 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering NetApp Insight 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of NetApp Insight 2018. Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman, and guess who's here now? Dave Hitz, EVP and founder of NetApp. Dave, welcome back to theCUBE. Thank you, I'm glad to be here. This is a big event. We were in the keynote this morning when we were walking out, standing room only, really strong messages delivered by George Curian, who you stopped by for the first time a couple hours ago. Great customer story. The futurist was a very interesting perspective. 26 years ago, can you envision where you are? You know, the futurist, nevermind that. I have a very different perspective than him. I think we are entering the golden decade of artificial intelligence. It's smart enough to be super, super cool, and it hasn't figured out how to kill us yet. Decade. Enjoy your last 10 years. Oh no, that's it? No, no, you asked, you asked, could I envision this? 26 years ago, oh my God, no. I mean, we were a little start up, and we have these spreadsheets that said we would grow to basically what the VCs told us, if we could get to 100 million in revenue, we could go public. So naturally, our spreadsheets showed 200 million in revenue, now we're five, six somewhere in there, and it was like, we're so far beyond anything, I imagine, when we started. And we were doing technical nerdy products for little engineers and little work groups, you know? And the idea that that part of the storage market would merge against the heavy-duty, high-end enterprise storage market doing databases, and then that would end up colliding with the cloud market and helping like, no, we didn't even imagine the stuff that's happening now. I mean, it's so far beyond. It's a jiggling dream work to make movies. I mean, that was, you know, they do showings, they do previews for their vendors, and so I've gotten to take my 11-year-old daughter, she's 11 now, but to see early viewings of some of these movies, it's just fun. So, Dave, it's always interesting. In the industry, a lot of time, you say like, okay, this architecture is long in the tooth, there's a new generation, do things better, and everything like that, on tap. Been around for a long time now. Seems like it's been, you know, reinvigorated with the cloud and everything like that. You know? Let me make a comment about that, because people do this, oh, on tap is so old, isn't that the old generation? So let's talk about old. Mainframes are old, and AS-400s are old, and Unix is old, and then there's Windows, which is kind of younger, and on tap's younger than that, and then there's Windows NT, which was the rewrite of Windows, and clustered on tap is younger than that. So like, stop with the old. You know, I mean, iOS is after that, so okay, fine, we're older than iOS, but it's not an ancient, and then we've revamped it again to go run in the cloud. I mean, we first started doing on tap running in Azure, sorry, in Amazon, initially. We started that work in 2013 and shipped it in 2014, so like, that was yet another refresh. So. You bring a point, it is adjusted and moved. It wasn't something that's static. Can you speak a little bit to that cloud, you know, the rewrite, and focus around the cloud, and what that's mean internally. I know you've been reinvigorated with everything that's happened the last few years. You know, the cloud, everybody's doing it now, and everybody's trying to be cloud relevant. We were really struggling early on. I will say, you know, 2013, 2014, we were really trying to get our heads around what to do, and a lot of people were stepping back, like no, no, no, let's see if we can slow it down, and I mean, not just outside of NetApp, but NetApp as well, and the guy who was the CEO at the time, Tom Georgins, and George Karan was part of the staff then, I'm proud of what we did, was we said, you know, let's really lean in. It's either going to happen or it's not going to happen, probably not based on what we do, and if it does happen, we'll be way better off leaning into it early, learning how to make this stuff work, and that's, you know, we shipped on tap in the cloud in 2014, and it sucked. I mean, and nobody else had anything like it, it was awesome, right? Whenever you look at old technology, the first iPhone sucked too, but it was both great, but it needed so much more work. Like the very first rev, I remember a story, Joe Caradonna is a programmer, he's like, we tried to get our own IT organization to use it, and they told us the security wasn't good enough, so we had to fix the security, like, I mean, we've been through so much stuff, that's almost five years ago, we've been working on it, and so you do all of this work, and then Cloud Volumes is a complete, have you guys had Anthony on? Yes, a couple hours ago. I love how Anthony thinks. So he's a cloudy guy, right from the foundation, he joins the executive staff, whole new perspective on stuff. So Cloud OnTap, like, oh, OnTap's my baby, and we put it in the cloud, I'm proud of that, like, yeah, we're forward leaning cloud, and Anthony's like, you know, just so you know, that's not nearly good enough. They're like, that is a very old school, infrastructural thing, probably storage infrastructure people will like that they can have their same old OS running in the cloud, but it's not what cloudy people want. Cloudy people don't want to run a storage OS in the cloud. Cloudy people just want to say, I'd like a volume, please, here's your volume, thank you. And by the way, it should be a restful API, like, Cloud OnTap was none of those things, and so if you look at the work we're doing now, it's like, okay, here's a restful API, here's the JSON schema, send it to the Azure Resource Manager, like, that's cloudy. And so, and it was because, you know, I mean, we did a good job engineering getting it in, but we didn't have that like, what does cloud smell like? If you know what I mean, like the right whiff of cloud, anyway. So Anthony really brought that, and I just, I feel really good about where we're at now, because it's like, cloud developers develop this stuff for other cloud developers, it feels like that. Well, in the last five years, it sounds like tremendous amount of transformation, reinvigoration, NetApp has some bold marketing messaging. We are the data authority. We help customers become data-driven. You talk about these three business imperatives, customers have lots of choices that, you know, public cloud, private cloud, hybrid. George talked about this morning in his keynote that hybrid and multi-cloud is now de facto. You know, someone asked me, I was giving a talk, and they asked me, okay, so so much cloud, how long do you think, till NetApp's not chipping hardware? And I was like, no, no, like, we don't see that going away anytime soon. If anything, we think that our success in the cloud, because customers want to do that, will help us gain share on-prem, because customers also want to do that, right? George's picture shows, yes, there's traditional on-prem IT, enterprise IT, there's private clouds, people HCI, converged at CI, and then there's public cloud. To me, the interesting question is, why do people do those different things? The number one driver for public cloud is innovation. Like, if you just, like, all the catch words you can think of, if you want to start up a DevOps team to go program, I would like a new mobile phone app, and I wanted to take a picture of the person's face, oh look, it's a woman, she looks happy, and then you want it to listen to the voice, and like transcribe the voice, and then do a sentiment analysis on the words, oh, she looked happy, but it's snarky, and then you want to feed that into neural net, deep learning engine, and say, well, what should we try and sell her? Like, I guarantee you, the team working in the public cloud will beat the on-prem team hands down every time, right? I mean, that's, so when you look at people, when they go, we want all in on the cloud, or there's got to be 100% cloud, my question is, well, what's your pro, like, don't start with that, what's your problem? If it's drive innovation, for the private clouds, typically that's just all about speed. They're so uniform, regular, they're all the same, you have extra capacity, you know, you've got empty rack space for where the next one goes, someone says, I need some storage, and you say, hey, it's got a self-service software to find API, like, just do it yourself. And then in the enterprise space, the enterprise IT, UNIX, Windows, client, server, like that zone, probably the bulk of your investment, right? That's where you've been spending the money historically, probably still the bulk of most people's investment, but they want to modernize it. They don't want to get rid of it, they don't want to turn it off, it's working, but they like it to work better, so flash enable it, just get the performance issues out of the way, by the way, shrinks your footprint in the data center, frees up space, and connect it to the cloud, like not moving it, but just back it up, or do DR, like something cloudy. And so, to me, I look at those three goals, are tightly linked to the three styles of infrastructure. Notice I haven't really talked about products yet. The conversations I like to have with customers these days, help me understand what your business challenges are. You're trying to move faster, be more innovative, modernize the stuff you have. Okay, like what ratio, now let's talk about how we could do those things together with the data fabric, and let you build the data fabric you need. I mean, our data fabric strategy is not to tell customers what to do, it's to help them build the data fabric they need for their needs based on, oh, we're all about innovation, all in on the cloud, like okay, fine, we can do that, but let's talk about that, or is it? Anyway, now I'm stuttering. I haven't decided about this stuff. I haven't decided about this stuff. It's really exciting, because I think back, just a couple of years ago, if you go to the enterprise, oftentimes, storage was the boat anchor prevent me from moving forward. Now, we know that data is absolutely going to be one of the drivers going forward. How do we help those people make that transition? How do you see NetApp driving that transition? So boat anchor is an interesting word, because I think if you look at the cloud compute, it's very easy to move compute into the cloud. Yes. Right, and the thing about compute is, it just happens and then it's done. Like you turn it on, you turn it off, you spin up a VM, you spin down a VM, it's easy. The reason that data is a boat anchor, is not because it's a boat anchor, it's because data's the hard part. Like you fired up the compute in the cloud, but usually you're computing some data. Well, how'd you get the data to the place where the compute is? And then when you're finished, a lot of times you created some data. Well, how do you keep track of the data you created in the cloud, and is it legal for it to stay in the cloud? And now you want to put the data in a different cloud, or put the data in your own data center, like who's watching all of that data? It's not a boat anchor because data sucks. It's a boat anchor, actually, because it's the important thing you want to keep forever. Right, I mean, maybe you do, or you want to delete it and know for sure it's gone. Like those compute doesn't have any of those issues. So what's my point? Whatever is hard, like if this was easy, anybody could do it, right? Whatever is hard, you go hire lots and lots of smart people to work on hard problems, and then customers like, whoa, you're solving hard problems. I guess I will pay you after all. Isn't that what business is? So the majority of your conversations start with helping customers identify what they've got. We're best to spread out their investments. It's not product-based, it's about business outcomes. I'd love to get kind of in the last few minutes here, your perspective on NetApp's own IT and digital and cultural transformation. How does that help your legacy, long-time enterprise customers feel an even stronger trust with NetApp? I think prior to our cloud work, customers for the most part, customers and potential customers, they knew us. You know, it was interesting, even as we thought about marketing the new work that we're doing, one of the questions was like, how much should be about the cloud? How much should be about the old stuff? And we've really leaned in almost 100% on telling people our new cloud stories that are both public and private. And our VP of marketing, I think she had a really gene English, she had a really good perspective. She basically said, look, we've been telling the on-prem storage iron story for 26 years, and if there's a customer who's out there waiting to decide who to use, I don't think telling them that story again in year 27 is going to be the thing that makes the difference. Like they've decided they're happy with their Hitachi or their EMC, whatever it is, but they don't know that NetApp could help them in this brave new world, right? They have no clue that OnTap's also running in Amazon. I mean, I was like, seriously? I can run OnTap in Amazon? Yeah, like fire it up, it's five bucks an hour, whatever the number is. It's like, that's crazy, you know? And so, and then people go, well, we've had so many conversations where they're trying to get a cloud strategy together and we talk about all these things and data movement and data management and cloud ends. I like just all of these tools and they're very excited about where they're trying to go and they said, you know, by the way, I do also have an on-prem storage need. Could you do me a quote for like what I need this week? And meanwhile, let's do some planning about what I need next year, right? You've got both of them working together and I think it's that combo that's important. Last question, how do you, if only you had more energy and excitement, like legitimately about this, but how do you keep some of the NetApp folks that have been here for a long time, how have you helped reinvigorate them to really be able to digest the massive impact that you guys are being able to make across industries? One of the things that I think helps, because there is, let me back up a step. You know, Steve Jobs is such an awesome guy and also in his life, he made so many mistakes. And one of the things that he did when Apple was almost entirely floated on their Apple 3 business, and was it Apple 3, Apple 2? And he was doing the Mac and basically his message to everybody else was, if you're not working on the Mac, you suck. Except by the way, that's the product that's floating the entire business and generating all the products and I really was conscious of like, that's the wrong way to do it. And when I look in particular of what we're doing, we've got new operating systems like E-Series and like SolidFire, HCI is a whole new thing and yet ONTAP is still shop through our entire product line. I mean, the cloud volumes, the cool hottest new thing, it's ONTAP under the covers, right? And you look at the HCI, it's got the SolidFire block storage built in there as a very scalable model. Oh, but if you'd like files, guess what? We run ONTAP in a VM, it's HCI, it runs VM. And so actually, if you look at what's going on in there, the work that we've done going way back, and yes, it's evolved and it's changed, but that same work is actually shot through as technology, no longer the front piece, but it's shot through all of it as technology. So it is kind of a unifying characteristic. If you talk about that, I think it helps people get more comfortable, both internally, but we have the same, you know, you asked how do you get employees comfortable? A lot of customers have the same problem. You know, they've spent a lot of investment in learning ONTAP's foibles over the year and cloud volumes hides all of that. So gee, maybe I don't like this. Like, you know what? If you need all those features, cloud ONTAP, you can run ONTAP, but like, some people do want to do that. So I just feel like the fact that the pieces all fit together, work together, actually gets people comfortable with it. Excellent. Well, Dave, thanks so much for stopping by. Thank you for having me. Sharing your energy and your excitement and your passion and all this wisdom and looking at where you guys are 26 years later. We look forward to your 27. Great, thank you. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. We are Net Up Insight 2018 in Vegas. To go around, Stu and I will be right back with our next guest.