 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering NetApp Insight 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of NetApp Insight 2018. We are in Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas, and Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. And we have a couple of guests joining us now from the A team. Cue the music, right Stu? We've got Phoebe Go, cloud architect from NetApp. And we've got Paul Sringfellow, one of our CUBE alumni, technical director of Gardner's Systems, one of NetApp's partners. Guys, thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE. And your matching outfits. So first of all, this morning, before the general session started, I saw both of you on camera talking a little bit about the A team. For our audience who might not be familiar with that, I know it's been around for five years. Phoebe talked to us a little bit about the A team, who composes, obviously we've got a channel partner, it's not just NetAppians, but give our viewers a little bit of an overview of the A team. So NetApp really appreciates our advocates from our channel partners and also from our customers. We really love hearing from them and we also love giving them back information about what we do and where we're going with our vision and our strategy. So we have channel partners on the A team as well as customers and technical advisors from NetApp, such as myself. And we get together every now and again at events like Insight. And we also bring them to Sunnyvale where they're given some information about what's coming up with our strategy. And this is a small group of about maybe 30 people. Paul, how long have you been part of the A team and what has that, what have you learned from some of the other folks that are on that team? Yeah, it's a great question. I've been on part of the team for three years. And it's kind of a symbiotic relationship almost in that it kind of works both ways. I think there's lots of value for NetApp in the partnership in that they get to hear kind of from channel partners on the street about what people actually think of their technology. You know, and it also works in that we get to see quite a lot of pre-release information. So, and it gives us the opportunity to feed back to NetApp directly from the things that we see out in the channel about what customers actually want. And then we can feed that back into NetApp. And we've seen over kind of over the five years of the team, we've seen product strategies change. We've seen new products come to market because of that direct feedback. And then from our side, when we talk to our customers, there's real value in being able to say that we've got that direct relationship with NetApp. We've got that access to their executives and access to their research team. So, it works really well both ways for us. In the keynote this morning, we heard George Curry and talk about digital transformation. And one of those pieces is that hybrid multi-cloud is the de facto IT architecture. Paul would love to get your feedback as a channel partner. What this kind of hybrid multi-cloud means to your customers, it means to your business. Yeah, so I think the idea of hybrid, I think it's different for a lot of people. So, in lots of cases, hybrid for some organizations may be that their entire data center remains on-prem within their own walls. However, they might be using a software service in Office 365, they may be using a Dropbox. And I don't think that's kind of the definition that George was talking about this morning when he talked about hybrid cloud. I mean, my little take on what George talked about as well with hybrid cloud, I think is understanding that it exists, understand that public cloud is a thing. You know, that the, as yours, the AWS's, the Google's play a part in a way that some organizations are working. That's not necessarily the way your organization wants to work. So, understanding that it's there, designing an architecture that recognizes that and makes sure that if you ever want to use those kind of services in the future, that you'll be able to do so. But it's equally valid to say, actually, public cloud isn't for us. As long as you make that as a decision and don't just fall into it because you've not really thought about it, that's a perfectly valid strategy. Yeah, I really agree with what you were saying. So often when we talk about hybrid and multi-cloud, we're talking about infrastructure. And there's more than just infrastructure. Things that I've been saying for a few years, let's follow the applications and even more importantly, let's follow the data. I love we get some international viewpoints here because sometimes North America, it's like, oh, let's talk only about public cloud and seems to be kind of a monolithic thing. People would love to get your viewpoint. What are you hearing from customers when they talk about cloud, what does that mean for them and how's NetApp and NetApp's channel partners helping them sort through this new future? Yeah, well, definitely our customers and our channel partners are talking a lot about cloud, creating or adding agility to their business, allowing them to move faster and to be more flexible. And what NetApp is looking to do is really enable that and speed that up for no matter where you are in the globe, whether you're in Australia or in America or in Europe, that you can achieve those business outcomes that you really want. And we know that the cloud is going to help us get there so we really want to help them use the data in the best ways and use the technology that makes sense for the business to be able to get to public cloud. How are you hearing a lot of the messaging coming out, NetApp is data driven, it's the data authority, a lot of transformation that NetApp's undergone in its 26 year history. I'd love to get both of your perspectives before we wrap here about how are customers embracing that as looking to NetApp and its ecosystem partners to help them embrace this hybrid, multi-cloud environment in which they live and look at NetApp as part of their core cloud strategy rather than data management storage. I'm actually really excited about this because I love collaborating and talking to our customers and our partners. And what I find is that they're coming to us and saying, wow, we didn't know you guys did that. And you're not even, you're not selling us something, you're really helping us get there. And you're having a story, we're having a conversation about how we can really get there, get to their business outcomes rather than trying to push a product where I find that we get to have really collaborative conversations. Paul? Yeah, actually I couldn't agree more. I think that that, what data fabric, what this kind of hybrid cloud model means to our customers is it opens up a much wider conversation. We're not having a conversation about storage. We're not talking to a partner saying, would you like to buy some NetApp as a customer? Because that can be, that's a yes, no. I use something else, I'm not interested in NetApp or I'd love to buy some NetApp. But actually if we can have a data conversation that talks about how do you want to use this? What are the business outcomes that you'd like to achieve? What is it you are trying to do as a business? And let's help data be part of that transformation. Guys, thanks so much for stopping by, having a quick combo, especially Phoebe, since you've been in Vegas for four days already and your voice is hanging on by a thread. Paul, Phoebe, thanks so much for your time. Thank you. Yeah, you're welcome, pleasure, thank you. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE from Las Vegas NetApp Insight 2018. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. Stu and I will be right back with our next guest after a short break.