'm bridging technology, is that the scary stuff? >> Oh God, that was not - >> Was it really bad? >> It was really bad. >> Wow. Wow, the puns. >> There's a lot of seems in those bridges. >> It is lit on theCUBE A floor, we are all struggling. I'm curious because I've seen, your team is all over the place here on the show, of course. Your booth has been packed the whole time. >> Lena: Yes. >> The fingerprint. Talk to me about your shirt. >> So, this was designed by my team in house. It is the most wanted swag in the company, because only my security people wear it. So, we make it like, yeah, you could maybe have one, if this turns out well. >> I feel like we're on the right track. >> Dave: If it turns out well. >> Yeah, I just love it. It's so, it's just brilliant. I mean, it's the leaf, it's a fingerprint. It's just brilliant. >> That's why I wanted to call it out. You know, you see a lot of shirts, a lot of swag shirts. Some are really unfortunately sad, or not funny, >> They are. >> or they're just trying too hard. Now there's like, with this one, I thought oh I bet that's clever. >> Lena: It is very cool. Yes, I love it. >> I saw a good one yesterday. >> Yeah? >> We fix shit, 'member? >> Oh yeah, yeah. >> That was pretty good. >> I like when they're >> That's a pretty good one. >> just straightforward, like that, yeah yeah. >> But the only thing with this is when you're say in front of a green screen, you look as though you've got no tummy. >> A portal through your body. >> And so, when we did our first - >> That's a really good point, actually. >> Yeah, it's like the black hole to nothingless. And I'm like wow, that's my soul. >> I was just going to say, I don't want to see my soul like that. I don't want to know. >> But we had to do like, it was just when the pandemic first started, so we had to do our big presentation live announcement from home. And so they shipped us all this camera equipment for home and thank God my partner knows how that works, so he set it all up. And then he had me test with a green screen, and he's like, you have no tummy. I'm like, what the hell are you talking about? He's like, come and see. It's like this, I dunno what it was. So I had to actually go upstairs and felt tip with a magic marker and make it black. >> Wow. >> So that was why I did for two hours on a Friday, yeah. >> Couldn't think of another alternative, huh? >> Well no, 'cause I'm myopic when it comes to marketing and I knew I had to keep the tshirt on, and I just did that. >> Yeah. >> In hindsight, yes I could have worn an "I Fix Shit" tshirt, but I don't think my husband would've been very happy. I secure shit? >> There you go, yeah. >> There you go. >> Over to you, Savannah. >> I was going to say, I got acquainted, I don't know if I can say this, but I'm going to say it 'cause we're here right now. I got acquainted with theCUBE, wearing a shirt that said "Unfuck Kubernetes," 'cause it was a marketing campaign that I was running for one of my clients at Kim Con last year. >> That's so good. >> Yeah, so - >> Oh my God. I'll give you one of these if you get me one of those. >> I can, we can do a swapskee. We can absolutely. >> We need a few edits on this film, on the file. >> Lena: Okay, this is nothing - >> We're fallin' off the wheel. Okay, on that note, I'm going to bring us to our challenge that we discussed, before we got started on this really diverse discussion that we have had in the last 15 minutes. We've covered everything from felt tip markers to nuclear power plants. >> To the darkness of my soul. >> To the darkness of all of our souls. >> All of our souls, yes. >> Which is perhaps a little too accurate, especially at this stage in the conference. You've obviously seen a lot Lena, and you've been rockin' it, I know John was in your suite up here, at at at the Venetian. What's your 30 second hot take? Most important story, coming out of the show or for you all at Mongo this year? >> Genuinely, it was when I learned that two-thirds of the customers that had been mentioned, here, are MongoDB customers. And that just exploded in my head. 'Cause now I'm thinking of all the numbers and the metrics and how we can use that. And I just think it's amazing, so. >> Yeah, congratulations on that. That's awesome. >> Yeah, I thought it was amazing. >> And it makes sense actually, 'cause Mongo so easy to use. We were talking about Tengen. >> We knew you when, I feel that's our like, we - >> Yeah, but it's true. And so, Mongo was just really easy to use. And people are like, ah, it doesn't scale. It's like, turns out it actually does scale. >> Lena: Turns out, it scales pretty well. >> Well Lena, without question, this is my favorite conversation of the show so far. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> Dave: Great to see you. >> It's always a pleasure. >> Dave: Thanks Lena. >> Thank you. >> And thank you all, tuning in live, for tolerating wherever we take these conversations. >> Dave: Whatever that was. >> I bet you weren't ready for this one, folks. We're at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, Nevada. With Dave Vellante, I'm Savannah Peterson. You're washing theCUBE, the leader for high tech coverage.

>> From The Cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from The Cube and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> UiPath has always been an unconventional company. You know it started with humble beginnings. It's essentially a software development shop. Then it caught lightning in a bottle with its computer vision technology. It's really, it's simplification mantra and it created a very easy to deploy software robot system for bespoke departments so they could automate mundane tasks. You know the story. The company grew rapidly, was able to go public early this year. Now consistent with its out-of-the-ordinary approach, while other firms are shutting down travel and physical events, UiPath is moving ahead with Forward IV, it's annual user conference next week with a live audience there at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. It's also fast forwarding as a company, determined to lead the charge beyond RPA and execute on a more all-encompassing Enterprise automation agenda. Hello everyone and welcome to this week's Wikibond Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis and ahead of Forward IV, we'll update you in the RPA market the progress that UiPath has made since its IPO and bringing some ETR customer survey data that's contextualized the company's position in the overall market and relative to the competition. Here's a quick rundown of today's agenda. First I want to tell you theCube is going to be at Forward IV at the Bellagio next week. UiPath, this is their big customer event. It's live, it's a physical event. It's primarily outdoors. You have to be vaccinated to attend. Now, this not completely out of the ordinary. John Furrier and theCube were at AWS Public Sector this past week and we were at Mobile World Congress in one of the first big hybrid events of the year at Barcelona. We thought that event would kick of the fall event season, live event in earnest but the COVID crisis has caused many tech firms, most tech firms actually, to hit pause button. Not UiPath, they're moving ahead. They're going forward and we see a growing trend for smaller VIP events with a virtual component, topic maybe for another day. Now we've talked extensively about the productivity challenges and the automation mandate the pandemic has thrust upon us. Now, we've seen pretty dramatic productivity improvements as remote work kicked in but its brought new stresses. For example, according to Qualtrics, 32% of working moms said their mental health has declined since the pandemic hit. 15% of working dads said the same by the way. So, one has to question the sustainability of this perpetual workday. And we're seeing a continuum of automation solutions emerging and we'll talk about that today. We're seeing tons of M&A as well but now, in that continuum, on the left-side of the spectrum, there's Microsoft who in some ways, they stand alone and their Azure is becoming ubiquitous as a SaaS-Cloud collaboration and productivity platform. Microsoft is everywhere and in virtually every market, whether video conferencing, security, database, cloud, CRM, analytics, you name it. Microsoft is pretty much there and RPA is no different. With the acquisition of Softomotive last year, Microsoft entered the RTA market in earnest and is penetrating very deeply into the space, particularly as it pertains to personal productivity building on its software stake. Now in the middle of that spectrum if you will, we're seeing more M&A and that's defined really by the big software giants. Think of this domain as integrated software place. SAP, they acquired Contextere. They also acquired a company called Process Insights, Service now acquired Inttellebot. Salesforce acquired Servicetrace, we see Infor entering the frame and I would put even Pega, Pega systems in this camp. Software companies focused on integrating RPA into their broader workflows, into their software platforms and this is important because these platforms are entrenched Their well guardants of thoughts and complicated with lots of touchpoints and integration points and frankly they are much harder to automate because of their entrenched legacy. Now, on the far side of that spectrum, are the horizontal automation players and that's been let by UiPath with automation anywhere as the number two player in this domain. And I even put a blue prism in there more M&A recently announced that Vista is going to acquire them Vista also owns Tibco, they are going to merge those two companies. You know Tibco is come up with the integration play. So again I would put them in that you know, horizontal piece of the spectrum. So with that as background, we're going to look at how UiPath has performed since we last covered them and IPO and I'm going to bring in some ETR survey data to get the spending view from customers and we'll wrap up. Now, just to emphasize the importance of automation and the automation mandate, we talk about it all the time in this program. We use this ETR chart. It's a two dimensional view with net score which is the measure of spending momentum on the vertical axis and market share which is a proxy for pervasiveness in the data set that's on the horizontal axis. Now note that red dotted line, it signifies companies within elevated position on the net score vertical axis anything over that is considered pretty good. Very good. Now this shows every spending segment within the ETR taxonomy. And the four spending categories with the greatest velocity are AI, cloud, containers and RPA. And they have topped the charts for quite a while now. They are the only 4 categories which have sustained above that 40% line consistently throughout the pandemic and even before. Now the impressive thing about cloud of course is it has both spending momentum on the vertical axis and a very large market share or presence in the data set. The point is RPA is nascent still. It has an affinity with AI as a means of more intelligently identifying and streamlining process improvements. And so we expect those two to remain elevated and grow to the right together. UiPath pegs its TAM, total available market at 60 billion. And the reality is that could be understated. Okay, as we reported from the UiPath S1 analysis we did pre IPO, the company at that time had an ARR annual recurring revenue of $580 million and it was growing at 65% annually. And nearly 8000 customers at the time, a 1000 of which had an ARR in excess of a 100k. And the net revenue retention the company had was over 145%. So let's take a look at the pictures 6 months forward. We mentioned the $60 billion TAM, ARR now up over $726.5 million on its way to a billion ARR holding pretty steady at 60% growth as is NRR, net revenue retention and more then a 1000 new customers and 200 more with over a 100000 in ARR and a small operating profit which by the way exceeded the consensuses pretty substantially. Profitability is not shown here and no one seems to care anyway these days. It's all about growing into that TAM. Well that's a pretty good looking picture, isn't it? The company had a beat and a raise for the quarter earlier this month, so looking good right. Well you ask how come the stock is not doing better. That's an interesting question. So let's first look at the stocks performance on a relative basis. Here we show UiPath performance against Pega systems and blue prism, the other two publicly traded automation. Pure plays sort of in the case of Pega. So UiPath outperformed post its IPO but since the early summer Pega is been the big winner while UiPath slowly decelerated. You see Blue prism was at the lag until it was announced that it was in an acquisition talks with a couple of PE firms and the prospects of a bidding war sent that yellow line up as you can see. UiPath as you can see on the inset, has a much higher valuation than Pega and way higher than blue Prism. Pega interestingly is growing revenues nicely at around 40%. And I think what's happening is that the street simply wants more. Even though UiPath beat and raised, Wallstreet is still getting comfortable with management which is new to the public market game and the company just needs to demonstrate a track record and build trust. There's also some education around billings and multi-year contracts that the company addressed on its last earnings call. But the street was concerned about ARR for new logos. It appears to be slowing down sequentially and a notable decline in billings momentum which UiPath CFO addressed on the earnings call saying look they don't need the trade margin for prepaid multi year deals, given the strong cash position. Why give anything up. And even though I said nobody cares about profitability well, I guess that's true until you guide for an operating loss when you've been showing small profit in recent quarters what UiPath did. Then, obviously people start to care. So UiPath is in bit of an unknown territory to the street and it has a valuation, it's pretty rich. Very rich actually at 30 times revenue multiple or greater than 30 times revenue multiple. So that's why in my view, investors are being cautious. But I want to address a dynamic that we have seen with this high growth rocket chip companies. Something we talked about Snowflake and I think you are seeing some of that here with UiPath. Different model in the sense that Snowflake is pure cloud but I'm talking about concerns around ARR and from new logos and that growth in a sequential basis. And here's what's happening in my view with UiPath. You have a company that started within departments with a smaller average contract size, ACV maybe 25000, may be 50000 but not deep six figure deals. That wasn't UiPath's play. And because the company focused so heavily on simplicity and made it really easy to adapt, customers saw really fast ROI. I mean break-even in months. So we very quickly saw expansion into other departments. So when ACV started to rise and installations expanded within each customer, UiPath realized it had to move beyond a point product and it started thing about a platform and making acquisitions like Processgold and others and this marked a much deeper expansion into the customer base. And you can see that here in this UiPath chart that they shared at their investor deck, customers that bought in 2016 and 2017 expanded their spend 13, 15, 18, 20x So the LTV, life time value of the customer is growing dramatically and because UiPath is focused on simplicity, and has a very facile premium model much easier to try before you buy than its competitors it's CAC, Customer acquisition cost are likely much lower than some of its peers. And that's a key dynamic. So don't get freaked out by some of those concerns that we raised earlier because just like Snowflake what's happening is that the company for sure is gaining new customers, may be just not at the same rate but don't miss the forest through the trees I.e getting more money from their existing customers which means retention, loyalty and growth. Now speaking of forest, this chart is the dynamic I'm talking about, its an ETR graphic that shows the components of net score against spending momentum. Net score breaks down into 5 areas. That lime green at the top is new additions. Okay, so that's only 11% of the customer mentions. By the way we are talking about more than a 125 responses for UiPath. So it's meaningful, it's actually larger in this survey or certainly comparable to Microsoft. So that's just something right there. The next bar is the forest green. Forest green is what I want you to focus. That's customer spending 6% or more in the second half of the year relative to the first half. The gray is flat spending which is quite large. The pink or light red, that's spending customers spending 6% or worse, that's a 4% number. But look at the bottom bar. There is no bar, that's churn. 0% of the responders in the survey are churning. And Churn is the silent killer of SaaS companies. 0% defections. So you've got 46% spending more, nobody leaving. That's the dynamic powering UiPath right now and I would take this picture any day over a larger lime green and a smaller forest green and a bigger churn number. Okay, it's pretty good, not Snowflake good but it's solid. So how does this picture compare to UiPath's peers. Let's take a look at that. So this is ETR data, same data showing the granularity net score for Microsoft power automate, UiPath automation anywhere, Blue Prism and Pega. So as we said before, Microsoft is ubiquitous. What can we say about that. But UiPath is right there with a more robust platform. Not to overlook Microsoft, you can't but UiPath will you that the don't compete head to head for enterprise automation deals with Microsoft and may be they will over time. They do however compete head to head with automation anywhere. And their picture is quite strong as you can see here. You know as is Blue Prism's picture and even Pega. Although Blue Prism automation anywhere UiPtah and power automate all have net scores on this chart as you can see the tables in the upper right over 40%, Pega does not. But you can see Pega as a pure play RPA vendor it's a little bit of sort of apples and oranges there but they do sell RPA and ETR captures in their taxonomy so why not include them. Also note that UiPath has as I said before more mentions in the survey than power automate which is actually quite interesting given the ubiquity of Microsoft. Now, one other notable note is the bright red that's defections and only UiPath is showing zero defections Everybody else has at least little of the slims on defections. Okay, so take that as you will but its another data point, the one that is powerful nit only for UiPath but really for the entire sector. Now the last ETR data point that we want to share is the famous two dimensional view. Like the sector chart we showed earlier, this graphic shows the net score on the vertical axis that's against spending velocity and market share or pervasiveness on the horizontal axis. So as we said earlier, UiPath actually has a greater presence in the survey than the ever present Microsoft. Remember, this is the July survey. We don't have full results from the September-October survey yet and we can't release them until ETR is out of its quiet period but I expect the entire sector, like everything is going to be slightly down because as reported last week tech spending is moderated slightly in the second half of this year. But we don't expect the picture to change dramatically UiPath and power automate we think are going to lead in market presence and those two plus automation anywhere is going to show the strength in spending momentum as will most of the sector. We'll see who comes in above the 40% line. Okay, what to watch at Forward IV. So in summary I'll be looking for a few things. One, UiPath has hinted toward a big platform announcement that will deepen its capabilities to beyond being an RPA point tool into much more of an enterprise automation platform, rewriting a lot of the code Linux, cloud, better automation of the UI, you are going to hear all kind of new product announcements that are coming so I'll be listening for those details. I want to hear more from customers that further confirm what I've been hearing from them over the last couple of years and get more data especially on their ROI, on their land and expand, I want to understand that dynamic and that true enterprise automation. It's going to be good to get an update face to face and test some of our assumptions here and see where the gaps are and where UiPath can improve. Third, I want to talk to ecosystem players to see where they are in participating in the value chain here. What kind of partner has UiPath become since its IPO, are they investing more in the ecosystem, how do partners fit into that flywheel. Fourth, I want to hear from UiPath management Daniel Dines and other UiPath leaders, their exiting toddler wheel and coming into an adolescence phase or early adulthood. And what does that progression look like, how does it feel, what's the vibe at the show. And finally I'm very excited to participate in a live in-person event to see what's working, to see how hybrid events are evolving, we got to good glimpse at Mobile congress and this week in DC at public sector summit. As you know theCube is doing hybrid events for years and we intend to continue to lead in this regard and bring you the best real time information as possible. Okay, that's it for today. Remember these episodes are all available as podcasts wherever you listen, all you do is search breaking analysis podcast. We publish each week on Wikibound.com and Siliconangle.com and you can always connect on twitter @dvellante or email me at David.vellante@siliconangle.com Appreciate the comments on LinkedIn and don't forget to check out ETR.plus for all the survey data. This is Dave Vellante for theCube insights powered by ETR. Be well and will see you next time. (upbeat music)

(electronic music) >> Narrator: From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston Massachusetts, it's the CUBE. Now here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. >> Cloud is dead, it's all going to the edge. Or is it? Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante and I'm here with Stu Miniman. Stu, where does this come from, this narrative that the cloud is over? >> Well Dave, you know, clouds had a good run, right? It's been over a decade. You know, Amazon's dominance in the marketplace but Peter Levine from Andreessen Horowitz did an article where he said, cloud is dead, the edge is killing the dead. The Edge is killing the cloud and really we're talking about IoT and IoT's huge opportunity. Wikibon, Dave we've been tracking for many years. We did you know the original forecast for the Industrial Internet and obviously there's going to be lots more devices at the edge so huge opportunity, huge growth, intelligence all over the place. But in our viewpoint Dave, it doesn't mean that cloud goes away. You know, we've been talking about distributed architectures now for a long time. The cloud is really at the core of this building services that surround the globe, live in just hundreds of places for all these companies so it's nuanced. And just as the cloud didn't overnight kill the data center and lots of discussion as to what lives in the data center, the edge does not kill the cloud and it's really, we're seeing some major transitions pull and push from some of these technologies. A lot of challenges and lots to dig into. >> So I've read Peter Levine's piece, I thought was very thought-provoking and quite well done. And of course, he's coming at that from the standpoint of a venture capitalist, all right. Do I want to start you know, do I want to pour money into the trend that is now the mainstream? Or do I want to get ahead of it? So I think that's what that was all about but here's my question Stu is, in your opinion will the activity that occurs at the edge, will it actually drive more demand from the cloud? So today we're seeing the infrastructure, the service business is growing at what? Thirty five percent? Forty percent? >> Sure, sure. Amazon's growing at the you know, 35 to 40 percent. Google, Microsoft are growing double that right now but overall you're right. >> Yeah, okay and so, and then of course the enterprise players are flat if they're lucky. So my question is will the edge actually be a tailwind for the cloud, in your opinion? >> Yeah, so first on your comment there from an investment standpoint, totally can understand why edge is greenfield opportunity. Lots of different places that I can place bets and probably can win as opposed to if I think that today I'm going to compete against the hyperscale cloud guys. You know, they're pouring 10 billion dollars a year into their infrastructure. They have huge massive employment so the bar to entry is a lot higher. I'm sorry, the second piece was? >> So will the edge drive more demand for the cloud? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think it does Dave because you know, let's take something like autonomous vehicles. Something that we talk about. I need intelligence of the edge. I can't wait for some instruction to go back to the cloud before my Tesla plows into an individual. I need to know that it's there but the models themselves, really I've got all the compute in the cloud. This is where I'm going to train all of my models but I need to be able to update and push those to the edge. If I think about a lot of the industrial applications. Flying a plane is, you know, things need to happen locally but all the anomalies and new things that we run into there's certain pieces that need to be updated to the cloud. So you know, it's kind of a multi-layer. If we look at how much data will there be at the edge, well there's probably going to be more data at the edge than there will be in the central cloud. But how much activity, how much compute do I need, how much things do I need to actually work on. The cloud is probably going to be that central computer still and it's not just a computer, as I said, a distributed architecture. That's where, you know. When we've looked at big data in the early days Dave, when we can put those data lines in the cloud. I've got thousands or millions of compute cycles that I can throw at this at such a lower price and use that there as opposed to at the edge especially. What kind of connectivity do I have? Am i isolated from those other pieces? If you go back to my premise of we're building distributed architectures, the edge is still very early. How do I make sure I secure that? Do I have the network? There's lots of things that I'm going to build in a tiny little component and have that be there. And there's lots of hardware innovation going on at that edge too. >> Okay, so let's talk about how this plays out a little bit and you're talking about a distributed model and it's really to me a distributed data model. The research analysts at Wikibon have envisioned this three-tier data model where you've got data at the edge, which you may or may not persist. You've got some kind of consolidation or aggregation layer where it's you know, it's kind of between the edge and the deep data center and then you've got the cloud. Now that cloud can be an on-prem cloud or it could be the public cloud. So that data model, how do you see that playing out with regard to the adoption of cloud, the morphing of cloud and the edge and the traditional data center? >> Yeah we've been talking about intelligent devices at the edge for a couple decades now. I mean, I remember I built a house in like 1999 and the smart home was already something that people were talking about then. Today, great, I've got you know. I've got my Nest if I have, I probably have smart assistants. There's a lot of things I love-- >> Alexa. >> Saw on Twitter today, somebody's talking like I'm waiting for my light bulbs to update their firmware from the latest push so, some of its coming but it's just this slow gradual adoption. So there's the consumer piece and then there's the business aspect. So, you know, we are still really really early in some of these exciting edge uses. Talk about the enterprise. They're all working on their strategy for how devices and how they're going to work through IoT but you know this is not something that's going to happen overnight. It's they're figuring out their partnerships, they're figuring out where they work, and that three-tiered model that you talked about. My cloud provider, absolutely hugely important for how I do that and I really see it Dave, not as an or but it's an and. So I need to understand where I collect my data, where it's at certain aspects are going to live, and the public cloud players are spending a lot of time working on on that intelligence, the intelligence layer. >> And Stu, I should mention, so far we're talking about really, the infrastructure as a service layer comprises database and middleware. We haven't really addressed the the SAS space and we're not going to go deep into that but just to say. I mean look, packaged software as we knew it is dead, right? SAS is where all the action is. It's the highest growth area, it's the highest value area, so we'll cover that in another segment. So we're really talking about that, the stack up to the middleware, the database, and obviously the infrastructures as a service. So when you think about the players here, let's start with AWS. You've been to I think, every AWS re:Invent maybe, with the exception of one. You've seen the evolution. I was just down in D.C. the other day and they have this chart on the wall, which is their releases, their functional releases by year. It's just, it's overwhelming what they've done. So they're obviously the leader. I saw a recent Gartner Magic Quadrant. It looked like, I tweeted it, it looked like Ronnie Turcotte looking back on Secretariat from the Belmont and whatever it was. 1978, I think it was. (laughs) 31 lengths. I mean, massive domination in the infrastructure as a service space. What do you see going on? >> Yeah so, Dave, absolutely. Today the cloud is, it's Amazon's market out there. Interestingly if you say, okay what's some of the biggest threats in the infrastructure as a service? Well, maybe China, Dave. You know, Alibaba was one that you look at there. But huge opportunity for what's happened at the edge. If you talk about intelligence, you talk about AI, talk about machine learning. Google is actually the company that most people will talk about it, can kind of have a leadership. Heck, I've even seen discussion that maybe we need antitrust to look at Google because they're going to lock things up. You know, they have Android, they have Google Home, they have all these various pieces. But we know Dave, they are far behind Amazon in the public cloud market and Amazon has done a lot, especially over the last two years. You're right, I've been to every Amazon re:Invent except for the first one and the last two years, really seen a maturation of that growth. Not just you know, devices and partnerships there but how do they bring their intelligence and push that out to the edge so things like their serverless technology, which is Lambda. They have Lambda Greengrass that can put to the edge. The serverless is pervading all of their solutions. They've got like the Aurora database-- >> And serverless is profound, not just that from the standpoint of application development but just an entire new business model is emerging on top of serverless and Lambda really started all that but but carry on. >> Yeah and when you look in and you say okay, what better use case than IoT for, well I need infrastructure but I only need it when I need it and I want to call it for when it's there. So that kind of model where I should be able to build by the microsecond and only use what I need. That's something that Amazon is at the forefront, clear leadership position there and they should be able to plug in and if they can extend that out to the edge, starting new partnerships. Like the VMware partnerships, interesting. Red Hat's another partnership they have with OpenShift to be able to get that out to more environments and Amazon has a tremendous ecosystem out there and absolutely is on their radar as to how their-- >> They're crushing it So we were at Google Next last year. Big push, verbally anyway, to the enterprise. They've been making some progress, they're hiring a lot of people out of formerly Cisco, EMC, folks that understand the enterprise but beyond sort of the AI and sort of data analytics, what kind of progress has Google made relative to the leader? >> So in general, enterprise infrastructure service, they haven't made as much progress as most of us watching would expect them to make. But Dave, you mentioned something, data. I mean, at the center of everything we're talking about is the data. So in some ways is Google you know, come on Google, they're smarter than the rest of us. They're skating to where the puck is Dave and infrastructure services, last decades argument if it's the data and the intelligence, Google's got just brilliant people. They're working at the some of these amazing environments. You look at things like Google's Spanner. This is distributed architecture. Say how do I plug in all of these devices and help the work in a distributed gradual work well. You know, heck, I'd be reading the whitepapers that Google's doing in understanding that they might be really well positioned in this 3D chess match that were playing. >> Your eyes might bleed. (laughs) I've read the Google Spanner, I was very excited about it. Understood, you know, a little bit of it. Okay, let's talk about Microsoft. They're really of the big cloud guys. They're really the one that has a partnership strategy to do both on-prem and public cloud. What are your thoughts on that now that sort of Azure stack is starting to roll out with some key partners? >> Yeah absolutely, it's the one that you know. Dave, if you use your analogy looking back, it's like well the next one, it's gaining a little bit, gaining a little bit but still far back. There is Microsoft. Where Microsoft has done best of course is their portfolio of business applications that they have. That they've really turned the green light on for enterprises to adopt SAS with Office 365. Azure stack, it's early days still but companies that use Microsoft, they trust Microsoft. Microsoft's done phenomenal working with developers over the last couple of years. Very prominent like the Kubernetes shows that I've been attending recently. They've absolutely got a play for serverless that we were talking about. I'm not as up to speed as to where Microsoft sits for kind of the IoT edge discussions. >> But you know they're playing there. >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Microsoft does identity better than anyone. Active Directory is still the standard in enterprises today. So you know, I worry that Microsoft could be caught in the middle. If Google's making the play for what's next, Microsoft is still chasing a little bit what Amazon's already winning. >> Okay and then we don't have enough time to really talk about China, you mentioned it before. Alibaba's you know, legit. Tencent, Baidu obviously with their captive market in China, they're going to do a lot of business and they're going to move a lot of compute and storage and networking but maybe address that in another segment. I want to talk about the traditional enterprise players. Dell EMC, IBM, HPE, Cisco, where do they stand? We talk a lot at Wikibond about true private cloud. The notion that you can't just stick all your data into the public cloud. Andy Jassy may disagree with that but there are practical realities and certainly when you talk to CIOs they they underscore that. But that notion of true private cloud hasn't allowed these companies to really grow. Now of course IBM and Oracle, I didn't mention Oracle, have a different strategy and Oracle's strategy is even more different. So let's sort of run through them. Let's take the arms dealers. Dell EMC, HPE, Cisco, maybe you put Lenovo in there. What's their cloud strategy? >> Well first of all Dave I think most of them, they went through a number of bumps along the road trying to figure out what their cloud strategy is. Most of them, especially let's take, if you take the compute or server side of the business, they are suppliers to all the service providers trying to get into the hyperscalers. Most of them have, they all have some partnership with Microsoft. There's a Assure stack and they're saying, okay hey, if I want an HPE server in my own data center and in Azure, Microsoft's going to be happy to provide that for you. But David, it's not really competing against infrastructure as a service and the bigger question is as that market has kind of flattened out and we kind of understand it, where is the opportunity for them in IoT. We saw, you know Dave. Last five years or so, can I have a consumer business and an enterprise business in the same? HPE tore those two apart. Michael Dell has kept them together. IBM spun off to Lenovo everything that was on the more consumer side of the business. Where will they play or will companies like Google, like Apple, the ones that you know, Dave. They are spending huge amounts of money in chips. Look at Google and what they're doing with TP use. Look at Apple, I believe it was, there was an Israeli company that they bought and they're making chips there. There's a different need at the edge and sure, company like Dell can create that but will they have the margin, will they have the software, will they have the ecosystem to be able to compete there? Cisco, I haven't seen on the compute side, them going down that path but I was at Cisco Live and a big talk there. I really like the opening keynote and we had a sit down on the CUBE with the executive, it said really if I look out to like 2030. If Cisco still successful and we're thinking about them, we don't think of them as a network company anymore. They are a software company and therefore, things like collaboration, things like how it's kind of a new version of networking that's not on ports and boxes. But really as I think about my data, think about my privacy and security, Cisco absolutely has a play there. They've done some very large acquisitions in that space and they've got some deep expertise there. >> But again, Dell, HPE, Cisco, predominantly arms dealers. Obviously don't have, HPE at one point had a public cloud, they've pulled back. HP's cloud play really is cloud technology partners that they acquire. That at least gives them a revenue stream into the cloud. Now maybe-- >> But it's a consultancy. >> It's a consultancy, maybe it's a one-way trip to the cloud but I will say this about CTP. What it does is it gives HPE a footprint in that business and to the extent that they're a trusted service provider for companies trying to move into the cloud. They can maybe be in the catbird seat for the on-prem business but again, largely an arms dealer. it's going to be a lower margin business certainly than IBM and Oracle, which have applications. They own their own public cloud with the Oracle public cloud and IBM cloud, formerly SoftLayer, which was a two billion dollar acquisition several years ago. So those companies from a participation standpoint, even a tiny market share is compared to Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. They're at least in that cloud game and they're somewhat insulated from that disruption because of their software business and their large install base. Okay, I want to sort of end with, sort of where we started. You know, the Peter Levine comment, cloud is dead, it's all going to the edge. I actually think the cloud era, it's kind of, it's here, we're kind of. It's kind of playing out as many of us had expected over the last five years. You know what blew me away? Is Alexa, who would have thought that Amazon would be a leader in this sort of natural language processing marketplace, right? You would have thought it would come from, certainly Google with all the the search capability. You would have thought Apple with Siri, you know compared to Alexa. So my point is Amazon is able to do that because it's got a data model. It's a data company, all these companies, including Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook. The largest market cap companies in the world, they have data at the core. Data is foundational for those companies and that's why they are in such a good position to disrupt. So cloud, SAS, mobile, social, big data, to me still these are kind of the last 10 years. The next 10 years are going to be about AI, machine intelligence, deep learning, machine learning, cognitive. We're trying to even get the names right but it starts with the data. So let me put forth the premise and get your commentary. and tie it back in the cloud. So the innovation, in the next 10 years is going to come from data and to the extent that your data is not in silos, you're going to be in a much better position than if it is. Number two is your application of artificial intelligence, you know whatever term you want to use, machine intelligence, etc. Data plus AI, plus I'll bring it back to cloud, cloud economics. If you don't have those cloud economics then you're going to be at a disadvantage of innovation. So let's talk about what we mean by cloud economics. You're talking about the API economy, talking about global scale, always on. Very importantly something we've talked about for years, virtually zero marginal costs at volume, which you're never going to get on-prem because this creates a network effect. And the other thing it does from an innovation context, it attracts startups. Or startups saying, hey I want to build on-prem. No, they don't want to build in the cloud. So it's data plus artificial intelligence plus cloud economics that's going to drive innovation in the next ten years. What are your thoughts? >> Yeah Dave, absolutely. Something I've been saying for the last couple of years, we watched kind of the the customer flywheel that the public clouds have. Data is that next flywheel so companies that can capture that. You mentioned Amazon and Alexa, one of the reasons that Amazon can basically sell that as a loss is lots of those people, they're all Amazon Prime customers and they're ordering more things from Amazon and they're getting so much data that drive all of those other services. Where is Amazon going to threaten in the future? Everywhere. It is basically what they see. The thing we didn't discuss there Dave, you know I love your premise there, is it's technology plus people. What's going to happen with jobs? You and I did the sessions with Andy McAfee and Eril Brynjolfsson, it's racing with the machine. Where is, we know that people plus machines always beat so we spent the last five years talking about data scientist, the growth of developers and developers and the new king makers. So you know what are those new jobs, what are those new roles that are going to help build the solutions where people plus machine will win and what does that kind of next generation of workforce going to look like? >> Well I want to add to that Stu, I'm glad you brought that up. So a friend of mine David Michelle is just about to publish a new book called Seeing Digital. And in that book, I got an advance copy, in there he talks about companies that have data at their core and with human expertise around the data but if you think about the vast majority of companies, it's human expertise and the data is kind of bolted on. And the data lives in silos. Those companies are in a much more vulnerable position in terms of being disrupted, than the ones that have a data model that everybody has access to with human expertise around it. And so when you think about digital disruption, no industry is safe in my opinion, and every industry has kind of its unique attributes. You know, obviously publishing and books and music have disrupted very quickly. Insurance hasn't been disrupted, banking hasn't been disrupted, although blockchain it's probably going to affect that. So again, coming back to this tail-end premise is the next 10 years is going to be about that digital disruption. And it's real, it's not just a bunch of buzzwords, a cloud is obviously a key component, if not the key component of the underlying infrastructure with a lot of activity in terms of business models being built on top. All right Stu, thank you for your perspectives. Thanks for covering this. We will be looking for this video, the outputs, the clips from that. Thanks for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman, we'll see you next time. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware, and it's Ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to VMworld 2017 in Las Vegas. We're at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my co-host, Peter Burris. Mike Arterbury is here, he's the Vice President of Technology Alliances at DELLEMC, Mike, welcome to theCUBE. >> Dave, thanks. Peter, great to see you guys again. >> The Ecosystem is absolutely exploding. VMware is on fire, the data center is on fire, you know, the technology business is just, as Pat and Michael were saying this morning, this is going to be the most boring time ever, relative to the future. >> Right. >> What's happening in the Ecosystem, bring us up to date. >> Well I think as Michael and Pat have talked about this week, pretty proficiently, is the fact that technology transitions are all out in front of us right? It's a new world, the opportunity for both On-prem and Off-prem infrastructure is all out in front of the companies, the family of companies, and we're putting together some of the best offers, the best combinations of technology. The DELLEMC infrastructure, VMware, Infrastructure Management, and a host of ISVs that, whose workloads we combined with all of our infrastructure and platform technology, to drive customer outcomes. >> It, it-- >> Well actually, let me jump in on this real quick if I may. So one of the things about Ecosystems, is that there's a danger in the metaphor of the Ecosystem, because an Ecosystem evolves in response to a number of things. But Ecosystems in the Tech industry require care and feeding. They have to be set up, they have to, contracts have to be written, programs have to be put in place. This is really, really hard work, and it's undervalued by customers too much. So tell us, talk to us a little bit about the work that goes into forming an Ecosystem, sustaining an Ecosystem, and then creating new degrees of freedom, in some of these partnerships, as these new problems emerge, and these new types of complexities, and these interesting problems, get to be solved. >> Well, so I'll start at the start, which is, we've got the vestige of two great partnering companies, Dell classically, and EMC classically. EMC classically partnered much more deeply at a technology level, and Dell partnered at a go-to-market level right? They could monetize in a high-velocity way, these partnerships. When you put the two companies together, you get both the monetization and the technology, the deep technical alignment between the partner, and Dell, but you can start at the very simplest instantiation of a solution. A vSAN Ready Node, or a VxRail, a hyper-converged appliance. Basically we take VMware, goodness, in their storage, software-defined storage offer, and we combine that with a very tightly configured set of offers from our PowerEdge Server lineup, and our VxRail lineup, and we test the configurations, and we test them and tighten them, and test them and tighten them, so that we can give customers a very prescriptive understanding of what their outcome's going to be, when they deploy a hyper-converged offer, running on DELLEMC infrastructure. >> So for what that means, if I can, sorry Dave, what that means is that in your... So the partnership then becomes measured, not just in terms of whether the logos are together, but whether or not it's been engineered together. Whether it's been tested together-- >> Tested together, validated, you bet. >> Whether it's court regimes are put in place, and that's different from how we used to think about partnerships. >> Well, and that's a critical point, and Andy Jassy on stage this week, basically said, "Hey, this is not a Barney deal," Barney being I love you, you love me, let's do a press release. It's got substantive engineering going on, and so that's really what differentiates a core partnership that has teeth, versus one that's just what we call a Barney deal. But I wanted to ask you to go back to the sort of different cultural nuances that you mentioned, Dell, high-volume, high-velocity, EMC, very high-touch, bring those two worlds together. Are there inherent conflicts there, or were you able to, are you in the process of sort of re-engineering how you form those partnerships? >> You know, interestingly enough, in the 2000s, I managed the partnership between Dell and EMC from the Dell side, and we created a lot of good customer outcomes, by combining their storage platforms, our go-to-market prowess but, but it was all learnings that we could transform the business with, when we actually did a hard-core marriage between the two companies. So I would tell you then, it was two companies trying to play nice together. Now, it's one company, and we're playing really effectively together so-- >> Well, I tell ya something there, I talked to Chad about this at a show recently, and asked Michael Dell about it as well. If you look back, that was an epic partnership that you entered, and the outcomes were tremendous, and I argued that in fact, if Michael had had a mulligan, that he would've just bought EMC sooner, and drive the, drove that integration sooner, he essentially said, "Yeah I wish I could've "Bought EMC sooner." But I think that to your point, you had, you know a partnership, and now that you're one company, you can really drive some outcomes that you couldn't through you know, smaller tuck-in acquisitions are you seeing that? >> Absolutely, so what we have today, because of the combination, because of the marriage, is one portfolio. Compute, storage, networking, combined with the goodness from our family of offers, whether it's VMware or Pivotal, you heard a great announcement about Pivotal today, and what they're doing with Kubernetes. So we're going to be able to combine all of those things, the breadth of our portfolio, in a way that we never could before when it was a partnership based on siloed offerings. Now we can really build solutions, and we've got a whole family of products, which we call Ready Solutions, that combine cross business unit portfolios, and our family of products as well. >> So can you talk about the scope of some of the technology partnerships, maybe get specific on, on some of the ones that you're exited about, I mean, I know you're excited about them all but-- >> Sure, sure-- >> In the time we have maybe you could address it-- >> So principally, I would start with VMware. While VMware is a family member of ours, we still manage the relationship much like we would a partnership, where you have to play team ball, and drive your technologies together, and test them, and ruggedize them. But once you get past the infrastructural software of virtualization, customers don't stop at virtualization, they run workloads on that virtual infrastructure, so you look at SAP, and what we're doing with Hanna, and IoT, and Leonardo. You look at what we're doing frankly, with Microsoft, what we're doing with some of the public Cloud providers, in connecting both our infrastructure on premises, with the capabilities of the Public Cloud, in a way that leverages the most appropriate Cloud to run a particular piece of software, and a particular workload in. Those workloads are going to gravitate towards the best usage model for a customer, but we want to have a full compliment of offering so that we can offer the right Cloud for the right customer at the right time, and the right price. >> So I got two quick questions for you, and one draws off of what you just said, and that is the, I really like that notion of technology partnership, and go-to-market partnership, and the expertise at EMC, and the expertise at Dell. Customers want invention, which is the engineering element, the technology partnership. But they also want the innovation side, which is, it's been applied to my business, and I'm adopting it, and it's creating business value for me, and I'm finding, are you finding, that as Dell broadens it's, or DELLEMC broadens this notion that even the technology partnerships are becoming informed by the innovation, or the go-to-market partnerships, so that it's making the technology side that much more successful? >> Absolutely, so we want, every day in the hardware business you have to fight commoditization, you fight that by simply adding value right? It could be business model value, it could be technology value. We add innovation everywhere we can. So those combinations both of our technology, and our partners technology, but in a way that doesn't just combine it, it doesn't make it any easier to buy, it makes it easier to operate. It makes it easier to understand, it makes it easier for a seller to sell it, and a customer to buy it and consume it. So you'll hear Chad talk about an easy button a lot. That is our mission in solutions, is to combine those things in a way that makes it easy for everyone. >> So here's the second question I have. And it's going to be a challenge out to you, because increasingly as companies become more digital businesses, and recognize the role that these technologies play in driving their business models and their go forward, they are struggling with this question of partnership. They are still driving with procurement, driving with taking cost out, et cetera, when in fact, they have to find ways to drive with partnership and strategy, and whatnot. What can DELLEMC do to train this industry about how to do partnership better? >> Well, I think you demonstrate the value that you create for a customer, for a partner, for a seller in these combinations. If you can show that you create real value through your innovation, through your great partnering, then that's value that any one of those constituents can align to. You create value, you let them harvest that value, and they will come back to you again, and again, and again. >> So we have to go Mike, but last question is, how do you see, or do you see your Ecosystem of technology partners sort of reforming, not only to the new DELLEMC, but also to this new Cloud reality, that I'm not going to put everything in the Cloud, I'm going to bring the Cloud model to my data? >> Right, I think VMware's going to play a pivotal role in that right, because they are the-- >> Unintended right? >> They are unintended. They are the kings of workload management today, and what customers really want, from the Public Cloud, or the Private Cloud, is a way to move those virtual machines around in a very seamless way. So at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter where you operate that workload, you're going to operate it in the location that it best serves your mission as a customer. And so I think they're going to play a very instrumental role in how we do that going forward. >> Mike Arterbury, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. But really Peter, to your point, this is hard work, and customers generally undervalue it, but they expect it, and it adds a lot of value, so thanks very much for sharing your perspectives. >> Thank you guys. >> Your welcome, alright keep it right there everybody, we're going wall to wall, this is day two, two sets here at SiliconANGLE, theCUBE, and WikiBond. We'll be back, right after this short break. (alternative music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE. Covering HPE Discover 2017 Brought to you by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. >> Okay welcome back everyone, we're here live in Las Vegas it's theCUBE's exclusive coverage of HPE Discover 2017. HP Enterprises premier show, it's theCube on our third day I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vallante. And our next guest Bob Moore returning back, Director of Server Software Private Security, he's got the hottest product, he's here on the show. We're going to go do a deeper dive. And Jason Shropshire SVP, CTO of InfusionPoints. Welcome back welcome to theCUBE. >> John, thank you Dave. You're the talk of the town here on the show with the simple messaging that is clean and tight. But outside of that, from a product stand point is really some of the security stuff you guys are doing in the Silicon. >> Bob: It is. >> In the server with Gen 10, pretty game changing, we've been curious, we want more information. >> Bob: Yeah. >> John: Give us some more update, what's the update? >> Glad to do that we're really proud of the announcement of course it's a big bold announcement this week. Claiming ourselves the world's most secure industry standard server. So that's big, that's huge, that's based on this new revolutionary security technology that we've been developing frankly over the past couple of years. So it's been two or three years in the making. A lot of hard work, we actually started to look at what type of security trends were happening, and what we might have to do to protect the servers. And we've come up with a game changing capability here. And it's one thing for us to say it internally at HPE, but we are so certain that we are in a great security position that we went external and found a security firm outside, that independently could look at it and do some compare, contrast testing with a competitive unit, so. >> So let's drill into that, actually I had some other questions on the industry in terms of what is going on at the chip level. Always on security is kind of a theme we've heard in the past from some of your competitors, but lets get into some of the competitive analysis. What do you guys see in the benchmarks. Jason, what do you guys discussing , because at the end of the day, claims are one thing. No offense to HP, you're kind of biased of course. We have folks on from the marketing team as well. Where's the proof in the pudding? >> Oh yeah, well one thing that we know for sure is that threat is real, right, with firmware. And it was great for us to analyze HP's new technology. We had on the bench two different beta units. >> John: You guys are the ones who did the benchmark. >> Jason: Yes the analysis. >> Independent. >> Independent yeah, FusionPoints is a cyber security firm independent from HP, they approached us to do the testing. >> John: Okay. >> We have head analysts that do this sort of thing all the time for our customers. >> So take us through what happened. >> Yeah so they procured for us three competitor servers. Sent them to our shop. We set them on a bench, all side by side. From what I can tell, no one's ever really done a test like that, you know, within the server industry. It was very exciting. There's been a lot of benchmarking done and performance, things like that. But from a black hat stand point, to actually look at the hardware, that hardware level testing, we couldn't find any examples of anyone doing it. I thought that alone was just evidence that HP was very serious about security and they knew what they had. So. >> John: You guys getting your answer, because you know the malware, and all the ransomware going on. People are going through elaborate lengths. >> Jason: Absolutely. >> Business model, organized teams, this is a really orchestrated security market now, with the black hat guys out there, really hacking away at every angle. >> Yeah well, you know we saw evidence that firmware issues and exploits are here to stay. The Vault7 release that happened recently showed us that there are exploit kits. Intel security released within a day a tool to let you do firmware validation. But to do that you have to take your server offline and build a gold image of what that firmware should look like. And then compare like a week later if you think you might have had a breech. You have to take your server down and compare it against that gold image. And who has the time to do that? But what we found in analyzing the Gen 10 server is HP has built this in, where this can be done in real time, while the server is running. No performance hit, no down time. It really is a revolutionary game changer I think for firmware security. >> So Bob, can you explain what IP you developed in Silicon that Intel, where do they leave off and you pick up? >> Sure, sure because Intel has some great security technology. And we actually support a lot of Intel technology. Their TXT, their Trusted Execution Technology as part of our Gen 10 servers. But what we've done at HPE is we've really taken it multiple steps further than that and we've developed. Because we're in a position where we develop our own custom HPE iLo-silicon chip, we're able to anchor what we actually do, imbed the cryptographic algorithms into that, and we anchor all the server's essential firmware. Right, think of it as anchoring it down into the bedrock. So there's really no way you can get in and breach that. And even if you did, instead of taking it offline like Jason was talking about here. We have the ability to not only provide that protection, but we would detect any type of malware or virus that gets in. And then frankly, we can recover that, almost immediately within a few minutes. In fact we're demonstrating that here during Discover this week. >> Is there anyplace online where people can get information, people watching, probably curious. >> Bob: Sure >> You can just give them the URL. >> Yeah just naturally it's our HPE.com/security. And that where there we've got some white papers there and other things there. >> So you say you can recover universally instantaneously. >> Bob: Yes. >> And you do that by what, fencing certain resources or... >> Yeah well what we've done, is we verify as the server is running, we're doing a runtime for more validation. So we're checking that firmware, making sure it's free of any malware, viruses, or compromised code. Completely perfect in original shape, like when we ship it from the factory. And we're storing in another location inside the server, a secure copy of that. Think of it as log box, inside the server, where it can't be found unless we need it to go into recovery mode. Then we draw from that, we've checked it daily, we've stored it there, we know it's authentic, and we can pull that back into recover in case something does happen to the server. >> And then asynchronously reclaim that wasted resource, clean it up and bring it back online. >> We can, we can recover the server, the firmware, toward the end of the year, we'll be recovering the operating system as well. Also we've got a really holistic way to get that recovered. When we talk to customers, a real big concern, and sometimes it's called bricking a server, you've got a bricked server, something that just won't operate. And it's important because 60% of small businesses that suffer a security breach, go out of business within six months, so it can be huge that lack of cashflow for customers. It's that denial of service, that disruption of business. Well we prevent all that, because we can not only protect the server, but then recover from a breach. >> So the anatomy of that breach, can we go through a common use case? So malware gets in, it gets into the server, it's hiding, typically you don't know about it. And in this new scenario with your Gen 10. You'll be able to identify that. >> Bob: That's right. >> To protect it, okay. And if I understand, the business impact of the problem you're solving is, not only are you sort of automating that protection, but you're also eliminating, a lot of wasted time, and downtime, and accelerating the response. >> Yeah I think that's what Jason was talking about earlier. Normally, if you're server gets infected, you completely take it off line and then do a manual recovery. And customers still have the choice to do that, but in our case we can recover immediately within a few minutes if something happens and gets a breach. >> Those types of exploits are typically in the data plane as well. With firmware you can't even really detect that you've been hacked. So down in the firmware virus scanners, those things don't work. So if you have a BIOS exploit, that is on either the iLO, that would be on the BMC the baseboard management controller. And undetectable by the operating system. >> That's crazy because it's a clean haven for hackers. I mean they know how to get in there, once you're in there, you're in. >> I don't know if a lot of customers realize this but the first thing when you turn a server on, there first thing that comes on is the firmware. In our case it's the iLO firmware. Over a million lines of the firmware code run before the operating system even starts. So that can be a cess pool for a trojan horse. And the research shows a virus, somewhat analogous to a human virus, it can stay there, hibernate in there for months, maybe even a year or more until it springs forth and opens up the passwords or bricks your servers, or does some nefarious thing. >> A cesspool from the customer standpoint, from a hacker is like going to the beach. Pina Coladas, you're clean you're down there having fun. >> Well what's your stats? The average time to detect an intrusion is over 200 days. >> Bob: That's right yeah. >> So essentially, you're detecting it instantaneously. >> We can, we run that runtime firmware validation on a regular basis, can be run as much as everyday, and so you'll know almost immediately. Which is really great because of a lot of regulatory bodies want to know if a breach has occurred. So this gives customers the ability to know somethings happened to them. >> Jason I want to challenge the claim here, because first of all I love the bravado. Yeah, we're bad ass, we're number one. >> We know that. >> What is the, how did the leaderboard come out? What was the results? Did HP come out number one? >> Oh absolutely. >> What's the lead, what's the gap, talk about the gap between HP and other servers. Did they send you the best servers? What was the benchmark, I'm sure you did your due diligence, take us to more of the results. >> Sure, sure, so yeah again we were comparing all the servers side by side. A test that had never been done from what I'd seen. When we looked at by feature, by feature, and started analyzing things. We sort of broke down and we saw we really had two different angles that we were looking at. The penetration test as aspect. What we were looking for vulnerabilities in the firmware, at the physical layer, at the network layer. They passed that with flying colors. We found a few minor issues that they jumped on and resolved for us in a matter of hours or days. And then the other aspect was a feature by feature comparison that we looked at. We looked at the silicon retruss obviously and we saw what the others were doing there. At best the other guys were using firmware to validate firmware. The obvious issue with that is if the firmware is compromised it's not trustworthy. >> Spoof, yeah, yeah. >> It's in no position to validate and verify. >> It's like Wallstreet policing itself. >> Jason: Yeah, can't trust that, They have a revolutionary intrusion detection switch on the Gen 10, that actually detects. If the lid is lifted on the server, anywhere from when it leaves the factory to the garage of the installation point, server doesn't have to be plugged in like the other guys. >> So if it's just a physical casing breach, >> Jason: Exactly. >> What happens there, flags the firmware, makes a note, does it shut it down? What happens? >> It makes a note, it puts it in the log entry so you can tell if that server has been tampered with in transit. >> So the insider threat potential should go away with that. >> Right, physical access, you don't have to worry about that because we can verify that server gets to the customer in it's unique, original, authentic condition. Because even though the power is off that is going to register and auto log an alert if that chassis has been opened. >> So I can't go to the vault of the Bellagio, like they did in Ocean's Eleven and put my little, and break into the server and you know go in there. >> Bob: Exactly. >> Okay, now back to the results. So the other guys, did they all pass or what. >> Well we did find some issues that we're looking at and doing some further testing on. >> So we're going to be polite and respect the confidentiality you have the ethos of security as you know sharing data is a huge deal, and it's for the integrity of the customer that you have to think about so props for that. For not digging into it, we'll wait for an official report if it does come out. Alright, so I got to ask you a personal question Jason. As someone who is in the front lines. You know every time there's a new kind of way, whether it's Bitcoin and Block chaining, you see a slew of underbelly hacking that goes mainstream that people are victimized. In this case firmware is now exposed, well known. >> Jason: Yeah. >> What as a professional, what gets you excited, and what gets you alarmed if anything about this? What new revelations have you walked away with from this? >> Well it's just how pervasive this issue is. You know the internet of things has exploded the number of IP devices that are out there. Most of them have, firmware issues, almost all of them have firmware issues. And we've just now seen bot nets being created by these devices. Cameras, IP cameras and things like that, that become attack platforms. So I just want, one of the things that impressed me very much about HP's approach here is that they're being a good corporate citizen by making a platform that's going to be implemented in tens of thousands IP addresses. Those systems I think will be much more secure. Again it can't become an attack platform for other people, for attackers to abuse. >> So the surface area, so your point about IOT. We always talk about the surface area of attack vectors. And that vector can then be minimized at the server level, because that's like the first mile in. >> Right we come and really refer to that as the attack vector or the attack surface. And so we narrow that attack surface way down. >> Can you even subjectively giVe us a sense as to how much of the problem this approach addresses? I mean is it 1%, 10%, 50% of the attacks that are out there? >> I think the important thing here is moving, shifting the bar. I've likened this, what HP is doing here to what Bill Gates did 15 years ago with the Microsoft memo. I mean that really revolutionized operating systems security within Microsoft and I think it had a ripple effect out into the industry as well. So I think HP is really pushing the bar in the same way but for firmware, instead of the operating system level that was the paradigm 15 years ago. >> And I think you'll find on our website we put some of the studies actually, and it's over half, I think it's 52% of the firms that responded have had a breach or malware virus in their firmware. So over half of those, and 17% had a catastrophic issue with that, it really is more pervasive. We've seen a lot of news about the data plane level, where thefts are taking place at the application level of the operati6ng system. And we've got to pay attention to the firmware layer now because that's like I said, a million lines of code in there running. And it could be an area where a trojan horse can sit, and we essentailly narrow that attack surface. We're also delivering with the Gen 10, the highest, the strongest set of security ciphers available in the world today. And that's a commercial national security algorithms. We're the only ones to support in our server, so we're proud of that. >> Well Bob and Jason thanks so much for sharing the insite. It's super exciting and relevant area, in the sense that it's super important for businesses and we're going to keep tracking this because the Wikibond team just put out new research around true private cloud, showing the on prim, cloudlike environments will be 260 billion dollar market. That's new research, that's groundbreaking, but points to the fact that the on pram server situation is going to be growing actually. >> Jason: For sure. >> So this is, and with cloud there's no perimeter so here you go, firmwares, potential exposure you solved that problem with good innovation. Thanks so much for sharing. >> Thanks you guys. >> Thank you. >> The inside Jason and Bob here on theCUBE talking about security servers, attack vectors, no perimeter, it's a bad world out there. Make sure you keep it protected of course. This is CUBE bringing you all the action here at HPE Discover. We'll be right back with more live coverage after this short break. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellan6te. Be right back after this short break, stay with us.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the CUBE covering HPE Discover 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. >> Hello, everyone, and welcome to the CUBE's special presentation of HPE Hewlett Packard Enterprise Discover 2017. I'm John Furrier and my cohost Dave Vellante. For three days of wall to wall coverage. This is our intro section of our three days of Hewlett Packard Enterprises transformation and coverage. This is our seventh year covering HPE Discover, formerly HP Discover after the split. Lot of commentary today. We have seen HP over the years transform. We've been watching this, sort of a front row seat to HP, now HPE, really getting hammered in stock market their last earnings again didn't meet expectations, but this is not a quick turn around. I mean, this is a market place that's shifting. HP's had their plan now for multiple years. We're going to cover it for three days. But interesting. The world is turning. You had tweeted this morning on a Twitter storm you put together @dvellante, twitter.com. So it's Dvellante. Everyone should check it out. But it really highlights it. True private cloud, or private cloud, cloud has impacted everything. HP's kind of shifted their cloud strategy. It's becoming clear what they're doing, but private cloud, true private cloud, is legit. It's a 250 plus billion dollar market opportunity, as you guys have put it out on wikibond. Hybrid cloud is very relevant, and on the horizon is multi-cloud, the ability for customers to use multiple clouds. And on top of that we have machine learning, AI, and a myriad of things. Marketplace is shifting significantly, HP has been transforming significantly over the past five plus years. Your thoughts this year at HPE Discover and marketplace conditions and are they poised for success? >> Well, John, we're in the fifth year now of the turnaround that Meg Whitman initiated, and I think it's the light at the end of the tunnel year. HPE-- We've said many times at theCUBE that HP has the strength to grow. Well, it's certainly shrunk. They're about a 50 billion dollar company with a 26 billion dollar market cap, and there's a way to eek out some growth. If you separate all-- Call it Remain Co. Like the remaining company. Take out the software, take out EDS, take out actually tier one, tier one customer who's-- who's not buying as many servers as possible, or as they had previously, and the company grew about one percent. So what you're seeing, John, is some quarters HP grows a little bit, some companies it shrinks a little bit, but essentially it's facing what most legacy hardware companies are facing. Legacy hardware's down, everybody's scrambling to what we call true private cloud, which is essentially hybrid IT, trying to mimic the public cloud. And then HP adds in a dose of IOT at the edge, and then, really importantly, services. Services have never been more important for this company, and that is what I called earlier Remain Co. The remaining HP. Once it jettisons the software business this fall, that's what will be left, basically a 50 billion dollar company with about 55,000 employees. >> I was looking at a-- some IOT stories just last night, and a Business Insider article came up. It was an image, and it had listed the companies that-- by average age. And you had, obviously, Facebook, average age like 28. HP was at the highest end, like 39. And I want to bring up this notion of changing market because HP has always been customer focused, so the question is, if they are truly customer focused, as is Amazon, for instance, we talked to Andy Chasey, he talks about that all the time. And the context of where you've been and where you're going, historical legacy, declining markets, say servers for instance. And where you're going. It brings up an interesting point. And notable is recently Amazon web services hired Gosling, the founder of Java, which had a big conversation on the internet around age. A lot of the winners are older systems guys. So what's interesting is I actually look at that Business Insider article and saying actually age is a wisdom point now, because right now HP's got to solve customer problems. In addition to transforming themselves, they're looking at a customer base that's changing their requirements, so having experience is actually a good thing, as pointed out by some of the big leaders right now in hyperscale are old m systems guys. This is an opportunity for HP, and I think that's where I want to get your thoughts on. Are they customer focused in your mind, and if they are going to be, continue to be, what should their customer focus be? >> Let's talk about what customers are doing. So, first and foremost, customers are deinvesting in non-differentiated, you know, hardware maintenance and provisioning, okay. So they're shifting IT labor from provisioning luns and servers into digital transformation initiatives, so that's sort of one piece. The other pieces there as they're shifting those resources in places up the value stack. So it's applications; it's, as you say, digital transformation services; it's new IOT activity. So they're only investing-- from the HP standpoint, HP's an infrastructure company. They're only investing in infrastructure that looks like public cloud and can focus on hybrid. So are they customer focused? Yes. And what are they doing there? So they're investing in MMA, they're doing some MMA tuck ins. They're focused on develop-- delivering platforms with an API that are essentially programmable infrastructure. And very importantly, they're in a low margin business now. It's sort of low 30 percent gross margin business. So they have to get volume. How do they get volume? How do they reach those customers? Partners. So you are seeing a new partner emphasis. You know, are they customer focused? Yes, but they're really right now partner focused to reach those customers and increase their scale and coverage. That is a critical difference between the new HP, not that they always didn't have partners, now partners are critical to their success. >> One of the things that's the theme here is simplifying hybrid IT and I think from a customer standpoint, simplifying that is going to be critical. At the same time, creating new services opportunities. So I want to get your thoughts on the top story, at least from my perspective, here at the show at HPE Discover, and that is, is it better to be big or small? And HP has a strategy of a collection of small, nimble, agile business units. Dell EMC, for instance, has a strategy of being big and using leverage and supply chain and what not. Two different strategies. We pointed that out on the web. Certainly we've heard a lot of different approaches. Your thoughts on HP's strategy vis a vis bigger and better, or smaller and nimbler is better. >> Well, HP's not small. Hewlett Packard Enterprises is still big. I mean, it's a, it's a company that's twice the size, or more, than EMC was at its peak. So it's still a very, very large company. The difference is, John, I think they're focused. So they really are focused on hardware and infrastructure, the support, you know, the digital transformation, whatever you want to call it. The big question I have, John, is now that HP is getting rid of its software business, its outsourcing and EDS business, what is HP going to do with regard to software and services. So, they reinvented the whole services organization. The big question mark for me is software. Will they get into this, what you call inter-clouding business? Software to manage multiple clouds. It's a wide open space, everybody's going after it, and I haven't heard much from HP there. So what is their software strategy? Now, the other thing I'll add, is the good thing about being smaller is that it's going to generate cash for them. So they're going to get, going to get cash out of the spin merge with CSC. They're going to get cash out of the spin merge with MicroFocus. And you've already seen HP become more aquisitive with the Simplivity acquisition, certainly with Nimble recently, previously the Aruba acquisition, and some other tuck ins. That's critical in order for HP to reposition and continue to grow. >> Yeah, and my take on HP right now is they got to be more assertive. Their voice in the marketplace, at an industry level, has to be very assertive and relevant. I think that's something you've got to put the stake in the ground and hammer that home. I think we got the piece parts, and I think the spin merge is not a "they're getting out of that business." They're just decoupling from the monolithic entity that was HPE and creating kind of cohesive entities. And I think there's a strategy, in my opinion, that looks really strong there in the sense that, hey, at the end of the day, it's going to be a services game. And if you look at the IOT Edge, to me that's the tell sign of the marketplace. As the value shifts from IT-- So, simplifying IT, having true private cloud, having some hybrid pathways for IT, maybe a declining market from a service perspective, but simplifying that and operationalizing that and shifting the value to the Edge with services is a huge opportunity for HP. This is something that not a lot of people on Wall Street are kind of rocking at this point. But the value shift from IT, centralized IT, to a distributed kind of network effect is a really interesting play. And I think this a bet I think HP's making from my standpoint, and that's where the intelligent Edge piece comes in. If they could nail that, and layer on the services, and bring real value paths for customers with outcomes that are, not pie in the sky-- Sure, they throw some AI in there, machine learning, it's all relevant. Getting into open source. Taking that labs machine and memster technology and bringing that out at an appropriate timing. With the services in place. I think that's a good strategy for HP. >> Well, you mentioned Wall Street. Look, Wall Street is very tactically focused on the quarter and the margin decline, and, you know, D-Ram prices doubled in January, okay? So a company like HPE is going to get hurt by that. So that's head winds for these guys, these currency head winds. The stock, the price will go up and down. But the point I want to make, John, is there's a new competitive reality. CIOs have woken up to open source and cloud. And as a result, we've emerged into a new competitive dynamic where HPE is competing with Dell. It's competing with China, and it's competing with AWS. And it's one different-- Two differentiable advantages or services, you know, clearly HP's doubling down on services. I'll actually add a third. The second is partnerships, and the third big one, which is green field, is an ecosystem around IOT and what they call the intelligent edge. >> Well, Dave, great commentary. My, again, my feeling is customer focus at an industry level, having the right product mix that's relevant in the, for the solutions customers want. And also their partners. Leveraging that partner network. Really going to be a two pivot points for me. I see that as great leverage for HP. At the end of the day, everyone talking about declining market of servers and storage. I actually don't see that. There's more computers available now, more storage available. The key is can that shift to true private cloud, which again is a 250 billion dollar market, partly declining. And hybrid cloud is certainly growing. So, declining and growing, I mean they're all different perspectives, and I think HP's messaging here-- Come the end of the show, we're going to look at that and understand and impact and unpack that, that analysis. So, I'm Jeff Furrier, Dave Vellante. Day one of coverage, of three days of wall to wall coverage at HPE Discover 2017. More live coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering HPE Discover 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We're here live in Las Vegas for HPE, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Discover 2017. I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE with Dave Vellante, and our next guest is Bill Philbin, who's the general manager of storage and big data for Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. Bill, welcome to theCUBE. Again, good to see you. I think you've been on since 2012, '13, '15. >> Is that right? What, are we carbon dating ourselves now or something? >> We've been tracking our CUBE alumni, but you're heading up the storage business-- >> Do I get a pen? >> We're working on that, Jerry Chen-- >> Seven of them >> Jerry Chen at Greylock wants to have, now, badge values. So, welcome back. >> Thank you, thank you for having me. >> You were just on theCUBE at VeeamON, which is an event Dave was hosting, I missed it in New Orleans. But a lot of stuff going on around stores, certainly. Virtualization has been around for a while, but now with Cloud; whole new ballgame. Programmable infrastructure, hybrid IT, Wikibond's true private Cloud report came out showing that private Cloud on Prim is $250 billion market. So nothing's really changing radically in the enterprise, per se, certainly maybe servers and storage, but people got to store their data. >> Bill: That's right What's the update from your perspective, what's the story here at HPE Discover? >> So I think there's really three things we're talking about amongst a number of announcements. One is sort of the extension of our All Flash environment for customers, who, as I was saying at Veeam, have the always-on. New world order is we expect everything to be available at a moment's notice, so I was in the middle of the Indian Ocean, using Google Voice over satellite IP on the boat, talking to San Jose, and it worked. That's always-on environment, and the best way to get that is, you know, with an All Flash [unknown], so that's number one. Number two, going back to the story about programmable infrastructures, storage also needs to be programmable, and so, if you've had Rick Lewis or Rick Lewis is coming he'll talk about composable infrastructures with Synergy, but the flip side of that is our belief that storage really needs to be invisible. And the acquisition of Nimble gets us a lot closer to sort of doing that in the same way that you have a safe self-driving car is all the rage. All that rich telemetry comes back, it's analyzed, fingerprinted, and sent out to customers to a point where it's, I call it the Rule of 85. 85% of the customers, the cases are raised by InfoSight and closed by InfoSight, and they have an 85 net promoter score. We're getting to a point where storage can be invisible, cause that's the experience you get on Amazon or as you swipe your credit card, say I want ten terabytes of storage, and that's the last time you have to think about it. We need to have the economics of the web, we need to have the programmability of the web, that's number two, and number three of what we talked about, and this is a big issue, a big thing we talked about with VeeamON, was data protection. The rules of data protection are also changing. Conventional backup does not protect data. I was with a customer a couple weeks ago in London. 120 petabytes; this is a financial services customer now. 120 petabytes of storage: not unusual. 40 of it was Hadoop, and they were surprised because it's unprotected, it's on servers, it's sort of the age of the client-server, and the age of Excel spreadsheets all over again. We realized that most businesses were running on Excel, so All Flash, a different way of supporting our customer support experience, and number three, it's all around how do you protect your data differently. >> What's the big trend from your standpoint, because a lot of that self-driving storage concept, or self-driving car analogy, it speaks to simplicity and automation. >> That's right >> The other thing that's going on is data is becoming more irrelevant, certainly in the Cloud. Whether that's a data protection impact or having data availability for Cloud-native apps, or in memory, or all kinds of cool stuff going on. So you got to lot of stuff happening, so to be invisible, and be programmable, customer's architectures are changing. What's the big trend that you're seeing from a customer standpoint? Are there new ways to lay out storage so that they can be invisible? Certainly a lot of people were looking at their simplification in IT operationally, and then have to prepare for the Cloud, whether that's Multicloud or hybrid or true private Cloud. What architects are you seeing changing, what are people doubling down on, what's the big trends in storage, kind of laying out storage as a strategy? >> So I think the thing about storage in the large, one of the trends obviously that we're seeing is sort of storage co-located with the server. When I started at HP now seven years ago, gen six to gen ten, which we've announced here at this show, the amount of locally attached storage in the box itself is massive. And then the applications are now becoming more and more responsible for data placement, and data replication. And so, even while capacities are growing, I think six or seven percent is what I saw from the latest IDC survey, the actual storage landscape, from a shared storage company, they're actually going down. And the reason is, application provisioning, application-aware storage is really the trend, that's sort of number one. Number two, you see customers looking at deploying the right storage for the right applications. hyperconverge with SimpliVity's a really good example of that, which is they're trying to find the right sort of storage to sort of serve up the right application. And that's where, if you're a single-PoINT provider company now in storage, and you don't have a software-only, a hyperconverge, an All Flash in a couple different flavors, including XP at the top, you're going to find it very, very difficult to sort of continue to compete in this market, and frankly, we're driving a lot of that consolidation, we put some bookends around what we're prepared to pay for. But if you're a PoINT providing storage company now? Life is a lot harder for you than it was a couple years ago. When we started with All Flash, I think it was like 94 All Flash companies. There are not 94 All Flash companies today. And so, I think that's sort of what we see. >> Well, to your point about PoINT companies are going to have a hard time remaining independent, and that's why a lot of 'em are in business to basically sell to a company like yours, cause they fill a need. So my question relates to R&D strategy. As the GM, relatively new GM, you know well that a large company like HPE has to participate in multiple markets, and in order to expand your team, you have to have the right product at the right time. One size does not fit all. So the Nimble acquisition brings in a capability at the lower end of the market, lower price spans, but it also has some unique attributes with regard to the way it uses data and analytics. You've got 3PAR Legendary at the high end. What's the strategy in terms of, and is there one, to bring the best of both of those worlds together, or is it sort of let 20 flowers bloom? >> So, I don't know if it's going to be 'let 20 flowers bloom', but I would probably answer a couple different ways. One is that InfoSight, you're right, is unique value proposition, is part of Nimble. I would bet if I come see you in Madrid, if you have me back for the, whatever, 13th time, [Laughing] that we'll be talking about how InfoSight and 3PAR can come together. So that's sort of the answer to number one. The answer to number two is, even though within the Nimble acquisition, one party acquired the other party, what we're really looking at is the best breed of both organizations. Whether that's a process, a person, a technology, we don't feel wedded to, "Just because we do it a certain way at HP, that means the Nimble team must conform." It's really, "Bring us the best and brightest." That's what we got. At the end of the day, we got a company, we got revenue, but we got the people, and in this storage business, these are serial entrepreneurs who have actually developed a product, we want to keep those people, and the way you do that is you bring 'em in and you use the best and greatest of all the technologies. There's probably other optimizations we'll look at, but looking at InfoSight across the entire portfolio, and one day maybe across the server portfolio, is the right thing to do. >> And just to follow up on that, Tom, if I may, so that's a hard core of sort of embedded technology, and then you've got a capability, we talk about the API economy all the time. How are you, and are you able to leverage other HPE activities to create infrastructure as code, specifically within the storage group? >> So if you look at us, at our converged systems appliances like our SAP HANA appliance, databases greater than six terabytes, we have 85% market share at Hewlett-Packard. And the way we do that, and that's all on 3PAR by the way, and the way we do that is we've got a fixed system that is designed solely to deliver HANA. On the flip of that, you have Synergy, which is a composable programmable infrastructure from the start, where it's all template-based and based on application provisioning. You provision storage, you provision the fabric, you provision compute. That programmable infrastructure also is supported by HP storage. And so, you have-- You can roll it the way you want to, and to some degree I think it's all about choice. If you want to go along, and build your own programmable infrastructure and OpenStack or VCloud Director, whatever it is, we have one of those. If you think simplicity is key, and app and server integration is important part of how you want to roll it out, we have one of those, that's called SimpliVity. If you want a traditional shared storage environment, we have one of those in 3PAR and Nimble, and if you want composable we have that. Now, choice means more than one, I don't know what it means in Latin or Italian, but I'm pretty sure choice means more than one. What we don't want to do is introduce, however, the complexity of what owning more than one is. And that's where things like Synergy make sense, or federation between SerVirtual and 3PAR, and soon we'll have federation between Nimble and 3PAR. So to help customers with that operational complexity problem, but we actually believe that choice is the most important thing we can provide our customers. >> I've always been a big fan of that compose thing, going back a couple years when you guys came and brought it out to the market. We're first, by the way, props to HP, also first on converged infrastructure way back in the day. I got to ask you, one of the things I love doing with theCUBE interviews is that we get to kind of get inspiration around some of the things that you're working on in your business unit. Back in 2010, Dave and I really kind of saw storage move from being boring storage, provisioning storage, to really the center of the action, and really since 2010 you've seen storage really at the center of all these converging trends. Virtualization, and hyperconverges, all this great stuff, now Cloud, so storage is kind of like the center point of all the action, so I got to ask you the question on virtualization, certainly changed the game with storage. Containerization is also changing the game, so I was telling some HP Labs guys last night that I've been looking at provisioning containers in microseconds. Where virtualization is extending and continuing to have a nice run, on the heels of that we got containerization, where apps are going to start working with storage. What's your vision and how do you guys look at that trend? How are you riding that next wave? >> It all comes down to an application-driven approach. As we were saying a little earlier, our view is that storage will be silent. You're going to provision an application. That's really the-- see, look at the difference between us and, let's say, Nutanix with SimpliVity. It's all about the application being provisioned into the hyperconverged environment. And if you look at the virtualization business alone, VMware's going to have a tough go because Hyper-V has actually gotten good enough, and it's cheaper, but people are really giving Hyper-V a much better look at than we've seen over the course of the last couple years. But guess what? That tool will commoditize, and the next commoditization point is going to be containers. Our vantage point, and if you look at 3PAR, you look at Nimble, we're already got it, we've already supported containers within the product, we've actually invested companies that are container-rich. I think it's all about, "What's the next--" >> And we at Dacron last year said, "We know you're parting with all the guys." But this is a big wave. You see containers as-- >> I see containers as sort of the place that virtualization sort of didn't ever get to. If you look at-- >> John: Well, the apps. >> On the apps absolutely, positively. And also it's a much simpler way to deploy an application over a conventional VM. I think containers will be important. Is it going to be important as the technology inflection point around All Flash? >> John: Flash is certainly very-- >> That I don't know, but I think as far as limiting costs in your datacenter, making it easier to deploy your applications, et cetera, I think containers is the one. >> What's the big news here, at HPE Discover 2017, for you guys? What's the story that you're telling, what's going on in the booth? Share some insight into what's happening here on the ground in Las Vegas from your standpoint. >> So I would say a couple of things. I think if you look out on the show floor, it seems more intimate and smaller this year. And there's a lot of concern, I think, that HP is chopping itself off into various pieces and parts, but I think the story that maybe we're not telling well enough, or that it gets missed, is out of that is actually a brand new company called Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, which is uniquely focused on serving enterprise infrastructure customers. And so I think, if I was going to encourage a news story, it's about the phoenix of that, and not the fact that we've taken the yes guys, and the software guys, and the PC guys. It's that company, maybe in Madrid we'll do this, and that company, that's really, really, really exciting. And as you said, storage; sort of in a Ptolemy versus Galileo approach. We believe everything, first of all, revolves around storage. We don't believe in Galileo. So if you look in here at the booth, we've announced the next generation of MSA platforms of 2052, we've got the 9450 3PAR -- three times as fast, more connectivity for All Flash solutions. We've talked about the secondary Flash array for Nimble, most effective place to protect your data is on an array, is on a type where the data came from, and that is the secondary Flash market. We're big into Cloud, we've talked about CloudBank here, which is the ability to keep a copy of your store-once data in any S3-compliant interface, including Scality. I don't know if I'm forgetting, I'm sure I'm forgetting something. >> John: There's a lot there. >> There's a lot there. >> I mean, you guys, I love your angle on the phoenix. We've been seeing that, we've been covering seven years now, and it is a phoenix. And the point that I think the news media is not getting on HP, there's a lot of fud out there, is that this is not a divested strategy. There's some things that went away that were the outsourcing business, but that was just natural. But this is HP-owned, it's not like it's like we're getting out of that, it's just how you're organizing it. >> And with a balance sheet that now is really a competitive weapon, if you will, you're going to see HP both grow organically and inorganically, and I think as the market continues to consolidate, the thing to remember also is there's fewer places to consolidate to. And so if you're a start-up, there's a handful of companies that you can go to now, and probably the best-equipped, right-sized, great balance sheet, great company, is Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. >> Well we had hoped to get Chris Hsu on, but I've always said the day we talk about the debates on management style, but I've always been a big believer as a computer science undergraduate, decouple highly cohesive strategy is a really viable one, I think that's a great one. >> Yeah, and there's still a good partnership with DXC, there'll be a great partnership with Micro Focus, and there's both financially as well as from a business perspective. But it's really an opportunity to focus, and if I was at another company, I would wonder whether or not if their strategy continues to be appropriate. >> Bill Philbin, senior Vice President and general manager of storage and big data at Hewlett-Packard Enterprises, theCUBE more live coverage after the short break. From Las Vegas, HPE Discover 2017, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante with theCUBE, we'll be right back after this short break.

>> Narrator: Live from the Wigwam in Phoenix Arizona, it's theCUBE, covering data platforms 2017, brought to you by Qubole. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. I'm joined by George Gilbert from Wikibond and we're at DataPlatforms 2017. Small conference down at the historic Wigwam Resort, just outside of Phoenix, talking about, kind of a new approach to big data really. A Cloud native approach to big data and really kind of flipping the old model on it's head. We're really excited to be joined by Tripp Smith, he's the CTO of Clarity Insights, up on a panel earlier today. So first off, welcome Tripp. >> Thank you. >> For the folks that aren't familiar with Clarity Insights Give us a little background. >> So Clarity is a pure play data analytics professional services company. That's all we do. We say we advise, build and enable for our client. So what that means, is data strategy, data engineering and data science and making sure that we can action the insights that our customers get out of their data analytics platforms. >> Jeff: So not a real busy area these days. >> It's growing pretty well. >> Good for you. So a lot of interesting stuff came up on the panel. But one of the things that you reacted to, I reacted to as well from the keynote. Was this concept of, you know before you had kind of the data scientist with the data platform behind them, being service providers to the basic business units. Really turning that model on it's head. Giving access to the data to all the business units, and people that want to consume that. Making the data team really enablers of kind of a platform play. Seemed to really resonate with you as well. >> Yeah absolutely, so if you think about it, a lot of the focus on legacy platforms was driven by, scarcity around the resources to deal with data. So you created this almost pyramid structure with IT and architecture at the top. They were the gatekeepers and kind of the single door where Insights got out to the business. >> Jeff: Right. >> So in the big data world and with Cloud, with elastic scale, we've been able to turn that around and actually create much more collaborative friction in parallel with the business. Putting the data engineers, data scientists and business focus analystist together and making them more of partners, than just customers of IT. >> Jeff: Right, very interesting way, to think of it as a partner. It's a very different mindset. The other piece that came up over and over in the Q&A at the end. Was how do people get started? How are they successful? So you deal with a lot of customers, right? That's your business. What are some stories, or one that you can share of best practices, when people come and they say, we obviously hired you, we wrote a check. But how do we get started, where do we go first? How do you help people out? >> We focus on self funding analytic programs. Getting those early wins, tend to pay for more investment in analytics. So if you look at the ability to scale out as a starting point. Then aligning that business value and the roadmap in a way that going to both demonstrate the value along the way, and contribute to that capability is important. I think we also recommend to our clients that they solve the hard problems around security and data governance and compliance first. Because that allows them to deal with more valuable data and put that to work for their business. >> So is there any kind of low hanging fruit that you see time and time and time again? That just is like, ah we can do this. We know it's got huge ROI. It's either neglected cause they don't think it's valuable or it's neglected because it's in the backroom. Or is there any easy steps that you find some patterns? >> Yeah, absolutely. So we go to market by industry vertical. So within each vertical, we've defined the value maps and ROI levers within that business. Then align a lot of our analytic solutions to those ROI levers. In doing that, we focus this on being able to build a small, multifunctional team that can work directly with the business. Then deliver that in real time in an interactive way. >> Right, another thing you just talked about security and government, are we past the security concerns about public Cloud? Does that even come up as an issue anymore? >> You know, I think there was a great comment today that if you had money, you wouldn't put it in your safe at home. You'd put it in a bank. >> Jeff: I missed that one, that's a good one. >> The Cloud providers are really focused on security in a way that they can invest in it. That an individual enterprise really can't. So in a lot of cases, moving to the Cloud means, letting the experts take on the area that they're really good at and letting you focus on your business. >> Jeff: Right, interesting they had, Amazon is here, Google's here, Oracle's here and Azure is here. AWS reinvent one of my favorite things, is Tuesday night with James Hamilton. Which I don't know if you've ever been, it's a can't miss presentation. But he talks about the infrastructure investments that Amazon, AWS can make. Which again, compared to any individual enterprise are tremendous in not only security, but networking and all these other things that they do. So it really seems that the scale that these huge Cloud providers have now reach, gives them such an advantage over any individual enterprise, whether it's for security, or networking or anything else. So it's very different kind of a model. >> Yeah, absolutely, or even the application platform, like Google now having Spanner. Which has the scale advantage of Cassandra or H Based. The transactional capabilities of a traditional RDB mess. I guess my question is. Once a customer is considering Qubole, as a Cloud first data platform. How do you help the customer evaluate it? Relative to the dist rose that started out on Prim, and then the other Cloud native ones that are from Azure and Google and Amazon. >> You know I think that's a great question. It kind of focuses back on, letting the experts do what they're really good at. My business may not be differentiated by my ability to operate and support Hadoop. But it's really putting Hadoop to work in order to solve this business problems that makes me money. So when I look at something like Qubole, it's actually going to that expert and saying, "Hey own this for me and deliver this in a reliable way." Rather than me having to solve those problems over and over again myself. >> Do you think that those problems are not solved to the same degree by the Cloud native services? >> So I think there's definitely an ability to leverage Cloud data services. But there's also this aspect of administration and management, and understanding how those integrate within an ecosystem. That I don't think necessarily every company is going to be able to approach in the same way, that a company like Qubole can. So again, being able to shift that off and having that kind of support gives you the ability to focus back on what really makes a difference for you. >> So Tripp we're running out of time. We got a really tight schedule here. I'm just curious, it's a busy conference season. Big data's all over the place. How did you end up here? What is it about this conference and this technology that got you to come down to the, I think it's only a 106 today, weather to take it in. What do you see that's a special opportunity here? >> Yeah you know, this is Data Platforms 2017. It's been a really great conference, just in the focus on being able to look at Cloud and look at this differentiation. Outside of the realm of inventing new shiny objects and really putting it to work for new business cases and that sort of thing. >> Jeff: Well Tripp Smith, thanks for stopping by theCUBE. >> Excellent, Thank you guys for having me. >> All right, he's George Gilbert, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching Data Platforms 2017 from the historic Wigwam Resort in Phoenix Arizona. Thanks for watching. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube covering Dell EMC World 2017 brought to you by Dell EMC. >> And welcome back here to Las Vegas, we're in the Venetian, the Cube is at Dell EMC World 2017. Good afternoon or good evening if you're watching out on the East Cost or perhaps overseas. Good to have you with us as we continue our coverage here on the Cube. I am John Walls along with Keith Townsend who's the principal at CTO advisors. And we're joined by Boaz Palgi who is the vice president and GM and one of the founders of ScaleIO. Boaz, thanks for being with us here on the Cube. Good to see you. >> Yeah my pleasure. >> John: First time I think, is that correct? >> No no no it's my fourth time. >> John: Oh fourth time, first time with me, my apologies. >> It's my first time with you, yes. >> My apologies, tell me about the history a little bit. I think it really says something about the growth, the explosion and what you've seen. 14 employees back in 2013, Dell makes the purchase. Today you have 220 plus working. So obviously you've had a lot of great growth, a lot of expansion, but a lot of success. >> Yes, yes we've experienced a lot of growth not just in the number of people, but also in customers. Not just in number of customers but also in the capacity in production with customers. So today we see we have well over 300 large enterprise customers like financial institutions, telecoms, all kinds of other enterprises. Also on top of that some mid-size and even smaller customers. And what we see is that the capacity sizes of our customers have been growing over those four years as well. So if four years ago we had maybe a part of the storage estate in some of our customers, today we have quite a few large enterprises that have completely standardized their entire block storage estate on their ScaleIO. Maybe one example of that was today in the keynote opening of this event, Dan Maslowski of CitiGroup presented how they have been using ScaleIO. They're running ScaleIO on tens of petabytes today and still growing very, very fast and with a lot more capacity to be added over the next few months and years. >> So what's going on there? Why are customers with CitiGroup want, who've already made the move, but are making the move over to SDS. What's generating that kind of activity and what kind of gains do you think they're realizing from that? >> I think there are two ways to look at this. One way to look at it is that actually storage arrays were invented 25 or 30 years ago in order to work around the problem of lack of resources for CPU, for processing, for memory in the application servers. So 25, 30 years ago an application server had barely enough resources to run a single application. So if people wanted to add another application to manage the storage, etc., they had to take another server, fill it with disks and that became the storage server which is the storage array of today. But nowadays application servers obviously have ample resources in terms of CPU memory, network, bandwidth. You can put any media whether it's flash or magnetic in your servers. So you still have enough resources. That's exactly where ScaleIO comes into play. We take those little part of those resources to actually provide enterprise class, storage capabilities in a software form factor alongside the applications or the hypervisors or the databases on those same servers. So this is maybe the technology enabling the shift in the paradigm that has been happening. On the other hand when you look at what is possible today products like ScaleIO make operations of the data centers significantly easier. So if in the past you needed to have dedicated storage products that were actually islands by themselves you couldn't really inter operate between various storage products or various vendors. You needed dedicated storage teams that were specialized on that storage every few years. Storage estate would come up for refresh or their competitors would start bidding. You would start getting very expensive and intrusive data migration projects from the old storage to the new storage. All of that is something of the past when you work with soft storage like ScaleIO. >> So Boaz, let's talk about that for a little bit. WikiBond did research and determined that they called this market originally service, some people may call it hyperconversion infrastructure. But overtake traditional storage arrays in sales in the next couple of years. You talked about ease of use, let's talk about the deployment. How is ScaleIO consumed? >> We see several form factors of ScaleIO today. The most obvious one is software. Some of our customers buy ScaleIO software. They have the servers of their choice which might be Dell servers or HP, or IBM or any other server vendor out there. They build their own estate just like they used to buy servers to run their databases for Oracle or to run their operating system, the hypervisors, etc. Now they also run the storage as another application really on their servers. That's one form factor. Actually people some of our customers today downloaded software from ScaleIO from the internet, started to use it, started to grow it and then came to Dell EMC to buy the license and to grow it and to put it into production for real. >> That's a kind of strange statement you said. This is a platform that holds petabytes of storage. You're telling me customers just download it and installed it? I missed the whole sales process before the download part. That's very unusual for an EMC. >> It's unusual for EMC and especially for all of NS really in the storage space. But this is, this is a new world. So ScaleIO software is freely downloadable for testing purposes. Customers find it, download it, and we have not a small number of customers that actually came to us that way. Hey, we already use ScaleIO, we tested it. We took some servers that were lying around, we built a cluster, it works. It gives tremendous performance, it's easy to operate. We want to roll it our in production. And we're saying we need to buy the license for that. This is one form factor. The second form factor that we see are appliances. ScaleIO obviously supports the 14G servers of Dell. We are agnostic really to the underlying hardware. But this is with one of the Dell server approaches that we are supporting is to provide appliances based on 14G servers running ScaleIO together with hybervisors or like ESX or hyper VOKVM and a management software around it that we call AMS that allows customers to manage their entire stack of the server and the ScaleIO software and the hypervisor software and the firmware, etc. with single-clicks configuration, single-click upgrades, and pretty soon also a single-click deployment of machines and storage together. This is the second form factor appliances with whole management package for the entire stack really wrapped around it. The third form factor that we see are the VX Ragflex approaches. Where VCE or CSPD these days are selling entire racks including networking, compute, and ScaleIO storage. Customers can buy these racks, plug them in, and start running their applications and their environment out of the box. >> It's all about simplicity, right? I mean talking about one-click, you're talking about the accommodation of force, the new structure. So it's all about making it a lot easier at the end of the day. >> Keith: It's solving a great problem. >> Huge problem. I would say it's simplicity of management but also simplicity of operations. In the past traditional storage estates forced people to deal with storage items. Forklift upgrades from old systems to newer systems. When you have an array that's full you now need to somehow migrate data to another array. There are a lot of operational challenges with the traditional approaches that completely disappear just like that when you deploy a software like ScaleIO which completely scales across all these clusters, across all these environments, across bare metal operating systems as well as across multiple types of hypervisors. You really get one big pool if you may, of storage that well big and big pool also provides among the best performance in the industry as well. And this is because our architecture that is completely paralyzed and it makes it possible to not only aggregate capacity, but also aggregate performance across a large number of devices and nodes. >> So curious geek question. When EMC originally bought ScaleIO, Chas Thacket did what I think he called a face melting demo of using ScaleIO in AWS. Crazy stuff I don't even know, it was like a million iops or something coming out of AWS. Shows the portability of the application. Future of ScaleIO, you see a use case for ScaleIO in the cloud? >> Well, ScaleIO in many cases enables the cloud. So we see one of our main use cases is infrastructure of the servers. This is really private clouds in the enterprise or managed hosting or public clouds in telcoms or managed service provider environments. This actually represents a very significant part of our deployments. Another part of our deployments are the traditional enterprise applications like Oracle and SQL and hypervisors of the world. Then we also see deployments of the newer type of applications like (foreign words), Cassandra, all kinds of open stick implementations, etc. Also on ScaleIO. >> I hate to jump ahead but it's always interesting to talk with people such as yourself who are always kind of thinking ahead. What's the next big headache, or what's the next big problem that you'd like to tackle or you'd like to challenge that you think with a more polished or more defined storage capability would solve whatever that dilemma might be that emerging for the enterprise? >> I think the first hurdle we need to pass is just the challenge for most industry veterans in particular to make this shift from they're built like a tank traditional storage arrays that you can touch and see to software that has a connotation, or a perception of it's just software I can't touch it, I can't see it, how can it be robust? How can it be performance? How can I operate it in an easy manner? As a matter of fact, all of those topics are better with a ScaleIO software than with traditional enterprise arrays. We've built some of them in the past. But in ScaleIO you get the most advanced benefits in terms of operational ease, elasticity, scalability, performance, flexibility of deployment, readiness for the future. Agnosticity to the underlying hardware, underlying media. So this really makes the data center a lot easier to be operated, and also a lot lower cost because you eliminate a lot of the complexity. You eliminate a lot of the smaller vendors that only deliver a small part of your hardware state because now you as a customer can really leverage everything on your X-86 hardware. This is commodity par excellence. You can go out there, you can get server vendors to bid for the hardware state that you want to run. And on that estate you can run your applications, your databases, your ScaleIO software, whatever you need. >> So you're telling them you can touch it, or you don't have to touch it, you don't have to feel it. Trust me, it's real right? >> Don't trust me, try it. >> Boaz, thanks for being with us. We appreciate the time here on the Cube and great seeing you. Again four time around you're about to join the five-time alumni club so congratulations on that. >> Can I by the way tell you a little bit about the version, the new version? Maybe very quickly end of this year we're releasing a version, a new version of ScaleIO, ScaleIO Next. The main items there are we are delivering space efficiency, but we provide it in a dynamic manner. So one of the big downsides of putting space efficiency in storage systems is that it usually hits performance quite significantly especially if the data is not too compressible. In ScaleIO we will dynamically compress data based on the compressibility of the data. So if data is not compressible we won't waste resources trying to compress it. If data is very compressible we will use more resources but we will also compress it and we will be able to do that with a very little, very small degradation of performance compared to the non-compressed environment. That's one, two we introduce volume migration in a non-disruptive manner enabling customers to move volumes from flesh-only to magnetic-only to hybrid environments on the fly without any disruption to the ongoing applications. We introduced a spot for vevos in order to be able to run all the ScaleIO capabilities, ScaleIO volume capabilities on a virtual machine granularity level in ESX. And we are also introducing the next level of the AMS management software which is the wrapper around the server with ScaleIO software appliance bundles that enables you to manage the entire stack. >> And timing again? >> End of this year, end of '17. >> Good deal, you've got a full plate, don't you? >> We do, we do. >> Very good well done, thank you again and sorry about that. I knew you had news you wanted to get in, I'm glad you did. >> Thank you for the opportunity. >> You bet, all right back with more on the Cube here from Dell EMC World 2017 right after this.