 Live from Barcelona, Spain. It's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. Everyone, welcome back to the live CUBE coverage here in Barcelona, Spain, for theCUBE's coverage of Cisco Live, you're up 2018 kicking off the new year, the big event, I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE, co-host of theCUBE. Our next two guests, Alfred Manhard, is a senior director channel and system integrators for NetApp, EMEA, Europe, Middle East, and Africa, and Benjamin LaPlaine, EMEA, chief sales and solutions officer with OutScale. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, welcome. Love this partner segment, NetApp, you have a customer on, partner. You guys have an interesting relationship. Why don't you like to talk about your relationship with OutScale? Why are you guys here? I think engaging with, not only with the typical resellers and distributors is pretty key for us. We engage with service providers and cloud providers from 2012, 2013 ongoing. It's mainly to be the foundation for their services. They are going to market with and OutScale is out of France, one of our predominant service providers we engage with on a local level. How has the channel changed? Because as the cloud service providers and cloud creates such great agility and speed, you can get products out faster, MVPs and those things can be very specialized. How is your go-to-market change with the cloud? Accelerated it, changed the makeup, what's NetApp? First of all, the market is demanding it. So some of our traditional players go the services way and some service providers go the typical traditional way. So engaging and broadening up the ecosystem was pretty critical for us. So different engagement models are needed because the customers require different kind of consumption models. Good leverage sales model, always a good business. Benjamin, talk about what you guys do. I want to ask some specific questions about your business and how you guys are advising and implementing services with customers. But first, take a minute to explain your business. So Outskian is a cloud service provider. So we built the company in 2010 and we've been providing a public cloud solution for worldwide, so implementing in the US, in Europe and in Asia for the past five years now. The objective is to be able to provide sovereignty and a reliable solution, cloud solutions for our customers worldwide. And it's based on NetApp and Cisco Flexport architecture. So you guys actually have a cloud yourselves? Yeah, exactly. And you bring that to customers? Yeah, so for the past five years what we've been doing is develop our own orchestration layer that allows us to actually use the whole Flexport architecture to provide infrastructure as a service for our customers. And what we've been doing for the past year is actually package all the technology that we've been developing for the past years into a unique solution which is TINA on-prem which is a private cloud solution ready to be deployed wherever you need to. I'll get back to the Flexport in a minute but I want to drill down on this notion of serving the customers because there's a thirst for customization and specialization whether it's an application or some regional challenge on the data. Certainly we see that with GDPR. It's coming down like a freight train like a ton of bricks on everybody. So there's like design challenges that are now upon the customers. How are you guys bringing the customer's solutions to them? Is it rapid engagements? Is it ongoing? What's your relationship with your customers? So if we talk specifically about GDPR but I think it's true for most regulation that comes out, I'll have the chance to be able to develop the software with security design first. So that means that it's designed for security but also for privacy. So that's kind of a give us the edge when talking about regulation enforcement and also all the process that we put in place around infrastructure management that allows for us to provide the best services for our customer, always align with the regulations that comes out. What are the biggest challenges your customers face with the cloud? I think most of them, so things improved a lot for the past years but the first thing was everyone wanted to do it because that was kind of the name, the things that you want to go into. Now it's more big data or AI but the idea behind this is a company knows that the cloud is not an option. They will go to the cloud. The question is how and why and when and how. So we try to help and support these companies to decide what's the best for public cloud or private cloud? Alfred and Benjamin, I want you guys both to answer this next question. We've been observing and reporting on theCUBE and certainly Cisco's validated it that everyone kind of has some cloud thing going on. I put a nap in there. It might be low hanging fruit test dev or something non-critical but all the work and energy and money being spent is kind of getting their act together on premise because they got to get cloud operations going, move from the old operating model to cloud ready on premises and then do some hybrid cloud. Do you guys see it the same way? And if so, what specifically are they doing on? Is it DevOps? Is it pure operational? What are your thoughts? Sorry, Benjamin. So from what I can see is we've seen companies for the past year that went full public cloud and then other company that always stay back and say, no, we won't go to the cloud. And we see kind of things going into a balance point where basically all companies now realize that they need to have a part of their infrastructure such as private cloud for security, politics, regulation sometimes. And the other place is to decide what's going to be the perimeter they're going to be allowed to put into the public cloud. So that's why now we are more talking about hybrid between public and private cloud. And that's one of the first major design of the solution that we developed. Are you saying that you're seeing some customers move completely from on-premises to cloud, full migrations? No, I think what I've seen is people that have kind of saw that the cloud was not made for them finally decided that maybe it could have been useful for some of their operations. So I don't think it's always like an all-in move. You need to decide whether it's going to be good depending on the perimeter, the context, the data, the pretty city of the data. Alfred, on-premises activity. Heavy, on the one side, on the other side. I think you talked about test dev. A lot of people play around with test dev. This is mainly on a local level behind the scenes. But if it then goes to backup or disaster recovery it goes up the productive stack. They are more interested if it's really going well, if the data resides in their country, if all the legislations are held. So we currently see it getting out of the test dev. And on the other side, we've clearly seen a trend that the customers are forced by the software vendors to go to the cloud. So Microsoft is going cloud. SAP is also going cloud. So it's not only a market trend, it's also a trend from the software vendor that they are forced to do something and they want to keep control of their data. That's why data is a little bit different from going to the cloud with computing with the apps. Data is a huge issue. All right, so how are you guys using NetApp? Talk about the flex pod. You mentioned that earlier. So, outscale, we've been using NetApp for the past six years, I think, something like that, which is a very long time compared to the lifetime of our company. The thing is for us, the most important thing was to be able to provide the best services for our customers. So even if we abstract some of the features, some of the value of the NetApp product that we buy, we just keep the value for ourselves to be able to deliver more services, more value to the end customer. So that's how we've been doing things. And the second thing is also when you want to deploy privates on-frame solution, it's always better and it's more reassuring for the customer when you use and you partner with one of the leaders on their own market, such as NetApp. So when I hear people use the term enterprise class architecture, what does that mean? Does that mean certain, maybe arrays? Is it configuration? Is it network? What does enterprise class architecture mean to you? For me, it's two things. So the first thing you have the architecture and also the hardware they're going to use to apply to this architecture. The thing is, I was talking about reliability. I think that's one of the major things is how much maintenance is going to require, how it's going to impact the operations for the user or for the end customer. And when you see the architecture that we've deployed, it's everything is redundant. It's not fair safe, it's failure proof, which is even better because that means that you know things going to fail at some point and you can't allow yourself to have a failure where you can't serve the service to your customer. What's the biggest thing that you've learned in doing the cloud migration, cloud service provider with customers over the past two years? What's the big aha moment that you've had? I think that's when you realize that even if you have some pattern that you can recognize for a specific customer or for a certain type of customer, you have no magic recipe. So that means that you always need to take a step back, look at the problems of your customers and try to think what's the best for my customer and how can I bring the right services to him so he can add value to his market and his business. You mentioned regulation. So the question to Benjamin is, how does the role of storage play in a world where data and sovereignty issues come into play? Does it change the strategy? What goes on for the folks that are really trying to solve this problem? I think we see more and more movement where basically even the customer want more managed services. I think it's always important to give the customer the hands so he can do whatever he wants with his data. So we are here to support him, to give him the best advices, the best practices about data management. But at the end, he's still accountable and responsible for this data. So at the end, I think it's just, we need to give the right tools to our customers so they do exactly what they want to do with the data and they don't have like hidden policies applied to their own data. So for example, replication of your data for safety measures, okay? Maybe they don't want it to be replicated abroad. They want it to stay on the territory. So that's kind of a thing that you need to really think about and give the right tools to your customers. Alfred, what are the top use cases that you guys have seen at NetApp for cloud service providers and just in general, the partners, because they're in the front line serving customers. They need to have low cost, high performance gear, great software, we heard reliability. What are the use cases now that you're seeing is if they broader use cases, are they more narrow, what's your... So of course, when you come from a storage perspective, you mainly aim for the infrastructure and for the storage related services which we are not where we are stopping because we are working with Cisco on this validated designs, going up the stack. So if you are not going up the stack regarding different workloads, going after the IoT, going after the analytics, going after the application layer, we will fail. So having a fair balance of partner that can offer the services from bottom to the top, that's very important. And of course, use cases like intelligent business analytics, going after SAP, going after SAP HANA, going after Microsoft. This is obvious that the partners and the customers are going that way. Benjamin, talk about what it's like working with NetApp. You happy with them? Some things that they've done that you think other suppliers should adopt? What's the mode of support from NetApp? What's the overall experience like? I would describe it as strong partnerships where they are always the exclusive partner for the storage as Cisco can be on the other breaks of technology that we are using. We have a strong relationship, we have a booth on their own stand today, so that's one of the reasons why we're here. We're also pushing with them with the whole you were talking about analytics, we're talking about big data. Also, we have a lot of use cases, pretty amazing use case in retail in Europe. Also, we give them a lot of feedback about how we use the hardware, what could be improved, and I think that's the kind of communication that makes strong partnerships and bring value to both sides. NetApp's a very engineering-oriented company, I know them very well, living in Silicon Valley, so I give them props to that. Question for you is, when you hear someone say data-driven storage or data-driven analytics, what does that mean to you as a partner of a storage supplier? For us, it's another way to look at the way we're going to provide service to our customers in the years to come. I think that customers are going to expect more and more services, more and more value from the service that we're going to provide them, whether it's going to be storage, compute, or network, or even security, and I think that's always a good thing for us to have more tools to build new technology for tomorrow. And NetApp's channels and partners, what's the message from NetApp these days to the partners here enabling them? Obviously, help them make money, obviously. I think the biggest challenge is that we drive the ecosystem in the right direction. If we just stick to the traditional players, we will not be successful. So we have to expand the ecosystem, going up to different players that are currently probably not on our radar, going up to ISVs that help us to really embrace the data from a value perspective. So our biggest, let's say, message to the channel is, don't stay where you currently are, develop the channel with ourselves. And certainly, the relationship with Cisco is blooming for NetApp. It is, it's probably since six years, we have now around 8,700 joint customers. We go up the stack, we talk about strategic engagements on an IT, as per perspective, so it's going in the right direction. It's important. As your competitors get distracted and do things or doing things, you guys eating their lunch, is that, you're smiling? Eating their lunch is probably not the right way. Maybe a croissant, breakfast, or a dinner, is there, what's going on? Are you eating the breakfast, lunch, or dinner of the competitors? Currently, I would say in French, I think we are jointly engaging on a croissant perspective, so we're heading in the right way. So these partnerships are very important. It's always a great fun time. It's been fun watching the storage and been watching NetApp for many years. Remember when they went public, back on the dot-com A-days, they still keep their roots. Great to see you, having great success. Congratulations on a great partnership. It's theCUBE Live Coverage here with NetApp and their partner inside theCUBE here at Barcelona, Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. I'm John Furrier. We'll be back with more live coverage after this short break.