 Good morning everybody, welcome back to Las Vegas. This is day four of theCUBE's wall-to-wall coverage of our Super Bowl, aka AWS re-invent 2022. I'm here with my co-host, Paul Gillan. My name is Dave Vellante. Sanjay Poonan is in the house, CEO and president of Cohesity, sitting in as our guest market watcher, market analyst, you know, deep expertise new to the job at Cohesity and it was kind enough to sit in and help us break down what's happening at re-invent. But Paul, first thing, this morning we heard from Werner Vogels. He was basically given a masterclass on system design. It reminded me of mainframes years ago when we used to, you know, bury through those IBM blue books and red books. You remember those Sanjay? That's how we learned back then, right? But it made me think, wow, now, you know, IBM's from a systems design, nobody talks about IBM anymore, nobody talks about Amazon. So you wonder 20 years from now, you know, what it's going to be, but what Werner's amazing. He pulled out a 24 year old document that he had written early in Amazon's evolution about synchronous design or about essentially distributed architectures that turned out to be prophetic. His big thing was nature is asynchronous. So systems are asynchronous. Synchronous is an illusion. It's an abstraction. It's kind of interesting, but you know. Yeah, I mean, I've had syndromes for things, timeless architecture. Werner's an absolute legend. I mean, when you think about folks who've had, you know, impact on technology, you think of people like Johnny Ive in design. You got to think about people like Werner in architecture. And that's the fact that Andy and the team have been able to keep them engaged that long. I pay attention to his keynote. Peter DeSantis has obviously been very, very influential. And then of course, you know, Adam did a good job, you know, watching from, you know, having watched as I was at the first AWS re-invent conference as a time was present at SAP. And there was only 1000 people at this event, okay. Andy had me on stage. I think I was one of the first guests of any tech company in 2011. And to see now this become like, it's a mecca. It's a mother of all IT events. And watch sort of even the transition from Andy to Adam is very special. I got to catch some of Rubo's keynote. So while there's some new people in the mix here, this has become a force of nature. And the last time I was here was 2019 before COVID, watch the last two ones online. But it feels like, I don't know what you guys think. It feels like it's back to 2019 levels. I was here in 2019. I feel like this was bigger than 2019, but some people have said that's about the same. 60,000 versus 50,000. It was a little bigger than 2019. But it feels like it's more active. And then last year, Sanjay, you weren't here, but it was 25,000, which was amazing because it was right in that little space between Omicron before Omicron hit. But you know, let me ask you a question. And this is really more of a question about Amazon's maturity. I know you've been following it since early days. But the way I get the question, number one question I get from people is, how is Amazon AWS going to be different under Adam than it was under Andy? I mean, Adam's not new because he was here before. Some sense he knows the Amazon culture from prior when he was running sales and marketing prior, but then he took a time off and came back. I mean, this will always be, I think, somewhat Andy's baby, right? Because he was the thing, and I sent him a text, he should be really proud of what he accomplished. But I think he also asked him, when I saw him a few weeks ago, are you going to come to me? And I said, no, I want to leave this to be Adam's show. And Adam's going to have a slightly different view of him. And his keynotes are probably half the time. It's a little bit more vision. There was a lot more customer stories at the beginning of it, taking you back to the inspirational pieces of it. I think you're going to see them probably pulling up the stack and not just focus on infrastructure. Many of their platform services are involved. Many of their even application services, I'm surprised when I talk to customers, like Amazon Connect, their sort of call center type technologies, an app layer, it's getting a lot. I mean, I've talked to a couple of Fortune 500 companies that are moving off Avaya to connect. I mean, it's happening and I did not know that. So it's, you know, I think as they move up the stack, the platform's gotten more, the data-centric stack has got, and you know, in the area we're working with Cohesity Security Data Protection, they're an investor in our company. So this is an important, you know, both, I think tech player and a partner for many companies like us. I wonder, you know, the marketplace, there's been a big push on the marketplace by all the cloud companies the last couple of years. Do you see that disrupting the way software, enterprise software is sold? Oh, for sure. I mean, you have to be a ostrich ahead in the sand to not see this wave happening. I mean, what's it, $150 billion worth of revenue, even though the growth rates dipped a little bit the last quarter or so, it's still, aggregatively, between Amazon and Azure and Google, you know, 30% growth. And I think we're still in the second or third inning off a grand one trillion or two trillion of IT, shifting not all of it to the cloud, but significantly faster. So if you add up all of the big kings of the on-premise world, they're, you know, they got to a certain size that growth is stable but stalling. These guys are growing significantly faster. And then if you add on top of them, platform companies, the data companies, Snowflake, MongoDB, Databricks, you know, Datadog, and then apps companies on top of that, I think the move to the cloud is inevitable. In SaaS companies, I don't know why you would ever implement a CRM solution on-prem. It's all gone to the cloud. That happened 15 years ago. I mean, within three, five years of the advent of Salesforce. And the same thing in HR. Why would you deploy a HR solution now? Got Workday and got, you know, others that are, so some of those apps markets are just never coming back to an on-prem capability. Sanjay, I want to ask you, you built a reputation for being able to, you know, forecast accurately, hit your plan, you know, you hit your numbers, awesome operator, even though you have a, you know, technology degree, which, you know, that's a two-tool star, a multi-tool star. But I call it the slingshot economy. This is like, I mean, I've seen probably more downturns than anybody in here, you know, given, well, maybe, maybe. Maybe me. You and I both. I've never seen anything like this, where visibility is so unpredictable, the economy is slingshotting. It's like, oh, hurry up, go, COVID, go, go, go, build, build, build. Then pull back. And now, going forward, now pulling back. Slutman said, you know, on the call, hey, the guide is the guide. He said, we put it out there, do our best to hit it. But you had CrowdStrike at issues, you know, mid-market, service now. I saw McDermott on the other day on the TV. I just want to pay, you know, buy from the guy. He's so wonderful, right? But mixed, mixed results, Salesforce, you know, octa now, pre-announcing, hey, they're going to be, or announcing, you know, better visibility forward guide. Elastic kind of got hit really hard. HPE and Dell actually doing really well in the enterprise. Of course, Dell getting killed in the client. But so, what are you seeing out there? How, as an executive, do you deal with such poor visibility? I think, listen, what the last two or three years have taught us is, you know, with the supply chain crisis, with the surge that people thought you may need of, you know, spending potentially in the pandemic, you have to start off with your tech platform being 10X better than everybody else and differentiate, differentiate, because in a crowded market, but even in a market that's getting tougher, if you're not differentiating constantly through technology innovation, you're going to get left behind. So, you named a few places, they're all technology innovators, but even if some of them are having challenges. And then I think you're constantly asking yourselves, how do you move from being a point product to a platform with more and more services where you're getting, you know, many of them moving really fast? Nikesh Arora, I like him a lot. He's probably one of the most savvy operators also that I respect. He calls these speedboats. And, you know, his core platform started off with the firewall network security, but he's built now a very credible cloud security, cloud AI security business. And I think that's how you need to be thinking as a tech executive. I mean, if you've got core, here's your core beachhead 10X better than everybody else. And as you move to adjacencies in these new platforms, have you got now speedboats that are getting to a point where they are competitive advantage? Then as you think of the go-to-market perspective, it really depends on where you are as a company. For a company like our size, we need partners a lot more. Because if we're going to stand on the shoulders of giants, like Isaac Newton said, I see clearly because I stand the shoulders of giants, I need to really go and cultivate Amazon so they become our lead partner in cloud. And then appropriately, Microsoft and Google, where I need to. And security, part of what we announced last week was, last month, yeah, last couple of weeks ago was the data security alliance with the biggest security players. What was I trying to do that? First time I've ever done it in my industry was get Palo Alto, CrowdStrike, Wallace, Tenable, CyberArk, Splunk, all to build an alliance with me so I could stand on their shoulders and them helping me. If you're a bigger company, you're constantly asking yourself, how do you make sure you're getting your gammas on? They're top 100 customers spending more with that. So I think the playbook evolves and I'm watching some of these best companies through this time navigate through this. And I think leadership is going to be tested in enormously interesting ways. I mean, Snowflake is really interesting because they, 67% growth, which is, I mean, that's best in class for a company that's $2 billion. But their guide was still pretty aggressive. So it's like, when it's good times, you go, hey, we can guide conservatively and no, we can beat it. But when you're not certain, you can't dial down too far because your investors start to bail on you. It's a really tricky algorithm. But Dave, I think, listen, at the end of the day, I mean, every CEO should not be worried about the short-term up and down the stock price. You're building a long-term multi-billion dollar company. In the case of Frank, he has, I think I shot to a $10 billion, you know, analytics data warehousing, data management company on the back of that platform because he's eyeing the market that not just terror data occupies today, but now Oracle occupies us or other databases, right? So his time as it grows bigger, you're going to have some of these things, but that market's big. I think same with Palo Alto. I mean, Datadog's another company, 75% growth at 20% margins, like almost rule of 95. When they're going after not just the observability market, they're eating up the SIM market, security analytics, the APM market. So I think, you know, you look at these case studies of companies who are going from point product to platforms and are steadily able to grow into new tabs. You know, to me, that's very inspiring. That's what I seek to do at Arkon. I get that it's a marathon, but, you know, when you were at VMware, weren't you looking at the stock price every day just out of curiosity? I mean, listen. You weren't micromanaging it. You do, but at the end of the day, and you certainly look at the days of earnings and so on and so forth because you want to create shareholder value. I'm not saying that you should not, but I think an obsession with that, you know, in a short term, makes you, you know, sort of myopically focused on what may not be the right thing the long term. Now, in the long arc of time, if you're not creating shareholder value, look at what happened to Steve Bomber. You needed a Satya to come in to change things and he's created a lot of value. Yeah, big time. But I think in the short term, my comments were really on the quarter to quarter, but over a four, eight, 12 quarter, if companies are growing and creating profitable growth, they're going to get the valuation they deserve. Do you think the, I want to ask you about something that Arvin Krishna said in the previous IBM earnings call, that IT is deflationary and therefore it is resistant to the macroeconomic headwinds. So IT spending should actually thrive in an adverse economic climate. Do you think that's true? Not all firms of IT. I pay very close attention to surveys from whether it's the industry analysts or the Morgan Stanley's or Goldman Sachs, the financial analysts. And I think there's a glut in certain sectors that will get pulled back. Traditional view is when the economies are growing, people spend on the top line, front office stuff, sales, marketing. If you go and look at just the Cloud 100 companies, which are the hardest private companies and maybe with the public market companies, there's way too many companies focused on sales and marketing. Way too many. I think during a downsizing and recession, that's going to probably shrink some because they were all built for the 2009 to 2021 era where it was all about the top line. Okay, maybe there's now a proposition for companies who are focused on cost optimization, supply chain visibility. Security's been intangible that I think is going to continue to have an investment. So I tell, listen, if you are a tech investor or if you're an operator, pay attention to CIO priorities. And right now in our business at Cohesity, part of the reason we've embraced things like ransomware protection, there is a big focus on security. And by intelligently being a management and a security company around data, I do believe we'll continue to be extremely relevant to CIO budgets. There's a 20 ransomware attempts every second. So things of that kind make you relevant in a buying. You have to stay relevant to a buying pattern or else you lose momentum. And I think what's happening now is actually IT spending is pretty good. I mean, I track this stuff pretty closely. It's just that expectations were so high and now you're seeing earnings estimates come down and so okay, and then yeah, you've got the inflationary factors and your discounted cash flows, but the market's actually pretty good, you know, relative to other downturns that if this is not it, we're not actually not in a downturn, not yet anyway, it may be. All right. Oh, there's a valuation down there. You have to prepare, not on sales. When I was on CNBC, I said, listen, it's a little bit like that story of Joseph, seven years of fees, seven years of famine. You have to prepare for potentially the worst and if it's not the worst, you're in good shape. So will it be a recession 2023? Maybe, you know, high interest rates, inflation, war in Russia, Ukraine, maybe things do get bad, but if you're belt tightening, if you're focused on operational excellence, if it's not a recession, you're pleasantly surprised. If it is one, you're prepared for it. All right, I'm going to put you in the spot and ask you for predictions, expert analysis on the World Cup. What do you think? Give us the breakdown. I wish India was the World Cup, but you can't get enough Indians and all to play soccer well enough, but we're not, I'm a US fan for us. I would love to see one of Brazil or Argentina and as a messy person, I don't know if you'll get that, but it would be really special for Messi to lead, to end his career like Maradona winning a World Cup. I don't know if that'll happen. I'm probably going to go one of the Latin American countries if the US doesn't make it far enough, but first loyalty to the US team and then after one of the Latin American countries. Can you take one of the Latin American countries as your best bet to win? I don't know. It's hard to tell. What happens now at this stage, anybody can win. You just have lots of shots in gold. I'm a big soccer fan. I mean, I don't know if the US is favorite to win, but if they get far enough, you get to the finals, anybody could win. I think they get Netherlands next, right? That's tough, right? That'd be really tough. But the European teams are good too, but I would like to see US go far enough, and then I'd like to see Latin America win a team, one of Argentina or Brazil. That's my prediction. I know you're a big cricket fan. Are you able to follow cricket the way you like it over here? I've gone on North League times the night because they're in Australia right now, yeah. I watch the T20 World Cup, select games of it. Yeah, I'm not rapidly following every single game, but the World Cup games, I'll catch and do it. It's good. I mean, I love every sport. American football, soccer. You're getting David basketball now. I mean, I hope the Warriors come back strong. Hey, how about the Warriors Celtics? What do we think? We do it again? Well, this year? I'll tell you what. As a Boston San Francisco, I would love that. I actually still, I have to pay off some folks from my Palo Alto office with some bets still. We are seeing unprecedented NBA performance this year. It's amazing. You look at the stats, it's like nothing. I know it's early, like nothing we've ever seen before. So it's exciting here. Well, always a pleasure talking to you guys. Hey, great to have you on. Thanks for having me on. Love the expert analysis. Sanjay Pune de Vellante. Keep it right there. Reinvent 2022, day four. We're winding up in Las Vegas. We'll be right back. 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