 Hello everyone, welcome to the CUBE Studios here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media, Inc., also co-host of the CUBE. We're here for a CUBE conversation on Thought Leader Thursday, and I'm here with Chris Cummings, who's a senior manager, advisor, big-time industry legend, but he's also the chasm group right now, to where he's crossing the chasm of famous books, and it's all about the future. Formerly an executive net-ass, been in the storage and infrastructure, cloud, tech business, we're also friends of Stanford, season tickets together, and go to the tailgates, but big-cal game coming up, of course, but more importantly, a big-time influence in the industry, and we're going to do some drill down on, what's going on with cloud computing, all the buzzword bingo going on in the industry, and also AWS, Amazon Web Services, Reinvent is coming up, with a little preview there, but really kind of share our views on what's happening in the industry, because there's a lot of noise out there, we're going to try to get the signal from the noise. Thanks for watching. Chris, thanks for coming in. Thank you so much for having me. I'm glad to be here. Great to see you. So you have seen a lot of waves of innovation, and right now you're working with a lot of companies to try to figure out the future. That's right. And you're seeing a lot of significant industry shifts. We talk about it on the queue all the time, blockchain from decentralization, all the way up to massive consolidation with hyper-converges in the enterprise. So a lot of action, and at the end of the day, the people out in the marketplace, whether it's a developer, or a CXO, or CIO, CDO, whatever enterprise leaders doing the transformations. We got all of them. They're trying to essentially not go out of business. A lot of great things are happening, but at the same time, a lot of pressure on the business is happening. So let's discuss that. I mean, you are doing this for work at the Chasm Group. Talk about your role. You were formerly at NetApp, so I know you know the storage business. So we're going to have great companies about storage and impact infrastructure. But at the Chasm Group, how are you guys framing the conversation? Chasm Group is really all about helping these companies process their thinking, think about if they're going to get to be a platform out in the industry, you can't just go and become a platform in the industry. You got to go knock down problem, problem, problem, solution, solution, solution. So we help them prioritize that and think about best practices for achieving that. You know, Dave Vellante, my co-CEO, co-partner, co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media, I always talk about this all the time. And the expression we use is, if you don't know what Checkmate looks like, you shouldn't be playing chess. And a lot of the IT folks and CIOs are in that mode now where the game has changed so much that sometimes they don't even know what they're playing. You know, they've been leaning on this magic quadra from Gartner and all these other analyst firms. And it's been kind of a slow game, a batch kind of game, now it's real time, whatever metaphor you want to use, the game has changed, so the chess board has changed. So I got to get your take on this because you've been involved in strategy, you've been on a product, you worked at growth companies, big company startups, and now looking at the bigger picture, what is the game? I mean, right now, if you could lay out the chess board, what are people looking at, what is the game? So we deal a lot with customer conversations, and that's where it all kind of begins. And I think what we found is this era of pushing product and just throwing stuff out there, it worked for a while, but those days are over. These folks are so overwhelmed, you know, the titles you mentioned, CIO, CDO, you know, all the DevOps people, they're so overwhelmed with what's going on out there, what they want is people to come in and tell them about what's happening out there, what are their peers doing, and what problems are they trying to solve in order and drive it that way. And there's a lot of disruption on the product side, so tech's changing, obviously the business models are changing, this is a different issue. Let's get into some of the tech things. You have a tech perspective, let's get into the tech conversation. You've got cloud, you've got private cloud, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, micro-machine learning, hyper-machine learning, hyper-cloud, all these buzzwords are out there. It's buzzwords bingo. But also the reality is you've got Amazon Web Services absolutely crushing it, no doubt about it. I mean, I've been looking at Oracle, I've been looking at Google, I've been looking at SAP, looking at IBM, looking at Alibaba, looking at Microsoft. The game is really kind of a cloak and dagger situation going on here. A lot of things shifting on the provider side, but no doubt scale is the big issue. That's right. So how did the customer squint through all this? The conversations that I've had, especially with the larger enterprises, is they know that they've got to be able to adopt and utilize the public cloud capabilities, but they also want to retain that degree of control so they want to maintain whether it's their apps, their DevOps, some pieces of their infrastructure on-prem. And as you talked about that transition, it used to be, okay, well we thought about cloud, we's equal to private cloud. Then it became public cloud, hybrid cloud, people are hanging on to hybrid cloud, sometimes for the right reasons and sometimes for the wrong reasons. Right reasons are because it's critical for their business. You look at somebody, for instance, in media and entertainment, they can't just push everything out there. They've got to retain control and really have their hands around that content because they've got to be able to distribute it. But then you look at some others, they're hanging on for the wrong reasons. And the wrong reasons are they want to have their control and they want to have their salary and they want to have their staff. So boy, hybrid sounds like a mix that works. So I'm going to be having a one-on with Andy Jassy next week, exclusive. I do that every year as part of the queue. He was a great guy, a good friend, become a good friend because we've been a fan of him when no one loved Amazon. We saw that early, obviously at SiliconANGLE, now he's the king of the industry. But he's a great manager, great executive. And he's done a great job under the ethos of Bezos and Amazon. He ships stuff faster, lower prices, hate the flywheel that Amazon uses. Everything's kind of on them. They own Twitch, which we stream to, and we love. But if you could ask Andy any questions, well, what questions would you ask him if you had to have that one-on-one? Yeah, well, it stems from conversations I've had with customers, which was probably, once a week I would be talking to a CIO or somebody on that person's staff and they'd slide the piece of paper across and say, this is my bill. I had no idea that this is what AWS was going to drive me from a billing perspective. And I think we've seen, you know, we've had all kinds of commentary out there about ingress fees, egress fees, all of that sort of stuff. I think the question for Andy, when you look at the amount of revenue and operating margin that they are generating in that business, how are they going to start diversifying that pricing strategy so that they can keep those customers on without having them rethink their strategy in the future? So are you saying that when they slide the paper over that the fees are higher than expected or low and happy, they're happy with the prices? Oh, I think it's the first time they've ever thought that it could be as expensive as on-premise infrastructure because they just didn't understand, when they went into this, how much it was going to cost to access that data over time. And when you're talking about data that is high volume and high frequency data, they are accessing it quite a bit as opposed to just stale, cold, dead stuff that they want to put off somewhere else and not have to maintain? Yeah, and one of the things we're seeing that we pointed out, the Wikibon team is a lot of these pricings are the clients don't know that they're being billed for something that they may not be using. So some AI or machine learning could come in potentially. So this is kind of what you're getting at. What's the operational things that Amazon's doing to keep prices low for the customer and not get billed shock? That's right. Okay, so that's cool. What else would you ask them about culture or is there anything that you ask them about? His plans, what else would you ask them? I think the other big thing would be just more plans on what's going to be done around data analytics and big data. We can call it whatever we want, but they've been so good at the semi-structured or unstructured content. When we think about AWS and where AWS was going with S3. But now there's a whole new phenomenon going on around this and companies are as every bit as scared about that transition as they were about the prior cloud transition. So what really are their plans there when they think about that? And for instance, things like how does GPU processing come into play versus CPU processing? There's going to be a really interesting discussion I think you're going to have with him on that front. Awesome. Let's talk about IT. IT, Information Technology Department, it's formerly known as DP Data Processing Information. Oh, that stuff's changed. But there were still guys that were buying hardware, buying NetApp drives that you used to work for. Buying EMC, doing data domain, doing a lot of stuff. These guys are essentially looking at potentially a role where, I mean, for instance, we use Amazon, we're a big customer, happy customer. We don't have those guys. So like, if I'm an IT guy, I might be thinking, shit, I could be out of a job. Amazon's doing my job. So I'm not saying that's the case, but that's certainly a fear. Absolutely. But the business models have to shift from old IT to a new IT. What does that game look like? What is this new IT game? Is it more not a department view? Is it more of a holistic view? And what's the sentiment around the buyers and your customers that you talk to around? How do they message to the IT guys like, look at this higher value jobs you could go to. Right. You mentioned analytics. That's right. What's the conversation? Certainly some guys won't make the transition and might not make it, but what's the narrative? Well, I think that's where it just starts with what segment are you talking about. So if you look at it and say, just break it down between the large enterprise, the Uber enterprise that we've seen for so long, mid-size and smaller, the mid-size and smaller are gone. Okay, outside of just specific industries where they really need that control, media and entertainment might be an example, that mid-size business is gone for those vendors, right? So those vendors are now having to grab on and say, I'm part of that cloud phenomenon, my hyper cloud of the future, I'm part of that phenomenon. And that becomes really the game that they have to play. But when you look at those IT shops, I think they've really need to figure out where are they adding value and where are they just enabling value that's being driven by cloud providers. And then really that's all they are as a facilitator. And they've got to shift their energy towards where am I adding value? And that becomes more of that data. That's differentiation, that's where differentiation is. So non-differentiated labor is the term that Wikibon analysts use. That's going down. The differentiated labor is either revenue generating or something operationally more efficient, right? That's right, that's right. And it's all going to be revenue generating now. I mean, I used to be out there talking about things like archiving. And archiving is a great idea. It's something where I'm going to save money, okay? But I got this many projects on my list if I'm a CIO of where I could save money. I'm being under pressure about how am I going to go generate money? And that's where I think people are really shifting their eyeballs and their attention is more towards that. And you got IoT coming down the pike. I mean, war hearing is from what I hear from CIOs when we have a few in-depth conversations is look, I got to get my development team ramped up and being more cloud native, more microservices, I got to get more app development going that drives revenue from my business more efficiency. I have a digital transformation across the company in terms of hiring culture and talent. And then I got pressure to do IoT and I got security. So of those five things, IoT tends to fall out, security takes preference because of the security challenges. And then that's already putting their plate full right there. That's right, that's real time. And those people are so much pressure on that right now. And then you're thinking about IoT. And then in the meantime, by the way, most of these places don't have a DevOps shop that's operating on a flywheel, right? So you're not, what's it? Goldman Sachs has 5,000 developers, right? That's bigger than most tech companies. So as a consequence, you start thinking about, well, not everybody looks like that. What the heck are they going to do in the future? They're going to have to be thinking about new ways of accessing that type of capability. This is where the cloud really shines in my mind. I think in the cloud too, is starting to fragment the conversations people will try to pigeonhole Amazon. I've seen Microsoft, I've been very critical of Microsoft in their cloud because first of all, I love the move that they're making. I think this smart move business-wise. But they bundle in 365 office. That's not really cloud, it's just SaaS. So then you start getting into the splitting of the hairs of, well, SaaS is not included in cloud, but come on, that's SaaS is cloud. Well, maybe Amazon should include their ecosystem. That would be a trillion dollar revenue number. So all companies don't look the same. That's right. And so for my enterprise, that's the challenge. Do I got to hire developers for Azure? Do I got to hire developers for Amazon? Do I got to hire developers for Google? There's no stack consistency across private enterprises to cloud. Because I'm a storage guy, I got NetApp drives and now I got an Amazon thing, I'm like Amazon, but now I got to go Azure. What the hell do I do? I got EMC's here and I got Nimble's there and HP, and I still got tape from IBM from five decades ago. So John, I got a great term for you that's going to be a key one, I think, in the ability. It's called histocompatibility. And this is really about, Oh, here we go. Let's get nerdy at the tape glasses on. It's really about the ability to be able to interoperate with all this system. And some of these systems are live systems. They're current systems. Some of it's garbage that should have been thrown out a long time ago and actually recycled. So I think histocompatibility is going to be a really, really key tool. Well keep the glasses on, let's get down in the weeds here. I like the, where's the pocket protector? If you had the pocket protector, it would be in good shape. So vendors got to compete with these buzzwords, with some buzzword bingo. But there are trends that you're seeing. You've done some analysis of how the positioning, so you're also a positioning guru as well. There's ways to do it. And that's a challenge for suppliers, vendors, who want to serve customers. They got to rise above the noise. That's a huge problem. What are you seeing in terms of buzzword bingo? Because like I said, I used to work for HP in the old days and they used to have an expression. You know, don't call it what it is, because that's boring and make it exciting. So the analogy I used was, sushi is basically cold dead fish. So sushi is a name for cold dead fish. So you don't call your product cold dead fish. You call it sushi. That was the analogy. So in our world- That was HP UX. That was HP UX. HP was very engineering. That's not, sushi doesn't mean anything. It's cold dead fish. That's what it is. That's what it does. So a lot of vendors can error in that. They're accurate and they're engineers. They can call it what it is. But there's more sex appeal with some better naming. What are you seeing in terms of the fashion, if you will, in terms of the naming conventions? Which ones are standing out? What's the analysis? Well, I think the analysis is this. You start with your adjectives with stem words, John. What I mean by that is things like histocompatibility. It could start with things like agility, flexibility, manageability, simplicity, all those sorts of things. And they've got to line those terms up and go out there. But I think the thing that right now is- But those are boring. I saw a press release that said, we're more agile. We're the most effective software platform with agility and depth. It's like, what the hell does that mean? Yeah, I think you also have to combine it with a heavy degree of hyperbole, right? So hyperbole and off-the-cuff, out statement that is so extreme that you'd never really want to be tested on it. So an easy way to do that is to add hyper in front of all that. So it's hypermanageability, right? And so I think we're going to see a whole new class of words. There are 361 great adjectives with stems. But honestly- So go through the list that you have. I mean, there's so many, John. So hyper is an easy one, right? Hyper is easy. I think that's a very simple one. I think now we also see that micro is so big, right? Because we're talking about microservices and that's really the big buzzword in the industry right now. So everything's going to be about micro-segmenting your apps and then allowing those apps to be manifest and consumed by an Uber app. And ultimately that Uber app is an ultra app. So I think ultra is going to be another term that we see heading into the spectrum as well. And so histocompatibility is the word you mentioned here, my notes, you mentioned. So histo means historical, it means legacy. So basically backwards compatible would be the boring kind of word. Histocompatibility means we got you covered from legacy to cloud, right? Or whatever. Micro-segment tillaby really talks to the granularity of data-driven things, right? That's right, that's right. Another one would be macro-iability, macro-API ability. It's kind of a mouthful. But everyone needs an API, I think we've seen that. And because they're consuming so many different pieces and trying to assemble those, they've got to have something that sits above. So macro-API ability I think is another big one. And then lastly is this notion of mobility, right? We talk about, as you said earlier, we talked about clouds and going from, it's not just good enough to talk about hybrid cloud now, it's about multi-cloud. Well multi-cloud means you were thinking about how we can place these apps and the data in all kinds of different spaces, but I've got to be able to have those be mobile. So hyper-mobility becomes a key for these applications. So hyper-scale we've seen, we've seen hyper-convergence. Hyper is the most popular. Absolutely. Adjective with STEM, right? So, STEM words. Okay, micro-act makes sense because, you know, micro-targeting, micro-segmentation, micro-services, it speaks to the level of detail. I love that one. Which ones aren't working in your mind? We've seen anything that's like so dead on arrival. Sure, I think there's a few that aren't working anymore. You got your agility, you got your flexibility, you got your manageability, and you got your simplicity. Okay, I could take all four of those and toss those over there in the trash because every vendor will say that they have those capabilities for you. So, how does that help you distinguish yourself from anyone else? So that's old hat. That's just, it's just gone. So yeah, the ever fight fashion is Jeremy Burton at EMC now at Dell Technologies, said on theCUBE, I love that. So these are popular words. This is a way to stand out and be relevant. That's right. I mean, this is the challenge for vendors. Be cool and relevant, but not be offensive. Yeah. All right, so what's your take on the current landscape for things like how do companies market themselves? So let's say they get the hyper, all the naming and the stem words down, they have something compelling, something that's differentiated, something unique. How do companies stand out above the crowd? Because current way is, advertising's not working. We're seeing fake news. You're seeing the analyst firms kind of becoming more old, slower, not relevant. I mean, does the Magic Quadrant really solve that problem or are they just putting that out there? If I'm a marketer, I'm a B2B marketer. Yeah. I was working with theCUBE and our team, obviously. Great benefits, you know, plug there. But seriously, what do you advise? Yeah, I think the biggest thing is, you know, you think about marketing is not only reaching your target market, but also enabling your sales force and your channel partners. And frankly, the best thing that I found in doing that, John, is starting every single piece that we would come up with with a number. How much value are we generating? Whether it's zero clicks to get this thing installed. It's 90% efficiency. And then prove it. Don't just throw it out there and say, isn't that good enough? But numbers matter because they're meaningful and they stimulate the conversation. And that's ultimately what all of this is, is a conversation about, is this going to be relevant for you? So that's the thing that I, that I started with. So you say being in the conversation matters. Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. What's the thought leadership view? What's your vision on how companies should be looking at thought leadership? Obviously, you're seeing more of a real time. I call it, the old world was batch marketing. Email marketing, do the normal things, get the white papers, do those things, go to the events, have a booth. And then the new way is real time. Things are happening very fast in the market. People are connected now. It's a global, basically message group. That's right. LinkedIn, Facebook, all this stuff. And it's really an unfulfilled need that you guys are really looking to fill, which is to provide that sort of real time piece of it. But I think vendors trip over themselves and they think about, I need a 50 page vision. They don't need a 50 page vision. What they need is, here are a couple of dimensions on which this industry is going to change and then commit to them. And I think the biggest problem that many vendors have is they won't commit, they hedge, as opposed to they go all in behind those. And they want to, and one thing we talk about at Kazim Institute is, if you're going to fail, fail fast. And that really means that you commit full time behind what your vision is. Yeah, and cross the Kazim was based on, you got to get to mainstream, get the early pioneers across the Kazim. The other paradigm that I always loved from Jeffrey Moore was inside the tornado. Get inside the tornado because if you don't get in, you're going to be spun out. So you got to kind of get in the game, if you will. That's right. Don't overthink it. And this is where the iteration mindset that comes in, that's quote agile startup or agile venture. Okay, cool. So let's take a step back and reset to end the segment here. Reinvents coming up. Obviously that's the big show of the year. VMworld, I got a, someone was coming on Facebook. Oh, VMworld 2008 was like the big moment where they're comparing Amazon now to VMworld in 2008. But you know, Pat Gelsinger essentially cut a great deal with Andy Jassy on VMware. And everything's clean. Everything's growing. They're kicking ass. They got a private cloud and they got the hybrid cloud with Amazon. Yeah, well it's the VM cloud on Amazon that really seems to be the thing that's really driving their move into the future. And I think we're going to see from both of those folks, you are going to see so much on containers. Containerization, ultra containers, hyper containers, whatever it may be. If you're not speaking container language, then you are yesterday's news. And Kubernetes certainly the orchestration piece right underneath it to kind of manage it. Okay, final point, what's in store for the legacy? Because you're seeing a few major trends that we're pointing out and we're watching very closely which are really, I put into two buckets. I know Wikibon has a more disciplined approach. I'm more simple about that. The decentralization trend that we're seeing with blockchain which is kind of crazy and bubbly but very infrastructure relevant. This decentralized, disrupting, non-decentralized incumbents. So that's one trend. And the other one is what cloud's doing to legacy IT vendors, Oracle. You know these traditional manufacturers like that HP and Dell and all these guys and NetApp which is transforming. So you got disruption on both sides. Cloud and like a decentralized model, apps. What's the position view from your standpoint for these legacy guys? It's going to be quite an interesting one. I think they have to ride the wave and I'll steal this from Peter Levine from Fram Andreessen. He talks about the end of cloud computing. And really what that is just basically saying everything's going to be moving to the edge and there's going to be so much more compute at the edge with IoT. And you can think about autonomous vehicles as the ultimate example of that where you're talking about more powerful computers certainly than this that are sitting in cars all over the place. So that's going to be a big change. And those vendors that have been selling into the core data center for so long are going to have to figure out their way of being relevant in that universe and move towards that. And like we were talking about before, commit to that, right? Don't just hedge but commit to it and move. What's interesting is that I was talking with some executives at Alibaba when I was in China part of their Alibaba cloud conference and also on Amazon had mobile conferences with Andy Jassy and his team over the years. It's interesting, a lot of people don't understand the nuances of kind of what's going on in cloud. And what I'm seeing is it's essentially to your point, it's a compute game, right? So if you look at Intel for instance, Alibaba told me on my interview, they don't view Intel as a chip company anymore. They're a compute company, right? And CJ Bruno, one of the executives reaffirmed that. So Intel's looking at the big picture saying, the cloud's a computer, right? Intel inside is a series of compute and you mentioned the edge. Jassy's just building a set of services with his team around core compute, which has storage. So this is essentially hyper-converged. That's right, cloud, that's right. I mean, this is a pretty big thing. What's the one thing that people might not understand about this? If you could kind of illuminate this trend. I mean, the old Intel now turned into the new Intel which is a monster franchise continuing to grow. Amazon, people see the numbers. They go, oh my God, they're a leader, but they have so much more of headroom. Right, right. And they got everyone else playing catch-up. What's the real phenomenon going on here? I think you're going to see more of this aggregation phenomenon where one vendor can't solve this entire problem. I mean, look at most recently in the last two weeks Intel and AMD getting together. Who would have thought that would have happened? But they're just basically admitting, we got a real big piece of the equation, Intel, and then AMD can fulfill this niche because they're getting killed by NVIDIA. But you're going to see just more of these industry conglomerations getting together to try and solve a broader problem. Just to end the segment, this is a great point. NVIDIA got a niche segment, graphics now competing head to head with Intel. So essentially what's happening is the landscape is completely changing once competitors no longer, new entrants, new competitors coming in. So this is a massive shift. It is. Okay, Chris Cummings here inside theCUBE. I'm John Furrier for CUBE Conversation. There's a massive shift happening. The game has changed, and it's incumbent on startups, venture capital, blockchain, ICOs or whatever's going on, to look at the new chess board, look at the game and figure it out. Of course, we'll be broadcasting live at ADOS re-invent next in a couple of weeks. Stay tuned, more coverage. Thanks for watching.