 Live from San Jose, it's theCUBE. Presenting Big Data Silicon Valley. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media and its ecosystem partners. Good morning, welcome to theCUBE. We are on day two of our coverage of our event, Big Data SV. I'm Lisa Martin with my cohost, Dave Vellante. We're down the street from the Strada Data Conference. This is theCUBE's 10th Big Data event and we had a great day yesterday learning a lot from myriad guests on very different nuances of big data journey where things are going. We're excited to welcome back to theCUBE an alumni, Octavian Tanase, the senior vice president of data on tab from NetApp. Octavian, welcome back to theCUBE. Glad to be here. So you've been at the Strada Data Conference for the last couple of days. From a big data perspective, what are some of the things that you're hearing in terms of from a customer's perspective on what's working, what challenges, opportunities? So I'm very excited to be here and learn about the innovation of our partners in the industry and share with our partners and our customers what we're doing to enable them to derive more value out of the data. The reality is that data has become the 21st century gold or oil that powers the business and everybody's looking to apply new techniques. A lot of times machine learning, deep learning to draw more value out of the data, make decisions, better decisions and competing in the marketplace. Octavian, Octavian, you've been at NetApp now eight years and I've been watching NetApp as we were talking about offline for decades and I've seen the ebb and flow and this company has transformed many, many times. The latest, you were obviously, cloud came in, flash came into play and then you were also going through a major transition in the customer base to cluster it on tap and you've seemed to negotiate that. NetApp is really back thriving, stocks up. What's happening at NetApp? What's the culture like these days? Give us the update. Well, I think we've been very fortunate to have a CEO like George Korean who has been really focused on helping us do basically fewer things better. Really focus on our core business, simplify our operations and continue to innovate and this is probably the area that I'm most excited about, right? It's always good to make sure that you accelerate the business, make it simpler for your customers and your partners to do business with you but what you have to do, it's innovate. We are a product company, we are passionate about innovation and I believe that we are innovating with more pace than many of the startups in the space so that's probably the most exciting thing that has been part of our transformation. So let's talk about the big data. So back in the day, if you had a big data problem, you would buy a big Unix box, maybe buy some Oracle licenses and you try to put all your data into that box and that became your data warehouse. The brilliance of Hadoop was, hey, we can leave the data where it is, there's too much data to put into the box and we're going to bring five megabytes to code to a petabyte of data and the other piece of it is CFOs loved it because we're going to reduce the cost of our expensive data warehouse and we're going to buy off-the-shelf components, white box servers and off-the-shelf disk drives, we're going to put that together and life will be good. Well, as things matured, like the old client server days, it got very expensive, you needed enterprise grade, so where does NetApp fit into that equation? Because originally, big storage companies like NetApp, they weren't part of the equation. Has that changed? Absolutely, and one of the things that has enabled that transformation, that change is we made a deliberate decision to focus on software defined and making sure that the on-tap operating system is available wherever data is being created, at the edge on an IoT device in the traditional data center or in the cloud. So we are in a unique position to enable analytics, big data, whatever that data, whatever those applications reside. Now, one of the things that we've recently done is we partnered with IDC and what the study, what the analysis has shown is that deploying an analytics, a Hadoop or NoSQL type of solution on top of NetApp, it's half the cost of that. So if you, when you consider the cost of the servers, the licenses that you're going to have to pay for these implementations, commercial implementations of Hadoop, as well as the storage and the data infrastructure, you are much better off choosing NetApp than a wide box type of solution. Let's unpack that a little bit because if I infer correctly from what you said, so normally you would say, okay, the operational costs are going to be dramatically lower. It's easier to manage a professional system like a NetApp on-tap that's integrated, great software. But am I hearing it correctly? You're saying that the acquisition costs are actually less than if I'm buying white costs. So a lot of people are going to be skeptical about that, say, Octavia, no way. It's cheaper to buy in a white box stuff. Defend that statement. Oh, absolutely. If you're looking at the whole solution that includes the server and the storage, what NetApp enables you to do, if you're running the solution on top of on-tap, you reduce the need for so many servers. If you reduce that number, you also reduce the licensing cost. Moreover, if you actually look at the core value proposition of the storage layer there, DAZ typically makes three copies of the data. We don't. We are very greedy and we're making sure that you're using shared storage and we are applying a bunch of storage efficiency techniques to further dedupe, compress, compact that data for world-class storage efficiency. So cost efficiency is obviously a great benefit for any company when they're especially evolving from a digital perspective. What are some of the business-level benefits? You mentioned speed a minute ago. What is data on-tap and even on-tap in the cloud enabling your enterprise customers to achieve at the business level, maybe from faster time to market, identifying with machine learning and AI, new products. Give me an example of maybe a customer that you think really articulates the value that on-tap in the cloud can deliver. So one of the things that is really important is to have your data management capability, whatever the data is being produced. So on-tap being consumed either as a VM or a service, I don't know if you've seen some of the partnerships that we have with AWS and Azure, we're able to offer the same rich data management capabilities, not only in the traditional data center, but in the cloud. So what that really enables customers to do is to simplify and have the same operating system, the same data management platform that for both the second platform traditional applications as well as for the third platform applications. I've seen a company like Adobe be very successful in deploying their infrastructure, their services, not only on-prem in their traditional data center, but using on-tap cloud. So we have more than about 1,500 customers right now that have adopted on-tap in the AWS cloud. What are you saying in terms of the adoption of Flash and particularly interested in the intersection of Flash adoption and the developer angle? Because we've seen in certain instances organizations are able to share data off of Flash much more efficiently than you would be, for instance, off a spinning disk. Have you seen a developer impact in your customer base? Absolutely. I think most of customers initially have adopted Flash because of high throughput and low latency. I think over time customers really understood and identified with the overall value proposition and cost of ownership of Flash that enables them to consolidate multiple workloads in a smaller footprint, right? So that enables you to then reduce the cost to operate that infrastructure. And it really gives you a range of applications that you can deploy that you are never able to do that. Everybody's looking to do in place or in inline analytics that now are possible because of this fast media. Folks are looking to accelerate old applications in which they cannot invest anymore but they just want to run faster. Flash also tends to be more reliable than traditional storage. So customers definitely appreciate that. Fewer things could go wrong. So overall, the value proposition of Flash, it's all encompassing and we believe that in the near future, Flash will be the de facto standard in everybody's data center, whether it's on-prem or in the cloud. How about backup and recovery in big data? We obviously, the enterprise is very concerned about data protection. What's similar in big data? What's different and what's NetApp's angle on that? I think data protection and data security will never stop being important to our customers. Security is top of mind for everybody in the industry and it's a source of resume changing events if you would and they're typically not promotions. So we have invested a tremendous deal in certifications for HIPAA, for FIPS. We are enabling encryption both at rest and in flight. We've done a lot of work to make sure that the encryption can happen in the software layer to make sure that we give customers best storage class efficiency. And what we're also leveraging is the innovation that ONTAP has done over many years to protect the data, replicate its snapshots, adhering the data to the cloud. These are techniques that we're commonly using to reduce the cost of ownership, also protect the data that customers deploy. So security is still a hot topic, right? And like you said, it probably always will be. But it's a shared responsibility, right? So customers, leveraging NetApp safe for on-prem hybrid, also using Azure or AWS, who's your target audience? If you're talking to the guys and gals that are still managing storage, are you also having the CISO or the security guys come in and gals to understand, all right, we've got this deployment in Azure or AWS. We're going to bring in ONTAP to facilitate this. There's a shared responsibility of security. Who's at the table from your perspective in your customers that you need to help understand how they facilitate true security? It's definitely been a transformative event where more and more people in IT organizations are involved in the decisions that are required to deploy the applications. There was a time when we would talk only to the storage admin. After a while, we started talking to the application admin, the virtualization admin. And now you're talking to the line of business who has that vested interest to make sure that they can harness the power of the data in their environment. So you have the CISO, you have the traditional infrastructure people, you have the app administration, and you have the app owner, the business owner that are all at the table that are coming in looking to choose the best-of-breed solution for their data management. What are the conversations like with your CXO executives? Everybody talks about digital transformation. It's kind of an overused term, but there's real substance when you actually peel the onion. What are you seeing as NetApp's role in affecting digital transformations within your customer base? I think we have a vision of how we can help enterprises take advantage of the digital transformation and adopt it. I think we have three tenants of that vision. Number one is we're helping customers harness the power of the cloud. Number two, we're looking to enable them to future-proof their investments and build the next generation data center. And number three, nobody starts with a fresh slate, so we're looking to help customers modernize their current infrastructure through storage. We have a lot of expertise in storage. We've helped over time, customers time and again adopt disruptive technologies in non-destructive ways. We're looking to adopt these technologies and trends on behalf of our customers and then help them use them in a seamless, safe way. And continue their evolution to identify new revenue streams, new products, new opportunities, and even probably give other lines of business access to this data that they need to understand is there value here? If so, how can we harness it faster than our competitors, right? Absolutely. It's all about deriving value out of the data. I think earlier I called it the goal of the 21st century. This is a trend that will continue. I believe there will be no enterprise or sector that won't focus on using machine learning, deep learning analytics to derive more value out of the data to find more customer touchpoints, to optimize their business, to really compete in the marketplace. Data plus AI plus cloud economics are the new innovation drivers of the next 10, 20 years. Completely agree. Well, Tavian, thanks so much for spending time with us this morning, sharing what's new at NetApp, some of the visions that you guys have and also some of the impact that you're making with customers. We look forward to having you back on the program in the near future. Thank you, appreciate having the time. And for my co-host, Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live on day two of coverage of our event, Big Data SV. We are at this really cool venue. Forge your tasting room, come down here, join us, get to hear all these great conversations. Stick around and we'll be right back with our next guest after a short break.