 Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live Europe, brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to Barcelona, everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my co-host, Stu Miniman. Stu, myself and John Furrier will be here all week. Eric Herzog is here. Long time CUBE alum, friend. Great to see you again. He's the CMO of IBM Storage Division. He's joined by James Amys, who's the head of networks at Advance, the service provider guys. Welcome to theCUBE, good to see you again. Great, thanks for having us. Love being on theCUBE. So, we love having you. So, James, let's start with you. Tell us a little bit about Advance. We want to dig into some of the networking trends. We're hearing a lot about it here at Cisco Live. Yeah, thanks. Advance are a managed service provider, software company based in the UK. One of the largest software companies in the UK, providing end-to-end solutions for lots of different market verticals, including healthcare, local government, regional government, national infrastructure projects we get involved with, as well as charity sector, legal sector, a lot of education work we do. So, it's a real diverse portfolio of products we offer. And with the managed services piece, we also offer complete IT outsourcing. So, this is desktop support, telephony support, printer support, all the way back into integration with public cloud platforms and private cloud platforms, the majority of which is our end. So, Eric, Advance are both a customer and a partner. Right, right. And so, you love VersaStack. You guys are, I presume, a VersaStack customer as well. Yeah, VersaStack customer and the VersaStack, as you know, integrates Cisco, UCS, Cisco networking infrastructure, IBM storage of all types, entry products up into the fastest all-flash arrays with our software, Spectrum Virtualizer, Spectrum Accelerate family. And James' company is using VersaStack as part of their infrastructure, which they then offer, as you know, to his service to end users, as James just described. So, let's talk about some of the big trends that you guys are seeing and how you're both responding to customers and you're responding to your customers. So, we are seeing here today a lot about multi-cloud. We've been hearing that for a while. The network is flattening. You're a network expert. Love to get your thoughts on that. Security, obviously, is a huge topic. End-to-end management, you know, another big topic, something that IBM is focused on. So, James, what are the big mega trends that you're seeing that are driving your business decisions and your customers' activities? So, I think one of the big changes we're seeing is a change from large-scale, enterprise-scale deployments of a particular type of technology. And customers are now choosing, because they're informed, the best fit for a particular application or a particular service. And that may be coming to a service provider like ourselves to offer our service product to them, or they're looking for us to run an infrastructure service for them or integrate with a public cloud offering. So, the competition of the public cloud for service providers is key. And I think people were looking around a few years ago thinking, how do we compete to this? Well, with the partnerships that we have with IBM in Cisco, it gives us a very compelling, competitive offering where we can turn around and say, well, we can give you a like for like, but we can give you a slightly better service because we can give you guaranteed availability. We can give you guaranteed price points. And this is all backed with key vendor certified designs. So, we're not talking about going out and developing a solution that takes us maybe 18 months to take to market. This is understanding a requirement for a quick Q&A with a customer. Align that to a reference architecture that we can literally just pick up off the shelf, deploy into our data centers using the standard building blocks that we use across the business. So, Nexus 9K, 7Ks are our standard bread and butter inside the data center environment. As Eric pointed out, Cisco UCS is our key Intel compute platform that we use. And the store-wise IBM product has been a real true success story for us. So, we started off being a mixed vendor house where we would align storage requirement based with what we could find in the market that was a good fit. But the store-wise products has basically just allowed us to standardize and the speed of deployment is one of the key things. So, we started out with a very lengthy lead time to service ready, which is when we start charging for revenue. And if we were on a 90-day build, well, we've got a lot of professional service time, a lot of engineering time, getting that ready to go and take to the customer. And then we turn it on and we can start seeing revenue from that platform. With VersaStack, it's enabled us to accelerate how quickly we can turn that on. And we've seen that drop to literally days through standardization, elements of automation as well. Many of our environments are bespoke because we have such a wider range of different types of customers with different needs, but it allows us to take those standing building blocks, align them to their needs and deliver that service. James, we found that the MSPs are often in the middle of those discussions that customers are having on multi-cloud. So, you talked a lot about the services you build. Are they also coming to you? Do you tie into the public cloud services? Yes. Yeah, so maybe you can help expand a little bit on how that works. Five years ago, it was the public clouds are all going to kill the managed service providers and what we see is customers can't sort out half of what's going on. They've got to be able to turn to partners like you to be able to figure this out. Yeah, that's a fantastic question because I think three years ago, we'd be talking to our customers and they were, I am going to this public cloud or I am going to build this infrastructure. Whereas now they're making more informed select decisions based on what's right. The drive to the hosted office and voice platforms offered by Microsoft is a big drive and many of our ITO customers are going in that direction. But it's how we integrate that with their legacy applications. Some of the ERP solutions that some of our customers use have had millions of pounds of investment into them. And that's not something that they can just turn off and walk away from overnight. So, it's how we're integrating that and we're doing that at the network level. So, it's how we're appearing with different service providers, and integrating that and offering it to them as a solution. And what we try to position ourselves is really it's the same experience regardless of where we're placing IT consumption or workload. It doesn't matter whether it's inside our data centers, whether we're talking on one of the public cloud platforms or even on-premise. So, we have quite a few customers that still have significant presence on-premise because that's right for their business depending on what they're doing. Especially with some of the research scientists. So, you've got to deliver flexibility in your architecture. I know you talk a lot about software-defined. You guys made a big move to software-defined a couple years ago, actually. Maybe discuss how that fits into how you're servicing advanced and other clients. Sure, so IBM Storage has embraced multi-cloud for several years now. So, our solutions, well, of course, they work with IBM Cloud and IBM Cloud Private. Work with Amazon, they work with Azure, Google Cloud. And in fact, some of our products, for example, the VersaStack, not only is advanced using it, but we've got probably 40 or 50 public, small, medium-sized cloud providers that are public references for the VersaStack. And Spectrum Protect, which is our backup product, number one in the enterprise backup space, Spectrum Protect has got at least 300 cloud providers, medium, small, and big, who offer the engine underneath for their backup as a service, is Spectrum Protect. So we make sure that, whether it be our transparent cloud tiering, our cyber resiliency technology, what we do in backup archive, Object Storage works with, essentially, all cloud providers. That way, someone like James, you know, a CSP MSP, can leverage our products. And we, like I said, we have tons of public reference around VersaStack for that. But so can an enterprise. And in fact, I saw a survey recently that it was done in Europe and in North America that when you look at a roughly, the two billion U.S. size revenue and up, the average company of that size and up will use five different public cloud providers at one time, whether it be due to legal reasons, whether that be procurement, you know, the web is really the internet. And, you know, the cloud is really just, it's been around for 20-some years. So in bigger accounts, guess what is now involved? Procurement. Well, we love that you did that deal with IBM Cloud. But you are going to get a competitive quote now from Amazon and Microsoft, right? So that's driven it, legal's driven it, certain countries write the data needs to stay in that country, even if you're cloudifying it, if so to speak. So if the cloud provider doesn't have a data center there, guess what, another geography is different. And then you of course still have some large entities that still allow regional buying patterns. So they'll have three or four different cloud providers that are quote, certified by corporate, and then you can use whichever one you want. So we make sure that we can take advantage of that wave. At IBM we ride the wave, we don't fight the wave. So you've got, in that situation, you've got these multi-clouds, you've got different APIs, you've got different frameworks. How do you abstract all that complexity? You've got Cisco coming at it from a networking standpoint, IBM now with Red Hat is going to be a big player in that, that world, VMware. What do you guys do, James, in terms of simplifying all that multi-cloud complexity for people? I think with some of it, it's actually demystifying. And it's engaging with our partners to understand what the proposition is and how we can develop that and align that to, not only our own business, but more importantly to the needs of our customers. We've got some really, really talented technicians work within advance, and we've got a number of different forums that allow them to feedback their ideas. And we've got the alignments between those partners and some of those communities so that we can have an open discussion and drive some of that thinking forward about ultimately see engaging with customers. So the customer's feedback is key on how we shape and deliver not only the service to them, but also to the service to other customers. We have a number of customers that are very similar, but they may work in different spaces. Some are even competitive. So we have to tread that line very carefully and safely, but it's a good one-to-one relationship between the client service managers, the technical, so the technicians we have inside the business, having that complete 360 communication is key. And that's really the bottom two, it's communication. James, Tim, I'd like you to dig into security for us a little bit. I think we surpassed a couple of years ago. I'm not going to go to the cloud to it because it's not secure too. Oh, I understand. It's a time for me to at least reevaluate my security and most likely manage service providers, public clouds are probably more secure than what I had in my data center. But if I've got multiple environments, there's a lot of complexity there. So how do you traverse that and make sure that you've got a comprehensive security practice, not just all these point solutions for security all over the place? Yeah, so that comes down to visibility. So it's visibility, understanding where all the control points are within a given infrastructure and how the landscape looks. So we're working quite closely with a number actually of key Cisco and IBM partners as well as IBM and Cisco themselves directly to have a comprehensive offering that allows us to position to our customers. You used to once upon a time, you had one gate, right? So all we needed is some good security on your internet-facing firewall. Well now you may have eight, 10, 20, 30 of those. We need to have consistent policies across those. We need to understand how they're performing, but also potentially if there's any attack vector on one of them, how someone is trying to looking to compromise that. So centralized intelligence, and that's where we're starting to look at AI operations to gather all that information. The longer the days we'd have 20 people sitting at a room just reading screens, those 20 people now need to see the reams and reams of information instantly. Something needs to be called up to them so they can make a decision quickly and act upon it. And that's really where we're positioning ourselves in the market to differentiate and working with key partners to be able to do that. Eric, talk about your announcement, Cadence. IBM has a big show, Think, coming up in a couple weeks. Cube's going to be there, of course. What can we expect from you guys? So we're actually going to announce on the fifth before Think. We want to drive end users and our business partners to the storage campus, which is probably one of the largest campuses at IBM, Think. We'll have over 15 pedestals of demo and actually multiple demos because we have such a broad portfolio from the all flash arrays to our VersaStack offering to a whole set of modern data protection, management and control for storage, which manages and controls storage that's not ours, right? Our competitors' storage as well, and of course our software defined storage. So we're going to do a big announcement. The focus of that will be around our storage solutions. These are solutions, blueprints, reference architectures, as Jane mentioned, that use our software and our storage systems that allow reseller or end user to configure systems easily. Think of it as the ultimate recipe for that German chocolate cake, but it's the perfect recipe. It's tried, it's true, it's tested, it's been on the food channel 27 times and everybody loves it. That's what we do with our solutions blueprints. We'll have some announcements around modern data protection and obviously a big focus of IBM storage is being in the AI space. So both storage as an AI platform for AI applications and workloads, but also the incorporation of AI technology into our own storage systems and software. So we'll be having announcements around that on February 5th, going into Think, which will then be the week after in San Francisco. Great, so I'm here entrusted. Data protection plays into that. AI, intelligence, machine intelligence, and I'm also hearing heterogeneity. Multiple platforms, whether it's your storage, you said, or competitor's storage. Now does that also include sort of the cloud sphere without announcing anything? But you guys have, you know, you've seen your pictures, it's Azure, it's AWS. I mean, that continues, yeah? So absolutely, so whether it be what we do from backup and archive, right? Let's take the easy one. So we support not only the protocol of IBM Cloud Object Storage, which we acquired and allows you to have object storage either on-premise or in a cloud instantiation, but we also support the S3 protocol. So for example, our spectrum scale software, giant scale out, in fact, the two fastest supercomputers in the world use spectrum scale, over 450 petabytes running on spectrum scale, and they can tier to an object store that supports S3, or it can tier to IBM Cloud Object Storage, who have an IBM Cloud Object Storage customer, that's great. If you're using the S3 protocol, you can tier to that as well. So that's just one example. Same thing we do for cyber resiliency. So from a cyber resiliency perspective, we can do things with any cloud vendor of an air gap, right, and so you could do that A with tape, but you can also do that with the cloud. So if your cloud is your backup archive, replication repository, then you can always roll back to a known good copy. You don't have to pay the ransom, right? Or when you clean up the malware, you can roll back to a known good copy, and we provide that across all of the platforms in a number of different ways, our protect family, our new product safeguard copy for the mainframe that we announced in October. So all that allows us to be multi-cloud resiliency as well as how do we connect to multi-cloud backup archive automated tiering to all kinds of clouds, whether it be IBM cloud and of course I'm a shareholder. So I love that. But at the same time we're realistic. Lots of people use Amazon, Google, Azure, and like I said, there's thousands of mid to small cloud providers all over the world and we support them too. We engage with everyone. What about SaaS? You know, that's one of the questions we've been trying to squint through and understand is, because when you talk about five cloud providers, there's obviously infrastructures of service and then there's service providers like advanced. And then there's like a gazillion SaaS companies. Right, a lot of data in there. And a lot of data in there. How should we think about, you know, protecting that data, securing that data? Is that sort of up to the SaaS vendor and thou shalt not touch or should that be part of the scope of a storage company? Well, so what we do is we engage with the SaaS vendor. So we have a number of different SaaS companies. In fact, one of them was on theCUBE two years ago with us, they were a startup in the cybersecurity space and all of it's delivered over SaaS. So what they do is in that case, they use our flash system product line. They get the performance they need to deliver SaaS. They want no bottlenecks because obviously you have to go over the network when you're doing SaaS. And then also what they do is data encryption at rest. So when the data is brought in, because we have on our flash arrays, the capability in most of our product line, especially the flash systems, to have no performance hit on encrypt or decrypt because it's hardware embedded, they're able to have the data at rest encrypted for all their customers. That gives them a level of security when it's at rest on their site. At the same time, we give them the right performance they need to have software as a service. So we engage with all, we probably have 300, 400 different SaaS companies who are the actual software vendor and their deployment model is software as a service. By the way, we do that as well. As I mentioned over 300 cloud providers today have a backup as a service and the engineers are Spectrum Protect or Spectrum Protect Plus, but they may call it something else. In fact, we just had a public reference out from SilverString which is out in the UK and all they do is cyber resiliency, backup and archive, that's their service. They have their own product, but then Spectrum Protect and Spectrum Tech Plus is the engine underneath their product. So that's an example in this case of backup as a service which I would argue is not infrastructure but more of an application. But then true what you call real application providers like cybersecurity vendors. We have a vendor who in fact does something for all of the universities and colleges in the United States. They have about 8,000 of them, including the junior colleges and they run all their bookstores. So when you place an order, all their AR and PR, everything they do is from this SaaS vendor that's based in, they're in the Northeast and they've got like I said, about 8,000 colleges and universities in the US and Canada and they offer this, if you will, bookstore as a SaaS service and the students use it, the university uses it and of course the bookstores are designed to, you know, at least make a little money for the university and they all use that. So that's another example and they use our flash systems as well and then they back up that data internally with Spectrum Protect because obviously it's the financial data as well as the inventory of all of these bookstores all over the United States at the collegiate level. Now James, we got to wrap but just sort of give you the final word. UK specialist, right? So Brexit really doesn't affect you. Is that a fair statement or? Well, it will do, yes. How so? I think it's too early to tell. No one really knows. I think that's what all the debates are about is trying to understand that. And for us, I think we're just watching and observing. Yeah, so it's- It's staying focused on your customers, obviously. So no predictions as to what's going to happen. I was- Not for me. A few weeks ago, I got hurt both sides. You know, oh, it's definitely going to happen. Oh, it might not happen, but. Okay, again, give you the last word. You know, what's your focus over the next, you know, 12, 18 months? So our focus is really about visibility. So Dave touched on that when we were talking about the security. For customers, understanding where their data is, where their exposure points are, that's our key focus. And VersaStack and the IBM store-wise product underpin all of those offerings that we have. And that will continue to be so moving forward. Guys, great to see you. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE and our pleasure hosting you. Great, thank you. I really appreciate it. You're really welcome. All right, keep it right there. We'll be back. Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman from Cisco Live in Barcelona.