 from the Sunnyvale, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE! Covering Accelerator Journey to AI, brought to you by NetApp. I'm Peter Burris with Wikibon theCUBE and we're broadcasting from theCUBE here from NetApp's data visionary center today. And we've got a number of great conversations with some NetApp executives, specifically about the role that NetApp and AI are going to play together as the market evolves. And we're joined first by Gene English, who's a senior vice president and CMO of NetApp. Gene, welcome to theCUBE. Great, thanks Peter, nice to see you again. A lot of great stuff to talk about Gene. So let's start with this interesting relationship, NetApp, AI, the centerpiece of it is data. Yes. What does that mean? Absolutely. Well I think just to start, technology is changing everyday lives and digital transformation really tops the strategic agenda of most CEOs today. And so when you think about what does that mean in terms of data? Data is actually the lifeblood of an organization and it has to really be able to seamlessly flow through that organization to really add value. So we think of data as the heart and when we think about data and AI, we want to accelerate the journey to AI. But to do that, you have to be able to holistically manage your data. So as we think about the need to manage data, that says that there's a number of challenges that customers face. You have to be able to bring great technology but in ways that allow customers to do things specifically with it. So talk a little bit about the relationship that NetApp is developing with its customers to try to ensure that that journey to AI can be accelerated. Absolutely. Well the first is really around when we think about digital transformation and especially as AI is part of it, how are they going to get more connected to their customers? A better customer experience. An experience that allows them to feel connected not only to the experience they have with the company but to their peers and to their customers as well as suppliers. We also know that we want to be able to think about what do customers need to do to create new value and new business opportunities, new services, new companies. Companies are also looking at how do they optimize their operations? How do they even take out the cost of back office and take out that capital to be able to fuel innovation especially when it comes to customer engagement? AI is becoming more and more a part of how companies are doing each of those and they're using those analytics and insight to be able to power through that digital transformation which is now really being seen as a data driven digital transformation. Well we certainly agree at Wikibon, Silicon Angle and theCUBE, we believe that the relationship between business and digital business is in fact the digital business uses data as an asset. There's a special class of customer though that is as we move forward and that is some of the hyperscalers, the big cloud suppliers who are participating in this process of driving so much innovation in the industry. Serving them is a particular challenge. Talk to us a little bit about how that works. Sure, well we are definitely seeing that there's a certain class of customers that are starting to think about what do they do to thrive on data and not only can they thrive but they have to be able to put data as an asset. It has to be at the top of the strategic agenda of the company. It has to be able to seamlessly flow through that company. We're seeing that they're called data thrivers and those thrivers are set apart. They're driving bottom line revenue, they're driving increased customer acquisition, they're seeing definitely higher profit margins but in all those results we notice that there's a few things they're really doing right and they're getting it right. One of those is that they're using the cloud and they're using public clouds, they're using private clouds, they're acquiring more DevOps skills, they're hiring data scientists, they're really being able to think about how do they hire digital officers, data officers and a lot of that is around how they want to leverage AI. We know that over 50% of companies will start to adopt AI next year. We know that they're going to start to leverage AI to gain better insight and these new roles of people are definitely the ones who are being able to think about how do they manipulate that data, how do they use that data to have a competitive advantage and how do they leverage the cloud to get more services like AI from these big cloud providers? Well, it's pretty clear as you try to service that broader range of potential customers that you have to have a couple of touchstones you keep coming back to. Increasingly design has to be one of them, thinking in terms of design, great products but also designing engagement, designing how you work with customers, designing how you work with partners. Now, you have, along with your team, has bought some of that data-first, data-driven notions into how you've designed this data visionary center. Talk to us a little bit about how you have been using design to ensure that great experience across the board from NetApp. Absolutely. Well, first, as NetApp thinks about how to holistically manage data, that was really the inception of Data Fabric and Data Fabric was a vision, it was a strategy years ago and we've been really working to see how do we bring that strategy to life and being that data visionary for our customers thinks about from the edge to the core to the cloud and what do we do to help bring that Data Fabric across? You can seamlessly manage data, integration points across all those environments, you can migrate data to the cloud, you can make sure you're consuming data services like analytics and AI and you're really being able to bring that value back. AI is at the center of that. We wanted to design and experience that brought Data Fabric to life for our customers. One, how do they modernize their current architectures, especially with cloud-connected flash and what we're doing with AI? We wanted to make sure that we were thinking about how do they build these private clouds and what do they need to do to really bring out applications at speed? Third is we want to inspire innovation with the cloud and the work we're doing with the cloud providers. We've had new services like cloud volumes that have been launching with AWS, with Azure, as well as Google. And with all of the biggest clouds, we've been thinking about how do we bring that customer experience to life? That design comes forward through the Data Visionary Center, where we are today. This center is where we want to actually have customers come in and be inspired by what they can do in their own digital transformation journey. We want to build trust with those customers and partners. We want them to know that we understand their industry, we understand their needs, we understand what's happening in the market. IoT, AI, what's happening with securing data? How do they think about leveraging the cloud to really maximize business impact? We want to be able to have frank conversations, inform each other of our strategies. How do they then able to interpret those and internalize that information? The whole Data Visionary Center has been based on how do we help them to be able to grow? How do they partner with us so they can leverage our services to help them to maximize the value of data? So we provide those opportunities, hands-on kiosks, demos, learning, even being able to do what we've done with NVIDIA with an advanced solution around even our Vincent solution where they can start to play with AI in real time. Then we want to be able to enjoy the conversation here at the Data Visionary Center and talk about next steps and the journey ahead. So we're excited about the Data Visionary Center. We just opened it a few months ago and we're thrilled to be able to invite customers and partners to be here. So let's extrapolate, extend beyond the Data Visionary Center and make the observation that marketing broadly has become altered, changed, transformed as a consequence of using data. Marketing at NetApp in particular is interesting because you're fundamentally marketing data-driven as a concept. So how has marketing's evolved experience with data informing how NetApp broadly engages customers and builds products? CMOs are becoming one of the top functions to really drive digital transformations. When you think about how do you connect and engage with customers more? How do you engage with them on a personalized level? How do you ensure that you're having that constant communication online, offline, and continuously be able to build that relationship? Marketing's at the center of that. We're excited that we are a data-driven organization and as a data-driven organization we're having real business impact to the business and real customer engagement. We're excited that we're at the heart of what we're doing to transform the business. Not only from our branding and how we think about reinventing NetApp, we are a data-driven company. We are data-driven as we think about that aspiration for our customers. Our Data Visionary concept is about how do we inspire people to want to bring all that data together and really simplify and integrate and then unleash that potential for their own companies. Marketing's at the center of how we're engaging people, especially in the cloud. And as we have a no-touch experience and customers are engaging with us to be able to download trials, being able to see demos, being able to watch other customers and where they are on their own journey, but being able to surface that, again, digitally and as well as offline as well in personal engagement. Analytics, big part of what we're doing to understand customer needs better, understand those needs from the solutions they expect from us, understand their needs from what they're enduring in the market, and then being able to help the company think about that in terms of roadmaps, think about that in terms of key messages, think about that in terms of real solutions and real engagement. Gene English, Senior Vice President at CMO NetApp. Thanks again for being on theCUBE and talking about data-driven and marketing. Thank you. Nice to see you. Good to see you again.