What's New with NetApp Cloud?

good morning and thank you for joining us as Steve said I'm mark Bregman I'm the CTO here at NetApp and I kind of want to talk about why why we why are you here to talk to us and why are we interested in talking to you because as he pointed out you might think of us in the past is a storage company and so why would this be relevant well I joined the company about two years ago and part of what attracted me was the realization that the company had at the time that really had to transform ourselves from a very successful enterprise primarily Enterprise focused storage systems company to a data company if you look at the what's happened in our industry over the last several years I think there's been a pretty major shift actually over my whole career if I go back 25 30 years ago every discussion with an enterprise customer started with infrastructure what servers are they going to buy what storage are they going to buy how you can put their network together then it progressed on to what are their applications software or software infrastructure going to look like and the afterthought was of course data as part of that I would say that probably 10-15 years ago that had already shifted to the starting point of the discussion being software and applications the you know growth of ERP and CRM and all these other large enterprise systems really drove a lot more decision-making that led to the definition of infrastructure but data was still sort of in service to that in the last several years that has shifted further to the point where when we talk to customers when I talk to our customers many many times most times now it starts with data what's the data they have with the data they need with the data they can get access to how are they going to leverage it whether that be through analytics or other forms to help their business and so when we talk to customers we really see three dimensions to what they're doing with data from the beginning of the IT and for industry data was really used to optimize or improve operations of the business I mean you can go near by here to the Computer History Museum and see you know freedom calculators and IBM Teno ones and accounting machines in those days the data was accounting data and information technology was being used primarily to streamline optimize improve the efficiency of the business through the use of data and that continues today you see our own example we have a system if you want to call it that we call ace up our auto support system or ought to support data all of our products in the field report back to us primarily we've used that to better understand the performance of our systems in the field perhaps to predict failure to understand reliability performance etcetera to improve our products very classic way of using data but what's happened really since the advent of the web and more importantly mobile is companies have realized they can also use information and data to enhance the relationship they have with customers I dare say probably every one of you has on your mobile device an app to connect to your bank your financial services organization and if you're like me you interact with your bank much more often today through that app than you ever did when you had to go to a branch office in fact I haven't been in a branch office in can you remember the last time I was in a branch office but yet almost daily I interact with my bank and so that gives them an opportunity not only give me new services but also those touch points understand me better create more customer intimacy that's the sort of the second wave of data and information use and very much transformative because it's moving us into this next generation sometimes called third platform applications distributed mobile big data etc the third aspect of data and that's really emerging now and you see it in different industries emerging at different rates is organizations that are not data organizations buy it in their core but they're recognizing that they can use data to create new offerings and the sort of apocryphal story I like to use is think about Tesla Tesla cars report back massive amounts of data the engineers are using that to constantly improve the vehicle classic improve optimize the business they're using it to through the screen and the connectivity to communicate more with the customer I get I have a test I get notices there's an update coming their new capabilities they're reaching out and creating customer intimacy I said this several months ago I set out I'm just waiting for the day they offer me insurance because who knows more about my driving experience than Tesla probably nobody so they're in a better position than almost anybody yeah that's right that's another exactly no way so I made up this idea about Tesla and I was told they're doing this in two countries in Europe as a test pilot so they're actually doing it the room was the other one that's you know kind of creepy but those are opportunities to take the data which they're using for other purposes and suddenly they wake up and say wait a minute data can be the business not just data in service to our old business the other classic I mean big case example is what ge is doing as they really reinvent themselves as an information and data company even while they still produce heavy equipment but their business models being completely transformed so as we think about that in our context it means we can't just be a storage company and be relevant we have to become a data company so what does that mean well are we going to go and help customers like Tesla for example figure out what's the actuarial risk of Dave driving his Tesla by the way he probably will not get that offer because his driving might not be as good as mine I don't know but I may be lying with them to show me the data but the point is that snot our business that's their business but the thing that's a challenge for our customers is shepherding all that data managing all that data understanding what data they have where is it is it where it should be can I move it to where it should be so several years ago we started down this path talking about something we call the data fabric and it was initially envisioned as a way to help connect sort of seamlessly connect data across all of our different platforms and the cloud as we've as our thinking about its matured we've recognized that it has enormous value because it allows it can allow customers to build solutions that are data oriented but abstract the complexity of underlying storage as a as a non-story if we were here at the storage field day we'd be talking about AI ops and Lunz and lots of stuff down at the storage plumbing layer and while that's very interesting we know a lot about it you start to talk to somebody in a business about data that's just complexity they don't want to deal with and so the the data fabric can start to extract that complexity and allow customers to deal with their data whether it's in a public cloud or multiple public clouds the multi cloud whether it's on Prem whether it's in a SAS application etc and unlock the value of that data an example it's interesting I think in looking at this progression of data is think about mapping if you go back not so many years ago think pre mobile or certainly pre mobile maybe pre web if you want to get a map if you're going on a trip and you want to map what's the view you went and bought a map paper map Rand McNally or one of these books now in the back end they were already digitized and so those paper maps had been produced in a digital system and then printed in order to disseminate them the next phase was to put them on a screen maybe on a phone or on a GPS device and give you a little bit more information but it was still a pretty self-contained data environment today you have ways maybe on your mobile device ways access is a vastly a vast number of disparate diverse sources of data there's mapping data there's traffic data that's coming from you know various sources there's data that's coming from the users the the live data which is being brought in from the population of users that's being used to give you real-time updates on traffic there's data on road constructions coming from another source all of those multiple sources are brought together and normalized put together and then distributed and displayed in near real-time to the user and that is increasingly the type of information or data driven business that people want to take part in so you've seen not too long ago IBM acquired the weather company what's that all about that's their realization that data the actual data itself is extremely valuable and that that's a source of data which they can monetize along with other sources for their customers so I guess the simple message is why are you here talking to us or why do we want to talk to you because we're moving beyond the storage layer up into the data layer and data resides everywhere including and especially including in the cloud and so how the cloud plays in this emerging world of data is very important you may have seen in fact you can see we have this new tagline data-driven that doesn't say storage driven data driven and again just to give you another kind of a metaphor think about financial services 100 years ago probably the biggest consideration of what bank to use would have been do they have a solid vault to lock up my money to store my money and similarly for many years in our business our primary goal was providing that vault that place to store data securely safely reliably that's still important you still don't want the bank to lose your money but you sort of think of that as table stakes the real differentiator today are all the other services that they can provide around your money visibility transformation mobility of your money think about that just substitute the world were data and that's where we're headed we have to help our customers with the visibility where their data is the mobility moving their data the ability to optimize where they place their data based on how it's being used all those services which still reside deep down they're tied to or related to storage but they're not presented to the user or the customer as a storage system so that's really part of our transformation we talk about the journey to become a Data Authority and I think that sometimes confuses people because I don't think we're going to be an authority on what's in some research team's genomics data we don't know about genomics but we do want to be an authority in helping them understand where that data came from how they can get access to it most efficiently how they can preserve it protect it move it store it etc the data layer rather than focusing on the just on the plumbing and the storage layer so that's where we're heading and a big part of this is engaging with our customers and different voices within our customers to understand better where they're going last spring I was at a meeting in New York of chief data officer x' for the financial services industry now these are people which historically we would not have spoken to because they're not buying storage but they are setting direction for their industry and for their companies in not only policy but approaches to how they want to use data and so it's increasingly important for us to start having a dialogue with people in that role to understand what we need to or can deliver to help achieve the goals of the enterprise and not be relegated to just you know to the back to the metaphor a bank of banks just being the producer of the safe that's sitting in the vault that's sitting in the basement so that's a lot of where we're headed and I hope that by the time you hear from Anthony and and Dave you'll understand two things one is that we in fact are moving very much into this space around cloud and data oriented solutions and that we have credibility coming from the background we come from it's not just something we're talking about but we're building on a lot of the years of experience technology base relationships we have with our customers knowledge of our customers to deliver the solutions they need as their focus moves up more and more to how they can use data to change the world so at this point are there any comments or questions does this make any sense to you I see a few people nodding and I see a few people looking blank so we go in the middle of the road yeah can I just ask about your conversations with your customers a part of the talking of various vendors that count field day that this week there's been a realization that customers don't know first of all what cloud means what it should mean and they're taking a very legacy mindset of moving applications lift and shift or shunting data in net apollyon saying stammering data to the cloud and vendors who then talk to customers customers say ah I want to start mirroring my data to the cloud and so vendors get the impression that that's what customers need when customers don't actually understand or know what the possibility of cloud is how does that impact with the word data and storage and the fact that you're getting actually the wrong information from from your customers so I think that's a really good question and it really comes back to sort of a famous problem of the innovators dilemma if we talk only to our current users the current buyers of our products they'll communicate to us in the language they're used to and they'll say things like what I really need to do is snapmirror to the cloud it's just another endpoint and frankly I think whenever we see a new platform emerge think about going from mainframes to client server or client server to the web or now to the cloud every time the first wave is taking the old paradigm the old applications and just moving it to new platform generally trying to get cost or maybe efficiency or flexibility it's only after users have started exploiting the new platform that they start to recognize that its unique capabilities allow different things different things to be done and this is really the shift of you know I think you've heard this term sort of second platform applications and third platform applications you could take a second platform application hosted in the cloud and maybe there's some benefit but it's really only once you realize that there's unique capabilities so that a cloud platform provides and you start exploiting those in sort of distributed dynamic maybe using technologies like containers and other technologies bulky cloud multi data source technologies that you really get the benefit of the new platform yeah please regularly I mean there's a lot of naivete in especially higher level net well a lot of times management people have little understanding of the technology that's changed since they were typing programmers and I suffer that as well but I mean talking to people oh yeah we want to move this into the cloud well that's clearly a legacy lift and shift infrastructure thing and oh by the way we've got this stuff in the cloud and we'd like to move it back week that's just the same right like know that you built on the platform it's completely different you know and so yeah we and we want to add value in both of those situations right so so we can't just listen to the old legacy guys and think it's all about running on tap and the cloud solves all the stuff I mean that that's one interesting thing that solves a class of problems but definitely is is just a teeny subset of the zone you'd like to be getting into we'll talk more about that we don't need to like do it all now but yes the short answer address in it was just a good deal that we got absolutely right it's also why it's why I think it's so important particularly from my point of view not to only talk to the same people within those enterprises because if I go and talk to the storage admin or the VP of infrastructure who's putting in place has been for years putting in place data centers and all of that they're going to talk in that language if I go and talk to a line of business group that's deploying new applications and acquiring SAS applications and doing things in the cloud they have a different perspective if I go and talk to a chief data officer who may not even care about infrastructure or how things get deployed but cares about what they're trying to achieve I get yet a different profession and so the trap we have to avoid is talking only to our existing user base and user costs and customer base on the other hand we also can't ignore them because today they are the keepers of the data in many cases and the implementers that are ultimately asked by the chief data officer or maybe even the line of business to go implement and they the teams that are currently building a product you're a public company you need to maintain that revenue going forward but also skating to where the where the park is how do you and if customers are coming to you and you're talking to them and they saying you have an a that's just a legacy company you've been doing this for so long is do enterprises or companies have an a perception issue that may be a rolled and they shouldn't be inventing or even looking at an old come and old dog time to do new tricks I think that's a really good question actually I think Dave's going to talk about that in more detail so I don't to steal his thunder but you know we've seen this been in our 25-year history several times right when we started when the company started we were positioned in a certain place and as the web came along as example we had to shift we were a NFS only and then we had to adapt to sifts and other things we were a web company and then we had to or an Internet and then we had to adapt to enterprise so we've had to go through these perceptual shifts and real shift in terms of the products we deliver we're doing that again so there is that concern it's also true that and I think you see this many times that new new startups come out in the new space they don't have that legacy so it's easy for them to position themselves but it turns out that there's a lot of there's a lot of capability that's needed to really deliver reliable solutions around customers data and while a new startup can come out and talk about it and deliver some piece of it we have a long history of intellectual capital on which to draw and so we can apply a lot of that to this new space and so examples are things like look at what happened in the in this is getting back to sort of more our existing business but look what happened in the all flash storage business we were late we were late into that market and yet we've gone from essentially nowhere to the number two player and we're the fastest-growing is that because we did something magic with flash I actually think the real reason is we were able to take what we could do with flash but we could also bring along with it all of the rest of the data management tools and infrastructure which for 20-some years we had been developing and which now if you're a startup who starts with pure flash you have to build all that and that's hard so we get the benefit of both our history but we have the burden if you will of overcoming the perception and there is a big effort we put a lot of effort in the last year last six months into repositioning the way we're perceived in the market my question is related to that so this additional focus that you're going to have I mean your capital and your experience definitely valuable but this I mean these required completely different skill sets in my mind different human capital different tools even different passions about your work and the types of projects you work on so how are you how are you making that part of the shift well let me answer two parts of that is you you I go out you sort of hinted at something which I think you also hinted out which is very important our our our our existing business is not going to go away overnight oh you can be around for a long time it's not where the growth is it's not where the new investment is and so we have to sustain that we have to continue to enhance it and build that what you're talking about is this the new style the new things that require a different way of thinking different skills different approach you're absolutely right and that's why for example we've brought in people like Anthony Anthony doesn't come from a storage systems background he comes with a very different perspective as we're bringing as we're recruiting and bringing in new talent that's what we're looking for we're not going in saying let's go take somebody who used to write you know micro code for a disk drive and them going right you know it if I could even live in kubernetes that yeah that doesn't make sense now some people can transition but that's not the way to get there the thinking styles are so different I mean you've been in the cloud world for ages and as we do things like take our on top data operating system and put it in the cloud Anthony's coming you're going you guys think six months is a good release cycle but I think you should give it to me every week or two and every six months beside that one's ready for the hardware guys he is like just shaken co-op and he he's telling the finance people every metric you measure is not even the right metric for my kind of business you know I mean you I think it can be a combo yeah some of us old dogs try to learn new tricks right and I'll talk more about that later but you just got to get new folks in thanking wrong with that world because it's radically different absolutely it is it also I think you know we're a very partner centric business it also means we've got to think very differently about what partners are what is a partner and who are our partners if you know historically I would argue that our partners were people who sold our stuff and there were channel partners and they knew everything about us and they maybe they enhance them they took it to customers in this world it's very different in many cases we're going to partner with people who are building with us but they're not directly contributing to us but because they're part of our ecosystem they add value to the ecosystem not to us correctly very different models so yes we have a lot of invention reinvention to do it's no question about it and we've started as I as I started to say we've started down that path a lot with our messaging and our positioning and our marketing and you can see it internally because a lot you know you can almost see right away certain parts of our company certain people in our company have an easier time or a harder time internalizing that and that's maybe the first filter now if you have a hard time internalizing it but you're still working on storage systems that might be ok because somebody's got to keep doing that yeah but if we think those are the people they may build the new world they're not that's good so yeah we're very aware of them and and it touches everything I mean just not to get to inside baseball but even when we talk to our own internal people about recruiting and hiring the kinds of people want to recruit have different not just different profiles but you have to recruit them in a different way than you do a traditional systems engineer and so but those things are changing our own internal processes have to change I mean one of the things that I would say you can start to see some of this going back even a few years ago is a very I think a very big shift towards open-source you know here is a company that you can look at as a traditional you know old-world proprietary system vendor you could think of us that way but in fact if you start peeling the onion you find out that we've been very active in open-source for a long time some people have looked at and said oh well you bought SolidFire and that's why you're a big participant in and for example in some of the open source projects but the reality is that if you look at pre acquisition and post acquisition we were the number one contributor and SolidFire was the number two contributor before the position to open stat open we're coming at them and though we did a lot of a storage stuff so it wasn't that we acquired them to become a contributor we were already very very active and even that thinking about how do you think about creating intellectual capital in an open source environment is a radically different way of thinking it is then our traditional five years ago way of thinking so that is I mean interestingly our own what we talk to customers about in terms of transforming themselves with data transforming their business thinking about these new models of computing and storage is exactly what's happening to us we're living it as well we're going through our own transformation and I think that both gives us some touchpoint when we talk to customers some proof points of what we're going through but it also is something that helps us understand what they're going through other thoughts or comments I would mean what you're talking about is a complete redesign of all of your system that's going to take a long time to do every time you change one bit of it the rest of your system fights back against that change how is that going to affect what you're doing with existing customers as you make this transition you need to fund this transition to elementary so you have to get a lot of people to come along with you you can't just start a brand new company with entirely new customers doing things completely in a new way you have to bring a lot of people along with you doing this how are you approaching that are you talking about in terms of our our operational systems or illicit because what you're talking what you've brought up there is that there's a lot of sorry there's a lot of people in process that you need to change so you're talking about HR and hiring practices talking about how you find those people and how you recruit them and then when they come in they go to expect to work in different ways and do different things that requires operational change it changes your revealed force that changes your Commission model it changes the nature of some of your finance because you're looking at subscriptions instead of well instead of looking out cations people called plans or even if it's still on premises gear it may be a subscription model because people are going that way so that starts to get into rev wreck you oh yeah it goes everywhere the limitlessly I'll be an example for smaadahl of how you do planning of subscriptions versus capital is completely dead I mean you you are right I mean nothing day one you admit the problem and you just start working away on it but I mean yeah everywhere through the company there's places where there's differences and I think you pointed out something and that was a good example it would be very easy to say okay we really need to change this model but we can't do that until we fix the system so that's a big project so three years from now we're going to be that would be the classic enterprise approach yeah we can't do that and the good news is we know we can't do that so we're doing things which a good example is consumption model we don't have our our financial billing and all those systems in place to automatically do all of that but we also can't wait so that means we're going to have you know lots of little monkeys in the back room doing that work hopefully nobody will notice they'll still get a bill they won't know that it was manually done that efficient no it is and we know we have to fix that but we also can't wait so we're that's an example we have to be able to operate with exceptions rather than try to move the whole system in a new direction same thing will happen in our Salesforce they're going to be a lot of our salespeople who operate the way they've operated for years and by the way we can probably tell who they are they're the ones that are going to a harder time transitioning but they're going to be some that can operate in a different model because they're the ones who are taking the lead on the new stuff and they're going to be under maybe different compensation plans and they're going to operate in a different way you can't move the whole student body at once no but I mean there's a good point about the societal things because there's a few interrelated bits there so okay if I'm going to be billing you in a different way because it's consumption price I also have to change my comp plan for the fellows be able to be rewarding that way because if I don't make certain some of these changes even if it's not in the perfectly efficient way but don't make those changes the rest of the system will fight back again to the halt changes and it won't change yeah okay so I mean this is a classic problem when you're trying to introduce even a new family of products as the traditional sales team wants to sell what they have and we've got this competition so we've had to do this in the past this is a bigger change and I'll tell you it is something that as Dave said it cuts across everything so we've had we've got to make big changes in our go-to-market we've got to make changes in our engineering and delivery to your you know to sort of Anthony's mantra of how come it takes us so long to releases why can't we get it out there and by the way when you're delivering things in this model it's different than when you're sending a box off somewhere you're not gonna be able to touch it again you don't need to think about it the same way and so we can try things we can experiment more easily we can be more dynamic similarly on our internal systems like hiring and HR I mean one of the interesting discussions I had some time ago with our head of HR is I said look if we go hire a few of these engineers in these new areas and I understand you're concerned about you know salary bans and we got to keep compensation even but what if we overpay them relative to that one of two things will happen they'll be wildly successful to be glad we overpaid them or they won't be and we'll fire them and then it won't matter but it's not going to affect the whole rest of our universe until it either is a success or a failure in which case it's self-correcting so I think we've got to think that way about a lot of our systems you know we could say well oh my god what if we're wildly successful with consumption model we'll have to hire thousands of people to do all the behind the scenes back-office stuff until our systems are ready that would be a good problem to have as opposed to let's wait until we have all our systems then find out it doesn't matter hey so that's that is the approach we're taking typical now the trick is to do that in a way that the complexity behind the scenes doesn't project itself out into the customer will get away from you too much where it starts to because you're a public company that's like we're going to be raised at all ocelot in that it needs to be managed which is which is the challenge how do you do a managed transition where you don't have time to wait that that is a universal challenge we're in a changing world there another question go to my next point so it feels like you're you're building the plane in flight yep so that being said how are you timing everything like what so if is the products available if it's available today what are your release cycles how does that all factor into what you're doing to make sure it's a quality product that can be used let me give you an example because we started also focusing on how we can do and again it comes back to sort of a selling I said earlier how can we improve our own operations and then how can we adapt our operations to a new model so an example of that is in our own core operations take on tap our our core mainstream product we've we've shrunk the development cycle by a factor of three or four over the last two years we did that by changing the way we are our own engineering infrastructure operates we've taken advantage of a lot of our technologies to make it easier for engineers to spin-off environments to do testing and not wait for IT to come and put it in place a lot of things which by the way are also relevant to our customers but it's given us the advantage of being able to move much faster so we go so Anthony comes in and said I want this in six weeks we go wet we could do it now in six months look how much better it is he says I don't care it's not good enough for what we need in the cloud and he's right but we've learned a lot in going down that path and we're now trying to take that and ask ourselves oK we've taken the on tap engineered systems development cycle down from 18 months to six months or less fantastic but now how do we get the cloud software cycle down to six weeks so that's a whole nother step and we're going through some of that and back to the earlier comment some of it is going to have to be done a little bit as you use the analogy of you know while we're flying the plane we're changing the engines some are going to be a little bit ugly for us a little hard in the meantime as we get there it'll get streamlined and easy only get Anthony in this so you said we could have a tease right there you haven't said anything you know it's just building the plane in the middle I mean yeah there is some of that let me talk a little bit about the path we've been on and then Anthony's role so we started I think it was three years four years when did we first ship on tap in the cloud we that was 24 24 14 I think so that's quite some time ago and now we have lots of customers doing that we've been adding new products over time - classic odd way try random things see what works right some of them do some of them don't it's it's grown somewhat but still fairly small and we were running into a lot of these exact issues that that folks are pointing out like oh wait what does this mean for sale what does this mean for finance how are we going to drive that and George who's our CEO said this is not going to work if we don't start a separate business unit with a high-level business leader who comes out of this world understands this stuff and starts driving change and that parents Anthony I in fact I remember one of the first times that I wandered around with Anthony this was it a big trade show in Vegas and we were wandering around and he said to me so one of the things I'm trying to get the sense of is now that I've got this new rolling out of how much class do you think I should break I'm like oh you need to break a lot of glass so I mean but your background is clouded so why don't you just describe a little bit of where you've come from because I mean that's where like telling stories about you and the stuff you've taught us that that's still in your sphere yeah I mean I've been developing in the cloud now for about 16 years and I haven't touched on premise in that time and I would never go back prior to coming to NetApp I was the president and CEO of a 100% cloud company called hot schedules and we were building solutions in the cloud for restaurant retail hospitality businesses from McDonald's down to the mom and pops when we were in Vegas wandering I was like oh yeah that's one of mine yeah and you know we really continuously to the cloud we actually were even beyond cloud in that we were really mobile not just mobile first but mobile only prior to that I actually built what is now the application infrastructure at Oracle on the Oracle cloud and I was actually net a customer before we acquired son and I never really saw the box I've did one data center tour and that was enough for me I really didn't need to see how elegant cabling could be but to me you know we went with NetApp because Larry being Larry had sort of figured out based on its investment in Salesforce that there were certain rules that we would have to follow and one of them was you know those that build it run it and so Larry sort of said to me Anthony congratulations you're building the Oracle cloud and you have nobody in operations so you have to run the whole service lights out we actually did a fairly extensive valuation of storage vendors and we chose NetApp really simply because as well as having a richer to functionality we could activate the functionality through a set of API s and so I've always sort of thought of NetApp as a software company and so when everybody says you know net up is a storage company I sort of I sort of look at them and say you know what why do you think that and I think that's just because the physical representation tends to sort of come out as a box but that did some very smart things I think in building its software in a way that didn't too tightly couple it to the hardware and so on top you know can be available as much and I think on the cloud as it can be on a box so net up had sort of done some smart things but for me I think the nice thing about coming into net app at this stage of sort of technology evolution is when I was sort of first doing it way way 18 17 years ago now people try to sort of bucket the cloud in a way that made them feel good and I always remember a classic meeting I had with people that should remain nameless where they sort of said look Anthony the cloud is really simple to understand we drew this triangle they said this triangle represents the hierarchy of organizations the big guys at the top the little guys at the bottom and and they drew a line right through the middle and they said on-premise up here cloud down here is that it we're done thanks very much let's move on I was like wow you know but but today I think net app to its credit and so the history of the company it tends to lean in to these sort of disruptions and it's a company that lasted longer than most I think because of that and here a net up I I'm just you know having a ton of fun being independent when I need to be independent but then leveraging the rest of the organization when I need to leverage the rest of the organization but my lens is very much cloud I don't look at the problem from a net app perspective to the cloud I look at the problem from the cloud to everything else and my team is comprised of mainly engineers who build exclusively on the cloud build on AWS on Azure on bluemix on TCP I mean those are our four primary platforms and my guys wake up every day and release some of them are now two continuous releases most are probably down to two to four week releases and we've built a pretty healthy cloud business we've got well almost up to thousand customers now using our cloud stuff we're adding about almost two a day now to the portfolio and while the lion's share of them a net app as a growing number that have never been net at customers we're buying us for cloud deployments cloud you know strategies whether that's moving legacy on one end or new application development on the other see your point earlier Julian I mean if we were I think it's a great opportunity that we've got a big install base and that up folks to sell to but if we were only selling to those folks that would be pretty worrying with respect to what we were learning so organizationally as a I don't mean as negatively but a pure play storage company let's say pure-play data company EMC very big competitor partnering with Dell another big competitor to try and expand their business on the other side HPE breaking itself up to try and reinvent itself you've obviously bought SolidFire which is understandably a change in your organization but it's not as big a change as these two big other competitors do you think that that's the you've got the right organizational structure to to do this or do you need to be doing other more radical things I mean selfishly I would say you know I'm really glad we don't have compute I love the fact that you know we partner for it but I see compute in the hyper scalar as part of our sort of you know HCI architecture I think if we had compute we'd be saddled with an additional burden and I'm just I'm amazed that those companies that you mentioned are so far removed from the cloud honestly i baffles me that they must be denying the existence of it to the point of almost you know there are Sun in the streaming live but stupidity I mean like you cannot doubt the cloud it is too big a force now it has so much momentum I think we had a bit of an advantage because of our size which is to say we were smaller HP and EMC VMware both tried to stand up clouds to compete against Amazon and we were looking at that that is it we never really I mean we were looking at that we were like are you kidding me I mean Microsoft annual a month monthly cloud budget I think as I'm approaching a billion a month I mean that's two of us per year we're about five six billion runway we said there's no way we have to partner and so we really have taken a partner with Amazon partner with IBM Google as you're much more than any of those other guys have and I think that's partly because of our size because we're not standing up the full stack against them to some extent if they have to choose who to partner with were less threatening company to partner with so we've really leaned in hard on that you say in a way you seal your ploughed future as providing the additional services to the cloud native storage of Amazon Google bluemix or whatever rather than because we're a company and we do in cloud we have to set up a separate branch cloud and that's the mistake that they you made a point you know when I came in my friends would say so you're building a cloud we did I know I'm not at all me you know all I see in the clouds are you know Larry got in trouble for saying it but the cloud is essentially you know a bunch of machines with spindles that spin and so why can't our software manage the spindles in the hyper scalars just as well as it does the spindles that we buy from a third party we don't manufacture disk drives right we write software to help make you know disk drives and now flash drives we write software to help make that stuff better in all sorts of ways when we're in our box we don't matter if we get to describe some Seagate or Amazon and lean we make Amazon better economically rewards us for that and the other point is because we are neither trying to be one of those nor have we aligned to a single one we have that sort of Switzerland opportunity which makes it easier for them to partner with us and solve problems which they recognize but maybe don't want to face entirely of multi cloud and hybrid cloud and it allows our customers it gives them the confidence that they get they still have choice they work with us they can be in Azure and an M and oh geez so let's see so I'm going to do a little bit of a reset now you know all of the people here's the flow Marc's talking about big-picture data why doesn't end up going after data how do we fit into that Anthony will talk more about so what exactly are we doing in the cloud how much progress have we made what projects have we got what do I see and then I'll come back and link back a little bit to whoa now that is 25 years old how does this fit in and we'll all be more right Liva but so just so you know like as you put your questions I mean we're all here we'll all do it together but that gives you a little bit of a sense of where you can grab hold on the place we're talking and right but I think this was not good because it just opened it up a little bit like what are you guys up to what's the lay of the land so hopefully that just helped get that

Channel: Tech Field Day

Views: 3,143

Rating: 4.7894735 out of 5

Keywords: Tech Field Day, Cloud Field Day, Cloud Field Day 2, CFD2, NetApp, Dave Hitz, Mark Bregman

Id: 3Jkw4DrXrrY

Length: 44min 41sec (2681 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 30 2017