 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering NetApp Insight 2017, brought to you by NetApps. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas. This is theCUBE SiliconANGLE's flagship program where we go out to the events and extract the signal and the noise. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Keith Townsend. We're here at NetApp Insight 2017 here at the Mandalay. They've got two great guests, senior executives, senior NetApp folks are going to share some insight into what's going on. We have Mark Regman, who's the senior vice president CTO. Thanks for coming on, John Woodall. VP of engineering, integrated archive systems. The first partner of NetApp going back in the day. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on. So we've seen that movie before. Every cycle of innovation, there's always opportunities. It's interesting now, we're in a cycle where you can see some new waves out there coming in. And we think we're surfing on some waves now but the tsunami's coming, everything from blockchain down to just cloud growth like crazy. You guys have done extremely well. You've seen them before, these transitions. What's, I mean, people are busy right now. Your customers are super busy. They got app development going on, dev ops, they got security unbuckling from IT, becoming critical, data coverage. What should they know about this transition that they may miss or that they should pay attention to? Well, I mean, I would say that the thing that is probably the most profound is we've gone through a couple of big transitions as you mentioned in the industry as a whole. 20, 30 years ago, we would talk to customers and they'd start with infrastructure, and they'd talk about servers and storage. 10, 15 years ago, they'd start with applications and they'd talk about their ERP or whatever software and that would decide then the infrastructure. Today they're starting with data and companies are realizing that data is the thing that's going to transform their business. And then based on that data, what software am I going to use and then talk about infrastructure. So the conversation's kind of turned around completely from where it was 20 years ago. John, you've been a partner. Obviously the partner landscape is certainly changing. You're seeing resellers and bars and I think the word Vab even exists, value-added business. They're actually building their own tech because there's opportunities to be a service provider. Yeah. Almost like a telco. Who would have thought? It's crazy. It's great. I think from our perspective as a longtime partner, we've been successful with NetApp through transitions. We were talking before about the resiliency of NetApp and going through transitions. They've done it again. The keynote today filled with a lot of what I call mic drop moments of yet another level of innovation. But you're right, things have flipped almost 180 degrees in the discussion. It's starting with data. It's starting with a business outcome as part of the discussion. And it's not about what can I sell. It's about in solving the problem, do I accelerate the pace of my business? Do I open up new ways to monetize in my business? Do I drive efficiencies in my business that translate to the bottom line? As a reseller and as a partner, we have to transition with that because the discussion changes, the skill sets change, and it becomes much more of a services play on the front end and to help through and then becomes managed services as you end that. Mark, I want to ask you a question. We were joking with the product marketing team on the cloud earlier. The slogan should be, I didn't know NetApp could do that. It just keeps happening. Oh, I didn't know they did that. A lot of that's kind of the history of NetApp, but I want to ask something specific. We see it's a success out there in the cloud. You look no further than Amazon web services. Now Microsoft's kind of catching up through the rear. Google's there. Some of the people are trying to kind of get in there. But Amazon's the winner when it comes to the number of announcements you see at an event. And I'm sure that reinvent coming up is going to be a tsunami of, they're bigger announcements, more services. So it's a plethora. And so that's an indicator of success. And also the new differentiator at scale as you got to keep iterating. You guys had a slew of announcements. So running engineering and being the CTO. What's going on at NetApp? What's the conversation like? You have all these roadmaps? Is it just all this innovation? Is it part of the plan? And just give us some insight into how this all works. I think for a long time, maybe for the first 20 years of the company, we were almost like a one product company. And the innovations were all in that lane. They were all, you know, make this a better product. Make OnTap better. And customers loved that because they were growing with us. What's happened is it's kind of exploded in multiple dimensions. So we're continuing to innovate in our core. But at the same time, we're having to say, how can we use this capability in a completely different way in the cloud? How can we help customers manage their data no matter where it is, not just on our OnTaps systems? We made the acquisition a little over a year ago, a year and a half ago of SolidFire to get into an area of a different approach to managing storage. And it's not, sometimes people get confused and think, oh, that's how you got into Flash. Frankly, we were already doing Flash, and we have Flash in all of our product lines. The real reason we did that was to get into this more programmatic, scale out, API-driven model of administration of storage. And we're having to do that in so many dimensions. So as we expand those dimensions, of course we have to expand our innovation. We have to innovate at a given rate in each of those threads. The old joke in Silicon Valley is, you know, get lucky once and you get rich and it's hard to, you know, the sophomore jinx. Whatever you want to call it, repeated successes is a sign of success and certainly as a partner, you don't want a one-trick pony at all. I got to ask you, given the NetApp history of those successes, the data fabric is very good positioning. I like that positioning because it's got a lot around. It's super important. We think data is the new wave that's going to come bigger than cloud in terms of its impact. What from NetApp for the customers that are watching, your customers and potentially new customers as you take new territory down with data, what is it about the NetApp portfolio or the architecture, the DNA that makes you guys relevant in this data fabric equation? Because you can't just get there overnight. There's this economy of scale. What is it about NetApp that makes them super relevant? Couple things, one thing, what's the one thing? Well, I think it comes back to you. I think you even said the term sort of DNA. It's what is it about NetApp? Why are we the one that's been around for 25 years continuing to make it through these transitions? And I think it's because we've, first of all, don't rest on our laurels. We're not caught up in the innovator's dilemma of continuing to just refine what we already have. We'll do that, but we also recognize that there are emerging new customer needs and our basic intellectual capital can be applied in different ways. So, when I talk to our engineers, they don't talk about, oh, I build controllers that go into arrays that manage data. They realize that deeper down, there's a kind of intellectual capital that could go into a piece of software in the cloud. And there's a customer problem there we can go solve. So, I think it's about being motivated by solving those customer data problems. So, culture, it's culture. It's culture. It's the product side. Obviously, you have a data. Next is, storage stores data. So, it's not, it'll be rocket science to figure out that storing data. I'll give you an example. I mean, there are a lot of competitors in the flash storage business that have come into the market and basically gave up on us because we were late to come into that market. But we came into the market, we accelerated, we passed them. Why is that? Partly, we built a good product at the flash storage layer, but more importantly, we leveraged all of the storage management which we'd already built over 20 years. And so now we're suddenly out there with a very rock solid flash engine, but it's supported by all these other capabilities which make it valuable to our customers. So, it's not just, hey, here's a new tool. It's, here's a new solution to your problem. And I think that's a big part of our DNA and our technology side is, we've been in data management for 20 years. We just never talked about it that way. So, John, we had Dave hits on earlier. And he said that one of the keys to keeping away from the innovators dilemma has been that NetApp has leaned into the thing that would kill us. I tweeted that out, like, that's an awesome quote. They've leaned into the things that kill them. As a partner though, that can be a bit scary. Technology is a fairly enterprise tech is a very stable thing. NetApp has been with ONTAP, a very traditional partner, even with FAS and bringing those innovations to flash. How has that ride been for you guys over the past 25 years? It has been consistent. It has been a great partnership. And it continues to be a great partnership because as I look out and comb my portfolio of offerings and partnerships, NetApp stays very high in that, not just because we have a great run rate business, but because NetApp in their innovation allows me to continue to solve problems with an existing partner, which makes us more efficient. Now, having said that, we talked about, you mentioned data fabric. That's a completely different discussion from a storage company. At first you think, okay, I'm replicating data. I have a transport layer, that's fine. But what are you doing beyond that? And I think you begin to see a new NetApp emerging as software defined. An organizing principle in my mind of the data fabric is it gives the customer freedom and flexibility that just buying storage doesn't give you. It gives them the flexibility to deploy in the cloud, next to the cloud, on-prem, as a virtual instance, as an AMI in the cloud, et cetera. So it allows the customer to place data and workloads where and when and how they want to make sense for their business, not NetApp's business or my business. And so in that, we're starting to see now with Anthony Lai's demo today of Cloud Orchestrator. Which, by the way, isn't shipping yet, but it's multi-cloud there, that's multi-cloud instance. Right there. And it's applications. It's provisioning VMs, it's provisioning out of age. I think if you guys get to the market fast, that'll be the first true multi, I call it real multi-cloud. There's a lot of fake multi-cloud out there, but that would be a real use case. And that's a completely different discussion. So to kind of plagiarize, you can teach an old storage dog a new trick. So they've transformed to meet the emerging needs of a new market. We are having to transform with them. So there's a bit of bumpiness that we're all going to experience as we learn that and do that. But, I want to just double down on that. I want to get also, you can both perspective, what you're really teasing out with the cloud orchestrator demo, in my mind, the impact of that demo, the significance is, you guys as a storage company, now a data company, are enabling opportunities with the data. That's clearly what's happening, obviously. There's no debate there. But the impact is to developers. Now, the developer dynamic is, as these DevOps guys come in, there's re-skilling going on, right? That's the biggest challenge with multi-cloud, is each cloud has its own way to pipeline data, or do things with data. So you got, so making that easy, I don't want to have the higher guys to program for each cloud. On the hard to find. Well, and you can't, it's incredible. It's too hard. Abstracting that away is going to be a boom for the developer market. That's a new market. That's a different thing. It's a very different market than we've been in before. Absolutely. So what are you doing? What's the plan? Just continue to enable developers? Well, I think the comment you made earlier about lean into the thing that's going to kill you is exactly right. I wouldn't have said it quite like that, but I'm not Dave Hitz. But we definitely, when we see a challenge, we lean into it. And that does two things. It's a little bit like, I don't know, it's a taekwondo where you use the other competitor's energy. I think it's Judo. Use the other energy and power of the other opponent to win. And it's kind of what we're doing. And I think when you do that, it means we have to transform and our partners do. And you know, your partner's been with us a long time. You've been through a lot of transitions. Yes, we have. Well, the Judo leverage is about, I mean, Judo moves about leverage, right? And that's about having it installed. You guys have that leverage. You have the customers. And the customers are moving as well. So we could try to keep them, hold them back. Or we can move with them and actually accelerate them to where they're going, to our benefit and to our partner's benefit. And I think that's what Dave was referring to. Well, Mark and John love to have you guys on. Love to do a follow-up segment in Palo Alto. Our offices are literally 300 yards from each other. Certainly you guys are in Sunnyvale. This is a super important conversation. I'll give you guys the last word. Impact to customers for NetApp with the new capabilities with data center innovation modernization, NextGen data center on premise, true private cloud, and power harnessing the cloud with data. All that working together in some cases, end-to-end or in pieces, whatever the customer is. What does it mean to the customer, this new NetApp? Well, I'll still align from our marketing teams. And what it really means is it's going to enable customers that change the world with data, transform their business, create new opportunities. It's a new wave in the economy. It's going to be disruptive and tumultuous for some. We have an opportunity to go into a customer and to help them find new ways with their data, because the two key assets of the company as are people and then data. So the people are there taking their data, allowing them to find new opportunities to go to market faster. NetApp's in a unique position. It reminds me of value creation. I mean, a lot of stuff with blockchain, you see the indicators, almost the web 1.0 again. You see in the new shift in architecture happening, upside down, it's almost a reverse. Well, the developer model's right. I mean, when you talked about Amazon, I think from 2008 until 2014 or 15, they introduced about 3,000 new services on their platform. I don't see an average IT organization doing that. Yeah. And that rate's going up now. Yeah. It's on an exponential growth. I think you're starting to see the swim lanes, if you will, of each cloud. I'm calling them native clouds, because they're so native, but they're also powering a new ecosystem and partners. We've had more time to talk about the partner equation. There are a lot of musical chairs going on in the partner ecosystem. You've been with NetApp in the beginning. Congratulations. Thank you. Congratulations on all the success on the platform and the product innovation. It's theCUBE bringing you the innovation and the data through our data fabric called theCUBE. We'll be back with more live coverage after this short break. Calling all barrier breakers, status quo measures, world.