 From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering NetApp Insight 2017, brought to you by NetApps. Hello everyone, welcome back to our CUBE coverage, exclusive coverage here at the NetApp Insight 2017. This is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, the co-host, co-founder, subordinate, new Keith Townsend, CTO advisor here in Las Vegas, Nevada, at the Mandalay Bay. Our next guest is Jennifer Mayer, Senior Director of Cloud Product Marketing in New Fuchs, who's the Senior Manager of Cloud Product Marketing. You guys are doing a lot of the heavy lifting on the front lines of the NetApp on the cloud. Welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. Thank you so much for having us. Okay, so we've been covering it, but now it's pretty clear that there's a cloud play, there is a cloud play for NetApp. You guys are showing product, a lot of products in the keynotes, both in the data center, in the next generation, but the cloud, big part of the story, it's certainly we here resonating with customers and all the guests that come out from the eight teams and your partner channels, all are like, this is really a really great thing. Part of the plan? Absolutely part of the plan. I mean, if you caught any of the latest messaging, which Gene and the team have worked really hard on, it's all about us being the data authority and the hybrid cloud, right? And so if you think about let's unpack hybrid cloud, there's only about 1% of the population of the planet that's not adopting cloud in some way. And we believe that after the last 25 years of our history and data management and our leadership with things like ONTAP, that we are well equipped to help people get there, how they want to get there and with what, right? And you have an install base too, so you've been selling boxes, everyone knows you for selling. That's an old term, but I've been showing my age. Hardware. But hardware's not going away, the Amazon makes their own stuff too. So you got to still store stuff, so storage will be there, servers will be there, hyperconverses, all that's happening under the hood. But the software's where the value is, certainly we have an expression in SiliconANGLE, software's eating the world as Mark Andreessen said, but data's eating software. Anthony, your general manager came on and said, data is trumping applications. You see applications had data, now data has applications. So that flips things upside down, and you guys got to go build that market out for your customers. How do your customers at NetApp and prospective customers, new customers, NetNew, engage with NetApp and what's the positioning, what's the value? Yeah, there are a lot of different ways to do it. So if you're an existing NetApp customer today, it's a really, really easy way to get into the cloud. So we have one of our product called ONTAP Cloud. It's our storage operating system, the number one storage operating system in the world, running inside Azure and AWS hyperscalers. So you use all the same tools, all the same mechanisms that you would use on premises, but you're now running in the cloud. So that makes it really easy to lift and shift applications that are using NFS or SIFS or iSCSI protocols straight into the cloud. Because you have the same storage operating system that you have on premises, you have deduplication, you have snapshots, you have cloning, you have all of the advantages of data management infrastructure that has been developed over the last 25 years. So some of the pushback that I've seen is that, yeah, you have the tooling, but isn't the cloud all about the new? Can you actually build new apps using ONTAP and Microsoft or Azure, NFS? Can you talk to us a little bit about the story about not just bringing your legacy tools, quote, unquote, but also the new capabilities that developers will find as a result of the cloud offerings? Yeah, absolutely. I think, in my opinion, the most exciting announcement this week, and others may argue differently, but they're a little bit biased, because it's my baby, so I do care about it, is that Microsoft announced, and that we are not the real technology provider for Microsoft launching an enterprise class NFS service natively in Azure. Now, if you think about that, if it runs natively in Azure, it sits right next to the infrastructure that is processing HD Insight that's running SQL Server. Microsoft announced that they are having SQL running on Linux, so suddenly having an enterprise class very, very fast, high performance, managed by NetApp, NFS service running natively in Azure opens up the opportunities to do IoT to run your enterprise databases against this infrastructure and really opening up the doors for customers to do more. And because you're using tools like HD Insight, you can run analytics, you can now expand into AI, into machine learning, all of that is now open to people that are cloud native. And cloud natives don't want to go back and learn how to manage the storage infrastructure. That's not a good use of their time. So something like the NFS service in Azure, you don't have to learn how to do storage. All you do is you go to the portal, you provision it, you click on it, it's running, it's done. I think that's a really important point because everybody just hears it's a new native or first party service in Azure, which frankly is industry first. I mean, nobody, especially from the storage provider standpoint is doing that today. But I think the ability to get all those enterprise class services without it feeling like a prostate exam is probably a first for everybody. Well, you're put under for that these days. But I mean, my point is, the multi-cloud thing's interesting to me, and this is, I think you guys have hit on something with the cloud orchestrator product we saw on stage, the demo, is that multi-cloud customers don't want to be locked in. That's right. That's number one thing we hear in theCUBE and the suppliers, whoa, we don't lock in. Now open source has been growing, that's great, but the lock in, the new lock in, as we call it, is functionality. Are you helping customers scale up and scale out at the same time? So the question for you is, how far along is that cloud orchestrator and is that the guiding principle of the cloud group to seamlessly abstract away? First of all, the cloud orchestrator allows you to move data around just by clicking buttons. It actually takes away all the under the covers work that's needed. That's right. Because each cloud has its own architecture and how they do things. So that's a value portion that I think will be a home run. It is, and a big priority for NetApp and specifically in our cloud business unit and our cloud marketing is to make sure that people feel like they have the freedom to choose where they want to go and how, right? And so think about it like a compass. A compass still needs you to pick the destination and it tells you the best way to get there. That's really sort of what we're trying to do in the orchestrator is just a very flexible way to help people do it, even at the API level. All right, so for all the naysayers out there, they're going, oh, NetApp, they're just cloud washing. They're not really in the cloud game. What does this mean? How do you put that to rest? Because I know you've been involved in Amazon for some time. Now with the Microsoft deal, pretty significant. What do you say to the naysayers or customers that might learn for the first time? Wow, it's a good story there. There's a path to the cloud. You know, we joked one time that we should have an entire marketing campaign that said, oh, I didn't know NetApp did that. Because there are so many things, even me being fairly new to NetApp that I didn't even know we were doing let alone knowing how long we were doing them for. And so it might shock some people to know that we've been doing the on tap cloud product for four years. I mean, four years. And that product, frankly, was born out of our own need to abstract the software and test it on our own for test dev, right? Well, Jean's in town, so she's a good marketer, so she should do a good job of changing the marketing angle. But the tell sign to me at events is on keynotes, right? This is to me the relevance kind of barometer. I think Amazon has really nailed this. They have so many announcements. They can't even keep track of them. They actually, there's just a tsunami. That is an indicator of success. And that's, to me, the competitive advantage. Keep on introducing new products. You guys said how many products introduced on stage today? I mean, it was just not enough time. A lot, the payload was huge. There's a huge- It's a really good sign of momentum and what's to come. Yeah, it's a great sign, great sign. And I think what's going to, I'm sorry, we're so excited we can't even help ourselves. I think what's going to be interesting and a challenge for marketing moving forward is, how do you put a net around it when you want to announce it? Because when you look at continuous innovation and delivery, we're going to be doing something every few days, right? Once a month, once every two weeks, so. Well, you guys have a good install base. And I always said, you can't go out of business if you have money in the bank and if you have customers, thousands of customers that you guys have, not losing that core and building on the core. So how are you guys, from a product marketing standpoint, you got a package to the core. You got to have your core base. But now you have new constituencies, new personas in your base now developing. You have analytics. You have chief data officers. You have the guy who's going to be thinking about governance now and GP, GS. GDPR, GDPR, GDPR, getting late in the day. But it's a global scale. You guys now have a new territory to take down. What's the plan? You take that one. Yeah, I think it's a really interesting one. Let me give you a specific example that we can broaden the store a little bit. We recognize that one of the problems that our customers have is backing up their SaaS environments. So they have gone from on-premises environments where they were maybe using our storage, maybe not, moved into the cloud. And like one of our customers was talking recently about, he has hundreds of SaaS providers and he doesn't really know what data they have. So he's concerned about data protection. He's concerned about losing that data, obviously hacking attacks and similar things. So we actually started a program around a product that we call Cloud Control. And Cloud Control for Office 365 is the first iteration of that that we launched just a few months ago. And it takes your Office 365 data and protects it and retains that data so that if something happens, somebody hacks, somebody corrupts your files, your CEO deletes emails and three months later he wants it back, that that data is there and it's protected and it's secure. And so that's a native cloud service. You don't buy any equipment from us to be earlier a comment about moving boxes. So the cloud for us is a great vehicle to get to these new buyers. And the interest that we're getting back is tremendous. But you absolutely right that we need to find different ways and we are finding different ways to get to these buyers, to get to these personas that are out there. Well, not having a hardware specific thing is certainly a great way in cloud. Exactly. I mean, you have a data backup recovery. There's no walls in the cloud. So the on-premise paradigm changes a lot. Yeah, and this time we're talking SaaS to SaaS, right? All right, so ecosystem partners. And one of the big successes is partnerships. Yep. What's the strategy on partners? I mean, cloud-native foundation, cloud CNCF, cloud-native compute foundations, it's growing all the who's who who are in there. And you guys are getting involved in that. What's your position? What's the strategy for partners? Yeah, so as you would expect, cloud is different enough that one framework doesn't match the things that we've been doing for those 25 years that we've been so successful in this business. So what we've tried to do in this new cloud-first partner program that we've launched several months ago is really target our cloud-native partners. These guys that couldn't care less about on-prem, they don't even know how to spell the word storage and see how do we help service them with some of these great data services that we're bringing to bear, really. And these guys have no previous NetApp history with us. And we've got a couple dozen partners that have already signed up on our behalf and we'll continue that momentum, but we're certainly excited to give them a new level of treatment that NetApp hasn't done before. So I'd love to hear feedback from the lower level, from the ecosystem. NetApp, which I think is a good thing, is very opinionated when it comes to its approach to cloud. This isn't old, bring any old object store to the, you know what, if you adopt ONTAP, if you adapt NetApp data-driven vision, the data fabric, if you adopt that, then you enable a new level of cloud mobility. So as you've bought that message to the ecosystem, what's been the response? A lot of these guys are pretty opinionated themselves. I was going to say, you've already talked to Anthony and he's pretty opinionated. Yeah, now I think it's well received, right? I mean, who doesn't want the ability to have some freedom to move around and choose their partners as we go? And I think one thing that Ingo was alluding to earlier is the fact that we're pretty heterogeneous in our data services. You don't have to have NetApp to be able to benefit from cloud control or cloud sync or on command insight, which is one of our sort of business insight tools for infrastructure and cloud cost monitoring. So it's nice to be able to give them a more sort of open message, but still have a pretty strong opinion on where people need to go and why. So let's talk about cloud control a little bit more. Is cloud control an API, or is that just a, is that only control plan? It's a service. So it's a native cloud service. You can buy it on the marketplace. You can do free trials. You don't buy any hardware anywhere. It will grab the data through official APIs out of Office 365 and store it in a choice of locations. So we can host the storage for you or you can store it in AWS. You can store it in Azure or you can store it on premises and storage could web scale, which is our object store. So, you know, for some customers it's important for compliance reasons to have an off-site on-premises copy. Other customers would prefer to use Azure, use AWS, depends on what kind of licensing agreements or massive purchase agreements they might have. So we give our customers that flexibility. But that is an example for native cloud service. We have another one's called Cloud Sync, which is a data migration tool. You can go from SIFS, NFS, or S3 to SIFS, NFS, or S3. So, and it transforms your data. So you can go from a, from an NFS source and move it natively into an S3 object in the cloud. It's another example for a native cloud service. You don't, it's not a license. It's not something that you buy and install on premises. So that brings the question about data mobility today. I know cloud orchestrator is something that's coming into the future. But as far as data mobility, can I do something that's simple to say, or it's complex, depending on your perspective? Saying I have two AWS regions. I'm front-ending this with ONTAP and I'm using it ONTAP as a file. And I want to replicate storage from one AWS region to another one. Can I do that with object in the back end and then use ONTAP to present that as files on both, on both coast, for example? Yeah, it depends a little bit on your application and the interface that you're using, but let's say you're using ONTAP cloud. You can replicate between regions. Using cross-region replication, that's easy. Right. But what's different is we have HA. So what you can do with ONTAP cloud is that you can do a field over from one availability zone to another availability zone. And that's all managed within the software. So if you're thinking about moving enterprise application, mission-critical applications, running production inside the cloud, you definitely want to have HA. We did, we tackled this a little bit different for the NFS Azure service because we were running and operating infrastructure that is underneath the Azure portal. So we have the reliability built into our product because it's running on our equipment. So we have complete control over that. Guys, final question. I know we got to go, but I want to give you thoughts on management software because the management game is changing the cloud too as the trend of having the same code bases running on-prem and on the cloud or applications working across multiple clouds brings up the role of the folks that are being shifted to high-value activities. One of them is managing dashboards and which is automating some of the system management to application management. Obviously ONTAP has been around for a long, long time. That has a history of good management tooling. How does that translate to the products in the cloud? It does and I want to pull back to talk a little bit about ONTAP inside because we kind of overlook it because it's been around for a little while and it is more traditionally thought of as an SRM tool, but really some of the capabilities that we've talked about even as early as today was the fact that now we're extending sort of those infrastructure analytics and those business insights so you can identify resources that are wasted or places that we're out of capacity and you're bottlenecking. Now into the cloud for things like cost monitoring. So imagine you're a CIO and you have people going around your back swiping credit cards to find whatever tools they want to use in the SAS universe to get their jobs done, only you have no idea where they're spending your money. Now you'll have the ability to look at almost a unified bill and see which departments are charging what money and charge back those departments to keep them accountable in your budget. We call it the tool shed problem. All these tools. They're everywhere. They're everywhere. Don't be a tool. Get out and get that tool shed. It's too many things in a tool. You get too many tools. We have a lot of tools, yeah. So we're happy to have things like that that help give people a little bit more empowerment to first identify what's going on down in things. The problem is though in tools, they buy at tools, sometimes it turns into something else. Like you buy a hammer and it turns into a lawn mower, but that's not what it's designed for. You can't mow your lawn with a hammer. So a final question before we break is product marketing focus. What's the to-do items? You guys got your list. I know you're making decisions on the product teams on how to take it to market. What's the to-do list for you guys? I'll give my answer and then I'll let you close, but it's messaging, messaging, messaging, right? I think in marketing, we traditionally get sick of our own message before sometimes our audiences have heard it and certainly we don't want to let Jean down because she's done such a phenomenal job of getting this ship steered in a singular direction. So you're going to see a lot of big bold messages from us, a lot of us not being apologetic about some of the great IP that we've got and some of the great things that we're doing. So we want to be sort of out there reiterating that we're helping people harness the power of the hybrid cloud and that we are the data authority in the hybrid cloud. As I say, position it and they will come. That's absolutely right. Anything you'd like to add? You know, so I spend a lot of time both with our internal product teams and with our partners like Microsoft, for example. It's really exciting with last few weeks and the great thing for me is that we have more and more and more partners coming to us, wanting to leverage our products and working with us and understanding how they can participate in the data fabric vision. How can they be part of this network of partners and solutions and services that we're building? And that has been really, really exciting. Cloud is real. We're a little excited. We're making it work. Cloud is real. We're looking forward to following up. We'll have to get you guys at the studio in Palo Alto. A lot to talk about, a lot more. Certainly, Kubernetes containers bring a huge renaissance in application development. That's going to create a lot of value. You guys are at the center of it. It's theCUBE, we're at the center of the action here in Las Vegas with NetApp Insight 2017. We'll be right back with more live coverage at this short break. I'm John Furrier with Keith Townsend. We'll be right back.