 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering NetApp Insight 2018, brought to you by NetApp. Hey, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of NetApp Insight 2018 from the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman, and we're welcoming back one of our alumni, Brendan Howe, SVP of the Cloud Volumes Services at NetApp. Hey, Brendan. Hey. Thanks for taking some time to come chat with Stu and me. And thank you for having me. Big event. 5,000 plus people, the keynote this morning, we had a chance to go to that, and it was when we were leaving, standing room only. Biggest Gene English, your CMO was saying, this is the biggest collection of customers and partners under one roof. That's great. Yeah, fantastic. You're a long time NetApp yet. 12 and a half years. 12 and a half years, young. So you've seen a lot of transforming NetApp's transformation. I have. In the messaging and the positioning, NetApp is the data authority. We're helping customers be hashtag data driven. Cloud is really now seeming to be at the heart of NetApp's strategy. Talk to us about that evolution. Absolutely. You always want to be positioning yourself ahead of where you are, where you want to go. You want to be perceived as the future of where you're aiming. And I think it's been clear to us for a while now that the whole dynamic and movement to Cloud is probably the most disruptive and most impactful thing that's hit traditional IT. We've lived through a lot of changes. I've been here for a lot of them, where you went through a virtualization and the way applications were deployed and the way infrastructure was deployed waves and up and down of the economy. Those were minor speed bumps, I think, in the journey of how we get to where we want to go. The disruption of Cloud, which really could be characterized as the availability of an unprecedented set of services from the biggest public clouds in the world who happen to be the biggest companies in the world has changed the dynamics completely. I don't know that people fully appreciate why it's been so impactful. When you talk to customers, what you hear is they go to the Cloud for agility and speed. It's not really a cost discussion of where our compute instances or bits or storage cheap or one or the other, it's an agility argument. And what Cloud brings to them is unprecedented pace of change, of adoption, of speed of line of business that they can't reproduce otherwise. So I think it's really important that we aim ahead of where we want to be, which is really a Cloud-first data-oriented company and that's why you see so much of that messaging from us. Yeah, Brendan, it's really interesting. I think back, if I turn back the clock it does in years ago, we didn't talk about software defined, yet there were certain companies out there, the storage, it was like, okay, we're going to create software for storage. Well, no, that was some software that ran on their box and only on their box. That's right. NetApp was the hipster software defined by the storage company, right? They were software before anybody else was. When you talk about NetApp in this Cloud world, I think it's taken a while to kind of come into focus. I remember back at the early solutions, it was like, oh, let's stick a filer in a data center, direct connect it, we can offer some services. But the nirvana we've been trying to reach is storage services available, lots of different places. Can you walk us through some of that as philosophically where NetApp's going? Yep, I think that's a good observation. I would say, think back about four or five years ago, which I still think most of the industry is in at the moment. The notion of working with cloud was largely a connect to cloud theory. As you described, where you have systems that would interconnect into the cloud or even leap into that world of taking an operating system and having it run in a VM in the cloud. I think of that as a cloud connected strategy. And customers were intrigued, but what we often heard from them is, it really can't be consumed as a cloud service and it really can't be part of my traditional bill with Azure, Google or AWS. So it's interesting, but it's an adjacency and what we're really looking for are native cloud services. So we took that to heart and really retrenched our effort to figure out how to build cloud data services that behave every bit like a native cloud service from the big cloud companies all the way through to metered billing, provisioned and managed through the native portals of those cloud companies. Other than a brand label here and there, a customer may not even know it's net up. That's how cloud oriented these services are. I think that's what it's going to take to be successful in this space. And you do that across multiple clouds with a quest towards going after market share. At the end of the day, you want to be relevant in as many cloud instances as exist so you aim at the big cloud companies and you aim at global scale. So I think that was what the learnings that we had through that journey is, it's not enough to just to reference architectures or software ports to the cloud. You really have to think about native services. There, clearly you have to find unique value. You have to do something that's not available otherwise, which is par for the course, but you also have to look at levels of integration that make it very, very easy to consume. And in the cloud, that's an unprecedented level of simplicity. One of the big challenges of the multi-cloud world is it would be really nice if it was just a utility. People always say, oh, well, I'm going to choose a cloud and I can change things. Well, as you said, there's differentiation in the cloud. If you go talk to Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, they're not all saying, no longer is it the race to the bottom. So when you talk about partnering with the clouds, how do you provide unique differentiation? You need to integrate with all of the different players yet. Customers would love to be able to, you know, oh, it's just a Kubernetes service and I use this deal and I move things around. How do you balance and deal with that, complicated nuanceness of what multi-cloud really is? Yeah, well, I think the starting point is being good at a cloud in something, right? And then you build on that competency. The big bank theory of going in and helping a customer with a hybrid cloud scenario that extends to multi-cloud is sort of the longest term vision of where they might end up over time to, so to some extent, it's the hardest problem to take on first. So if you core that back down a little bit saying, let's focus on a use case that runs in the cloud to get started and we'll build on that. The true fashion of start small, iterate, you know, grow, earn monthly recurring revenue, build on your success and go is really the nature of the beast of what we're trying to do. Each of the cloud environments tend to have real core competence that leads customers there in the first place. Now, I don't know that you can ever listen to discussions from AWS without hearing about the breadth of their platform as a service and how attractive it's been to the development and DevOps community, or you swing over and talk to Google, it's all about machine learning and analytics and TensorFlow and all of that big query type stuff. And then you swing over to Azure and you hear about linking to the enterprise with traditional applications now unable to run natively in the cloud. You follow those paths towards use case success and figure out how to build those solution stack with real value for the customer. So we're trying to bring cloud volume services into the fold, not as infrastructure as a service that's an option as well that might be faster, but tether that to real use cases where look, people are trying to move SAP HANA environments into the cloud, can we help? People are trying to figure out how to run database in the cloud, can we help? People are trying to figure out how to run analytics on file data that may even be collected on prem, how can we help? So you get into those types of discussions and start building validation and it gets a lot easier to begin the journey of getting involved. I do think a multi-cloud world is the reality where people will end up as I do a hybrid cloud, but customers have to work their way through that implementation in order to achieve that outcome. I think that's a long journey for a lot of customers. And I think there's a lot of technology that still has to be built to realize that full vision. The point is we're focused on that. I think we're on the right path. And if you saw the keynote this morning, Anthony gave a nice preview of some of the data fabric vision that really showed snippets of how that plays out, a lot of which is available today, which is pretty cool. Last question in about a minute left, Brandon. NetApp is very customer focused, very customer centered. Always has been. You've a exactly massive install base of as George was addressing this morning, a lot of enterprise customers not born in the cloud, those who are digital, those who are now. And last question, how have your customers helped influence the evolution of cloud volume services? Yeah, you know, in a variety of ways. At times the traditional NetApp customer that runs our things on-prem is the most complex customer for services in the cloud because their expectations are, take everything the way they run on-premise and reproduce that in the cloud. And that's just simply not practical because you're in a new environment with new circumstances, with new economics that make that achievement for a customer near impossible to do. So to some extent you have to sort of reprogram the traditional NetApp customer to understand the cloud is different. The compare is not against us on-premise. The compare is the services in the cloud today that we look to improve upon. So that's one aspect of it. But clearly a lot of our customers here at the show have decades of experience in leveraging the features we have into application environments that exist in the cloud today as well. And as it turns out, efficient handling of data still is a problem. Having a reliable and dependable way to do backup and recovery is still a problem for customers. The ability to deal with bulk data from a backup and archive perspective, it's still a problem. So I think a lot of the themes are the same and the technology applies, but it has to be built differently because of the ecosystems that we're going in. And I think the customers here are beginning to realize that. And then you bring in the wildcards what's happening with Kubernetes and the drive towards application provisioning and how all of that can be linked to our solution set. We bring a lot of new opportunity that is different than the way traditional on-premises worked. Is that just like one of the biggest barriers initially was helping these large incumbent enterprises realize that it isn't possible to just go from on-prem to cloud to proof? I think so. The whole notion of taking the exact configuration, but that by the way, they custom tuned. It said, I want to do that exact same thing in the cloud. It turns out that the configuration options in global cloud services just simply aren't available to do that. So you have to sort of rework your customer's mindset into the proper compare and set expectations the right way. All in evolution. Well, Brandon, thanks so much for stopping by and having a chat with Stu and me. We appreciate it. Thank you, it was a pleasure. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. We are at NetApp Insight 2018 from Vegas. We'll be back with our next guest shortly.