 Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering NetApp Insight 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. Welcome to theCUBE. We are live at NetApp Insight 2018. I'm Lisa Martin and I'm joined by Stu Miniman. Stu and I are going to be here all day. This is the third annual insight with customers and partners and NetAppians and Analyst Impress. Stu, this is the second time theCUBE has been here. We just came from the keynote and the interesting thing that Steve and I both noticed was, at least the first 75 minutes of the keynote that we got to see today, none of the product news was announced. It was really about strategy, hashtag data driven, how NetApp wants to enable their customers from DreamWorks to oil and gas companies, healthcare, et cetera, to use data, develop a data strategy to move their businesses into the digital age. Yeah, Lisa, first of all, great to be working with you again. Always. And I'm excited. Yeah, second year that we've been at this show, a third of the NetApp insights that we've done because we've done both the US and the European shows. My first time actually coming to a NetApp event. I remember, gosh, I'm showing my age. I remember when NetApp started, network storage was becoming a thing. NetApp really rose its ascendancy with file systems and NAS. And FAS is the one operating system to rule them all. Really grew into a very sizable business. The company's about $6 billion worth of revenue. And I think somewhere about 10,000 employees. So today, NetApp is really the largest independent storage company after Dell took EMC off as an independent now. So it's interesting to watch. George Currian got on stage and talked about digital transformation. And one of the things I'm really interested in looking at is how is NetApp doing in that transformation? Because most people, when I was talking to some customers at some of the meals and walking the floor and things like that, NetApp is my filer company. I buy boxes. Sometimes I'm buying some software and there's some things there, but I'm the guy that runs NetApp gear, if you will. And that transformation, what is the NetApp of 2019 and beyond? Are they a storage company? Are they a hybrid multicloud software-led something-something company in the future? Are they a services company? There's a nice ecosystem here. So that's what I'm excited to dig into. And George Currian, he and the keynote this morning laid out the four things that companies need to do for digital transformation. It's something we'll dig into. But yeah, I had to go search NetApp on the news release and be like, oh, cloud insights and on tap in the cloud and HCI and partnership news and things like that. So there definitely is some news. They just didn't talk about it in the keynote. Yeah, it was an interesting keynote for me and as theCUBE, we go to a lot of keynotes many times a year and this was an interesting start to it. You know, it's clear from the NetApp messaging on netapp.com, NetApp Insights, things that are being put out on the media that they're really putting cloud at the heart of their strategy. The discussions and the keynote this morning included futurist, Gerd Leonard, who's going to be on the program with us in just a few minutes. Interesting take on data, humanity. The only thing that NetApp talked about was about 75 minutes into the keynote this morning was when Anthony Lai got on. He's going to be on the show later today talking about the data fabric. And I think some of the messages that NetApp is wanting to get out is that data fabric is transforming from a vision into an architecture kind of foundationally to enable organizations to employ those four principles of digital transformation that George Curian talked about. Digital transformation requires IT transformation, speed is the new scale, some interesting thoughts and concepts. They're more conceptual. I liked the DreamWorks customer. I think she's a great speaker. Kind of talked also about how DreamWorks, everybody knows DreamWorks track, how to train your dragon, are becoming more, more thing from a customer to an engineering partner. So that was an interesting kind of, I wouldn't even say undertone, but part of the story today. Yeah, Lisa, absolutely. When you look at traditionally, not only NetApp, but all the storage companies, where they sold to, it was the storage budget and oh, how do I manage with the explosion of data and that growth and what's the performance, the speeds and feeds, the price per terabyte, all that kind of stuff. I thought we could actually take George Curian's four characteristics and say, how's NetApp doing? First is digital transformation requires IT transformation. I heard yesterday in some of the sessions they actually had some of NetApp's IT people to talk about how they're leveraging and using new technologies. We talked about speed is the new scale. Well, how fast is NetApp? We have a number of acquisitions. There was the big solid-fire acquisition, which is now fully part of the portfolio. They had a Kubernetes company that they bought recently. They've had management companies that they've bought. How fast is NetApp keeping up with the pace of what they're doing? Hybrid multicloud, I think NetApp first of all was really what you would call software defined before that was a thing. And they were very early in jumping on this wave of we need to play in the cloud environment. Most of the storage companies really lined up and it was like, oh wait, Amazon's the competition, you can't do that. But NetApp was partnering with Amazon for many years. Now I'd like to see more proof points as to what customers are doing, how are they doing it differently. But absolutely, we're going to have Microsoft Azure on the program with Anthony Lai this afternoon. I know we're going to be talking about Amazon, we're going to be talking about Kubernetes and Istio, where does NetApp fit into that environment? I've been going to the KubeCon shows for a couple of years and storage is actually lagging in that space. When you talk about having persistent data, that's not something we're there with. We spent more than a decade trying to fix storage and networking in the virtualized environments and NetApp played a strong role in helping on the storage piece there. So it'd be great to see how they are going to play into the Kubernetes and Istio discussion. And the last piece is they said, moving from data center to data fabric, which is the closest tie to the products as you said to what they're doing. Well Stu, we have a jam-packed schedule today, all day, we're going to be able to unpack a lot of things from NetApp, execs, to their branding folks, to customers. So Stu and I will be right back with our next guest. Again, the Kube live from NetApp Insight 2018 will be right back.