 I think we're here at Intel Forecast 2012 with a conversation with Kurt Obli-VP and CTO of NextGen Cyber and Technology with Lockheed Martin. Thanks for sitting down with us and you got your posse here for, and although they're not mic'd up, they have some, maybe you can chime in some answers and talk real loud, pick up the microphone. So welcome to SiliconANGLE's conversations. Appreciate it. Well, thank you for the invitation. So you're up there giving a presentation on cloud security. Lockheed Martin is well known in the defense circles around tech, government defense and or just in technology in general, pretty innovative. Cloud has been around, it's been hyped up, it's been cloud washed, people talking cloud, this, that, all these benefits. And as we're reporting on SiliconANGLE, we're just not seeing a disruption in mainstream businesses, mainly around just the existing infrastructures just so solid in the data center that the adoption of cloud from an application standpoint, there's been some inhibitors, one of them's been security. So we've seen private cloud, which is an extension of data centers have emerged under controlled environments, but still not the massive jump to cloud per se. The public cloud. To public cloud and even use some hybrid cloud, non-mission critical apps, crack applications some say or other things, but it's evolving. So what, so I'll get your take on one, that state of that conversation. How far are we off from being fully adopted with cloud? Obviously there's some disruption benefits there. And where are we today in the cloud market? So from a big picture perspective, I think three years ago, cloud was the officially most overhyped word we had, right? More approach. Now, this year I think it's being replaced with big data, maybe mobility's out, as it's starting to nudge cloud out because people are starting to use cloud and it's starting to roll out more in mainstream. But with any new technology, who are the first adopters in that? If you were in new company and I'll use Netflix or Netflix as an example, and you write your application to leverage cloud infrastructure and cloud applications, then the ability for you to execute without having those legacy baggage is a lot easier than if you are a traditional company with a traditional set of responsibilities, policies, securities, et cetera, legacy applications to make a wholesale migration. I've yet to see at every big inflection point in technology, everybody says the mainframe's dead, but I think IBM still makes a whole lot of money running those mainframes. Yeah, well, you brought up the good point. I mean, it's just marketed, how markets are built, right? Markets are built around disruption and benefits, economics and value benefits. And so I agree, I think we're seeing, and I'm not dissing cloud per se, I'm a pro-cloud, but the inhibitors are that real economic advantage for a legacy person, thousands of servers they've been doing for the past 10 years, server consolidation, virtualization, service standardization, all that stuff, the checklist, now network virtualization, and they go, okay, and what's the benefit does Amazon, these guys offer me? I have an existing set of applications, they're just not there yet, that's where we're reporting. However, there are cases where there's compute and infrastructure, whether you're running Black Shoals or something out there, but from a pure adoption standpoint, one of the things is security. Around multi-tenancy and things of that nature. So what is the state of security around, and some people are seeing online providers have more security than an enterprise trying to do it. Yeah, so what's the take on that? So if you look at security as an inhibitor, and sometimes a crutch used by people to say, well gee, I can't go use a public or a private cloud because of that security thing, but sometimes that's valid, and sometimes that's because they're using that as a crutch because they don't want to automate it because there's a cultural challenge, there's a certain fear there. So everybody has different security goals, right? And they have different security threats they might be managing. So when we look at the security landscape, we typically see compliance, which doesn't really provide security, but it makes sure that you do all the things that governments ask you to do. There's the 80% threat that allows you to manage and defend against the known threats that are out there, and then there's what we refer to as the 20% advanced threat. That's groups that are very well funded, they're creating new pieces of malware every day. That is something you can't just buy out of the box. It's much trickier to look at. So if you look at what your goals are and what your risk level is, and you have some assets, applications data, and you can work with a cloud provider that gives you transparency into all their operations, their security so that you have built a trust level that you can put your applications and data in that environment, you're going to leverage it. That's the key thing is that trust level. So for the folks out there, the buyers who want to look at the cloud, how should they architect their cloud for security? If they have the green field opportunity and or I want to move into a provider, so there's the trust question on this. So Lockheed Martin is a consumer and provider of cloud services, so of course you can just call us, we'll help you out. The reality is that's one of the things that we created the Open Data Center Alliance for. We see these different challenges and when a vendor works with, Lockheed Martin's a pretty good sized company, greater than 100,000 team members, greater than $40 billion in revenue, but relative to the whole world, we're just one company. So with Open Data Center Alliance, we've gotten over 300 companies together that said, what's the common use cases or usage models that we would start with so we can enable and help us get to cloud computing? So that's a question I've gotten from several customers and friends and colleagues. So I send them over to the ODCA website and say, check out some of these use cases and these usage models, it'll give you a jump start from what you should be asking for in whatever cloud solution you have. What use cases that you've seen is the most compelling for the cloud movement right now to port over because it's still some fuzziness around where that first stepping stone is for someone. So it's really all about the application. So first you have to think about where you want your application to run from. We're right now from the ODCA perspective that I popped up in my notes here. We have 14 usage models published so far. The bulk of them are around security because that is a concern. If you're responsible for delivering an application, ensuring it's confidential, the integrity of it, the availability of it, privacy of it, you're probably going to have these concerns. So the first set of usage models are all about provider assurance, security monitoring, identity management, cloud-based identity, governance and audit, privilege user access for infrastructure service, cloud-based identity provisioning and single sign-on. So that seems to be the most compelling area to spend time on, which is why we did. Then we start looking at things like automation. And the automation is one of the key things that tries to lower your costs. If you can't automate, the chances of you lowering your costs is a lot harder. Common management policy, obviously, regulations around the world are changing faster than cloud can. At first it was this giant cloud that was around the world and then different governments started saying, you can use a cloud as long as the data is in our country. That limits some of the cloud opportunities that you might have, but that's the regulations, that's what you have to work with. And I think the last piece here is transparency. If you didn't understand where your clouds are and where your assets are, the chances of you trusting that provider, dramatically you down. Let's talk about the provider market. I actually had a chance to interview Marvin before he sold this company to Verizon at VMworld 2010. And at that time, the big conversation was online service providers in this area. And there was obviously not a lot of work being done on the on-premise side. Actually, all the action was being done at the server provider. So we put out the thesis that there was more security at the provider level than the actual customers themselves could do. Where are we today? Because that seems to be the same message we're hearing from customers that there is actually comfort in the provider. The question is the business practices. So it's not a tech issue. It's a business model issue. Could you comment on that? Because it's kind of confusing because it's certainly a great OPEX opportunity. But is it a tech issue or is it more of a business model? I don't see it as a technology issue. I do see it as a business model and investment model. So if you're a relatively small company and you're starting up or a mid-sized company, there is a pretty significant amount of investment you need to do to be able to protect your supply chain, trusted platforms, 80% known threats and 20% advanced threats. And not every company has that level of investment. So if you're a smaller company and I can go to a service provider who's making that investment and they share that investment with me to provide increased level of security, that's awesome. But if you go to one of a large company, a Cisco, a Lockheed Martin, a Bank of America, these are companies where trust is everything. So they're making those bigger investments to have that same level or in sometimes even a higher level of security than a provider because providers don't have that domain knowledge that each of those industries I mentioned has. In the case of Lockheed Martin, we do a lot of work with governments around the world. There's a certain level of security needed that's heightened because of the work that we do. It attracts a certain kind of adversary that the average provider may not have the opportunity. So let's talk about disruption to the data center because this is about the data center conversation about the deliance here. So I'm a data center guy. I got zillions of servers. I've done all the server consolidation, standardized my servers, done all this stuff and I'm ready for cloud. I got all this infrastructure. I got 5,000 apps I'm running. You guys start a cloud from scratch, build all standardization, take advantage of the clean sheet of paper and build a killer innovative product, low cost, all that leverage. Sure. What's the benefit to me now as a buyer? What do I need to look for? Because ultimately you're going to bring benefits to me from an economic standpoint and also from a product standpoint. So everybody, mileage will vary. So if you have a, if you remember Gartner has, there are different maturity levels for IO. If you have an extremely optimized environment, you have great ITIL processes, you have optimal organization and you've gone through all those steps. The value you would have to go to the cloud is going to be less than if you are, say a little more unorganized, maybe a level one or level two organization. So depending on what you're trying to accomplish will dramatically change the value you're in there. In that case I got all these servers. How would you approach me, engage with me? What benefits would you offer me? Because actually there's some things I can put out in the cloud that are, that's great for lower cost in terms of economic value, applications, well maybe mobility. Where does that, that buyer, I'm city bank, I'm like a big company like that or I got all these servers. How do you get them to the cloud with your service? I, when I look at something like a very large company, you mentioned several, it's going to be a portfolio of capabilities. So when you look at what you're trying to accomplish, if you're going to make a large CapEx investment and I can do the same thing with an OpEx investment, I only need six months of it, that's where you leveraging public cloud infrastructure probably has great benefit for you. If you are a very large group, you probably have enough economic scale where your general compute needs and if you've optimized them, you've brought some of the cloud automation self-service in there, you're probably that private cloud is probably going to be dominant. So personally where I see the market going is a unified cloud world where depending on your company, you're going to have a large private cloud footprint that's very well optimized and then you're going to have hybrid cloud across multiple providers that provide you something unique. I'll give you a quick example. First, for retail maybe. Maybe for retail, the holiday season is the easy use case but maybe you have some groups out in Asia. The distance from Asia to a US data center, latency is a killer. Maybe I move some capabilities over to a capability in that area of the world so I have great customer experience for my customers and my end users there but my core data always resides back in your home country where that home country is. Yeah, I think that absolutely correct on that I completely agree with that vision. I think the diversity of this operating system model of holistic data centers is really where it's at. Totally agree, I love that and I think that's a reality that will be for everyone. Question, just to engage a little bit. You guys built all your stuff from scratch and they got a great infrastructure. What's your take about Flash? Flash is being very disruptive from a product standpoint in the data center. It's changing storage architectures. Big data is a big part of that. Data is part of compliance. You're going to deal with all this stuff with cloud. Have you seen the Flash change some of the server configurations? Oh, absolutely. When we look at, well first, we don't build everything from scratch. We're very much partnered and able to make a whole ecosystem. We actually have a cyber line. Well, you can assemble from scratch maybe. Maybe that's a better word. Well, we felt me wrong when there's not something on the market. We will invent it and create something unique but the reality is like for Flash, that's been a quiet storm coming. Why? Number one, sustainability in your green ecosystem is number two. The power management of having a green data center using Flash versus spending disk with power supplies. Huge value proposition there. When you look at the new applications coming out, big data applications, virtual desktops, those are high IO rate applications. When you start using Flash, your ability to scale dramatically improves. Now you're moving the bottleneck away from storage. And you're in your physical data center back into the compute world and the networking world. So there's always a bottleneck somewhere. It's just to decide. Yeah, now it's the network because storage has been solved with Flash or it's on a good path. And network virtualization is the hottest. I mean, I think Flash is changing the architectures. And so with that, what do you think about network virtualization going on right now? So it's a hot area. Network seems to be the bottleneck you talk about age and latency. Network latency now becomes a problem because you've got cores and IO with Flash. You can have caching layers. You can sit with the server. You can put it anywhere with Flash. So now the problem goes to the network. Without a doubt. I remember a few years ago they said, oh, network bandwidth is free. No one's ever seen my Verizon bill or AT&T bill. When I give wireless card to my kids one Friday night in Netflix, they've crushed the whole month, right? So. I mean, I was talking to a guy who's in Atlanta and completely over capacity. You can't get. I mean, it's a huge bandwidth problems. And that's actually based on behavior, right? 10 years ago we were more consumers on the internet. Now, with everyone walking around with 100 mega pixel cameras and everything like that, we are creating content. Video, pictures, voice at such an amazing rate that we're gonna have to look at a lot new architectures because the bandwidth doesn't seem to be growing fast enough. We had Pauline Nis from Intel. She's one of the top brains at Intel. She said in the Q-Class we had HP discover that the network, she's really worried about the network. That's the key bottleneck right now. So, you know, because all the advances on compute and apps are growing so fast, it's just now the network's a problem. So, here we go, back to, you know, it's like shoots and ladders, like you get back down to square one. Well, even the concept of having a centralized cloud is a reality, right? Because if you have network bottlenecks and they get worse, what's going to happen? The same thing we did with mainframes and distributed computing. We're gonna mute that compute to whatever that edge is, avoid that network bottleneck so you have a great experience and then somehow try to optimize that network on the backside. Her final question before we break here. Very next guest. For the folks out there, CIO or practitioners in IT and who are looking at expanding out their footprint on the data center side and going private, public and hybrid, what would you tell them? What advice would you give them about the horizon in front of them, the landscape, the next five years? Value of opportunity, massive change. What would you, what's kind of forecast would you give them? My forecast is this is a great leadership inflection point to take advantage of. We are gonna see massive change and it's kind of like going surfing. You can fight the waves, don't try it. Start understanding what your business objectives are and pick the waves that you can embrace and bring those technologies as fast as you can to your early adopters because if you're not doing it, someone else is going to do it for you. Ride the wave or become driftwood as Pat Gelsinger would say in theCUBE. So that's a great advice. So big data is one of the big areas. What are the areas you say that will to ride and what kind of waves to ride right now? So from a big picture perspective, it starts at the end using the consumers. We're generating all kinds of great stuff with mobility. That's putting pressure on the networks. We need cloud computing to automate it, generating big data like you've never seen before. Can we add some real value out of it? Harness the data. Harness that data and make everything contextually relevant to whatever your goal is. Kurt, thanks so much for coming on to Canyon Conversation with SiliconANGLE. theCUBE, appreciate it. We'll be right back with our next guest.