 13, we are live for special presentation of the Cube, Silicon Angles, the Cube, our flagship program. We are live on the outfield grass at AT&T Park, home of the San Francisco Giants, not the 49ers. That's going to be Candlestick, soon to be the new park. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, and our guest here is NetApp's CIO. We have, no it's not Kim Stevenson, we're back here inside the Cube. Thanks for Cynthia Stoddard coming on theCUBE. We're just talking about CIOs on Twitter. You and Kim Stevenson at Intel are very popular, so what do you think about all this action here? I think it's great. I mean, we have wonderful customers, partners here, and I think the excitement is not about the excitement at VMWare. So Pat Gelsinger, the commitment from VMWare is pretty solid. They come out here, we're in the NetApp jersey, very well known within the culture of VMWare, the relationship between the two companies. What is the coupling and decoupling of storage happening in the market? People want more storage, but yet you see compute playing a role, flash is playing a role, it's a CIO. You've got to balance the disruption and the innovation and the existing sustainability of the business. How do you look at that trend? Well, the way that I look at the trend is you have to embrace, you have to actually embrace the trend. If you don't, you're going to be left behind. Now that's not to say that you don't have a business to run, and you have to be somewhat cognizant of keeping your systems up and running. But I think as a CIO and as part of IT leadership, you really have to inspire your group to be able to look at new technologies and really take the right level of risk to be able to experiment and then place those technologies within your infrastructure. Because if you don't, you're going to be faced with an old infrastructure that doesn't meet the needs of the business and won't scale or won't be agile going forward. The thing about in VMworld, you see a lot of tables out there. People are actually having meetings. You see a lot of biz dad, but a lot of tech geeks talking about some of the under the hood things that are going on and within virtualization. I want to ask you, someone who's in the trenches, what's the winning formula for a person in IT right now? Mindset to execution management, what should they be thinking about? Because there's so much to do. Everyone wishes they had another day in the week, but there's a lot of technical things. There's a lot of business issues, a lot of hiring personnel factors. What's the winning mindset? What's the winning formula from your opinion or at least a philosophy? So I think the winning mindset philosophy is really to focus on value after the business. So if you're in IT and whatever level you are in IT, you really need to understand what your business challenges are. Because then you can look at the technology portfolio that you have and what is available in the marketplace and then pull from that portfolio in order to meet the business needs. So I think it's really, really critical. I would say that part of that winning mindset is also to embrace a bit of the unknown, to figure out what the unknown can do for you. Don't be afraid, just because something has been stable in your organization for a long time, that's great. But look to the future, because at one point that stable infrastructure or solution wasn't stable. We talked to Kim Stevenson, we mentioned her on the intro, she's from Intel and I just got in my mind, scramble is getting late in the day. But one of the things that we always talk about is the challenges of being the CIO for a tech company like NetApp and she's at Intel. Your job is to push the envelope. Yes. And you got to be out there and pushing it and breaking things, as Mark Zuckerberg would say. But also to get out there and not to be afraid to take chances at the same time, you got infrastructure to run. How hard is that, Juan? And what lessons have you learned that you can share with other CIOs? Well, I think it is difficult. And I think one of the things that we've done, and this is basically from lessons learned, is really to look at innovation and look at it and incubate it. So for example, in my organization, I have a group where innovation lives and they're able to incubate, try new things out, really untether. They can try anything else. So a playground. A sandbox playground. So equip people with a playground, but don't contain it just to the playground. Invite others into the playground so that they can try out new things too. Because you just don't want it to be a special little playground for the select individuals. Is there, can you share any examples that you've had to look? Experimentation in the playground and Johnny cut his knee, but someone did something good and examples of something that just came out of nowhere? Like seed of idea and collaboration, is there any innovation examples? Actually our cloud staff, our internal cloud staff, figured out that we could create an environment based on cloud technologies that really enable end user computing. Look at some of the shadow IT applications and provide a safe haven for people to really equip their end users. The innovation playground, Dave, Dave, what's your take on the shadow IT playground too? Is this, shadow IT's becoming almost de facto R&D. R&D. You know why I love shadow IT? Because it drives IT. It's just form of competition. So, right? I mean, competition's a good thing. We all believe that. We live in this great country and so shadow IT can wake up and say, okay, maybe we can do better. Maybe they'll all turn it. We should bring out the light. We should bring it to light and actually the shadow IT is there because people need to create and do their jobs. So IT needs to learn to enable so that people can do it in a really cost effective environment. So people talk about people process and technology. It's always the big theme and they always say technology's the easiest part. People in process is the hardest. Technology's not so easy either. But thinking about those three, and your sandbox idea is sort of playground ideas. It touches on all those areas. But in your tenure, last couple of years now, how have you affected those three areas? Maybe some of the big things that you've done. People process and technology. Where do you see that going in terms of your vision for NetApp IT? So we've really gone through a total mindset change within IT on the people in the process side. So really from a silo thinking to really a thinking of one team. We're one IT team. We're one team within NetApp. And that takes a lot of conversation, a lot of commitment to working with your staff in order to get there. But I feel that my staff right now is probably one of the best IT organizations that I've ever had behind me, if not the best. They're extremely committed. They try new things. They speak up. On the process side, we've done a lot of work to really put ourselves in the seat of the end user and look at it from their perspective, really from services. So instead of talking about applications and talking about infrastructure, talk about the service that you deliver to the organization. So going forward, really focusing on those two things is really acting as one team. So I might do this piece of infrastructure, but if I'm connected, I need to connect with my partner and make sure that we connect as a team. And then looking at the service component from what the end user expects. You know, that's an interesting point because when people talk process, a lot of times they're talking about IT processes. And I'm inferring from what you said, you're talking about IT processes and business processes coming together. That's right. I know I had some clients in the financial service industries over the years that were very good at that. When you talk to them about processes, they would talk to you about business processes and really very business driven. Maybe that's a financial services mindset because it's revenue driven, but you're starting to see that in more and more businesses now. It's a change in looking at IT again as a competitive advantage. Yeah, we've had these workshops to actually look at what a service should be and bring the business and IT together and it's absolutely amazing because they understand each other's challenges. They talk about the same things. Used to be in different ways, now in the same way. So if you put yourself in the end user, what they need for the business. Dave and I are like being entrepreneurs with our own business and being self-funded. You know how that is in Silicon Valley and it's hard, right? But one of the things that we've noticed as we kind of have to use our big data, we showed you a little bit of our big data app, is that we notice that the cloud and big data is changing the value chains within the customer's environments. It's not changing their business, it's just reconstructing the value activities within those value chains. So now it begs a couple of questions. It's some business strategy process conversations, management innovation, then there's some technical enablers. But ultimately the automation has to come from knowing the process. So my question to you is, the old days was general purpose computing. You know, put a box in, get it done, right? Store some stuff, make some stuff happen. But now automation requires knowledge of the processes. And every customer is different. So you can't just say product X for all these customers, there's a little bit of a customization. So is that going to be done with virtualizations at a service opportunity? Is that just the way it's going to be? Automation has to come from custom deals. This is the question we had on theCUBE today and it's an important one. Orchestration and automation was the number one thing people said they wanted to see improved. Yeah, I think the automation, actually there's a common component and then there's the customized component. And I think that that's really what the value of IT is going to be able to provide in the future is understanding that customized component for the business so that you can track that orchestration and that automation throughout the lifecycle of the process and add that value. We were talking to Vaughn earlier and one of the things he pointed out was that's a good point just to kind of pick up on that. So if you have a common framework, foundation, the customization is essentially push button. It's the service menu. That's right. There they can configure their own. That's right. It's not a lot of customization, it's just okay, I want that selection. It's a manifest as we were talking earlier. Yeah, and you can think of it as a service catalog. A service catalog and a service catalog really specialized for different lines of business. I think I wonder if I could get your thoughts on this. I've always felt like the hardest part of a CIO's job. I mean, we as managers, you can have examples where you're setting clear goals for your people and they're meeting them and you're doing a good job managing them. And other examples where we maybe weren't so good at that. As a CIO, you're getting pulled in so many different directions. You have somewhat conflicting objectives, right? You got to keep costs down. You got to protect the company's data and make it secure. At the same time, you got to be agile. So you've got these, the spectrum and you're getting pulled in both directions. So how do you balance that as a CIO and how do you succeed with those somewhat sometimes conflicting needs and objectives? I think that you have to prioritize. And part of that prioritization is actually by building a good relationship with the business and the business executives to understand what really are those important blocks that you need to focus on. Yeah, you can look at the whole variety of things that you need as a CIO and you can look at and become overwhelmed by I have to do these 50, 100 different things. But if you can link what you have to do to the actual business priorities and not just the short-term priorities but the priorities over a range of time and really stick to those priorities, you'll be better off. And like I said, make sure they're business-driven. And even, I mean, that sounds sensible but even that's not easy, right? Developing those relationships, it's hard work, right? It is a lot of hard work. Okay, we're here live at AT&T Park talking about innovation playgrounds, CIO, thought leaders, Cynthia Stoddard. I'll give you the final word for the folks out here to end this segment. We're here live, great customer event. What should folks out that aren't here experience this great event know about VM world this year? What's the big encapsulated thought, quick sound bite from you on, what's here? I think people should really look to VM world to say, how can I really take the technologies, embrace and move my organization forward to agility with the cloud? I think there's some really good things and if you embrace the cloud a little bit, you are gonna absolutely move your organization forward. Cynthia Stoddard, CIO of NetApp, thought leader, a lot of passion, a lot of knowledge, pushing the envelope, giving people freedom to have an innovation playground. That's where it's gonna come from the cloud, changing the economics, the value chains and adding business value. That's the theme of VMware. This is theCUBE's special presentation live in the outfield of AT&T Park home of the San Francisco Giants. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.