 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re-invent 2020, sponsored by Intel, AWS, and our community partners. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re-invent 2020, the digital version. I'm Lisa Martin. I've got a CUBE alumni with me here. Now Ronan Schwartz joins me from NetApp, the SVP and GM of Cloud Volumes. Ronan, it's nice to see that you're doing well and healthy. Thank you. I'm glad to join you, even though it's virtually. I hope it will be fun as well. Yes, it will. And that's one of the nice things with this time that we're all trying to figure out is we have technologies like this to be able to still engage with partners, with customers, and there's been so much innovation that's gone. So I'd love to get your perspective on what's going on with them. I know you guys had NetApp insight just a few weeks or a month or so ago, but talk to me about kind of some of the things that you're seeing in the market from a cloud adoption perspective. So cloud adoption is actually not new. What we're seeing is a continuous acceleration of the cloud adoption. We kind of started by the fact that we are remote and I think definitely the pandemic, the need to work remote, engage remotely and so on and actually even accelerated the adoption of cloud. It's something like that could even exist. I think what we are seeing in NetApp and in the market in general is very fast adoption of cloud, the movement of the core services, core workloads into the cloud and organization that are not just adopting cloud, but actually innovating in the cloud faster than ever. What's been some of the conversations like with customers? Because I know, you know, we've talked a lot about this in the last nine months, this acceleration of digital transformation and customers needing to pivot multiple times, not just survive during this time period or keep the lights on but really be able to thrive and push their business forward. Talk to me about some of the customer conversations you have. Is this more about business level conversation right now with respect to moving to cloud from a strategic standpoint because as every business suddenly had to, everyone's got to work from home. That was a big shift. It is a major shift and it's also for some organization, it's a very untrivial change that needs to happen to the cadence of doing a business to the specific setting. And I think we all as individual kind of feel the change, right? I sometimes have like this huge urge to sit with my team and kind of whiteboard what needs to happen next. And it's a little bit different to do it when it is a virtual whiteboard. But if I take it into the conversation that we're having with customers, I think customers have moved from the first few months when it was really about survival and how do I make the basic things work and ensure continuity into the place that organization are looking to leverage the change and increase innovation, increase the transformation that I've already been going through. When it comes to these things, I really want to, there is a really good article from AWS that I want to share that is really talking about the six R of cloud adoption. And I really like that as an analogy because it talks about the fact that when you have cloud applications, you have the opportunity to rehost, really list and shift them. You have the opportunity to replatform, really design them from the cloud from scratch. You have the ability to refactor the applications meaning that you're actually adopting certain cloud components. And in some cases you're actually repurchasing or really or retiring applications and in some places you just retain them on premise. So I think the organization are looking into their current situation and they're basically choosing their strategy, not their strategy of adopting the cloud but their strategy of how to move specific workloads into the cloud. Right, to take advantage of many things including cost optimization. So talk to me about the NetApp partnership. You guys have been partners with AWS for seven plus years now. NetApp CloudVolume platform for AWS. Talk to me about that. So NetApp has been a long-term partner of AWS and the data is in the core of the cloud business and basically moving data to the cloud is also super important. And NetApp is a company that has been a leader in cloud and data services that in general have been there from almost day one. We've been building the capabilities from the cloud volume on top to the cloud volume service which is a native service in AWS in the last few years. Basically our latest announcement that we made in our insight event is putting all of that in a single platform, the cloud volume, the cloud volumes platform and basically optimizing it for the AWS users meaning that the user with no additional effort can store data, receive access to the data and the performance needed for the right application but also enjoy out of the box data services like backup, like disaster recovery, like compliance and like caching and so on really giving the different use cases, the full support needed. What are some of the changes in use cases that you've seen when we talk about compliance? We just had another expansion of the California Consumer Privacy Act on our ballot during this last general election. We've seen ransomware on the rise so talking about backup has been a big topic. Talk to me about some of those use cases that are shifting that you see that NetApp is helping customers address. This is an excellent question and sometimes people treat storage as infrastructure but the truth is that the data on that storage is actually one of the most important assets that has moved into the cloud and really building your data fabric with the right level of governance and insurance for everybody is a really important thing. We just talked about like all of this acceleration of moving into the cloud. What that means is that the core data services are no longer optional. They could not be left to a specific implementation desire or no desire. They have to be built into the platform and kind of be ensured in a continuous way. Absolutely that data is gold or the new oil if companies can protect it secure access it and make sure that they can actually extract insights. And as we talk about and Gartner and analysts like show the projections of the volumes of data just growing and growing and growing. And now we've got companies that have gone from maybe 100% on site operations to maybe 100% remote. We've got the expansion of cloud and the edge. There's a lot of changes going on there. And one of the things that we do know that's happening from an IT perspective is it's getting more complex. So talk to me about how you're working with customers to make things simpler as data volumes grow and as they're adjusting to a new world. So sometimes maybe this is my opportunity to definitely correct one of the thinking that some of the AWS customers might have on NetApp which is it's focused about storage only. The truth is that there is a variety of services around infrastructure that we do that we go way beyond storage. I kind of mentioned in my last answer a few of them like disaster recovery, like backup and we just started to touch upon compliance. The ability to understand the data that is moving into the cloud, the exposure to PII, PCI, and how does it fit the different regulation. But NetApp is also offering optimized computing with basically our spot acquisitions but by NetApp technology. We're also offering the full virtual desktop service and I'll use the last one as kind of the perfect example. If you would like to empower 1000 people to get their virtual desktops available, it is become a matter of a single click and a full automation is giving you not only the virtual desktop but also a dedicated storage that is optimized for that. So we're looking into a variety of services all of them optimized to work on the AWS cloud. All of that with out of the box very easy configuration that empower everybody to basically do the right thing in the clouds. So when you're in customer situations and conversations which I know you still are obviously virtually and you're saying that we want to make sure that we really clarify. The NetApp has evolved dramatically since 1992. We've been talking about that for a long time. I used to work at NetApp and marketing back in the day but when you're having this customer conversations I actually know giving a customer an example of some successful customers who really understand the value, this whole breadth of value that NetApp delivers especially in AWS environments. I would divide the customers in a high level into three categories. You're seeing basically application developers where the goal to deliver their application as fast as possible. And their need is not just to do it as fast as possible but they're trying to do it in the most efficient cost effective way possible. So the net of conversation with them is how can infrastructure empower them to do things better, faster and cheaper. And then there is actually a list of these capabilities that are supporting them very, very well. An example will be that today a lot of the new developments are done especially by the cloud natives are done leveraging Kubernetes. So NetApp is giving you Kubernetes optimized storage, Kubernetes monitoring and resource optimization and also if the ocean capability is the full ability to manage and optimize your containers. So this is kind of one group, the developers group and there is actually thousands of these customers that are leveraging NetApp on AWS to deliver that. I think the second group is central IT and central IT have a really tough job these days. They needed the same time to support the innovation as we discussed in the first use case but also the lift and shift and move of the critical applications. When we're looking, when we're talking to central IT we're guaranteeing to them the same latency or closes possible latency, the same performance, the same scale that they had on premise and even more in the cloud. So this is what allows the largest customers in the world to move their SAP from on-premise to the cloud. Really, I think that the top five, at least five of the top 10 SAP applications are leveraging NetApp as part of their cloud journey. Another example and maybe the third example is basically organization where they're putting an innovation in the cloud in parallel to their existing on-premise example. There I think one of our reference customers is Blackboard, the vendor that is offering something very relevant these days which is remote learning and capabilities like that. Well, they have actually built a very extensive on-premise environment. A lot of their new capabilities, a lot of the innovation is delivered in the cloud where scale is faster, the resources are available are much easier, but they still need the power of the best of breed and storage technology. They still are looking for cost-effective optimization and this is where NetApp is helping them. How do you kind of bridge the different groups? Talked about the developer groups and what they need and what they expect in a regular world versus central IT whose job as you said is now more challenging with this spread. How does NetApp help those two groups come together and really evaluate the opportunities that this new situation provides and how NetApp can help them accelerate that? So this is basically where the platform capabilities are playing a role. A developer and also the DevOps organization are able to consume the right capabilities that they need in order to get their job faster while central IT can go into the same platform and basically manage it from security, from backup, from disaster recovery and from performance, general performance perspective, including very easy ability and automation to move the entire applications from Dev to QA and into production. So the abilities of basically the different users who have an optimized experience when the developers are looking for productivity, time to market, maybe even the cost effectiveness, DevOps is looking for the automation, the agility and basically the life cycle and then central IT is looking to optimize cost into the overall resourcing and really delivering it to multiple groups. Single platform give you everything in one place. Make it sound so easy. So last question as we go into the year 2021, remember that joke last year everyone said 2020, it's hindsight, we're going to know everything. I could care to forget a whole bunch of things but as we move forward and I think we're all counting on the clock changing and bringing in good things, we've seen a lot of change. We've also seen a lot of opportunities uncovered and you've talked about some of those. Talk to me about some of the things that NetApp and AWS customers can expect next year. So we've been innovating together very, very fast. If I just look into the last few months then you've seen AWS pushing outposting to the market as kind of the edge of the cloud. NetApp have been an early partner of that kind of coming together and saying that and really offering the best storage as part of the outpost. I think what you'll see is as we go into 2021 is the fast innovation and the expansion of the offering is going to continue into 2021. The things that both AWS and NetApp already have in progress are kind of ensuring that. So that wouldn't be a big risk for me to share that. I can already see the pipeline as it is going into the customer. I think the second thing that you'll see is a lot of focus on optimization and a lot of that optimization done automatically for the customer without the customer need to proactively define and set things. I think it is a very, very strong trend where both optimization for scale, optimization for performance, optimization for cost are kind of built into the offering. I think as we're scaling into the cloud you'll see significant growth in the amount of offerings coming from vendors including NetApp and AWS but also increased consumption of the customers that will expect more and more of it to be automatic. I think the last thing that I think we are going to see accelerating in 2021 is system of record moving into the cloud. The innovation is already done in the cloud first approach in almost all cases but what we're going to see is significant acceleration in the amount of system of records moving into the cloud, analytics moving into the cloud and we're going to see it done by mainstream companies in a very, very large scale. Lots of things to look forward to. Ronan, thank you for joining me on theCUBE today and sharing what's the latest updates with NetApp and AWS and the opportunities for your customers. We appreciate your time. Thank you, Lisa, it was a pleasure to meet you virtually. Likewise, maybe sometime at some event and we'll come back and we'll get to meet in person. I hope so. For Ronan Schwartz, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE.