 Live from Berlin, Germany, it's theCUBE. Covering NetApp Insight 2017. Brought to you by NetApp. We are wrapping up a day of coverage at NetApp Insight on theCUBE. I'm Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Peter Burris. So we've had a lot of great interviews here today. We've heard from NetApp executives, NetApp customers, partners about this company's transformation and about what it's doing now to help other companies have a similar transformation. What have been some of your impressions of where NetApp is right now and what it's saying? I think it starts with the observation that NetApp realized a number of years ago that if it was just going to be a commodity storage company, it was going to have a hard time. And so NetApp itself went through digital transformation to try to improve its understanding of how customers really engaged with it, how it could improve its operational profile, its financial footprint. And the result of that was a company that first off was more competitive, but also that had learned something about digital transformation and realized the relationship between the products that they were selling, the services that they were providing, the ecosystem that they had that they could tap in working with customers and said, what if we took this knowledge, applied to those things, what would we end up with? And so we now have a company that is still talking about products, but very much is also talking about what businesses can do with data differently to affect the type of transformation that NetApp itself has been going through. That's a compelling story. No, and you're describing this introspection that the company did, as you said, well, if we can't survive with our old business model, what can we do differently? And now eating its own dog food, but then telling other companies about its story and how it's made changes. I mean, do you think NetApp is where it should be today? I mean, are you pleased with the progress you've seen? Well, that's one of the great challenges in the tech industry today, is nobody's quite sure where they should be, because nobody's quite sure there are no benchmarks. what's going on underneath them. So many years ago, in response to a reporter's question about IBM, they said, well, you know, what do you think? Is IBM going to be successful at moving the aircraft, turning the aircraft carrier? And I said, you don't get it. The IBM's problem is not that they're trying to turn the aircraft carrier, it's that they're trying to rotate the ocean so that they could go straight and everybody else's position would change. And that's a lot of what's happening in the technology industry today. As people are turning, the ocean's being rotated and there are a couple of companies like AWS that seem to have their fingerprint or their finger on some of those changes. I'm not sure NetApp has that kind of a presence in the industry, but what is clear is that the direction that NetApp has taken is generating improved financial results, lot better customer satisfaction, and it's putting them into position to play in the next round, so to speak, of competition in the industry. And in an industry that's changing this fast, that all by itself is a pretty good position to be in. Well, you know, and you're talking about the changing industry, and then also the changing employment needs that this company has in terms of getting people in their workforce who really understand not just that data is an asset, which is what we keep hearing today too, but really understanding how to capture the data, tease out the right insights from the data, and then deploy a strategy based on those insights that actually will create value to the business, whether that's acquiring new customers or saving money or earning new lines of business too. Well, for example, we had a great conversation with Sheila. Sheila Fitzpatrick about GDPR is phenomenal conversation. Sheila is in charge of privacy at NetApp, and the decision that she drove was to not just do GDPR, NetApp have to GDPR here in Europe, but to do GDPR across the entire company. Now, two years ago, I don't know that a NetApp person would have come onto the cube and talked about GDPR. But that is a problem. That is a challenge that every business has faced. And bringing somebody on that has made some really consequential decisions for a company like NetApp to be able to say, here's how other businesses need to think about GDPR, think about data privacy is a clear example of NetApp trying to establish itself as a thought leader about data and not just a thought leader about commodity storage. So I think there's a lot of changes that NetApp's going to go through. They still are talking about ONTAP, they're still talking about HCI, talking about all the various flash products that they have. So that's still part of their conversation. But increasingly they're positioning those products not in terms of price performance, but in terms of applications to the business based on the practical realities of data. And I also think we've heard a number of executives talk about NetApp having a more consultative relationship with its clients and partners and really learning from them how they're doing things and then sharing the learnings at events like NetApp Insight here. And just really on the ground, we're working in partnership with these companies too. Data is a physical thing. And I think a lot of people forget that. A lot of people just look at data and say, oh, it's a suffemeral thing, yeah, it's out there. And I don't know much you have to worry about it. But physics is an issue when you're working with data. Adam Steltzer, the gentleman, the Dr. Adam, the gentleman from NASA who talked about the role that data science is playing at NASA and Mars Exploration talked about the need to worry about sparse data because they have dial-up speeds to send data back from a place like Mars. Now, they're working on problems, but when you start thinking in those terms, the physical limitations, the physical realities, the physical constraints of data become very real. GDPR is not a physical constraint, but it's a legal constraint. And it might as well be physics. If a company does something, we heard, for example, that there are companies out there that, based on their practices and how they were hacked, would have found themselves facing $160 billion liability. Now, that may not be physics. I can only move so much data back from Mars, but that is a very real legal constraint that would have put those companies out of business if GDPR governance rules had been in place. So what's happening today is companies or enterprises are looking to work with people who understand the very physical, practical, legal, and intellectual property realities of data. And if NetApp is capable of demonstrating that and showing how you can turn that into applications and into infrastructure that works for the business, then that is a great partner for any enterprise. Well, and do you think that other companies get it? I mean, the sense of where we are today, I mean, you use this example of GDPR and how it really could have sent companies out of business if those rules had been in place and they'd been hacked or suffered some huge data breach. Do you think that NetApp is setting itself up as the thought leader? And in many ways is a thought leader. Do other companies on the same level? No, they're not. And certainly there are a lot of tech companies that are moving in that direction and NetApp is, they're comparable with NetApp and working both close with NetApp and opposition in NetApp, at least competitively. But the reality is most enterprises are, how best to put this? Well, what I like to say is William Gibson, the famous author who coined the term cyberspace, for example, once said, the future's here, it's just not evenly distributed. So there are pockets of individuals in every company who are very cognizant of these challenges. The physical realities of data, what it means, what role data actually plays. Why is, what does it mean to call data an asset? What's the implications on the business of looking at data as an asset? That's in place in pockets. But it's not something that's broadly diffused within most businesses. Certainly not our client base, not the Wikibon SiliconANGLE client base, is certainly not broadly aware of some of these challenges. A lot of things have to happen over the course of the next few years for executives and rank and file folks to comprehend the characteristics of the nature of these changes start to internalize and start to act in concert with the possibilities of data as opposed to in opposition to the impacts of data. And those are the people who we had guests on today just talked about the data resistors because there are those in companies, maybe they're just an individual in a company, but that can have a real impact on the company's strategy of moving forward, deploying its data smartly. Yeah, absolutely. And we also have the gentleman from The Economist who made the observation that concerns about artificial intelligence impacts and employment might be a little overblown. So a lot of those data resistors might be sitting there asking the question, what will be the impact of additional data on my job? And it's a reasonable question to ask because if your business, or we also talked about physicians, a radiologist for example, someone who looks at x-rays has historically not been a patient facing person. They would sit in the back and look at the x-rays, they'd write up the results and then give them to the clinician who actually talked to the patient. I not too long ago saw this interesting television ad where radiologists presented themselves as being close to the patient. Why? Because radiology is one of those disciplines in medicine that's likely to be strongly impacted by AI because AI can find those patterns better than often a physician can. Now, the clinician may be a little bit less affected by AI because the patient is a human being that needs to have their hand held. And their life is on the line. Their life is on the line and healing and treatment is about whether or not the person is able to step up and heal themselves. So there's going to be this kind of interesting observation over the next few years. Folks that work with other people will use data to inform. Folks that work with machines, folks that work don't work with other people are likely to find that other machines end up being really, really good at their job. Because of the speeds of data and the compactness of data, human beings just cannot respond to data as fast as a machine. But machines still cannot respond to people as well as people do. And they don't have empathy in it. And they don't have empathy. So if I were to make a prediction, I would say that in the future, if your job is more tied to using machines, yeah, you got a concern. But if your job is tied to working with people, your job's going to be that much more important. And increasingly, the people who are working with machines are going to have to find jobs and have them working with other people. Right, right. Well, it's been a great day. It was always, it's fun to work with you. This is our first time together on theCUBE. It was a great day. But theCUBE is a blast. If theCUBE is a blast, it's a constant party. I'm Rebecca Knight for Peter Burris. This has been NetApp Insight 2017 in Berlin. We will see you next time.