 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering NetApp Insight 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. Welcome back to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman Live in Las Vegas at Mandalay Bay at NetApp Insight 2018, the third annual with customers, partners, and less-pressed NetAppians. We're excited to welcome two alumni back to theCUBE. We have Nancy Hart, head of marketing for Cloud Infrastructure at NetApp and Dale Deegan, Cloud Infrastructure Business Director. Guys, welcome back to theCUBE. Thank you so much, it's so great to see you guys again. Likewise, so we got back from a standing room only keynote, thousands of people here, and one of the interesting things, Nancy, that Stu and I both observed were today, no product announcements, it was really about concepts, you know, the first time we heard anything, architecture-related was really the data fabric, but George Curian, CEO of NetApp, talked about the four principles of digital transformation. I think we can unpack those with you guys. The first one talking about digital transformation requires IT transformation. Talk to us about that, speed is the new scale. What does that mean for NetApp as a company that needs to transform into your customers? So it makes for our customers this idea that speed is the new scale, right? That to create new businesses, to create new opportunities, to create new revenues, they have to be a lot more agile and agile in their ITs, right? So, at NetApp, what we're really focused on doing is how to break down the barriers between dev and ops, right? The days of silos, months of provisioning, all of that is now gone, because companies now need to help their teams build faster, build better, and that's really what George was talking about in this idea of speed is the new scale. And if our customers are not driving IT, agile IT operations in their own data centers, their competitors, certainly are. How does that, NetApp talks a lot about being data-driven, the data authority in hybrid cloud. George also said hybrid clouds do in multi-cloud or the de facto architecture. When you talk with customers, how do they digest? NetApp's going to help me be data-driven. Right. What's that conversation like? So it looks like a lot these days is we have, and our customers, they have their own users, their own internal dev ops teams who've gotten very used to taking their corporate Amix and running up to Amazon and setting up a new compute shape or new storage, right? The thing is that we see customers are trying to rebalance where they put their data, where they put their applications. Do some things belong in public cloud? Absolutely. But there's also this natural rebalance. Not every application should be in the cloud for reasons of data governance, perhaps cost, whatever it is, when they build that next new application, it may be in the data center. So to make that work is this idea of a hybrid, multi-cloud experience. And the key part of that is the experience. It's not a management experience, it's a consumption experience. It's a very seamless, simple consumption experience that you've got up in the public cloud, but in a private cloud in your data center. Nancy, I like that. We've been saying on theCUBE for a couple of years now, cloud is not a destination, it's an operating model. Yes. It's a way we need to think things. But Dale, when I talk to customers, when you talk about their cloud strategy, when you talk about what they roll out, every single one of them, totally different. How much they're doing SaaS versus how many different public clouds they're doing. And of course, they're still figuring out what they've got in their traditional data center. As you said, certain companies have been selling them multiple products. They've got their data all spread out. So are we getting away from silos? How architecturally do we build this? There's so much differentiation out in the marketplace today. It'd be lovely to have a magic wand and say, oh, yeah, everything's simple, but it really hasn't been the case in Enterprise IT. I think you nailed it the way you described it right there. You have enterprises that have built up a collection of applications. Some of them have been given a cloud mandate, and so that means something different to everyone. Sometimes they're going out all SaaS. Sometimes they're saying, I want to put everything, all my storage in the cloud. We're seeing an interesting moment in time where there's almost a reaction to that and finding out maybe there's silos within different public cloud service providers. Maybe the monthly cost is a little bit larger than what people might have expected on that. At NetApp, we've been working with our customers, and I kind of love being here, because in the last couple of years it's just been this huge transformation of the company around that. Taking a lot of our customers that viewed us as number one in storage, they're a trusted provider on that, and really expanding out to a more data-driven solution on there. Things we've done internally to address that is really focused on different business imperatives, because I think each of our customers has their data center that they need their rock solid applications on. They're thinking about this journey to the cloud. They're trying to innovate with acceleration in the cloud with different services, with the biggest public clouds, and along the way, they're also saying, I need some of that agility internally, and so we've really built that to build out your hybrid multi-cloud experience, and the company strategy is coming together. We're seeing investments, we're seeing growth, and announcements, and all of those. So, one of the interesting things that I observed in the keynote this morning was NetApp being 26 years young company, right? Massive install base. You've got a lot of customers who were not born in the digital age, and George Kearing, your CEO, seems to kind of address them almost right out of the gates. So, let's talk about the data fabric a little bit more. Let's unpack that, because some of the messaging seems to be reflecting that, and I think Anthony Lai talked about this a little bit this morning in the keynote as well. It's transforming from a vision to an architecture. For your customers, your incumbent enterprise customers who were not born in the cloud, what does being data-driven mean to them? How are they embracing this architecture idea of the data fabric and using it to use their data to identify new customer touchpoints, deliver new services, increase revenue? So, we're seeing a lot of our customers really transform their business to take advantage of these new services in the cloud. The value that a lot of them are bringing to us is they have a massive amount of institutional data that maybe was in different silos. Maybe, and they had different as-a-service offerings touching it. We're able to bring it together with the data fabric so now they can consolidate this into a large amount of tangible data. You can have multiple as-a-service solutions and services coming from public cloud service providers to do analytics on data. For example, we have energy companies that have seismic data from 50 years ago that is sitting on tapes. It's better than anything they could even get today. They bring it all together and now they're doing data analytics on this and they're finding new ways to really take advantage of that. So, we're seeing that across the board and our goal is to try to move them along that journey. Nancy, could you give us a little insight as to who you're selling to, where is NetApp getting involved in those strategic discussions? As I said, everybody's got a cloud strategy but I said usually the ink's still drying and it's something you need to revisit often. Where is NetApp seed at that table? You've got a lot of partners here. And how are things changing? A lot of things are changing in a lot of ways for NetApp. In the companies that we're selling to and the who we're selling to at those companies, we certainly see a lot of new buyers. And it's interesting to see now that the decision-making, who's sitting at the decision table when they make that decision of what kind of infrastructure to purchase? It's getting at a larger and larger group. And now we're really seeing the dev teams, their internal dev ops teams have a seed at that table who are having significant influence on the infrastructure and operations teams on what kind of investments that company should be making, right? So, working with partners, going to market through the largest public hyperscalers and reaching these new buyers in new and existing accounts as well. So even if there is a traditional part of the data center, I guarantee you somewhere in every company there's a new dev team working on new business models. And so we want to attack. Does the conversation, Nancy, start at the business outcomes level? Absolutely. And Dale, from your perspective, how are you seeing some of the more technical folks in an organization participating in a business outcomes driven conversation where it's more about, these are the things we need to do to compete to increase our revenue. How is that persona-based conversation changing? So actually I have a story from a customer meeting earlier this week, right? So we were talking with the customer about the data fabric and what we can do and how we can deliver a seamless experience between public and private clouds. And we walked out of the room and the gentleman from the customer, because I walked in that room as a storage admin and I walked out as a data fabric architect, right? It's happening. It is pretty good validation. It's happening right now, right? The personas, even the personas that we traditionally know are certainly changing. What are you saying? To that point, we're seeing some of the attributes that service providers are offering. We're seeing enterprises at the same time try to build those at scale. And it's really been amazing as we're seeing, you spoke about speed as the new agility on here. And it's really the agility to be kind of build those infrastructures quickly and take advantage of that at a business advantage level. And a lot of the most technical customers of ours are saying now they have a seat at the table to kind of inspire some of those business innovations. They see how they could make the company more efficient and all of a sudden they're getting a lot more attention at the sea level. All right, so a few years ago there was the wave of big data. And it was really what I summed it up and one of the key findings was it was that bit flip of saying, oh my gosh, I have so much data too. Oh yeah, I've got so much data and I can take advantage of it. What I want you to help connect us is when you talk about being data driven, NetApp at its core is there's storage, there's infrastructure, there's software. How do I then get the insights and the value out of the data that I've helped my customers get to? So let me give you an example of what NetApp is doing around this very issue. So we have a very large install base like you talked about. We have a new product called ActiveIQ and what it does is based on community wisdom, pulled from 30,000 or more installed systems across our entire customer base. And what we do is we use AIML to extract value and intelligent insights and then actionable plans for our customers so even if our customer doesn't have 30,000 units installed they can take advantage of all of that knowledge themselves. So we drink our own champagne and we apply the things that we learn but we can also help customers do the same thing in their own business as an extract value from their own data. I'm curious too from a company as history does NetApp, formerly network appliance, how is a NetApp drinking our own champagne example? How does that influence customers' perspective on NetApp's transformation and convince a customer to trust NetApp and go yes, this is a partner that I want to work with to help us be able to just do this point, not just amass a ton of data and de-silo but extract insights that are essential to drive business change. So we actually have some breakout sessions here where NetApp IT is speaking to that. Talking about how we have, that's NetApp on NetApp. We've got the active IQ data coming in to an all-flash-faz tier, being tiered down through e-series to object storage to the giant data lake of active IQ doing analytics on that. And so that's a great reference for us. We're able to have them speak to our customers directly eye to eye in our executive briefing centers and oftentimes that pushes them over the edge on that one. Because we're living the dream and we're making our own mistakes along the way and so when we have folks from our NetApp's own IT department come speak with customers it's very credible about, oh, we did this, it worked, we did this, it didn't work so much, right? But we're in that same transformation journey as our customers as well. Well, the failure I always say is my, it's not a bad afford, it's part of that journey. Yes. Well, finishing up Nancy with you, talk to us about the Mia customer example that really articulates the value that NetApp is delivering as an enabler of a data-driven company. So one of my favorites these days is we work with a company called Children's Mercy Hospital Kansas City, right? And they brought us new CIO in. He was really interested in transforming the IT experience for his clinicians, right? These are the people that work with kids in the hospital, sick kids, they're stressed out families. And I love this story because it's very easy for me to imagine if my child was in the hospital how stressed out I would be to have a clinician walk in, fast easy access to the latest data about my child, a happy clinician. That would be such an impact to me. And so to see what our customers are doing at Children's Mercy, and they're also multi-cloud. They've got their own private clouds, they're accelerating their VDI, they're working with public clouds all through NetApp product. In the end, to help those kids and to help maybe some mom somewhere via just a smidge, less stress. Are you helping them to use some of the emerging technologies, IOT, AI, to drive faster, better outcomes and decision-making for these critical, literally life and death situations? Exactly. So the first project we're working on them is about accelerating their VDI. How does he get a virtual desktop to all his clinicians? So whatever room that clinician is in, he has access, or she has access to the latest data about that child, right? And to make the overall just a better experience. So that the new CIO is very keen on just delivering a better experience, not better technology, but a better experience for his clinicians and for his patients. Nancy and Dale, thanks so much for stopping by on day one of Inside. We appreciate your time. Got to give you some cube stickers because you're double alumni now. We're alums. Thank you very much. We want to thank you. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman for watching theCUBE. Again, we're live all day at NetApp Insight 2018. Stick around, Stu and I will be right back with our next guest.