 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering NetApp Insight 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. Welcome back to theCUBE, continuing coverage of the third annual NetApp Insight with customers, partners, about 5,000 plus people here. Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman, and very excited to welcome to theCUBE for the first time, George Curie, and the CEO of NetApp. George, thanks so much for stopping by. Of course, thank you for having me. Really enjoyed your keynote this morning. First of all, it was standing room only. There was about 5,000 plus people here. Gene English, your CMO, mentioned to us a few hours ago that this is the biggest collaboration of your partners and customers under one roof. The momentum is palpable, the messages are palpable, and I really enjoyed some of the messages that you delivered in your keynote. One, I'd love to get your perspective on the data authority and how NetApp itself has transformed in recent years to become that data authority. What does that mean from your C-level perspective? You know, we've always been in the business of helping our customers help make their businesses better with data. We used to do it strictly in the form of storage systems, but over the last few years, we have built a much more robust portfolio of capabilities, both technological as well as partnerships to enable customers to use our technology wherever their data sets, whether it's in the edge of the enterprise or in the heart of the biggest cloud providers in the world. And we believe that the world will be a hybrid, multi-cloud world because of the need for speed and efficiency in how IT delivers support to digital businesses. And our idea is to help our customers by using our tools to integrate all of their data for business advantage. So we see ourselves as someone who is really knowledgeable about being managing customers' data in a hybrid cloud world. That's what we call data authority for the hybrid cloud. And you talked about this morning too, kind of early in your keynote, it sounds like you were addressing, NetApp has a massive install base, helping those customers understand those that weren't born in the digital age. They have to be there now to be relevant, to compete, to identify new service models. So I thought that was a very poignant message. But something that Stu and I were talking about is the four pillars of digital transformation. Walk us through, for those that didn't have a chance to see your keynote, walk us through those four pillars, how NetApp is enabling customers to utilize them. Absolutely, we talk to our customers about if you're not a born digital business, you need to transform yourself, especially using your data to compete with these born digital companies. And there are four ideas that we shared with customers that are the cornerstones of such a transformation. The first is that digital transformation requires IT transformation, business as usual in IT wouldn't cut it for the digital era. The second is an idea that was created by the Boston Consulting Group, which is that speed is the new scale. It's the hallmark of competitive differentiation and advantage in the digital world. I was talking about the fact that Fortnite, a game that was created just a year ago, has now got 125 million customers or players. That wouldn't happen in the physical world. And the third is that because of the need for speed, you need to be able to take advantage of innovation sources anywhere, which creates the necessity to operate in a hybrid, multi-cloud world, where IT is enabling the business to access innovation everywhere. And finally, that while you're doing it, you need to think about your data, the critical asset that you have that the born digital companies don't, and how to use that, and you need to build a data strategy, which requires you to move from thinking about data centers to data fabrics. And so those were four key principles that we are sharing with our customers. George, I think that's a great way to measure what's happening with digital transformation. I wonder if you can help us take a lens at NetApp itself. So when you talk about speed, NetApp has 26 years of experience. You've got over 10,000 employees. A company of this size and this heritage, you have some girl's strengths, but you're competing against some of those cloud native players. Cloud is the bar which we are all measured, as someone said on the keynote this morning. I believe it was you. Can you speak especially to the speed aspect, how you look internally, what has to change culturally? I know Gene talked to us this morning. Operationally, there were changes made that's your background. Absolutely. I think that we are an example of a company that is using data to accelerate our business in multiple ways. The first was in product development, we have used a lot of information about how customers use our systems, how the support organization reacts to customer situations, and have accelerated cycle times for software development. It was 20 months when I joined, it's now six months on our hardware platforms, and on the cloud we are releasing new capabilities every two weeks. So we've really become a cloud native development organization, and it required a lot of changes. I would just tell you that getting the engineers through to the other side of it has been extraordinary. They love the new world. They would never want to go back to the old world. Another place is around our customer interface where we've invested a lot more in digital marketing capabilities. Our CMO Gene English is an expert in that world, and so we have had new discussions with cloud-only customers entirely electronically. And on the back end, in terms of support, we have amassed a lot of information about our customer systems, and now we're using artificial intelligence through a capability called ActiveIQ to tell them proactively what they can do to benchmark themselves against the best. So we say, listen Stu, we think your system, which is operating an exactly similar environment to Lisa's system, is not working as well because you've done these five things. And so there's a lot of ways where we are trying to progress our own transformation. I would tell you that the secret, there are two important lessons learned. One was we started with business-led initiatives rather than an end-to-end transformation of the business. And the second is we structured a transformation program led by the Chief Transformation Officer so that it would become the day-to-day reality of our business, not the afterthought of the normal course of business. And so those are two key practical tips that we would share with our customers about transformation. George, NetApp has a strong history with partnerships. When I think about channel-led, NetApp has always been there. From a technology standpoint, NetApp has negotiated some challenging waters. I think specifically VMware was a big wave, of course, acquired by EMC, but NetApp did better in VMware environments than it did in the market as a whole. Today VMware is still a very important piece of the marketplace, but Amazon's another one that is a challenging company to partner with. Everybody's always worried, okay, how long do you partner with them before they take over? How do you look at that? What are the most important partnerships from a NetApp standpoint and how do you face those today? We've always kept the customer at the center of a partnership. I think that the secret to our success has always been that we keep the customer interest paramount, and it allows us to partner with companies who may be part of some of our competitors. I think today if I look at it, clearly in terms of the customer lens, we have a lot of work going on with the big cloud providers, both in North America as well as overseas, to help customers architect a truly hybrid multi-cloud. We showed some really exciting work that we've done over the last year to make that a lot more tangible and real, and it's the result of deep engineer-to-engineer collaboration with them. I think the second area that we're making investments in are really to build the foundation for using data alongside artificial intelligence and machine learning, specifically with training and inference models, and there we've been fortunate to be able to collaborate with the leader, NVIDIA, in that market, and it's about focusing on what we bring and keeping the customer at the center of the conversation. In terms of the go-to-market side of things, we've also done work, for example, with Lenovo, where we are bringing complementary skill sets into the market. They're bringing computing skills, we're bringing storage and data management skills. They have strength in certain geographies, and so we feel like it's a really complementary relationship, and we respect there, all of our partners, what they bring to the market, and we're excited and honored to work with them, to be honest. So one of the things that I've read recently, and it was apparent in a lot of the messaging today, is the evolution of the data fabric. It's moved, it's transformed from a vision to a legitimate architecture. Talk to us about some of the evolution in the last 12 months and how your customers have helped be able to really make that real. We've learned a lot about real use cases of the data fabric. Today we have hundreds of customers deployed and in production with it, and we've been fortunate to be able to iterate at cloud speed on the new capabilities. It is real today. We allow you to have data management services integrated across all of your environments in your data center with the world's best flash. We've connected and we're very excited to connect our enterprise-grade HCI solution to it, and of course a catalog of consistent data services that cross enterprise cloud with our HCI and the biggest public clouds. We have taken advantage of new container technology and capabilities that Kubernetes and Istio bring to the market to build a really good control plane for all of this. We've innovated around data insights using foundational technology from on-command insight that gives you now visibility into where all of your data sits. And you'll see us continue to bring out really exciting innovations in the data fabric. The reason that the data fabric is resonating with customers is because it helps you build a consistent set of data services in a hybrid multi-cloud world and use your data for business advantage. That's why it's resonating. George, NetApp has gone through some ups and downs over the 26 years. In many ways, it's been closer. People have said it's been on the brink of being gone and it's remade itself. How has NetApp continued to do this? And why should people believe that NetApp is in the position to execute best for the future? I think we've always been resilient at looking at things that could have been threats and making them opportunities. Throughout the generations, there was the transition from the internet computing, the dot-com bus that affected everybody. Virtualization was supposed to kill storage. The cloud was supposed to kill storage. And through every one of those transitions, we have looked carefully at how could we take what could be a threat and make it an opportunity. And make it an opportunity by serving our customers best through those technology moves. And I think that's the core to our success. I would say that what we have done over the last few years is massively up the game on execution. We laid out the data fabric strategy four years ago as a vision and four years later, we've got customers, we've got the biggest cloud providers, we've integrated it with the world's best Flash and the world's best HCI. And we are delivering roadmaps. So I think that's really the promise of the new NetApp. We are really, really focused on execution. Another thing, sorry, Sue, that we've heard along those lines in terms of NetApp's evolution and staying continuing to stay relevant is that the NetApp on NetApp story is one that NetAppians are proud of and should be. But it's also seeming like, is that a differentiator? When you're talking with customers who have so much choice, that NetApp on NetApp story, that authentic, this is how we pivoted over the last 26 years to stay relevant, to compete. Tell us a little bit about how you're, as the CEO when you're meeting with customers, how does that story resonate with them? Our transformation story is a topic of conversation with all C-level executives. Everything we talked about with our customers today, we are an example of. So for example, we did not take on an end-to-end IT re-architecture. We prioritized the digital business initiatives in the company and said, what are the barriers in our own IT that preclude that? And so we prioritized IT initiatives to support the digital business transformation of the company. We have created two data hubs in the company as we have progressed those initiatives. One, a product data hub through our auto support mechanism which is now integrated into every technology that we sell to customers, both in the data centers of our customers and on the cloud. And on the customer-facing side, we've evolved to a customer hub. So I think that there are examples that we share both in terms of leadership, people change management, transformation of IT that are extraordinarily relevant. And I think that one of the things that we are open about sharing is the mistakes we've made. I think that brings an honesty and a transparency to our relationships with our customers and they trust us because of that. All right, George, it's been really interesting. People said for years, storage is going to be killed off by everything else. If you look at all of the big waves right now, data's at the center of all of it. What I want you to help us understand is connect the dots for us because NetApp, most of the customers I talk to here, the first thing they'll think about is, well, NetApp's my storage company. Storage versus the data and how I get value out of that. Help us connect the dots as to how I go from being a storage supplier to helping customers become data visionaries, as you say. I think one of the really important discussions we have with customers is data is the foundation of a digital business. It's sort of the oil of the digital business and software is the engine, right? It operates on the data to make the business go better. The challenge that most business leaders have as they think about digitizing their businesses is that they have fragmented their data across systems and silos that were the prevailing norm in IT. Not only did it fragment the data, but it made operating IT much more complicated. And so two long held paradigms that we have shared are finally coming to reality, right? NetApp has always been a simplify your data center unlike our competitors. And that's coming through for the needs of simplification. And the second is while you're doing it, build a platform that can integrate all of your data so that you can accelerate your transformation. And I think we're well positioned for that. I think there are customers here who have never met us in the storage systems world that have joined us on the cloud like Booksy Nexcode, the genomics company that never buys a piece of equipment from NetApp. So we're really excited about an enormous number of those new faces that we're seeing. And then there are customers that started with us as a storage system supplier that we are bringing to the cloud. And so we're going to keep pushing forward. Yeah, just quick follow up on that. It was really opened my eyes. I was at the Cisco show earlier this year when you talk about the future, you know, Cisco, the networking company, they said, you know, 10 years from now you won't think of us as a networking company. You'll think of us just as a software company. What's that up at the future? We will offer our intellectual property in a broad range of ways, right? I think we'll still be offering systems, but I think the brains of those systems will really be super smart software, software that's digitally enhanced and software that's enhanced with machine learning capabilities. I think we'll offer them also as cloud services. And we're really going to be focused on helping our customers with their data problems. We think that's an extraordinarily rich landscape. And we think that it has the opportunity to propel our business to achieve everything we've wanted to achieve. So we're excited about the momentum. We are, you know, honored to have so many customers, partners, and technologists here. And I think this is the best insight in the three years that I've been CEO and I'm looking forward to having an even better one next year. Excellent, keep moving that bar, George. Thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE. You're now an alumnus. I'm going to give you a sticker so you brand yourself. Stu and I really appreciate you sharing your insights and your time with us. Thank you so much. It's been an honor to be here. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. We are live from NetApp Insight 2018 in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin for Stu Miniman. Stick around. We'll be back with our next guest shortly.