 Live from Berlin, Germany. It's theCUBE, covering NetApp Insight 2017. Brought to you by NetApp. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of NetApp Insight 2017 here in Berlin, Germany. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Peter Burris. We are joined by Tim Pitcher. He is the Vice President, Next Generation Data Center for NetApp. Thanks so much for coming on the program. It's an absolute pleasure. Pleasure to be here. So let's start just defining for our viewers the Next Generation Data Center. How it's built, how it's founded. Yeah, so if you think about NetApp today, we think about our customers really consuming technology in three ways. We've got sort of more, we're modernizing traditional data centers and architectures using data management and flash storage and these sorts of things. And this really is our backyard. This is what we've been doing for years and years, been incredibly successful at it. And the big disruptor in many ways is cloud. And so our partnerships with the major hyperscalers are critically important to us as well. But there's a third piece to the Jigsaw, which is the Next Generation Data Center. And the way we think about that is that if you imagine that you want to use cloud services but you want to do that, a lot of that yourself, you want to take advantage of the sort of simple, scalable, automated nature of cloud, then that's really what we're delivering in the Next Generation Data Center for our customers. So the Next Generation Data Center is being driven by technology advances, business requirements, the realities of data, what are the practical things that are driving or indicating the steps that people should take as they think about new technology and new business practices? Yes, I mean the big driver is really to remove a lot of complexity from their business. So if you think about going to the cloud, you're making a very simple, really consumption choice. You're saying I'm going to consume data and services from the public cloud environment. And that drives a similar behavior inside large organizations as well, organizations of all sizes. So they're thinking about how do they build a private cloud, take advantage of both in a hybrid cloud environment or they can have multiple public cloud instances as well. So they're thinking about it all very differently and they're thinking about the most appropriate service that they're trying to deliver or the most appropriate way to deliver that application or that data set, if you will, to their customers. So it's not like everything needs to be in one place and also critically, customers very often want to change that as well. So they'll make a decision to put something in the public cloud. It might not be the best fit over time for whatever reason. So they want to bring it back in-house and deliver that on their own infrastructure. And when they do that, they want to take advantage that they like what they've had in the cloud so they want to put that on premise. So the real drivers are things like, they really want simplicity. They're really focused on a much more performance outcome that's focused on simplicity, focused on how you scale your business and being able to have truly multi-tenant environments that give you the predictability of your traditional architectures, if you will, the architectures you know well and you've been using for a long time. But you want to be able to do that in a cloud-like environment because you get the economics of cloud, but you get the predictability of dedicated environments. So which of the customers that you work with are in fact executing this next-generation data center strategy most beautifully, in your opinion? Well, so if you think about the strategy that Nanap has for next-gen data center, it's really based on two companies that they acquired. One is Object Storage Platform called Storage Grid Web Scale. The other one is SolidFire, which SolidFire was a young, emerging, hot technology company that was focused on delivering what I've just articulated, simple technologies, simple storage platform operated at scale, completely automated. And SolidFire was born out of a service provider and born out of a service provider at the same time as OpenStack. So it's kind of unique in that perspective in that the company was formed to solve a problem. And the problem that Rackspace really were looking to solve was how do they take their managed service clients and move them into the cloud? What's stopping them doing that? And the answer is obviously customers worry about security and things like that, but the key thing that was really stopping them was their concern about performance. So if I'm going to share, put all my stuff in with everybody else's in a shared environment, how do I know I'm going to get what I'm paying for? How do I know that I'm not going to have somebody else's applications consume all the services that are going to be given to me? So as a consequence, this was the thing that prevented people going to the cloud. So this is what the company was formed to fix. So SolidFire came out of that and that's our background and that's why NetApp acquired us because very different way of looking at things. So as a consequence, service providers are really at the forefront of how they deliver services to their customers and they leverage SolidFire. We were very successful as an independent company selling to service providers and have been increasingly successful now that we're part of NetApp. So our very first customer, for example, is in Jersey and is still a very happy NetApp customer company called Collego and they offer a tiered services all on SolidFire, trusted cloud services in an offshore kind of environment. So they're focused on the financial services community and things like that. And now we have also major service providers as well like one-on-one in Germany which is one of the largest service providers in Europe. It's an existing in a long time NetApp customer and they're a SolidFire customer for their public cloud services as well for the cloud that they offer. And in the UK as well, Interroot, major service provider. What I like about them is one they deal with a massive amount of traffic. They've got a huge network, so very traffic intensive. But also they really take advantage of SolidFire being part of NetApp now. So they use the ONTAP based products in their managed services which those products are optimized for that kind of environment. But for their cloud environment where they're offering tiered services, they use SolidFire. So they've got us on both sides of the house, if you will. And so it's a great example of SolidFire being part of NetApp, why that's so powerful and why that's so successful. And companies like Internet Solutions in South Africa is one major service provider in South Africa. Big consumer of SolidFire. And now as part of NetApp, it's a much better place for them because we've got a big business in South Africa. We're very successful there. So we're part of that team now and they go from strength to strength. So now the next challenge is taking some of the best practices that have emerged from what you've learned with working with these service providers and transferring them to other industries. Yeah, so we're seeing a lot in fintech right now. In Pharma is a good market for us. AstraZeneca uses SolidFire. It's a great example of one of NetApp's long-term and major customers that's now consuming products and services from other business units and other offerings that we have across a much broader portfolio. So they've been, you know, they're a very happy customer now. That's part of our global account business. Business Wire and the UAE is another example of a successful business transformation that they're doing as well. We see a lot of activity in DevOps. These products are perfect for DevOps in that they, because they're so simple, they don't require management. They're completely automated. You're not building those large infrastructures of people to support these environments and it's much quicker to be able to launch applications because of the simple nature of the technology. You can launch applications, new products, new services. So your time to market is an awful lot quicker as well. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show, Tim. It's been a really fun talking to you. Been a pleasure. Thanks very much. I'm Rebecca Knight for Peter Burris. We will have more from NetApp Insight just after this.