 Live from Orlando, Florida. It's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage here in Orlando, Florida for Cisco Live 2018. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Stu Miniman's my co-host, three days. We're in our third day, our next guest, Lee Howard, Chief Technologist, Global Industry Solutions and Alliances at NetApp. Welcome to theCUBE, good to see you again. Absolutely love any chance I get to hang out with you too. Love the technologist angle, because I got to ask you a first question. Cisco really kind of put the hard stake in the ground on the opening keynote. Old way, an architecture slide. Everyone's like, oh, a slide, yeah, firewall. New way, circle, cloud, a lot of services. They've recognized that world's changed. Network's not going away. You guys are in the storage business. That's not going away, but it's changing. What's the key change that your customers, and you're at Cisco, the customer service should know about going on right now that they should pay attention to? Yeah, I think from NetApp's perspective, the big focal area we have is turning the corner that we're no longer an infrastructure or a hardware provider. We're data management, we're software driven, and I think that story, if you've been watching us on Wall Street, has resonated very well, very positively received, but it's not just architecture. We're really rearranging ourselves, putting our money where our mouth is, and the focal point going forward is, how do we change from a meantime between failure as the measuring stick to meantime to resolution? How do we do more intuitive? The messaging here at Cisco Live has been absolutely around that, of how do we do policy-driven automation? How do we do so in an intuitive fashion, and then have the adaptability to where it's not a three or five-year refresh cycle, but how are we continually developing and delivering insights and helping improve environments on a daily basis? One of the things that's pretty consistent we're seeing is, obviously, as the market understands what you guys are doing, you guys have been doing this for a while. We've been following NetApp. You would go doing cloud very early on with AWS. Certainly, you're very customer-driven as well, but you're seeing some change happen because of the scale aspect with the cloud. Change is constant, so really having managing the change with the tech is critical, and that's through a software science. Can you just share your vision on that because to have evolutionary change from a scale standpoint, meaning not the same as it was yesterday, more data growing, what is the core tenets of the architecture? What should customers be thinking about? Because if change is the constant, the tech can't be a one-size-fits-all. What's going on? What makes this model work for you guys? We have more key constituents out there than what we did five years ago, and so in that comes more concerns, more factors on how we need to do our development cycles going forward, and so instead of this, every three years there's a refresh, and that's our big update push. We're on a six-month cadence, and if you look from, you know, on tap, moving from eight dot x to nine dot one, we're seeing at times 40% improvement, that customer has purchased nothing, that environment has changed zero, but we're continuing to develop a better product on a software-based developmental scale rather than having to wait for the hardware to get swapped out, and I think that's where we're seeing a lot of success. One follow-up question, Stu, before you. I know Stu's got a question, it all gets in there, so how's that changed your relationship to the customers? What's changed, because we know the old way, what's the new engagement model with the customers? There were absolutely growing pains, because there was perceptions out there whenever George first took us down this road that you guys are old guard, you're a filer company and that's it, and it took a while to gain the credibility to be able to enter into these newer conversations and really be up-leveled, higher up in the org chart, to be able to say this is no longer just an execution partner, we're a strategic partner to be able to really go to market with and build that out, and it's that data pipeline from edge to core to cloud with an application pipeline on top of it. I view it like a utility grid within a city. If you walk into any room in that city, you flip on a light switch, you expect for that light to turn on and illuminate the room, like the top of my head is this environment right now, but it's understanding that you have to have that data availability, regardless of who your constituency is out there and from our sensor endpoint, be that a person, be it a device to where that is consumed, that entire continuum, we're the only people out there that are going to be able to deliver that in as efficient way and as seamlessly as we do. Yeah, Leah, and I love the vision that you talk about there, we're talking about multi-cloud IoT, it's not the network appliance that I knew of 20 years ago, help connect the dots for us because when I look at the Cisco NetApp partnership, the biggest piece of that is FlexPod. And many people will be like, oh, FlexPod's been around for eight years. I take filers, I take networking, I take servers, I wrap them all up together, put together a solution. It's simple, but that may be not, it's not multi-cloud, it doesn't fit into some of these new paradigms. Where's the modern applications? Where's the multi-cloud? How does the software message and this convergent infrastructure solution fit together? We've got kind of three real key constituents that you have to be able to deliver a solution to nowadays. You've got the traditional IT curators and stewards, you've got the software devs, and you have operations. And if you can go through and find ways for them to collaborate and speak the same language, it comes down to a dialect. And if you can be that Rosetta Stone to be the translation layer between those, that's how businesses can start playing and taking you going forward. Yeah, we're going to have those traditional pieces of the stack that are going to be in there, those are necessities. But it's layering in the app dynamics from Cisco and giving folks a way to say, here is what our growth plan needs to be to start migrating to the cloud. You have our partnerships that we've set up with AWS, Amazon, Google Cloud, you have Cisco's partnerships that they've set up there to where they're choosing to run NFS on us. We're getting pulled into deals on that. Yeah, no, I love that. One of the patterns we've been seeing from customers is step one is you have to modernize the platform. And then that has to have a lot of the same pieces of what I'm doing if I'm in public cloud. And then I can modernize the applications on cloud. Well, in the refactoring of those applications, as you're evaluating that, is I don't want to just bolt on a capability. I want to extend my existing presence out into this new realm. And I think that's been the delineating factor whatever you're looking at. It's not a heavy lift from adding proficiencies. You're just changing the location where you're executing your applications. Leo, I want to get your thoughts on the technology. You mentioned before that you guys are changing your relationships. Certainly, you have a technology advantage. There's some good tech there. Hardware and software, even though you're emphasizing more software. But there's also now business impact. You're now becoming a business partner. Yes. And there's, I won't say business technology, but the outcomes are driving everything. If it's a system, holistically with cloud. So in the successful models today, open source has proven well through generations that co-development has become a very big part of today's collaboration where you don't have to have the other guy to lose to win. Yes. And so collaboration and co-creation is a big part of why DevNet successful. Absolutely. The big why cloud is successful, open source is successful. You guys are kind of an alliance program that requires integration. You have that kind of a posture there. What's the secret sauce for you guys going forward? How do you see the trajectory of the alliances, the partners, at the end of the day, integration becomes critical? Absolutely. Cloud, what's your vision on this? We had to take a step back and really get to know who we were at the time. And there was a mentality of make the world net app. And we wanted to be disruptive as much as possible. And you can't have the monarchies of IT anymore. It has to be a democracy. You have to have a coalition of folks that are bringing best of breed to bear. And especially in the open source model out there, you're getting new titles, new ways of being able to innovate that are being posted daily and curated daily. So if we can be that common broker between these, it's no longer a layer one through four conversation. It's not layer one through seven. It's that layer eight, speaking the dialect of the end user. And if you can articulate those eight layers and be able to do so in a way saying that we're great at what we do, we also need you to be great as well and put that best foot forward and be that willing partner, you find that if you can be at the central junction point of that, that the rest of the business, the rest of the org starts going and then that message really starts resonating. So the next question I want to ask you is obviously enabling technologies, kind of what you're getting at. Let's have that enablement where people can do development, whatever that is, solution and or code or whatever it could be. What should people know about net app? What's the one thing or a few things that makes net app an enabling capability for this new world order that's happening around this new development environment? Well, I think it's the focus that's out there, that we're not trying to push a box or a skew. We are a portfolio company with a lot of different ways to be able to consume and the focus has always been on the end user. How do you want to interface with your data on a day to day basis and then collecting the feedback loops? I think that's something a lot of companies out there want to pontificate and force solutions out there. Ours are, how can we co-op together? You know, we're taking a lesson. So the date is the key. The date is the key and if you can rally around that and pull the right resources together, I think you end up with a solution that everybody is able to get ahead with. Yeah, well, one of the areas where that's critically important is IoT. Yes. Most customers we talk to, they're early in the discussion, some of them are rolling out, a lot of listening, a lot of figuring out, a lot of diversity in what people are doing. Where are the customers at and how's NetApp engaging? Well, you're finding that you're not, you know, in 10 years ago, you would go very deep into one specific vertical and that's how solutions were set up. That's completely fell on its side to where we're seeing machine learning IoT as a data pipeline that's going horizontal and going across all customers out there and those that it's either you are above the line and you're taking advantage of this or you're going to be fledgling in two to three years. And so, you know, where we're really wanting to go with this is articulating from that end point, you can get into OnTap and you're able to carry this and go regardless of where you need to execute those applications and we've got co-opt with Jasper, we have co-opt with Kinetic from Cisco to help securely onboard that data at the edge, at the fog, depending on what the use case is and then being able to normalize it and be able to move it, sort it, curate it and move because data right now, I mean, that's the new oil. And so, if you can combine that and turn it into information which is adding understanding to that data, you've got a recipe to really start delivering, as I said in the keynote out there, it's changing the INIT from information to innovation. It's innovation technology. What's the data driven story? Obviously, data driven has been around, it's been one of those things that's kind of like digital transformation and it's been kicked around as a management practice and also a technical architecture concept. You talk about data driven in your talk here at Cisco Live, what did you talk about in your session? Yeah, the big focal point out there was that there are new IT imperatives that require us to change the way that we approach defining problems and if you can change the way that you've defined problem, it's going to set you on the road to come up with a more intuitive solution. And so, going through, we've got use cases of hospitals that are out there where readmission rates are being dropped, sepsis mortality rates are being dropped because we're no longer having a bifunctional area or bi-departmental silo in environments, we're trying to go through and shatter silos out there so that we have a good standard platform for information sharing. Consumer or patient, regardless of where you're at, that value chain of how they're able to get data from source to innovation has been the primary focal point of what we've been driving towards. Lee, thanks for coming on theCUBE, I really appreciate your insight, very candid, very direct and articulate on NetApp. I got to ask you the question around the show for the people who couldn't make Orlando this year. What's the big story coming out of Cisco Live? If you step back and look down at the show, what's the big story? I mean, we're coming off of five back-to-back quarters of double digit growth according to IDC and so there's a trajectory but we're wanting to get to that next gear and ramp up. So you've heard some of the other of my party come on here and speak of managed private cloud, talk about the industry focus and I think what you're going to see out of us is continuing to be that data authority but doing so in a easy to consume fashion so that the lay person out there is going to be able to garner the same insights the way that any large industry player would be able to as well. It's the democratization of data. Democratization of data. Lee Howard, Chief Technologist in theCUBE, breaking it down for you. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman. More coverage, stay with us as we are going into the end of day three coming up. Stay with us. We'll be back with more after this short break.