 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering NetApp Insight 2017, brought to you by NetApps. Okay, welcome back everyone. We're here live in Las Vegas, the Mandalay Bay for NetApp Insight 2017. This is exclusive CUBE coverage. I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE Co-Pounder of SiliconANGLE Media. My co-host is Keith Townsend, CTO advisor. Our next two guests is James Whitemore who's the VP of Brand and Demand for NetApp and David Richard, VP of Solutions Engineering. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on, appreciate taking the time. Thanks for having us. So we're kicking off the day here. Long day, we're going to go up to like seven o'clock, I think, interviews with the folks. A lot of exciting things happening with NetApp. Obviously, data is changing the world. We're seeing a lot of those examples in the real world. Don't want to rehash, we just talked about on the intro. But society changes from the boardroom to the dorm room, from play to work. You're seeing every dimension of life changing. We call this digital transformation in the enterprise, but it's affecting truly everyone. This is the consumerization of IT, playing out in real time. People are reimagining how life and work is happening. NetApp, great leader, entrepreneurial company, back in the 90s, always had that DNA. How has storage become more and more enabling? In a way that's going to change society? How is storage? Storage company NetApp, that's turning into a data company. Having the kind of solutions. What's the brand promise? What's the DNA of NetApp right now? Well, I think data first, it's kind of like, we were really not a storage company anymore. We are a data company. And we will help our customers put data at the center of their business. Not think about storage, but think about data and where it is, what it does, how they use it, how they bring data from multiple places, multiple partners, and really put it at the center of their business. David, I was talking with eight years ago with NetApp folks, you guys were kind of progressive and in Amazon, first, real company in Amazon doing this kind of storage data convergence way back when. So eight years now, where's the solutions for customers? What is the, because customers want the cloud, they want on-premise, they got to take care of business there, hybrid policies, everyone's hyped, but on-premise activity, whether it's private cloud or DevOps, the data piece is critical. How's that evolved? Sure, so, and first of all, like you said, NetApp's been pretty early to the space, so six, seven years ago, we're already pretty embraceable cloud as a deliberate technology and as an ecosystem, and we were never, as a company, threatened by that, right? I think a lot of people in our business, especially in the storage industry, were very concerned that ultimately they were a competitor of ours. So I think we realized early on that it was a part of an ecosystem that we had to be part of, and we really focused on trying to demonstrate our value regardless of where the bits and bytes are stored. So trying to drive that consistency of customer experience, whether or not they're doing an on-prem hybrid or a full public cloud, and in trying to leverage the skillsets and the technologies that they already had in a traditional NetApp environment, and use those to manage it across a very complex, multi-cloud, multi-hypervisor environment. And that's really most of the stuff we've been talking about today, right, is we did a lot of great announcements in the last hour, and it's all around helping enterprises put cloud technology in the center of their business and do that with the confidence that the data's going to be protected, that there's going to be predictability of customer experience, and that they're going to be able to maintain that asset that data is becoming to the company. So I'm curious, NetApp, SolidFire, rock solid technology from a storing and retrieving bits perspective. But now we're getting into the conversation about data. We knew who NetApp's and SolidFire's customer was in the traditional enterprise, or ISP, or service provider. Who's the customer today? Who are you guys talking to? It's no longer the storage call center anymore. Who's that message that you're delivering it to, and how are they receiving it? Yeah, well, in my role as being the guy that runs the solution engineers, so the guys that are out there interfacing with customers and trying to collect requirements, it's been an amazing shift, right? So we're very familiar with going into the infrastructure guy and having a conversation around how they can build a performance secure storage environment inside the four walls of a data center, maybe expanding it to, hey, how can I replicate that to a couple of data centers. Now that's not the case. Now we're really spending a lot of time finding the application owners, or better yet, finding the people that have inside organizations that have connections to customers who are looking to engage those customers differently through technology. So it's a lot more searching for people. It's much more of a discussion about business outcomes and customer intimacy than it ever was. I'd like to get some of the solutions you mentioned. I've got some announcements. But before we get there, how do you guys solve the problem for customers? Or better yet, what is the core problem that you solve for customers today? Obviously it's not just the storage as we were pointing out, it's a data problem. What is the problem that you're solving and what are some of the new solutions you guys have coming out at the show here that you'd like to talk about? I'll give you my perspective on that. And I think you guys probably didn't get to see the keynote presentation this morning. I'm sure you guys were setting up here, but there's really come like three ways that we think about it. We think about that each and every one of our customers is doing one sum or all of three things. They are trying to modernize their existing infrastructure, to bring it current, to make that infrastructure more efficient and operationally effective. They're trying to build a next generation data center. They're trying to look outside of what they have today and look at what that next generation data center should be and they're trying to harness the power of a cloud. And we tend to group our solutions in the way that we think and the way that we talk to our customers in those three areas. And many of them are doing all of those three things at once, right? Yeah, so get the date, get the speed, get the next-gen data center. What is the product you guys announced? Can you take a minute to talk about them? Yeah, sure, sure. A whole bunch of things. Probably the most interesting and exciting one is the Microsoft NFS solution that we just announced. So this is actually pretty cool capability. This is the ability for a user inside of Microsoft Azure to natively provision NFS. And it's, like I said, it's natively driven inside of the Azure infrastructure. But it's delivered through NetApp technology. We think it's important that as customers start moving to the cloud, that they start to be able to bring their tool sets and their expectations that they have. And so that was a key one. And that's really what you're seeing is the maturation of the relationship that we announced with those guys about six months ago. Also a couple of other things there about deepening the relationship around some of our backup products and especially around helping customers protect Office 365 applications in the cloud. So that was a big one. We, most recent release of data on tap 9.3, we did our first pre-announce of that today. Same thing, it's a lot about, obviously it's leveraging the new technologies around performance, right? So this is NVME. This is high speed interfaces and flash, which obviously is very important today when you're really trying to, you know, when you're building applications that latency really matters. So that's a big thing. It's also building and expanding upon our ability to provide the highest levels of data availability as well as data compression and efficiency around that. So that was a pretty big one. We're continuing to evolve the tool set around cloud, right? So the things that allow our customers to be able to orchestrate and maximize and visualize their utilization of the cloud and some other products around helping, you know, customers truly do multi-cloud and multi-hype advisor in an operational way. All right, final question for you guys both to share. This comes up a lot, so I'd like to get your thoughts. What are customers saying? Share some anecdotal sound bites around what customers are saying about some of these challenges because they're pretty significant. You got to take care of business and modernizing infrastructure, blocking and tackling. You got to do next-gen, which means either software paradigm DevOps or, you know, private cloud ready, and then obviously cloud apps. That's a hybrid and or public private, whatever you want to call it. That's a lot of work. Now over the top, you've got data governance, you've got IoT around the corner. I mean, this is really, really challenging for CXOs. What are customers saying to you guys about the relationship that they're having with NetApp? Share some either data or anecdotal sound bites. So we had around 50 CIOs, chief data officers, and that type of person here at an executive summit yesterday and kind of like, you know, some really, really kind of like clear requests. It's help us. This is complicated. The way that we look at our world is, you know, very mixed between our legacy infrastructures, the private clouds we're trying to build and the public cloud that we're trying to harness and help us do that. And the feedback they give us is, yes, you are doing the right things. Everything that we showed them yesterday, everything that we showed them today, of really being able to look at data holistically across all of those type of platforms, is exactly what they want to be. So they're leaning on you guys more. They are looking for leadership, kind of like, you know, how do we do this? I think we're talking about NetApp DNA, right? And I think that's an important thing right now is, you know, I say things very complex, customers can be very confused. I think customers are also very fearful of lock-in. And I think they're very fearful of making decisions today that they can't un-make in the future. So they're asking us a lot of questions about, if I make this decision today, does that preclude me from being able to make bigger decisions or different decisions in the future? If I go down this road, can I go back? And so that, it's more about just providing, demonstrating to them that they have a safe ecosystem and that we're not going to be providing all the solutions that they're going to use inside the cloud, but we're going to be open and embracing them as many of those as possible to protect their investment. You guys got a great customer base too, and it's growing. And the thing that we took away last week at our big data NYC event we had in Manhattan was, in that world, big data, you've seen the hype come and go. There's no tolerance for hype. Customers, to your point, are super busy. Their plates are full, and the rubber's got to hit the road. And so they played with some stuff, total cost of ownership becomes a big problem, right? So like, some of those, the fruit's not coming on the tree of some of those hyped up technologies, so they want to have a partner. You guys hear that same thing in general? Yeah, and if you go, I would encourage everyone to go check out the recording of the general session this morning. You have some really clear demos of how we are helping customers, how we are really helping them drive efficiency in their existing infrastructure, to work across clouds, all of the hyperscale clouds, to bring a next generation date center platform together. We're based on the solid-fire HCI products, and really, really clear things that we're doing to help them. You can't just buy a new digital transformation product. You got to lean on what you got and build from there. Yeah. You can't buy hybrid cloud, there's no skew for that. But there's also, there's almost this consumerization of IT where there's expectations that things should be that easy, right? Especially I think at some senior levels, there's an expectation that they're trying to drive change down into organizations and organizations are being resistant to it. But often it's just that things are still complex. Well, that's a good point. We're going to get into some of the segments around that. That speaks directly to the automation. That speaks to the non-differentiated labor that's shifting to more labor activities, value activities. We're seeing that certainly in the Wikibon data on our side, but great point. They want the ease of use of consumer. Wait, it should be magic. Yeah. Yeah. It should be like a Tesla, right? Everyone wants the self-driving storage. So, thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. Day one here, NetApp Insight. Check it out. They've got great demos. Again, it should be easy. There's a lot of work involved if you're an enterprise. Check out NetApp. It's theCUBE. More coverage after this short break. Digital transformation.