 Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, the co-host and co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media. We're here for a CUBE conversation in our studios in Palo Alto, California, here with two great guests inside the industry to help illuminate the cloud computing conversation really around what's coming up with Amazon re-invent. But more importantly, the major advances happening than in the digital transformation around IT and around developers and around cloud and how that's impacting business. And our guests are Chris Cummings, who's with the Chasm Group, a consultant that helped people in the former industry executive at NetApp and right out of the storage company, Peter Smales, the CMO of Datos.io, and then he's the CMO there, and a new progressive solution. So guys, great solution, and Peter, I know you've got news, we're going to do another segment on your big news coming out, so we're going to hold that off. The game has changed, right? And we talked with Chris and I had a one-on-one about this, but the industry conversation is there's people that are in the know, and people who are trying to figure out what's happening and how it impacts their business. CIO, CEO, CDO, Chief Data Office, Chief Security Officers, there's a lot of things on the plate of businesses. Big time. So let's unpack this and let's illuminate what it means. So cloud computing, Peter, what's your take on this? Because Datos takes a unique approach. I love your solution, a lot of people like this solution, but it's nuanced because it's cloud that's driving you. What's the big driver? So the big driver, you said at the top of the discussion, the big driver is digital transformation. Organizations are trying to be more data-driven, okay? This is completely throwing traditional IT amuck because we're not living in the traditional world anymore of all my data sits within a single data center. I run my traditional monolithic applications. That's changed. The world is no longer running in a traditional four-wall data center and the world's moved away from the traditional view of scale-up architectures to elastic compute, shared nothing, elastic storage environment. So what's happening is you've got the challenge of trying to be, trying to essentially support your digital transformation initiatives and it's just throwing all the underlying infrastructure foundations that an entire generation of IT professionals has known into disarray. So everything's kind of a little bit cattywampus right now. Chris? Well, and like you said, those people all have gone from being implementers to their movement to being developers. And it completely changes, there has to be a big change in their mindset and it changes the management folks, the CIOs, the CDOs, the people that you interact with on a daily basis, right? Because these people are all trying to kind of come up to the next generation and get there. So you talked about, you know, we got re-invent coming up in a couple of weeks and I think re-invent's a perfect term for this entire conversation because everybody is re-inventing themselves. The customers re-inventing themselves, the IT organizations are re-inventing themselves, you know, the individual roles within organizations are changing, the whole evolution of DevOps versus traditional roles. So it is really- And the vendors are all trying to re-invent themselves too. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Well, there's a lot of noise, so the customers are being bombarded with pitches. You know, and if I hear one more digital transformation pitch without substance, I still don't understand. So in the spirit of trying to understand, first of all, I believe in digital transformation, but you can't just say the word, you got to prove it. But it's hard to prove a new approach if they've never seen it before. It's kind of like Steve Jobs would say is, you know, you want a blackberry, that's a phone, but the iPhone's not what you've seen before, but everyone loved it, changed the industry. That dynamic's happening in the cloud, where, for instance, your solution, it might not have seen before, but it's highly relevant to the user behavior expectations of the new environment. Okay, so this is the issue. What is the new environment specifically around digital transformation? Because I have an investment in storage, I'm a customer, I bought a Zillion Drys from NetApp and EMC, I got data domain backup, and I got a perimeter, I had all the stuff, and now I got this cloud thing for bursting and I got some analytics running there, and I got the hotshot young developers banging out apps and they want to put it in the cloud and security, what's going on? Let me take that one first and then I'll open it. Can we just buy more storage? Yeah, just, hey, just, no, John, you don't just buy more storage, you upgrade from spinning to flash. I mean, that's really, that's really, really, cutting edge right there. No, I think what a lot of you see that they're doing is basically saying, listen, for all this secondary, tertiary, quartinary, I mean, I didn't even know what that word was, but you know, your second, your third, your fourth cuts of that data, move that all to the cloud, get that out of my environment, I'm not going to be kind of, you know, submersed in dealing with all of that anymore, then maybe I can clear out some of my headaches so I can actually focus on that primary cut and what do I do about that primary cut? And that's where, you know, these completely new approaches come into play. And, you know, Peter, I don't know if you call that hybrid or multi or what, but it is basically just trying to get some of that noise out of their system so they can focus on the things that's the most valuable. So the way I would make that, Daniel John, is sort of to us, it all rolls down to the notion of the modern IT stack. Okay, so essentially the way you respond to digital transformation, which is all about being more agile in some of the buzzwords you hear, but they're trying to be more customers, trying to be, vendors are trying to be, or excuse me, customers, organizations are trying to be more customer centric, they're trying to be more business driven, more data driven. Okay, great. That's their initiative. That's a mission. That's a mission. What that means for IT specifically is a fundamental rearchitecture of the underlying stack. Okay, or along a couple of vectors, which is organizations are building these new applications. Okay, they're fundamentally rearchitecting applications. What used to be a monolithic oriented, traditional relational on-prem databases now running in a microservices highly distributed configuration. That's vector number one implication. Implication number two is we're absolutely in the mainstream of hybrid cloud. Okay, you might be running all your apps on-prem, but you're still connected to somewhere in the cloud for archiving, for BI, for test dev, whatever the case may be. And number three is the world has moved completely to an elastic compute shared nothing world. So we call that the modern IT stack. So modern IT stack, modern infrastructure today. Shared nothing, you said? Shared nothing. I mean, the cloud is shared nothing. Oh, shared nothing. Yeah, shared nothing, shared nothing storage. Shared nothing compute. That's, those are the foundations of cloud based architecture. Is that called serverless? You could call it serverless as well. If you look at the modern IT stack, so to your point, the modern IT stack, modern infrastructure today is EC2. Modern storage is S3. It could be object-prem, object storage sitting on-prem. Modern applications are IoT. Modern data, our customer 360, IoT. Modern databases are DynamoDB. It's MongoDB, it's the number two database in the cloud. So to answer your question very specifically to make it tangible, that's to us the fundamental implications. That new modern IT stack throws storage into disarray. It throws data management into disarray. It's an operational disruption. It's an operational disruption. Let's back up for a second because I think you nailed the thread I was trying to connect on. So let's take MongoDB, your reference to that being a database, would that come from? We all know what. The LAMP stack, it was one of the drivers. But developers drove that. So it wasn't the IT department recommending Mongo, right? So the developers were driving that because of ease of use. Now there's some scalability with Mongo that we all know about. But what that means is no one gives a crap if it can scale because you already hit your product market fit. Then you can rearchitect. So you're seeing this use case of developers driving some of the behavior. Hence containers, Docker containers, and the role of Kubernetes. Okay, so that's the case. How does an enterprise customer deal with that vector? Because now the developers are dictating the stacks. Well is it a free for all right now? I mean this is. I think both of those guys are, think of it as they used to be warring factions, dev and ops. And the fact that we say the word dev ops right now is kind of an oxymoron, right? Because they don't actually know each other and actually don't naturally talk to one another. And they go, that's the other guy who's holding me back. They look at. It goes over the fence. And so now you've got folks that are really trying to bring it together a little bit more on that front. And I think that we're starting to see some technologies where people can say, not only can I use that to accelerate my development, so it meets the dev criteria, but also the ops people say, you know what, that stuff's not so bad. I could actually work with that. And then there's IT going, uh-oh, because they're basically sitting there on the catcher side. So to your point, it's the dev ops that, it is very much of an application led environment. The tip of the spear for the new IT stack is absolutely application led. And IT is challenged with essentially aligning to that, collaborating with that and keeping up with that pace of change. And John, you know, on this point, I think this is where back to reinvent and really the role of AWS, this all started because of that, right? When a developer can just say, I don't even know who those IT people are over there, but I can spin up my S3 instance and I can start working against it. They start moving down the path. They show it to somebody. Someone says, wow, that's great stuff. I want that. Guess what? We need to make sure that that's enterprise class and scalable. And then that's where that whole thing starts. And then it becomes that pull you apart. Oh God, what did these developer people do? I'm going to inherit this. What the heck am I going to do with it? Now it's, we've got to move that to be more symbiotic up front. I remember talking to both Pat Gelsinger and Andy Jesse years ago, I think maybe five years ago, and I asked the question, what enables developers infrastructure, what is the enabling point? Does infrastructure dictate developer behavior or do developers dictate infrastructure behavior? This was years ago when the dev ops was an early on movement. Clearly the vote is there. Developers are driving infrastructure, hence the dev ops infrastructure as code model. That's proven. Jassy was interesting because he looked at it that way and said, yeah, we saw the same thing. And they've never wavered. Amazon's stayed on the course and they just been running like a machine, like just pounding it out. I asked Pat Gelsinger, he once positioned the AWS as the developer cloud. Kind of, I wouldn't say depositioning them, but he was basically pointing out, they're the developer cloud. Now Amazon's the enterprise cloud, because they've developers are now a big driver of that. And the scale with data is actually turning out to be a better security environment for cyber. So it's cloud's winning. Cloud is winning and sort of just take that one step. It's always ultimately, the winner is going to, it's Darwinism. It's like the winner's going to be the one with the richest ecosystem. You know, and AWS is becoming that enterprise, and you could argue, I mean, GCP's fighting to be in there. Oracle's not going to go quietly into that dark night. I mean, you've got multiple public cloud vendors, but the reality is that he who has the biggest, he or she who has the biggest ecosystem is going to win. And that's right now, is AWS driving that bus. All right, so I need to see those glasses for a second. If I want to go into the other line of question here. Absolutely, you may use those. Oh, you put them on. All right, good. As long as he's wearing them. He had to wear them. You know, on that front too, on that front too, I would think, you know, we started back where VM was the big new thing. And here we go with VMs. And then all of a sudden we're coming up and we're saying, yeah, now there's containers. And so now we're going to see this move to, we want to micropackage these services and be able to aggregate them. Well, you know, the average IT shop that I would be talking to out there is just still trying to figure out how do they put together their on-prem and their AWS instance. So this notion of hybrid is where most of these large enterprises are. We see a lot of terminology out there and a lot of vendors talking about multi-cloud. But multi-cloud is really just taking an option on the future and saying, I'm not locked into you AWS, even though I am locked into you 100% right now, I don't want to be forever in the future. That's a value statement that they're gesturing. Good segue. But it's not a practical implementation. I've got my nerd glasses on. So I've got my nerd glasses. So next question will go a little nerdy because this is an important one. I put out on my crowd chat for Amazon. So the crowdchat.net slash AWS re-invent. It's open. I have a lot of questions on there. Feel free to weigh in. It's an influencer only chat. So, you know, no consumers. I asked the question and this is to the value statement because multi-cloud is basically telegraphing lock-in. We don't want lock-in. But we want love choice. If you have good choice and good value, we'll go there. So it's a value equation. So the question I said is, where do you, this is a question I put on CrowdChat. I'll ask you guys. Where do you see the value that cloud creates for customers in the next 24 months? Hashtag cloud. So the first response was from Sabu Alamaruju, who's the CIO at Expedia. He writes, agility from the service ecosystem and rapid second order architecture, architectural changes, thereby clearing technical debt. Second one from Grant Chase. Born on the cloud apps already here. Next wave migrating of existing apps. And then Madhu Tsukahara has said, legacy SaaS applications will be disrupted by cloud microservices, serverless and AI and machine learning. So we start to see the pattern. Your thoughts, value creation in the cloud is going to be what? So I think they're hitting on the right trends. I mean, I would go back to the first one, which is how do I get this on-prem stuff that's driving me crazy, consuming all of my resources in terms of maintenance and upgrades and then optimizing my environment for that. Which ones of those are core and which ones of those are really kind of ancillary? I've got to have them, but I really don't want them. If I didn't have to use them, I'd get rid of them. Take all, just do that homework. Separate the two cleanly. Move ancillary to the cloud and move on. So service ecosystem, he nailed. By the way, I agree with you. That was my favorite answer. And rapid second order architecture changes. This speaks to what data CIOs is doing because you guys, kind of what you're in, the tornado that you're in, kind of just a play on the chasm group here is you guys have a solution that's got visibility into some of the real dynamics of the environmental environment. People, tech, stack, et cetera. So what are some of the things that you're seeing that point to these second or level architecture changes? Well, you mentioned a couple of different things, which is you mentioned the notion of technical debt, which I think is indirectly what you were just talking about, the ability to sort of, you know, get rid of my technical debt. It's an easy way. It sort of eliminates my barrier to entry to creating net new applications. So without having to sort of, I avoid the innovators dilemma, if you will, because I can build these net new applications, which are the things I have to, to drive my digital transformation, et cetera. I can do that in a very cost effective and agile way. Well, meanwhile sort of ignoring the old world. Then what I'll do is I'll go back and I'll worry about the old stuff and I'll start migrating some of that old stuff to the cloud. So in the context of, yeah, so what we see from a data CIO perspective in the context of data management is that one applications drive the stack, like you said earlier, it's absolutely the applications that the tip of the spear drive in the stack. Organizations are building net new applications that are cloud native, okay, and they're built on the new modern IT stack. And at the same time, they're also taking their legacy application. So I like that second answer as well, which is modern cloud applications are here. And the interesting thing is you say modern cloud apps, modern cloud apps don't have to run in the cloud. You know, we've got customers that are running their action model. It's an operating model. We've got customers running 100% on-prem. Their e-commerce stuff runs on-prem. Then you have people that run in the cloud. So it's a mindset. It's an operating model. So you've got folks absolutely deploying these cloud native apps. Well, it's an architectural model too. It's how they're deploying and servicing apps. And ultimately it comes down to the architectural model. That's what shifted and that world is very infrastructure. The other thing I would add to the cloud thing is if you do it right, the cloud actually can give you architectural independence and cloud independence, but you can't be focused on the infrastructure level. You've got to focus the application level because then you can be agnostic to the underlying. So Peter, you guys are disrupting a very large space. Backup and recovery in the cloud, which you guys are doing at the application database layer, is a very progressive solution. So I love your approach, but you're talking about disrupting the data domains of the world. We're talking about big whales, big incumbents that are built around four walls in the data center. What are you seeing? What's the makeup? What's the personnel of the customers look like? I mean, if DevOps is happening, which we agree it is and the evidence is there clearly, they're not 50-year-old backup and recovery guys. They're young guns. They're probably not thinking about waking up every day with their coffee saying, what am I going to do with backup today? They're waking up saying, hey, I'm going to drive some more machine learning and AI in my apps and I'm going to provide workflow movement too. I just had breakfast with someone. You said that. I thought of this micro segment. I had the craziest dream last night. It was microservices. Yeah, so I can answer that two ways. Sort of, there's the technology side of it, you know, sort of fun little tidbit, you know, average age of the traditional backup and recovery software architecture, about 20 years. Architected well before the mainstream advent of the cloud or certainly modern applications. The person's 20 years old or 20 years of architecture. No, the architecture of the software, the solutions are coming up. That point is they've been around for a while. It's old. It's old, fair enough. So on the technology side, that's a dilemma. On the persona side, you're absolutely right as well. These are, you know, it's the application folks that are driving the conversation that our applications dictate the IT stack. They're building these new architectures which have all these implications on the underlying. All right, so I'm going to play devil's advocate just because I want to connect the dots again, illuminate what I think the problem is that you have. One is, okay, I'm a CIO. Hey, he's my storage guy. Who the hell are you, young gun? Complaining about your backup and recovery. He recommends all flash arrays in the data center provisioned in a vSAN environment, whatever that's going on. Who are you? You're just nothing to me. You don't make that decision. I'm the guy that can give you all the visibility to your data to make you smarter and more agile as a company. I can save you money. I can make this company. So what do I need to do differently? If I'm the CIO, I don't want to make these calls, these architectural calls based upon old dogma or old reporting lines. This is an example. I go to him, he's my storage guy. Who are you? I already built you the dev ops environment. He runs storage. And so you're impacted as a developer. How do you guys talk to that guy? What does this CXO have to do differently to adapt to the new environment? I'll take that and then you can jump in. So I think what you see is you see the proliferation of new personas. Like you see chief transformation officers. You see chief digital officers. You see system architects and DBAs getting a more prominent role in the conversation. So the successful CIOs and technology officers are the ones that are essentially going to get the cowboys and the Indians to collaborate more closely because they have to because the folks that were over in the corner that used to get laughed at, you know, building these old mongos and these new applications and such, they're the ones holding the keys to the future. So the successful technologists are going to be the ones that marry those personas from the application side of the house with the traditional storage infrastructure folks as well. You successfully do that, then you can be more, then you can move more quickly for it. What do you think? Well, I think some of it's going to come back down to economics too. And I agree with that move, which is I talked to, you know, over a hundred CIOs and their staff in the last year. I had one conversation where the person said, you know what, the chief complaint about me as CIO is I'm not spending enough money. And I thought to myself, it sounds like a company that I should put some bucks into because they must be doing really, really well. Everybody else is looking at it saying, you know what, I'm under pressure to adopt the cloud because there's a belief out there that the cloud is going to be so much less expensive than what they've done in the past. And then I think they find that it's not, that's not just the one size fits all answer to that. And so as a consequence, you're going to have people say, listen, this money printing operation or this funnel out the door to whether it's EMC or NetApp for, or whatever it may be, whatever storage vendor for backup architecture, they've got to stop that funnel because they've got to take what they were spending there and move it to the things that are going to make money for them, not just kind of kind of hold on to it and de-risk their enterprise. I'm here with two industry leaders, Chris Cummings and Peter Schmael, talking about the impact of infrastructure technologies and app development in the cloud for businesses. It's a great conversation. I have a final point I want to just get to. I know we're running on some time here, but yeah, we want to go a little further. I think this is awesome. Thanks for taking the time to share it out. One of my other questions I put on my crowd chat was a true or false and comment question. Here's a statement. Serverless computing will become mainstream, will come to mainstream private cloud. True or false comment. Sabu said, false. Adoption and success of serverless patterns depend almost entirely on the strength of the ecosystem that the data center lacks. Interesting comment. I was leaning towards true, but I don't have enough insight on this because I'm waffling between true or false. I love serverless. I love the idea of notion of resources that are just programmable. But what is the state of serverless? I mean, is he right? Is that there's not enough ecosystem in the data center areas? Or you want to go first? Well, I would just call out two things on that front. One is, I think you need a lot more germination of microservices that are out there in order to be able to put that all together. That's one aspect. We're seeing that growth come rapidly, right? The other thing is, now your security is beholden to the lowest common denominator, the security of that individual microservice. So I think you're going to have some fits and starts here as we move down that path because boy, oh boy, the last thing I want to do is get all modern, but at the same time, put myself at a greater amount of risk. I thought the comment at the end was, I think it's true. I thought it was interesting what he said at the end. He said, the ecosystem that the data center lacks, I would contend that potentially the ecosystem that the cloud has would support that. Because the cloud by definition, it's a shared nothing world, you know? So he also commented, someone said Lambda. My expedia is that Lambda's growth is almost entirely due to the power of the ecosystem of services, which is one of the key points and the points to his blog post. Stu Miniman, all right, we'll keep my nails weighed in, because Stu's on this big time. Service will definitely be used for edge applications. Currently don't see use cases for general data center usage. So edge of the network. Again, good point. This edge of the network thing helps you because most people are using cloud for edge. So this IOT, which is an edge of the network, whether it's devices, sensors, industrial equipment, or people's devices on their bodies, is a huge data source. Clouds rolling that up, or a cloud like infrastructure. But it's not necessarily rolling it up. It's just connecting all the dots as to where you can put storage and you can put compute where the data is, or you can move the data to where the storage and the compute is. Yes, there's core and edge, that's absolutely true, but the notion of rollup isn't necessarily true. It's not necessarily the cloud enables me to do all this class of aggregation. I basically distribute my compute, I distribute my storage. Well, when I say rollup, I'm assuming there's some sort of architectural thing. Okay, sure. So, but this fits into your wheelhouse, I think, because I'm just connecting the dots on why it's a question for you, is it would make sense for a solution like Datos to be there because that's an application. So, you back up IoT? Oh, absolutely. We back up IoT, but we basically back up any modern cloud application. And by definition, what does that mean? So, IoT is an app for you? IoT, absolutely. So, the technically where we plug in is we plug in at the database level. And the databases, basically, are the underlying infrastructure that support the applications. So, in the case of IoT, those are typically very highly distributed across Geos. Absolutely, we protect them. So, we were just talking earlier about the words flexibility, manageability, agility. That's kind of vanilla words that everyone uses these days, but you actually really doing it. Right, so, thanks for that setup. Yes, we actually do all those buzzwords. Chris recommends, I recommend that you call it hyper-flexibility, or micro-flexibility, or ultra-flexibility. Or go mega, just go mega right now. Or Uber, and steal a little of that, although that's kind of out of favor with Uber. We want to let that one fly by. But remember, we also talked before, we thought we were spot on with our product being branded, RecoverX. We thought we were really in the spot with the whole, you know. Your name is awesome. RecoverX is a great brand. We're going to stick with that for now, before we, yeah. Good branding name, RecoverX down. So, Chris, thanks guys for coming on. Final comment, any words on the storage industry as it evolves? You mentioned earlier, just call it flash. Certainly, all flash arrays are doing well. Pure storage went public. Flash is a standard, it has benefits. Where does the flash storage go with all this cloud value coming over the top? Well, I think, you know, there's going to be a couple, I have one comment on that, which is we see what flash is doing at the array level. And now we're going to see what NVMe does at the cache layer for allowing this access to information, right? You think about, I want to run a singular query, but some of that data is here, there, everywhere, but I've got to have a level of performance that allows me to actually run it and get an answer from it. And so that's where that comes into play. I think we're going to see a whole host of folks flooding into that space to try and improve performance, but not only improve performance, but enable that whole distribution model. Yeah, and I would just pick up on sort of more persona-centric thing, which is the message to sort of the traditional IT shops is it is all about collaboration. Like the folks over in the corner, the application folks, it is absolutely all about getting more closely aligned because cloud is here, multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, call it whatever you want is here. The traditional IT stack is absolutely being disrupted and it's all about embracing this application-centric data-driven view of the world. That's the future. Traditional IT's got to align with that and collaborate and drive that whole thing forward. That's the message. That's great. I agree 100% with what you guys just said. Great comment. I would just say Wikibon calls it UniGrid, which is, I would rename it HyperGrid, meaning it's just one system, to your point, private, public. It's all cloud-like. Absolutely. So that doesn't matter where it goes. Okay, guys, thanks for the thought leadership. Peter Spales and Chris Cummings here, breaking down the industry landscape on storage, infrastructure, application developers, in context to cloud, this is theCUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.