 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Boomi World 2018, brought to you by Dell Boomi. Good afternoon, welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Boomi World 2018 from Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin with John Furrier, and we're welcoming back to theCUBE one of our alumni, Nima Baby Head of Technology Ecosystems from Pivotal. Nima, welcome back. Thank you for having me back. So Pivotal, part of the Dell technologies, part of the companies, because IPO'd recently, and I did read that of the first half of 2018, eight of the 10 tech IPOs were powered by Boomi. Well, I don't know about that specific. I know that tech IPOs are making a big comeback. We did IPO on the 20th of April, so we've passed our six month anniversary, if you can say. But it's been a distinct privilege to be part of the overall Dell family of businesses. I think what you have in Michael is a leader who, he has a specific vision, but he's left the independent operating units to work on their own, to find their path to that journey, and to help each other as brethren, as like sisters and brothers. And the fact that Pivotal is here supporting Boomi, that Boomi is within our conference of supporting, our customers that we're working together really speaks volumes. I think if you take a look at it, there's a lot of things happened this week, right? So a couple of weeks ago, IBM's acquiring Red Hat this morning, VMware is acquiring Heptio. That's a solid signal that the enterprise transformation and adoption of cloud native model is really taking off. So the new middleware is really all about the cloud native multi-glot environment. And what's interesting, I want to get your thoughts on this because, first of all, congratulations on the IPF, so we're saying Pivotal's never going to go public, and they did, you guys were spectacular, great success. But what's going on now is interesting. We're hearing here at this show, as other shows, is cloud scale and data are really at the center of this horizontally scalable cloud value proposition. Okay, great, you mentioned Kubernetes and Heptio and VMware, that's all great. The question that is, how do you compete when ecosystems become the most important thing? So you work at VMware, you're at Pivotal, down those ecosystems, Boomi's got an ecosystem. Partners, which is also suppliers and integrators. They integrate and also developers. This is a key competitive advantage. What's your take on that? So I think you touched on my point. You compete because of your ecosystem, not despite your ecosystem. We can't be a completely hegemonic like Microsoft or Cisco or Amazon can afford to be. And I don't think customers really want that. Customers actually want choice. They want the best options, but from a variety of sources. And that's why one of the reasons that we not only invest in the Dell ecosystem, but also in Pivotal's own ecosystem, is to cultivate the right technologies that will help our customers on that journey. And our philosophies always find the leaders in the quadrant, the Cadillac vendors, the Lexus vendors, onboard them. And the most important thing you can do is to ensure a pristine customer experience. We're not measuring whether feature A from one partner is better than feature B from another partner. We really don't care. What we care about is we can hand wire an automate what would have been a very manual process for customers so that let's say Bumi with Cloud Foundry works perfectly out of the box. So the customer doesn't have to go through and hire consultants and additional external resources just to figure out how two pieces of software should work together. They just should. So when they make that buying decision, they know that the day after that buying decision, everything can be installed and their developers and their app dev teams and their ops teams can be productive. So that's the power of the ecosystem. We need to talk about the relationship between Pivotal and Bumi because Bumi's been born in the cloud as a startup. Acquired eight years ago. You're part of the Dell Technologies family. VMware is VMware. We know about VMware. Doing great. You guys are doing great. Now Bumi's out there. So how do they factor into and what's the relationship you have with them? And how does that work? And how do you guys work together? Perfect question. So in my primary role at Pivotal is to manage all of our partner ecosystems specifically the technology partners. And what I look for are any force multipliers, any essentially ISVs who can help us accomplish more together than we could on our own. Bumi's a classic example of that. What do they enable? So take care of classic customer. Classic customer has let's say 100 applications in Inventory that they have built, managed and purchased, procured off from a shelf to shelf components. And roughly 20, 30% of them are newish, green field applications, perfect for the cloud native transformation. Most 80% of them or 70% are going to be older, brown field applications that will have to be refactors. But there's always going to be that 15% towards the end. It's legacy, mainframe. It can't be changed. You cannot afford to modernize it, to restructure it, to refactor it. You're going to have to leave it alone. But you'd need it. Your inventory systems are there. You're working. These are critical systems. Most people think legacy is outdated, but they're actually just valued. They're critically valuable. They just cannot be modernized. So a partner like Bumi will allow you to access the full breadth of those resources without having to change them. So I could potentially put Bumi in front of any number of older business applications and effectively modernize them by bridging those older legacy systems with the new systems that I want to build. So let's do an example. I am the Gap and I want to build a new version of our in-store procurement system that runs on my iPhone that I can just point to a garment and it will automatically put it in my checkout box. How do I do that? Well, I can build all the intelligence and I can use AI and functions and I can build everything inside of containers. That's great, but I still have to connect to the inventory system. The inventory system. Which is a database. All these systems are out there. Somewhere or something. And my developers don't know enough about that old legacy database to be able to use it. But if I put a restful interface using Bumi in front of it, and a business connector that's not older XML or kind of inflexible, whatever, solo gateways, then I have enabled my developer to actually build something that is real. That is customer focus. That is appropriate for that market. Without being hamstrung by my existing legacy infrastructure. And now my legacy infrastructure is not an anchor that's holding me back. You mentioned force multiple, Lisa. We talk about this all the time on theCUBE where that scenario is totally legit and relevant because in the old version of IT, you'd have to essentially build inventory management into the new app. You'd have to essentially kill the old to bring in the new. I think what containers and cloud native has shown is you can keep the old and sunset it if you want on your own timetable. Or keep it there and make it productive and make the data disposable. But you can bring the cool, relevant new stuff in. And I think that is what I see and we see from customers like, okay, cool, I don't have to kill the old. I've got to take care of it on my own timetable versus a complete switching cost analysis. Take down a production six times. Exactly. Build something new, will it work? You crush your fingers, okay. Again, this is a key IT different dynamic. It is. And it's a realization that there are things you can move and those are immutable. They're simply just monolithic that will never move. And you're going to work within that, those confines. You can have the best of both worlds. You can maintain your legacy applications. They're still fine. They run most of your business and still invent the new and explore new markets and new industries and new verticals and just new capabilities all through and through without having to touch in your backend systems, without having to bring the older vendors in and say, can you please modernize your stuff? Because my business is dependent and I am going to lose that. I'm going to become the new Sears. I'm going to become the new Woolworth or whoever blockbuster that has missed an opportunity to vector into a new way of delivering their services. When you're having customer conversations, I'm curious, talking with enterprise organizations who have tons of data, all the systems, including the legacy, which I'm glad that you brought up that that's not just old systems. There's a lot of business critical, mission critical applications running on them. Where do you start that conversation with a large enterprise who doesn't want to become a blockbuster to your point and going, this is the suite of applications we have. Where do we start? Talk to us about that customer journey that you help enable. Well that's great because in most cases the customers already know exactly what they want. It's not the what that you have to have the conversation on. It's the how do I get there? I know what I want. I know what I want to be. I know what I want to design. And it's how do I transform my business, fundamentally do an app transformation, enterprise transformation, digital transformation. Where do I begin? And so our perspective at Pivotal is we're die hard adopters of agile methodology. We truly, truly believe that you can be an agile development organization. We truly believe in Mark Andreessen's vision of software eating the world, which let's unpack what that means. It just means that if you're going to survive the next 10 years, you have to fundamentally become a software company, right? So look at all the companies we work with. Are you an insurance company or are you delivering an insurance product through software? Are you a bank or are you delivering a banking product through software? Well one's the last time you talk to a bank teller. Or the ATM, most of your banking's on online. Your computer or your mobile device. Even my check cashing. I don't have to talk to anyone, it's wonderful. Ford Motor Company. Do they bend sheet metal and put wheels on it? Or are they software company? We'll consider that your modern pickup truck has. They're an IoT company now. Yeah. All those sensors on those manufacturing lines. That's what's crazy. You have 150 million lines of code in your pickup truck. Your car, your pickup truck, your whatever is more software than it is anything else. But also data's key, I want to get your thoughts on this, this is super important. Michael Dell brought up on the keynote today here at the Boomi World was, okay, the data's going to stay in the car. I don't need to have a latency issue of, hey, I need a nanosecond results. With data, cloud has become a great use case. With multi-cloud on the horizon, some people are going to throw data in multiple clouds. And that's clear use case. Everyone kind of see the benefits of that. How do you guys look at this? Because now data needs to be addressable across horizontal systems. You mentioned the gap and gap example. That's great. So one of the biggest trends we see in data is really event string. Is the idea that the ability to generate data far out exceeds the ability to consume it. So what if we treated data as just a river? And I'm going to cast my line and only pick up what I want out of that stream. And this is where Kafka and companies like Solace and any event-driven networks and Spring Cloud functions and Spring Cloud data are really coming into play. Is the acknowledgement that yes, we are not in a world where we can store all of the data all the time and figure out what to do with it after the fact. We need timely, and timely is within milliseconds, if not seconds, action taken on an event or a data event coming through. So why don't we modernize around that type of data structure and data event and data horizon? So that's one of the trends we see. The second is that there is no one database to rule them all anymore. I can't get away with having Oracle and that's my be all end all. I now have MySQL and SQL and Mongo and Cassandra and Redis and any number of other databases that are form, fit and function specific for a utility and they're perfect for that. I see graph databases. I see key value stores. I see distributed data warehouses. So my options as a developer and as a user is really expanding, which means the total types of data components that I can use are also expanding exponentially. And that gives me a lot more flexibility on the types of products that I can build and the services that I can ultimately deliver the income. And that highlights microservices trend because you have now a multitude of databases, not the one database rules them all. There'll be literally thousands of database on sensors. So microservice has become the key element to connect all these systems. All of it together and microservice is really a higher level of abstraction, right? So we started with virtual machines and we went to containers and we went to functions and microservices. It's not an upward trend necessarily as it is an expansion into different ways of being able to do work. So some of my work products are going to be very, very small. They can afford to be ephemeral, but there may be many of them. How do I manage a cluster of millions of these potential workloads? Back it up, I can have ephemeral applications that run inside of containers or I can have rigid fixed applications that have to run inside of virtual machines. I'm going to have all of them. What I need is a platform that delivers all of this for me without me having to figure out how to hand wire these bits and pieces from various different, either proprietary or open source kits just to make it work. Now I'm going to need a 60 to 100 to 200 person team just to maintain this very bespoke thing that I have developed. I'll just pull it off the shelf because this is a solved problem, right? Pivotal has already solved this problem. Other companies have already solved this problem. Let me start there. And so now I'm here. I don't have to worry about all this leftover plumbing. Now I can actually build on top of my business. The analogy I'd use is you don't bring furniture with you every time you check into a hotel. And we're telling customers, no, every time you want to move to a different city just for a business meeting or for a work trip, we're going to build you a house and you need to furnish it. Well, that's ridiculous. I'm going to check into a hotel and my expectation is I can check out if any other room and they're all be the same and it really doesn't matter what floor I'm on or what room I'm in, but they'll have the same facilities, the same bed, the same, you know, restaurant facilities. That's what I want. That's what containers are. Eventually all the services surrounding that hotel room experience will be microservices. And we are the workload. The people. And we are the workload. And we are the most important thing. We are the application, you're right. I love that. That's probably the best analogy I've heard of containers. Nima, thanks so much for stopping by the Cube, joining John and me today and talking to us about what's going on with Pivotal and how you guys are really helping as part of Dell businesses dramatically transform. My pleasure. Thank you both. Thank you. Thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with John Furrier. We are in Las Vegas at Boomi World 18. Stick around, John and I will be right back with our next guest.